Kal ordered his squad to halt as an urgent message appeared on his AR display. Every man and woman around him froze in time with the simulation, those who had been in motion stopping as soon as they could. He grinned at them as he took the call.
No need to check the caller. Only one person could interrupt him like this.
“What do you need director?”
“I am sending over an immediate investigation and deployment Priority Alpha.”
The director’s voice ended when he terminated his end of the call.
Busy man.
Kal ended the simulation after turning command over to his lieutenants. The brief mandated a low profile, so he would be SLIDEing in. He stretched his fingers, moving each independently as he read the rest of the mission file and prepared.
Today he would play an upper TP exec, one of his favorite legends: Cain Aloysius Pence.
Cain stepped out of the auto shuttle and wrapped a white scarf around his neck as he did. The thick fabric kept out cold he could not feel and concealed a small arsenal of tools and weapons.
“The path is clear, Kal. Their butts clench in terror at the approach of Cain Aloysius Pence.”
“Thanks Bernie.”
Cain spoke with his mind, devoting himself to this persona to the point of adjusting his Persona Attributes.
Gerald Ratner, the head of the Main City Telepersona office met him at the curb.
“Mr Pence, I am so happy to see you.”
Cain straightened his back and flashed a disapproving glare at Ratner. His flat eyes conveyed scorn while his words put Ratner in his place.
“I am here to investigate the incident Ratner. You should practice telling me the truth. That is the only thing on this rock that will get me out of your hair faster.”
The man standing opposite him demonstrated why he had been promoted so far. Of course, Cain knew he would react this way, he had reviewed Ratner’s Persona profile.
“Very well. I dread your presence here and loath the delay in productivity. I can already see this stain forming on my year-end review and I want it dealt with. From my perspective you are only slightly more tolerable than multiple murders in my facility.”
Cain laughed and patted Ratner on his shoulder. He felt no pity for the man, or respect. Cain had personally purged such emotions in preparation for this encounter. The pat on the shoulder came as nothing more than the necessary sequential gesture for turning Ratner to his side.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
He leaned closer to the facility chief and Cain said, “I want out of here as much as you want me gone. I need to speak to your head of R&D. Mrs Henrietta MacDonald?”
Ratner grimaced at the name, but nodded and said, “Anything to get you out of here.”
He winked at Cain and they headed into the building toward the R&D section.
“I don’t know how they got in here. There was a maintenance issue.”
Cain despised section heads like Henrietta MacDonald. She spent her afternoons on regular “sanctioned investigation missions” that conveniently required disabling her tracking and sensory recording security measures. In the short time following her to the creche chamber, Cain decided that Telepersona would be better off without Mrs MacDonald. And that whatever perversion she pursued on company time during her afternoons would make for bad PR.
Around them, the usually clean and sterile lines of an experimental creche and implant testing facility lay in ruins.
“Why here and not something behind more layers of security?”
“My analysis showed that deeper layers of security provoked outside interest. I directed security budget to R&D. I was well within my purview.”
Cain shook his head. Her tone said everything. Whatever afternoon delight she pursued likely cost stipend. For the expense to be high enough to require embezzling…
“So. An unknown subject snuck into the secure area of your testing facility and stole a prototype executive alpha implant and killed three guards doing so.”
Checking the records of those dead guards made Cain sigh and grit this teeth. He rubbed his temples and said, “Plus, this implant was SLIDE and CC-0 enabled, wasn’t it?”
The head of R&D stammered as she finally realized the full import of what she had done. Untraceable, relentless, and top of the line. More superlatives could be applied to the advanced suite of executive-level skills that this stranger had implanted.
She — Cain could smell her latent pheromone signature — would be impossible to find alone.
Henrietta finally managed to speak,
“Whoever it was is still missing the other implants. They only have a week.”
Cain shook his head, already farther along the analysis path than Mrs MacDonald. The S in SLIDE stood for “survival.” The moment the thief’s executive assistant warned her about the effects of the implant she would move to secure a remedy.
A red blinking circle warned him that the Director was about to speak: “Investigate the thief. And deal with this incompetent pervert as you like. Burn the room out and I will send data on implant clinics with compatible upgrades.”
Cain nodded, Mrs MacDonald thought he responded to her. When he raised the small wand up her eyes went wide for a moment in recognition.
Well, she was the head of R&D here after all.
Cain pressed a button on the wand and a wide beam spread out, disintegrating Mrs MacDonald and a section of the equipment down to the steel in the opposite wall. He adjusted the strength on his disintegration wand and cleared out the rest of the evidence. Satisfied, he stepped outside and followed his mysterious quarry’s scent back to the elevator and down to one of the support floors.
“Bernie, send cleaning robots out to this location and then scrap then when they try to empty their bags.”
“Roger, Cain. Anything else?”
Finding her name proved trivial. Althea Thompson. The other civilian at the black site had been Maxwell Sturgess. Cain filed away the second name as a person of interest, but dug up as much as he could on Ms Althea Thompson.
“Yes, give me data on all of Ms Thompson’s relations and known associates.”
