“Would you like something else?” he asked.
“No.”
Annoyingly, he lingered, staring into her with his faux-Simone eyes. Sonia squirmed in her seat. Hadn’t she seen this man before, on the sidewalk near her apartment? Was he even a waiter? His shirt didn’t exactly match the other waiter’s shirts.
She forced herself to return his stare. “What do you want?”
The waiter grinned, said, “Stay as long as you like,” and walked away, leaving her empty cup on another table.
Juanita Torres’ physical body reclined in the passenger seat of her self-driving Elon IV. The car negotiated Chicago traffic on its way to the law offices of Ferguson & Torres. Behind her Experiencer glasses Juanita had eye-flicked herself to a virtual tent pitched in the high desert of New Mexico, where she lay quietly with Ellis. Sometimes Juanita simply needed to be alone with her friend, without words. It was a meditation, a stress-reliever. A timer would call her back to the car when they approached the office. Beyond the open tent flap pink and yellow layers of sunrise set off the jagged line of the Sangre de Christo Mountains. Then a figure appeared, blocking the view. Simone The Slayer in a panther-black bodysuit ducked into the tent, expertly wound a shiny garroting wire around Ellis Ng’s neck and snapped it taut. Blood sheeted over Juanita, splattered the tent fabric, making a sound like rain. Juanita slapped her Experiencer glasses off and sat up in the car, screaming. Simone’s muffled laughter drifted up from the floorboards near her feet.
A collective shudder swept through the café and across the open plaza. Random people stumbled to a stop. Sonia winced, feeling their pain—her connection to other people. What would she be without this shared suffering? She wasn’t brave enough to find out. She had never been brave enough. The pain she caused was her only tie to others.
The woman in the white sundress and headscarf a few tables away began weeping, her shoulders visibly shaking, and then slammed her glasses hard on the table top, even as others hastily donned theirs. Sonia’s segment was loose in Labyrinthiad. You could feel it. Like a sudden pressure drop before a coming storm.
Only one man failed to react.
At a table across the open café space, his Experiencer glasses parked on top of his bald head, he never took his eyes off Sonia. A broad, stocky man in a dark blue collarless overshirt. Two University girls, awkwardly holding each other in grief, crossed in front of him. When Sonia could see again, the table was empty.
Quickly, Sonia pocketed her Cube and dropped five euros on the table. She stood, rattling her chair back, and walked quickly away from the café.
She cut through a narrow cobblestone alley, intending to double back and make her way to the Arguelles neighborhood. There she kept a safe room unconnected to her Sonia Andrijeski identity—a name with shallow roots. In Arguelles she would hide in the camouflage of rowdy students and jangling nightlife.
The yellow walls of the alley loomed over her. Dead vines trailed from boxes under shuttered windows. Sonia quickened her pace, and then stopped, gasping, when the bald man stepped around the corner and stood in her way. She scuffed back, glanced over her shoulder. She could run but he would easily catch her. They both knew it. He grinned.
“For an assassin,” he said, “you’re a mousy thing.”
She retreated another step, and he moved toward her. A little dance.
“I’ll scream,” she said.
“You won’t.”
A pink cloud boiled out of a device in his hand. Sonia heard herself cough, as if the cough were un-synced with her collapse. The cobblestones came up and slammed her shoulder. The bald man stood over her. He tucked his device away, started to bend down. The sound of a motor ripped into the alley. She seemed to hear it after the bald man had already turned in reaction—Sonia’s pink cloud reality.
The bald man fell, his body landing next to Sonia with a sickening and off-timed thud. She blinked heavy lids. A red puddle oozed away from the fallen man and began investigating the channels between cobble stones. Sonia managed to push herself back before it touched her. She looked up. A man holding a gun dismounted a blue Vespa and approached her. The waiter from the café, the one with Simone-The-Slayer’s eyes and scar. He tucked his gun into his waistband, pulled his shirt over it, and hunkered next to her.
“He would have taken you back to the States,” the waiter said, his words almost-but-not-quite in sync with his lips. “But I don’t take people back.” He shrugged. “Private contractors, right? Some are more full service than others.”
Sonia squinted, trying to interpret what he’d said as anything other than an obvious threat. She struggled to get up. The waiter watched her, like he was watching a representative of an unrelated species. A true killer’s coldness reflected in a virtual killer’s eyes. God, he was a fan. Sonia grasped at self-control. Her voice barely broke when she said, “Don’t hurt me, please.”
He pressed his hand to his chest, as if he couldn’t believe what she was suggesting. “I would never. I admire you too much. At least, I admire Simone. Professional respect crosses worlds.” He reached out quickly and picked something up. Her Cube. Sonia’s hand twitched involuntarily. And the gun was back in the waiter’s hand and leveled at her.
“I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “Give me your key, promise to never upload to Labyrinthiad again, and you can go.”
“What?”
“I’ve been watching you for days. I could have taken you out any time. Giving you a chance to walk away, that’s me showing respect for what you created.” He held the Cube up. It contained Simone’s unique code, all her untraceable killing routines. “Decide now.”
Sonia tried to rub the fogginess out of her eyes. “You want to be her. Simone.”
“The key. Deal or not?”
“What if I don’t want to?”
“Then I hurt you.”
Numbly, she recited the code.
The waiter held the Cube in the palm of his hand. He voice-entered the code. The Cube glowed blue, ghostware deploying raw content for manipulation. He stared avidly at the display—Simone The Slayer in utero—then turned the Cube off, pocketed it, and, without another word, walked away.
Never upload to Labyrinthiad again? Impossible. But without Simone to connect to the common suffering, who was she? What was her purpose?
The killer mounted his Vespa and zipped out of the alley, leaving Sonia standing next to the dead man. A trace of motor exhaust lingered. She cringed, alone and exposed, and stumbled back the way she’d come, her head throbbing. Soon she found herself in the anonymous safety of the crowded plaza, surrounded by people she could no longer hurt. Woozy, she stopped and covered her eyes. A wave of pink-cloud dizziness swept through her and she started to fall, barely catching herself. Someone took her arm, steadied her. Sonia stiffened.
“Are you all right?” It was the woman from the café, the one so upset by Simone’s kill that she had slammed down her Experiencer glasses. Others stopped, concerned. Is she sick? Give her some room. A young man produced his phone. Should I call for medical?
Sonia shook her head. “No, don’t.”
The woman, still holding Sonia’s arm, searched her face. “You’re sure you’re all right? You looked like you were going to faint.”