Eli William - Cash Crash Jubilee

“What do you think he’s actually smelling?” Taste and scent were crude senses limited only to the naked world.

“Maybe a bit of his own imagination to augment the overlay.”

“Hallucination?”

“Woah. Sounds like fun.”

“But what’s with the flower obsession? And why this flower in particular?”

“You wanna go over and ask him yourself? I bet he’ll give you a nice sniff.”

I just want to know how one of the top officials at our organization, with prestige and a good salary, ended up like this, thought Amon, but kept his perplexity to himself as it had no bearing on the mission. Instead, he zoomed in on the holster at the minister’s waist.

“Looks like a duster,” said Amon, “but his shirt is covering half the handle, so I can’t tell what kind.”

“I’m betting nerve. His bio says he used to be a Liquidator. That was decades ago, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he held on to his gear. Lots of bureaucrats do I’m told.”

“Let’s hope so.”

Dusters were guns that fired clouds of microscopic robots called “dust,” which could be programmed to perform various tasks. Cog dust did delicate repairs inside engines. Surgical dust did medical operations without scarring. Insulation dust sealed up small cracks. Others, like piranha dust, insomnia dust, and vegetable dust killed their targets or worse. Nerve dusters were standard issue for Liquidators. Both Amon and Rick were carrying one. While nerve dust was not the sort of thing anyone wanted to see unloaded on a crowd of pedestrians, it was not lethal and caused no permanent damage. If Rick’s guess about what kind of weapon the minister carried was right, the chance of a bystander being seriously hurt was low. If it was wrong…

“We’ve got enough background, I think,” said Amon.

Rick nodded. “Should we try to dust him from up here? He’s tall so we could probably find a clean shot somewhere.”

“I say no. I agree that he’s an easy target, but with all those people around there’s still a small chance that someone might take the spray. Let’s try approaching him through the crowd. We can blend in as plants and try to get close. If possible, we’ll lure him to a quiet place. Crash him privately. If he doesn’t budge, we take him out right there on the street.”

“Got it. Let’s go.”

They took the escalator down to the ground floor and exited the mall along with a draft of air-conditioning that clung to them a moment before dissipating, and abandoning them to the stagnant swelter. They crossed the scramble intersection and waded through a converging copse of Fair Ladies Under the Moon, their faceless bud-heads bobbing side to side with each step. Up close now, Amon could see small spines sticking from the joints and interstices where their body parts met, between shoulder and neck, leg and abdomen. Vines ran along the soil from the base of each plant to others close by, interconnecting them all in one great verdant web that blanketed the ground. Even as the plants moved, these organic threads never tangled, wriggling and extricating from each other in response to every adjustment in the configuration of bodies. Feeling the heat of direct sunlight on his exposed face and hands while simultaneously seeing the moon above in the dark firmament made Amon slightly queasy, as though the disjunct between sight and touch sent subtle circadian disturbances through his nervous system.

Through a brief opening in the foliage of limbs, Amon thought he caught Kitao looking right at them, but the next moment he was ogling his surrounding anthro-vegetation as before. When they reached the loam ledge of the curb at the edge of Hachiko Plaza, Amon turned to ask Rick if he’d noticed the same thing and gasped at the sight of him. Rick had become an insect, grotesque in his vivid enlargement. His nose was a sharp needle, his eyes white and lifeless, his skin pale green and translucent, with the foggy red forms of his internal organs visible through his bloated abdomen. Looking down, Amon saw that his own body was likewise transformed.

“Get low!” he hissed and pushed Rick down on the soil—which felt hard, warm, and grimy like summer concrete—and crouched with him behind a perfume kiosk. He gestured for Rick to follow as he shadowed a tight group of plants with dangling fronds like briefcases. Through intermittent gaps in the crowd, he could see Kitao darting his eyes about from his high vantage over the thicket of purplish-red bud-heads. He was searching for them, his right hand hovering next to the holster at his hip. Still stooping, they reached the streetcar stationed in the middle of the plaza and took cover with their backs up against the outer wall.

“How the hell’d he make us into… what are we?” Rick wondered.

Amon clicked on Rick to select his body, activated an image search engine and a FlexiPedia article popped up in the air.

“Aphids,” said Rick, seeing the title of the article in their shared window.

“His software must differentiate us from everyone else.”

“Uh-huh. But how?”

Amon tilted his head and grimaced quizzically.

Rick thought for a moment and answered his own question: “Maybe he’s using our professional profiles. He must have configured the overlay to mark anyone whose profile he has permission to access. That way when GATA staff like us come into close range, we turn into insects.”

“That sounds about right. We’d better be careful. Crazy or not, he did used to be a Liquidator.”

“Yeah. Just check out those nerves of steel. He’s not acting one bit like someone who knows he’s bankrupt.”

The visceral revulsion and shame of cash crashing was inculcated deep in every Free Citizen, so there was no telling how bankrupts might react once they saw Liquidators approaching. Amon had witnessed many get on their knees and beg for mercy. Some wet their pants, or vomited and retched, or screamed soulful terror. Others wept or sobbed silently, while a few fainted or went limp with resignation. Others still flipped into a blank-eyed stupor, as though brain dead, or smiled in a daze of inexplicable euphoria. Now and then, he had heard from his veteran colleagues, a few of them even tried to commit suicide on the spot. Amon remembered one time when a woman crumpled into a convulsive ball and pulled every strand of hair from her head. The worst was when they had tantrums, violently rampaging against anyone and anything within reach. The prevalence of such cases was the reason bankrupts were not told of their financial status until the moment of reckoning; until their cash crash was imminent and impossible to reverse.

Kitao’s show of confidence, his last stand at this busy urban nexus, was an unprecedented reaction in Amon’s career. Only a man who used to be a Liquidator could pull something like this off. To predict the arrival of Liquidators, he had to have the algorithm for calculating bankruptcy and be able to use it on himself. To know that being in a crowd would make them hesitate, he had to be familiar with mission protocol and the prohibitions against long-range fire around bystanders. To mark Liquidators as enemies, he had to have access to their professional profiles. And to even consider trying to fend them off, he needed a duster and training in marksmanship software. Using his insider know-how and experience, the Minister of Records was trying to postpone his own cash crash, in cleverly premeditated disobedience of a cardinal rule he had spent his life at GATA upholding: that bankrupts were no longer citizens.

Yet despite his apparent resolution to fight until the bitter end, the fear seemed to get Kitao at last, for when Amon flung his perspective out of his body and around the corner of the streetcar to scope the scene, he saw the minister dashing off through the plaza, taking huge strides with his long legs. Charging through the milling tangle of green figures, he bowled over a flower that bloomed in his path, sending a cloud of white petals and pollen fluttering in his wake, and disappeared into the dark tunnel under a train-bridge.