(Ed note: sorry for the spotty chapter uploads lately. Dealing with some health stuff on my end; I’ll try to not let it get too bad, though.)
Mason County Courthouse, Shelton, Washington.
An old, beat-up pickup truck rumbled around to the back of the historic Mason County Courthouse and huffed to a stop. The engine knocked a few times, then, with a puff of black smoke from the tailpipe, rattled to a stop as well. The truck’s passenger door opened and a long-legged beauty with strawberry blonde hair tied up in a neat bun at the back of her head stepped out on three-inch stiletto heels.
“Dammit, Tim, when are you finally going to get this old piece of shit running right?” she said as she slammed the door of the truck, rattling the window that was stuck half open.
“I—” Tim began, his knuckles turning white around the steering wheel.
“No more excuses, Tim! Fix it or get rid of it.” Siobhan turned around in a huff and began stomping toward the employee entrance of the courthouse.
“Vonnie! I’ll.... Sigh, and, she’s gone,” Tim muttered, then turned over the ignition. After four tries, it finally caught, and with a loud bang and the squeal of an engine belt in desperate need of replacement, it sputtered off into the distance.
......
Siobhan, or “Vonnie” for short, stepped into the courthouse and looked around for the nearest bailiff or other staff member. It was her first day of work, and she was extremely early. It couldn’t be helped, though, as her husband, Tim, worked at the high school and had to be there by the time the first bell rang, which was hours before the courthouse officially opened for business.
Only finding a janitor, she sighed and asked for directions to the staff room. The janitor, an old hispanic man, pointed the way for her. She thanked him and set off, her heels clicking and clacking against the polished floor of the building.
When she stepped into the staff room, she coughed; apparently it doubled as the employee smoking area and two security officers and a young woman in the same kind of Office Lady uniform as Vonnie were inside, smoking and chatting while watching television. Apparently Vonnie wasn’t the only person who carpooled to work with someone who didn’t necessarily follow regular office hours.
She nodded to the three people in the room, then sat down on the couch and looked up at the television. It was playing a live broadcast of the first Imperial Agency Council meeting, where a strikingly attractive black woman with glowing hair that was floating was delivering a progress report as the head of the Imperial Blessings agency.
“The imperial blessings agency has been tracking crime and vigilantism. The instances of people using their blessings to commit crimes has risen to twelve percent of the total crime rate, not including costumed vigilantes, who consider themselves superheroes and go out to commit crimes in the name of fighting crime,” the woman said, shaking her head in disapproval. “To that end, we’ve broken ground on a number of official academies for the blessed, where people who receive blessings can study and eventually earn a license to become superheroes....”
The report went on in the background, but Vonnie lost interest in it and her eyes glazed over as she accessed her implant to begin taking over the security cameras in and around the courthouse, as well as uploading worms and trojans to the internal computer network in the courthouse. Once those tasks were complete, she took out a makeup compact from her purse and began touching up her makeup, using it as a cover to drop a nondescript object the size of a button on the ground.
She closed her compact and put it back in her purse, looking at the people in the room to ensure they weren’t paying her any attention, then sent a command to the object she had just dropped to the floor. Upon receiving the command, the button-
sized object rapidly dissolved and the individual nanites in the nanite colony spread out throughout the courthouse, attaching themselves to various surfaces and using those as conduction microphones.
The entire courthouse was thus bugged, and nobody was the wiser at all.
Vonnie leaned back on the couch and stretched, then stood and got herself a cup of terrible coffee.
“Seems like every government building has the same exact crappy coffee, no?” she quipped to no one in particular.
The other office lady in the room, a prim and proper woman in her early- to mid-twenties laughed and said, “Yeah. You must be new here. I’m Sarah, Judge Maxwell’s stenographer.”
“Vonnie,” Siobhan replied, stretching her arm out to shake Sarah’s hand. “And yeah, today’s my first day. My husband dropped me off on his way to work, so I’m a bit early. Do you know when the human resources department generally has someone around? I still need to do my inprocessing.”
“Sure, Gail should be here in around...” Sarah checked her watch, “twenty minutes or so. Just time enough to ‘enjoy’ some of our terrible coffee here.”
“It only makes it worse that I’m from Seattle, home of Starbucks and hipster huts,” Vonnie chuckled.
“I’m sure it does!” Sarah agreed with a laugh. She was a plain-
looking woman, a bit chubby and with mouse-brown hair in a pixie cut that didn’t quite suit the shape of her face. But when she laughed, her eyes sparkled and her brilliant smile made her appear quite a bit more attractive, offsetting her severely upturned nose and making her haircut seem to fit her personality more than it did her face.
“So can you tell me about the people I’ll be working with? I’m here to clerk for Judge Carlson—how is she to work for?”
Sarah winced on Vonnie’s behalf. “Oof. I’m sorry, she’s a hardass. Expects you to know everything, even if you don’t know it. She’s gone through six stenographers in the year and a half since she was appointed to the bench. They call her Cuntson around here, but don’t let her hear you say that, and you didn’t hear it from me,” she said, practically in a whisper.
One of the two security officers in the room looked over and added, “She definitely won’t like you. She’s old and wrinkled like a prune, and you’re, well...” he blushed, “err, not.”
“Thanks for the compliment!” Vonnie replied with a beaming smile, though she was inwardly grumbling about her hell-mode difficulty assignment.
The three people continued chatting as the other security guard watched the IAC meeting on the television with laser focus. Vonnie looked over at him from time to time, wondering if she may have just found her first person of interest in the investigation into the cult activity in her area of operations.
