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Chapter One

Chapter One

T

here is nothing better than closing a huge account. The rush, the high you get when the client signs his name on the dotted line. You can practically hear your bank account filling up. It’s the greatest goddamn feeling.

And Wes Moony was feeling it right now. Oh man, he was feeling it deep. Because he hadn’t just landed any client; he’d landed the biggest client of his career, the latest in a long string of big clients: the largest producer of performance enhancing nanites in the galaxy. They were his, and so was their money.

Everyone on Jasob was in the throes of that feeling of victory. The entire station was in the midst of the biggest office party Wes had ever seen—three different caterers, an open bar, and some “party favors” brought by a rep from one of the pharmaceutical companies Wes had also landed recently. There was hardly an un-dilated pupil on the whole station.

Wes had just popped another party favor when Sinclair Thomas, the Jasob CEO, called all the employees into the main conference hall. Wes’s legs seemed to be moving without him, doing all the work so he could relax and enjoy the ride.

The crowd of Jasob employees was buzzing with an energy that tickled every part of Wes’s body. It danced on his fingertips, tasted like honey-soaked cake. He bumped into Sherry from accounting, a curvy brunette that laughed with her whole body. He started to apologize, but she forced the words back by shoving her tongue into his mouth. She pulled away just as he got a taste of her and was swept away by the river of Jasob employees flooding toward the stage that was erected at the front of the room.

The energy dancing across Wes’s body intensified.

Sinclair walked onstage with all the flair and circumstance of a rock star. And he was greeted as such. The people who spent most of their lives tucked in their cubicles, heads hanging, retinas burning away as they stared at monitors, wrists twisting and aching as they tapped away, had become a hedonistic mob.

Sinclair paused center stage and looked out at his people. He raised his arms in a dramatic gesture and signaled the launch of an impressive suite of pyrotechnics. The conference hall filled with thick smoke. The mob sucked it in like a cloud of weed smoke before the ventilators pumped it all out to prevent it from suffocating them.

“My people,” Sinclair declared. The crowd erupted. “We have done it. You have done it.” He paced the stage, building the energy in the room with each lap. “Jasob now has controlling market shares. We are number one!”

The crowd exploded again. The riotous applause and cheering morphed into a symphony of drug-induced color. Wes could taste their joy. It tasted like butterscotch.

“But, before I get into the details, let’s take a moment of silence for our comrades at StrobeNet.” Sinclair folded his hands in front of him and hung his head. As the crowd began to mimic him, he threw his arms wide and shouted, “Just kidding! Fuck them!”

The conference hall filled with more cheering. More color and butterscotch.

Wes put his fingers to his neck, feeling his pulse. It felt like a snake crawling beneath his skin in rhythm to the blink of the lights above. Fast, fast, slow. Fast, fast, slow.

“Shit,” he said to himself. “I took way too many of those party favors.”

“Those StrobeNet bastards are out on their asses today,” Sinclair continued. “Their shiny, state-of-the-art space station, the so-called ‘future of corporate technology and innovation in the industry’ is nothing but vapor. They failed miserably as possible, and the free market does not tolerate failure. StrobeNet’s clients began jumping ship immediately, and we were there to capitalize. We poached client after client, fighting tooth and nail to keep them from the losers at Layton and Chrisoff. And, as of this morning, we succeeded. The last of StrobeNet’s clients are ours!”

An assistant strolled onstage carrying a blue sack like she was Santa Claus. She opened it and held it out for Sinclair. He reached in and pulled out a handful of small, black tech boxes. He threw them out over the crowd like he was sprinkling feed over chickens.

“And that kind of diligence is always rewarded. Stellar-Art chips for all!”

The crowd surged toward the rain of swag. They elbowed each other, clawed at each other to reach them.

Animals

, Wes thought, though he felt the need for the art chips swell in his chest.

He imagined his coworkers as mice. He became a cat. He batted them around, played with them before sinking his teeth into their necks. All the Stellar-Art chips were his. Everything was his.

“Wes Moony!”

His heart felt like it had been dropkicked from the inside of his chest. It had transformed into a rabid coyote, howling and running headlong into his ribs, bashing its own brains outs.

Every eye in the conference hall suddenly fell on him, pounced on him.

“Let’s give him a hand!”

The room erupted at Sinclair’s direction.

The noise wasn’t a symphony anymore. It was a riot of breaking glass, screeching tires and toppled trash cans. It smelled like burning garbage and tasted like ash.

Sinclair pointed to Wes. “This hardworking son of a bitch landed five of StrobeNet’s largest clients. We are number one now because of him. And for that—” Sinclair motioned to someone offstage. A second later, the same assistant who’d brought the blue bag drove onstage atop a new Zenith Astrobike. “I am sending you home with one of these!”

Wes’s rabid coyote heart went still. It turned into a fluffy, white bunny. Twitching nose. Cotton tail. Cutest goddamn thing you’ve ever seen. He tasted butterscotch again.

“Head on backstage to claim this sexy beast, Wes. You’ve earned it.”

The applause built as Wes waded through the crowd. It crawled into his ear and planted seeds that bloomed into flowers.

“Sweet fucking Uranus, I need to come down,” Wes said to himself.

He finally made it through the crowd, to the relatively calm and quiet area backstage. The assistant showed him to his new bike—the sweetest ride he’d ever seen, with hover capabilities, autopilot functionality, and speed settings that couldn’t possibly be legal on most planets.

But once the assistant left him alone to enjoy his prize, rather than mount the thing and let the joy flow through his body, he fell onto his ass and buried his face in his hands.

“Be cool,” he repeated to himself. He focused on his breathing and on the cold sweat forming on his brow. “This is a reward. I’ve worked hard. I’ve earned it. This is what I work for.”

He wiped away a bead of sweat before it rolled into his eye. That’s when he noticed the crate. A wooden box that stood waist-high and was big enough that he could have crawled into it if he wanted to. And he kind of did want to. But it wasn’t the crate itself that had caught Wes’s attention; it was what was written on the side of it:

Layton Corp

.

Their competitor, one of the ones from whom they’d just sniped StrobeNet’s clients. Backstage at the celebration for beating Layton Corp for market share was an odd place to find a crate with their name on it.

Wes rubbed his eyes and looked again, making sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing. When he pulled his hands away, the words were still there, illuminated by the lights dancing across his vision.

A little noise reached his ears underneath the muted sounds of the celebration on the other side of the curtain. A scratching. And then a lot of scratching. He closed his eyes again, hoping the sound was a hallucination that would fade away. It wasn’t. It didn’t.

He followed it to the crate and knew that it was coming from inside. He approached the container like it held a bomb or a wild animal and he was hoping not to trigger it. He nearly wet himself when something scurried across the top of his foot. He jumped and squealed like a child. Then he caught a glimpse of the creature. It resembled a mouse—furry and about the same size—but it was definitely not a mouse. It ran off, disappeared under the stage.

Before Wes could sit, a pack of dozens of those same creatures rushed past him, all disappearing under the stage like the first. The sight of them, their quick movements and sudden disappearance, made his heart frantic again.

He leaned against the crate and focused on his breathing. His heartbeat matched the rhythm in the crate.

Thump, thump, bang

.

Thump, thump, bang

.

The cheering on the other side of the curtain became a sound of alarm. And then it became screaming.

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