Punishment

[2]

LIAM HAD TO ADMIT, for a brutal man, the CEO of SecuriTech knew how to throw a party. For his son Knox’s fifteenth birthday, Eeron Brindle had rented out Xelon Park and spared no expense in its transformation. The manicured lawns and engineered weeping willows became the lux backdrop for the elites of the Upper City to sip intoxicant-infused electrolytics and down customized EpiCure pills with flavor profiles no one had before experienced. Cocoa and Chili Beef, or Brandy-poached Nigerian Akara with rose petal and rhino stuffing.

How anyone knew what a rhino was meant to taste like, Liam couldn’t imagine. They’d been extinct for centuries. The patrons’ zoo didn’t even have a rhino.

Maybe that was how the designers knew.

The music was tailored to every guest’s personal data profiles and broadcast with targeted harmonics so everyone heard their own soundtrack at their preferred volume. At dramatic moments throughout the party, the music would sync across all the guests, based on a complicated algorithm SecuriTech had first developed to predict market fluctuations after Rebooter terrorist attacks.

 Good thing they have the program, thought Liam. Because they are about to have just such an attack.

He crouched in the crook of a weeping willow, the lights and holos below casting him in darkness. The party’s decor itself blinded the revelers to the danger they were in.

Fitting, Liam thought. Their excess will be their downfall.

 There were at least a dozen Guardians patrolling the perimeter of the park, as well as a few combat robots. The place was impenetrable, so it was good thing that Liam had entered the park days ago, knowing he’d never make it in on the day itself.

He’d been hiding out in the trees and in holes he’d dug beneath hedgerows. He ate ration pellets from his pockets, moved only at night, avoided the patrol bots, the Guardians, and even the work crews setting up the party.

Finally, it was the night when he would make his move. He’d come from Old Detroit to Mountain City on the most important mission of his young career.

 He was going to kill Eeron Brindle, CEO of SecuriTech, and he was going to do it in front of all the top executives of the city. 

The Senior Rebooters didn’t believe Liam could do it, didn’t believe it could be done, but Liam knew. He felt it. He had a role to play in history. Maybe even the role to play. Someone had to be the one . . . why not him?

“Youthful foolishness,” Commander Pei had called it. But she did not forbid him. These sorts of lone wolf operations cost the Rebooters nothing. If Liam was captured, he knew well enough to kill himself before they could torture answers out of him, and if he was killed—either by the Guardians or at his own hand—Rebooter military operations were down one teenage soldier, nothing more. They had plenty of those to spare, even if none were as talented as Liam.

And if his mission succeeded? It would be a crushing blow to the system. It would send a message that no executive was safe from the wrath of the Rebooters, not even the CEO of SecuriTech.

A lone assassin killing a man like Eeron Brindle would empower every would-be revolutionary in the Valve; every downtrodden, debt-ridden proxy would see that the patrons were not invulnerable. They were human and they could bleed. This assassination would be the signal that could spark a general uprising against the injustice of the corporations. The Jubilee, the day when all debt would be forgiven. Maybe he was the one who could do it; maybe this was the moment it could be done . . .

Liam took a deep breath, getting his grandiose thoughts under control. He couldn’t celebrate victory before the foe was vanquished. A good assassin thinks only of the action at hand. Let the consequences sort themselves.