Revised Cha 1
Apr. 1st, 2012 07:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
valarltdAny comments welcome
The great black tower of the Broine Enterprises And Security Technology arcology loomed over the city like the Beast some called it. Inside the three-quarter mile high building, twenty million people worked, ate and slept, living out their lives within its self-contained walls.
Sean O'Neill watched through the window of the luxury car, ignoring the mostly naked brunette massaging his feet, as the arcology drew ever closer. He had gotten this far, he could carry off the rest of the con. The car turned in at an exit and descended into an underground garage. Sean withdrew his feet from the girl and eased them back into his new and very expensive shoes.
She held the mirror as he checked the fine suit and realsilk tie, then brushed the cuff of his shirt over the gold-plated data-jack in his temple to make it shine. He cleaned a smudge off the blue metal of the stylish, fake lenses he wore and steeled himself to play his part.
The car stopped and he remembered to let the driver open the door for him. Martin Laurent, left hand of the Wheelman, did not open his own car door. Sean stepped out of the car, wearing Martin's fictional life, as well as his hand-tailored suit. He was calm and cool and not sweating.
He had never let a mark see him sweat and didn’t intend to start now. That resolve grew harder to maintain as the security guards took him to the elevator and the lobby. He calmed his breathing and heart-rate with meditations his teachers had made him learn. There were undoubtedly cameras and sensors tracking everything about him, and body temperature and heart-rate told more truth than people's words.
In the lobby, he walked straight, not looking around, and looked at the receptionist. The woman glanced up, her cats-eye shaped lenses a rosy pink that flattered her upswept blonde hair. The sight of the security guards made her give Sean her full attention.
“I am Martin Laurent, sent by Mr. Erik Ezekiel of Ezekiel InforTech. Please inform Mr. Broine that I have arrived for my appointment and am awaiting his earliest convenience.” The words came out with what he hoped was polished smoothness. He had said them a thousand times to his diction coach as he prepared to for the mission. Martin was a bit of a pompous bastard, Sean had decided, with a touch of arrogance. He had learned the part very well.
The receptionist fiddled with her desktop computer, made a couple of calls and then smiled very brightly up at him. “Mr. Broine will see you. Enjoy your visit to Broine Enterprises.”
Sean followed the security guards to the next stop. He surrendered the custom gun he carried without argument. This was all very standard, and Martin would do this any time he was sent out.
“We can't send this guy up,” the tech at the scanner said. One of Sean's guards came around and looked at the screen.
“Finger razors,” the guard said to his partner. “Should we handcuff him?”
Sean shrugged, his mind racing. Then he felt it click into the cool arrogance of Martin Laurent. “If it makes you feel safer, certainly. However, you will answer to not only Mr. Ezekiel, my employer, but your own Mr. Broine as well if I am unable to complete the transactions I have been sent to facilitate.”
“If the Beast wants him uncuffed, we can take the keys along,” the guard at his side said. “And the Boss can make the apologies as well.”
“Yeah, let's let the ones paid to do the thinking and talking worry about him. We're just keeping them safe.”
Sean let them cuff his hands behind his back, and walked on when the tech cleared them. He carried himself in such a way that the people they passed might have mistaken him for merely deep in thought, with his hands clasped behind his back. They took a slidewalk, much cleaner than the ones in Sean's neighborhood, to a small capsule of a monorail car.
The three of them made for close quarters, but Sean refused to show his discomfort on the brief ride into the heart of the arcology. They took him to an elevator bank in the middle of an office building and headed up.
Sean's ears popped repeatedly on the swift ride up more than half a mile. His guards hustled him off the elevator and through the labyrinthine office building. They stopped in front of a desk.
“Visitor to the top,” they told the little man with the blue mohawk behind the desk. The man plugged a cord into the jack in his temple and a keyboard into the plug behind his ear. He looked up at Sean with eyes of solid blue stone that matched his hair.
“Name and business,” he said, with the usual lack of manners corporate hackers displayed.
“Martin Laurent, from Ezekiel InfoTech. I have a thirteen-twenty with Mr. Broine and it is now thirteen-oh-five.” Martin Laurent gave back as good as he got from corporate console jockeys, it seemed. Sean tended to stammer around them. He breathed slowly and recited poetry in his head, just as he'd been taught.
Three long minutes the hacker kept him there, his stone eyes closes, his shallow breathing rapid type as he poked and prodded the backstory on Martin Laurent. All Sean could do was keep reciting poetry in his head and send a silent prayer to St. Isidore that the LedaCorp techs really had made his identity airtight. One hundred and eighty long seconds he waited.
“Take the fast elevator. Don't keep the Beast waiting,” the hacker said, waving toward the bank of elevators behind him.
This elevator ride wasn't nearly as long, but Sean's ears popped again from the speed. He swallowed to clear them and to shake what nerves remained. He was handcuffed in an elevator three-quarters of a mile above the city, with two big guys carrying machine guns. He thought about poetry instead. One of his coaches had made him memorize what felt like reams of it, sonnets, long blank verse things, and others. Odd that it should be the most useful thing he'd learned.
He knew very few people came up this elevator, that millions of people beneath him would never even see the man with the blue mohawk. He'd wanted to be a salary-man in an arcology once, but guys like him never had that kind of chance. A little school, minimal tech skills, and a lot of street smarts got him by. With his criminal record, he wasn't qualified to work in the recycling vats of an arcology.
The security guards followed him down a hall to a large, ornate door that just might be real wood. One of them tapped a security code on the pad, gave a voice print and answered six different question. Sean heard his false name and waited.
The speaker crackled “Approved.”
The guards left him handcuffed. Sean ran out of poetry as he waited for the door to open.
To take his mind from his nerves, heobserved the hallway, checking any security and escape routes he could find. Like everywhere, the higher he went, the posher it became. Here at the top of Broine Tower, backed by all the money of Broine Enterprises, with their mercenaries, water monopolies and food patents, life looked very sweet.
A metal track set into the archway of the elaborate door would hold a metal plate to seal off access in case of hostility. All arcologies were fortresses at the upper levels. That had been their purpose during the Resource Wars, when corporations leveled their full arsenals at each other. This was not a place he could merely walk out of.
Coming up the hard way, Sean had learned the natural order of things in his world very early. Incautious little fish got eaten by the big fish, who in turn got eaten by bigger fish, who in turn got eaten by the sharks, and that all the fish in the sea—including the greatest sharks—did their best to avoid even a passing encounter with the giant octopus. Zaran Broine lurked unseen in the background of most transactions, everything from buying a vitamin soda to sending money by secure Net-transfer, his many tentacles reaching far and wide into everything.
But Sean had found himself ensnared in the tentacles of an equally powerful kraken and now he was playing far out of his league, backed by people too powerful to deny, crossing people too dangerous to face. He owed his backers far too much to say no. Too much money, a life, a functioning body that actually looked human instead of a mess of scars and too many other things.
He swallowed hard, wondering if this delay would actually make him late. He discarded the idea. Such an insult to an upper level functionary would not be in anyone's interest. It would send relations between the megacorps into the junker.
His own life had gone straight into the junker when his wife had vanished, stolen from their bed in the dead of night. He stopped that thought. The job. He had to think about the job, not about Kyla.
He did his best not to flinch when a nude red-haired woman answered the door. She wasn’t Kyla. She stood taller, and curvier. All her curves were on display, gold nipple rings included. Silver cuffs, with tie-down rings, circled her ankles and wrists and a fancy silver electronic collar sat on her throat, a leash dangling.
He was glad Niall was not along for this part of the job. The sight could trigger his brother and he could afford one of Niall’s PTSD freakouts and captivity flashbacks as little as he could afford sweat. Niall had volunteered to come along, but his backers had final say and denied him, for very personal reasons. Sean couldn’t dwell on that unsettling topic right now either. He’d work with Niall after he got out of this. The job. Just the job. He had to stay focused on the job.
“Welcome. Master is expecting you, Mr. Laurent.” She opened the door all the way, with a visible effort at its weight. Then she went to her knees and held up her leash. Sean stepped across the threshold, wondering if he’d ever walk out again as the door shut behind him automatically. He shrugged, showing his hands were still cuffed.
A pair of goons, like the ones he’d left behind in the elevator, stepped into place in front of the door. The rich and powerful played by their own rules at this level and there was no law that would prosecute the billionaire head of Broine Enterprises for the murder of a lowlife like him, assuming anyone besides his backers—who considered him completely expendable—even noticed.
“If you will follow me, Mr. Laurent, I will lead you to where Master awaits you.” The girl gracefully rose, gave a respectful bow, as if apologizing for turning her back on him, and then turned and led him in. He followed her shapely rear deeper into the lair, trying not to admire the sexy sway of her hips. The stone-faced goons fell in behind him, a reminder that no matter how warm the welcome was, he was not a trusted guest, but one subject to removal, whether transport or something more lethal, at any false move.
Just a mark, he reminded himself. Zaran was just a mark, no matter how rich or powerful. He was no different than the office drones to whom Sean sold black market computer bits, which might or might not work, semi-legal energy drinks, which usually worked, and good luck charms, which worked as hard as the buyer.
Zaran’s immense penthouse apartment was tasteful, understated, all the words Sean had heard but never really believed. The rooms looked big enough to encompass the whole first floor of his apartment building, with space left over. The real wood furniture didn’t overwhelm any room, and despite the antiquity of some of the pieces, they had been cared for, and not passed through at least three careless owners, like everything he’d ever owned.
The art on the walls—real paintings in frames, not projected images—was colorful, if disturbing in subject matter. Sean didn’t recognize any of the men in ancient clothing, but they all had a certain cast to their faces that made them look sinister. He drifted closer to the wall to read the small gold nameplates on the paintings. Emperor Caligula. Pope Innocent III. Niccolo Machiavelli. The Marquis De Sade. He recognized only the last from some recent required reading. He shivered. He was in very far over his head.
The same stamp appeared on the faces in the great battlescenes, with women being carried away as plunder, in the faces of torturers, subjecting more women to unspeakable torments, and on the faces of the demons in paintings of Hell in every religious tradition. Sean wondered where the golden floor tiles and cut diamond doorknobs were, and then remembered that the Broines had had money long enough to develop taste to go with it. They had long ago gotten over the need to flaunt it.
As he passed from the dimly lit gallery, a splendid view of the city spread out on all sides from the enormous windows that let in light, but only reflected the sky from outside. Sean knew from his handlers that the glass would withstand anything up to a direct nuclear hit. From up here, the city was all glittery silver, shiny glass and pretty stone, without the street-level squalor and litter, without poor people. He had swum straight into the octopus’ lair, feeling like a very small fish, although he was pretending to be a shark himself.
Sean tried not to case the place as he followed the girl, but the abundance of sculpture and art made it difficult. He clutched the leash tighter and stopped his automatic reach for a golden knickknack on the hall table. Everything would be ID chipped, impossible to move on the open market, even if he could get it out. The very large security goons who had followed him from the elevator discouraged any such thoughts. Discreet black bubbles on the ceiling told him that he was still watched by others as well.
The saturnine man lounged in the study, flanked by a pair of leather-clad retainers, his shoulders being massaged by a naked blonde. Tall, thin, dark, a bored look on his narrow face, Zaran sneered up from where he sat, toying with another blonde’s curly hair as he read on a handheld computer. The redhead dropped to her knees and crawled to kneel up beside the chair.
“Yes?” Even his voice sounded bored as if Sean had disturbed him from watching the paint dry. He had been born to wealth and privilege, a general and explorer with no more vistas to conquer. This was not a man who had ever scrounged his dinner off other people’s plates in a dishroom, or run for his life through back alleys and over fences. Sean was willing to wager good money that Zaran’s largest task was finding a way to fill all the waking hours in a day without killing someone, probably one of the girls, for his amusement. Sean had the thought that as far above the law as Zaran was, murder was probably just as boring as every other pastime.
“I’m your thirteen-twenty appointment, Mr. Broine, here about the girl you have for sale. Gemini’s reject.”
(and from there it's identical)
The great black tower of the Broine Enterprises And Security Technology arcology loomed over the city like the Beast some called it. Inside the three-quarter mile high building, twenty million people worked, ate and slept, living out their lives within its self-contained walls.
Sean O'Neill watched through the window of the luxury car, ignoring the mostly naked brunette massaging his feet, as the arcology drew ever closer. He had gotten this far, he could carry off the rest of the con. The car turned in at an exit and descended into an underground garage. Sean withdrew his feet from the girl and eased them back into his new and very expensive shoes.
She held the mirror as he checked the fine suit and realsilk tie, then brushed the cuff of his shirt over the gold-plated data-jack in his temple to make it shine. He cleaned a smudge off the blue metal of the stylish, fake lenses he wore and steeled himself to play his part.
The car stopped and he remembered to let the driver open the door for him. Martin Laurent, left hand of the Wheelman, did not open his own car door. Sean stepped out of the car, wearing Martin's fictional life, as well as his hand-tailored suit. He was calm and cool and not sweating.
He had never let a mark see him sweat and didn’t intend to start now. That resolve grew harder to maintain as the security guards took him to the elevator and the lobby. He calmed his breathing and heart-rate with meditations his teachers had made him learn. There were undoubtedly cameras and sensors tracking everything about him, and body temperature and heart-rate told more truth than people's words.
In the lobby, he walked straight, not looking around, and looked at the receptionist. The woman glanced up, her cats-eye shaped lenses a rosy pink that flattered her upswept blonde hair. The sight of the security guards made her give Sean her full attention.
“I am Martin Laurent, sent by Mr. Erik Ezekiel of Ezekiel InforTech. Please inform Mr. Broine that I have arrived for my appointment and am awaiting his earliest convenience.” The words came out with what he hoped was polished smoothness. He had said them a thousand times to his diction coach as he prepared to for the mission. Martin was a bit of a pompous bastard, Sean had decided, with a touch of arrogance. He had learned the part very well.
The receptionist fiddled with her desktop computer, made a couple of calls and then smiled very brightly up at him. “Mr. Broine will see you. Enjoy your visit to Broine Enterprises.”
Sean followed the security guards to the next stop. He surrendered the custom gun he carried without argument. This was all very standard, and Martin would do this any time he was sent out.
“We can't send this guy up,” the tech at the scanner said. One of Sean's guards came around and looked at the screen.
“Finger razors,” the guard said to his partner. “Should we handcuff him?”
Sean shrugged, his mind racing. Then he felt it click into the cool arrogance of Martin Laurent. “If it makes you feel safer, certainly. However, you will answer to not only Mr. Ezekiel, my employer, but your own Mr. Broine as well if I am unable to complete the transactions I have been sent to facilitate.”
“If the Beast wants him uncuffed, we can take the keys along,” the guard at his side said. “And the Boss can make the apologies as well.”
“Yeah, let's let the ones paid to do the thinking and talking worry about him. We're just keeping them safe.”
Sean let them cuff his hands behind his back, and walked on when the tech cleared them. He carried himself in such a way that the people they passed might have mistaken him for merely deep in thought, with his hands clasped behind his back. They took a slidewalk, much cleaner than the ones in Sean's neighborhood, to a small capsule of a monorail car.
The three of them made for close quarters, but Sean refused to show his discomfort on the brief ride into the heart of the arcology. They took him to an elevator bank in the middle of an office building and headed up.
Sean's ears popped repeatedly on the swift ride up more than half a mile. His guards hustled him off the elevator and through the labyrinthine office building. They stopped in front of a desk.
“Visitor to the top,” they told the little man with the blue mohawk behind the desk. The man plugged a cord into the jack in his temple and a keyboard into the plug behind his ear. He looked up at Sean with eyes of solid blue stone that matched his hair.
“Name and business,” he said, with the usual lack of manners corporate hackers displayed.
“Martin Laurent, from Ezekiel InfoTech. I have a thirteen-twenty with Mr. Broine and it is now thirteen-oh-five.” Martin Laurent gave back as good as he got from corporate console jockeys, it seemed. Sean tended to stammer around them. He breathed slowly and recited poetry in his head, just as he'd been taught.
Three long minutes the hacker kept him there, his stone eyes closes, his shallow breathing rapid type as he poked and prodded the backstory on Martin Laurent. All Sean could do was keep reciting poetry in his head and send a silent prayer to St. Isidore that the LedaCorp techs really had made his identity airtight. One hundred and eighty long seconds he waited.
“Take the fast elevator. Don't keep the Beast waiting,” the hacker said, waving toward the bank of elevators behind him.
This elevator ride wasn't nearly as long, but Sean's ears popped again from the speed. He swallowed to clear them and to shake what nerves remained. He was handcuffed in an elevator three-quarters of a mile above the city, with two big guys carrying machine guns. He thought about poetry instead. One of his coaches had made him memorize what felt like reams of it, sonnets, long blank verse things, and others. Odd that it should be the most useful thing he'd learned.
He knew very few people came up this elevator, that millions of people beneath him would never even see the man with the blue mohawk. He'd wanted to be a salary-man in an arcology once, but guys like him never had that kind of chance. A little school, minimal tech skills, and a lot of street smarts got him by. With his criminal record, he wasn't qualified to work in the recycling vats of an arcology.
The security guards followed him down a hall to a large, ornate door that just might be real wood. One of them tapped a security code on the pad, gave a voice print and answered six different question. Sean heard his false name and waited.
The speaker crackled “Approved.”
The guards left him handcuffed. Sean ran out of poetry as he waited for the door to open.
To take his mind from his nerves, heobserved the hallway, checking any security and escape routes he could find. Like everywhere, the higher he went, the posher it became. Here at the top of Broine Tower, backed by all the money of Broine Enterprises, with their mercenaries, water monopolies and food patents, life looked very sweet.
A metal track set into the archway of the elaborate door would hold a metal plate to seal off access in case of hostility. All arcologies were fortresses at the upper levels. That had been their purpose during the Resource Wars, when corporations leveled their full arsenals at each other. This was not a place he could merely walk out of.
Coming up the hard way, Sean had learned the natural order of things in his world very early. Incautious little fish got eaten by the big fish, who in turn got eaten by bigger fish, who in turn got eaten by the sharks, and that all the fish in the sea—including the greatest sharks—did their best to avoid even a passing encounter with the giant octopus. Zaran Broine lurked unseen in the background of most transactions, everything from buying a vitamin soda to sending money by secure Net-transfer, his many tentacles reaching far and wide into everything.
But Sean had found himself ensnared in the tentacles of an equally powerful kraken and now he was playing far out of his league, backed by people too powerful to deny, crossing people too dangerous to face. He owed his backers far too much to say no. Too much money, a life, a functioning body that actually looked human instead of a mess of scars and too many other things.
He swallowed hard, wondering if this delay would actually make him late. He discarded the idea. Such an insult to an upper level functionary would not be in anyone's interest. It would send relations between the megacorps into the junker.
His own life had gone straight into the junker when his wife had vanished, stolen from their bed in the dead of night. He stopped that thought. The job. He had to think about the job, not about Kyla.
He did his best not to flinch when a nude red-haired woman answered the door. She wasn’t Kyla. She stood taller, and curvier. All her curves were on display, gold nipple rings included. Silver cuffs, with tie-down rings, circled her ankles and wrists and a fancy silver electronic collar sat on her throat, a leash dangling.
He was glad Niall was not along for this part of the job. The sight could trigger his brother and he could afford one of Niall’s PTSD freakouts and captivity flashbacks as little as he could afford sweat. Niall had volunteered to come along, but his backers had final say and denied him, for very personal reasons. Sean couldn’t dwell on that unsettling topic right now either. He’d work with Niall after he got out of this. The job. Just the job. He had to stay focused on the job.
“Welcome. Master is expecting you, Mr. Laurent.” She opened the door all the way, with a visible effort at its weight. Then she went to her knees and held up her leash. Sean stepped across the threshold, wondering if he’d ever walk out again as the door shut behind him automatically. He shrugged, showing his hands were still cuffed.
A pair of goons, like the ones he’d left behind in the elevator, stepped into place in front of the door. The rich and powerful played by their own rules at this level and there was no law that would prosecute the billionaire head of Broine Enterprises for the murder of a lowlife like him, assuming anyone besides his backers—who considered him completely expendable—even noticed.
“If you will follow me, Mr. Laurent, I will lead you to where Master awaits you.” The girl gracefully rose, gave a respectful bow, as if apologizing for turning her back on him, and then turned and led him in. He followed her shapely rear deeper into the lair, trying not to admire the sexy sway of her hips. The stone-faced goons fell in behind him, a reminder that no matter how warm the welcome was, he was not a trusted guest, but one subject to removal, whether transport or something more lethal, at any false move.
Just a mark, he reminded himself. Zaran was just a mark, no matter how rich or powerful. He was no different than the office drones to whom Sean sold black market computer bits, which might or might not work, semi-legal energy drinks, which usually worked, and good luck charms, which worked as hard as the buyer.
Zaran’s immense penthouse apartment was tasteful, understated, all the words Sean had heard but never really believed. The rooms looked big enough to encompass the whole first floor of his apartment building, with space left over. The real wood furniture didn’t overwhelm any room, and despite the antiquity of some of the pieces, they had been cared for, and not passed through at least three careless owners, like everything he’d ever owned.
The art on the walls—real paintings in frames, not projected images—was colorful, if disturbing in subject matter. Sean didn’t recognize any of the men in ancient clothing, but they all had a certain cast to their faces that made them look sinister. He drifted closer to the wall to read the small gold nameplates on the paintings. Emperor Caligula. Pope Innocent III. Niccolo Machiavelli. The Marquis De Sade. He recognized only the last from some recent required reading. He shivered. He was in very far over his head.
The same stamp appeared on the faces in the great battlescenes, with women being carried away as plunder, in the faces of torturers, subjecting more women to unspeakable torments, and on the faces of the demons in paintings of Hell in every religious tradition. Sean wondered where the golden floor tiles and cut diamond doorknobs were, and then remembered that the Broines had had money long enough to develop taste to go with it. They had long ago gotten over the need to flaunt it.
As he passed from the dimly lit gallery, a splendid view of the city spread out on all sides from the enormous windows that let in light, but only reflected the sky from outside. Sean knew from his handlers that the glass would withstand anything up to a direct nuclear hit. From up here, the city was all glittery silver, shiny glass and pretty stone, without the street-level squalor and litter, without poor people. He had swum straight into the octopus’ lair, feeling like a very small fish, although he was pretending to be a shark himself.
Sean tried not to case the place as he followed the girl, but the abundance of sculpture and art made it difficult. He clutched the leash tighter and stopped his automatic reach for a golden knickknack on the hall table. Everything would be ID chipped, impossible to move on the open market, even if he could get it out. The very large security goons who had followed him from the elevator discouraged any such thoughts. Discreet black bubbles on the ceiling told him that he was still watched by others as well.
The saturnine man lounged in the study, flanked by a pair of leather-clad retainers, his shoulders being massaged by a naked blonde. Tall, thin, dark, a bored look on his narrow face, Zaran sneered up from where he sat, toying with another blonde’s curly hair as he read on a handheld computer. The redhead dropped to her knees and crawled to kneel up beside the chair.
“Yes?” Even his voice sounded bored as if Sean had disturbed him from watching the paint dry. He had been born to wealth and privilege, a general and explorer with no more vistas to conquer. This was not a man who had ever scrounged his dinner off other people’s plates in a dishroom, or run for his life through back alleys and over fences. Sean was willing to wager good money that Zaran’s largest task was finding a way to fill all the waking hours in a day without killing someone, probably one of the girls, for his amusement. Sean had the thought that as far above the law as Zaran was, murder was probably just as boring as every other pastime.
“I’m your thirteen-twenty appointment, Mr. Broine, here about the girl you have for sale. Gemini’s reject.”
(and from there it's identical)
