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“Yana Wu, not suicide, terrorist. This chick does not want any attention. Super sneak.” Zhang slide the file to Akemi who pulled his chair up as he opened the keyboard hologram on his teardrop.
Akemi loved a good terrorist. “Well, she’s logged into Rummage right now.” Jenkins rolled his eyes as he stared at his own screen. “Not too sneaky if you ask me.” “Are you fucking serious?” Zhang was not a fan of Jenkins’ stupidity, but Akemi enjoyed the wall to bounce his ideas off of. “Rummage is the perfect place for someone that wants to blend in. Doesn’t matter what your ideas are, there is someone louder and crazier on Rummage, and Wu is fairly sane for a terrorist. You sure, Zhang?” Akemi allowed his gaze to leave the screen long enough to see one of Zhang’s sleek, black eyebrows raise in sarcastic anger before he continued. “She’s a C.U.N.T. Not usually prone to aggression.” Akemi caught Zhang’s eye through the electric haze that surrounded the crisp screen projecting from the teardrop. “She’s not normal.” Zhang emphasized this as she packed her things. Zhang had a normal life with a real boyfriend now. “I told you, sneaky. If I have to come back in less than sixteen hours, I am going to be pissed.” She pointed to both of us as she exited the room. “Mmhhm, love to watch her leave, right boss?” Jenkins lived in a time long forgotten by enlightened beings, but Akemi was not enlightened, and he remembered how shitty things were before the gender shift of 2056. So, he kicked Jenkins’ backward chair out from under him. “Don’t talk to me like you post; I’m not some far away, blogging CUNT that makes your balls tingle with my harsh retorts.” Akemi refocused his attention on his screen read through the most recent, enraged posts by Yana Wu. “The Cunning Unified Nation of Twats is known for just sitting around and complain. I think Zhang got it wrong.” Jenkins stood over Akemi’s shoulder, which rattled Akemi to no end. “Take the Davis file, and get out of my office.” Jenkins was only given straight, white male cases. Despite the fact that he was a total douche bag, Jenkins flourished in the realm of the contrived asshole. Even though white men only occupied about ⅕ of the population, they cause about 50% of the disarmament cases. Mostly suicides like Pimbleton; the kind of guys that hate the world because they assume the world hates them. They know the only way anyone will ever remember them is if they do something mega fucked up, but these guys are such cowards that they usually just let the idea fester in their brain until it’s so clear on their face that we can easily step in and wipe them clean. “Hey look,” Jenkins broke into Akemi’s thought process once more. “Pimbleton already applied for a new INeuc upgrade.” Jenkins laughed to himself. “Quiet.” Akemi was onto something. His first thought was that Wu was a plug.The NRA and Alt.Right loved to plant their own people among the C.U.N.T and DemSocialists to cause tension, but Wu was pure. Nothing in her past pointed to anything but a classic uber liberal that was cultivated in the backwoods of Oregon and then transplanted into the streets of Chicago. She was here to change the ever growing housing crisis, and perhaps the world along with it. That’s what her Wizper account said anyway. But Zhang had found the dark cloud that had crept over Wu’s social accounts. She had started to frequent anti-nuec bars and NRA funded neutralization rallies. Of course, Wu was not foolish enough to post herself in such establishments, but her image can clearly be seen on the posts of others, and one card holding anit-nuec member stood out above the rest, Marco Bennett. Yana Wu had been cropped out of nearly seventy-two posts by Marco Bennett. Either Marco had just been dumped by Yana, or he was trying to hide the fact that he was currently with her. The average socialite does not have the ability to revert images to their original form, but U.S. Corporate is not a socialite. Wu was on the move, digitally at least. She had jumped from Rummage to Wizper and was commencing to rant about the lack of jobs for doctoral students and the over abundance of modified orphans. People demand perfection from their children and then are disgusted with what perfection really means. If you didn’t want a child that could run a mile under five minutes while explaining quantitative theory to you, then why did you build it? Perfection Rejectors are fucking monsters! She was the quintessential liberal socialite; she refused to abbreviate anything. It was clear that her parents had made modifications to her in the womb. Her face just a bit to symmetrical, and her doctorate from Oxford earned at the age of 21 screamed of brainstem mods. Bennett was on a similar socialite path, but in the opposite direction. Careening around the darker side of Rummage, and crooning about the absurdity of free medicine. U.S. Corp claims capitalism, but where is the freedom?! Death to regulations and death to the commie trash! He had no obvious modifications, but bookoos of family money hidden away in offshore accounts. This kid was a classic spoiled, corporate insider. Born and raised on the company dollar. Moan monopoly into his ear and he’s hard for days. Both these kids are middle class socialites with everything in common, minus their basic ideologies but ideologies are a dime a dozen these days. They went to great lengths to cut her out of every picture she appeared in that he posted, and to post pictures of her in a different location on the same night. What Akemi needed was the account of someone else that was at the NoNuec bar that evening. That was easy enough, but Akemi hated being stuck in the office for more that an hour. He delegated the social scanning task to one of the interns, and he headed to the telepods. The NoNuec would be just closing up, and the Alt.Right crowd would be pouring into the streets. If he wanted to see Wu and Bennett’s motives in person, now was the time. They were born and raised to hate each other, but Akemi was starting to think that they didn’t, and that was the big red flag. With a quick ID scan of the city Akemi proved his theory correct; they were together. Huddling outside the Chicago Art Institute in attempts to appear like the starving students and loan dodgers that litter college campuses these days. *End Part 3*
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“Where are we at with the Pimbleton case?” Akemi asks Zhang, the senior agent on his team, but Zhang was way ahead of him.
“Taken care of.” Zhang slid her finger across the blue hologram that projected from her INuec as it rested on the table in front of her. The information that was once projected onto her holographic screen was now projecting onto Akemi’s device, which he had just tossed onto his desk so he could see the perps file while also drinking the cup of coffee another agent, Jenkins, had just placed in his hand. All Jenkins was good for was Coffee, but Zhang was good for everything. Zhang had worn the label ‘number one gal’ for a couple years; until she dumped him to focus on her career, but now she was aiming for his job and then some, so he guessed it paid off. “Neutralized?” Was Akemi’s question in regard to Holton Pimbleton, 32, bank teller with Fox Banking and Loan, and a suicide risk. “Revoked.” Was Zhang’s response. “How’d you manage that?” Akemi sat back in his chair and got comfortable for the tale. Zhang really was the master of her trade. “It was a thing of beauty.” Jenkins answered first. “I couldn’t of done better myself.” “Yeah, that’s why they sent me.” Zhang tossed her hair and continued. “These guys so cheery when you run across them. He had Jenkins here running in circle for the past two weeks.” Zhang shrugged and Jenkins rolled his eyes as she continued, “I found him at Fox Bank after his shift. He was heading to some restaurant to eat alone; he eats there every night alone, so I follow him.” “Why didn’t you ask to join him. Pretty thing like you would get an immediate yes.” Jenkins was new, so he still asked dumb questions. “One, I don’t want to eat with that shit-fuck.” Zhang flicked Jenkins across the face with her pointer finger. “Two, do you really think a suicide risk is going to buy that someone, out of nowhere, suddenly grows a heart and wants to reach out to them? Especially me?” She points at her high angled cheek bones, brown, cat eyes, and black, waist length hair as if to make her third point. “That’s your problem, Jenkins. You think these people actually want to get better, or some shit. If I had offered help, I would of lost him.” “So what was your move?” Akemi knew the answer to his question, but it always sounded so much cooler when it came from Zhang. “A clean scan; disarmament at its best, gentleman.” She smiled at Jenkin’s confusion. “So, he’s playing with his INuec, watching one of those companion channels and I saunter up with my wand.” She holds the thin, black scanner as a visual. “You just walked up to a suicide risk with an exposed scanner?” Now Jenkins was starting to ask the right questions. “It’s called tact, my friend.” Zhang twirled the instrument in her hand as she continued her story. “You can’t even approach these guys head on without spooking them, but luckily the bathroom was behind where he was sitting, so I just make like I’m heading for the toilet and bam! He had no clue until I was in full scan mode and his teardrop was blinking pure green.” “Did he freak?” Jenkins was a total schadenfreude. “Total spaz.” Zhang too. “I slid him his documentation, but he wasn’t having any of it. He almost touched me.” No one touched Zhang unless she wants them to. “Had to flip him. He’s probably getting his cast set now.” “Do you think he’ll still do it?” Jenkins was hoping with ever fiber of his being that Pimbleton would show up on the news later that night hanging off a ledge. “Nah,” Zhang was too seasoned to wish for such things. “Suicide cases never go through with it once the lines been cut. Their game is pure narcissism, and if they can’t affect others with their pain, they won’t do it. The real trigger pullers opt in for a scan. That’s when you know they’ll do it. Guys like Pimbleton are just murders convincing themselves their depressed.” “Wait, people still opt in for scans?” “You are such a newb, man.” Zhang laughed at Jenkin’s ignorance. “People opt out of the program everyday, and that is their right.” The story was done and Akemi was ready for the next file. He didn’t like it when Zhang got to have all the fun. “Who’s our top threat for the morning?” *End Part 2* |
Updates, short stories, and information from R. T. Kilgore.Archives
June 2021
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