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PREVIOUS
This story takes place on the 26th of January, 2016. Day of upload.
CTI & Meer © Me
Colmaton Universe © TRAIN
Swift Tech & Jonathan © MrDuhast
Artwork © Catrin
Colours © Sketchpadman

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Meer frowned, looking down into the empty plastic cup with a look of disgust before tossing it into a garbage can. The cheap food worked to power her core, processed easily, but nothing could replicate the genuine taste of the food she had experienced at the slurp n’ Gulp before and she had made a habit of avoiding restaurants. If CTI was really on the lookout for her, she was going to avoid putting her face on all the cameras around Colmaton.

For now though, the android lynx was focusing on building up a small stockpile for herself. The bullets in her personal ammunition stores could run out, and even though her railcannons could resort to energy blasts if they ran out of physical ammunition, it was always good to keep extra stock, even if makeshift. Slowly she turned into the alleyway, a different direction from her usual, and wandered for awhile, twists and turns. She figured that there was nothing wrong with a healthy dosage of paranoia, and soon enough she found herself stopped in front of the maintenance door that marked the entrance to her hidden home.

Inside it had changed in the weeks since Christmas, a few extra blankets for a softer bed, not that she needed it but it was better than feeling the concrete on the other side of the fabric. In the corner was an old wooden table, brought in from some alleyway after the owner junked it, atop that a microwave plugged into the wall next to a toaster oven. Something for her to use to cook the various microwaveable meals that she had purchased, or even anything that could be used in there. She didn’t need it, not really, meats and various other things could be eaten and processed raw. However she found herself missing the taste, every time her artificial tongue got a chance to taste the food, she found herself remembering her past life from before and to her, it had felt like decades since she had tried so many of these delicious things.

These were the things that she had longed for, but they were gone, all of them. Nothing was real for her anymore.

The lynx slid back, turning sideways to cast a glance at a few boxes that had been piled up her all of the canned and boxed food. Disposable phones, piled up neatly next to a few cardboard boxes that contained ammunition and a couple firearms. Another thing besides taste that she clung to, communication, but not with random strangers, rather one of the staff back at CTI. A fennec named Jonathan that she had been communicating with, having memorized a private cell phone number she kept it contact with the vulpine. One of the few people, if the only one who was actually kind to her while her behaviour had been inhibited, he actually cared and despite the lapse in her memory, she believed that he was the one who helped her escape.

But despite the fact, that, from the perspective of others, he had allowed a potentially murderous android to escape she could not get himself to do anything that might be compromising. No one had discovered him, at least as far as she knew, and they both intended to keep it that way. Each SMS conversation was very simple, she would contact him at specific times, basic conversations about how they were doing and while his answers were much more elaborate her own were short and cold. She didn’t know how to respond much of the time, as Meer had never owned a cellphone, and had to self-teach herself how to use one, luckily onboard computers were helpful with the manuals.

However, the fennec reminded her of another thing that she longed for, warmth. Not the warmth of her internal systems, or the sun, even the food, but the warmth of another furson, holding her, even if just her hand. As much as she wanted to rise up against both Swift Tech and CTI, take the companies down from the top and prevent them from further harming other fursons like they had herself, she was properly alone in this fight. Any support that the lynx had at this point was purely moral support and nothing more.

Soon though, the first step would come soon. Even on foot she wasn’t very far from the Swift Tech offices, and with her body she was like a tank compared to the security they had. All she needed to do, was get the right timing and go in there, one bullet right between the eyes of Aaron Lawson and the technological empire that Swift Tech had built would crack and destabilize. With no one at the time the company would surely scramble to find someone else to take his position, stock would fall and CTI would likely move in to gain more control over their sister company. Corporate warfare would ensue, and she could continue to move against them, eliminating key members of each company until they were engulfed in so much hell that they collapsed completely.

Of course, that’s how she believed it would go. The lynx had not been educated on how the corporate world worked, but she knew that taking out enough key members of both CTI and Swift Tech would still cause significant damage to them, and perhaps, perhaps once it all ended, and she as free. If she had to pick one thing to do at the end of it all, she could go find that fennec, Jonathan, after the giants fell and he could give her the warmth she sought...