Just before the planet Krypton, in the Rigellian star system, exploded into cosmic nothingness, an enterprising scientist, Jor-el, bundled his son into a rocket and set the controls for Earth. "Krypton and I will die but a least my son will live!" he cried dramatically.

Unfortunately he miscalculated; the rocket missed Terra by 300 million miles and few screaming into the heart of the sun.

The baby be cane invulnerable in our solar system and was unharmed by the heat, but, as he was only 11 months old, he died of starvation within 37 hours.

And thus do our dreams die. And when we have no dreams, we have only reality.

• Imagine
• A world.
• Imagine a world where there are four people to every job.
• Four people.
• Forty people.
• Four hundred people.

Suppose you had a room. Into this room walk four people. Out of the room walks one person.

Walking to work.

Imagine that happening every month.

Now imagine you are one of the four.

and.......

There was a flat whisper of sound. Cursing, Jon threw himself behind the panel. Above him the air spat and crackled into a thousand glistening rainbow fragments that sparkled and danced as the air imploded. A laugh. Shrill and directionless.

"Hey, 3, you sure looked funny there. Nearly caught y'all at once. Would look real impressive when they come to pick up the pieces, eh 3!"

But I was talking to thin air; Jon wasn't listening. No, he was too good for that; he was already fifty metres to the right, swearing and planning a new strategy.

(Too slow, man, too slow, too slow.)

"An atomic imploder, Krisnos! That would have reduced me to a parcel of matter as big as my fist.........

".....what would become of Lori.......

".....I spent too much time with the kid."

He shuddered and melted into the shadow; a black man in a black land, and.....

A socio-psychologist was on the 'scan saying that "the regard for the value of human life is virtually non-existant." And he was laughing, and....

and.......

He'd heard it before he'd seen it; a low scratching noise, and out of the corner of his eye, as if in slow motion, a graceful cloud of miniscule crimson pellets of blood and flesh had risen defiantly to spatter the ceiling. (Practise, Training, Automation.)

He was there in seconds and had surveyed and evaluated the situation in less. (Experience, maan.)

2 was standing over 4; and 4 was dead.

2 was just a kid, about 15 years old. It tied in well. Young kids always went in for impressive but messy weapons. Like this one's grenade gun. (...great little piece this, you're going to love it, fires tiny grenades designed to pierce the flesh. The, kapow, explodes! Isn't it a little beauty! Just feel that action, son......)

It didn't take long to learn that the clean silent weapons were just as deadly but oh so much less of a giveaway......

and.......

It had taken Jon forty-five minutes to drive the two kilometres to the factory because of the downtown traffic but thanks to his new Asmen filters and Yano Aircycle Plant, he felt no discomfort at and stage of the journey. He parked in the fifty-seven storey Multivac car park, complete with its own supermarket and two pleasure parlours.

and.........

The shadows merged, shifted and were Jon/3. Standing there silent, unmoving, uncaring, the barest, faintest ripple in the background. Oh yes, Jon was good, very good; he'd been working for quite a long time. Relatively.

But it was all so relative these days. He smiled; 2 and 4 were dead, they would never work (again?). But I? Unfortunately, I was also good. Jon had seen them come and go and he could pick them. There were the green kids in all manner of shapes and sizes; fast, cocky, clumsy, lucky. Others were mad, some apathetic, still others tried to reason with you, saying "Between the two of us, we can screw the bastards up. Can't you see we're just the rats in a trap." And when they died they were smiling.

And then there were people like Jon. Professionals. Killers, Murderers, Survivors. Behind Jon stood the mercenary, the cossack, the barbarian, the knight; the cutthroat. Suddenly he felt very tired. "Fuck the system!" he thought; but of course he couldn't. He needed the credits: for Lori and the kids, for the car, the house, the guns, the water, the filter system and for every other goddamn thing that being a member of civilisation entitled you to. He needed credits to move, to breathe, to think.....thoughts like "I'd better go and find the bastard."

(Yeah. Find him and blow his stupid head off, maan.)

and......

and.........

The kid was just standing there, silent and unmoving, staring at his handiwork. His whole body was relaxed, floppy; as if someone had removed all his bones and thrown them in a corner. 4 was a red pool on the floor; a fat, corpulent body, unused to exercise, unused to working, unused to living. Where his head should've been, there was a greasy smear; Jon guessed he was a rich playboy whose credits had played out and who'd now had to choose between working and certain death, only to die in the system he'd spent years evading. Jon shrugged. The kid? Very inexperienced, very young, very shocked. His grenade gun dengled limply from his left hand; a discarded toy. (Fix it mommi. Kiss it better.) Probably his first kill.

"Not like on the 'scan is it boy?" Jon thought. "It smells, it's messy, it's happening to you. You can't laugh and say to your pals, 'Oh, didn't he make a funny squealing noise when he died!', and boast about it when you make your first kill. Well now you have and his brains are in your your mouth and it's not fun."

Steel blue fingers on a steel blue trigger.

The child's eyes glazed over.

then.

a flat whisper of sound.

and.......

Mark giggled and pressed the button; immediate response. The mini-comp picked out a random number. Five. A twist of the wrist, tendons tensed, and childish coordination moved the polythene counter five spaces on the Egopoly board.

Penalty Card!!

It screamed at him. Take me, take me, kiss me, I'm yours. I'm death. And Mark flipped it over and it was death.

There, in clean black type, precisely, clearly and very irrevocably printed was a black skull, and under it the word Poison.

Tears welled in Mark's eyes as he took the green tablet from its little box set within the board. His playmates felt a twinge of pity for him, but more so an overwhelming sense of relief; Mark had got it, not them, not this time, maybe next, but not this time. Mark... well, it was all part of the game. You accepted the risks when you played it made it fun. And it was fun, wasn't it?

Mark got up and walked slowly over to his mother, his chin puckering and lips trembling as he unsuccessfully tried not to cry. Another kid moved quietly to take his place. The game continued without a pause.

As the poison took effect, he was openly sobbing into his mother's thigh while she phoned for the Squad.

"How will I tell his father?"

Almost embarrased, she turned to the mother next to her. "He always was a poor loser," she said.

and.........

Something white and very fast chewed past Jon's ear and buried itself into the wall. His skin crawled. Aproto-mech! There were better ways to die. A shift, a blur, and he was gone.

It was so simple. There was I in front of him. Jon stabilised and became sharp. I was gloating. I was safe.

"Hey 3, you like my little pet, very cute, knows lots of treeks, ees very cheep." He laughed, head tilted back and face wrinkled into a dozen troughs

Fool.

"Hello I" said Jon.

Krisnos he was fast! Jon moved his frame of reference fractionally, only a microsecond before I whirled, dived, rolled and fired in one fluid movement that made full use of the fact that his spinal column had been removed and replaced by flexible plastic. Jon felt the blast suck at his hair as the panel behind him shrank to golf-ball size.

"Hard luck I" said 3.

His first shot converted the imploder into alumnoferrous dust and reduced 1's hands into smoking, blackened stumps.

Shot two removed the legs.

And shot three........

Jon placed the muzzle on I's neck. And I laughed.

The Last Thoughts of a Dying Man:

Michael lay there, suprisingly devoid of feeling, cold steel death at his throat, his limbs charcoal and he thought of Lin. She was a good wife, and a great mother to the kids His four kids, or or was it three? Didn't one die the other day, or was it some other family? Somethimes he lost count. Haha, migod, that was funny.

"Hey, how many kids you got man?"

(Offhand.) "Oh, three.... or four....."

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

The last thing he ever saw was a pair of steel grey eyes. Very cold steel grey eyes. And so very, very empty,

and......

The President of the World appeared on the 'scan dressed in a clowns outfit complete with a red rubber ball on his nose. He was high on Dalmathion 101.

"Aliens landed in Canada today," he was saying, "and migosh golly, are they fun....."

Stephen wanted to commit suicide. To spite his landlady who lived below, he used an atomic grenade and took the entire block with him.

and......

A thief trying to break into a car fumbles and the anti-burglar device blows his hand off. A man passes, murmurs "What an interesting little gadget" while simultaneously filing it away for future reference.

and.........

The pycho-sociologist isn't laughing, he is crying.

and..........

A little girl stealing a small packet of vitamins from a grocery store is chased and cut down by the owner's portable flame thrower before she has gone fifteen metres. While half the onlookers are congratulating the shopkeeper's accuracy, the others half are laughing and pretending to warm their hands on the still burning corpse. "Best damn gadget I ever did buy," the shopkeeper is saying.

and......

A man snatches a pink cyclamen from its stand in the Museum of Ancient History but is vaporised by the intruder alert system which unfortunately destroys the plant too. "Never mind," say the people, "the holograph is just as good and will require less care....."

and.....

The door clicks and and 3/Jon starts to walk through. "Congratulations, Sir," rasps the metallic voice. "Your machine is number 897554."

Jon stands at the threshold, drinking in the sight.

Imagine.

A huge workshop filled with repair machines. Filled with men like him. Real men. Men who'd fought for the right to use these machines.

The New Order.

Bespotted with gore, he starts to slowly and proudly walk to His machine.

"Just a minute!"

The foreman)?) is standing there; a well-built woman in her early twenties, with cold black eyes and brightly polished quartz teeth.

His smile falters.

"You're fourteen minutes late, 3" she says, and devoid of any expression withdraws a laserlight from her chest holster.

The emerald light glinted and danced on her teeth as it neatly punched a hole through his heart.