Chapter Fifteen - Empirical

“Though empirical evidence may have demonstrated that there’s no such thing as karma, we still find ourselves attracted to the idea. It is so simple and elegant a system that it’s hard not to begin to think that the world works on such karmic scales when we know it does not!”

--On the Philosophy of Guilt, 2045

***

I rode my bike up and to the top of a skyscraper some dozen blocks away, then I slowed down and parked on the roof.

Leaning forwards, I let my head thunk against the bar and closed my eyes. “Fuck,” I muttered. The adrenaline was washing off. The image of what I’d just done replayed itself. Of all the times I had to not miss.

“Fuck,” I repeated.

Are you okay, Catherine?

I nodded, took a deep breath, then just stewed in the moment. This was going to have consequences. If I was a smarter girl, then I’d be able to guess at those, but right now, I had no fucking clue.

Samurai were above the law. At least, that’s how they acted. I’d acted that way too. It was useful, it let me do shit without having to worry, it had let me save lives.

I knew there were stories about samurai shooting politicians, mobsters, CEOs, but those had always sounded like legends. A cynical part of me, a big part, always suspected that those stories existed because it gave stupid rebellious morons like me a reason to believe that there was still some karmic justice out there.

I’d never seen a samurai blow up a politician’s head on live TV.

“Wait. Myalis, was that being broadcast?”

Mayor Dupont’s speech? Yes. It was on television as well as several live feed sites. Do you want viewership details?

“Was anyone watching?” I asked. I sure as shit wouldn’t watch anything like that. Cartoons would be a better waste of my time than seeing the mayor complain.

Initial viewership was low, but news that the mayor was working with a samurai spiked viewership. Initial views say at around thirty-thousand and increased to two point two million at the time of your shot.

“Shit,” I muttered.

The clips have gone viral. It would be a considerable amount of work to track down total viewership of those. It’s safe to assume that it's in the tens of millions already.

It had only been a few minutes! I groaned. There was no hiding this.

If it helps, initial views suggest a generally positive response. I imagine it will spread a lot more as the afternoon goes on.

Yeah, no shit. Pre-samurai me would have been gobbling this shit up. The fat ugly mayor getting his skull vented after being a douchebag would have been like poetry... okay, so I was still kinda proud, but this was going to have consequences.

I flicked a few buttons on my augs and made a call.

Lucy picked up on the third ring. “Huh?” she asked. She was very clearly still asleep.

“Hey Lucy,” I said, voice low and reassuring. “I had the meeting with the Mayor.”

“Oh, yeah, okay,” she said. I heard her yawn, then shift around. She was clearly still in bed. “So?”

“Lucy, how would you like to be the new mayor?” I asked.

Lucy was quiet for a while. “I’m going back to bed. Night.”

I blinked. “She hung up on me,” I said.

You did awaken her from REM sleep.

Well I wasn’t going to call her a second time, that would just annoy her. Taking a deep breath, I shifted on the seat of my bike, then gave it a bit of gas and rode off the edge of the roof. “Let’s head back to the Family HQ,” I said as I entered their address back into the bike’s autopilot. “The meeting with the Mayor was supposed to get the city to clear up some shit, get the ball rolling. Maybe they’d need to expedite permissions or do some bullshit paperwork or whatever.”

You suspect that won’t be a problem any longer?

“Do you think whomever’s gonna take his place is going to stonewall us?” I asked.

It’s highly unlikely.

Yeah, I figured as much. Whichever poor intern or career politician had to fill in for Dupont would probably be pretty aware that they were more expendable than he was. If I was in their shoes I’d be walking real carefully and jumping at shadows.

The Family HQ approached and I glided to a stop in the rooftop parking lot, leaving my bike near the entrance. I took my time slipping off the bike, giving the family some time to figure out that I was here. “Can I expect trouble here?” I asked.

Hmm... this is interesting.

I froze up. “What is?” Were they planning to off me? It wouldn’t have surprised me all that much. I started to check my gear.

It seems as if the Family was planning on assisting you with your sewer repair and reconstruction project.

“Was planning?”

They had yet to truly begin other than to appoint some interns to start communicating with outside groups. One moment... I’m in their communication suites. It seems like the work they did overnight was perhaps less than what they could have done if they put all of their efforts into the project.

“I was getting sidelined?” I asked. The fuckers. Then again, the Family was a big deal. They probably had a lot of work going on across a lot of the city, and beyond New Montreal as well.

Was is the operative term. It seems that news of your interaction with the Mayor has reached the Family and that, in turn, has encouraged them to increase the priority of your mission.

I was expecting the consequences of my actions to be negative for me. This sounded like it was pretty much the opposite. I started heading towards the elevator doors only for them to open up and for Eric to stumble out of the elevator. “Miss Stray Cat,” he greeted. Eric was sweatier than I remembered him being, and the guileless smile of his had taken on a new look to it. “We weren’t expecting you.”

“I came to see how things were progressing,” I said.

“Ah... yes, of course. That’s your prerogative. Yes, of course. Please follow me? The, ah, group in charge of your project are hard at work, but I’m sure they’ll make some time for you.”

Cat, you might want to see this.

I slipped into the elevator while Myalis brought up a small screen in my augs. It was a camera view from somewhere in the building. I recognized some of the people, they’d been the smiling weirdos I saw last time I was here, three of them in an office. They were clearly panicking.

The audio popped into my ear. “She’s coming! She’s coming and we don’t have shit to show her?” one of them was saying.

“Calm the fuck down. It’s not that bad, it’s been barely a day, she can't expect us to be that far ahead,” another said.

“She can expect us to have done something!” shouty replied.

“We did do something,” one of the women shot back. She was a good deal calmer, though she lacked that smiling corporate calm that they all had yesterday. “Let’s present what we have and hope that it’s enough.”

I cut away from the camera feed and laughed. Eric spun around to look at me, but I waved him off. “I saw a funny meme,” I explained.

“Ah, of course,” he replied.

The elevator stopped at the same place as last time, and Eric went through the same spiel, asking if I wanted something to drink, and politely asking that I wait.

It was a lot easier to wait when I knew that the people making me wait were the ones dreading the meeting. I had ten or so minutes of sitting around to do, so I split my attention between Myalis’ spying and checking out some local media sites. The video of the mayor getting shot was out already. The official livestream had cut off nearly as soon as my Trenchmaker fired. Fortunately, there were some hundred-odd people in the crowd filming everything, so there were dozens of angles of the mayor getting hit.

It was still weird seeing myself in third person. I couldn’t help but notice how strangely I stood there. It looked like I didn’t give a shit that a crowd was watching. It was weird. I should have been a little more self-conscious or something because this didn’t look natural.

Some people just had a gift for being charismatic while just standing there. I wasn’t one of those people.

“Miss Stray Cat, they’re ready to see you now,” Eric said.

I followed him into a boardroom, the smiling faces were all at their places, grins fixed, but I noticed the sweat, I could almost smell it off of them. “So,” I said as I grabbed the seat at the head of the table and pulled it away so that I could stand there. “What kind of progress have you been making?” I asked.

***