Dead Man's Resolution

by Thomas K. Carpenter

 

  He’d bought himself more time, but he still didn’t know what to do about William’s stylish guard.

  Rotating through the blooms, he found another spell fitting his needs. After formulating his plan, he circled around to a nearby corner. Along the way he grabbed an old left turn sign with most of the yellow paint missing.

  Waiting a few feet around the corner from the courtyard, Tibor activated the spell. He couldn’t find any panthers, but he was able to scale up a black cat until it stood at hip height. He let the panther wait on the far wall until the Japanese man glimpsed it.

  When he did, the Japanese man switched off his samurai skin and grabbed his numb-gun. Tibor traced a path for the panther to follow that led to his hiding spot. It leapt and sprinted across the courtyard in long graceful bounds. As the dot on Tibor’s mini-map moved to the corner, he realized his plan hinged on the man’s weapon being a numb-gun and not a real one.

  With no time to adjust, Tibor readied his illusion. As the Japanese man rounded the corner, Tibor sent the enlarged black kitty onto him. Recoiling in surprise, he unloaded his gun at the creature.

  Tibor, who had constructed a virtual diorama of the street to hide behind, waited with his piece of sheet metal. As the man fired his gun, Tibor pushed the sheet forward. A half-dozen projectiles exploded on its surface splattering the man with hundreds of numbing droplets. He fell to the ground in slow motion.

  Tibor dropped the sheet as his fingertips numbed under the splatter. The man lay on the ground lurching mechanically as random sections of his body succumbed to the liquid. The gun lay in the dirt covered by an oily goo.

  He found William in the car, bound and tied. His friend embraced him as soon as his arms were free.

  “Thanks for coming to get me.”

  Tibor noticed the bald man’s dot had disappeared from his mini-map.

  “We’re not free yet. Let’s get moving.”

  Upon exiting the back of the car, William cried out and crumpled to his knees. Tibor feared the worst, until he saw the Japanese man on his back with the numb-gun pointed at them. The shot had hit the car and the spray had covered William’s leg. Helping him to his feet, they moved away before the man, twitching on the ground, fired again.

  “Shit,” William said after a few blocks.

  “What?”

  William stopped, and they nearly toppled over. “We should have taken the car.”

  “No. We don’t want to give them more reasons to come after us. It’s bad enough we have the computer.”

  “You vag! You didn’t throw it in a lake?”

  Tibor’s stomach tensed into a horrible knot.

  “I’m sorry. I should have, but can we worry about this later? I almost died earlier.”

  William’s face shifted from anger to concern as they resumed their three-legged hobble.

  “This looks familiar. Let’s head through here." Tibor recognized it as the blacksmith’s shop without the digital renderings once they were inside. They didn’t have long to rest when Tibor heard a shout from behind them.

  “Stop right there!” The bald man ran through the street toward their hiding spot.

  Tibor dragged his friend to the stairs.

  “He’s behind us. We need to lose him in the building.”

  The bald man wasn’t coming quietly as he cursed all the way up the stairs. They headed straight for the roof.

  Once there, Tibor verified the world matched his expectations. He didn’t want to get fooled again. They hobbled to the far side as Tibor checked for any escapes that he might have missed last time. Cutter hadn’t reached them yet.

  “Think you can jump, William?”

  “Jump? Are you crazy?”

  Tibor pointed to the warehouse roof across the gap. “I jumped to that roof last time.”

  William leaned against a vent housing and then slid to a sitting position. “I can barely run Ti, let alone jump. You go. Maybe you can rescue me again.”

  Tibor kicked a small vent pipe producing a puff of dust from its hole. “Shit. How did I get trapped again?” He scrolled through his options looking for another way when he saw the man appear in the rooftop doorway.

  “He’s on the roof.”

  “You go, man. Maybe you can lead him away.” The defeat in William’s voice lay heavy in his words.

  Tibor checked the gap again. If he jumped now the man might turn around before he found William behind the vent housing.

  The bald man took his time.

  Tibor gave himself room to run. The man’s lack of urgency in chasing them down bothered him. With his back to the man, he flipped his goggles up again to make he hadn’t been geohacked.

  “Sure as pajamas, I wouldn’t do that, boy,” the voice commanded.

  Tibor steeled his resolve and began his sprint. The vent pipes and housings passed him at a rapid pace. The gap loomed as he concentrated on his footsteps.

  Then he realized that William hadn't heard the man speak, because his friend didn't have his ARNet anymore. The man on the roof was a simulacrum.

  Tibor hit the brakes, but he didn’t have much room to slow down. He lost his footing and rolled toward the edge of the building. Before he slipped over, he caught hold of the pipe he’d kicked before. The rusted pipe snapped at the base and Tibor felt momentum suck him over the edge. As he grasped for purchase, a hand grabbed his arm.

  Hanging over the edge, William grunted and yanked Tibor back onto the roof. They both heard gravelly laughter from the far side of the gap.

  “That’s tip-top thinking, boy.” Cutter appeared from behind a wall on the other warehouse roof.

  Tibor stood and pulled William up. He didn’t want to be in range of Cutter’s gun.

  “You’ve been a few stones quicker than the bloody arse who had that box before, eh?” The man laughed again while a ray of sunlight danced a glare across his shiny head.

  William tried to pull Tibor toward the exit, but he held firm. He pulled the dead man’s ARNet from his pocket and held it up.

  “If I throw this across are we square?”

  The man rubbed his head thoughtfully. “Unless you’d like to jump a few more buildings?” Cutter showed them a mouth full of teeth.

  Tibor hoped it was a grin.

  “You won’t be a vag and come after us?” Tibor yelled across the gap.

  “You took what wasn’t yours. I think you’d better decide what’s right and what’s true.”

  Tibor considered his words, then unhooked the computer from the auxiliary cable. His HUI resumed its previous, lesser status.

  Then he hefted the little black box in his hand and gave it a firm toss that took it well across the gap. The bald man sidestepped and snatched it out of the air, tucking it into a pocket in one smooth motion. He nodded to Tibor then turned to leave.

  “Wait!” Tibor called out, halting Cutter in a half-step.

  William pulled on his arm, but he wouldn’t budge. The bald man checked over his shoulder.

  “Where’d you guys get those mods?”

  “Are you crazy?” William whispered as he pulled harder.

  Cutter paused and then left without answering.

  The two waited in silence until the feeling came back to William’s leg.

  While they walked back to Tibor’s electrobike, he explained what had happened while William was in the car. During the story, his friend studied him as if he’d never seen him before. Especially as he explained how he’d jumped the gap and had disabled the samurai using the illusionary black cat and an old sign.

  The two of them barely fit on the bike and they were both glad that no one from school could see them. Tibor dropped William off at his house amid a heavy silence. After William got off the bike, he stared intently at his friend.

  “You’re not going to be a vet are you?”

  Tibor could hear the hurt in his friend’s voice.

  “What do you mean?”

  Wil
liam shook his head as he walked to his house.

  Tibor called out, “Nerds rule the world…”

  William paused in the open door.

  “But not until after high school,” William said as he closed it. His smile was mix of sad and sweet.

  Tibor arrived to an empty home as his father was away on a business trip. Sitting on a kitchen stool, his friend’s words cycled through his head when he noticed that a small blinking red message had arrived. William would have mind-texted him, and his father would have sent a video link, so Tibor immediately knew where the message had come from.

  With a thought, he opened it to find the mod BlackTome ready for download.

  Tibor pushed away from the counter. His brief encounter with Cutter had taught him a valuable truth. Those that controlled these new realities, also owned the real world beneath. A strange expanse opened in his mind, offering infinite possibilities and limitless worlds.

  Tibor set his system for download.

  ###

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  EXCERPT from Book One of the DIGITAL SEA Trilogy,

  by Thomas K. Carpenter

  Chapter One - The Ghost Assassin

  He licked the nanoblade in a deliberate motion. It was the only way to get it clean. His muscles twitched, and with a light snap, the blade was sheathed and tucked into a vest pocket. He felt—quick as a nanoblade. Yes, that was it. He could feel it in his sinewy muscles.

  He chose a tight fitting black outfit, admiring the way it clung, and brought out his muscular tone. Even though no one would see it, he smoothed the wrinkles. Instead, they would see an overly tanned businessman with graying hair too busy trading in his personal stock space to be bothered. The kind annoying enough no one wanted to stare at too long.

  “Mal’ak ha-mashhit,” he whispered in Hebrew, though he was not one of them.

  The hotel room was a tomb of luxurious marble covered in ancient tapestries. He could run the length of the room, do a double back handspring and have room to spare. Sharp light pierced through the clear panes of the stained glass illuminating the massive bed, which still sagged in the middle. Everything was real, except him.

  Without a sign, he dropped to his knees and flipped off his connection to the Sea, scanning the room. If a rival could slip a counter-program into his system, then they could hide beneath the digital rendering, and he’d be forced to believe the illusion. Most likely to his demise.

  The mesh of the net that draped over the world disappeared. The lack of change in his room was startling. Normally, such reality checks exposed a dirty, decaying world. On the streets, he liked to walk without the outer layer on, seeing the filth beneath—women missing most of their teeth, women that were really men, emaciated men hiding behind a fantasy life too scared to see the truth.

  He finished his survey of the room, confident nothing lurked. The nature of his business forced him to be ever-vigilant. The outer layer rose back up surrounding him as efficiently as it had disappeared.

  He stepped over the black high-heel Darycki shoe lying next to the bed, fingering the bulge in his vest. He sighed deeply. The job would be disappointing, unsatisfying in its simplicity. He felt like a sledgehammer, when a whisper would do the same job. The assassin cleaned the room, removing all traces of the night’s entertainment.

  Footfalls echoed as he stalked down the hallway. He sent a note to the desk requiring his personal items, including the large chest, to be sent a hotel in Mumbai.

  A few hundred meters from the hotel, as he walked down the steps to the Meijo line, he modified his personal information, the outmod, so that he would be seen as a middle-aged Japanese salaryman shuffling down the street with his head bowed down. The salaryman was just a cog. Not to be noticed. Instead of a confident gait, he broke his step into a shuffle where as before his face had exuded an annoyed ambivalence, now it was the blank stare of homogeneity.

  He smiled under his digital mask, thinking of assassins of century’s past, smearing ash and ointments on their faces to disguise themselves. Now a thought changed appearances, and to see behind the mask, they had only to turn off the Digital Sea, but humanity was much too immersed to give up the illusion.

  His trickery involved more than a change of appearances. Simple detective work could see a person changing from one to the next, but a digital version of the salaryman had been walking around the streets and living his life in Nagoya for a few weeks, virtually, until he walked down the steps and the assassin stepped into his persona as if he was inhabiting a ghost.

  He fell into the wave of people flowing toward the open doors, and was swept inside, huddling against the side to avoid the press of people in the center. The busy train surprised him, since Nagoya, like most major cities, was on the decline. Fingertips explored chipped paint on the wall while the digital wall looked pristine.

  An advertisement sprang to life in the form of an attractive Japanese woman above the press of people as the subway train rattled back and forth. In his stock broker guise, he could have easily blocked out the ad, but a salaryman didn’t have the kind of disposable income needed to suppress the ad since the subway was sponsored by Ecoverse. So he endured it.

  “Sumimasen,” a polite Japanese woman said as she bowed deeply.

  Immediately his ARNet translated the words.

  “My most humble apologies, Wantanabe-san, for disturbing you on your wonderful trip. Our sponsors, Ecoverse, would like to take a brief moment out of your ride to explain the glories of our products. Our humble programmers have created a host of mods to enhance your life. We notice you have an older version of YenManager and KatoKatcher. If you wish to upgrade, please acknowledge the marker placed in your nimbus layer. Remember the Ecoverse motto, Conservation through digitization.”

  He scanned the riders: old, young, students, mothers. Mostly dark hair, except for a few wide-eyed foreigners along the far bench unknowingly taking up too much space. He did not pity them. They were sheep waiting in their digital cages, too numb to care, waiting for the slaughter. He was the Angel of Death among them.

  The train lurched to a stop. He slipped out of the doors ahead of the masses. The arrows pointed down the concrete hallways to the Higashiyama line, but he went the other way. As he crested the stairs, the sunlight broke through the clouds briefly illuminating the city around him. He stood at Sakaemachi Station. Reaching to the sky before him, the Nagoya Tower straddled the Hisaya Ondari Park.

  A strange hillbilly music drifted upon him. To his left stood a large blue fountain full of geysers that sprung from stone dolphins. Arrayed on the street side of the fountain, a dozen youths gyrated around on the bricks. He was familiar with such places. Youth congregated to showcase their allegiance—cosplay, yoshinko, debutante, Goth, furry; including styles he’d never heard of, and probably only existed for a few days. The young men strutted around with huge bulbous coifed hair. His ARNet whispered they were a form of Elvis impersonators of his early years. The assassin hadn’t heard of him.

  Across the street more performers strutted, cloaking themselves in outrageous styles only possible in the Sea. The performer before him defied classification, proving the point that physics didn’t matter in a digital world. He had transformed himself into a living squeeze box. His arms and legs were accordions and his hands drum tips. As he danced, music issued forth with fat notes floating upwards like soap bubbles. Around him, constructed of the digital mesh, drums hung in the air and were also set into the street. Drum tip hands pounded out the beat on the imaginary drums, as his arms and legs gyrated. The dancer’s mod projected the music out to all those nearby. He listened for a dozen heartbeats, then blocked the signal.

  Only fools dance in the street.

  He drew the veil back to watch him gyrating around with arms splayed out like a child’s doll hung from a dog’s mouth. The cracked concrete beneath his feet made him grin. Even the Nagoya tower had an orange mixture of rust and mold snaking up t
he supports. Everywhere it rotted. Beneath his mask, he sneered, licking his lips. The putrefaction of the world could not be avoided.

  Seven billion people couldn’t be pruned in a century without good roots being chopped. Those noble politicians had saved the world by enacting Sagan’s Law, and reversed the millennium’s old climb of the common people with a dash of ink.

  Even their efficient markets that had helped the common folk rise from the gutters had been turned against them, once the world started trading population bonds. Countries could earn a profit by conveniently losing a few hundred thousand people.

  I am God’s scythe, set among the field to cut the chaff from the wheat.

  The assassin realized he was not walking with the hesitant gait of the salaryman, but instead he stalked up the street. He didn’t care. It wasn’t a subtle job.

  The sounds of the rally wafted over the youth loitering in the spaces between the streets. He was blocks away from the Nagoya Tower. A gaggle of young Japanese girls dressed in the styles of their favorite anime characters huddled around a small bench. An impulse consumed him like a flame as he discretely removed the nanoblade from his vest pocket.

  An agitation had been building in him. There should be foreplay in death, not precision. His benefactors had made it clear the manner of the job. It still made him sick. He was an artist, not a machine.

  He slowed his gait. A girl on the edge of the group dug into a clutch purse. She wore an angular, militaristic uniform with a short skirt, all in purple. His ARNet whispered she was dressed as Murasaki Kisaki—The Purple Queen. He could feel himself go stiff. O’ Gabriel how you flaunt your duties.

  As he neared, he feigned to drop something. He relied on her culture to supply the next action. Her lips pursed in a little ‘o’. He pointed to her feet, and she followed his fingers and bent down to look. The assassin moved in close. She smelled like peaches.

  He leaned in to pick up the non-existent object, bumping into her. The blade had a phallic curve, thin as a whisper, and it penetrated her clothes. She didn’t notice the cut, as he slipped down the street, and wouldn’t until later when she would find a small slice in her shirt above her hip.