FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Theo

The room was small. Five feet by five feet, with a bench along the back wall where the tiger was seated. The only way Theo could stretch out was if he lied down on the floor, at the diagonal, and only in one of them, since the toilet and sink in one corner took out just enough room there to prevent him from stretching out completely.

He'd been there three days. He doubted they were allowed to hold him one such a small cell for this long, but considering the crimes he was accused of committing, and the number of people who had to have suffered, if not outright died while the Rogue AI had taken over the city, he doubted anyone cared about his rights.

Sounds came from the other side of the door. Metal sliding against metal. They were undoing the bolt. It was a monstrous affair that had been put together at the last moment. The welds had still been warm when they'd put Theo in the room. It had no electronic components. Just one large metal bar with clamps. Independents might be anti-technology, but the Anarchist had shown a willingness to use technology far beyond what they were known to have. As their so call leader, Theo was being held in a box only brute force could take him out of.

The door opened and a woman, a pangolin, in the gray SolGov uniform with an insignia marking her as a security officer stood in the doorway. She looked him over, not bothering hiding her disdain. "Get up."

Theo stood. His job for now wasn't to make himself a troublesome prisoner. He needed to play his role as leader of the Anarchist, make himself important enough that they would have to send him to Luna.

"Hands front." Theo placed his hands before him, next to one another and she moved aside.

A guard, in heavy armor, his helmet made it impossible to guess the species, entered the room and placed small bands on each wrist. He stepped out and the woman was visible again.

"You so much as breathe wrong and I'm going to send enough current through you to stop your heart a few times over, do you understand?"

Theo nodded and lowered his arms. He twitched fingers on his right hand, sending a code to Cass so he would start paying attention.

"The bands have an active broadcasting system," the voice only he could hear said. "If she tries to use it, I might be able to decrypt the signal, but if I try to do anything ahead of time, she will notice the interference. I'd recommend not doing anything that will cause her to use them. Also, I'm still cut from the net."

That would be because of the headband Theo was wearing. A broadcast jammer to keep him from using his implant to communicate with anyone on the outside. He didn't have an implant, but Cass played that role, and communicated with the network on the same frequencies.

"Step outside."

She wrinkled her nose as he stepped closer. Three days wouldn't normally be enough for him to be all that rank, but he'd ran hard before that, then had to fight for his life, a few times. Oh and he'd made out with a hot kisser of a tiger. All that combined without a chance to shower helped make his sent memorable.

Three guards stood around him, dangerous looking rifles held across their chest. These guys weren't kidding around.

"Follow me." She walked and Theo didn't wait to be pushed to follow her. She set a quick pace through a corridor with doors on each side. More cells, although those had standard electronic locks.

The door at the end of the hall opened to another corridor, but the doors in this one were further apart. Larger rooms. Cass brought up the plan of the floor. Interrogation rooms. The third door on the left opened and she motioned for him to go in.

This room was a dozen feet deep and wide with a table in the middle. A woman sat on the other side of it from him. She was a dalmatian and dressed in a better gray uniform. She didn't have any insignia, which told Theo she outranked anyone here.

Her gaze regained its focus. She'd been reading something or accessing the net through her implant. She looked at him, motioned for the chair. "Thank you sergeant, you can wait outside, I'll let you know when I'm done with him."

"Yes Ma'am." The door closed and Theo was alone with the dalmatian.

He hadn't expected to be questioned here. As the leader of the Anarchists, he'd expected to be shipped to Luna on the next ship with a cell on it for deep questioning. They couldn't have sent her here, even on the fastest ship it was still a week from Luna to Mars. So she was local.

Nothing in his briefing on Mars had indicated SolGov had Special Security Agents here. He'd have to get the information to Anderson when he had the chance.

"Please, take a seat."

Theo sat.

"You failed, you know." He remained silent. "Whatever you were trying to do, we stopped it."

Theo didn't react to the lie. They hadn't stopped anything. He had. He'd been the one to chase the Anarchists through the city, fight them, find the kill program and get to the communication center to feed it to the Rogue. Of course he still wasn't entirely certain how the Rogue had been destroyed. He had to have ingested the program, but Cass had informed him the program had just vanished. Still the Rogue was gone, so it had worked.

Her gaze flicked to the left, she wanted him to think a message had appeared there, but he'd studied the behavior of people using implants, so he could imitate them.

"And I've just received confirmation that the last of your associates has been captured. Some we've questions have already given you up."

He wondered how much of that was the lie. He doubted any of them knew his name, so they couldn't give them that. All they'd had was his picture, as well as that of Roland and Patricia. For all he knew they hadn't captured any of them.

"Why don't you just make it easier on you and tell me how you got here?"

"I don't recognize the authority of the Corporations to prosecute me." She tilted an ear. "The Corporations are nothing more than slaves to the machines, and machines don't have any rights to judge a living person."

"Right, you and your anti-technology beliefs." Her tail was tapping against a chair leg in annoyance. The tapping stopped. "Although, I'm curious as to why an independent like you has an artificial arm, let alone an implant."

Theo closed his right hand. That and his forearm were mechanical. Usually his tools were stored there, but they had been taken out when he'd been captured. Cass' drive was also there, but it was shielded, undetectable.

"Some of us have seen the light."

Another tilt of the ear. "Some Anarchists have begun embracing technology?"

"No." Theo let out a low growl of anger in his voice. "Some of us have realized what our, your, masters are, and broken our shackles. I don't care what you think of me, we will save you from them."

"Right, heroes, the lot of you. That's why you almost destroyed this city, to save us."

"A message needed to be sent, an example made."

An image of a mongoose appeared before him and it took more effort than he wanted to keep himself from reacting.

"Why don't you tell me about the role this man plays in your organization?"

"Him?" Theo laughed, all the while cursing Marcus. What had he said? Why hadn't he played the victim like Theo had instructed him to? "You think I'd let a slave in my organization? I used him to infiltrate your government center and discarded him."

She quirked a smile. "You're trying too hard. We have Mister Bowfinger in custody. He admitted to working for you, even gave us interesting details on how you corrupted the city's infrastructure. I bet you didn't know he'd listened in on that."

His smile wasn't an act. "You're the one trying too hard." Marcus might have admitted to being in love with Theo, he'd done too good a job there, and maybe even helping him get into the storage building where he'd been found, but he knew nothing about the rest. "I'd abandoned him long before any talks of how we'd proceed ever came up."

Another image appeared, the inside of a storage compartment, with bodies among crates and archaic tech on a table. "What about this? As far as we can tell, the dead are Independents. You were there. Mister Bowfinger claims you killed them."

Theo snorted. "They thought they knew better than me how to proceed."

"Mister Bowfinger claims there was a woman with you. Who is she?"

"I thought you'd caught all my associate? Didn't he identify her?" He relaxed a little, it sounded like they were treating Marcus more as a witness than an accomplice.

She sighed. "Look, you claim you're trying to help us, well I am trying to help you. Do you have any idea what's going to happen to you? If you don't help yourself by talking to me, you're looking at a very short stay in a cell before you are executed. You give me the name of who you report to, and I can see to it that you get hard labor instead. It won't be great, but you'll be alive, and who knows, maybe you'll even live out the term and get to see a blue sky again."

"You can't accuse me of anything. Slaves can't lay accusations, only your masters can to that." Theo looked up. "Do you hear me? If you're so afraid of us, why don't you come here yourselves and accuse me? You come yourself if you want to know what else we have planned." He looked around, careful not to act like he'd let anything slip. His interrogator was smart enough to have caught it, and if she wasn't, then one of the multiple people listening in would be.

"Laying it on kind of thick, aren't you?" Cass commented.

He crossed his arms over his chest. "Like the coward they are, they aren't coming. You should think about whose side you are on when the war comes, because I can promise you that we won't show any mercy to any collaborators."

The dalmatian studied him, and a moment later the door opened. "Take him back to his cell. I'm done with him for the time being."

Theo stood and headed out to be surrounded by his guards.

"You know," Cass said, "considering that rant, you better hope they don't have an interrogation team here. Otherwise we are utterly screwed."

Theo agreed with Cass, but he'd had to go that route. He needed to raise the stakes so he'd be sent to the experts. He needed to get off Mars if he wanted even a sliver of a chance to escape.