// The Mortimer Incident //

It was another boring night of VIDscreen scanning when Fate spotted a little figure he thought he recognized. "Oh. Oh! Hello, pussycat."

Somewhere, he'd picked up a feed of a high-wire balance act--a small CatKynd running from trouble. Toggling a button, he split the monitors to zoom in. Security risk. Flight risk. Danger risk. Heh...Sascha would accuse me of having a type. Flexible as hell, though. He couldn't deny he admired how she bounced around with ease while more of the club she'd fled into got bashed up by proxy.

Tiny women and their capacity to draw lasers.

Maybe he did have a type.

His monitors weren't even, which made the beam she escaped the building on look like a series of steps. Fate tapped a few keys and an irregular angle appeared with the others. Video shot from a short distance down, across from the route she took. Not a standard connection. Had a bit of a wobble to it.

Drone.

"What have we here?" Fate poked. Just a bit.

Illegal. Check. High-end. Check. Armed? He slammed code through the transmission and felt a cold chill. Well armed. Check. Tagged by a bounty hunter...that was like, a default check, and Fate wasn't happy about the layers of encryption surrounding the owner's origin.

The drone's target could be anybody. It could even be sitting dormant until a specific face set it zooming off.

It moved to follow her without Fate ordering it to.

"Uh oh, kitty cat has mean friends."

Hazel eyes jerked to the left, where he threw the fleeing cat lady's image up on the bigger, far monitor. He could crack the encryption and fully backtrace the drone, sure. He could also blind the thing, change its target list, blow it up, and otherwise make it addled until she was out of range. But all of that required him to out himself as an interference to the bounty hunter holding the machine's controls, and since it hadn't yet thrown an active target on her, it could make things worse.

So Fate did none of that.

Instead, he sent a volley of signals toward her. What kind of tech did a CatKynd have laying about? All of it would be suddenly very noisy, and much, much more entertaining than simply nudging things out of the way.

He waited a moment, watching the screen with a massive grin as the messages hit around her. Her pupils dilated with surprise and then narrowed to suspicious slits as she spotted the drone. Would she choose to listen?

There was a pause.

He saw her chew on the inside of her cheek before she tapped her wristcomp again.

He eyeballed the screen directly ahead.

That's when he noticed the fur on her tail had puffed up in every direction. Fate winced even as he tried to hold in a burst of laughter.

He reread the message. Oh, this cat was more clever than most.

She hadn't said 'like that again'--which would've left the door wide open for variations on the theme--she'd simply said 'again'.

She was already on the move, following his earlier directions.

Fate laced his fingers and flipped his hands around to pop his knuckles. Playdates were never boring.

Fate chewed on the end of a stylus as he studied the three monitors to his right. Still no Sass, though he'd gotten word that his friend yet lived. A miracle, given her proclivities for falling into the seventh circle of bounty hunter hell no matter what planet she wound up on. He felt a disconnect; strange not to be watching her back.

For now, she was in someone else's hands. Capable ones. He didn't trust often, but he didn't have any say in the matter. He'd done what he could for that high profile job and any missteps from the launch were his--particularly the part where she cut off all comms and went mission-silent. He shouldn't worry.

He'd chosen instead to do some spring cleaning.

He blinked through the command lines, the bare minimum effort required for the rote task of moving his virtual ass to a fresh den of iniquity. Er. Technology. Den of. That. There was little room for iniquity since he'd reconfigged his favorite sexbot vids to interfere with the corporations in his stead.

"Welp. Cleaning is boring," Fate mumbled around the piece of copper-colored metal. "I should call--oh, right. Who's the fucking genius who decided to do this?"

Everything was down. He'd flushed everything, even his comms, so he had to wait for all the mirrored meshes and Network addresses to settle in, so that meant he had limited access to mayhem. Couldn't do so much as prank call a corps security department.

Fate snickered. He already had one in mind for the Life Support brand for Repeater Genetics--a corps who refreshed Elite genomes on the regular, so those wealthiest of folks could eke out a few more years of life without replacing a single part. A corps whose core policy was "no operable and identical simulacrums" because the CEO was afraid of mirrors. "Hey yeah, I've got a message for Michael Loane, he goes by Mike, can you find him for me? I can hear 'em now: Has anyone seen Mike Loane?"

"Looking for 'my clone'," he smacked the desk with a gleeful grin. "At the place where they made it illegal, all because someone's afraid to look himself in the eye."

It was stupid. He was stupid.

He fell quiet for a moment as he swung his chair in a slow half-circle and back again. "Can't play."

He closed his eyes for a moment, opening a file that remained the one thread he had left, a single database that pinged constantly on a wealth of names and Network addresses, reporting back lifesigns and wristcomp connections.

Sascha was still offline.

He picked up one of his keyboards and a can of compressed air and began thoroughly dusting every inch of the damned thing, even though he'd done it less than an hour before. There were no missions to toss to contacts, not if he wanted to monitor them--which he always did.

"Can't work."

Work was FUN. Those who'd come to expect Fate to interrupt their comms knew to expect chaos. Most of his 'agents', Fate sent to do things because they'd had bad days or bad news; those missions--still necessary, in-person tasks that were light on risk and mental load--made his people shake that stuff off because they were too busy trying not to laugh at his outrageous suggestions or trying not to punch him through their wristcomp as he sent something uncommonly lewd instead of a passcode they'd expected.

Those missions ended with smiles. Folks he coerced into running small gigs got paid well, their missions helped regular people over the elite and powerful, and Fate made sure harm stayed out of their way.

But there were other missions, tougher ones, that required every sensor and hacking trick he had to keep trouble at bay. For those, he worked with folks who thrived in the shadows, behind the scenes, who took risks he couldn't always anticipate.

For those, Fate worried.

"i'm not worried, u're worried," he keyed out on the re-pristined keyboard, then plugged it back in.

Because there were missions that went wrong. If he were to screw up, people would die. Not just his agents in the field.

He was keenly aware of his role in the continued survival of regular, unaware folks whose livelihoods depended on corporate plots failing, whose safe food and product oversight relied on secrets being exposed without the source of the leak being traced back, on simple fucking breathing under boots of capitalism that were too cheap to fix one inconveniently placed, broken air filter. Even though he had confidence in his skills, he diligently double and triple checked for active and passive threats--as well as *other* things that could go wrong--when he was supposed to be someone's virtual backup. (And sometimes when he wasn't.)

Didn't mean his 'official' communications got any less ridiculous, x-rated, or intentionally annoying.

It definitely didn't mean that when his agents were done working and headed to their respective safe houses, off-grid hideouts, or homes, that he wasn't going to have some prank waiting for them when they got there.

Yet now...those weren't the missions he fretted about the most. He hadn't realized there was a third kind until tonight.

The worst missions, he decided, were missions where he couldn't get access due to closed circuit nonsense, where 'someone' hadn't plugged him in so he could invade the place and see every inch of it, where she'd instead decided to rely on an insider for the op.

"How was I supposed to know she'd get so mad about being called Sugartits?" He let out a heavy sigh. "She's fine, man," Fate said aloud, twirling the stylus between his fingers. Sascha was a pro. The offline symbol sat coldly grey in its little column. "She'll be back and tearing my stupid ass a new one by morning."

He still worried.