Chapter Fifteen – Empirical

Chapter Fifteen – Empirical

“Though empirical evidence may have demonstrated that there’s no such thing as karma, we still find ourselves attracted to the idea. It is so simple and elegant a system that it’s hard not to begin to think that the world works on such karmic scales when we know it does not!”

–On the Philosophy of Guilt, 2045

***

I rode my bike up and to the top of a skyscraper some dozen blocks away, then I slowed down and parked on the roof.

Leaning forwards, I let my head thunk against the bar and closed my eyes. “Fuck,” I muttered. The adrenaline was washing off. The image of what I’d just done replayed itself. Of all the times I had to not miss.

“Fuck,” I repeated.

Are you okay, Catherine?

I nodded, took a deep breath, then just stewed in the moment. This was going to have consequences. If I was a smarter girl, then I’d be able to guess at those, but right now, I had no fucking clue.

Samurai were above the law. At least, that’s how they acted. I’d acted that way too. It was useful, it let me do shit without having to worry, it had let me save lives.

I knew there were stories about samurai shooting politicians, mobsters, CEOs, but those had always sounded like legends. A cynical part of me, a big part, always suspected that those stories existed because it gave stupid rebellious morons like me a reason to believe that there was still some karmic justice out there.

I’d never seen a samurai blow up a politician’s head on live TV.

“Wait. Myalis, was that being broadcast?”

Mayor Dupont’s speech? Yes. It was on television as well as several live feed sites. Do you want viewership details?

“Was anyone watching?” I asked. I sure as shit wouldn’t watch anything like that. Cartoons would be a better waste of my time than seeing the mayor complain.

Initial viewership was low, but news that the mayor was working with a samurai spiked viewership. Initial views say at around thirty-thousand and increased to two point two million at the time of your shot.

“Shit,” I muttered.

The clips have gone viral. It would be a considerable amount of work to track down total viewership of those. It’s safe to assume that it’s in the tens of millions already.

It had only been a few minutes! I groaned. There was no hiding this.

If it helps, initial views suggest a generally positive response. I imagine it will spread a lot more as the afternoon goes on.

Yeah, no shit. Pre-samurai me would have been gobbling this shit up. The fat ugly mayor getting his skull vented after being a douchebag would have been like poetry… okay, so I was still kinda proud, but this was going to have consequences.

I flicked a few buttons on my augs and made a call.

Lucy picked up on the third ring. “Huh?” she asked. She was very clearly still asleep.

“Hey Lucy,” I said, voice low and reassuring. “I had the meeting with the Mayor.”

“Oh, yeah, okay,” she said. I heard her yawn, then shift around. She was clearly still in bed. “So?”

“Lucy, how would you like to be the new mayor?” I asked.

Lucy was quiet for a while. “I’m going back to bed. Night.”

I blinked. “She hung up on me,” I said.

You did awaken her from REM sleep.

Well I wasn’t going to call her a second time, that would just annoy her. Taking a deep breath, I shifted on the seat of my bike, then gave it a bit of gas and rode off the edge of the roof. “Let’s head back to the Family HQ,” I said as I entered their address back into the bike’s autopilot. “The meeting with the Mayor was supposed to get the city to clear up some shit, get the ball rolling. Maybe they’d need to expedite permissions or do some bullshit paperwork or whatever.”