Luck and Death at the Edge of the World, the Official Pirate Edition by Nas Hedron Read Free Book Online Page A

sequences they left behind, but there’s not much to work with. The rest I’ve extrapolated. It was a very efficient burn, I would say.”
    “Yes,” I have to agree, “very efficient. Very smooth work.”
    As the figure approaches the house, the dogs suddenly materialize, hundreds of them. Even though I understand in a basic way how they work, it still seems miraculous. Your brain can process the fact that this is a sim, but your gut can’t, and you clench, release adrenaline, feel the impulse to run. They are huge and intentionally ugly, but what they are doing—the chaos and madness of it—is the scariest thing of all. With a howl, one leaps onto the back of another, gripping it by the back of the neck and trying to bring it down, as a wild dog would its prey. In a flash the pair disappear, then reappear, grappling face to face, slashing at each other with teeth that are twenty centimeters long and sharp as hell. With the power in their jaws they could tear open an armored personnel carrier, and right now they’re doing their best to tear open each others’ faces. Their teeth meet and clash, and they let loose with outraged howls, sounding like metal tearing and thunder cracking all at once. Their frames are buckytube, but their “fur” is just an adornment made out of some polymer, and they tear it off each other in large, messy hanks.
    They disappear again, but it doesn’t matter: the same thing is happening all across the grounds. The scene is repeated with minor variations hundreds of times, as far away as the lake, nearly as far as the eye can see. The din is horrific—it would almost be enough to make me believe in Hell if Tijuana hadn’t done that already. The worst sight is a lone dog near the house which jumps and twists in the air, snapping furiously behind itself, attacking itself. It vaporizes, then reconstitutes, still trying to break its own back.
    All the while, the simulated figure that Alan has extrapolated from the burned data calmly crosses the grass, unnoticed by the dogs. If the sensors had been working and it was a real figure we were seeing, the mask would present no trouble at all. The infrared sensors are quite sensitive enough to have made out the contours of the assassin’s facial skin beneath any mask and Alan could have reconstructed the precise shape of the face from that data. Hair also has a specific heat diffusion pattern which would have told us the length of the hair on the head, whether or not there was facial hair, and similar details that could have been added to the reconstruction. The particular temperature of the hair as it dissipated the underlying body heat would even have told us the hair color, adding the final touch. In other words we would have had a photographically perfect portrait of the assassin—if the infrared had been working. Instead I watch a masked nobody cross the grass and enter the house as the dogs go mad, appearing and disappearing, attacking each other, the trees, the lawn furniture. Thank god it’s the middle of the night or they’d be tearing apart the groundskeepers and any other staff who were wandering around.
    “This is a hell of a show, but we’re not really learning anything here,” I say, wondering if some part of my decision to leave isn’t based in fear. Maybe I’m feeling the exact visceral response that the dogs’ engineers intended. Still, it’s true. “Let’s get back.”
    “Home,” Alan commands.
    In that instant we are back in our reclining chairs, slowly sitting up, standing, and stretching. I feel the odd sense of dislocation that goes with exiting a sim no matter how many times you do it. On top of that is a powerful adrenal rush brought on by the dogs’ display of insane, mutinous aggression. Only Alan seems unaffected.
    “Thanks for your help Alan. I’ll leave you and Carmen to follow up anything else you can think of. I have some other angles to pursue.”
    “Certainly,” Alan says.
    As I leave security,