Short Story Highlight: “Enter The Dragon. Later, Enter Another” by Lavie Tidhar

Just wanted to draw your attention to a short story I published on my blog yesterday: Enter The Dragon. Later, Enter Another – which deals with a future increasingly dominated by the effects of multiple WikiLeaks…

1.

Julian Assange’s Impenetrable Fortress of Ice lies on top of Mount Terror, on Ross Island in Antarctica.

It is a beautiful, icy desolation, hiding inside it the Planet’s Most Wanted Man. His name is Julian.

The Fortress is patrolled at all times by WikiLeaks guerrillas, battle-hardened veterans of the War on Info, the War on Terror, the War for Family Values and the American Way of Life. Behind its sheer ice walls the WikiLord resides in utilitarian splendour, banks of computers broadcasting a continuous digital signal to overhead satellites, spreading the word. The words.

Data. All, as the faithful say, is Data.

Information wants to be free.

2.

They bred me out of the black vats, deep underground, moulded me out of the greatest warriors of all time, General Schwarzkopf and Chuck Norris with a hint of Idi Amin, a touch of Bruce Lee. I am the Dragon. I kill at the speed of thought. I come to Antarctica as men have done over centuries, by sea. A British ice-breaker deposits me on frozen land. Broken icebergs drift across the ocean. I practice by breaking solid ice with my bare hands. I stare up at the frozen volcanoes, at Mount Erebus and Mount Terror. Erebus is a beautiful cone of snow and ice, but the eye is drawn to Terror, where battle drones fly like dark birds in the sky.

I kill a bear with only my knife and wear its hide.

I am ready for this task, as ready as I can ever be.

I reach the volcano.

I begin to climb.

3.

The Iraq War was a computer simulation. Thousands of sentient ghosts died within its cycles of warfare. Viruses of Mass Destruction wrecked havoc on a sculpted landscape, a PR coup d’état for the American infidels. The truth is everywhere you look, just pick up the signal, reality is not what you see, it is what you think it is.

4.

The first Assange I eliminated was in Paris. He was a version 5.02, without the killer instincts as yet, blond almost white-haired, a charismatic, preaching the word on the Rue Saint Michel.

As I ran away from the scene of my crime Mandela-bots chased me, telling me there is another way. I did not want their truth, nor reconciliation. I escaped by speedboat on the Seine, already I was booked for a second job, in Tel Aviv.

5.

On Dizengoff Street I eliminated the Assange preaching sedition, a later model, war programming upgraded, he put up a fight, his knife routines were beautifully choreographed but I am the Dragon, and I completed my mission and flew to Riyadh.

6.

There had been seven Assanges in Riyadh but none when I left.

continue reading.

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