Maniac’s Mayhem: A guide to being a corporate slave

"We have to do something. The number of crazy people wearing masks is increasing in Germany."

"What should we do, ma'am? We don't know which one is the Samurai."

"I don't care! Figure it out. I don't want my city to become a psycho-infested hellscape like Milan."

-- The Mayor of Strasburg when confronted with the fact that the rate of masked crime went up. Brought to you by the Purple Truth.

 

I wake up early today, awakened by the blaring alarm of my augs. My bed is still comfortable today, but the girl this time is a lot hairier. I scratch Daisy behind her ear. She is fine here. People will take care of her, but I still wish I could take her with me. Sadly, I don’t have a good enough excuse as to why I have 70 kilos of African predator as a pet.

I grab the bag that I packed yesterday. It is just filled with some clothes and some fancy computer stuff, with my mask hiding in the false bottom. I put on my training gear with a T-shirt and sweatpants. I am not sure why we are meeting in a training room, but dressing for the occasion can only be of benefit to me. I grab three of my drones. I can’t bring them all, but a few nobody would notice. I have them turn into buttons of the pride flag, the lesbian flag, and the flag of Switzerland, respectively. I stick these onto my backpack, to make the thing looks well-used instead of brand new.

Are you sure that you don’t want to bring all your weapons?

‘Nah, need to leave some of the fun toys for Yun Min. The claymore will be enough.’

I do one last check to make sure that I have everything before slinging on the backpack and heading out. It does not take me all that long to reach the training hall, which belongs to a larger gym owned by New Hope. I quickly check the internal computers, which tell me that John rented one of the rooms for private training. I quickly head to the designated room and head inside.

Inside, I find 3 of my 6 man team already present. Michael is standing to the side, watching John and Eva participate in a mock fight. Well, it's a fight in its own way. I guess Eva is jumping around, trying her best to land a proper hit on John, but John easily bats those attempts aside with cybernetically enhanced strength and reflexes, outpacing the woman easily.

I go stand next to Michael, throwing off my backpack and the basic raincoat I had been wearing.

“So, does this mean that you are my sparring partner?” I say in a neutral tone.

Michael jumps away from me, his arms going every which way. “Noo, noo, I don’t want to fight.”

I shrug. “That is fair. It would be weird if you saw much fighting as a bio-engineer.”

“I am not even sure why I am part of the team.” he says, a bit despondent.

“Speed mostly.” I say with a shrug. “Most of the data we will find is biological. Having an expert answer would be helpful.”

“But why me? Why not Regan or Schneider.”

“Because they are well known, some people will notice when they show up in Zurich. You are the perfect balance between competent and unknown that we need for the mission.” I say.

“If the two of you are done gossiping, why does one of you not help me get a good hit?” Eva shouts from the mats.

“Because if I would help you, it would no longer be fun.” I shout back.

“Evelin, that is no way to treat a teammate. If one asks for help, you help!” John shouts back.

I just shrug, starting up the program I made after Silver Scorpion almost choked me to death, taking control of John's cybernetics.

“Okay, Eva, now!” I shout.

She runs in low, ready to pounce. At the same time, I turn off all of John's cybernetics. Eva’s punch lands and John falls to the ground. Eva stands still for a second, stunned, and I turn John's cybernetics back on.

“Evelin, the fuck was that?” John says, a lot of the bite having left his voice.

“I took control of your cybernetics and turned them off.” I say.

“Yeah, but how did you do that?” John asks me.

“I wrote a program for it.” I say. “I was attacked by a cyber-enhanced Samurai; I only survived by pure luck; kind of wrote a program to make sure I survive next time.”

“Any way you can protect me against such attacks?” John asks.

“I can, but on short notice, it won’t look pretty,” I say.

“Well, I'll take whatever I can get; you shutting me down like that is scary.” he says with a nod.

John and Eva then decide that teaching Michael the basics of sparring is a better use of their time. A few more minutes pass, and Davis walks in and joins me on the sideline, watching the fight play out. Eventually, Mio also joins us, and the three on the floor stop fighting and head over as well.

“Mio, you got what I asked for?” John says, when he is within speaking range.

“Of course.” she says as she folds out her tablet. “Check it out. I created a full background for all of you.”

I suddenly get a request for a file transfer. After accepting it, I am shown six different identities.

“We should still put some pictures online, and all that creates a paper trail of our existence, but all the correct data is there.” Mio continues on.

“So who is who?” Eva asks.

“Well, you and John are Katharina and Heinrich Garnholz, a happily married couple with one daughter”, she points at me. “Sofia Garnholz, I will be Sofia’s girlfriend, Yui Sato. And lastly, Davis and Michael will be James and Karter Wagner. They are pretending to be a married gay couple.”

“Not to be mean or anything.” Davis says, “But is that not too many gay relationships? Statistics say gay people are a minority.”

“Yes, you are right, that is why normally I would only do straight relationships. But we are using the pride parade and festivities as the reason we are visiting. And in this case, being gay is the norm. Or maybe not the norm, but entering a city when a gay festival is happening, as a gay couple is a lot more believable."

“That all makes sense, but what is the connection between the two groups? Travelling with strangers is still odd.” John asks.

“We don’t have a connection. We were given two cars, so we might as well enter as two groups.” Mio explains.

“Then how do we reconvene with each other?” John asks. I almost feel sorry for the girl. Having someone loom over you like that can’t be great.

“I booked us a hotel; all the reviews say that they barely clean, so it is perfect.” Mio says, a smile on her face.

“I see. Anything we still need?” John asks.

“Well, besides taking a couple of pictures and finding some wedding rings, the only thing we still have to do is paint Evelin's hair pink.”

“We have to do what?” I ask in surprise.

"Well, Eva has her normal hazel eyes, and you and John have obvious cyber-eyes, so nobody will complain if you don’t match, but John and Eva both have brown hair. I am not saying people with brown hair can’t have a kid with blond hair, but it is uncommon, so we need to change it to be safe.”

“But why pink?” I ask, still perplexed.

“Well, trying to colour-match it to the exact shade of brown is hard. Making it a ridiculous colour, so people know it is dyed, will make them doubt it less.” Mio answers.

“But why pink? Can’t it be a more subtle colour?”

“Well, most lesbians have pink hair, right? So you fit in, and with a brighter colour, people will pay more attention to that than to the fact that you all have different noses and such.”

I cross my arms and raise an eyebrow. “As a lesbian, I doubt that pink is the most common colour.”

“Exactly, you are a lesbian, and you will have pink hair, proving my stereotype.” Mio says, a big smile on her face.

“Evelin, stop complaining.” Eva says. “We are infiltrating. If we have to wear something uncomfortable or weird; we just do so.”

I just glower at the woman, coming up with lots of ways to take revenge.

“Well, Evelin, you have your mission. Go dye your hair.” John says, “Mio, you bring any hair dye?”

“Yes, I did.” the woman says, while taking out two big boxes of hair dye and handing them to me.

“There is a private shower room attached to this hall. You can get it done in there.” John says while pointing to one of the far doors.

After about an hour, I leave the shower room after washing out the excess chemicals. Why does this stuff have to smell so bad? I think while inspecting one of my now pink locks of hair. I mean, I am not really attached to the colour of my hair, but I still would prefer a colour that does not stand out as much. Then I look at Eva, whose hair has been cut in a style which closely resembles the Karen haircut, and I realise I could have gotten off a lot worse.

“You're back.” Mio says excitedly. “That colour looks good on you.”

“Mio, after this mission is over, I am going to kill you.” I say in a level tone.

Mio just slaps my shoulder. “If you say it like that, I would almost take it seriously. Also, it is Yui or babe, my love, or any other nickname from now on.”

I groan and just turn to walk the rest of the time. They are in the process of taking pictures of their new personas in holographic simulated scenery. I walk up, waiting my turn to take some pictures that we are going to use to give our fake personas a paper trail. Messing with metadata to change data is not that difficult and will make it look like we did not just appear out of nothing. Sure, with a closer examination, people can tell that it has been messed with. But barely anyone would look at that in the first place.

After a half hour or so, we are finally done, and we all sit down on the mats in a circle.

“Mio, Evelin, how secure is this room?” John asks.

We exchange a quick glance with each other before Mio speaks up. “There are no bugs, cameras or other listening devices if that is what you are asking.” She says.

“Good, let's discuss some more details of the mission.” He says before turning to me, “Evelin, you have an opinion on the mission?”

“Uhm, yeah, we are probably looking for a black site. Looking at the list of people that disappeared, most of them are experienced infiltrators, right?” I ask, looking at Eva.

“Yeah, I knew a few of them. Most of them would not go down easy.”

“So that means capturing them without a trace is not easy and most likely very expensive. And running up those expenses is only worth it if the projected profits from protecting the secret is worth it.” I say.

“So we are going after something valuable. Glad you are finely caught up. They would not send a six-person team if they thought there was not something valuable.” Eva says.

“Yes, but we are not looking at a weapon manufacturer's new handgun that can punch a hole through a hover tank or an exotic gem dug up by a mining company. We are working with a food company. The only reason that I can think of for increasing security this much, is if they discovered a way to grow the food at a significantly lower cost or can improve the texture or taste significantly without increasing production costs.” I explain.

“Why those options?” Mio asks.

“Well, reducing cost is obvious. They spent about 80 billion credits per year in just production. If they can reduce the cost by even 10%, then that means that the 8 billion credits will become available in profit. As for flavour, it is more complicated, but if you are the best tasting fake meat on the market, people will know and are more likely to buy your product, allowing you to obtain a larger portion of the market.”

John nods and then turns to Michael. “How likely is it that they upgraded the security for one of these reasons?”

“That is most likely the case,” Michael says. “There are no other options I can think of.”

“What size would this black site have to be at a minimum?” John asks

“It can be rather small. It kind of depends on how fast you want results.” Michael answers

“So we are looking for a small facility in Switzerland. Luckily, the Swiss did not build a bunch of bunkers.” Eva groans.

“So I guess that means we have to extract the data from a high-rank manager then.” John says.

“Unless you want to poke around every bunker or dark site in the area, yeah.” Eva says.

“Right, all of you get ready. The first couple of days will probably be information gathering.” John says. “We leave tonight. The sooner we are there, the sooner we can get to work.”

Everyone nods in agreement.

“Okay, now let's do some combat training. I hope it is unnecessary, but I would rather know what you all are capable of in a fight.” John continues.