<b>Roo'd</b>

# Roo'd

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# Chapter #51

A few blocks away Cass stepped out of an identical taxi, head bowed, studying her shoes rather than looking up at the crowd ahead. She wore a plain black skirt and slightly worn brown business jacket over a beige blouse, her makeup plain and poorly done. She pushed wire-rimmed glasses up her small nose with her forefinger and walked with tiny steps up the walk towards the fifth of eight huge buildings she and Tonx had scouted out the day before.

Nodding and bobbing, she slowly made her way through the crowd, just another Chinese housewife juggling work and home. Her neck bent and eyes lowered, elbows held close to her ribs, she pushed with excruciating slowness through the dozens of black-clad Gothic Lolitas clumped outside the building. “Granny” they said behind their fans, annoyed glances skewering her as she pushed by. “Old cunt” they said with mock sweetness as she passed, fingers blurring over their comms.

As she arrived at the front doors she nervously piled through pockets and her little purse. The guard stationed there watched, bored. Nodding and stammering more quietly than he could hear she presented her invitation with both hands. The guard rolled his eyes as he stepped away and comm’d the man on the 89th floor, apartment 3.

“That floor has very tight security right now, but go ahead” he said, waving her in. He returned his attention to the growing crowds outside. The sea of black petticoats ruffled in the breeze, multicolored heads of flossy hair curled and gelled into multi-layered anime styles. Little white- and black-gloved hands were comm’ing back and forth, moblog photos sprouting on the web like mold on bread. The network traffic spoke of an impending wave, a tsunami of flash mobbed pop-icon ecstasy.

Cass was in an elevator, her shoes very close together, tips aligned away slightly from the door. A group of three businessmen returning home from work stood shoulder-to shoulder in front of the door, murmuring rude jokes, ignoring her. They got out on floor 82. She stood motionless while the doors slid shut. Gravity pulled at her, let her go. She stepped out on floor 88.

Below, on the street, a rented miniature limousine pulled smoothly to a stop in front of the building. Three feed vans were already there, each a cluster of antennas, lenses, and electrified gridding. Reporters flew up, white polystyrene coffee cups bouncing on the ground behind them as the limousine arrived. The Lolitas swelled forward, estrogen-poisoned teenage throats screaming in waves. The crowd paused and the door of the car swung slowly upwards.

A hundred sets of tiny pink lungs inhaled, and Marcus stepped out of the car to the roar of voices so pure, so high, so fervent that he felt his nipples clench painfully against his chest in the face of it. He wore grey canvas pants, tiny scales welded onto metal strips woven into the cloth. The pants looped around his feet inside his oversized steel-toed Russian-Army issue size 52 (European) boots. He wore nothing else. His torso was a roadmap of overlapping scars detailing close to twelve years of closed-space fighting, his skin a curious grey color imbued by experimental (though now very popular) hardening therapies. He pulled his lips back in a wide smile, displaying his sharp metal teeth and thinking, for the millionth time, that if they knew how many times he’d sewn the tip of his tongue back on the crowd would vomit.

In one huge hand he held a two year old promo-sized can of Pokari Sweat, the product that had earned him acclaim across Asia. He’d recently learned that the Chinese company had re-issued his commercial as a resurgence marketing campaign, and was fairly sure that a lawyer he knew from L.A. could find a loophole in the contract that meant they owed him a great deal more money. He lifted his arms to embrace the crowd and sighed heavily as the five tiny Chinese guards in full riot gear locked their transparent shields in front of him.

Behind his head Xing had climbed to the roof of the car with a loudspeaker. It squealed and chirped and the crowd fell respectfully and abruptly silent. Xing read a short paragraph off a piece of paper, something about this visit being a bridge between their two nations, about The Shark’s desire to spread love and harmony between their people. He summarized by explaining that Marcus had received an email chain letter about one special little boy who had terminal leukemia and who had always wanted to meet him. The boy’s story had apparently so moved The Shark that he had resolved to come to China to make his wish come true.

Xing finished with a breathless read-through of Marcus’s availability for speaking engagements and modified fighter closed-combat entertainment events please contact him via his website, etc. etc. Marcus caught the name of his site and nodded graciously to the cameras. Xing clicked off the loudspeaker and Marcus began to wade forward, his five guards pushing hard against the girls.

Upstairs, Cass stood by the door at the end of the hall one floor below her target. She was watching the parking lot over the smooth folds of her invitation, pretending to read the address again. 88 floors below her Marcus entered the building, his guards stopping at the entranceway to hold back a sea of Lolitas. Other cliques had joined now, including a thin line of boys with shell-hard hair, imitation leather jackets gleaming in the sudden sunlight. Another large crowd of boys wearing matte grey climbing jackets and a variety of blue jeans milled quietly outside the main crowd, admiring the Lolitas. Everybody’s comms were streaming stuttered clips from their POV, hoping to catch something good. Online bots spun stitched-together video montages from the images, attention from a million separate eyes sculpted into a single democratically decided data stream of What Was Happening.

Car windows flashed brightly in the parking lot as three identical Chinese men climbed out of a van and unloaded an enormous white disk, like a sanitary wok, and mounted it on the roof of the van.

A tiny camera mounted in the middle of the hall tracked Cass according to an algorithm invented in France as she slowly minced her steps back towards the elevator bay, her hands quickly pulling out lipstick, applying it, stowing the glasses in the purse. Two sure thumb swipes pushed the tiny dots of eyeliner at the corner of her eyes, which had looked poorly applied, across the rims of her eyelids in perfect sweeps. Her cheeks flushed suddenly as she willed the capillaries in them to expand, her eyes glistening in a quick saline flood. She pulled her hair back in a saucy faux-professional two-part bun and let her chin settle level with the floor as she pressed the “up” button.

A moment later the bay dinged softly and she stepped to the next elevator door over just as it slid open. A full car of reporters and cameras were packed gut-to-ass in front of her, and they pulled back like a live thing as she stamped forward. Her chin was up, eyes blazing, shoulders back.

“Who here’s a freelance camera?” she asked in crisp Mandarin, her voice crackling with authority. “I got up here early and my footage will double your video asking price.” She slammed one palm against the elevator door as it tried to close. It dinged lightly in protest.

A stubble-haired man with bags under his eyes raised one hand, steadily ignoring the immaculately dressed reporter in a light blue business suit tucked under his elbow. Her eyes widened in shock and anger and she began to scream at him in a vitriolic stream.

“Shut up” said Cass loudly, slashing the air with her hand. The door dinged again and she slammed it again, harder. Everyone in the car winced.

“15 percent plus resale rights” said the cameraman.

“5 percent and I’ll use you again if what you get is good. I’m here for a joint LMA A&E report and have three more days of footage to get this week.” Three days of solid footage in a week was worth at least a month’s wages and the cameraman knew it. So did everybody else in the car. He nodded, dumbly, but his eyes shone. The reporter under his elbow bit her lip, lipstick smearing against her teeth.

The car dinged again and closed smoothly in front of Cass, a bubble of space surrounding her and her new cameraman.

On the ground floor a long bay of carefully locked glass doors silently clicked open, their magnetic locks discharged by an unusual maintenance schedule put in place fifteen minutes before. A few short blocks away one of Xing’s compatriots allowed himself a wry grin as he walked past the service box and bent to tie his shoe, slipping and pulling off the bottle-top shaped device Cessus had put in place, erasing the hack. One of the Cassicoos near the base of the building looked at his watch and swaggered towards one of the doors, pushing it open with the tip of his carefully shined shoe. He turned and yelled at the crowd before darting in.

Nearly a hundred Gothic Lolitas, forty Grays, fifteen Cassicoos, and a wide assortment of hangers-on burst through the bay of doors and overran the guards, heading for stairs and elevator bays. The Cassicoos were in front of everyone, and the guards grabbed for them first. Little single-shot disposable cameras were shoved against legs and arms, discharging capacitors in loud cracks. The guards disappeared, twitching, under the throng of frantic teenage legs.

In the parking lot the van hummed to life. The two-meter wide dish mounted on the roof shuddered and whined, saturating the 89th floor of the building overhead with carefully generated electromagnetic noise. If they had been looking anyone with a comm would have noticed they had no signal, would have seen that their access to police lines and panic buttons was suddenly cut off. But nobody did.

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