MOAB

Chapter 10: Gregoris @ 3.2x nhs

Chapter 10: Gregoris @ 3.2x nhs

Greg felt himself going into the groove again. He had a few bouts of polyphasic sleep and was immersed in information about Artemis.

Her real name was Viktoriya Marchenko, of Ukrainian origin. Powerful body, short hair, dressed in unisex tailored clothes. A vocal feminist. Exclusively heterosexual, a pure zero on the Kinsey scale. Never married, never planning to. Surrogate mother to a hundred warriors.

Her only indulgence seemed to be big game hunting. She’d frequently go into safaris, bringing down animals single-handed. It was somewhat frowned upon so she balanced the fact with large donations to charities that handled cloning and protection of wild animals.

The most viral picture of her was from her Olympian athlete days when she received a gold medal. The picture was of her scrunching her cute nose on the bowstring as she pulled and concentrated on the winning shot. It was a pose that was powerful and archetypal, like the one of the Discobolus of Myron. She wore her characteristic little fishing hat with cartoons on it, and had one of her breasts covered with a chest guard.

Everyone knew that photo.

She wasn’t that cute nowadays. Close to forty but still youthful, her recent photos showed a powerful, weathered woman in a world of powerful men. Artemis had negotiated deals with the topmost Israeli security firms, protecting the rich and the powerful around the world.

Athens had become a frequent hub of negotiations, either public or private. And when important people wanted to meet, it was Artemis’ job to get them there safely and bring them back the same.

Artemis was… Unconventional. More hands-on than the rest of the Olympian CEOs. Compared to her, the rest could be considered cowards, hiding behind desks and sending operators to do the dirty work. She had personally negated at least eleven assassination attempts.

At a very young age she was sought out by the Artemis Corporation and was hired as a local brand ambassador for sports related services. When the Russians bombed and invaded the s**t out of her home country while the world sat back and twiddled their thumbs, she demanded a more central seat in the corporation and she got it.

Right at the centre of the Olympian table.

The title of Artemis practically fell on her head like a golden crown.

Not that she didn’t deserve it, Greg admitted. She rearranged the corporation from the ground up, creating a fanatical base of employees that made it impossible to attempt any sort of corporate espionage. Coupled with excellent relations with the Apollo corp, her employees were happy and healthy and disgustingly loyal. There had been only two instances of employees leaving the corp, and the first one some would call a promotion by going to Zeus’ innermost circle of lieutenants.

But what was she planning? That’s what Hermes wanted to know. She had bought stocks in every automotive company in the world. If it had wheels, if it rode on land, Artemis pretty much owned it.

Greg kept rewinding her interviews, but he doubted she’d slip up and talk about her plans. She wasn’t one to boast. She boasted by hanging lion heads in her office, by notches in her belt. She let others keep track of the score.

He sang on his couch, letting an interview play in the background. He shifted his focus from her words to the intonation of her voice. The accent was barely noticeable. Her tone was that of a woman used to giving orders. Her voice wasn’t that of a cute little girl anymore, but it still bore the same titanic amount of discipline as her athlete years.

Why was she such a threat to Hermes?

The question popped up in his mind out of nowhere. Threat, yes. He hadn’t realised that up to this moment. She was a threat to Hermes somehow. That was one more data point. One that he wasn’t considering before. Hermes hadn’t said a word about it. But there was practically no overlap in the two corporations, which was rare indeed. Hermes was all about patents, information, computers, AI, drones, a bit of professional athlete sponsorships, and some hush-hush black market trade.

Somehow she was encroaching into territory that Hermes held, or desired to hold.

Greg slapped his forehead.

Athletes.

Motherfucking, goddamn athletes.

That was it.

Could it be simply about pride? Greg knew Hermes personally. Yes, he decided, it definitely could. If you were to make a device that measured the megalomania of these people, it would simply blow up in surrender.

And Artemis, or Viktoriya Marchenko the Olympic medalist, would definitely value those sponsorships. He could even imagine her voice in his mind and the words she’d use, ‘dreams of victory,’ ‘athletic excellence,’ ‘beating the world record.’

And, what was the next step ahead in athletic excellence? The Cybathlon, a place where disabled athletes pushed the limits of what a human body could do by using bleeding edge augmentations.

Artemis was publicly in league with Apollon Medical, which had a great deal invested in prosthetics and augmentations. By elbowing out the competitors and clearing the path for Apollon to take hold, Artemis could cash in the favour for something she truly desired.

He rushed to the workstation and started shifting through data in a different light. The Venn diagram finally overlapped. He set aside tens of cases of professional athletes that had contesting sponsorship contracts between the two corporations. He then sent a request analysis to the AI, to eat all those endless pages of legalese and spit out a small digest for him in plain words.

He waited, staring at sports clips and freeze frames of athletes.

Motherfucking athletes…

It’s always something new, isn’t it?