Los Angeles 2170, page 8
Wouldn’t be for long.
Just Business
Katrina smiled demurely and turned back to watch the cocktail crowd around her ebb and flow. Behind her, out a floor-to-ceiling, plate-glass window, a gorgeous view of the lights of inland Los Angeles as night fell. One hundred and fifty beautiful people before her, dressed in the latest, Twenty-Second Century fashions. Drinking, mingling, dealing.
For men, fashion tonight generally consisted of loose slacks in silks or light tweed, with a soft shirt and usually some variant of the open front jacket derived from the white-tie tuxedo of earlier days. It was generally longer here, coming down to the tops of the thighs in front, while trailing down to the knees in back like tails. On most men, it made them look taller and more impressive, while a few of the folks in here really needed a different look. Or more time in the gym and better nutritional consultants.
At the other end of the spectrum, Katrina found it easy to separate the wives from mistresses. At least both generally mingled well here, politely ignoring each other for the most part.
Wives were usually a generation older. Tending towards thickness, for the most part, and letting hair go naturally gray or perhaps frosting it lightly to indicate maturity. Mistresses ranged from barely past puberty to the august, ancient age of perhaps twenty-nine, from the apparent tendencies of most of these men.
And most of the power and wealth in this room was in the men. Which was rather a pity.
Katrina had studied enough history to miss that era in the middle of the Twenty-First Century when women finally inverted millennia of patriarchal domination, just time to take all the blame when the world those men had ruined came crashing down. Too many centuries of unbridled corporatism had damaged the entire planet to the point that whole countries had vanished beneath the waves, along with major cities she could only read about, and never actually walk through anywhere but a projection.
So the men were most of the power in this cocktail party. Most of the women around her were merely accessories. Pretty baubles who generally did their best work on their backs or their knees.
There were a few women with their own power, Katrina noted as she sipped on a light, bubbly wine from a tall flute and watched. They dressed like the men, not out of necessity, but out of a statement of purpose.
Deal with me like a man, not a woman. Ignore me, if you dare.
Katrina wanted that, one of these days. That ability to simply snap her fingers at the demands of a man’s world and go on about her business.
Today was not that day, but this mission would take her one step closer.
She double-checked that all of her internal equipment was running and recording, and slowly let the gravitational pull and flowing tides draw her closer to her target, looking like just another brainless bimbo at a party.
By design, none of her rig would be visible to anything less than a contact ultrasound. Nothing would spoil her outward image.
Eye cameras: set for normal light and leaning into the infrared, with the presumption that she would wash things later in the editing process. It let her see through clothes now, if she wanted, rather like X-ray specs still advertised in comic books. A few men had guns or knives artfully concealed. As did a few of the women.
Audio and olfactory sensors running a little muted, but that was the mob in here, projecting dozens of different industrial scents and trying to talk over the other hundred people mingling, plus the string quartet in the corner trying to keep up.
For a moment, Katrina let her skin sensors range up and down the scale, just to test them. The midnight-black, one-shoulder, silk gown she was wearing slid across heightened receptors like an alcohol fire on her nerves. The brush of her cocoa-colored, pageboy hair tickled her chin and the one naked shoulder when she cocked her head to the left just enough,
The sparkling wine tingled all the way down her throat when she took a sip, sweet and thin at the same time.
In the editing phase, she would probably start here and let the rest of the scene play out for her employer. The woman was paying good money to place a corporate spy in this cocktail party. She should be able to go back and experience everything that Katrina had felt when she played the recording.
After all, that was the promise of the Third Eye system. Katrina would experience and record it, secretly and internally, while her principle could simultaneously watch on low-bandwidth broadcast from her office now, and then later relive the experience by putting on the appropriate headset.
Probably as part of a divorce filing.
It was one of those things that got an old crone like Katrina, at thirty-two years of age, invited to parties like this. And paid her handsomely. Women wanted incontrovertible proof of philandering, if they were going to divorce a man when this level of wealth was involved. And these sorts of pre-nup agreements were usually tilted badly to favor the man, unless she had hired a good lawyer first.
Constance Ehrlynmeyer, half of the giant conglomerate EM Components with her husband Everett MacGill, apparently wanted this man’s hide on the wall like a trophy.
Katrina really didn’t care all that much about the why’s and who’s. The money she made in this industry was good enough that she had already paid off the surgery that made her a walking sensory camera. The parties were always lovely and filled with the best food.
And if Everett MacGill was really cheating on his wife, then she might even get laid tonight.
She supposed that might make her a whore, but everybody was working for money. At least until you had enough to work for yourself.
Soon.
Everett made eye contact as she let the movement of the various fishies around her guide Katrina closer to the corner where he was standing. Tall man. Slicked-back, dark hair. A little homely, but age was making him over into ruggedly handsome, in that strange way that it seemed to suck beauty out of women and give it the men instead.
Well-dressed, as one would expect with enough money to be invited by name to a party like this. Top One parties didn’t require that you belong to the one percent at the peak of the ladder, but you had to know someone who did to get invited.
Had to belong.
After all, rich men needed new bimbos as mistresses regularly. Heaven forbid a girl get past twenty-five and start looking and acting like an adult.
Katrina looked more mature than most of the youngsters in here, but that was also the confidence she projected. The promises of a better time in bed, if she decided you were worth a romp. Things these children had never learned yet, in order to keep a man’s attention.
Softly hard-to-get, to make it a challenge that enticed these fools.
“Your glass is empty,” MacGill said, stepping forward and grasping two fresh one from a passing steward. “Allow me?”
Oh, bravo, sir. Nice opening line. Polite, yet forward. Gentlemanly, even. Too bad I already know you’re married.
Katrina smiled coquettishly and nodded. Her glass vanished into the hands of another servant and MacGill handed her the fresh one.
She sniffed it luxuriously, as if enjoying the bouquet, rather than letting sensors built into her olfactory system isolate any dangerous chemicals someone might have introduced.
You can never be too sure, at a party with these folks. One in three such events ended up with someone in an emergency clinic or morgue, as folks mixed the wrong combinations, possibly at random, seeking to engage brain receptors that had long since been burned out by lower dosages.
“Everett MacGill,” he introduced himself, as if he was as stranger, like she was.
“Esmeralda,” Katrina replied, leaving the last name blank and letting the man move a little too close for common strangers just met.
He hovered. She watched his eyes.
Predictable.
Good luck had given Katrina genes for lanky height, one point eight meters in flats, plus the eight centimeter heels tonight. She was nearly eye-level with him. Her build was long and skinny, and she hadn’t ever bothered with the after-factory refits that would give her oversized, gravity-defying breasts.
Instead, she wore a tight, black dress that came up and wrapped around her neck, off one shoulder to cover the other arm. With nothing under it, her small breasts were starkly outlined, just the way she wanted them.
Most men forgot she even had eyes when she wore this outfit.
Everett MacGill didn’t deviate far from that mean.
“Are you enjoying the party, Esme?” he asked, automatically categorizing her as a bimbo by giving her a cute nickname.
Katrina shrugged.
“Tame,” she offered in a droll, almost bored voice an acting coach had spent six weeks refining.
Not that this event was tame. Except by perhaps the most jaded standards imaginable. Like she was presenting.
Katrina’s attention settled on a cute, petite redhead, not far away, in a cream colored dress that was backless and almost frontless. The woman was holding court for a handful of men, and two women, showing off one of the more exotic cyberware enhancements on the market these days.
From her frame, the girl probably had a large chest to begin with. The kind that would have turned to half-flat balloons by the time she was thirty, without a lot of pushups. But the redhead had obviously had them fixed. Probably completely removed and replaced, with a third one added in the middle. The dress was cut to show off two sets of cleavage, and she way the girl breathed just enhanced the effect.
Katrina had seen the upgrade in the catalog, when she finally got the infrared option added to her eye cameras. You could wire them up to your nervous system and control sensitivity and reactivity with three, mental rheostats, depending on if you wanted to have them pawed without pain, or react to the lightest breath.
Whatever paid the bills, right, girl?
She turned back to her target.
“Tame?” Everett even managed to sound shocked.
She could smell the alcohol on his breath from here, and had read a detailed file on the man consolidated by his soon-to-be-ex-wife. The woman who apparently wanted the whole company to herself, if he was going to embarrass her like this in public.
Katrina shrugged again, pointing her chest at the man for emphasis as she flexed.
“Small talk. Business deals. Idle gossip,” she gestured vaguely with one hand. “Irrelevant people doing tedious things to no useful purpose. Are you one of them?”
Katrina let her face go frank. Challenging. The man had a reputation as something of an amateur Lothario. It had apparently never risen to the level that Constance had ever chosen to do anything about it.
Until now.
“I pride myself on being a man of action and intellect, Esme,” he replied, rather huskily. “I was an inventor before I got rich. I am still a man of passions.”
Right. You were an organic chemist who got lucky and met the right woman at the right point in your career. She took your discovery and turned it into the seventeenth largest industrial combine on the planet over the last twenty years. Your last academic paper or patent filing was sixteen years ago, and you’ve coasted since. But don’t let me correct you in public.
She didn’t let any of that appear on her face, of course. And the equipment recording her every physical sensation right now couldn’t read minds, or none of the people who had hired her in the past would like her enough to hire her again.
Still, time to pay the bills.
Katrina turned even more towards the man, from the angle she had adopted earlier. Leaned forward with her torso enough that his eyes flashed down to molehills of cleavage she could show off in this dress. Let her voice drop in tone and volume.
“What passions inflame you?” she murmured, low enough he had to lean even closer than before.
At least he had drunk enough wine that his breath had the sweetness still. Plus a very expensive cologne probably picked out by his personal shopper. He didn’t look the type to know good style personally.
His pupils surged as he took her in. Constance had picked out the perfume she wore. It mixed well with the coconut milk shampoo Katrina preferred, so she came across to the unconscious mind as all summery and South Pacific.
“The Hunt,” MacGill purred.
Or perhaps he growled it. It was hard to differentiate. Maybe he had drank a little too much, as well?
“Seeing something and pursuing it,” he continued, leaning in too close, as if she would swoon at the magnificence of his manly body.
Maybe if you started spending a few days a week at the gym, buddy.
Still, bills had to be paid. Regardless of what she did to earn the money.
“Seen anything worth hunting?” Katrina asked, letting her voice float midway between innocence and invitation.
“One thing,” he announced quietly.
He had to be quiet, standing close enough that someone else might think they were dancing. Anything louder would have been too much, so at least he had some modicum of sense left under that dyed-back, brown hair.
Katrina could see the white roots from here, as well as the facelift scars and other things that he had done over the last few years.
Her own surgeries had been far more elaborate and intense, but done with more care to make the scars invisible, going in through her belly button, or popping an cybernetic eye out of socket to get to the silicon and wetware inside the reinforced skull.
But it gave her an appreciation of hiring the right surgeon. MacGill had picked his from the third tier of medical schools, give or take.
“And what might that be?” Katrina leaned forward.
Let her nipples press against the rough tweed of his jacket, the sensations recorded for later as twin points of fire.
His free hand came up and took possession of her hip.
Honestly, did every man take seduction lessons from the same video course? Can’t anybody try something new? Just once?
Still. Bills.
Katrina leaned to one side as he moved in to kiss her. At least he put some effort into it, moving slowly and steadily. Perhaps giving her tome to withdraw? Or kick him in the crotch?
That thought had to be suppressed, lest she act on it.
By-invitation-only was her rule. But this wasn’t her playground.
So she let him kiss her. Responded enough to get a really good recording, even when his tongue tried to pry her teeth apart.
He wasn’t a bad looking guy. Tall and only sort of out of shape. Smart, but long since passed that age where the genius of youth should have been augmented with adult contributions.
Maybe if he’d put as much effort into the marriage and the business as he did the drinking and carousing?
Perish the thought.
Stewards, or someone managed to grasp her wine glass and remove it safely. Probably watching the scene unfold so they could time it for perfect effect, grabbing both.
Shame there was nobody nearby recording this scene on identical equipment. It would have bene nice to insert a cut-scene right there. Good visual storytelling.
MacGill had both hands around her now, one on the bare skin of her left shoulder blade. The other kneading her bottom like bread dough. And discovering that the dress was all she wore.
Katrina broke the kiss and grapple by shifting her body sideways.
“Not that much of an exhibitionist, Everett,” she offered as a defensive invitation.
Or extrovert, but the best spies were introverts who could play a role convincingly. Like tonight.
“I have a place,” he replied, not letting the circle of his arms withdraw, so much as relaxing the death grip. “Here in the tower. Much more private.”
“Do you now?” she was all bubbling and innocent again.
Yes, seventeen stories above this party. A nice, petite luxury abode where meaningless flings could be private. She had seen the floorplans from Constance.
Katrina doubted she would even be the first girl up there this week, but hopefully the man’s cleaning service was good enough to change the sheets after each encounter.
They ghosted the party. Slid out a side door, hand in hand like innocent lovers, and hit the rear elevators largely unseen, if not unnoted in passing.
Everett’s passcard opened the door and activated the lift. Katrina recorded everything, from pushing the button to being pressed into the corner with a hand roughly mauling her ass again.
Constance would be getting her money’s worth from this.
The ding of arrival was quick enough that her dress was still on, if already crumpled a bit.
Out into the hallway, down to the left, and around a corner.
Anonymous, like all good zipless fucks were for these people.
What did the idle, bored rich do to keep themselves from squirreling in on themselves?
The suite showed a woman’s touch, so Katrina assumed his personal shopper was a female. Constance’s office wasn’t the least bit feminine.
Front room done in late-Modern Nihon, with bold monochrome fabric coverings for the futon and floor pillows. Nice art on two walls. Old wood shelves and bookcases showing trinkets and money, rather than taste or literary interest. Soft rug underfoot.
Wetbar along one long wall, next to the projection screen, across from the futon.
Katrina slid just out of grasping hands and inventoried the alcoholic contents from behind the bar. Everett’s conquests must love sweet stuff, or cheap rum mixed with colas, while his tastes were the more expensive bourbons.
“How can I please you?” she asked from behind the bar, waving an arm at his options.
“The Stralan Eighteen,” he purred.
Yes, the very expensive stuff.
Katrina poured two fingers each in two glasses and handed him one. A single bottle of this stuff cost more than her monthly rent in a tower flat at the low end of middle-class. She was going to enjoy it.
She sipped the carmelized smoke slowly, just as he did.
“And then?” Katrina asked coyly
“Then I’m going to have you,” he replied knowingly. “In the bedroom, or the futon, more maybe just bent over this bar.”
