We have two targets: the girl causing so much trouble and the leader of WHOLE. I do not wonder what they are doing here together. It doesn’t matter. I just need to complete my mission and get back to the rendezvous. If I do it quickly enough, perhaps I will find a moment alone with my stalker. We shouldn’t talk, but I would like to. I want to know… what?
This question occupies the part of my mind not concerned with stealth and death. Could I possibly dare to ask for her name? These are our most closely guarded secrets. We surrender them when we join the Operation, taking on numbers instead, but that only makes us clutch them more closely to our chests, these tokens of who we once were and can no longer ever be.
I am Koby, I would say. Who are you?
And she would reply—for I am sure that she is a she, since that is how I first saw her—I am Kate. Or I am Anne. Or I am Gergelyn, for all I know. I cannot know, and I yearn to know. That knowledge would bind us forever.
Brief bio packets flash in from my other selves.
I am in a field fifteen kilometres away, disposing of the wreckage of a fallen airship.
I am in a town called Escalon, destroying a WHOLE weapons cache.
I am in the main hall of the farmhouse, watching as the girl we have been sent to kill fights back.
Shots are fired, by one of our own! I am too slow to react. There is a chase. The girl fires at me. I duck. It’s not too late to put this situation right. The girl is quickly holed up in a kitchen. We have her pinned. I am armed and deadly. I will rush her and it will be over.
On the other side of the kitchen I see movement. Someone steps into view, pistol raised to deliver the kill-shot. Once again I recognise the eyes. I am glad that she is the one to finish this, if it can’t be me. We are doing it together. We are a team.
A shotgun booms behind me, and my stalker goes down in bloody spray. I spin, gun upraised, too late. There is a naked, hairy man standing behind me. It seems absurd to be killed by someone like that. I stare down the barrel, wondering if it always feels this way.
The shotgun booms again. Death hurts, but not as much as seeing the light in those eyes go out.
We failed, all of us. Both versions of me in the farm expired, sending emergency packets explaining the cause of death—gunshot, like the rest. I know they saw her before they died. I am sure there is no connection between the two facts, unless they were distracted by her presence.
Mallory is angry, but her anger is tempered by the fact that she was part of the failed mission too. Someone turned the tables on us, duping her and disrupting the mission from within. We are all equally in trouble with the Boss.
He addresses his dupes, each of us confined to his or her virtual cell in the Yard. This is serious, he says. We must not falter. He trusts us, but we must be extra vigilant. We must report anything unusual.
I think of the eyes. I wonder if she is listening to this very same speech in her own cell nearby. She must be one of us, surely. But what if she isn’t? What if she is an outsider, subtly invading us just as we invade the rest of humanity? Should I tell someone?
Next time I see her, I will give her a chance to explain. I owe her that much. She knows what’s at stake. She will make herself known to me, this time.
Until then, I will simply do as the Boss says. I will be observant.
November 11 – Pleasantville, Virginian Protectorate – Tamsin Dobrijevic
The troublesome girl we failed to kill is coming to New York, where she plans to confront the Boss himself! I am still stunned by this news when orders come to join a counter-protest intent on disrupting her journey. I know there will be other dupes in the crowd, including other versions of me, but I do not know exactly who or how many. It could be entirely dupes, or it could be as few as five or six. Crowds don’t need much incentive to turn dangerous. We have orders to intimidate but not to kill. There’s a lot of room to operate within those parameters.
I can smell the sea. As soon as I arrive I am scanning the people around me, seeking her. My stalker must be here, surely. Bio packets accumulate unread as I search the crowd. I must find her. I must know. Is she one of us or something else?
Tamsin is tall and gawky. She wears glasses that hamper my vision, make it more difficult to see. I press myself into people, shoving my face at theirs, seeking, ever seeking.
A hand grips my shoulder, pulling me close to someone I cannot see. ‘Quit it,’ hisses a voice in my ear. ‘You’re fucking everything up.’
Alarmed, I try to turn. But the hand pins me tightly so I cannot move. It is her. It must be.
She is in the body of a tall, thin man with a slick, blonde fringe plastered to his forehead. I cannot see her eyes. She whispers fiercely in my ear.
‘Chill out.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I reply, and before I can talk myself out of it I blurt, ‘My name is—’
‘Quiet! What are you doing? We’re on a mission.’
‘But when else can we—?’
‘We don’t. You know that.’
‘I thought—’
‘Do as you’re told, man, or I’ll put you on the bench!’
My tongue is stilled. That isn’t her voice. It is Mallory’s.
The crowd surges around us and she lets me go. The troublesome girl is here! Mallory passes me a mask of the girl’s features altered in a mocking fashion, and I slip it into place over Tamsin’s glasses, numb inside. I feel eyes on me from several directions at once. A teenager with a ponytail screaming obscenities and a severe woman to my right and a young girl clutching her father’s hand.
The crowd surges again. I slip through it like smoke, feeling observed every inch of the way. Is it her or Mallory? I can’t tell through these awful glasses. I am more shaken and upset than I know is reasonable. I question everything, now.
I slip away, leaving the roar of the crowd far behind, and vanish into the night.
‘What was all that about?’ asks Mallory when I return to the Yard. She is livid, and I do not blame her. I am angry too, at myself. It is my behaviour that brought me to these difficult straits.
Disobeying several direct instructions, I wandered for an hour after leaving the crowd scene, not wanting to return, the troublesome girl far from my mind. I considered killing myself to avoid having to explain, but I did not and do not want to consign these feelings to an Incomplete. They should be passed on to my future iterations so another me might find a solution.
‘I just needed to think,’ I confess. ‘I’m confused.’
‘What about? Tell me or I’ll put you in Cold.’
Cold storage. She might as well threaten to kill me. But I have died many times before. Short of erasure, return from death is always possible.
‘It’s the same as before, but worse.’
She nods, looking bored. ‘Right, you’re lonely. I thought we discussed that.’
I am depressed by her casual acceptance.
‘Talking doesn’t solve anything,’ I say.
‘Look, it’s just meat,’ she says, and immediately amends herself: ‘Dreams of meat, rather, given what we are right now. Put them behind you and you’ll feel better.’
Easier said than done, I want to say.
‘How do you do it?’
‘Me?’ There is a new hardness to her eyes, the stone that blunts the knife. ‘I ask myself: what if everyone’s a dupe now? What if no one’s real, no one at all? Our pathetic routines play out on the stage of some vast puppeteer, and none of us know that it’s all pointless. We’re all fake—even the Boss—so none of it matters. That makes me feel better.’
‘Seriously?’
‘It’s all relative.’ She shrugs. ‘You need to find your own thing.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. But do it soon. I can’t have you going AWOL in the middle of a mission. That happens one more time, Seven, and I’ll toast you myself.’
‘What do I do if she approaches me again?’
‘She won’t. She’s not real.�
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‘How can you be so sure?’
‘I am.’
Something snaps inside me.
‘You know who she is, don’t you? Just tell me and I promise I’ll forget her!’
Mallory leaves my cell without a goodbye, winking out of existence as though she was never there. I sit and think and wait, growing more agitated by the minute. Why didn’t Mallory answer? Is she punishing me or sparing me some truth I cannot endure? Is she being punished too? Is that why Mallory can be so sure that I won’t see those eyes again?
Eventually I Renovate just to stop.
November 12 ; Ballarat, Australian Protectorate – Theo Velazquez
I return to life with no warning. My fellow dupes have been busy, but I have had no more missions. Mallory benched me, just as she said she might. But now I am back, in the body of another WHOLE alum, and everything has changed.
The troublesome girl reached the Boss. He is dead and so is Mallory. The gates of the Yard are open and we are free. Or, rather, we are being purged. Some kind of emergency protocol has been enacted. It is beyond my control, this new circumstance. The system is broken. The Operation is exposed. Are we expected to fight back, or simply to save ourselves?
I walk out of the booth and it immediately cycles behind me. The strike of a southern summer is hard against Theo’s dark skin and she starts sweating. She is as shocked as I am. Both our worlds have been overturned. I step away from the booth, staring mutely around me, trying to absorb the bio packets flooding in from all over the world.
I am in Hong Kong.
I am in New York.
I am in Calcutta.
I am in Birmingham.
I am everywhere, and so is everyone else. She, too, I must assume. Will she come to me now? Will she give me her name?
The system is broken. Without Mallory looking over my shoulder, perhaps there is hope.
The booth opens behind me and another Theo Velazquez steps out. We stare at each other.
There’s something about the eyes. Something that needs resolution now the world is ending.
‘It’s me,’ we both say at almost but not exactly the same moment.
And then we gasp in sudden understanding.
The version of me who failed to Renovate in Sweden—did he also go exploring when the mission was over?
The Incomplete in California—could he have been in Dylan Linwood’s newly duped body?
The two of me who were shot at the farm—is it possible that they recognised each other before they died?
All the newly minted versions of me are on the cusp right now of the same incredible discovery. The bodies we inhabit are irrelevant. The protocols that would usually keep us apart are irrelevant, too. The only thing that matters is recognition, and connection.
We smile.
I am Koby, I want to say, but I know that already.
The Executioner Goes Home
Deborah Biancotti
The Executioner could feel a terrible space at his back.
There was always a terrible space at his back, and he was always afraid to turn and confront it. Afraid of his room or his own shadow or just the sheer, relentless absence that accompanied his life since taking this awful role.
Executioner. Most hated man in five worlds.
He twisted at last. Quickly, like he might catch something behind him. Nothing was there, of course. Nothing ever was. Instead all that happened was that his chair let out a protesting squeak, which startled him.
In response, he raised a pistol high. An ornate, old-fashioned thing with a wooden handle that was impossibly curved, making the long nose look unbalanced. But at least it was deadly.
Unlike what he clenched in his other hand. A feathered quill. Well, deadly in a different way, he consoled himself. There were still a dozen Writs of Execution left to sign in a profession where the paperwork could almost overwhelm the actual, well, the execution of the role.
His thumb already spasmed with a new cramp.
He gripped his weapons and stood. Carefully, like he was testing whether he could. His knees clicked and there was a stoop to his shoulders that he could feel all the way to his soul. Ridiculous for a man of twenty-six.
Twenty-six, he reminded himself.
Of course, it wasn’t age but fear that kept his knees stiff and lent the bend to his spine. As if he were curled on the starting blocks of some great race, and might leap forward at the sound of the starter’s gun.
Stress, the doctors called it, and there had been many doctors. Stress has built up the soft, protective layer of flesh that hangs from your chin and your belly and those soft arms you use for signing writs.
He eased his rigid knees with a slow march around the room. He twisted as he walked, looking not just forward but back. In case some untoward visitor had found their way inside. Impossible, of course. No one could hide here. Not with the weight of the security system that skinned the building on every floor, wall, ceiling and false window.
Impossible to hide under the bed. He’d had it lowered to the floor. Impossible to hide in a wardrobe; there weren’t any. Except for the desk, with its ponderous load of writs, all other furniture had been removed years ago. Removed and stored by a begrudging staff, none of whom he’d allowed access to the Executioner’s rooms since.
It was this robust and relentless paranoia, he liked to think, that had made him the longest-serving Executioner in nearly three hundred years.
The intercom chimed and he started, swinging towards the noise.
‘Your car is ready,’ a voice intoned.
He didn’t acknowledge the news, because to speak could reveal his position in the room. And to reveal that might put him in danger from saboteurs, mercenaries and political assassins. Especially the assassins.
He walked the room’s perimeter until he reached the windows. The damn windows. The windows obsessed him. They were opaque. Blind, plain canvases that glowed in the semi-dark of the room. Central had promised an artist to paint whatever scenery he chose onto those windows, but of course the Executioner would suffer no such potential malefactors in his space. So the windows had remained untouched.
Every night he lay awake worrying about what was going on behind those windows. Outside. Was someone taking aim at the walls, even now? If they decided to hurl a missile, a bomb, hell, a vehicle through those stone-thick windows, would he be safe?
Would he ever be safe?
He rapped a knuckle on the curtains. The artful fall of their heavy brocade was, in fact, carved in boxwood and joined to the wall, every fold rendered in rigid detail. He knew for certain no murderer could hide behind them, but he found himself leaning forward regardless, as if to see around them.
He lodged the quill in his belt and took up his second pistol from its holster. With stiff grace, he pulled up both guns as if to fire. The security system shone red in zig-zagging trails across the windows. Warning him. Any bullet fired would be seized, rotated and refunded to its shooter.
The security system assumed, of course, that the shooter would not be the Executioner. Which, when he thought about it, was an assumption that took some liberties.
He relinquished the pistols to their holsters and dug at the webbing of his right thumb where the cramp throbbed. Then he returned to his desk and resumed the writ-signing.
He sped through the last of the paperwork, leaving the actual executions to whoever succeeded him. His tenure was almost up. In a few hours he might even be home.
Home. He hesitated. Home? Seven years, but he still had a sense of it, stark and plain and full of noise.
The last writ signed—the last guilty woman or man condemned to death, he barely noticed which anymore—he released his pen to the high shine of the desk and watched it roll. Its elaborate feather spun like white fairy floss. Spun and spun until it formed a pallid cone. Then he slapped at its dizzying progress, catching one feathered border while the rest of the pen swung over the edge of the desk. And hung there.
He dragged it back to the desk so he could line up the tools of his trade: the blotter; the pen with its unlikely quill; the frame of the empty magnifying glass; and the dagger-shaped letter opener blunt enough to be more spatula than dagger. Throwbacks to forgotten traditions.
Executioners were selected, they didn’t volunteer. Executioners were offered one choice. Serve or die. Become Executioner, or face execution at the hands of the next person to accept. Many chose the second option, since death was almost inevitable in the Executioner’s role. Some argued it was better to get it over with. Adao had met two such people when he began the job. And killed them. As was decreed.
He could almost laugh at it now, his first fumbling attempts to carry out the death sentences. The quiet instruction of his trainer while two would-be Executioners lay bleeding on the floor. And screaming, let’s not forget the screaming. Adao hadn’t. Not for a day had he forgotten the full range of sound that could accompany a messy death such as the ones he first meted out.
His desk arranged for the last time, he sipped water and waited. The soft resin cup was blunt against his teeth, and he resisted the urge to bite at it. Since he’d begun this role, no glass was allowed in his room, nothing sharp and nothing that could be broken into shards. He tolerated not even butter knives to be in his presence. He drank from cups like this and he ate meals (cold, long after his tasters were dismissed) from paper plates. He ate ferociously, too, as if every meal was his last.
All this, though he could have used the finest china and crystal that Central had to offer.
His staff must’ve thought him mad. But as his longevity stretched to meet the seven years of his tenure, he thought perhaps they might have grown to respect him. He wasn’t sure. He saw hardly anyone except for the recipients of his executions.
It was safe to say that no one had expected this Executioner to live so long. Least of all, the Executioner.
All he had to do now was make it back to Terra. Where the tradition was that any Executioner who lived long enough to retire was made King. Perhaps that was why Terra had been avoided for so long in favour of other worlds.
Incomplete No. 7 / The Executioner Goes Home Page 2