around, and cuts both of his legs off just above the knees.
The businessman collapses to the floor.
It takes a lot of practice to make your avatar move through the Metaverse like a real person. When your avatar has just lost its legs, all that skill goes out the window.
'Well, land sakes!' Hiro says. 'Lookee here!' He whips his blade sideways, cutting off both of the businessman's forearms, causing the sword to clatter onto the floor.
'Better fire up the ol' barbecue, Jemima!' Hiro continues, whipping the sword around sideways, cutting the businessman's body in half just above the navel. Then he leans down so he's looking right into the businessman's face. 'Didn't anyone tell you,' he says, losing the dialect, 'that I was a hacker?'
Then he hacks the guy's head off. It falls to the floor, does a half-roll, and comes to rest staring straight up at the ceiling. So Hiro steps back a couple of paces and mumbles, 'Safe.'
A largish safe, about a meter on a side, materializes just below the ceiling, plummets, and lands directly on the businessman's head. The impact drives both the safe and the head straight down through the floor of The Black Sun, leaving a square hole in the floor, exposing the tunnel system underneath. The rest of the dismembered body is still strewn around the floor.
At this moment, a Nipponese businessman somewhere, in a nice hotel in London or an office in Tokyo or even in the first-class lounge of the LATH, the Los Angeles/Tokyo Hypersonic, is sitting in front of his computer, red-faced and sweating, looking at The Black Sun Hall of Fame. He has been cut off from contact with The Black Sun itself, disconnected as it were from the Metaverse, and is just seeing a two-dimensional display. The top ten swordsmen of all time are shown along with their photographs. Beneath is a scrolling list of numbers and names, starting with #11. He can scroll down the list if he wants to find his own ranking. The screen helpfully informs him that he is currently ranked number 863 out of 890 people who have ever participated in a sword fight in The Black Sun.
Number One, the name and the photograph on the top of the list, belongs to Hiroaki Protagonist.
12
Ng Security Industries Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit #A-367 lives in a pleasant black-and-white Metaverse where porterhouse steaks grow on trees, dangling at head level from low branches, and blood-drenched Frisbees fly through the crisp, cool air for no reason at all, until you catch them.
He has a little yard all to himself. It has a fence around it. He knows he can't jump over the fence. He's never actually tried to jump it, because he knows be can't. He doesn't go into the yard unless he has to. It's hot out there.
He has an important job: Protect the yard. Sometimes people come in and out of the yard. Most of the time, they are good people, and he doesn't bother them. He doesn't know why they are good people. He just knows it. Sometimes they are bad people, and he has to do bad things to them to make them go away. This is fitting and proper.
Out in the world beyond his yard, there are other yards with other doggies just like him. These aren't nasty dogs. They are all his friends.
The closest neighbor doggie is far away, farther than he can see. But he can hear this doggie bark sometimes, when a bad person approaches his yard. He can hear other neighbor doggies, too, a whole pack of them stretching off into the distance, in all directions. He belongs to a big pack of nice doggies.
He and the other nice doggies bark whenever a stranger comes into their yard, or even near it. The stranger doesn't hear him, but all the other doggies in the pack do. If they live nearby, they get excited. They wake up and get ready to do bad things to that stranger if he should try to come into their yard.
When a neighbor doggie barks at a stranger, pictures and sounds and smells come into his mind along with the bark. He suddenly knows what that stranger looks like. What he smells like. How he sounds. Then, if that stranger should come anywhere near his yard, he will recognize him. He will help spread the bark along to other nice doggies so that the entire pack can all be prepared to fight the stranger.
Tonight, Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit #A-367 is barking. He is not just passing some other doggie's bark to the pack. He is barking because he feels very excited about things that are happening in his yard.
First, two people come in. This made him excited because they came in very fast. Their hearts are beating quickly and they are sweating and they smell scared. He looked at these two people to see if they were carrying bad things.
The little one is carrying things that are a little naughty, but not really bad. The big one is carrying some pretty bad things. But he knows, somehow, that the big one is okay. He belongs in this yard. He is not a stranger; he lives here. And the little one is his guest.
Still, he senses there is something exciting happening. He starts to bark. The people in the yard don't hear him barking. But all the other nice doggies in the pack, far away, hear him, and when they do, they see these two scared, nice people, smell them, and hear them.
Then more people come into his yard. They are also excited; he can hear their hearts beating. Saliva floods his mouth as he smells the hot salty blood pumping through their arteries. These people are excited and angry and just a little bit scared. They don't live here; they are strangers. He doesn't like strangers very much.
He looks at them and sees that they are carrying three revolvers, a .38 and two .357 magnums; that the .38 is loaded with hollow-points, one of the .357s is loaded with Teflon bullets and has also been cocked; and that the pump shotgun is loaded with buckshot and already has a shell chambered, plus four more shells in its magazine.
The things that the strangers are carrying are bad. Scary things. He gets excited. He gets angry. He gets a little bit scared, but he likes being scared, to him it is the same thing as being excited. Really, he has only two emotions: sleeping and adrenaline overdrive.
The bad stranger with the shotgun is raising his weapon!
It is an utterly terrible thing. A lot of bad, excited strangers are invading his yard with evil things, come to hurt the nice visitors.
He barely has time to bark out a warning to the other nice doggies before he launches himself from his doghouse, propelled on a white-hot jet of pure, feral emotion.
In Y.T.'s peripheral vision she sees a brief flash, hears a clunking noise. She looks over in that direction to see that the source of the light is a sort of doggie door built into the side of the Hong Kong franchise. The doggie door has in the very recent past been slammed open by something coming from the inside, headed for the lawngrid with the speed and determination of a howitzer shell.
As all of this registers on Y.T.'s mind, she begins to hear the shouting of the jeeks. This shouting is not angry and not scared either. No one has had time to get scared yet. It is the shouting of someone who has just had a bucket of ice water dumped over his head.
This shouting is still getting underway, she is still turning her head to look at the jeeks, when the doggie door emits another burst of light. Her eyes flick that-a-way; she thinks that she saw something, a long round shadow cross-sectioned in the light for a blurry instant as the door was being slammed inward. But when her eyes focus on it, she sees nothing except the oscillating door, same as before. These are the only impressions left on her mind, except for one more detail: a train of sparks that danced across the lawngrid from the doggie door to the jeeks and back again during this one-second event, like a skyrocket glancing across the lot.
People say that the Rat Thing runs on four legs. Perhaps the claws on its robot legs made those sparks as they were digging into the lawngrid for traction.
The jeeks are all in motion. Some of them have just been body-slammed into the lawngrid and are still bouncing and rolling. Others are still in mid-collapse. They are unarmed. They are reaching to grip their gun hands with the opposite hands, still hollering, though now their voices are tinged with a certain amount of fear. One of them has had his trousers torn from the waistband all the way down to the ankle, and a strip of fabric is trailing out across the lot, as though he had his pocket picked by something that was in too much of a hurry to let go of the actual pocket before it left. Maybe this guy had a knife in his pocket.
There is no blood anywhere. The Rat Thing is precise. Still they hold their hands and holler. Maybe it's true
