Anti-antithesis

A huge thanks to Stella, the author of Foxfire, for her gift of this epigraph.

Dr. Maddie "Sharpshooter" Doppler, 2034

Roger

Waking up in the morning has become something of a challenge since upgrading my body, something that Daliah had explained more than once was certainly caused by the new cat part of my biology. I mean, the many micro naps I took through the day helped me stay active and alert for far longer than before, and I have had no problems waking up from those. It’s just the longer naps in my bed that caused me issues now, as I got extremely comfortable and warm, and the feeling of Daliah running her nails through my tail fur and near my ears bordered on pure ecstasy.

But I digress. She wasn’t here right now, as she had her own responsibilities at the Lower Six, and I did have actual work to do today. Not to mention Morrigan had done this torturous modification to my room where she could pump the smells of the kitchen to me in order to entice me to get up. It was on my request, to be fair, but still. I took another deep sniff of the air and felt my stomach grumble, the scent of grilling chicken and fresh bread overwhelming my desire to not move.

I slunked off the bed and stretched as I did a lazy cartwheel, feeling my newish muscles moving and my spine popping rapturously as my massive, fluffy tail followed along. As I stood straight and sent a command to my clothes to dress me, I moved my tail into my hands and ran my fingers along its length. Snow leopard was an excellent choice to base it on, as the black spots added a lovely bit of visual flair that worked- in concert with the deep, velvety purple. Not to mention how long it was. I loved using it as a scarf, with the weight of it being just right for comfort.

As I finished my impromptu grooming session, my clothes settled on business casual as their apparel for the day. Tan slacks and a tucked-in, sky-blue polo, with a set of polished black loafers to complete the look. I glanced at my clock app in my eye augs and chuckled as I noticed that it was a quarter ‘till six in the morning, lamenting my youngest brother’s new routine, as it meant it was a bit too late to see him for breakfast.

I was so proud of him for working on setting his own schedule, honestly, even if it was at the prompting of his therapist. And a set bedtime and wake-up time was a great start for him to begin healing into a normal human. I believed he should have been at the training hall since five thirty, getting used to his snake form and body doubles. The rest of his routine was still in flux, but Cari and Yerlette were doing what they could to assist him for the last couple of months, so I was certain he would be fine.

As I made my way to the dining room, I opened up a dozen or so windows in my augs of various news sites, stock markets, and reports from my employees, going over them at lightning speed to get an idea of the direction the day might take. The neural enhancers and extra co-processors made the task a breeze, so much so that I was able to reminisce on how I used to do this at the old dorm, using inefficient, external screens over breakfast.

As I took a seat at the agreed-upon dining table surrounded by my garden, Babushka placed a platter containing chicken bacon sandwiches in front of me with a thermos of coffee on the side. I leaned over and gave her a quick hug, muttering thanks as I read a slightly concerning report from Jeorge, my manager in charge of sales for Real Dreams, Limited. Well, he did plenty of other things for me as well, but officially that was his job. It mentioned the movement of a few of our competitors, but not in any manner I would expect. No espionage, no gathering forces or slanderous ads, but rather what appeared to be a full retreat.

Before I could start thinking about what that meant or what countermeasures I might have needed to draft, Babushka tapped my shoulder, drawing my attention to the mostly devoured plate of sandwiches.

“Breathe, Roger, and taste the food Buddy and I made, yes? Whatever you are reading can wait for you to savor breakfast first.” She said with her eyebrow raised in… Concern, I think. It had been a while since I had seen it directed at me that it took me a moment to place the expression.

Chuckling, I took another bite of the sandwich I had been plowing through and allowed myself to taste the wonderful creation I was presented with. My face must have lit up with shock as Babushka chuckled, turning around to walk back to the kitchen. The chicken was different, noticeably so, and it was not due to the spices, or lack thereof, in this case, not to mention the bacon.

The meat itself was juicier, yet also slightly tougher, while the bacon had a much more pronounced smoky flavor, with hints of something sweet. I took a look at the menu app that Baba Yaga and Buddy set up to explain what they were cooking and felt my jaw drop slightly.

The chicken was not from the bio-beds but rather from a live chicken that was grown from an egg from those Morrigan “rescued” from Bestle HQ. The bacon was the same, as it was smoked from one of the four that were slaughtered last month. I knew Buddy and Opal were still experimenting with the smoker, but this result was spectacular. Maybe there was an actual market for high-end real meat if this was the experimental product.

Taking Babushka’s cue, I let myself enjoy the rest of my breakfast, my tail waving lazily behind me as my ears relaxed slightly. I read up on the news aggregator The Family offered and chuckled at the state the rest of the continent found itself in. A bit of chaos from antithesis hives that were left unnoticed or not fully cleaned out, lots of corporate bullshit and plots causing untold damages to both public and private sectors, and what seemed like some chaos happening in the northeast near New Montreal.

An incursion had hit them squarely in their city limits, with numerous old guard Family Samurai there to prevent a full-blown panic. Though there was this tiny, scrungly thing of a girl fighting for her life beside a massive turret that had its own article. The investigative reporters The Family employed did an outstanding job detailing the harrowing few hours she experienced after initializing, not to mention the crimes of the building’s previous owners that allowed her to initialize in the first place.

There was also another piece on a local gangster who looked like a red panda mixed with a honey badger doing remarkable work on the xenos and executives alike. After skimming his profile, I made sure to send that story to Auntie Cass, as I am sure she would love to read up on another red panda-themed Samurai.

After finishing my meal and getting a refill of my coffee, I turned to my garden. The flowers were growing nicely, with a few buds getting ready to bloom over the next few days. Azaleas, poppies, lilies, and a dozen or so other types filled the space. I checked their soil nutrient levels, noting that a few needed to be fed soon and that they all needed to be watered today.

I took great joy in fulfilling the stereotype of a CEO being meticulous with their garden and all the sense of power and responsibility that came with it. Though, Yerlette made certain to disillusion me of the notion that it would be easy. I then turned towards the produce garden I had set aside, as Buddy had convinced me to try growing tomatoes as well, going with the angle of they are a type of nightshade and all.

Those things continued to surprise me, as while they were barely a month old, they were nearly as tall as I was with dozens of flowers. The seeds Synaptic made for me were based on pre-twenty twenty-two GMO plants, where they were not supposed to be the monstrous batch cooking things that current hydro-farms produced. Yet these things ignored that instruction, apparently, deciding that they were going to produce dozens of fist-sized tomatoes per plant. Considering this was my first harvest, I decided to allow the plants to grow as big as they wanted to simply to see what would happen.

After cleaning myself up and taking a quick power nap, I ambled my way to the DM Screen, more specifically my office that Morrigan added in the most recent retrofit, in order to get started on my work for the day.

Stepping into the Orwellian command center was something special, even after all these months. We had expanded the space spatially, adding another seventy percent of workable floorspace, as well as adding another two floors. Something that Bahamut had deemed necessary considering Cody’s Gremlins were a lot more numerous than initially planned. Turns out, logistics networks for armies needed plenty of people to make things work smoothly, not to mention that the surveillance network of Ravens needed its own staff.

And as much as Morrigan had initially planned to leave that work to the minions, we had hundreds of applicants from the residents of the Tower showing their desire to aid their loved ones and the troops as a whole, so I made her relent.

The floors were designed akin to a wide U, with the opening at the top being reserved for a massive situation screen of New Phoenix and a few of the surrounding territories, as well as the three sites we received from the Bestle raid, which had been transitioned from black site labs to warehouses. They would be useful eventually for expansion of the Monster Box, but for now we had no resources to spare for said expansion. The center of the room was, of course, open to overlook the central holographic war table that Bahamut claimed as his, with a few offices blocked off to look down from.

The Gremlin’s human staff were training beside Bahamut’s Owl minions currently, doing different training drills for assigned simulated conflicts and emergencies on the first and second floors, all of which were designed based on our current PMC forces. I was not certain on the specifics, as I left that entire side to Vic and Bahamut, focusing instead on the political situation and the surveillance network on the third floor where my office was situated.

As the glass gravity lift deposited me on the third floor of the Screen, I glanced around at the sparsely populated workstations. There were barely two dozen people up here at this time, all strictly vetted for security risks, all of whom were checking on security alerts and potential antithesis hives. Jeorge, a tall man of Spanish descent and my right hand, walked up to me with a strained smile.

“Good morning, sir,” he said calmly, radiating an aura of “nothing wrong,” though I could see his nerves towards me. He had only been working for me for a few weeks, after all, and I had this fun habit of testing people constantly.

I nodded and smirked lazily towards him, engaging in some small talk as we made our way towards my office. His body language was easy to read, his anxiety making it perfectly clear that he had not yet gotten accustomed to my feline tells or habits, as he was constantly trying to watch my eyes, ears, and tail all at once. It was a smart decision, to be fair; however, it was not something he could hide with such a short period of time.

I glanced at one of the operator’s screens and saw footage from a Raven displayed, showing the interior of some warehouse or another. The operator was flagging each crate’s inventory with the Raven, checking to see if the manifests matched the actual inventory or if there were things that should not be there at all. I did note that the Raven ate some of the inventory as it went, with the readouts giving a full breakdown of what made up the item, as well as a culinary report. I disregarded that information.

I sighed internally, recalling the dozens of jobs my family and I had done of similar nature through the years, of the weeks of grueling labor and shit conditions to find even one file out of place for employers who we never saw. And I marveled at the fact that we could do the same job dozens of times faster, remotely now.

We stepped into my sparsely decorated office, with Jeorge taking a seat in front of my faux wooden desk while I stood behind it, looking down on the holo-war table.

“I read your report on the movements of the smaller merchants, and while I agree that it is surprising that people whose livelihoods depend on competition are simply pulling back, I don’t have a great grasp on the exact motives why in this case.” I said, waving at Bahamut below.

Jeorge made some shuffling sounds as I heard my desk activate, generating various holo-screens above it. As I turned around, I saw numerous graphs, accounts, and public and internal communications from different sources. Jeorge went to speak but stopped as I began scanning the information myself.

A company could do a number of things that contradict itself, from PR statements to the actions of their CEOs to the movement of goods and manpower, and untangling those motives and actions had always been a fun pastime in our old, dull dorm. Back then, it was simply that, a pastime hobby that could do nothing, nor affect anyone, as I was not in a position to do anything interesting beyond entertaining Vic and Cody while Buddy tried to make something with the ingredients we had.

They were entertaining, to be fair, but now I could use the weapons known as information freely and at my discretion.

The company in question had footholds in a few different fields, namely apparel, low-level pharmaceuticals and cybernetics, and grocers, to name a few. Small franchises that dealt with single floors of mega-buildings at worst, or were the preferred businesses for certain boarding companies at best. Small tendrils at the end of leviathans, acting as eyes and ears for those who moved in the murky undercurrents of politics and profits.

For normal franchises, they acted mostly independently from their corporate overlords, running their day-to-day in complete ignorance while adhering to the rules and regulations their owners decided they must follow. However, these stores were fundamentally different, as they were all owned by one corporation I had been keeping my eyes on for years, and they were staffed by distant family members of board members. A strange occurrence in this day and age, when a board member made enough credits to buy a mega building floor for their own private use, where their entire extended family could live without ever working a day in their life.

Publicly, these thirty-five stores were closing for renovations, a not-so-unbelievable excuse, and considering the fact that they were all spread throughout the city, no one would pay them much attention. Internally, they were liquidating all of their stock and assets, changing internal identifications to different addresses, and moving their funds to credit chips in order to go into hiding. I smirked slightly to myself, understanding that the parent corporation was uprooting itself for some reason, and this was the perfect opportunity for me to dig a bit deeper into my curiosity about them.

Early on in our old career, we brushed against this leviathan while digging through the stored files in a live archive. He must have had some sort of panic switch installed, as a hit squad descended rapidly, causing us to request our second, and last, ever request for support from our old bosses. I ended up pulling out a massive amount of info from the archive’s nexus connection and saw some secondhand references to this corporation, yet I never caught any direct links to them again, only ever references or coded language.

As such, when we set up this surveillance system and this department of Raven Keepers, I set a semi-important priority to monitor a few corporations that fit the profile. Was this abuse of power for personal interest? Definitely, without a doubt, but so what? I made sure to inform Vic and Bahamut ahead of time and received Vic’s approval, with him shaking his head and giving me that bemused look he does. He knew this was akin to my white whale and knew that I would make sure that my hunt would not affect our operational abilities.

And now I had a direct, time-sensitive lead on that whale; I needed to move fast. I glanced down and saw Vic and Cari walk into the Screen, with Cari making her way to her office and Vic taking his spot at the holo-war table to receive his daily briefing from Bahamut.

“Jeorge, clear my schedule and get my Sweepers on standby.” I said as I turned to leave. I heard him say something in response, but I had already tuned him out as I activated Rache’s Go-Bag protocol.