Zoë Blade 19 min read

From a bookstore roof, a sniper sights an infrared beam on the neck of his target, and ponders how ironic it is that the man is sipping coffee, all for show, for an audience he cannot know he has.

Zoë Blade's 2009 story opens on a chillingly precise assassination, building a sharp cyberpunk and AI tale. Cool, tense, contemporary SF. Read it for a taut near-future story of surveillance, artificial minds, and what it means to be less, or more, than human.

In its time

Published in 2009, during the 2000s, open-culture and post-scarcity visions.

Reading it

19 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Aiko Frikki