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in Pittsfield, rising to 98 degrees at 1:47
P.M.
in Boston. Fair to partly cloudy skies all day; no precipitation.
Without putting on even his aeration sport coat, the fifty-seven-year-old
District Attorney opened the security door by sliding his smartcard through
the slot next to it and exited the Bayberry Hill Singles
Residences. He walked the half mile on a decaying, neglected, stationary
sidewalk uphill to the gleam-ing, newly built Mass Transit Authority station
in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and settled into an orthopedic recliner in
the first-class section of the 6:25
A.M.
Torpedo Train to Boston. He scrutinized fellow passengers for
unfamiliar faces, but like many of Brandon s similar safety-motivated
practices, he per-formed this survey only from force of habit. It had been
four years since the last assassination attempt on a prosecutor or judge
anywhere in the United States. Indeed all violent crime had become rare. Swift
and Sure had been too drastic for his tastes, more radical than it needed to
be, but at least it seemed to be working, for now.
Like most early morning commuters, he donned his virtual reality
helmet and set to work. The eighty-mile trip would re-quire forty-eight
minutes. Once again, Brandon ran the disc:
A closed fist strikes her face. She stumbles backward against the
wall of the welfare apartment, cracking the plaster. The furniture is
flimsy and old, the tiny room dilapidated, yet clean and orderly.  Don t do
this, Jeff, the woman implores, half begging, half mocking, as though more
curious than scared.
Her hands are loosely bound in front with a white cotton handkerchief that
does not block her 360-degree wristband camera. The mans AudioVid recorder is
running, too.
The woman is in her mid-twenties, inexpensively dressed, pretty in spite of
the burgeoning welts on her face. Her eyes reveal a brisk, defiant
intelligence (which almost reminds Brandon of Jan Smith in their college
days).
Her male assailant is slightly older, maybe thirty, tall and muscular,
wearing boots, blue
jeans, and a tattered under-shirt. Two small tattoos decorate his left
arm, and another his right.
The woman s facial expression turns from hostile disdain to unmistakable fear
as the man, eyes unblinking, begins to pour a clear fluid from a metal flask
onto her light blue dress.  What the fuck are you doing? she shouts.
Brandon stopped the VRD, hit the reverse switch, and watched the
woman s face happen and unhappen, then happen again. In-sanely, he wanted
to yell a warning. The disc continued:
His reddish-brown, deep-set eyes flash a chilling gleam; he brandishes an
electronic match.
 You ain t taking my kids away, Stacy. That s all there is to it. It just
ain t gonna happen.
She shudders when he activates the match; the feel of it is corporeal, even in
programmed form. A four-inch white flame instantly rises from its two tiny
metal tines. Her eyes suggest she s no longer able to convince herself that
he s bluffing.
His voice sounds cold, emotionless.  1 told you I d kill you first, bitch, now
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see it comin .
She watches, paralyzed in her denial, as he flips the flaming shard toward her
skirt.
 No, Jesus, no! the woman cries as her clothes begin to burn.  What about our
kids? 
She beats her bound hands at the flames exploding up her dress. Her voice
rises and breaks into a wordless cry. Her hair is burning. She collapses to
the floor, writhing, hands waving at her blackening face.  Oh, God, it hurts
& 
Jeffrey Lewis Cole Sr. stands erect over her, watching calmly. He raises a
finger and runs it over his, front teeth, like some disturbed child fascinated
and lured; entranced, but detached.
(To Brandon the man is like a robot, remotely op-erated by a fun-house
joystick.)
The woman seems to be trying to speak, but she is no longer capable of it.
Cole waits for the sounds she is making to end, then douses her scorched body
with a bucket of water as if extin-guishing a trash-can fire. His
eyes look away, then return and widen slightly, as though a new, less
evil force had somehow appropriated the joystick. He, finds a bedsheet and
carefully, almost lovingly, covers the corpse.
Then he calls the police.
Like most of the Massachusetts intelligentsia, District Attorney Butters was
starting to view cryonics as something more than a huckster s dream, a shell
game with death. At least the medics had gotten there in time to salvage her
brain, he thought. He hoped she would wind up at a legitimate facility.
Of course the wealthiest went to the Phoenix or one of its high-tech
competitors, and paid $175,000
for a full-body sus-pension, or $70,000 for a neuro. But most people couldn t
af-ford the Phoenix s rates, especially after Nobine had raised their [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]