Mech Pilot who would be happy to give a presentation for the Investors Quarterly Meeting
[Monday, June 17th, 08:46, Boardroom]
"As you can see, thanks to the Marketing Team's hard work, profits are up 300% from last quarter! Not to toot my own horn, but we managed to keep expenses to 70% of last Quarter as well!"
A stiff, gentle, and polite clap rounded the board room. A desperate weariness had everyone who even touched a Suit in the last year wishing they'd stuck to door to door sales and highway banditry. The vermin (some literal and others more figurative) of Bunker 18 sat in decaying office chairs that once were likely nice when they were bought, but now looked quite cheap. The pleather upholstery and brass painted plastic buttons weathered the apocalypse about as well as humanities' genome. Most of the chairs had been flayed bare, the few spared cracked into a dust of black flecks, a fitting analogy for the long term fire sale planning that humanity invested it's fate into.
The woman presenting wasn't a woman in Tucson during the Rains, but that didn't change her work ethic. Sure, she stood two heads shorter than the flight chief, but she was the crackshot pilot of the team. In her past life before the verminoform infection was sent by the Russians, she worked a quiet business job that went nowhere. Now with reaction speed 3 times as fast as a human peer, the "Rat Mom" had a twisted sense of humor. Glimmering green eyes, dusty brown fur, and a few surprises for any man brave enough to try to lay with her, she'd earned a reputation as ruthless and seemingly disconnected from consequence. The budding visage of a rising executive, she even wore a suit to work, fancy that. She'd sacrificed almost everything short of her tail for a chance to make this work trip happen, and the chaos of city life in California did not disappoint.
The team was flying sorties almost thrice daily because of how many letter runners were getting tagged by flying pigs. Helicopters weren't a match for Suits, but it was grueling work akin to US Navy pilot schedules. Suits in 2049 are not much larger than the front end of a hearty American Strong Pickup Truck, they tend to be cramped and when half of America became rat people there was a sudden mechanized use for people who could comfortably squeeze into the armor bulkheads. The average human even after the apocalypse is 5 foot 9, just a few inches too tall to survive most penetration of the frontal plates, so verminoform pilots tend to be the survivors. Maintaining a Suit takes 6 men who need to know at least 3 specialties of engineering to fix them, and that meant the high energy rats were running circles around their mostly human crewmates. Faster on the draw, slower on the take, as Mom likes to say. There's a cost in slow brain skills for most infected, she's a rare math-capable exception. The bulk of her team had to relearn how to read just to fly.
Gesturing to props she fished from the skeletons of brunch-brainstorming sessions past, she proudly displayed sorched pie charts and decayed posterboards on the makeshift eisel. Where space existed she managed to scribble notes detailing munitions expenditures and parts needs from Bunker 18's flight team, which as you guessed is called The Marketing Team. Bunker 18's reputation is owed to some of the meanest (literal and figurative) desert rats hauling from the US of A's ruins. Former military pilots, survivalists, stubborn bikers and recreational hikers, almost all of them were verminoform in Marketing, giving them the razors edge of combat prowess and non stop risk of psychosis. Mom is on a mission of peace and cohabitation between infected and humans, but as it turns out not everyone is buying. At their peak, Marketing were quite the mercenary outfit prior to last year's Q4 slaughter at the hands of Nimitz.
"Now, our esteemed colleagues in the Nimitz are mighty jealous of our approval to splurge on new equipment this coming Q3, so we'll need to hop to it and stay competitive! LT Scratches, could you warm up the projector? I have a power point I'd like t-"
An explosion roughly 8 stories above sent chips of the crumbling ceiling raining all over Marketing. A great scurrying followed, the regular men doing their best to keep pace with the darting rodents squeezing through tight spaces towards their stashed suits.
"AH, it must be 8 o'clock already! Coffee is on the platter near the door! Mom's got a strategy meeting with corporate!"
There of course was no coffee, that's been extinct since 2036ish. See the trick to marketing is actually Psychology, Con-man stands for Confidence after all. Mom's marketing team had stolen the DoD's property right off the Nimitz after the Q4 slaughter took them from a baker's dozen of suits and pilots to a mere sixpack. Oh and despite that on the way out they set charges to the Nimit's nuclear reactor, it probably cost human and rodent kind at least 50 years of delays to sustainable energy. Now what remains of Uncle Sam is attempting to force their way into a pre-apocalypse population shelter to finish the job and Make America Great Again. It was a classic "I never intended to pay for you"/ "I never intended to work for you" exchange between Mom and the DoD's head guy, and like most work trips, Marketing always gets a little too crazy at the cocktail bar.
The Marketing Team clocked in within 5 minutes of Nimitz's survivors making a fuss. As the GI's of the DoD forced entry, they blew fallout shelter bulkheads from the gloomy soot raining streets of San Francisco's cozy historical neighborhoods. If it weren't for the earlier atomic bombs, it'd be a shame to damage the street car tracks. Discarding their travel pamphlets and putting off sight-seeing, Marketing had a gig to keep to before the flight home. They made quick on joining the scattered civilians battling the handsomely equipped camo and gas mask toting fascists above. Enemy fire was pouring down into seemingly every hallway and corridor, what scarce NVG's remained functional in Uncle Sam's Nazi Parlor gave Nimitz an edge against the so-called "impure vermin" living in Bunker 18. Fortunately for famed physician, philanthropist, scholar, and Irish Catholic raised, Mexican Catholic trained Priest Doctor Molerat (today's important MVP to wow with flashy theatrics so as to make the sale), desert rats like the heat.
Marketing is notorious for negotiating with mercantile priorities, but Mom and Molerat go back to the same dead end office job. Rehab work under Corporate changes people, makes them reprioritize profit as a secondary concern. Dig a little and you'll find the humanity that lurks in the seemingly inhuman, the so-called other, hell most rats share like 90% of the genome with humans these days. But poverty is a familiar foe for Marketing, scrap pushers and scum suckers can't afford hardware like this on to fight for them, something Nimitz definitely knew as they forced 90 year old Bradley IFV's to roll down the cargo ramps. If it weren't for the newfangled Newtonian displacement fields most suits have, one of those brick shit houses would actually be a problem for Human Resources (that's the support crew). The one that drove into Mom's empty hangar got opened up like a stubborn pack of Skittles, the contents colorfully distributing themselves when the package is given just a bit too much pepper.
Mom was limber but not 60kmph in 3.4 seconds limber, especially not with 5 tons of man's final blow against itself in the form of experimental laser cannons. Unlike the poor gene-purist sods hoofing it in 100+ pounds of gear in moldy, humid, hot bunker air, the Suits move quick, plowing through infantry and light armor alike, their intended role according to old Lockmart documents. Built during the last days, their debut 20 years ago represented a leap in technology that sadly couldn't stop global warming, nuclear exchange, global market collapse, or an aerosolized gene altering retrovirus which then spread by contact with saliva or sexual fluids. Most people actually died of rabies, that shits fatal, don'tcha know?
A single shot from one of the two shoulder mounted beam cannons had cracked the museum piece of an IFV clean in half, detonating ammo and vaporizing dismounts in a single shot. The pressure wave sent debris and unfortunate fascists slamming into the reinforced concrete walls of the loading bay. Even years after everything fell into anarchy, seeing offices and parking garages makes mom feel a little lost. There was such a sense of control in having your little space and your little job. Raising the survivors of humanitys little oopsie is far more complicated and way more dangerous. She idled over the remains of what was her temporary home for the last six months, fluttering cinders of blank copy paper and the red hot slag of Armco paperclips resembled the city above.
That was hundreds of years of perfectly good office stationary that just got dusted. Now it's gone from personal (for killing her kids) to professional (offending her sense of efficiency and OCD).
"Boys, Mom's cooking tonight! Canned pork, your favorite!"
How a rat manages a gravely roar of fury over a shortwave radio is anyone's guess. Mom hasn't yelled like that since Jaundice got splashed last winter. It seems that even after the world's died, there seemingly is no shortage of pigs making a mess of perfectly nice people (and office supplies). She quietly fumed, surveying the damage through the periscope.
"Eh, Mom, we have new contacts on the 6th floor. Dismounts, no suits. I think they're holding back to wear us out with the bricks on the ramps, are we clear to engage with prejudice?"
Mom bit her lip. DoD had this place picked for a lynchin' last November, there was around 15,000 souls hiding on floor 10, the buffer was narrow and the mini fridge was fresh out of wine coolers. It was time to make deadline or sign the pink slip. Batteries wouldn't last long with the current pull, but it was well past time to pretend there was any way out but through this team building excursion.
"Fuck it, sure Detrompton, why not? We have the Beam Cannons, they don't. Traditional fare for the kids, Executive class service is for the Suits and anything that won't budge on our vertical integration plan. There's about two dozen Nimitz Suits left, that's four each which I think we can do, y'all ready for Martini's and the Spa this weekend?"
A chuckle ran the ranks, the half dozen of suits dispersing in teams of two. Before the concrete walls caused comms to become Shakey, a fuzzy echo of the commitment made it's way back.
"All copy, performance quota set. Let's sell some weight loss!" Squeaked the LT, Scratches. "Give them the gun, make 'em pay for the bullets!" echoed Marketing.
She was damn proud of what kids she had, damn hurt she didn't have the other seven. She dropped any sense of stability to pull this unit from banditry to the Mercenary lifestyle, and now they were probably about to all die heroes against one of the last great villains of the last age. In another life, Mom probably woulda hit the glass ceiling. These days she's more likely to smash through it, leaving double or triple digit casualties in her wake.
Just another manic Monday at the office. Rubbing the bags under her eyes, she took off with Scratches to clear a path. It's a thankless job to reach people when they don't even know that they want what you're selling, but maybe when the dust clears, Bunker 18 will teem with survivors and everyone can start again in the great secret gardens of Surprise, Az.
Whatever happened though, she wanted a latte almost as badly as she wanted to survive today.
