The song over, he toweled off and brushed his teeth, his hair, and made a quick pass at his stubble with an arc-razor. His hair wasn’t overly thick, but it did seem to grow back with speed and enthusiasm, especially when he was dehydrated. He made a suit selection from the screen next to the auto-closet. A moment later, a slim vertical panel slid open with a cleaned, freshly pressed suit hanging from a cross spar, steam still wafting off the fabric of its sleeves.
He took it off the rack, suddenly aware of his nudity and the eyes prying from the ceiling. “Paris, are you watching me dress?”
“I’ve watched you dress and undress every day for seven years, Tyson. Is today different?”
Tyson strategically placed the suit jacket over his unmentionables. “Honestly, a little, yes. Could you, I don’t know, turn around for a moment?”
He could’ve sworn he heard a sigh come through the speakers. “Cameras off. Two minutes should be enough to get your pants on, yes?”
“More than adequate.” Tyson briefly considered saying something to try and smooth out his scorned AI’s bruised feelings, realized how crazy that sounded, and went to work getting dressed as quickly as he could.
Minutes later, he stepped into a waiting travel pod in the basement garage of his residential building. “Immortal Tower,” he told the autopilot. The door clicked shut and pulled smoothly out of the garage with an electric hum. It was a six-minute ride from his apartment to the tower. Six minutes to organize his thoughts and set priorities for the day. Tyson felt rushed. He wasn’t used to feeling rushed.
“Paris, inform Dr. Spaulding she’ll be presenting at the shareholder address tonight on our progress curing the Teegarden pandemic. Keep it short, five minutes, and no Ph.D.-speak. Has the tailor been to see her yet?”
“For measurements and an initial fitting, yes, but he hasn’t delivered on the order yet.”
“Put a rush on it to have an outfit ready and sent to her before the presentation tonight. Pay whatever ridiculous surcharge he throws out, minus twenty percent to keep him honest.”
“Understood. Sir, I’m getting a Priority request from the NeoSun embassy. They request your personal attendance, as soon as is convenient.”
Tyson cringed. “As soon as is convenient” was diplospeak for “Right fucking now.” His partners in Grendel were quite upset about something.
“And the topic for this meeting?”
“Sensitive.”
“Shit.”
“Succinctly put. Shall I redirect your pod?”
Tyson wanted his pod redirected, all right. Straight back to his residence where he could resume depleting his stock of liquor. But there was nothing for it.
“Tell the NeoSun embassy that I’ll be there momentarily.”
The pod braked, hard, before reversing back to the last intersection it had passed, and took a new route toward Shensing Boulevard and Embassy Row. A dozen towers, each a unique architectural vision, lined the two sides of the boulevard, six abreast. NeoSun’s building, an imposing five-sided obsidian monolith clad in a lattice of burnished titanium pentagrams raced up to seven floors above the artificial ceiling long-dictated by Ageless tradition in Methuselah. As part of the Grendel endeavor, Tyson’s sometimes rivals, sometimes partners had renegotiated their rental agreement on those seven floors to be paid annually with tax-deductible donations to the MPD’s retirement program and the hospital system’s operating fund.
It was an agreeable arrangement, saving NeoSun many hundreds of thousands in taxes each year, and taking those expenses off Ageless’s ledger. It cost Tyson nothing on balance, and had sweetened the pot for his new partners. Still, everything had a cost. Now the other eleven corps on the campus were pressuring him for a similar arrangement. Tyson pushed the indignant/whining communiques and official correspondence to the back of his mind. If they wanted the bennys, they could jolly-well belly up to the bar and sign on to their own partnership projects.
The pod dipped below street level and rolled to a stop in front of the building’s private reception area. Here, VIPs could come and go without exposing themselves to the prying eyes of the public or press. Tyson stepped out onto the walkway and straightened a pantleg before continuing to the door. Two security guards in military-crisp business suits, one male, one female, stood to either side of the entry to the tower’s lobby.
“Good morning, Mr. Abington,” the woman said. She was tall and fit, with taunt muscles filling out her jacket at the arms and shoulders. Ex-marine, almost certainly. A small, but noticeable bulge beneath her left breast betrayed the presence of a hand weapon of some sort in a holster.
“Welcome to NeoSun. Please hold out your arms.”
“Seriously?” Tyson said.
“Bomb sweep,” the man said, producing a chem sniffer wand.
“We’ve had a few bomb threats called in recently,” the woman said apologetically.
Tyson smirked and held his arms out like a scarecrow. “If I wanted to destroy your building, I’d sign an order of demolition, not blow myself up.”
“Rules are rules.”
The wand beeped and turned green.
“He’s clean.”
“Obviously.” Tyson’s arms dropped to his sides.
“Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Abington, and I apologize for its necessity.”
“If you’re getting bomb threats, you should really be reporting them to the MPD so they can be traced back.”
The woman smiled cordially. “NeoSun InfoSec policy prohibits sharing the details of internal security matters.”
“It’s not ‘internal’ if someone collapses your tower onto the NorKel embassy across the street.”
“I’ll forward your request to my supervisors.”
“You do that. Now, is someone going to tell me why I’m here, or am I supposed to guess?”
“Of course not, sir. If you’ll follow me.” She turned on a heel and headed through the blast-resistant, overlapping sliding glass doors that protected the opulent lobby. The male guard fell into step behind the two of them. So, not doormen, but his escorts. That was fine with Tyson. Anything to speed this up.
In contrast to the clean, modern contours and metallic decor of Ageless’s receiving atrium, the more ostentatious and colorful tastes of NeoSun’s founders were still present more than a century after their
