​Sleaze Land – Chapter 14 (Ookie Cookie) Part 2

​Sleaze Land – Chapter 14 (Ookie Cookie) Part 2
 
 
 
     “Felix just sat there, not smirking exactly - or not so as you could call him on it - but clearly happy with how unhappy he'd managed to make all of us.”  Sarah Monette
 
 
“I want them begging for mercy!  I want them on their knees crying for salvation!  I want their helpless little faces, and I want them plastered all over every screen on the planet!  Is that understood?” Emma screamed at her team, after they’d woken her up to tell her the video feed from Sleaze Land had been mysteriously cut.
 
“Their pain and suffering don’t do us any good if people can’t see it!” she screamed some more when no on had come forth with any ideas.
 
No one had come forth with any ideas simply because no one had any idea what the hell was going on.
 
“Best we can tell,” Janet, her AI began over the intercom, “is the RAD tower has been disabled on the island.  If that is the case, the only solution is to airlift a replacement, which will take until morning.”
 
“Until morning?!” Emma screamed, like a mad woman, because she very, very much was a mad, mad woman.
 
“I could walk there faster than that.  Why the hell is it going to take until morning?” Emma demanded of her AI, who had taken the holographic form of her favorite Aunt.
 
“Because the tower is specifically designed to upload terabytes of data every minute from more than a thousand different cameras and relay stations from all over the island.”
 
“Oh…” Emma said, her voice as deflated as she suddenly felt.
 
“Tell the council we’ll meet in thirty minutes,” she told her assistant, who instantly dissolved into the ether.
 
“And the rest of you, she said, to her very corporeal team, “get the fuck out of my office.”
 
“At least the trials are going well,” one of her staff remarked, just as she was sliding out of the door.
 
“Just you wait and see… the pimp trials are going to be even better…” Emma told the young girl whom she had rescued from a sweatshop just south of the boarder.  A sweatshop AC Maganelio had been the highly-paid spokesperson for.
 
And, as it was Maganelio's cabin that had been reading as ‘distressed’ on the monitors right before they'd all gone dead Emma was finding it rather difficult to wait until morning to find out what was going on on that cursed island. 
 
“What about using a satellite?  Can’t we just redirect a satellite?” Emma asked of the ever-present AI that served as her assistant.
 
“The island is protected from all satellite probes due to Tiny’s presence,” her assistant informed her.
 
“I still don’t get how that works,” Emma stated truthfully.
 
And for a second, she almost thought she heard her AI assistant sigh, before she simply replied, “He’s radioactive, ma’am.  And as all remote sensing systems on satellites are based on electromagnetism, they simply can’t penetrate Tiny’s radiation.
 
Her AI had rematerialized once again in her office, and once again had chosen the form of Emma’s favorite aunt.  A long-deceased aunt whom Emma was growing more-and-more to dislike.
 
“If you recall, I stated the probability of this risk was at forty-three-percent, when you decided to place him on the island,” her assistant remarked rather sharply.
 
But then she smiled, just like Emma’s long-dead aunt used to do.  And then she once again disappeared.
 
With a sigh of her own, Emma Jorgensen slumped into her high-backed leather chair.  And then she dropped her face into her hands.
 
“What the fuck is Tiny going to do with the paperclips?” Emma asked softly of herself, so softly she was 78% sure the AI hadn’t heard.
 
And then she put her head on her desk, and tried to steal ten more minutes of sleep.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
© Raena Exe 2022
 
 
*Inspired by life.
*All characters, places, and events are completely fictional.
*All rights reserved.

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