Hunted

Chapter 1: Assassination

Jack Haley had only been in his new role of night maintenance supervisor for two weeks and already he was experiencing one of the job's low points. Two workers had called in sick and Haley, unable to get replacements on short notice, added himself to the night's duty roster, emitting a soft sigh as he did so. It came as no surprise to Haley that the rotating task selection system he had put in place deemed that he, as the last to choose from the available work, would be taking care of floor scrubbing and trash removal. He put on a brave face, forced himself to laugh at the friendly jibes sent his way, and got to work.

By six o'clock in the evening, the long, wide halls of Universal Technology always grew eerily silent. The dim ceiling lights were still unneeded, as the gray metal walls reflected the fading sunlight, leaving the vague impression that the building's interior was part of some great ancient cathedral. Haley had always appreciated the reverent feel of the place at night. He enjoyed the quiet and the time with his own thoughts.

Haley filled each of the seven floor scrubbing robots with water and detergent, then sent them on their computerized way. It was a task he would repeat three times to cover the building's twenty-one floors. As the last of the robots began its journey, he pulled a large trash compacting bin from a utility closet. Before heading for the first office, Haley paused at a window to take in the view.

The top floor was everyone's favorite for looking at the city, but the seventh was high enough to let one see its majesty. The mid-May sun wasn't due to set for over an hour, but it was already below the tops of the tallest buildings of the Earth's third largest city, Hope, which sprawled over 42,000 square kilometers of North America's eastern seaboard. The most impressive buildings soared up into the clear azure sky and dwarfed Universal Technologies' modest structure. On days when rain was forecast and the clouds hung low, the upper floors of a hundred buildings would vanish from sight, and Haley had often heard of the breathtaking view from above, as if the building was a much shorter one floating in an ocean of clouds, the rain below forgotten and the sun holding dominion. Rush hour traffic had started to ebb, and the city's traffic computer would soon be transferring outbound lanes to inbound to accommodate the citizens coming in by roads, pedestrian beltways, and public hover-car to enjoy Hope's nightlife.

Haley looked down at the trash bin and laughed softly. All this twenty-fifth century technology, he thought, and I'm still going to be emptying trash cans by hand. It was different in many companies where vacuum tubes waited to instantly whisk refuse away, but in a place like Universal Technologies, where otherwise brilliant scientists have been known to accidentally throw important papers away, the old circular file was still the preferred system. At least it allowed for second thoughts over what was being tossed.

Haley went from one empty office to the next, emptying the trash cans into the bin where the recycler separated and compacted the material. The offices on this floor were used by some of the company's top creative people, most involved in Universal's core businesses: pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, herbicides, and advanced military systems. The big desks were more times than not covered with unkempt piles of paper, and the large picture windows, Haley often thought, probably went unused for the most part.

The sixth office Haley stepped into was that of Jonathan Morris, the type of person the head honchos at Universal probably had in mind when they decided against the vacuum trash system. Morris had only been with the company a month, and already Haley was impressed at how hard the man worked. Tonight, as was often the case, Morris was still busily attacking some problem long after everyone else had headed home.

Morris sat bent over his desk, his thinning hair ruffled by a hand that ran nervously through it every few seconds. His face was twisted into a perplexed scowl and his head shook repetitively in a gesture of disgust or disbelief. Morris' desk was a mess, but Haley was sure the cruelest prank he could play on the man would be to clean it up. Haley had been with Universal long enough to know there was some sort of order to that chaos.