Lloyd Patterson needed no special invitation to come into the small room in front of him. He always repeated that he was the most successful of all his classmates - Jordan hadn't jumped higher then a simple clerk, Clark joined some insipid political movement and was ordering other fools on the streets, Briain Crumpst was maybe the only one redeemable, but he was a failure anyway with his wife that slept with every officer in Leeds garrison while Brian nursed his greenhorns. Right, many of those that he called friends when they met and those who he patted on the back were already married, with children and cats, and dogs and all the other hassle, became fat and crumpsy, were sitting in front of holoscreens and watching soccer in eveninings with a can of beer and a wife in fleecy robes.
Lloyd Patterson wasn't like them. He wasn't breeding poverty, he wasn't wasting his life on those petty bourgeois enjoyments, he wasn't sitting oh his sitzfleisch waiting for manna from heaven. Lloyd was the most successful of all his classmates; he was also the most successful of those folks from University and from district he lived in for twenty seven years before moving to corporate flat in Calderdale on 150th floor, far away from noise and fuss and the dust that clogged up his nostrils and made his eyes watering. That was a transitional moment in his life when he practically shown that beggars can be choosers, but he chosen not to be beggar; and to completely forget the time before, he burnt all the holodisks for twenty seven years at once, leaving only a couple of photos. No matter what happened in the past. Now Lloyd Patterson was a wealthy chief financial officer of Planetform's department on Leeds, officialese 8 hours per day and dandyfied for the rest even if one may point at his first grey hair and say that it's time to make a break.
Lloyd Patterson needed no special invitation, especially when someone unfastened his manacles, but still got a painful kick in the middle of his back and fell down on the rough dry floor. For the first half a minute after he removed a bandage in this small 2 on 2 room with only a single dim lamp, he was swearing, promising to get those space hippies and kick the crap out of them, but when a wan light of common sense reached his mind, Lloyd Patterson just sat down, holding head in hands. He was in a place he never knew, in a cage, waiting for something and he was pretty sure that it won't be something pleasant.
Had Lloyd ever thought that he can get the works in such a way? In no way. While the news on Neural Network channles carried screaming headlines about the blown-up buildings, assaults on ships, news from the frontline that was in a hour from his cosy armchair and his annual subscription to Girl of Sirius selection, Lloyd Patterson never feared anything. He knew that all those creepy stories happen somewhere else and with someone else - like it usually happens when you die of boredom on a sunny day. Lloyd remembered only one day when the sight of human or a half a human to be preciese, that was accidentally catched by the frame of some butterfingers' camera and it turned his stomach, seizing him while he was voimiting on the carpet all the whisky, as well as beef, shallots, chopped tarragon and that large white truffle that made the сourse piquant.
That day two years ago Lloyd assured himself that 'such' things can only happen to someone else.
Today Lloyd was awakened by the silence that was rather promising, but not in the way Lloyd would like. But he needed to pee, so the imagination was put on the back burner for his own good. If Lloyd could look at the matter from a different standpoint later, he may thank his urinary bladder for saving him from claustrophobia and panic attacks. He was a lucky bastard even if he never understood it himself. Finally, after weighting the pros and cons he came to the door with a little looking glass letting one see what's happening inside and knocked it.
"Hello-o-o?", but the coridor behind the door was silent like nothing happened. "Hey, someone around?" At that point Lloyd unconsciously started to act in the way he was used to, but his impelling tone hardly helped. After a minute of pointless attempts to get an answer he gave the door a fruity kick and sent those Gaian dregs to the deepest parts of digestive tract.
Seems that someone finally heeded his request. The door opened and a couple of goons dragged him out by the scruff of the neck and pushed him on through the passage, accompanying the pushes wiht humiliating sneering.
The goons dragged him through many small and narrow passages. Lloyd had no idea where are they taking him or what do they want. He just had to keep up with the kidnappers because every time he slowed down he felt a kick on his back. He wanted to shout but he couldn't. Maybe because of the shock.
"Where are they taking me?"
He asked this many times. After a few minutes of running he has been pushed into a vehichle. He heard some speech.
"Good job guys. They don't know nothing about our little action. We just walked in and out."
Lloyd felt something. The vehichle started moving under him. They were going to somewhere. As the time passed by he started thinking about who the kidnappers are. He had no idea, so he tried to pull the black mask a little bit down in order to see what is going on. He did not realise what is he doing. He managed to pull the mask down enough to have a look around. They were in a small hover-car on the way to the highlighted landing pad. He figured out what's going on. Lloyd was a hostage, who will be used as a provider of information, or something worse. The man tried to memorise the faces of the kidnappers, but the only result was a huge punch he had received from the guy who were sitting next to the driver.
"What are you doing!? Asked the driver while the other thug started beating their hostage up.
"Do not kill him yet. We need him. Have you forgot our plan?
"No. I haven't. He just managed to pull his mask down so he could take a look around. I taught him a lesson." Smiled the guy after he wiped the blood off his fists.
Lloyd's face was in pain. It was like someone is trying to sting a white-hot iron rod into his face. It hurt badly. After a few minutes of suffering he has seen a white light and lost conciousness.
See? What have you done? Anyway.. At least he won't jump around when we're taking him to the place.
The hover-car flown rapidly towards the landing pad. They landed on a small dark place and took Lloyd Patterson immediately to a storeroom.
Lloyd's feeling slowly started to return to him - first from the feeling of cold rough surface the back of his head was lying upon - then the aching pain on his wrists, tightly squeezed by some kind of cord - and finally the tender touch of hand, female hand on his cheek, that echoed with a headache after the road here.
"Sweetie?"
Voice, that voice too much contrasted with all the other and Lloyd instinctively turned towards that voice, trying to slightly raise his head.
"Uh, you're waking up, sweetie?"
The same voice? Right. Tender and soft voice was tickling his ear and he could even hear the breath - but all that felt like a dream more then a reality.
"Good, I'll help you then."
And a strong slap in the face finally made Lloyd wake up and stare first at the dust covering the concrete ground and then on two young females that looked at him rather scornfully. Reality seemed to be rather unkind to him today.
Who were those two? Why had those goons beat him and why is he right here on the cold floor somewhere, probably, outside the town, far away from the closest 'normal' human, from any terminal to call hep? What do they want from him? Lloyd's eyes were trying to catch something importaint with his eyes. Something that can say where he is, some way to get away. Wndow. Door. Some crates with the sticker 'Fragile'. Broken lamp on the celling. Some bags at the wall. Paper bags.
Something is written on them. "Stockman's", "Topwoman" and "Hello Kitty"?! No, it wasn't what he expected to see here in the storehouse where nothing good was going to happen with him.
"What the...", Lloyd sweared like a trooper, qualifying the ladies present as the worst creatures on the planet Leeds. He told them everything he had in mind about them, about their parents and friends, he stated his opinion on bringing hin here and explained what will happen to those two, sitting in front of him. Lloyd puffed, panted and shut up.
"Finally, you stopped blabbing nonsense", one of the young females noted, "so, now you can listen to me. My name is Tweedledum and this is Tweedledee", she motioned to other young lady, "and you are welcome behind the looking-glass."
Tweedledum gestured and the goons from the last evening appeared from the gloom of the far part of the premises and put him straight on the chair, not carefully, but at least without blows.
"So", Tweedledee stepped on the stage, smiling, "good day, mister Patterson. We have a lot of things to discuss with you if you don't mind. Hope you don't mind."
And something in that pseudo-polite tone made Lloyd break into a cold sweat.
Lloyd stared at Tweedledee and asked:
"Are you two serious?"
But right after he said the last word of the sentence he realised what he was saying. ~He imagined what would happen now. He saw the same warehouse, the goons and the girls too. He was tied to the chair. He felt something warm at his leg which became hotter in every second. 10 seconds later he felt pain but he didn't see blood. One of the goons was cutting his leg with a Plasma Cutter. Lloyd stared at him, then shouted.~ After this short, but stunning vision he got a huge punch right into his face.
"Shut up, will you? Don't scream again!"
Said Tweedledee while she was caressing her fist because she hit the guy as hard as she could. Lloyd looked at the girl. She was young and pretty. He couldn't continue the eye-gazing because he received a kick in exchange.
"You bastard!"
Shouted Tweedledee and she started kicking the man repeatedly. The goons grabbed the girl and started holding her back.
"Get your hands off me or I'll kill you too!"
They released the girl and she continued kicking and hitting Mr. Patterson.
All that nightmare lasted for a couple of hours - or maybe more since Lloyd lost the time sense while his formerly white shirt became red of blood from his cut lip and grey of dust. One of those bitches was unmercifully beating him, another one restrained her from that from time to time and asked questions about him in the most haugty tone. She asked about his friends and relatives, his work and everything up to the most humiliating parts of his biography.
Llloyd spitted out a clot of blood. He was in different world where there were no apartments on the floor where he had no need to breath smog, no high society parties, no whores for twenty thousands credits per hour, no fast gliders to get from one part of City to another in a minute, no fizz and that wild grass from Gaia, no acute care that will grab him and make him look presentable after all that.
They wanted something. They hadn't kidnapped him for some random reason. And now all he wanted is to stop that.
"So what do you want from me?" Lloyd hissed with the features convulsed.
"Clever boy, finally you understood that we're not here because of boredom.", Tweedledum giggled in return.
Deep inside Lloyd hoped that they will ask fore something easier, not only inside, though, it was almost written on his face and every part of him whispered of that and every hair on his body trembled in unison. When one of those goons liberated his hands, Tweedledee put a small touchscreen on his knees and stepped back to pick up a gun from one of the crates and aim it at Lloyd.
"Now listen to me, cur", she hissed, "this console is pretty much connected to neural net. Leeds Planetform office is connected to it as well. Understood?"
Information terrorism. Lloyd knew what it is and how an innocent information pretext could be turned into a massive scandal like the last year when they, luckily, found out that all the threats of publication of "top-secret government report" about Harris appeared to be a bluff, or at least seemed to be a bluff. Now there were three actors on scene: him, the touchscreen and that girl that could push the trigger with no doubts.
Lloyd was slowly typing adress of the server. What was he doing? Apparently, he followed the common sense, like any other human will do. It took a second for server to process the request, but that second was the longest one in Lloyd's life. In addition to common beliefs that one can see whole his life before death, Lloyd saw all his life as a top-manager of a Sirius-wide corporation, all the banquets and balances, cars and girls, remembered how he was sure that while he does everything right it will be happily ever after.
Login, his name and surname; password, the name of his first girlfriend he met almost twenty years ago. Here it were, folders referring to respective databanks, multi-level security and dozens of access levels. Lloyd Patterson hadn't got in any way high one, but it was enough to cause massive damage to his reputation and whatever else to the company. Will someone care about him? That was the question Lloyd hadn't answered. He just handled the touchpad to that Tweedledum in front of him and said,
"That's all I have access to", then he caughed with a rather doomed tone and added, "Enjoy".
Tweedledum made the cutiest of all her faces and grabbed the touchscreen to plug in the holo-tainment bands and get deeper and deeper in surfing through the petabytes of information. What was represented as hierarcy of folders in two dimensions became an easy to understand flow of images, videos and key words around owing to algorithms used to process the starnadrized file system. Touchscreen beeped discontentedly, probably voicing its opinion about waste of resources on something that unnecessary, but followed the commands of user, unable to act in any different way. If this standart OI-13 personal communicator ever met those self-reproducting robots from the strange world in distant Omicrons, he would have something to compare this this shameless exploitation of his resources, but it will still be just a big communicator noone listens to.
And right when it was diligently and accurately storing the incoming information in his memory, Tweedledum's concentration was disrupted by deafening peep in the headphones along with a billion of error messages filling the space around - making her to pull off the band and thrown it aside to hold her head in hands trying to overcome the headache. At the same time Tweedledee's communicator revieved.
"What? Wait, how did they?!" and her slightly fritened glance told everything. "They found us, Seq."
Seq, or to be more precises, Sequoia known to Lloyd Patterson today as Tweedledum, in a second turned off touchscreen's connection to outer world, leaped up and nodded. "So we should get out of here as soon as possible. Take care of him, Rosie", she motioned to Lloyd.
"Finally." Rosie or Ambrosia Garcia, as she was known to Betonia's top hundreed most wanted list aimed right at Lloyd's forehead and pressed the trigger.
With eyes screwed up, Lloyd thought that it's all for a second, but the stroke hadn't followed. Before he opened his eyes, he imagined that he's already dead for a second and all that is "something" that happens after the flash of the light beam hits your head, leaving your body on the ground, no more controlled by higher nervous activity. No, it was just a malfunction, the one that happens once in a lifetime when gun that was meant to kill you don't shoot.
"Dammit."
"No time left", Sequoia replied briefly, "Let's go.", and added in Lloyd's direction, "Leave this lucky bastard."
Greyish sky with a tone of brown sugar with the lines illuminated by the rising sun was floating behind the thin glass of medical hover. It was the only entertaining and changing part of picture aroung Lloyd, so he stared on that indefinite color of the world around with some unbearable anguish he couldn't find a reason for. He will be fine.
The small dot rushed up on the horison. Armored Transport accurately reached the gravitational coridor created by Docking Rings and jumped to open space. Deep inside, in the cargo bay, Sequoia sat on one of containers and tried to finally check the information downloaded today - the connection was blocked fast, corrupting the files transferred and all the gainings looked like a terrible mess.
Finally, something - and she cheered up while waiting for the file to open and fill the screen with dozens of pages of text with graphics, links and images.
"Report on aberrations during the terraforming operations for Synth Foods Inc, Stuttgart, 0308770-1402774; by: Brian Stolle, Richard Carr, Herman Snitze, Karl Marx, Mikael Twarkovski."
It was something and they had no right to misuse this little chance.