Chapter 6 - The Property of the Network
“Put me down!” Leo shrieked, kicking his little scuffed sneakers violently against the technician’s padded chest. “Down! Down! Down!”
“Keep the camera rolling on his face!” Julian screamed, scrambling backward over the grass to frame the shot. “The distress metrics are going parabolic! Don’t drop the resolution, you idiots!”
Clarissa ignored the child’s screaming. She walked directly to the blue plastic shopping cart sitting abandoned on the sidewalk. She knelt before it, her leather gloves squeaking as she reached into the basket. She tossed the plastic banana aside; it bounced into the mud. She threw the fake eggplant into the bushes. At the bottom of the cart lay the scuffed squeaky tomato. Clarissa picked it up, feeling its unnatural weight.
It wasn't made of hollow rubber. It was dense, fitted with an internal locking mechanism.
“He kept it on him the entire time,” Clarissa murmured, a slow, predatory smile touching her lips. “The raw footage from the previous owners. The unredacted contracts. The unedited archives of the farm before we rebranded it as a suburban paradise.”
“Hey! Leave his toys alone!” Vance barked, surprising even himself. He took an aggressive step toward Clarissa, but one of the tactical-vested men immediately stepped between them, his hand resting conspicuously on an electroshock baton holstered at his hip.
“Step back, Mr. Vance,” Clarissa said smoothly, standing upright with the weighted toy tomato in her grip. “Your contract ended ninety seconds ago. Your payment has been deposited into your digital wallet. If you speak to anyone about today’s setup, the non-disclosure clause will trigger an immediate liquidation of your personal accounts.”
Leo continued to sob, his arms outstretched toward his stolen cart. “My tomato! My tomato!”
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Clarissa looked at Leo with cold curiosity. “He doesn't even know what he was carrying. He thought he was just doing his chores.”
Suddenly, the lock on the cruiser’s trunk clicked open from the inside. The heavy lid burst upward with violent force, knocking the nearest technician into the gutter.
