Zoë Blade

“ My paranoia starts to kick in as I realise how easy it would be for him to kill me, just as long as he took me unaware. For all my jacked up reflexes and painstakingly learned skills, in light of the new wholly artificial employees our rivals have been raving about, I'm starting to look a lot like an old Decca television set in a room full of Sony projectors. In all likelihood, Mike would have had me killed months ago already if I wasn't still so damned good. ”

“ The eerie glow of the walls and pipes is familiar enough, but the human sized and shaped blob glowing in the living room isn't. I switch the vision to only twenty percent infrared overlay so that I don't have as much information to distract me, and I brace myself. ”

“ Faye ejected the Helen Fryer disc and tossed it onto the bed next to the player, then slid the Kelly Travis disc in and pressed play.
Within moments, she was running on a treadmill in front of a full length mirror. She could smell her own sweat, sharp and strong, but it didn't matter. Closing her eyes again, she stared at her own face, or at least the face of a nameless actress, blue eyes staring back at her from behind a blonde fringe, smiling with determination and the knowledge that she could push herself further this time. Digitac actresses almost always smiled. ”

“ Mike sighs. "I'm not an idiot, you know. You have to understand, it's business, nothing personal." He's sweating now. I watch a little bead of perspiration make its way down his forehead. "How much do you know?"
I make my way to the shelf and pour a shot of whiskey.
"It's a bit early for that, isn't it?"
"Special occasion," I insist. It always helps to inebriate your opponent, to give yourself any edge over him that you can when it comes to reflexes. "I know how attached people can get to certain ways of doing things. The comfort of the familiar." I look at my glass thoughtfully. ”

“ Rebecca scrunched her face up for a split second.
"I like you," pointed out Faye.
"Yeah, but not like like. Not like you like boys."
Faye made an effort to look away from Rebecca's soft cheeks and her perfect lips. "What's meant to be so good about boys, anyway?"
"They have their moments," said Rebecca. "Some of them do, anyway. Maybe not the ones in our class, but once they're a bit older, maybe."
"Sounds like a long wait." Faye kept her gaze on the floor.
"They just take a few more years to grow up, is all. ”

“ Rebecca took a bite out of her sandwich.
"It's not healthy to be so pushy, either." Faye forced herself to start eating her lunch; she wasn't feeling hungry.
"Sorry," said Rebecca. She took a sip of her drink. "It's just that it's not the same without you during swimming lessons. Who else am I going to tease?"
"I'm sure there must be someone," said Faye.
Rebecca looked up as she thought to herself. "How come you're not allowed to go swimming with us, anyway? Just because you haven't started puberty yet? I mean, Jenny's way behind everyone else too and she still goes swimming." ”

“ The right move would have been to kill me as soon as he saw me in the room. But he can't do that. He needs me. So I turn my back to him, walking up to the window.
"Bad night?" asks Mike, feigning ignorance.
"You could say that. When I got home, I found an intruder waiting for me."
"My god!" says Mike. "What happened?"
"I dispatched her, naturally." The first rule in my line of work is never trust anybody, not even somebody pretending to be your friend.
"Her?" asks Mike, pretending to be shocked by her gender, knowing full well how rare human assassins are, let alone women. ”

“ I throw my katana onto the floor as a sign of good faith. While I'm not exactly ready to commit harakiri just yet, suddenly my imitation of a life doesn't seem to be worth fighting for so hard. I figure that if either one of us lives on, I haven't really lost much. The gamble's worth it, because if she'll go along with my plan—and I'm pretty sure she will, because I'm pretty sure I would—then we can both get what we deserve.
Mike doesn't get into his office until seven the next morning. When he sees me, he freezes, and for just a second he reveals fear in his eyes. ”

“ Eww, thought Faye as she opened her eyes and groped around for her Digitac player's stop button, overwhelmed by the two sets of images competing in her head. She pressed it just in time. Suddenly, the bright blue sky was replaced with the various posters of female rock stars that lined her bedroom's walls. The chattering of passers-by came to an abrupt end, and in its place she could hear the dull murmur of her parents' old fashioned flatscreen television downstairs. ”

“ It really puts my job into perspective when I'm reminded how the human race is the only species that isn't still wrapped up in daily life-or-death struggles for food, or at least, not for copyright free food. ”

“ It was an age old condition, her parents had told her. In a funny sort of way, they'd said, she was lucky to have been born when she was. As recently as a few decades earlier, people with her medical issue had to work it out for themselves after decades and sometimes even lifetimes of mental anguish. Nowadays it was something your doctor told your parents at birth.
"I know you don't exactly like your body," said her father.
"I look like a freak," muttered Faye.
"That's not true," said her mother sharply. "You look just as lovely as any of your friends." ”

“ Even in the sunshine, the guiding beam of my tripod mounted rifle is brightly illuminating a thick circle of skin on his neck, just below his white beard, but even if any of the passersby can see infrared as well as I can, they won't have time to do anything even if they notice it. ”

“ He gets up and makes his way to a shelf filled with various photos and figurines, where he pours himself a shot of whiskey from an expensive looking decanter.
As he glances back at me, I decline his offer of the same with a subtle shake of my head. Call me paranoid, but in my line of work, I never could feel comfortable if I was anything less than a hundred percent sober.
"They couldn't just have him running around pirating their intellectual property," Mike continues.
"But it's food," I protest. "It's not like it's a rich kid's luxury like music or films. ”

“ The large hall smelled of cabbages, potatoes and baked beans, and everyone else was talking and eating and moving chairs so loudly that Faye could hardly hear herself think.
"Just ignore them," suggested Rebecca.
Faye didn't say anything. She opened her lunchbox and fished around in her deep blazer pockets for her medication. She teased a pill out of the bottle and washed it down with some orange squash from her Helen Fryer thermos flask.
"It's not healthy to have secrets, you know." Rebecca peered across at her, trying to make out the label on the bottle. ”

“ There's no discernible change from an outsider's perspective, but inside my brain and its hardware, a dozen little defence applications are springing to life, waiting for my signal that they should start wreaking havoc. I usually slip into this mode several times a week, but in my line of work it's safer to err on the side of paranoia. ”

“ Besides, she couldn't bear the thought of giving a complete stranger, someone who didn't even exist yet, all of her emotional baggage. The memories of trying to cope with her birth defect, of trying to make sense of it, and of being constantly bullied at school because of her differences... ”

“ The trees are such a vibrant green this time of year, they look somehow unreal, set against the pale grey concrete blocks that people waste their lives in. I quickly inspect all the nearby rooftops, making sure nobody's on any of them. Old habits. "You know, I've been thinking a lot lately, and between the implants and the drugs, I'm beginning to feel less and less like a real woman and more and more like some kind of machine, just efficiently fulfilling her job role and nothing else."
"Efficiently?" I hear Mike practically choking on his drink. ”

“ Mike has a dubious look in his eye like he knows I'm up to something, just not what. For a manager, he sure lacks vision. He looks out the window at the ant-like people all those floors below, oblivious to the woman pointing a high powered laser rifle straight at him from the next block along, and raises his glass. "To—"
Despite giving my new business partner the order to fire, the laser burst still somehow makes me jump. I've never seen it up close before. On the receiving end, it's deadly silent, the only sound being the sloshed gurgles of the target. ”

“ His cardboard cup drops to the floor, and I unscrew the rifle from the tripod, duck below the top of the brick wall of the bookstore, fold up the tripod and put everything in my holdall, hidden beneath a pair of jogging bottoms.
In a fleece, t-shirt and designer jeans, I hopefully pass for someone on her way to one of the gyms scattered around the legal district, where people who help corporations sue their customers for a living would feel far too inconvenienced by taking a detour on their way home just to stay in shape. ”

“ Trust is simply a matter of being able to predict someone's moves. Since I'm a pretty good facsimile of you, I figure we can both predict each other just fine by working out what we would do in each other's situation. ”

“ Her mother's voice became unusually soft and quiet. "You're going to have to make a choice."
"What kind of choice?" asked Faye, her eyes still fixed on the floor. She could feel them welling up already.
Her father piped up. "We can give you some other pills that will give your body the oestrogen it ought to be producing. They'll make you look more like your friends, you know, put some weight on your hips and..." ”

“ I hire you because you're the sort of woman who knows better than to take unnecessary risks. Why did you wait so long?"
I let myself sigh. "OK, so I felt a little empathy towards the target. He'd never hurt anybody. I mean, I read his profile. He was essentially a good man." ”

“ All Godin want to do is ensure the uniqueness of the very specific dishes served in their chain of five-star restaurants, so don't give me any of that melodramatic bollocks about starving homeless people just because they have to eat boiled rice and steamed vegetables instead of foie gras en brioche. ”

“ There are plenty of public domain staple foods. The homeless can eat the same handouts as the starving children in Africa: rice, grains, vegetables, pulses. No one's trying to stop people from eating. They have more than enough to live on. ”

“ It's not our job to question our clients' motives, only their ability to pay. Besides, he was a liability. Copyright violation is one of the most serious crimes there is these days, given the structure of our fragile economy. ”