Eli William - Cash Crash Jubilee

OKAY, WE’VE GOT TO MOVE QUICKLY.Without waiting for Mayuko’s reaction, Amon glanced at the pulsing steel surface. Already the dent was as big as a giant’s fist.

He gave Mayuko precise instructions and she went into the bedroom.

WHATEVER YOU DO, texted Amon, as he waited around the corner, DON’T LOOK AT ME. I’LL PASS RIGHT BY YOU, BUT I NEED YOU TO PRETEND I’M NOT EVEN THERE. NOT EVEN A GLANCE IN MY DIRECTION.

She nodded, opened the emergency door, and stepped out onto the fire escape landing.

“Stay put!” rattled the emoticon man, his voice drifting to their ears from the portal in the living room. “My men are stationed downstairs and we can follow you to any floor. Don’t you dare waste my time!”

As Amon had suspected, they were watching the exit, but that wouldn’t matter. With a digimake eraser he rubbed out his entire body from head to toe, charged across the bedroom, and dashed out the door past Mayuko.

Taking the stairs two, three, four at a time, the division between each step irrelevant in his haste, Amon bounded to the next landing. Spinning around, he half-stumbled up another flight and reached the seventy-first floor. There he saw the emergency door for the apartment directly above Mayuko’s and gave its handle a quick yank but of course it was locked. No time for that , he thought, and kept on climbing.

Clang, clang, thump. Clang, clang, clang, thump. The sporadic rhythm of his feet on the metal grating beat out of time with the steady thudding on the elevator door. His ears were still half in the room with Mayuko and he made her perspective into a thin overlay. She stood beside the table looking at the dent. The steel egg seemed to be hatching now, with jagged shards of metal jutting from a small hole open at its peak. As though nothing were amiss, she went into the kitchen and filled the kettle, just as Amon reached the top of the stairwell wondering if she was planning to scald them.

On the left side of the roof he saw a raised block that resembled a small stage, where a thin man wearing a blue polyester jacket was strapping a bungee cord to a pudgy man in street clothes. On the far right, a square glass chamber that Amon guessed was an elevator stuck out over the edge. Two lineups bordered by rope barriers ran in parallel between the two, one headed for the bungee ride, one the elevator. Amon sprinted to the right along the outside of the nearest rope. As he approached the chamber, a glass platform crowded with thrill-seekers rose into it. When the platform became level with the roof, it stopped and the clear wall of the chamber slid open left and right from a vertical slit in the middle, whereupon the passengers poured off and got in line for the ride. When he reached the edge of the roof, Amon stopped beside the nearest rope, pushed in the people on the other side to make room for himself, and stepped over to join the front of the line for the elevator. As those around him began to board, Amon butted his way towards the doors, the absence that shoved and shouldered everyone aside getting strange looks. Then, just when he was about to step over the threshold, an arm swung down in his path like the barrier at a railway crossing.

“Sir,” said the owner of the arm, another man in a blue polyester jacket who stood to the side of the door, “You’ll have to go to the back of the line.”

Most ride operators discouraged cutting ahead by adding an extra charge, but some hired attendants like this guy to keep the crowds flowing quickly and maximize profits. Irritated by this unexpected obstacle, Amon made a tight fist and was about to slug him when he thought of a cheaper way through. Quickly, he changed his digimake settings to turn himself visible only to the man. He then set the surface of his palm to play a LifeStream montage of every moment he had ever dusted someone—beginning with Freg and working backwards to his very first mission—before holding it up in front of the man’s eyes. Immediately the man was transfixed, staring at the shifting images of person after person collapsing in horrendous agony, until Amon flicked aside his jacket, lowered his upraised hand, and gestured to his hip, directing the man’s gaze towards the holster clipped there. Once he saw the weapon, the man’s focus drew back and seemed to take in Amon’s whole body for the first time, including his concrete gray uniform, and his eyes went wide. This was Amon’s cue to step forward—the arm across the doorway no longer offering any resistance—and he got in the elevator with the others crowding in behind him.

Just as the doors slid shut, there was a vaporous hiss. White steam was rising from a kettle and brown granules filled a strainer set atop a cup. Mayuko was making coffee. When she glanced back at the elevator, Amon saw that the hole was about the size of a man’s head now and was stretching steadily as booted feet slammed repeatedly into its rim.

The glass chamber was the tip of a long rectangular shaft that ran down the side of the building to the street far, far below. As the platform began to plunge down the shaft, Amon found himself enthralled by the vista beneath the slivers of transparent floor not blocked by the feet crowded around him. Sheer cliffs of rippling promovation wildfire on all sides and ramified coaster tracks inter-spiraling between them whipped past as though rocketing towards the sky, while the squirming specks of cars and pedestrians that he could see through scaffolding cracks grew larger and larger. His readout said abuse of authority , intimidation , and, repeated every second, invisibility . This last action was more expensive than the others. The fee for completely erasing something from the ImmaNet in a private space (such as the Liquidation Ministry) was high enough, but applying invisibility to the human body in public was strictly banned by credilaw since it could cause dangerous collisions, and nine times out of ten was used for some perverted voyeuristic offense. Moreover, unlike the other actions, he had it on continuously. Amon felt sorry that Mayuko had to pay these hefty fines. The total was nothing compared to what it would have cost to dust the men in the elevator, but it would send her into debt before long, unless he could find a hidden place to turn visible as soon as he got to the street.

Despite all this, Mayuko seemed to be coping well. The hole was now big enough for a toddler to crawl through, and the jagged shards of metal that projected dangerously into the center were gradually bending outwards. But she just sat at the table sipping her black coffee and breathing deeply as she patiently awaited them. Amon was impressed.

The continuous battering seemed to have softened the metal, for all of a sudden the hole expanded several centimeters in every direction and the thudding ceased. Seconds later, the long nose of a tengu poked out slowly through the mangled door, followed by his head and shoulders. Suddenly, hands boosted him by his legs from behind and he flew smoothly through the hole, slipping barely between the jutting blades as though escaping from a shark’s jaw. Diving to the floor, he did a roll, sprang to his feet, and flapped his wings, flicking a color-wriggling splatter of InfoRain residue onto the walls. He then went over to the hole and kicked the shards outwards until all the sharp tips were bent flat against the door. When he was done, the remaining tengu immediately began to crawl in one by one and line up facing the way they had come. Once all eight were through, two stood on each side of the hole and took the hands that came out, helping the emoticon man into the room, wrinkled head first. Once he was standing with them, they did a simultaneous about-face, their golden eyes regarding Mayuko from the base of their long noses, like the crosshairs of sniper rifles. The bald man faced her too, if he could be said to face anything now that his featureless wall of pallid flesh was on again.