The razor glides down my cheek, leaving a swath of smooth skin behind it with a faint rasp. It’s a tranquil experience, almost meditative – there’s just something about the ritual that centers me. In the living room, ConCentric announces a new job with a gentle chime. I wipe my face with a towel and go to check it out – it’s some generic looking grifter, the kind who’s just smart enough to fuck with the heavyweights.
And now someone in the Syndicate wants him dead, and is willing to put up a substantial sum for such a service. They say he’s got dinner reservations at some fancy restaurant in the NeoFin district; I pass the building it’s in now and again. Should be an easy job.
118 floors up, the Olympus sunset shatters, reflected onto me at every angle by millions of windows. It can’t quite drive away the chill though; the building’s windows are cold and slick but my gecko suit sticks without complaining.
My altimeter pings, which means this is my stop. I grab the millimeter slit between the tempered sheets, unstick everything but my hands, and push. I arc up perfectly into the window, the tungsten carbide heel of my boot splintering the glass before I shatter it with my entrance. I roll through the impact, carrying myself off the chunks of glass, and come up kneeling, already analyzing the room.
My mark is on the other side of the room, halfway out of his seat alongside a woman and child (possibly wife and daughter). As expected, he’s got muscle – six with him, two more already moving towards me. The other patrons are in various stages of shock and fear, and the chef has ducked behind his counter.
I step down to meet the bodyguards, a plan already forming. I backhand the first, sending him sprawling across the floor; in the same motion I pull a knife from the opposite sleeve and slip it between the ribs of the second, dropping him just as quickly. The chef is back out from behind his counter, a knife in his hand and a look in his eyes. He’s not running like everyone else – he’s asking for it, and who am I to deny him?
I duck his clumsy swing, slip inside his reach, and smash his head into the restaurant’s gaudy full-wall screen. It fucks up the picture, turning the room’s light into a flickering mess of pink and blue. I drag his face across it for good measure (he was asking for it), then throw him by the head into a table. This time he says down, like he should.
I duck close to the floor, kneeling with arms outstretched just in time to feel slugs splitting the air over my back. Two of them have pulled guns, but now they’ve just started to walk towards me. Do they think I’m surrendering? Morons.
I throw one arm up and the table comes with it. It’s a good dense table, maybe even authentic wood, and it thuds brilliantly against the skull of one of the gunmen. The other hits me across the back with something heavy, and I stumble. I’m starting to get annoyed.
Synthepi hits my bloodstream – I stand a little taller, hear a little better. Colors are brighter, everyone moves slightly more slowly. The guard who hit me comes back in for more; I grab his forearm, pivot, and pull him headfirst into another exquisite table. Something cracks, but I don’t care what.
Two more come for me, one trying to pull a gun. I duck under his arm and grab his wrist, pulling him off balance and torqueing it until he screams. The other punches me in the back, but I barely notice. I hear him cry out a second later; he should’ve saved his energy.
I spin, pulling the gunman’s arm behind his back, blocking his partner’s next punch with my right arm. In the same motion, I bring my fist down hard on the gunman’s hurt wrist, shattering the forearm and throwing him to the ground. I catch another punch aimed at my head – a third guard wants to test his luck – then spin and connect the metal on my gloves to the temple of his partner. Everyone else dealt with, I backhand the new arrival, then do my best to kick straight through his chest.
I’m down to the final two, one bigger than the other, who seem to be trying to work together. The big guy comes at me head on, eats a punch to the chest as the little guy slips behind me. My other hand is poised to cave in the big guy’s skull when someone grabs it. I should’ve kicked him harder.
I slide my leg behind his and put him on the ground, but I take a punch in the mouth from the big guy. Before I can retaliate a chair hits the back of my legs, forcing me to kneel before the big guy as he levels a gun at my forehead.
I snap my head left as he fires, dropping a smoke bomb as I roll to his right. None of these amateurs seem to know where I went. I stand up behind the big guy and grab his gun hand, the muzzle barking out a rapid tempo as I swing my aim between his accomplices. His utility expended, I snap his neck, holding onto the gun as he slumps to the floor.
I hear the shot at the same time as I feel it impact my shoulder, but my body armor earns its keep and the worst I’ll be going home with is a bad bruise. I turn to make eye contact with the mark’s wife, a gun in her hands and horror on her face. I savor the feeling before shooting her.
The mark is making a run for the elevator with his daughter; looks like it’s time to get moving. He says something irrelevant as the doors close, then turns to face me and – it’s too late. I’m already there.
I grab him by the throat and kick him through the window, holding him dangling by his throat in the wind. I meet his eyes, and relish in the fear I find there. He manages to choke out, “what the hell are you?”
“Death,” I tell him, before I snap his neck and let him drop. OVCD can deal with the aftermath, the Syndicate pays me for neither discretion nor cleanup. As I’m walking back into the room, I see my reflection in the glass, with half a meter of glass protruding from my shoulder. Strangely, I can’t feel it at all. I pull it out and there’s no blood. I think that was a mistake.
I’m hit with severe vertigo and the entire world is blurring. I can see someone with glowing yellow eyes standing outside, looking in at me through the window. Some small part of me wonders how he’s standing 118 floors up.
A red and black hand reaches out of the window at me, rigid fingers extended to form a point.
I’m in a sewage treatment plant that smells like it handles the whole backwater planet it’s on. Ropes chafe at my wrists and attach me to a chair, while the remnants of some exotic ACh inhibitor float around in my bloodstream and periodically sends spasms through my muscles. Some asshole (Barry? Bob? Something like that) is pacing in front of me with a gun, yelling something about his family and vengeance. I open my mouth to tell him to untie me, but end up goading him instead. He turns towards me, eyes blazing with rage, and throws the gun away. He grabs the back of the chair and drags me right up to the edge of one of the vats of excrement, and after a short pause he tips me in headfirst.
I’m sinking, suffocating, trying my best to keep my mouth shut against the torrent but it’s getting in through my nose and my ears and my limbs still don’t work right and my traitorous medulla is doing its very best to get me to open wide and inhale –
I’m back in Olympus. I hear a thud and see red-and-black too-long legs splayed in front of me.
I’m underwater, exfil at the bottom of a primitive harbor where my target thought she could hide. I feel more than hear a distant boom as its pressure wave passes through me. I turn upwards to see bubbles pouring out of a tear in the hulk above me as it moves ponderously downward. I start to run, but I’m in the muck and it conspires with the water and the suit to keep me in one place. Slowly, almost gently, the ship comes down on my head, pressing me harder and harder into the muck, until my faceplate cracks and the pressure comes crashing in and –
I didn’t think I’d left anyone alive, but I can hear someone screaming.
I’m on a different backwater this time, marginally less civilized. I’ve been given the luxury of standing. They’ve gone with metal cords instead of rope and neuropharm to keep me in place. Something hot and acrid tickles my nose, a welcome respite from rancid sewage. I feel a heat at my feet that quickly transforms to a searing pain, spreading up my whole body, consuming all other sensations. I open my mouth to scream but all I can hear is crackling –
I wish he would stop screaming.
I’m on the ground, curled in a puddle of dirty water. One of my eyes isn’t working; I think they’ve poked it out. I’ve stopped feeling pain, and the slugs passing through my body register as little more than thuds. Some time passes, then I feel something cold press against the side of my head and –
I’m fragmenting, falling apart, shattering, dissolving in real time.
I’m stabbed.
Shot.
Electrocuted.
Beaten.
Boiled alive by microwaves.
Irradiated.
Pushed out of a shuttle during re-entry.
Crushed.
Vaporized.
These are too perfect to be memories. I’m shattered into my component pieces and hurled backwards, forced to relive the worst moments of a thousand lifetimes.
I slowly make progress, scrape fragments off the floor and mold them into something halfway resembling a person. I’m seeing death but no longer living it; it gets rationalized, introjected, some experiences transpiled into something bearable and others thrown away entirely. I put myself back together however I can. I have to.
I’m back in the restaurant, before I did the job. This time I’m hovering in the corner, a fly on the wall, watching with omnipresent dispassion. Some… thing wades through the crowd, head and shoulders above them. People flow around it like water, and fall like leaves.
It’s seven feet tall and impossibly thin, with glowing eyes that flicker and jitter in the broken darkness. Its joints shift and dance, throwing off the suggestions of conventional anatomy in favor of an almost alien mobility. Even I lose track of it when it dissolves into a cloud of smoke; seconds later a limb coalesces around the largest guard’s arm and slithers down to his gun, directing it as if it were nothing.
It plows through a half-dozen men with barely a scratch, killing with inhuman accuracy and impersonal sadism.
It’s me. The real me.
I’m crimson and gunmetal, proprietary alloys and compact servomotors, kilometers of graphene strands masquerading as a nervous system. I’m the result of years of work and billions of credits, an investment made hundreds of years ago that’s paying off to this day. I’m a compilation of the finest technology humanity had to offer, honed by centuries of experience and aimed towards one single goal: death.
Whatever… thing I am, I’m not a man.
Was I ever?