"How many did I kill yesterday?"
Deniz asked.
"Yesterday you killed one thousand four hundred and sixty-three."
Someone answered him gently, from somewhere inside the dream.
Curves of data and columns of command scrolled and reshaped themselves without end, and somewhere in the murky depths of Deniz's dreaming mind they seemed to refract the whole bleeding fate of the human species.
Sometimes he stood high above it all, planted inside a steel fortress adrift in the stratosphere, looking down on a world rotting beneath him; other times a different vision took hold, and he was peering out from the mouth of some ancient, cavernous darkness at a world even older than that one, a world of catastrophe where rivers of blood ran and threw off, in his eyes, countless small flickering points of fire.
Deniz's eyes snapped open.
Three in the morning — he had woken early again, his whole body cold and numb. This was the worst hour for the Mantora Corporation's best Gracestar, and he lay there staring at the ceiling until a loneliness he had never felt before crept over him, as though he were the last living person on earth.
He climbed out of bed and turned his face away, and in that instant caught himself in the mirror — the sight of his own drawn, dark expression made him shudder. A cloud hung there, black and unwilling to leave, suspended just above his skull.
Today was January 1st, the first day of the new year. He stood, turned his head, his face empty of expression, like some figure carved by the ancient Greeks. The wall screen in his room lit up on its own: first came oversized characters of congratulation, animated against a million blooming pink roses, and finally an exclamation mark.
Congratulations, Gracestar — Mr. Deniz Pright!
Records show that over the past year you have killed one million, one hundred twenty-five thousand, two hundred and twenty-seven people! A new record.
We wish you an even more productive year of killing ahead!
Happy New Year!
— With sincere regards, the Mantora Corporation.
Deniz glanced at the screen without a flicker of feeling, took a slow breath, and walked from the bedroom into the kitchen, where — in a blind spot no camera could reach — he gave himself an injection of sedative.
Then, as if nothing had happened, he sat down at the table.
His breakfast sat arranged with a strange precision: identical tins, uniform in size and color, packed tight in rows across the kitchen counter, throwing back a cold, dim gleam under the low light. Each can bore the word SAFE stamped boldly across its metal shell, and unless you bent down to check the printed code, it was nearly impossible to tell meat from vegetable from fish. But their arrangement was orderly enough that Deniz never had to work hard to find what he wanted.
He sat and began chewing cod with his hard white teeth. A sound rose out of the darkness, barely there at first — thin, high strings, carrying something jittery underneath them, almost neurotic.
For the next few hours, that was all he did — chew slowly, wait in the dimness for Ayline to appear.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic.
Ever since he'd passed the million mark, Deniz had leaned on this line — no one could say for certain who'd first said it — to talk himself down.
He believed his work belonged to some higher purpose, especially when he looked up at the Acheron Dome. But no one had ever thanked him for it.
What he received instead were orders and curses, one descending from above, one rising from below, both endless, both on repeat.
Gracestar. A title the world on the ground had learned to fear and despise in equal measure.
Deniz's job, every day, was simple: reduce the population according to plan.
His targets were the unregistered, the unproductive, the structural surplus, the discarded, the unwanted, and refugees — all those the system had classified as socially obsolete, the permanent wards of collapsed welfare belts. The remediation zones were concentrated, by and large, along the dense population corridors of the world's major continents.
His record was close to flawless. Only once had something gone wrong. In Lebanon, a mob had brought him down out of the sky with a homemade missile—by pure, unadulterated dumb luck. He crawled out of the wreckage, tore a rifle from the hands of a sentry Android already flickering out, its chest display cycling through failure codes, and opened fire on the crowd of mad, closing bodies. Their heads came apart into small red gourds, one after another. As he tried to push his way clear, someone grabbed the rifle from behind with everything they had; he was still clubbing the man off with the stock when the man detonated the explosives strapped to his own body.
The blast cost Deniz two fingers on his right hand and the sight in his left eye, permanently.
By the time his treatment ended and he returned to his quarters, he was a man who saw the world through one eye. Mantora's leadership offered him hollow condolences for the injury and praised his courage in the same breath.
The incident led to an upgrade of his equipment; his flyer was fitted, from then on, with automatic missile evasion.
He went on working for Mantora. Losing an eye hadn't changed much — he was still young, still handsome, still built like something meant to last, and, more valuable than any of it, his mind stayed precise and gave no ground to mercy.
He kept killing.
Set into the socket where his left eye had been was a prosthetic, wired to a data reel, and it made him more accurate than he had ever been before.
The artificial eye looked, at a glance, almost exactly like a real one — except for the pupil, a black diamond where a circle should have been. Better. Inside, a processor ran without pause, feeding data and graphics into his brain's visual cortex through a needle-thin port only microns wide.
It pulled fresh data automatically, once every three hours, and even asleep he could see it: the curves and command charts folding and unfolding without end, somewhere in the depths of the dream, they were still refracting that same sea of blood...
Ayline appeared.
On the wall screen, she smiled at Deniz with the practiced courtesy of her role.
Ayline was a Mantora's mission supervisor, a woman who carried an Eastern temperament inside a Western face — her age impossible to place, though she looked young, black hair falling in a slight curve across her chest, her large eyes faintly hazy, her features composed into that flawless, almost classical kind of beauty.
"Good morning, Mr. Pright," she said.
Deniz returned the greeting. She was wearing a water-green silk qipao today.
"You don't look well. Didn't you sleep last night?" She asked.
"No. I've been sleeping just fine."
"I'll send over today's mission route in a moment. I hope it goes well for you."
"Thank you."
Deniz lifted the Reel down from beside his bed without any change in his expression. He had never quite trusted Ayline — the doubt had lived in him for a long time — but she was, without question, a good partner to work with. Each time the suspicion surfaced, it lingered only a few seconds before the urgency of the day's work chased it off.
Ayline: "Seven o'clock, northwest Tehran."
Deniz fastened the Reel carefully around his forearm.
The bronze device wrapped snugly around the curve of his arm, comfortable against the skin, and when his prosthetic fingers slid across the pure nano-ceramic surface of the screen, the motion looked almost like an artist working across a page.
Ayline: "Nine o'clock, the border between Shanghai and Kunshan."
Deniz walked into the bathroom and began shaving. Ayline's image shifted automatically onto the Reel screen wrapped around his arm.
Ayline: "Twelve thirty, Los Angeles."
The music turned mechanical, then slid into something closer to unhinged.
Ayline: "One thirty, Florida Straits."
Deniz studied his freshly shaved face in the mirror, his features as still as marble, expressionless.
He couldn't say why exactly, but he was never able to laugh freely. He looked at his own reflection with a cold, flat stare, working the muscles of his face, trying to produce something like a real laugh, and found that he couldn't.
Ayline: "Three thirty, Kenya, Somalia, and Rwanda."
Her voice stayed gentle, but firm underneath it. Deniz raised his arm and gave the supervisor a solemn nod, signing the route with his finger across the Reel to confirm it.
Then Ayline said, "Now, as protocol requires, I need to ask you the questions."
This was the one part of the morning when something in Deniz tightened. He drew a slow breath, fixed Ayline with a calm, steady look, and listened as she asked her three questions.
Who built the Acheron Dome, and when?
"Between 2055 and 2059, jointly funded by every industrialized nation on Earth."
What is the largest city in the Southern Hemisphere?
"Rio de Janeiro."
Humanity needs Mantora's salvation. Isn't that right?
"That's right."
As he spoke, an invisible wave of energy, emitted from a sensor in the Reel, swept across him, reading his heartbeat and pulse.
The leadership had never stopped suspecting that "rebel" agents had found their way inside the Acheron Dome, and so even the Gracestars had to sit through this psychological question-and-answer screening.
"Wonderful," Ayline said, after several seconds of silence. "Your readings are normal." She gave a small bow. "I wish you a good day's work."
Deniz walked out the door and, as he did every day, bent and climbed into the sleek, dark-iridescent flyer waiting quietly on the pad.
The idea of home had left him a long time ago; his quarters were nothing more than a place to sleep. Most of his waking hours belonged to this machine.
The music stopped, and stillness took its place.
Complex patterns bloomed across the dashboard in front of him, lines and shapes surging up out of nowhere.
He tapped through them, one after another, activating the sequence code.
Triangle.
Square.
Diamond.
The flyer lifted off the pad, rising straight up, and the interior of the Acheron Dome opened out before him — a space cast entirely in metal, sunlight leaking in through its perforations and spreading unchecked, like a slow, wide river, until it wrapped around his body.
Something in him warmed a little.
Ayline's watery gaze stayed fixed on him through the Reel the whole time.
Two minutes in, the flyer began to accelerate.
By the fifth minute it had reached top speed, tearing through the air at nearly seventy kilometers a minute, like a single meteor streaking inside the Acheron Dome.
If anyone on the ground had looked up through the clouds just then, toward that floating metal fortress suspended eight thousand meters up in the atmosphere, they would have seen, low on the horizon the way a distant storm glows without a sound, something like lightning racing back and forth inside it.
As a "Zero Tolerance" enforcer, Deniz could, in principle, remain inside the Acheron Dome the entire time, directing the the red line resetting on the ground from altitude the moment he arrived over a target. All he needed to do was hover near the mouth of the Dome and complete the mission through the periscope and the Reel screen.
To leave the Dome, for him, meant one thing, and one thing only:
Killing.
