The assassins who liked shopping

The Assassins Who Liked Shopping

Yasenko Yvegeny's CV always raised a few eyebrows. It was true that the
world was currently vicious and cold and lethal to those who refused to
accept the way things were, but humanity was still civilised.
Because Yas, which was how he introduced himself to people he had just
killed who didn't die straight off, was not in the least civilised.
Despite his neat boyish haircut and a slim, well-dressed figure,
despite the readiness with which he opened doors and pulled out chairs,
despite the slightly stilted and respectfully enunciated speech behind
religiously brushed white teeth, he had the people skills of a
psychopath. He had heard of manners and his main response when he
encountered it was to beat it up and shoot it three times in the head.
In this sense, he would be nothing more than a trained, leashed killer
with a peculiar sense of humour and purposely horrible grammar if he
hadn't cultivated such a fastidious fascination with fashion.
So today Yasenko Yvegeny was going shopping. With Crash. Crash was
slick and cool and charming and had even less nuts and bolts in the
right places within his head than Yas did, but he had impeccable
manners and a Mark V AK-47 he was very good with. This latter fact did
the job of convincing Yasenko not to beat him up and shoot him three
times in the head as was his natural instinct. Crash was not a friend,
but he was a shopping partner and somehow a mirror is never as
trustworthy as a second opinion. And Crash was a good second opinion.
Eighty percent of his flat was wardrobe.
Today was not really a good shopping day. For such quick assignments as
the one he had been stuck with last night, Yas usually used a knife,
which meant latex gloves at least, which he had forgotten, and now he
had the icky feeling of a thin crust of dried blood all over his hands
that wimpy hotel soap had not been able to totally eradicate. This
meant fabric appreciation and texture assessment would go down.
Thinking about it in the vectorway tube to Copyfactor faded the
satisfaction of a job well done. It also made it unnecessary for Yas to
restrain himself from the urge to unVelcro the door at the next stop
and disembowel everyone there, a common preoccupation he faced during
long journeys.
It also meant he almost missed his stop. If it hadn't been for the
distinctive sounds of Crash throwing a fit being broadcast over the
P.A. instead of a soothing 'You are now approaching Copyfactor,
authorisation required to enter this stop', he would have ridden the
vectorway to the Channel and back. As it was he peeled the locking
strap away and exited in a half-hearted spring. No one claimed his
tube, and soon it whirred away to join a few others lined up in a
Departure Capillary branching off from the side of the main tunnel. A
mobile security camera crept up on insectoid legs to peer at him,
ducked a flying switchblade and trundled off, satisfied that he was
him.
Crash wasn't hard to find. He had driven his yellow coupe into the
stop's control shed to see what was keeping Yas and scratched a line
about the size of a spaniel's hair on his bumper. He was not happy.
Everyone could tell.
Yas grabbed one of Crash's arms as it spun in full fling, blocked the
right hook Crash instinctively threw at him, blocked the automatic
headbutt that followed, and said hello in the brief pause after that,
when it dawned on Crash that not everybody wanted to gut him on
sight.
"Ah, Yas!"
"Yes. I am late?"
"Ever so. How's your credit?"
"I must cash a kill."
Crash nodded understandingly. Papylon, the environmental company that
was housed within the greenhouse-like atmosphere of Copyfactor, billed
its employees according to assignments completed and the rates were
proportional to the difficulty of the job. Assassins got a lot,
geneticists even more. But whoever you were at Papylon, you had to do
your job to get your money, and submit it to financial processing
through the ether-line. Cashing in a kill, a virus, a kneecapping or a
gene was employee norm.
Reassured about the safety of his body, Yas let go and Crash hopped
into his car to reverse out. The three technicians having Chinese
takeout inside the control shed made mental notes to go alfresco next
time. Taking a running jump, Yas managed to land inside the passenger
seat just before Crash hit the accelerator.
"Do I need a new jacket?" Crash asked, seemingly unaware of human
frailty as regards large moving vehicles. He spun the steering in one
hand and the world seemed to rotate in a different direction, buildings
blurring, the white snaking lines of the vectorways melting into the
steel-blue-washed-grey of offices and residentials, decorative greenery
acting as if tossed in a blender. Yas had learned well from previous
efforts and braced his feet against the floor while he keyed his
assignment's number into his leech. He looked up at Crash's query and
shrugged.
Crash hit the brakes, but it was because a man walking his dog was
halfway across the road. Few people could really say things that
surprised Crash.
"I mean, say cashmere goes out," Crash continued, waving to the
pedestrian, "and so does wool, and all those iffy blends, and they
start saying naturals are in again." He gunned the throttle, jerked
back in his seat as he took off, shifting gears like a demon. "That
maniac new Dior designer and his flax-thick-cut-weaves. I mean, we'd be
going back to wearing leaves."
"Fur," Yasenko said.
"Leaves."
"Fur," Yasenko insisted, yanking at the steering and nearly helping
Crash drive into the plate-glass window displaying the highlights of
the Terryalla fall/winter menswear collection. For about three minutes
after the brakes were pressed into abrupt and violent service there was
a silence unhindered by all the buzzing in their ears and the blood
gushing through suddenly dilated veins, supercharged with adrenaline.
Within three inches of the front of Crash's car, fifty storeys of
sandblasted steel, concrete blocks and alloy-buffed aluminium rose
majestically into the soft, patchy greys and whites of the clouds,
sparkling coldly at them as they totally ignored it and stared
shell-shocked ahead of them.
In fact they were shocked, but not by the near accident.
"Look at that parka!" Crash breathed. "Look at the healthy
glow!"
"Best lining is always Russian mink," Yas said patriotically, although
he was an Italian national.
Both of them immediately vacated the car (which, used to sudden
evacuations, locked itself) and ran with the exuberance of small
children towards ice-cream on a hot day directly at the sliding doors
of the Terryalla store. Which parted obligingly for them.
And shot out, from the ends of their cunningly contrived
cross-sections, exquisitely aimed and timed needle-thin syringe darts
which caught Crash in the throat and Yas behind the ear just as they
stepped over the threshold with senses primed to full browsing capacity
ready to survey quality, cut, stitching and price tag in the most
casual of glances, the lightest of touches. Consequently, they did not
get the closer look at the magnificent furs that had distracted them
so, and they crashed, passing out very quickly, to the cool
diamond-tile marble flooring all Terryalla outlets sported, as if to
remind you how you could never get this kind of interior design done at
home.

When Crash said, "Yas?" he had so much upbeat perkiness inherent in
him it was impossible to believe that he had just discovered he was
completely paralysed and blind two minutes ago.
When Yas said, "Ah," he had the right kind of voice that suggested he
had just discovered he was completely paralysed and blind. On his back
on a springy and soft surface, but paralysed and blind.
"I think it's a specific-acting muscle relaxant."
Yas considered this thoughtfully.
"I think it is dark," he contributed.
"Please be understanding," a completely unfamiliar woman's voice said
from speakers of marvellous quality somewhere deep within the walls. If
there were walls. "We intend to make you an offer that will expand the
fundamentals of haute couture. Please be understanding. We do not wish
you to interrupt before you have a chance to weigh the offer."
"Please let me move," Crash requested hopefully.
"There will be some time. Please wait."
And soothing Muzak began to play.
Crash couldn't see Yas, but he was sure Yas was wearing his pained
expression, the one that spelled suffering in several different
languages all over his big liquid dark eyes.
"The music has refreshingly convinced me they want to hurt us."
"She said haute couture," Crash said with a sprig of cheer in his
voice.
"Couture," Yas said dreamily, pain forgotten.
The line between couture and ready-to-wear had blurred so much no one
blinked if you trailed peacock feathers under the hem of your geometric
/ neo-Cubic inspired patchwork coat on the walk to work. Normality is
defined by everyday use, and black was the 'safe' colour. (It was also
the 'assassin' colour, which made it easier for people to stay out of
harm's way, for assassin-killing assassins, and for non-assassins who
wanted be thought harmful. The only problem was with real assassins
thinking everyone else in black was an assassin, when this was clearly
not the case. Human nature is cyclic.)
But couture would not readily undo the effects of whatever paralysing
agent had them in its grip, and Crash was forced to resort to darker
thoughts, which gave rise to darker ideas. Unfortunately he was in no
position to carry them out, and so had to resort to the last weapon he
had left: his mouth.
"I think you don't have the slightest clue what to do with us!" he
accused the disembodied voice at the top of his voice.
Yas turned his head to direct an imploring gaze at Crash, whom he
couldn't see but his ears told him was very definitely (and loudly)
some distance (not far enough) to his right.
"Perhaps if we were not taking the pissing at them they will be nice
to us?" he suggested.
"I don't believe in being nice to people," Crash said with a superior
air of dismissal, "no reason why they should."
"Please be understanding-"
There was a spark and a fireball and then a deafening silence, that of
dead machinery and shut-down computers, as Crash's understanding
overstood. Yas couldn't know what had happened, but he felt a sense of
liberation in some way, encouraged by the bumping, swearing, clumping
noises that only Crash could be making, working his way around in the
dark. Straining his eyes he could see a dim green silhouette, and
unconsciously approved of the fall and folds of the fabric of Crash's
suit as it hung on the assassin, half-doubled over the illuminated face
of the leech cuffed to his wrist.
"I am not yet working," he said aloud.
"You got a double dose of the stuff. See, that's why being short isn't
half bad. Here." More bumps and scuffles ensued as Crash tried to
navigate the room by the glow of his leech, and failed, eventually
terminating in a relieved exhalation as Crash reached Yas without
falling over and knelt to press one of the handy little terminals of
the leech into Yas's jaw. "You mind a little shock?"
"Is it a Hugo Boss kind of shock?" Yas asked hopefully.
Crash told his leech to put a few volts into Yas. The leech did. Yas
jumped and then the room exploded into a crazy mazy white-light
pure-as-bright skymap that dizzied across your eyeballs and floored
both of them into more or less the same knocked-out-flat positions they
had been laid out in when they had literally fallen for fur, only a
while ago.

"Yas."
"Yes."
"I think the backup security system doesn't like us. Hey, you just
cashed a kill, right?"
"Yes."
"Think you pissed off the guy's wife or something? Maybe he hadn't
signed his will yet?"
"I pissed off him. Last words were 'dammit you're early'."
"You mean he knew you were coming for him?"
"Oh no. He was most surprised seeing knife in throat&;#8230;"
Yas's voice died away as he pondered the improbability of that. He
might be dense but he was physically fast, and the people he killed
usually didn't have time to get pissed / see his knife hilt-deep in
their gullets.
"&;#8230;surprised seeing me," he corrected himself. "Perhaps
Ardell will send friends from Papylon to come save us?"
Crash made a snorting sort of noise.
"We're Ardell's accessories," he said. "You think about it. I mean, he
might think we're out of fashion next week and give us marching orders
anyway. If somebody guts us first, he doesn't need to worry about us
getting revenge on him for firing us, right?"
Rather unhappily, Yas conceded, and drooped his head, although it was
pretty much on the floor.
"It's society," Crash went on, savage in this new and unexplained
darkness, which was colder than the first one, "it's the attitude
society has. You know, last time if you did someone in you got done in
by something called a government. It was like the Law and Business
Boards combined. But that was different. That was when killing people
was a bad thing. This is the future, we see things better now."
"They killed real animals to get leather and fur last time."
"Yeah. Now they kill us. I mean, we kill us, but they make it happen."
A scar, fading under regular bombardments of vitamin E but still
tracing a thin crescent across Crash's back, itched, and for a moment
there was a madness of reliving the moment when the scimitar had torn
through his skin (and a classic Gaultier trench), followed by dust up
his nose. "They're rich and they need us to outfashion each other,
we're the ultimate luxury lifestyle addition. And we do it anyway
because we get to wear cool stuff. Hey, Yas. You know why we do
this?"
"We get to wear cool stuff," Yas said, eager to please.
"Uh, yeah. But we could do business, or practice law, or even go into
advertising. I mean, it hurts less people."
Yas frowned, which is difficult when your nose is squashed on a floor
that doesn't like you.
"No, it does not," he said.
"You don't see blood spilling."
"Some things hurt people worse than we do. Me, I would rather kill
people quickly while they know why they die, like blade six inches deep
in flesh, throat cut from ear to ear, that is easier to explain. Not
papers papers papers piling up saying a million things but the main
thing is your wife takes away your daughter from the divorce and you
die inside while dragging body around through life."
"But I could make pinstripes work if I was a lawyer," Crash
mourned.
"Excuse me," said the man who had spent the previous ten minutes
nervously sidling up to them in the least provoking manner, which was
also the most startling, "excuse me, gentlemen, your documentary is
ready."
Crash made a monumental effort to smile sincerely, and succeeded by
chanting 'Armani, Versace' over and over in his head. He exchanged
puzzled glances with Yas. This was made possible by the gently growing
illumination slowly washing their surroundings into focus, and for Yas,
a welcome return of feeling in his muscles as the tranquilliser slipped
out of his bloodstream. They looked at the man.
He was an average-sized guy in an anonymous three-piece suit and boring
black tie, nearly tripping over the bland shoes he was tiptoeing in,
would have been happy in a crowd, and was terrified to be near these
two extremes of the human spectrum, however excellently incapacitated.
It was clear he was getting paid an enormous sum of money to be
here.
"I wish Mr Langer was here to give you a detailed run-down of our
proposition," he continued, gaining courage from the unexpected
civility he found in their polite attention, "unfortunately Mr Langer
has met with some sort of accident, which his lawyers do not wish to
reveal to us. We will continue with his plan, though, if you will come
with me."
"Did his plan involve sedatives?" Crash inquired.
"Ah-ha-ha," the man said, laughing through a brief spasm of pure fear,
"that was a safety measure, I apologise if it has offended you. We had
no idea how you would react. You do realise you are a phenomenon of
this age and society, don't you?"
He managed to conjure an expression of pleasant respect as he turned to
them holding out a hand, as though they needed help to get up. Crash
though he saw the lips shaping the words 'bonus, promotion'. With a
quick, purposeful whirlwind of limbs he sprang up, snatching Yas by the
neck and propping him up on his feet, and to put their new tour guide
at ease, gave him a little punch on the back.
"Oops," he said.
Yas looked at the body crumpling to the floor, then at the long, wicked
and beautifully contoured blades that had sprung out from the knuckles
of Crash's custom-designed multi-purpose gauntlets.
"The retractable claws on that are very sensitive," he pointed out.
"They react to adrenaline rush and impact but you must reset once a
week."
"But I did. Oh, wait, that was the left hand. Oh well. Better late than
never."
"Inspection-of-premises-time," Yas said, finding what he figured was a
door and pressing the knob set into it, which did nothing, then
experimentally turning it, causing it to swing open and amaze Yas,
whose doors usually slid aside. "He was nice," he added, as an
afterthought

The funny thing about human nature is its ability to change and warp
over a generation into a way of life that completely boggles the
generation before it, and the generation before that, more so because
each generation produced the following generation to begin with. The
radicality of each lifestyle mutation increases with the passing of the
years. By the time Yas and Crash found their ecological, social and
fashion niches, the children of the world had ditched Playstations and
talking dolls for sword-training modules and virtual mathematics
galleries. Just as gramophones had given way to vinyl and vinyl to CDs
and CDs to MP3s and MP3s to pure data, just as the Palmpilot and mobile
phone gave way to the leech, the remnants of whatever caring, sharing
society that had managed to survive the beginning of the twenty-first
century failed to stand up to the test of time. Murder had been a big
deal in the last half of the second millennium. Somewhere after the
Greatest Party In The World (Until 2999, That Is If We're All Still
Alive), someone decided enough was enough. You died in the end, after
all. What you had to do was make your life worth the trouble. What you
needed was enough money to enjoy things, something interesting and
exciting to do in order to convince people you were worth so much, and
the kind of medical technology that will seal up wounds and only wounds
and no other orifices.
Coupled with the growing boredom of the super-rich, the most
unbelievably stable economy the world would ever know for a few decades
yet, a severe revision of homicide laws and the amount of people going
into medicine as opposed to law enforcement, it was not surprising that
the global employment market for 'assassins' expanded so rapidly.
It is only remarkable that some of the assassins lived as long as they
did.

"What do you see?" Yas asked.
"Shopping windows," Crash said.
He fell down because Yas hit him on the ear and told him not to
joke.
"I'm not," Crash said, getting to his feet in a sideways roll that had,
on many occasions, saved his life. He shoved his leech in Yas's face.
"See? There's the windows. Down that door. You feel like hitting stuff,
go hit the people sitting in the windows, okay?"
Yas looked at the lump of featureless, rubbery material stretched
across Crash's lean wrist without seeing either windows or
people.
"I'm guessing you hire people to read your morning papers," Crash said.
He reached for Yas's arm, where there was a similar strip of grey
material bound around the wrist, and before Yas could react, clouted
him across the side of the head. When Yas came to, Crash was done
modifying his leech, and any outrage he felt had to be tempered by the
gratitude he also felt when he looked at his leech and it recognised
him and allowed him to see what it was now stealing from the local
network's computers.
And that was a row of displays, each fitted with a window of glass and
lit bright ready to illuminate the latest and most desirable product.
Only there were no products, unless people in sober suits and executive
haircuts and occasionally garish designer wear from the higher end of
the fashion spectrum counted as products.
"Oh," Yas said, "understood."
"Great," Crash said, "explain."
Yas looked again, and was satisfied, and smiled at Crash until Crash
hit him and told him to explain.
"Cease with the slaps," Yas warned him, sitting up and rubbing the top
of his head, which had really suffered way too much. "Bad for the head.
Look again at people in windows."
"I don't want to. They overdress and over-accessorise and they are so
not in my dinner diary."
"Think about what you say when you say 'over-accessorise'," Yas said.
"These people, they are like Ardell, all of them. They want what is new
and trendy and fashionable and not just clothes. People who like new
clothes are you and me. These people, the rich people, they like new
assassins. They want people like us to be their accessories because it
is like having a new car, a new necklace. And when you are richer, you
want things that are better&;#8230;"
Crash found that his gauntlet's retractable claws still worked
perfectly.
"That's really okay by me," he said, "but it's the thought of someone
shopping me, and not asking me if I want to be shopped or not first,
that gets to me."
"But is not you that is getting shopped," Yas said, getting to his feet
and pulling his clothes straight, like he would just before stepping
into a very expensive couture store. He even dragged a hand through his
hair and checked his carefully manufactured half-asleep-from-boredom
expression in the reflective surface of Crash's gauntlet-claws. "Come
now and act like good fashion critic. We are shopping for new
boss."

[to be continued]