Chapter Text

Part One: Ray Guns and Roustabouts

“People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it." — Ray Birdbury

“When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." — Shearlock Holmes

01: This Crummy Old Future of Ours ( June 21st, 2186 A.D.)

1.

It was just past 0330 hours, and the city was as alive as it ever was. Candy-colored specks of pedestrians scrambled across the dewy, shimmering pavement, and a swarm of buzzing drones swam through the air-car traffic, carrying flickering visions of elegantly adorned animals and flashy fashion accessories to and fro through the city's tangled web of skyscrapers and shifting hovertrain rails.

One such advert depicted the fully three-dimensional image of a lithe lioness, smoothly swaying beneath the frame of unmistakable FringeTech logo that hovered above her. The lioness' fur was resplendent with rainbow hues that streaked from her head all the way down to the bit of leg that flashed from the seam of her dark dress; the colors shifted and swam with every tiny movement she made. Her irises, too, were smeared with gold flecks and a swathe of saffron hue, and they had the unmistakable mechanical sheen that denoted the so-called "stimplant" modifications that had taken Zootopia by storm over the past few years.

As the drone that carried her made its rounds through the Zootopian skyway, the lioness repeatedly bent her impossibly huge figure down towards the citizens below and said:"I'm Dahani, and thanks to the latest in FringeTech neuro-mods and stimplants, I was finally able to become my most perfect self, and now, you can too! Sync your Smart Cards to this advert and get signed up for a free consultation for you, or someone you love. FringeTech: Experience evolution!"

If one of the animals walking down on the street below were to gaze upward toward Ursa-Corp Tower and look especially close at that ad, they would possibly see how the lioness' eyes pulsed and swirled with an eerie rhythm. If they took a moment or two longer to really take in what they were seeing, they might even notice that the colors themselves seemed alive, thrumming in step with some private, silent song that only the lioness could hear.

What that passerby wouldn’t see when they cast their eyes upward, however, was the lone figure who stood at the very top of the tower. In the visual cacophony of artificial light that blanketed the Zootopian skyline from dawn to dusk (as it had for as long as most anyone could remember), it was nearly impossible to make the out the figure of the fox as she teetered on the edge of the Tower's rooftop—even if the most keen eyed of predators climbed all the way up the tower to get a closer look, they would have only been able to catch the briefest glimpse of the fox's disembodied eyes: Two shining, emeralds orbs that floated above a nebulous form that wavered in and out of its shape like a desert mirage. After just a moment or two, even the eyes of this intangible ghost disappeared into the cloudy indigo swatches that made up what remained of Zootopia's night sky.

In fact, the technology that hid the fox from view shimmered and shifted in a manner not too unlike the rainbow fur of the Fringe-Tech lioness, only tonight this fox's purpose was antithetical to that of all those roving billboards.

Above all else, she was not to be seen.

The faint outline of a fox's tail flickered into view for split second, a shock of rust-tinged white against the polished chrome and glass of the building that almost immediately faded back into invisibility.

"You must be excited, Nora." The voice came not from outside, but from the neural up-link connected to the inside of the fox's helmet. The moment it spoke up, a little drone fluttered up next to her, seemingly from out of nowhere. It looked like a over-sized mechanical ladybug, complete with a mass of wires and softly-illuminated lenses that functioned as the eyes and ears, which tilted and posed to match up the voice that had just chimed in the fox's ear.

"I mean, I dunno much about long tails, myself," the voice continued, "but reliable sources have informed me that when they twitch like that, it means you're excited. Or nervous. Or does it just mean that you really have to take a leak?"

Nora flashed a glare at the bugbot hovering just a few feet from her face. "You know, Dallis," she said, "It could be that I'm just getting hungry thinking about how nice a plate of honey-glazed ham sounds right about now. Tell me, can that drone of yours tell if I'm drooling right now? Because that would be just too embarrassing." Nora did her best to spit out these words with an appropriately predatory growl, but the voice in her ear responded with the same snorting laugh that had become all too familiar with over the years.

"Yeah, yeah, killer. Save it for a pig that doesn't share an apartment with a wolf whose fangs are twice as big as yours. No offense." Nora was trying to think of a witty comeback to the pig's remark when another voiced popped into the conversation; it was much less surly, but just familiar.

"Dallis has been going on and on about my teeth lately, and I honestly have no idea why. My new flossing routine must really be doing the trick, eh?" The drone-bug jerked and flitted in the air as this second voice spoke, and Nora vividly imagined the sight of the pig sitting at his messy console, vainly wrestling for the controls to his invention.

"Brody? You're here too?" Nora sighed. "I thought this was supposed to be a covert op? Emphasis on ‘covert’. Is the rest of the ZPD going to pop out from that stairwell over there to throw me a surprise party, too?" She could hear the wolf growling as he fought Dallis for the bugbot's controls, and watched in bemusement as the poor machine swirled back and forth in manic arcs.

"Oh...it's just...us...I...promise," Brody grunted, just as the drone finally settled into a calm concentric hover just a few feet from where Nora stood. "The Chief just wanted to make sure you had more than just one pair of eyes on the ground, even if it was just me helping Dallis on tech support. You know how she can get, considering how much our client has invested in this little stakeout of ours."

Nora was indeed familiar with how Chief Dasher felt about the way the Zootopia Police Department handled privately financed operations. It wasn't unusual for wealthy individuals and larger corporate entities to bankroll small ZPD task to tackle particularly thorny cases of espionage involving expensive intellectual-property. In the old days folks might have scoffed at the notion of cops having to go to such extreme measures to tackle "white collar crime", but the companies of a hundred-and-fifty years ago hadn't quite taken to recruiting stimplanted blackhat hackers and ex-ZPD guns-for-hire to do their dirty work. Ursa-Corp was one of the biggest movers and shakers when it came to shaping the law and public opinion of the land, even when they weren't writing obscene paychecks to fund specific missions like tonight's.

It had only been a couple of years since the city passed the Corporate Citizenry Act that, among many other things, allowed these private ops to be fully legalized and made known to the public, and already they'd already woven themselves into the fabric of the city's politics. If the team screwed things up, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine Mayor Canter deciding that the ZPD was in need of new, more effective leadership. For all of the things that Nora and Chief didn't see eye-to-eye on, the fox couldn't exactly begrudge her boss for wanting to keep her job.

Nora tapped a pressure point on the nape of the helmet she was wearing, forcing the visor of her helmet down and cloaking her eyes in the same active camouflage that cloaked the rest of her body. Immediately, her vision of the world was coated buzzing bluish tint as her HUD powered on and populated itself with a vitals readouts and digital charts measuring all of the data her suit could gather from her nearby environment, including all of the cameras and sensors hooked up throughout each and every one of the Tower's hundred-and-fifty stories. It was an overload of data that Nora could barely make sense of, but that's what her dynamic duo was there to help with.

"Alright then, boys," she said. "Tell me what I'm looking at. Any sign of those unwelcome house-guests the company has been getting all worked up about?" Dallis replied first, and when he spoke a handful of the data-streams in the visor's UI rearranged themselves to make room for a small square labeled VIDLINK - TOFC.DALLIS CLOVER. In it, Nora could see the speckled face of her porcine friend, coming in clear as crystal thanks to the boosted wireless signal coming from their drone friend. Dallis was surrounded by a mass of wires, spare parts and takeout containers; at the edges of the frame, Nora could just make out the fuzzy tail and broad shoulders of Brody Paddock, sitting at his own equally messy desk only a few feet away.

"From the looks of things," Dallis said, "activity both in and outside of the building has been consistent since the day workers clocked out earlier this evening. Outside of the handful of employees hanging around on the first few floors, everything's been quiet."

"Might you say it's...too quiet?" Nora let her joke hang in the air for a moment, prompting a dramatic eye-roll from Dallis - Nora even thought she saw the bugbot heave a tiny sigh of its own before it zipped away from her and across to the far side the Tower.

"No, Nora, I wouldn't say that," Dallis said. "It's regular quiet. The same kind of quiet our preliminary scans of the Tower's records have been picking up for the past two days now. Animals clock in, animals clock out. Nary a crumb goes missing in the meantime." The pig threw up his arms and spun lazily in his chair. "I'm beginning to think this whole mission is big fat waste of time."

"Now, now, Dallis" Brody chimed, leaning into frame to pat his partner's hoof, "Chief Dasher promised UC an on-site stakeout tonight, and Nora's wearing our finest counter-espionage couture for the occasion. Let's keep our eyes-peeled for just a bit longer." Brody offered Nora a wink as he returned to his station, and Dallis nodded begrudgingly.

"Fine. You man the drone then, Brody, and I'll keep and eye on Nora's data feed. If we get lucky, we might catch one of the night-workers sneaking someone else's leftovers from the staff lounge fringe. I'm sure the bigwigs at Ursa-Corp will be glad they paid us the big bucks when Jill from HR finally gets caught with her hoof in the cookie jar! In fact, we may have to start enforcing even stricter snacktime monitoring protocol in order to -"

"Hold on a sec." Nora cut Dallis off. "We just pinged something on floor 128. What is that?" The pig perked up in his chair, his hoofs working the keyboard with more dexterity than one might have thought possible for an animal that's been given such unwieldy digits to work with.

"A temperature spike, it looks like, though it's not coming from inside the building. It's registering from...the outside windows? Brody, get the drone over there."

"Roger", said Brody, and instantly Nora's entire HUD was filled in by the first person feed of the drone as it zipped down over twenty stories of the exterior of the Tower. It came to a sudden halt above two figures suspended from wires, hanging against the Tower's wall. Circles popped up on Nora's HUD and zoomed in on the infiltrators - One of them looked to be a wolf, based on his silhouette, while the other had the clear lineaments of a feline. Every part of them, from their ears to their tails, was clad in military grade tactical gear, though they obviously lacked the optical enhancements that Dallis and Brody had outfitted Nora's own suit with. The cat was busy affixing a small, blinking cylinder to the window she was perched on, but the wolf glanced up and caught the gaze of the drone, the artificial glow of his helmet's eyes shining in the camera's night-vision. The wolf reached for his side arm and fired three times at the robot, though Brody's sharp reflexes meant that the drone was able to dodge each of them.

The cat had taken notice by then, though, and she too had drawn a weapon and taken aim at the drone, though even through the fuzzy filter of her HUD, Nora could tell that there was something...off about this gadget. The cat fired, but the muzzle didn't so much flash as radiate light, as if someone had torn a hole of iridescent light right in the middle of the sky, and immediately the drone was plummeting through the air, Nora's vision obscured by an incomprehensible whirlwind of blurs, smears, and static. Brody grumbled curses under his breath, but in just a moment he was able to orient the machine a little as plunged down towards the street, and though the two figures were little more than specks by then, the camera was still able to catch the horizontal plume of smoke and flame that shattered the window of the tower's 128th floor.

"Nora!" Dallis exclaimed, "The elevators have been locked down and building security is locked out from the fiftieth story down. You need to get to floor 128, now!" Nora didn't need Dallis' panicking to know she only had seconds to make a plan. The stairs were a no go; even at a dead sprint, the intruders would be long gone by the time she worked her way down. Nora looked down at her paws and flexed her fingers - with the visor on, she could see past the camouflage, and she was reminded of the hard steel bristles that ran up and down the gloves she wore.

"Brody," Nora said, "How many field tests did you say you were able to run on the adhesive grips in these gloves?"

"Um, I didn't. I said we were going to run field tests now that your suit was ready for live operations, but it's never actually been used outside of our lab work."

"Yeah," Dallis added, although Nora could tell by the look in his eye that he already knew what she was planning to do. "Nora, we told you yesterday that you'd have to use the manual climbing gear if you wanted to-"

"Sorry guys, there's no time!" Nora retracted her visor before either the pig or the wolf could register any further complaints, letting herself enjoy the cool night breeze as it hit her eyes for exactly one second. "Dallis...if I die...I want you to know it's all your fault. And also, give Brody all of my stuff."

Then, before she could give herself any more time to think, Nora dropped from the edge of the tower, both of her paws scraping against the tower's glass and metal facade. She immediately felt the sickening tug of gravity in her gut, and for a split-second Nora really did feel like might just keep falling, down and down until she made a messy handshake with the concrete below. This was an almost comical thought, given the exceptionally loud squeaking noise her paws made as she descended.

So much for stealth, Nora thought.

Then she felt and heard the soft hum of the magnets and electrically charged friction spikes in her gloves kick in, and she thankfully came to a halt some two stories below the roof. Nora tried to stifle the sigh of relief bubbling up in her throat, but Brody and Dallis made up for it with their half-terrified, half-jubilant cries of "Oh thank goodness" and "Dammit Fox, don't scare me like that!"

Nora was sure that in spite of their dramatics, the two had plenty of data they wanted to collect, but they thankfully kept their scientific curiosity in check. There was a job to do, after all, and it had already been a full twenty seconds or so since the mystery figures had blown a hole in the other side of the building. They could afford to waste no more time.

"Alright," Dallis said, "You're just above floor 147 right now. You just need to slide down to 128 and make your way inside."

"Right," Nora replied. She flexed her paws to loosen the grip of the gloves and slid silently down the remaining nineteen stories, perching just outside of the 128th story. From inside, Nora could make out the shadowy outlines of the two perpetrators on the other side of the glass. Unfortunately Nora's optical camouflage shorted out when the magnets in the gloves kicked in ( a design flaw that she was sure her friends would be kicking themselves over for days), which meant that anyone who cared to look could see Nora too. If the drone was still buzzing around, Dallis and Brody would have been able to see their friend's tail swishing wildly in excitement. "Thank goodness for small favors," Nora muttered, drawing one of her pistol and aiming it at a nearby glass panel.

"Nora, what was that?" Dallis' tone was one of resigned exasperation, but Nora was already pulling the trigger. The pistol had a built in silencer, but the crash of bullet to glass was still quite loud, and Nora had to shield her face from the resulting spray of glass shards that flew every which way. High-tech suit or no, her entrance was bound to be noticed.

Thankfully, Nora was perfectly fine with that.