Short stories for your coffee break. Part of the ’Future Imperfect’ series.

Today I committed the perfect crime.  I killed myself.  Technically it was murder not suicide, but as I wasn’t at the scene of the crime, in fact not even on the same continent when it happened, it was undetectable.  The day had started well with a half million American dollars being deposited in my bank account.

I never meet the client and I never meet the victim.  As I said, completely untraceable.  This case was slightly different though as the clients interests coincided with my own.  It’s the first and probably only time that I would have an emotional connection to the victim.

  As I said, the perfect crime.

Except that it wasn’t so I suppose I have some explaining to do.  The target that I eliminated was me or at least my almost identical clone.  It seemed such a clever idea when I first looked into cloning.  In my line of work, there is always the possibility of a revenge attack so a clone that looked like me, thought like me and to all intents and purposes was me, seemed a really good way of spending a big chunk of my savings.  The plan was that he was going to live the quiet life unless something happened to me and then he would take over.  It was almost like having a twin brother they told me and so it was at first.

We got on well together, even finishing each other’s sentences, but eventually he left to move to the other side of the planet so that any revenge attack on me wouldn’t include him.  What I didn’t account for was the mutant gene that had somehow slipped past the scrutiny of the medical team.  Don’t get me wrong, in his shoes, I might have followed exactly the same path which in his case led to him becoming one of the most powerful criminals on that continent.  He didn’t have my scruples however, so drugs, money laundering and human trafficking were all part of his portfolio.  As you can imagine, he made a lot of enemies but he had a strong loyal team around him which made him pretty much untouchable.

He sent messages, asking that I go work for him, friendly at first then becoming insisting and eventually demanding.  I guess it was pride that stopped me.  He could have been a client like any other, but I was the first.  I was his creator so I refused, time and time again.  Then the first attempt on my life happened.  I was lucky that time as it wasn’t expected.  An attack from my clone was unthinkable except that he not only thought about it, he put it into operation.  It was an ordinary Saturday the first time that it happened and I was sat at a pavement table outside of my favorite coffee shop.  I pride myself on my imagination and use of technology in my work but this attempt was clumsy, pathetic really.

A bomb was placed under my car which was parked several streets away.  What the moron didn’t realize though was that the vehicles electronic monitoring system watched him at work and then notified me.  It took me two minutes to neutralize the device and drop it into the river.  I didn’t realize that the idiot had been employed by my clone until later that day when I received a message congratulating me on my escape.  He also gave me a final demand, which of course, I refused.  I knew then that I had to act soon as he wouldn’t be as clumsy the next time.

I was already planning my attack when I was contacted in the usual anonymous way.  The manner that I have things set up is simple.  I receive a targets name, I research it then either confirm or reject the contract, receive half of my fee in advance, carry out the contract then receive the other half of the fee.  Only one person ever tried to screw me over forgetting that he had originally hired me for my skill set.  I lost my fifty percent and he lost his life.

I was stunned when the next request that I got was to eliminate my clone.  It was a hell of a coincidence but why not get paid for doing something that I would have done anyway.  It was no surprise that he had made enemies, but this was too much of a coincidence.  I was suspicious.  No, I was really, really suspicious.  Now if I were him, I might try to get me onto his home turf and what better way to do it than lure me with a contract.  I needed time to think this one through so I neither accepted nor rejected the work, I simply replied to it as pending.  My usual clients took this as a sign that I would consider the work when my current task was finished.  I hoped that my clone would think the same.

It was time to disappear for a while in case I was wrong.  There was still a chance that he would come after me here on my home turf so I quickly put together a few essentials and left town.  My bolt hole was an anonymous cottage on the coast.  I loved being there but used it rarely in case it was logged by anyone.  After all, one couldn’t be too careful in my field of work and although I took every precaution to remain anonymous, there was no such thing as being too careful.  That is where the defective gene had divided us.  I was an extreme belt and braces man, even to the point of paranoia.  He was very much the opposite and as far as I could tell, acted impulsively.

I had bought this place after my clone had left so there was no reason that he should be aware of its existence.  It was typical of my nature that it was set up with state of the art defense and surveillance systems and there had been no indication of observation either physical or electronic.  I needed time to think and this place gave me the perfect environment to do so.  I spent the days wandering along the shoreline with the soundtrack of the ocean waves accompanying me.  The evenings were my planning time.  I say planning but it was mostly rejecting idea after idea whilst nursing a thirty year old malt whiskey.  

It was on the third night that sensor number eight sent a signal to my smart watch.  I touched it and sure enough he image on the screen showed that there was a man trying to edge his way towards the cottage.  It was pitch black, but the ultrasonics of the sensor showed the outline shape in enough detail to see that the man was carrying a weapon of some kind.  Even though I was in a remote location, I couldn’t believe that he would be stupid enough to use an ancient noisy ballistic weapon so the chances were that it was a stunner of some kind.  That suited me fine as the modern electronic weaponry was open to a modicum of reprogramming.  In fact my sensors had been designed by me to do just that.

If a weapon carried by anyone but me passed within their vicinity, it would be neutralized without the owner being aware.  I remember hearing an expression from an old 2D movie back in the last century.  ‘Stupid is as stupid does’ describes most of the cretins that I come across.  Muscle rather than brain and it seemed that it perfectly described the situation here and now.  I continued to watch his approach and after a few minutes, it became clear that he was on his own.  Even more stupid.  I needed to find out what the hell my clone was up to so rather than eliminating him, I simply fired a remote tranquilizer dart which stopped him in his tracks.

An hour later, he was trussed up in my cellar with a truth serum, administered by yours truly, coursing through his blood system.  First the why.  It seemed that my clone was playing the game and had put out a contract on me.  Next the how.  Fortunately for me this clown had been lucky and had literally been in the next town when I had been shopping for food.  He had followed me to see where I was going and determined to get the assassination fee for himself, hadn’t shared his information with anyone.  As far as he was aware, there were others who were looking for me as well, but not in this district.

There was only one course of action to take.  I couldn’t risk my location being shared elsewhere so he had to go.  With the ocean just a few yards away, it was trivial to dispose of the body.  I realized that it was the first time that I had killed anyone without being paid for it.  Such is life.  Or in his case, death.

It was time to weigh up my options as my luck certainly wouldn’t hold out for much longer and that’s when the idea came to me.  I needed to eliminate my clone from a distance, in fact from here, but he wasn’t moving and there was no way that I was going there.  Occam’s razor provided the solution.  If you haven’t come across it before, its an ancient maxim that simply states that the simplest solution is often the best.  It was time to utilize my best friend – technology.  There was a lot of delicate preparation to be done and after my interesting evening, now wasn’t the time to start, but to be honest, the sense of relief that I felt, having got myself onto the front foot, was palpable.

Mind you, it also struck me what an odd expression that was, to describe planning a murder to be carried out from a distance of several thousand miles when the so called ‘front foot’ was totally irrelevant. There was also the interesting philosophical concept of whether the elimination of a rogue clone was actually murder.  That night, I increased the sensitivity on the sensors surrounding the house, enjoyed a late glass of malt and slept better than I had in a long time.  After several days of rain, I awoke the next morning to see bright sunshine pouring in through the windows.  Things were certainly improving.

I sat on the terrace, watching the seagulls swooping over the waves, nursing my habitual morning cup of latte.  The caffeine was obviously working its magic as the initial planning went smoother than I expected.  First of all, I needed to track his movements so that I could decide on the best time for action.  I refreshed my cup, this time with an espresso, and moved into my office.  The wall was covered in screens and the super fast internet access meant that I had immediate remote access to anywhere on the planet.

Now we all are aware of the ubiquitousness of cameras on a myriad of devices.  Hell, even in the last century they were putting cameras on vacuum cleaners although I could never figure out why.  Today, this meant that unless you were technologically knowledgeable enough, they were monitoring pretty much your every movement.  I know that the companies that sell the devices promised that the cameras were only available to be utilized by the purchaser, but I call that donkey shit.  As I sat at my desk, I could see four lenses pointing at me and as I move around the house, there are many more providing convenient functionality.  The thing is though, I have directed the data streams away from my internet pipe.  Most people don’t bother, either through ignorance or laziness.  

It was time for the first step.  I needed to find the exact location of my clone.  It was a simple task to find the contract that he had put out on me on the dark web and backtrace the network address.  A few minutes later I had that converted into a geographical location.  The two things about my clone that I had going in my favor were that he was technologically naive and was also incredibly overconfident. The lack of interest in technology had always puzzled me because a clone is supposed to be an exact copy, right?  I guess that the defective gene that had caused him to follow his individual path had also had other unplanned side effects as well.

It was time to start taking over the cameras in his immediate vicinity.  I started with his phone and tablet and then moved to others around his house.  The downside of him being on the other side of the world however, was that he was twelve hours out of synch with me.  I needed to start working at night, not my preference but necessary.  As I expected, he was heavily guarded although it was really odd watching a mirror image of myself going about his daily routine.  When he moved outside, I switched to the CCTV that is on every lamppost and every building these days.  They had enormously reduced petty crime, but if you valued your privacy, it was just bad luck for most people.  I watched as he walked a few blocks to a coffee shop, followed surreptitiously by his bodyguard.  He sat outside eating breakfast for thirty minutes or so then got into a black luxury vehicle that pulled up at the roadside.  I had seen enough but needed to know if this pattern was repeated every day.  A week later, I had seen enough to be reasonably confident that it was.  Time to move on to the next stage.  The coup de grace. 

Two days on I looked up the contract that had been taken out on me on the dark web.  It had been rescinded with no explanation.  A few hours later, it had disappeared completely.  I had won.  Time to return to my normal life.  The trouble was, I liked it here by the beach.  I decided to take a well deserved holiday.

Of course you want to know how I did it.  Actually very simple, almost trivial in fact.  The application of technology to my advantage.You know about driverless vehicles. Delivery trucks in particular are ubiquitous.   What most people aren’t aware of is that there is a safety mechanism whereby they can be driven remotely in the case of an emergency.  What?  You didn’t expect them to let thousands of vehicles onto the roads without some method of taking over control in case one ran amok. Using the local CCTV feed, I watched him on the street.  His bodyguards were a waste of time.  Simple timing, a jerk on the steering wheel from two thousand miles away and 3 tons of automated vehicle was under my control for the time that it took to smash into him.

Job Done.