A Walking Shadow

7. Target

"Thank you again for letting me talk with you," I tell Makuth for perhaps the fifth time today. She just looks like a regular Shaula—green skin, black hair, scales. From her appearance, I never would have guessed anything about her dangerous and controversial past.

She shrugs. "Since I retired from my job with the Shaula government, none of this information is classified anymore. But it's not something you should be sharing publicly."

"I won't," I promise. She knows the rules of the contract.

Makuth leans back in her chair, shutting her eyes as if recalling something in the distant past. "So. Parse. She was... an interesting target."

"She?" I interrupt. "Parse doesn't have a gender."

"I know. In my language, we use 'she' as the gender-neutral pronoun."

I'm about to point out that we aren't even speaking Shaula, but decide to let it go. Makuth continues.

"It wasn't an easy mission. AIs are notoriously hard to kill."

"Why did your superiors want you to kill Parse?"

"Well, you know all about Parse. She's a danger to society."

Makuth looks at me as if expecting me to agree. Just to satisfy her, I nod slightly. "I'm very interested to hear your story. You have... a unique perspective on Parse."

"I suppose I do."

*

I heard about my mission from the Shaula military commander at the time, Lesath. It was simple: seek out and destroy the AI that calls itself Parse. Of course, the Shaula military is very different now from what it was twenty years ago. For one, there are no more elite assassins, like I was. I have to say that I'm glad about that.

I had ten days to do it: more time than I usually got on missions like this. That was the first clue that this wasn't going to be like other assassinations I'd carried out. I also got very little information on the target herself. I learned later that this was because the Shaula didn't actually know all that much about Parse.

The first objective was to track her down. At first, I'll admit, I had no idea how to do that. Since Parse could potentially take the body of any living being or robot, I couldn't use my regular methods of locating targets. Fortunately, the data we had on her provided an answer: nanobots.

Okay, I'm going to have to get technical for a second. I hope you don't mind.

When Parse finds a new body to inhabit, it's not like she can surgically insert herself into it. Instead, she uses an army of tiny robots called nanobots that can swim through a body's bloodstream and lodge themselves in the brain. Each nanobot contains the entirety of Parse's code. They are self-replicating and highly intelligent, since they are controlled by Parse herself. Once in the brain, they secure themselves in such a way that Parse can control the motor functions, senses, etc of these bodies. Whenever she moves from one body to another, all the nanobots in the previous body self-destruct. The nanobots also keep the body from completely breaking down.

It turns out that technology like this is traceable, though not easily, and not over long distances. There are other complications, too—for example, nanobots similar to Parse's are frequently used in medicine.

But eventually, I did manage to trace Parse to the planet Sheratan. I don't know if you've ever been to Sheratan, but it's not a particularly remarkable place. It's very hot—I blame its binary star system—and mostly filled with small towns, especially in the polar regions. Parse was in one of the planet's few large cities. All in all, it took seven full days to track her down, more than I'd ever needed before. That gave me three days to figure out how to kill her.