Read Dead Man's Resolution for Free Online

roots being chopped. Those noble politicians had saved the world by enacting Sagan’s Law, and reversed the millennium’s old climb of the common people with a dash of ink.
    Even their efficient markets that had helped the common folk rise from the gutters had been turned against them, once the world started trading population bonds. Countries could earn a profit by conveniently losing a few hundred thousand people.
    I am God’s scythe, set among the field to cut the chaff from the wheat .
    The assassin realized he was not walking with the hesitant gait of the salaryman, but instead he stalked up the street. He didn’t care. It wasn’t a subtle job.
    The sounds of the rally wafted over the youth loitering in the spaces between the streets. He was blocks away from the Nagoya Tower. A gaggle of young Japanese girls dressed in the styles of their favorite anime characters huddled around a small bench. An impulse consumed him like a flame as he discretely removed the nanoblade from his vest pocket.
    An agitation had been building in him. There should be foreplay in death, not precision. His benefactors had made it clear the manner of the job. It still made him sick. He was an artist, not a machine.
    He slowed his gait. A girl on the edge of the group dug into a clutch purse. She wore an angular, militaristic uniform with a short skirt, all in purple. His ARNet whispered she was dressed as Murasaki Kisaki—The Purple Queen. He could feel himself go stiff. O’ Gabriel how you flaunt your duties .
    As he neared, he feigned to drop something. He relied on her culture to supply the next action. Her lips pursed in a little ‘o’. He pointed to her feet, and she followed his fingers and bent down to look. The assassin moved in close. She smelled like peaches.
    He leaned in to pick up the non-existent object, bumping into her. The blade had a phallic curve, thin as a whisper, and it penetrated her clothes. She didn’t notice the cut, as he slipped down the street, and wouldn’t until later when she would find a small slice in her shirt above her hip.
    His impulse had been foolish, and he had played it as far as it could go, but he had felt a hunger. The tension loosened. The crowd formed around the base of the tower. The barking speech of a politician shot across the crowd in staccato pulses. He silenced it before his system attempted to translate. The words wouldn’t matter much longer.
    What I suffer for my art , he thought, then closed his eyes, and sent a signal to a far away place with his mind. Though he couldn’t hear it, or see it, he imagined a great machine, full of steel and sprockets, starting up, even though it was probably a bank of quantum computers humming in the cold dark. The effect would be immediate, they told him.
    It was difficult to fool one person, to invade their system and distort reality without notice. It was the magician’s trick. To draw the eye away so the card could be hidden. Two people became more complicated, but he could do it with ease. Adding additional people made the trick exponentially harder. He had once twisted the veil with five, not for long, just enough to cut them all before they realized he wasn’t the waiter, and before they could realize they were dead. But they had been paying attention to their menu. And he had only needed to hide the blade, the motion and the slumping of the body.
    To actually hide something within the Sea was considered impossible. Rumors of a ghost program, powerful enough to break into many systems en-mass and confuse them to create true invisibility had been around as long as the Digital Sea. But those were just rumors. Every assassin in his line of work had toyed with the rumor, researching the possibilities, but once the math of it became clear, they gave up.
    He strode through the edge of the crowd, deftly avoiding everyone, the nanoblade held playfully in his fingertips. A few might have sensed something, but at most they considered it the wind at