Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain

WORKING

Lee, Yoon Ha. "Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain." Lightspeed #4 (September 2010).[1] Anthologized Lightspeed: Year One. John Joseph Adams, editor. Germantown, MD:[2] Prime Books, 2011. E-book selections and ordering at note with link.[3]

A philosophical SF story featuring guns: very special guns that would correspond to our handguns, with different capabilities for assassination, using technology — never described — so advanced as to border upon the magical (as in "Clarke's Third Law").[4] Note also the entity attempting (apparently) to hire the services of the protagonist-assassin.

The man smiles politely, and doesn’t take a seat uninvited. Small courtesies matter to him because he is not human. His mind may be housed in a superficial fortress of flesh, but the busy computations that define him are inscribed in a vast otherspace.

The man says, “I can hardly be the first constructed sentience to come to you.”

She shakes her head. “It’s not that.” Do computers like him have souls? she wonders. She is certain he does, which is potentially inconvenient. “I’m not for hire.”[5]

RDE, Initial Compiler, 11Jan20