mortals, a man with the voice of an angel and the proclivities of a satyr. I killed Max while
he sat in a seriously pimped open-top half-track in Jakarta, waiting for a roadie to return with his drugs (Max never did
get the hang of dressing down. Or going incognito). The Israeli laser weapon was originally an experimental device designed
to bring down Iranian missiles while they were still over Syria, or, better still, Iraq. I fired it from a container truck
a block down the street from Max’s idling half-track. Even attenuated to the minimum it was grossly overpowered for the job
and rather than drill a neat hole straight through Max’s fashionably pale, heavily sunglassed, wildly dreadlocked head, it
blew it to smithereens. Windows shattered three storeys up.
This was not elegant – far from it. The elegance came from the fact that the laser burst was not a single brutally simple pulse
but one which had been precisely frequency-modulated to mirror the digitalised information of a high-sample-rate MP3 signal,
compressed into a microsecond. What hit Max was effectively an MP3 copy of “Woke Up Down,” Gun Puppy’s first worldwide hit
and the song that had made Max truly famous.
Marit Shauoon was a populist politician in the Perón mould, and, like the others, I had been reliably informed that he would,
if left alone, take the world to a Very Bad Place, in his case starting with South and Central America. (As if any of this
really mattered to me. Craft, my trade, was all. I let those who handed me my orders worry about the morality of it.) He had
been a motorcycle stunt rider, the most famous in Brazil and then in the world. He crashed a lot but that just added to the
excitement, anticipation and sense of jeopardy in the crowd. All four of his major limbs were pinned and strengthened with
extensive amounts of surgical steel and even without those there were enough metal implants in the rest of his body to set
off airport security scanners while he was still walking stiffly from the car park.
I found an induction furnace for him. He heated up, quite slowly, from the inside, to the sound of vastly thrumming magnets
all around him, and his own screams.
… What? Why, why, and why? I would have had no idea if I had not been told, and even once I was told frankly I still didn’t
care. (I am mildly surprised I recall any of the reasons given below at all.)
So: Yerge would have started a political party to rid the USA of non-Aryans, bringing chaos and apocalyptic bloodshed. Max
would have given all his hundreds of millions in royalties to an extremist Green movement who – taking an arguably rather drastic
approach to harmonising the planet’s natural carrying capacity with the size of its human population – would have used the windfall
to design, manufacture, weaponise and distribute a virus that would kill ninety per cent of humanity. And Marit would have
used his vast communications network to… I can’t remember; broadcast pornography to Andromeda or something. As I say, it didn’t
really matter. I had by then entirely stopped enquiring why I might be committing such terminally grievous acts. All I cared
about was the artistry and elegance involved in the doing, the carrying out, the commission.
The execution.
The Philosopher
Screams. Too many screams. They have kept me awake at night, woken me from dreams and nightmares.
I do not enjoy what I do, though I am not ashamed of it, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that I am proud of it. It is something that has to be done, and somebody has to do it. It is because I do not enjoy it that I am good at it. I have seen the work of those who do enjoy our mutual calling, and they do not produce the best results. They get carried away, they indulge themselves rather than stick to the task in hand, which is to produce the results which are desired and to recognise them when they are produced. Instead, they try too
he sat in a seriously pimped open-top half-track in Jakarta, waiting for a roadie to return with his drugs (Max never did
get the hang of dressing down. Or going incognito). The Israeli laser weapon was originally an experimental device designed
to bring down Iranian missiles while they were still over Syria, or, better still, Iraq. I fired it from a container truck
a block down the street from Max’s idling half-track. Even attenuated to the minimum it was grossly overpowered for the job
and rather than drill a neat hole straight through Max’s fashionably pale, heavily sunglassed, wildly dreadlocked head, it
blew it to smithereens. Windows shattered three storeys up.
This was not elegant – far from it. The elegance came from the fact that the laser burst was not a single brutally simple pulse
but one which had been precisely frequency-modulated to mirror the digitalised information of a high-sample-rate MP3 signal,
compressed into a microsecond. What hit Max was effectively an MP3 copy of “Woke Up Down,” Gun Puppy’s first worldwide hit
and the song that had made Max truly famous.
Marit Shauoon was a populist politician in the Perón mould, and, like the others, I had been reliably informed that he would,
if left alone, take the world to a Very Bad Place, in his case starting with South and Central America. (As if any of this
really mattered to me. Craft, my trade, was all. I let those who handed me my orders worry about the morality of it.) He had
been a motorcycle stunt rider, the most famous in Brazil and then in the world. He crashed a lot but that just added to the
excitement, anticipation and sense of jeopardy in the crowd. All four of his major limbs were pinned and strengthened with
extensive amounts of surgical steel and even without those there were enough metal implants in the rest of his body to set
off airport security scanners while he was still walking stiffly from the car park.
I found an induction furnace for him. He heated up, quite slowly, from the inside, to the sound of vastly thrumming magnets
all around him, and his own screams.
… What? Why, why, and why? I would have had no idea if I had not been told, and even once I was told frankly I still didn’t
care. (I am mildly surprised I recall any of the reasons given below at all.)
So: Yerge would have started a political party to rid the USA of non-Aryans, bringing chaos and apocalyptic bloodshed. Max
would have given all his hundreds of millions in royalties to an extremist Green movement who – taking an arguably rather drastic
approach to harmonising the planet’s natural carrying capacity with the size of its human population – would have used the windfall
to design, manufacture, weaponise and distribute a virus that would kill ninety per cent of humanity. And Marit would have
used his vast communications network to… I can’t remember; broadcast pornography to Andromeda or something. As I say, it didn’t
really matter. I had by then entirely stopped enquiring why I might be committing such terminally grievous acts. All I cared
about was the artistry and elegance involved in the doing, the carrying out, the commission.
The execution.
The Philosopher
Screams. Too many screams. They have kept me awake at night, woken me from dreams and nightmares.
I do not enjoy what I do, though I am not ashamed of it, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that I am proud of it. It is something that has to be done, and somebody has to do it. It is because I do not enjoy it that I am good at it. I have seen the work of those who do enjoy our mutual calling, and they do not produce the best results. They get carried away, they indulge themselves rather than stick to the task in hand, which is to produce the results which are desired and to recognise them when they are produced. Instead, they try too
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