Chapter Fifty-Five – A Cut Above Middle Management

Chapter Fifty-Five – A Cut Above Middle Management

“The next big thing? Hmm… I think it might be crossovers. You know, take one media IP that the audience loves, mash it with another. Modern creative AI systems can be trained on both, so it’ll be easy for them to work it out into something semi-coherent, and you have a big audience to draw on. Easy money!”

–AI Prompting Artist ShallowPunk in a 2041 interview

***

I could be sneaky, when I wanted to be, and at the moment, I wanted to be.

Flying over to the Rama Corp building in the Bastion would have been a pretty stupid idea, so I had to figure out another way to get there. Fortunately, I wasn’t entirely alone.

“Ah, we can take my car,” Shy muttered.

“It has a stealth suite?” I asked.

She shrugged, very slightly.

That was… a maybe. I’d take it. Better than walking all the way over. For all that the building was only like, three hundred-ish metres away, it was three hundred metres of city away. Getting there would mean riding an elevator down, then finding my way across, then up. That could take all evening.

“Alrighty, then,” I said as I opened the bag Gomorrah had brought. There were, as advertised, little bombs within. Each one looked more like a penlight than a proper bomb-bomb. No dangly wires here, just a short, fat stick with a twisty bit on one end. It was helpfully labelled ‘TWIST TO ARM.’

I separated the lot into three equal piles on the table, then looked at Gomorrah. “Are you coming for this one?”

“I’m not the quiet and subtle sort,” Gomorrah said. “I’ll leave the padding around to the cats, and you as well, Miss Shy.”

Fair enough.

My coat was stealthy, as was my undersuit, but I had some rather normal clothes too, so I shucked off my jacket onto the back of my chair, then started to undress.

“Ah! Ah, um,” Shy said, which was practically a monologue from her.

“Just getting the non-stealthy stuff out of the way,” I said. “I’m not stripping entirely, chill out.”

“I don’t know,” Gomorrah said. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see you stripping to your undergarments in the middle of a café.”

I snorted. My undersuit was actually pretty damned modest. More so than even a one-piece swimming suit, what with the armoured plating and everything. It wasn’t designed to make me look too hot, it was meant to go invisible.

“You’re assuming I wear ‘undergarments’ at all,” I said, imitating her hoity-ness at the word. “I mean, I do, when I’m bleeding all over, but that’s the exception.”

Gomorrah sighed, deep and weary. “Catherine, do you… oh, nevermind.”

I grinned at her, then finished changing. “I’ll have to grab some things from the Bastion before we head out,” I said as I packed my coat pockets full of explosives.

It didn’t take too long for Nya and Shy to get ready. Shy didn’t have optical camo stuff. Her gear messed with augs and cameras, making her invisible to either. It wasn’t perfect, but that was fine. She had some movement tech as well, and could get us in.

Gomorrah had a map of the interior of the HQ, and she divided things so that we each had one floor to ourselves.

Mine was the topmost ‘lobby’ floor, Shy had the maintenance area below, and Nya the harder, higher security offices and server spaces, where the corp likely had the most guards wandering around.

Nya had the best stealth tech. It was so good, she refused to tell me about it.

We boarded Shy’s little car, which smelled like it had just been cleaned up on the inside, then we took off.

Her car was very much not a Protector vehicle. It might’ve been modded a bit. The console seemed too high tech, but the car itself was probably ten years old or so. I wanted to ask, but it wasn’t long before we were slipping close to the Rama Corp building.

“No alarms?” I asked. “Or invisibility?”

Shy shook her head, then pointed to a computer screen fixed to the dash. “There’s a system that flags my car as allowed wherever I go.”

“Neat,” I said.

She nodded slowly. “It means less questions.”

Ah, that made… some sense.