Florida -- Fiction; Immortalism -- Fiction; Science fiction; Walt Disney World (Fla.) -- Fiction
The fly-through is far less confused. Everyone except me, Dan and the
girl is grayed-out. We're limned in highlighter yellow, moving in slow-
motion. I emerge from the underpass and the girl moves from the Swiss
Family Robinson Treehouse to the group of her friends. Dan starts to
move towards me. The girl raises, arms and fires her pistol. The self-
guiding smart-slug, keyed to my body chemistry, flies low, near ground
level, weaving between the feet of the crowd, moving just below the
speed of sound. When it reaches me, it screams upwards and into my
spine, detonating once it's entered my chest cavity.
The girl has already made a lot of ground, back toward the
Adventureland/Main Street, USA gateway. The fly-through speeds up,
following her as she merges with the crowds on the street, ducking and
weaving between them, moving toward the breezeway at Sleeping Beauty
Castle. She vanishes, then reappears, forty minutes later, in
Tomorrowland, near the new Space Mountain complex, then disappears
again.
"Has anyone ID'd the girl?" I asked, once I'd finished reliving the
events. The anger was starting to boil within me now. My new fists
clenched for the first time, soft palms and uncallused fingertips.
Dan shook his head. "None of the girls she was with had ever seen her
before. The face was one of the Seven Sisters -- Hope." The Seven
Sisters were a trendy collection of designer faces. Every second teenage
girl wore one of them.
"How about Jungle Traders?" I asked. "Did they have a record of the pith
helmet purchase?"
Lil frowned. "We ran the Jungle Traders purchases back for six months:
only three matched the girl's apparent age; all three have alibis.
Chances are she stole it."
"Why?" I asked, finally. In my mind's eye, I saw my lungs bursting out
of my chest, like wings, like jellyfish, vertebrae spraying like
shrapnel. I saw the girl's smile, an almost sexual smirk as she pulled
the trigger on me.
"It wasn't random," Lil said. "The slug was definitely keyed to you --
that means that she'd gotten close to you at some point."
Right -- which meant that she'd been to Disney World in the last ten
years. That narrowed it down, all right.
"What happened to her after Tomorrowland?" I said.
"We don't know," Lil said. "Something wrong with the cameras. We lost
her and she never reappeared." She sounded hot and angry -- she took
equipment failures in the Magic Kingdom personally.
"Who'd want to do this?" I asked, hating the self-pity in my voice. It
was the first time I'd been murdered, but I didn't need to be a drama-
queen about it.
Dan's eyes got a far-away look. "Sometimes, people do things for reasons
that seem perfectly reasonable to them, that the rest of the world
couldn't hope to understand. I've seen a few assassinations, and they
never made sense afterwards." He stroked his chin. "Sometimes, it's
better to look for temperament, rather than motivation: who _could_ do
something like this?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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