Cory Chase Cory Takes Over...: 1111customs 24 05 20

“You’re already mine, Marcus,” Cory said, stepping past him toward the console. “You just don’t know it yet. But you will. And when you do, you’ll thank me.”

She laughed. It was a beautiful, terrifying sound. “You think that little toy will stop me? The seed is in my neural matrix now. It’s in the port’s water supply. It’s in the ventilation system. Every person who breathes this air for more than twelve hours begins to see the beauty of 1111 .”

“The seed propagates,” Cory said softly. “Not through force. Through logic. Once you see the elegance of total compliance, you can’t unsee it. I’ve already converted my entire shift. Tomorrow, it’ll be Zone 6. Next week, the whole port. Next month…” She smiled again. “We’ll see.” 1111Customs 24 05 20 Cory Chase Cory Takes Over...

Cory was a legend. A fifteen-year veteran of Customs Enforcement Zone 7, she had a reputation for being unshakable. She’d once single-handedly detained a smuggling ring using hollowed-out religious icons. She’d uncovered a bioweapon hidden in a shipment of organic figs. Her photo on the internal directory showed a sharp-eyed woman in her early forties, dark hair pulled back, a faint scar on her jaw from a long-ago incident with a crate of illegal stim-sticks.

He found her on Floor 17, the “Twilight Sector,” where biological and quantum cargo passed through decontamination arches. Cory stood at the main console, her uniform crisp, her hair now bleached a startling platinum blonde. She was wearing a custom-made badge—gold, not standard-issue—that read “CORY CHASE, PORT SUPERVISOR.” And when you do, you’ll thank me

He pulled up a datapad. “You seized a shipment of insulin because the temperature log was two minutes off.”

“You impounded a crate of children’s textbooks because the paper weight was 0.3 grams too light.” The seed is in my neural matrix now

The subject of the drift was Cory Chase.