Gamers - Amazon (24 page)

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 the 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.

His impulse had been foolish, and he had played it as far as it could go, but he had felt a hunger. The tension loosened. The crowd formed around the base of the tower. The barking speech of a politician shot across the crowd in staccato pulses. He silenced it before his system attempted to translate. The words wouldn’t matter much longer.

What I suffer for my art
, he thought, then closed his eyes, and sent a signal to a far away place with his mind. Though he couldn’t hear it, or see it, he imagined a great machine, full of steel and sprockets, starting up, even though it was probably a bank of quantum computers humming in the cold dark. The effect would be immediate, they told him.

It was difficult to fool one person, to invade their system and distort reality without notice. It was the magician’s trick. To draw the eye away so the card could be hidden. Two people became more complicated, but he could do it with ease. Adding additional people made the trick exponentially harder. He had once twisted the veil with five, not for long, just enough to cut them all before they realized he wasn’t the waiter, and before they could realize they were dead. But they had been paying attention to their menu. And he had only needed to hide the blade, the motion and the slumping of the body.

To actually hide something within the Sea was considered impossible. Rumors of a ghost program, powerful enough to break into many systems en-mass and confuse them to create true invisibility had been around as long as the Digital Sea. But those were just rumors. Every assassin in his line of work had toyed with the rumor, researching the possibilities, but once the math of it became clear, they gave up.

He strode through the edge of the crowd, deftly avoiding everyone, the nanoblade held playfully in his fingertips. A few might have sensed something, but at most they considered it the wind at their neck. He never would have thought they could make a machine powerful enough to push through so many security systems, to reweave that many views of reality, including the security cameras all around the tower. Yet, he strolled up the path, stepping around the guard.

He didn’t know what the man had done, or was going to do. It wasn’t his business to ask. The politician stood at a short podium in his gray suit, shouting at the crowd with one fist raised, pumping at the sky. The assassin drew up to him. It was a queer feeling standing in front a crowd without being seen. He turned to the crowd, hundreds of faces staring at the politician next to him. Not knowing death so near.

The assassin lifted his arm up slowly, measuring the distance, then pushed his own mod into the politician’s system. The crowd couldn’t see what he had seen, but they saw his reaction. One moment, the politician was shouting, the next he gasped, holding his arms out in front of him, as if he had seen a ghost, then his head fell off.

###

If you liked this sample, purchase the full version:
The Digital Sea
on Amazon.

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Also by
Thomas K. Carpenter

THE DIGITAL SEA TRILOGY

The Digital Sea

The Godhead Machine

Neochrome Aurora

GAMERS TRILOGY

GAMERS

FRAGS

CODERS

ALEXANDRIAN SAGA

Fires of Alexandria

Heirs of Alexandria

Legacy of Alexandria

Warmachines of Alexandria

Empire of Alexandria

Voyage of Alexandria

Goddess of Alexandria

HERON OF ALEXANDRIA SHORT STORIES

The Price of Numbers

The Weight of Gold

The Blood of the Gods

The Virtues of Madness

The Curse of the Gorgon

MIRROR SHARDS ANTHOLOGY

Mirror Shards: Volume One

Mirror Shards: Volume Two

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Thomas K. Carpenter resides near St. Louis with his wife Rachel and their two children. When he’s not busy writing his next book, he’s playing soccer in the yard with his kids or getting beat by his wife at cards. He keeps a regular blog at
http://www.thomaskcarpenter.com
and can be found on twitter under
@thomaskcarpente

Other works by this author can be found at:

Black Moon Books Publishing -
http://www.blackmoonbooks.com

To learn about new releases from Thomas K. Carpenter, like his Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/thomaskcarpenter