Feb 2018 v01 online

I drove her home, followed her into her
house, knocked her to the ground and put my
hands around her throat.
She screamed, then gasped. I was silent, but
my heart was beating a mile a minute. Joy or
fear? I could feel the structures in her throat
creaking and cracking and crumbling between
my fingers. She kicked her legs, knocking tables
with vases and god knows what else noisily to
the ground around us. The light in the room
wheeled as a lamp came down.
She started to quiet. I didn’t loosen my grip.
Her face, blue and swollen and already hard at
the lips, accused me, questioned me. Her eyes
were still open and I looked back on them with
shame, or something similar, but didn’t loosen
my grip.
Minutes passed. My own hands started to go
purple, numb, but I had to be sure. I waited to
feel the ghost of a pulse.
Nothing.
Unfortunately, I could already see blue lights
flashing dimly in the dark windows, behind the
silhouette of a neighbour that had heard the
commotion when it was already too late.
***
Daniel Farleigh expelled the breath he felt
like he’d been holding in for the ten minutes
that the simulator had been running. While the
whole affair had lasted a few hours in
programme time, the simulator accelerated the
realtime application by several factors,
sometimes several hundred. Daniel had let this
one run relatively slow, because he’d wanted to
watch carefully the zeroes and ones of the little
fake universe scroll across his sea of screens, and
try and feel what his little virtual double had
felt.
As usual, it didn’t really work. The data that
the simulation computer produced was purely
practical, tangible; the hard pros and cons of
the scenario at play, once the little universe it
simulated in perfect physical detail had been
snuffed out, along with everyone in it.
Daniel read the resultant data with
disinterest. Obviously, Kara wasn’t going to
work; she lived in the middle of the city in a
terraced house, had neighbours on both sides
with whom she was close friends, and had
worked in the same office as him for the last ten
months. There was no feasible way of killing
Kara without being caught in the first 24 hours.
He’d known that beforehand, and because he
knew, the Daniel inside the simulation
would've known too; nothing but an exercise in
futility, really. Still, Daniel was nothing if not
thorough, and this was the latest in a long line
of his own simulations – a horde of temporary
universes where Daniel’s double took a victim.
He looked over at Kara – the real Kara –
without turning his head. She sat, as she always
did, with her back to him, typing at speed and
immersed in her work. He quickly deleted the
digital record of the last minor simulation,
disguising the extra duration and power it had
cost as a final run-through of the previous
client’s project.
Realistically, the client project hadn’t been
much better. Daniel had the hollow luxury of
this justification almost every day. This time, a
massive corporate conglomerate was running
outcomes of its probable decision to semi-