The Grone Protocol: Remembrance’s Deceptitude, Chapter 006

Like most of you, I am a popular writer of highbrow thrillers and suspense novels in my spare time. For your entertainment and erudition (both of which I care about so much it hurts), I will be serializing my latest work, THE GRONE PROTOCOL, here in my “blog” (short for “web blog”) every week (unless I forget or something like last week). Here’s the sixth chapter, which should more than fill your daily quota of gripping intrigue. If not, go down to the library and start yelling “MYSTERY BOOK MYSTERY BOOK I WANT A MYSTERY BOOK!!!” until somebody helps you.

006

Sassafras Jones had been through plenty of troubles in her time, but she had also had her fair share of worries.

She fancied herself happy in her position at the Grone Corporation, doing office type things in an office amongst office people, but she found her thoughts often returning to her childhood. The youngest of three children in her family, she was also the eldest of six others, ranking third out of eight total. She loved each and every one of her brothers and sisters more than anything in the world, though she often entertained the notion that they were all robots, part of some sort of grand psychological experiment devised by her parents, the government, or worse. Lately she had been able to convince herself that this was, all things considered, fairly unlikely.

Sassafras opened the door to the seventy-second floor's supply room gingerly, touching the doorknob the way you'd touch your grandfather while bathing him. She opened the door as quietly as she could, hoping that whoever might be inside wouldn't hear. Three weeks ago, she had accidentally walked in on one of the secretaries going down on the mail boy, and she was hoping to witness something similar. Alas, as she peeked around the door her eyes fell upon an empty room. Putting her camera away, Sassafras cursed to herself under her breath. "If I want to run a famous porn website," she thought, "I'm going to have to actually pay people to have sex and let me photograph them."

As she filled a plastic bag with chicken feed, she felt a strange longing in her heart. Before she began working for Grone, she had been a champion jockey, but it had been years since she had so much as stepped in horse poopoo. She missed the thrill of the race, the roar of the crowd, the friction between the saddle and her ladyparts, but she knew that it was a world she could never return to. However, she would always, in her heart, be a good horse riding person.

Still, no matter how well she could sit on a horse that was running, in the end it would not be able to save her from what was about to happen.