Sagan's Law by Thomas K. Carpenter

Author:Thomas K. Carpenter [Carpenter, Thomas K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-11-26T00:00:00+00:00

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.

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