The Impossible Future: Complete set by Frank Kennedy (mini ebook reader .txt) 📕

They laughed. Clueless. He saw an opening.

“I didn’t grow up around here, as some of you kinda figured. Right? So, back in my old neighborhood, we had these seriously crazy ideas about equality. Anybody could dream big and do whatever they wanted. Born into nothing? Your family name ain’t worth shit? No problem. You could rule the world if you tried hard enough.” The crowd laughed. “Can you imagine that? Some punk-ass indigo come along and tell a Chancellor to fix him dinner? Talk about an empire buzzkill. Am I right, people?”

They ate it up. Every racial or caste-driven shot across the bow drew more enthusiastic laughter and applause. Michael went places that would have ruined him on first Earth. He decimated the poor, uneducated, and oppressed but championed the masters of wealth, power, and racial purity. Exactly what insecure Chancellors craved.

The more they laughed and applauded, the more they tapped credit transfer holocubes. Their new clown – the only one practicing this strange craft called “standup comedy” – was making enough money to rival the most successful Solomons. Bookings filled Michael’s admin stack at a steady pace. He gave most performances by circastream projection from home. The interactive hologram dropped him amid his audience, allowing him to walk around and ply his antics with the customers without having to touch these people.

However, a few performances – like tonight’s – were live.

By necessity.

Michael learned about the Entilles Club the day he and Sam moved into her inherited family compound two miles north of the city. Entilles operated every third day, its four levels drawing the region’s most powerful Chancellors to everything from classical concerts and “drifting opera” to off-book kwin-sho matches, dramatic theater, and “living art.” The last one, Michael learned, involved an intimate setting reserved months ahead and designed for sexual voyeurs.

Of most importance to Michael and the Solomon equity movement, Entilles hosted private conferences between the prefecture’s most powerful descendancies and Presidiums. In a world without centralized government, this was how they negotiated many of the most crucial economic and political decisions. And that, at a time of Chancellor civil war, made the Entilles a target.

Michael understood his role and precisely what to watch for, but worried double duty would throw off his comedic timing. He’d be nervous enough circling the stage surrounded by hundreds of people he despised, decked out in their most bejeweled finery. But having to put eyes on his target without giving himself away – that was another matter.

As he counted the final minutes on the substage beneath the audience, Michael reached for his flask. He filled it before leaving home, knowing full well he’d polish it off before night’s end. This was a new brand, more juiced than the variety making the rounds on the Pacific Riviera. He savored each sip and hid the flask. Two minutes before showtime, he sniffed a sweet jolt of poltash weed and scanned the prep room, where performers cavorted. He jumped off the substage and approached a Solomon soprano who’d later sing opera classics while hovering above the audience.

“Nice pipe,” he said, pointing to the four-inch blue cylinder from which the woman was smoking. “Left mine back at my landing. Care if I take a hit?”

She offered a wry smile, suggesting the hope of something joyful in return. “Of course, Michael. Finish it if you have time.”

He grabbed the pipe. “You know me?”

“Sweetie, every Solomon in the NAC knows who you are. You’re doing good work out there.”

As he inhaled from the pipe and filled his lungs with poltash, Michael tingled. Shit. How much does she know?

“Keep them laughing, Michael. They will look in the mirror someday, sweetie, thanks to Solomons like you.”

As smoke poured out his nose, he returned her pipe.

“Have you seen my act?”

Her smile dampened. “Once. That was enough. But it’s OK. I know what you’re trying to do. It’s very courageous.”

“More like a license to steal their damn money.”

She laughed. “As if they would ever miss it.” The substage glowed, signaling thirty seconds. “Slay them, Michael.”

He didn’t ask her name and figured he never would. Opera – on stage or hovering – offered no appeal. She cut a stunning figure, only a few years older, but even the possibility of a late-night union at her place did not stir him. Michael had one love, one desire, and she was millions of kilometers from Earth.

As the round stage rose beneath Michael, the ceiling pixelated and disappeared above him. He wasn’t nervous about the reception – most of his audiences reacted with quiet skepticism until they heard the punch lines. Rather, he dreaded performing in the round, which was the universal theatrical preference of Chancellors.

Michael hated the notion that no matter which way he turned, there were always people behind him. Two years ago, he took a pair of bullets in the back at Lake Vernon, Alabama, and should have died. Sam took a laser pulse through her spine at Hamilton Park in Philadelphia Redux and should have died. From time to time, the nightmares of both horrors tore him from a fitful sleep.

“If you’re gonna shoot a man,” he told Rikard a year ago, “look in his goddamn eyes first and know what you’re ending.”

“It’s a reasonable code,” Rikard said as they studied the layout of a mercenary’s landing. “Just don’t expect everyone else to hold the same standard as you.”

“Tell me about it. I grew up in a world of double standards.”

Michael kept to his code two hours later when he shot his first target working deep-ops for Rikard’s team.

It wasn’t hard to justify. The Presidium paying them to take out the assassins expressed sympathy for Solomon equity and pushed hard to prosecute anyone who collaborated in developing the immortals and the Jewel hybrids.