“Did you cut the pigtails off my daughter’s hair?”
I look at the outraged Mother, and wonder whether I should just make her fall asleep. It would be so easy, but also just a bit obvious. If the question hadn’t been asked as an indignant screech worthy of a parakeet, then maybe. But people were looking. And making half a plane of witnesses fall asleep attracts attention.
So I sigh, and shake my head.
“No. I mean, her pigtails were whipping across my face every time she turned her head to look out the window, but no. I didn’t cut them off. I mean, how would I bring a pair of scissors onto the plane? Unless you think I can will her pigtails from her head.”
I turn back around, and settle in my seat, closing my eyes.
“Who else could have done it?” I hear screeching in one ear.
I am so lucky to have ears that instantaneously adapt to changes in environment.
I once had to dive into a pool of molten iron, which you might ordinarily expect to have a detrimental effect on the hairs that detect the changes in air pressure that gives differentiated hearing.
And to instantaneously bubble the fat and meat off my bones, and to make charcoal of those bones too, I guess.
But thankfully, intent was my savior. I imagined a thin skin of protective shielding around me that channeled the heat into the earth’s core so I remained a constant cool temperature. And pow! I was able to swim in molten metal.
I open an eye. The woman is looming over my head. I look to one side, and see the girl, holding her pig-tails in her hands, as though cradling a dead pet. She has glasses, and they add to the quizzical owl look she seems to have perfected.
Perhaps if she eats up the pig tails, she will just eject little pig-tail pellets from the other end.
The poor girl looks hungry for a moment and then bewildered.
I really need to keep my thoughts to myself.
But one thing is clear. She isn’t all that unhappy about leaving behind the pig-tails. As though some Mother thought they looked cute on her.
I consider reattaching them, but at slightly the wrong angle, although that would just be me being a child. Inexplicably cut hair is one thing, but magically re-fused hair is tough to explain to a sap.
Ah, whatever.
I turn my head, and close my eyes again, and turn down the mother’s yapping.
I tune into the young girl’s thoughts, and they are as dull as most sap younglings.
Until I hear, “I hope he did do it. Then it means someone can do stuff in my life - someone that isn’t Mom. I wonder if I could do things myself?”
I open one eye, and turn my head slightly. The woman has sat back down on the other side of the girl, and is staring straight ahead, looking huffy.
I smile, nod, and lean over, whispering ,“You can do what you like. I mean, what is she going to do? Cut your pig-tails off?”
I wink, sensing her astonishment, and close my eyes again. Giving the girl a sense of individual potential was important. Especially given what they would be finding in the next couple of hours.
I sighed, and took three deep breaths: A signal to my body that I would be sleeping off my last contract for the rest of my flight. A Full Recharge.
When I arrive at the airport, I am escorted by a security guard past the queue. The woman looks a little satisfied, perhaps imagining that I had been reported to the hair police.
No such luck. I am escorted to a room, where Robert is waiting for me.
“Bob.”
I sit down opposite him, as the security guard vacates the room.
“Vangelis.”
My Mother had loved Chariots of Fire. That’s the story of my name. I kinda like it because it’s like an angel giving the V sign. Kinda fits, if I was a British person living in the last century.
My Mother was a Brit. But I wasn’t anything by the time I was ten. I ceased to exist, and they killed my parents to close the trail. I only found that little factoid out some years later.
But then it was the same for everyone in my unit, so it was hard to be resentful.
“Happy Birthday,” Bob says, and tosses a phone over to me.
I pick it up, and the screen turns on. Usual multivariant bio recognition, I assume.
On the screen is a picture of my target.
I feel a pang of hatred, mixed with an equal measure of satisfaction.
The man deserves to die. He has helped three spec units defect in the last year, who have between them wiped out a good fifty million saps.
“Yep. Guessed as much. You Ok for the wife and kid to find him?”
Bob nods. “We don’t need a murder hunt. No disembowelled carcass like Tokyo.”
I smile. “Did you like the meat hook in the Butcher’s shop window? I put his balls into a sushi dispenser, perfectly fried.”
Bob looks at me as though looking over a pair of spectacles. “Mmmm. Didn’t find the balls, so I guess someone enjoyed an unusual delicacy. Nice.”
“We’ll see if he’s expecting me.”
“He’s a she now. Got himself a vag.”
I feel my eyebrows ascending. Need to get me a better poker face.
“OK. Might have to get myself a bit of corpse relief once the job’s a good ‘un.”
Bob shakes his head. “You don’t have to be as bad as them, you know. People might think you are one of them.”
I feel the crackles of electricity around me. Blue sparks are grounded by the metal table. Bob sits back.
“Whoah. I’m not the enemy.”
The sparks flicker out gradually with a few deep breaths on my part.
“Do not compare me to them. You know how that ends up.”
Bob coughs. I guess his mouth has gone dry. My previous handler had lasted six months before he got himself enough confidence to put in a few wisecracks. Bronx humor, I guess.
“Right. Would rather not end up crispy fried. Agreed.”
I nodded, and got up, wiggling the phone between a finger and thumb distractedly.
“I need a little help with this one. Can you get Frangi? She’s likely to…”
“Ahead of you on that one. She’s waiting in another room. Says she’s looking forwards to working with you.”
I look to the heavens. Or rather to the loose ceiling-tiled strip-lit ceiling.
“How does she know about me?”
Bob shrugged. “You’re not exactly discreet. Word travels. You travel. You’re pretty much a legend, I’m afraid.”
I’m not sure how to react to this. On one hand, it’s nice to be appreciated. On the other hand, stealth is a little hard when you are an underground celebrity.
“Maybe I can get me a little plaque on Shadow’s Row,” I quip. Where the greatest figures in spec history are honored with a little plaque. Kind of depressing.
Bob pauses.
I sense his concern that the next words out of his mouth need to be carefully measured.
“Well. You’d better get going. You need to get there ahead of the wife and kid. We’ll keep them busy in an inefficient cab as long as we can. Just give us the word.”
He gets up, and I follow him out of the room, looking around at the depressingly bleak white corridors with black rubber flooring.
“Nice decor. Splash of red would brighten it up.”
Bob looks back at me nervously.
“Relax. I’m not that bored.”
He doesn’t look hugely placated.
I see a woman emerge from the room just ahead of us.
Twenty something. Surprising. Her reputation suggests someone jaded and in their forties at least.
She’s a brunette. She has a good physique. Probably athletic rather than muscled. She is checking me out as much as I am checking her out.
She stops in front of me, causing Bob to have to sidestep.
That was a bit mean.
Our conversation was in silence. Eye-to-eye. Measuring. Bob mostly staring at his toes. Anywhere but at us.
– Keeping ahead of their biological unit was particularly challenging, especially with the rotational genetic and epigenetic viral triggers that engineered mutations at an astonishing rate.
– But this guy was like the glue that kept the units coordinated.
– I am constantly astonished by the ingenuity of the cover-ups that have been coming up over the last year.
– The worrying one is the latest tin pot state’s intercontinental ballistic missile program unexpectedly accelerating. Because we know that the next big target may need containment, and how better to hide the need for the highest level of containment than by arming a rogue state with enough nukes to wipe the US off the face of the world.
– It’s escalated too far now.
– I know it, everyone knows it.
– Well everyone except the average sap who just thinks the world is going to hell with global warming.
That was a lucky escape last month, when Jazmin had managed to contain one outbreak with a freak tornado and ensuing weather system that had drowned any survivors. There were scattered survivors, but thankfully nobody who was contaminated.
– I mean, the girl and her Mom were going to meet the girl’s Father. He hadn’t been around for the last six months having been on assignment.
– They thought he was some special secret force within the Army.
– Almost right.
But Today, I need him to be dead.
– I needed them to find his disembowelled body. Not too much cleaning up though. Give them that, at least.
Frangi nods, turns to go. Then stops suddenly, turns her head around, enough for me to catch her smile.
She is licking her lips now. It seemed sexual, so it is probably anticipation of the job, rather than me.
She turns away again. I knew what that was about, and I don’t like it.
Power, real power, comes in many forms.
- Simon Huggins, 23rd September 2025