Overclocked Read Free

re­fused to co­oper­ate. Tania gave up, throw­ing the brush into the corner of her bed­room. She picked up her bag, dumped her phone in it and ran out of her apart­ment, head­ing for the car-park. An un­end­ing string of muttered curses fol­lowed her along her route.
    The low-slung res­id­en­tial com­plex Tania cur­rently called home had been built, and was main­tained in its en­tirety, by Rim­shot In­dus­tries, her cur­rent em­ployer. A lot of sci­ent­ists, aca­dem­ics and high-tech con­sult­ants vis­ited Rim­shot’s main cam­pus and it was a lot more con­veni­ent, not to men­tion a sav­ing of time and awk­ward ques­tions, to have them bil­leted at the com­pany’s pur­pose-built ac­com­mod­a­tion quar­ters.
    The com­plex it­self was airy and beau­ti­fully land­scaped with its own gym, swim­ming pool and sev­eral en­ter­tain­ment and so­cial rooms. If it wasn’t for the as­so­ci­ated work, Tania would have thought she was be­ing paid to stay at a high-class re­sort. But this morn­ing, she saw none of the tiling, warm tim­ber sur­rounds or sway­ing bam­boo land­scape screens as she bolted for her car.
    At least the arse­hole hadn’t thought to take her keys away, al­though she wondered if that was that due more to for­get­ful­ness on his part.
    “Arse­hole.” She beeped the re­mote sav­agely then tossed her bag onto the pas­sen­ger seat of her sleek little hy­brid sedan be­fore get­ting in.
    “When I get my hands on that low-down, schem­ing, mor­ally vacu­ous….”
    Gun­ning the en­gine, and glad of the light mid-morn­ing traffic, Tania drove to Rim­shot in a mood of ab­so­lute fury, not in the least re­pent­ant that she was us­ing pet­rol in­stead of the more eco­nom­ical elec­tric sys­tem. If it meant that she was closer to wip­ing the smirk off Carl Orin’s too-gor­geous, typ­ical blond-and-blue-eyed face, it was a sac­ri­fice worth mak­ing.
    It took ten minutes to get to work. Ten pre­cious minutes which already com­poun­ded the ini­tial two hours of delay. Don Novak, the dir­ector of the pro­ject, was go­ing to have kit­tens when she fi­nally turned up. And, in her haste to pack, Tania sud­denly real­ised that she had for­got­ten to turn her mo­bile phone back on. She felt like pound­ing the steer­ing wheel but con­ten­ted her­self with grip­ping it tightly and ima­gin­ing it was Carl’s neck.
    She stopped the car briefly at the com­pany’s se­cur­ity and mustered a small smile for Phil, the week­day morn­ing se­cur­ity guard. It wasn’t his fault the last six months of her life had sud­denly turned to shit. He raised the boom gate, gave her a cas­ual wave and she star­ted the hunt for a place to park.
    The Rim­shot cam­pus sat on top of a hill, with two levels of avail­able car space ter­raced be­low it. Mut­ter­ing a curse, Tania noted that there were no va­cant spots at all on the up­per ter­race.
    “Why should there be?” she said to her­self, resign­ing her­self to a longer walk up to the main build­ing. “Every­body else got to work on time.”
    She turned into the first empty space she saw on the lower ter­race, grabbed her stuff and hopped out of the car.
    “But no....”
    She crossed the tar­mac.
    “On this, the most im­port­ant day of my ca­reer....”
    She sprin­ted up the stairs.
    “The day when I ab­so­lutely had to be on time....”
    She entered the build­ing and gave the desk guards an­other tight smile as she strode past them and through an­other door, head­ing for the goods el­ev­at­ors.
    “I get fucked over....”
    She jabbed vi­ciously at a but­ton, strid­ing into the empty car the mo­ment the doors opened, and rum­ma­ging through her bag. At least she still had her se­cur­ity card! Tania flashed it at the reader and, when the panel pinged and the light be­neath the reader turned green, she hit the but­ton for