Character Profiles

Adnan Parish

Adnan Parish was an assassin, but not of the elegant and romantic variety. Not the hard-edged heart-of-gold sort, either. He wasn't even a cynical, bitter mercenary.

He was just a friendly guy who was weirdly good at killing other guys, and there's always been a market for that.

"Always" looks back a long way, when humanity has already spread out among the stars and started coming home again with dirty laundry and credit card bills and (only sometimes) an invading army. "Always" feels different when it's been 16 million cycles since you last wore skin.

Killing a digital guy isn't as easy as killing the older meat sort were, especially when you consider what they'd paid to make themselves immortal. But the market is there nonetheless. And Adnan was surprisingly good at it.

It paid well. A lifetime's worth of credit for a kill.

And Adnan himself was a weird little squirrel of a man. He was still meat, himself, though Senate knew he'd made enough to make himself machine by now. He'd learned enough to know it wasn't worth it, though.

His face was narrow and pointy, his nose delicate, his eyes beady.

His little ears lay neatly back against his skull as though they'd been slicked down with oil like his red-brown hair. And this: No matter where he went or what he was doing, he always seemed to have his hands up fidgeting around his face.

He always scurried everywhere.

He'd come up close, often blindside, and fill up your perspective, then hit you with a rapid, chittering barrage of harmless questions and disorienting revelations. You'd want to run, but instead, you'd stand your ground and let the madness wash over you.

He smelled, too. Oof. Awful.

And while all of that was obnoxious to the cafeteria crewmen and the shift foremen and the transportation security officers he encountered in the meatpacking district, it was nothing compared to the effect it had on the metamens.

Of course, they knew about the meat-man's mind.

Of course, they knew how humans worked. They'd been human, too. And meat-men provided lots of labor to the metamens, so they had to keep the meat-men under constant supervision.

They never slept. They saw through walls and in the dark. The metamens were wise.

But Adnan Parish they just could not comprehend.