The kill: a sci-fi story

He stopped to take his breath. He had no track of the distance he ran this morning.
Ran, ducked, ran again. Now he paused for breath.
He heard a shot ring out somewhere in the distance. 0.53 miles, 46 degrees NW, to be precise. He swerved to the right lane. Then he started walking, almost on tiptoe. Perspiration covered his face. But it did not cloud his vision.

He saw a man walking along the other sidewalk. He stopped. His hands reached his pockets. He is ready to make a move any minute now. The man walked away. Over to the main road. He stood and waited. Then he resumed his walk.

Year 2050. Place, Golfin Park, downtown. The man is CR. A young commando, in our recently formed, Espionage-Target AP team.
A guerilla war is on. Last year had been a tremendous breakthrough. We had infiltrated their strongest forts----the ammunition towns. But still, far from victory.

For four months, CR had been underground, and treading on the thinnest possible rope of survival. Golfin Park could hardly be called a war zone, compared to the other areas of the country, but still alertness was required to the point of a twenty four hour obsession.
CR had been without human company for year, but he preferred deserted roads. He felt a bulge in his stomach, every time his vision detected the gait and figure of a man, approaching from even two blocks away. If we could upload and update CR’s physical attributes on our C-check monitor board, ( along with his AP level, vision range, …) it would be just two words in caps – STRETCHED NERVES.

It is 10 pm now. Cr stopped. A figure ,coming closer. Not a bulky police personnel. Not the wayward steps of a rowdy drunk. On a deserted bylane, at 10 pm, in the middle of a decade long war in a foreign land , CR was relieved to find that there was no masculinity in the figure approaching him.
Cr was amused. He was amused by the fact that his primary emotion is of relief , on seeing a woman. What a climbdown. He recalled bylanes in nights like these, 3 years back, in his hometown. He and his friends taking stroll. The catcalls. The wonder-struck gaze sometimes, snapshots of inviting smiles, banter of friends . To hunt, and to be hunted. Three years ago, passion made a grand fest out of nights like these.

Now, a woman implied two things. She was not a Mav soldier , and had no arms. That was by the law of this country. She stopped. Her name was S.
‘Are you lost?’
‘Somewhat’ The scars showed.
‘Where are you headed to?’
‘ Scalpel Inn, north emerson.’
Cr could not fake the Mav accent, it always sounded ridiculous when he tried.
‘ Thats a long way to walk.’
Silence.
‘You can stay at mine , if you want to. It is just a block away. Tomorrow you can take the bus.’

10 minutes later, S was typing in the key-code to her apartment door. After they were in, she pointed the sofa out to CR.

Cr sat on the sofa, and looked around.
‘Hungry?’ An affirmative nod.
S was puzzled. Rarely had a stranger entered her living room without letting out a gasp of respectful exclamation. A moderate appreciation, was expected, at the least. How could anyone , even someone as insensitive to arts, as a soldier, ( the profession of CR, she already guessed, she had invited wounded soldiers before) not be taken in by the beautiful sculptures that adorn her room?
As Cr ate, she turned on a music and went to the shower. A handsome soldier, wounded and hungry. A femme fatale. How old-day Hollywoodish, she thought to herself. As she put the shower on, she looked straight at CR. The shower curtain, being made of a material that drew admiring stares from the living room. Stares from wounded soldiers, mostly, in the past.
Cr ate, looked at the shower room, looked down to his plate, ate again. This has not happened before to S. Sculptures were one thing. This was plain unnatural.
S came out of the shower. She had nothing on her. She waved to Cr.
Cr smiled, waved back.
‘thank god, you are not blind. , you are a vaks, aint you’
‘yeah’
‘ Had a desire of visiting your country , sometime. Now with this war and all , I don’t know if I will ever. Heard that women have a lot of freedom there. They can do any work over there. They even go about nude, in public places, that’s what I heard.’
‘that’s only in films theaters, ’ said Cr
‘yeah, but vaks men must be desensitized to this stuff , since like, long ago ‘
Cr looked up at S, watched her closely. Then he smiled..
‘No, its just I am different, because of the war . It is the AP’
S hadn’t heard of AP.
Ap is a technology discovered by VAKS scientists a decade ago, It is an acronym for abstract perception. The principle behind this is to allow certain people to get only the outlines, or the essence of his or her immediate surrounding environment. For example, Cr can only see houses as rectangular , or trapezoidal blocks. Trees as a series of straight lines, with a bunch of slanting rays at its end. A sofa is same a big flat chair. Its as if the whole word were sketches from a geometry book, with no colour no shades , no depth.
Men and women are mere cartoon sketches. Gender is identified from a combination of voice, gait , and two to three basic body dimesions . Once you have an AP lens inserted in your eyes , and you are AP trained, the world becomes a skeleton of its former self.
As it is with vision, so it is with sound. An ap-equipped person ( you need an audio plug behind your ears) will only listen to music as a mixture of some base frequencies. For him or her, no matter how different it is, all music is almost reduced to the background buzz of a non-playing radio station.

The advantage with this is that your brain doesn’t have to grapple with the unnecessary details. It eliminates a huge chunk of noise, and uses that extra space to heighten the sensitivity you get from just the outlines. It goes without saying that AP would be an ideal weapon , in a war, especially for disarmed/under-armed commandoes, whose main theme of life is , espionage and survival.
Not all vaks men could be ap-trained. It was a skill that only some possessed. It was true that training helped some of them, but you got to have an innate ability to respond to the training modules
It is for this reason that CR could detect bullet sounds from miles away, with a radar-accurate precison. It is for this reason, that even the tip of the mini laser-gun, positioned at the opposite end of the street , can make him change lanes. And it is for this same reason that he could not realize now that S is the most curvaceous woman he has ever met.

S listened as he talked. About us and them. About history. The Mavs were the superpowers with respect to ammunition. Compared to them , vaks were there ,where they had been at the end of the last century. And there was no way that within a short span they could match up to their opponents. But in some areas like AP, they were much ahead.
Cr stopped and got up. He saw S pouring a colorless liquid from a colorless bottle into a narrow conical container. He tasted it , and remembered the taste of champagne.
‘You can at least feel, can you?’
S had wrapped herself around Cr , who started feeling her, all over. Yes he can feel. He can feel to the point of explosion.
‘Don’t you feel like seeing me, at least once?’
S touched his eyes, and then kissed them. Then she put her lips right under his brows , and gently brushed her eyelids. Cr took his lens off. She , then reached at the back of his neck, and unhooked the audio plug. Everything flashed, in a single big bang moment.
The night, the room, the sculptures, the jazz. And S, the beautiful voluptuous S.


Later in the night, S was lying with her head on his chest, while R was recounting, how he had always heard the sound of bullets and tanks, in his dreams, every night since 4 months. He dreamt only of blood and war.
‘Do you have to leave on Friday?’
‘yes’
She sighed ‘I will try to make up for all the sleepless nights you had, all the bullet sounds and death wails you have heard. I will give you a day free of all these’


He woke up to a sunny morning. The first sunny morning after 4 months , a morning, when the sun was radiant yellow, and the garden a plushing green. Trees had leaves. Houses had architecture . Its as if someone had taken a sketch book, and painted it overnight. He could hear birds chirping. He could also hear Mozart playing.

He could not find S beside him. He called out her name, then walked into the garden. He could still hear the Mozart. He was amused that S had put up a audio-station somewhere in the garden.
He did not know that Mozart was playing in his head. That , while he went to alseep S had inserted a mini music chip, right where his ap-audio was. Now he was smiling. The music was slowly drowning all the other sounds , --the mowing machine, the chirping birds.
It also drowned the halting screech of two Mav army jeeps that stopped outside the garden wall. Three armed commandos got out and took position .
Commando 1 made a sign. They slowly made their way, through the bushthorns around the garden wall. Then he positioned his gun . He could not believe that it would be so easy a kill !
Cr was standing in the garden, smiling.
Three bullet shots rang out, and he was down. Actually even one would have done .
Cr did not have a inbuilt metal shield for his chest. Neither a mutant skin cover. He was not one of those commandos that would later appear in vaks history , who were physically invulnerable as a result of injected mutations. He was a normal man, like you and me. Only he had an enhanced power of abstract perception.
Let us also say this; He was , till many many years, the most powerful man, in this regard.

The news of Crs death reached our headquarters, the day after.
Some people claimed that contrary to their countries’ conventions, the Mavs had grown desperate enough to have women in their intelligence teams. Some said that it might not have been intentional on the part of a woman called S. . Maybe she tried to make up
for Cr’s past life, by gifting her a day of music. Maybe it was love.

Intentional or not, the fact remains that this woman had robbed our top man of the only power he possessed. She, in effect ,had killed him.

Some people , like me , do not agree with this harsh judgement. In many ways, Cr was lucky. It was seldom heard , in the last 10 years, that a commando had the luxury of a champagne night before his death. It was very rare to hear of a soldier who had touched a woman , the night before. I have never heard of a soldier, who, in a time as discordant and disharmonious as now, went to death in a plush green garden, smiling, with Mozart playing in his head.