Joined: December 3rd, 2005, 8:59 pm
Posts: 1494
Location: ORGANS!!!!
RS Status: Classic
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This story got me a nice little A* in my GCSE English Coursework last year. I hope you like it 
The Assassin
A tall, skinny woman, with dark hair, and deep green eyes, was quietly sitting on a leather-back chair at a desk, typing furiously on a computer keyboard. She was wearing black. She always wore black. To those who knew of her, she was Arada. To those who didn’t, she was just any other person, with dark hair and green eyes, sitting at a computer typing furiously.
This was how she lived, and always lived; always on a computer, typing away furiously making various computer programs, and talking on Internet forums and chatrooms. Her name on these was Arada. No-one knew her real name.
Despite no-one knowing her, she still had enemies. There was a good reason for this, though. She was a hacker. She had crashed seventy government supercomputers simultaneously whilst sitting quite still in her study. She had deleted all criminal records of herself from previous hacking convictions. She had written viruses the world over, using other peoples’ computers to make ‘bots’ which would collectively hack other computers, making the botnet ever and ever bigger, and all without any of the users knowing.
This is why DI were called in.
DI was a terrorist organisation, led by a man who only called himself ‘The Master’. Like Arada, no-one knew his real name. No-one asked. The last person who did ended up skewered to a flagpole. No-one knew what DI stood for, not even the members of the organisation. No-one asked, for fear of ending up like the flagpole guy.
The woman who had phoned DI had asked them quite simply to kill Arada. She said she would pay them a sum of ten thousand pounds - five thousand before, and another five thousand after completion.
The Master had given the job to a very successful assassin called Tom. There was one person who had told him Tom was a boring name for an assassin. He agreed, but the person was later found impaled on a spiked iron fence, garrotted with their own intestines, devoid of lungs. DI was not a criminal organisation to insult. Unless, of course, you were suicidal.
Tom was a traditional fellow when it came to assassination. He preferred to use older-style weapons, such as his patent-pending violently curved assassin’s dagger. He didn’t need anything else; in fact, he didn’t actually own anything else. Chances were if he did need anything else, he was dead; and he didn’t intend to die any time soon.
‘Ready?’ asked a fellow assassin.
‘If you ask that again, you won’t see tomorrow morning. Or, indeed, tonight.’
Tom left, his perfectly white, long hair flowing out behind him. He climbed into a top-spec black sports car – stolen of course – put the keys into the ignition, and drove away.
The car drove up near the house where Arada was believed to be living. Tom, wearing a black robe, and heavy black leather boots, stepped out. His dagger was to his side, in a small black leather sheath, which in turn was clipped onto his belt.
He walked across the road, and with utmost care, picked the lock of the front door with a couple of toothpicks. It made a small click as it unlocked.
That was too loud.
He slowly opened the door and into the front room. It was a very normal-looking house. It had beige carpets, pale yellow walls, and perfectly white doors. It even had the odd comical picture on the wall, each in identical wooden frames. Obviously Arada had made sure to make it look like the average suburban house. It was very convincing. Tom closed the door behind him; another click. Too loud.
Obviously the woman hadn’t heard, however, because he could still hear the very distinctive noise of typing on a computer keyboard, pausing every now and again, with the sound of pages turning in a book.
As he stepped through a doorframe, a floorboard creaked beneath his foot. The woman had obviously heard him then. The frantic continuous typing on a keyboard stopped, and was replaced with a sound Tom recognised as someone trying very hard to be as quiet as possible.
Sh*t.
Tom slowly unsheathed his knife with a small slicing hiss. That again, was too loud, but if she had heard him now anyway it wouldn’t have made much difference.
As he walked into the room he saw something very strange.
The computer was turned on, and a small webcam was on top of it, examining the assassin. On the screen, he saw a music-playing program, with a track called ‘keys’ that was paused.
Oh, sh*t.
Arada had tricked him. She had set up remote access to the computer using a program Tom has used a few times before: VNC. The familiar blue eye icon associated with a VNC Server was visible in the system tray. Arada could look in and examine the room, and at any hint of sound, she could remotely pause the track in the media program to make it sound like she had stopped typing. Tom gripped his knife tightly in his hand and stabbed it into the TFT monitor. The glass shattered, icy shards spreading out from the tip of the knife, with sparks erupting from the crater created by the point of the razor-sharp blade.
Tom turned round and left through the front door, closing it behind him. He got into the car, put the key in the ignition, and went back to DI HQ.
‘The hacker has tricked us. She has been using a VNC control to prevent her being traced back to that house.’ tom explained to The Master.
‘Interesting. Ok. I’ll get the hacker department on it.’ The Master pressed a button under his desk. Another man entered the room. ‘Joseph, go down to the hacking department and tell them to hack into Arada’s computer. They will have to make a secondary connection through Arada’s known computer. You understand?’
‘Yes, sir. Hack. Remote connection through known. Got it.’ he left the room.
‘Now, Tom, at the moment it seems there is currently nothing for you to do. Go down to chems and ask them about the Jackal poison.’
Tom left the room, and headed down the stone passageway in the general direction of the chems department. The DI HQ was once a Victorian mansion, made of granite. In fact, it was actually more of a fortress. Unless you were in DI, you wouldn’t get in. And if you did, you would probably end up like flagpole guy.
Tom opened the door to the chems department to find the vile smell of chlorine, ammonia, and fart all reach his nose, all at the same time. It wasn’t nice. With his sleeve over his nose and mouth, he walked up to a person who looked like he was in vague authority. He was wearing a gas mask.
‘What on earth is that smell?!’
‘Um… it’s the Nervato poison, chlorine, ammonia, and, well, fart, basically.’
Tom stared blankly at him.
‘We had a small explosion when we heated some poison. The only way to stop it killing everyone was to react the bleedin’ stuff with chlorine, ammonia gas, and hydrogen sulphide, which is, as I said, basically fart.’
‘Ok…’ said Tom, voice muffled by his sleeve. ‘I have been told by The Master to ask you about Jackal poison.’
‘This way.’ The man twitched his head in the general direction of a glass box, and started walking over. The box looked like the kind of thing you use to hold something incredibly radioactive, or very potent viruses. Tom followed the man over there. He pressed a few buttons on a small control panel, and a robotic arm moved through the glass box, picked up a small vial, and placed it in a canister to the side of the box. He pressed a few more buttons, and the small Perspex canister filled with steam, obviously killing any viruses that may be on it. The Perspex canister then popped out the side of the large glass box, like a coke can from a vending machine.
‘This is the Jackal poison.’ He said, holding up the Perspex box with the vial inside. Tom took it.
‘What exactly does it do?’
‘Well, if you’re lucky, you’re paralyzed for the rest of your life from the eyes down.’
‘And if you’re unlucky?’ inquired the assassin.
‘Well if you’re unlucky, the poison boils in the heat of your body, dissolves the cytoplasm around your nerve cells, causes your muscles to convulse so much you break your own back, and after all that, your skin melts off.’
‘And then you die, I suppose?’
‘Well… maybe.’
‘Delightful.’
A man ran up to the gas-masked person talking to Tom. He looked a bit distressed.
‘Sir… listen!’
It was quite a well-known fact that to be in DI you had to like heavy metal. And yet again, there was heavy metal playing; DI used it to lighten the mood, keep people friendly. It was currently playing The Call of Ktulu by Metallica.
The Call of Ktulu.
Sh*t.
DI had quite a few secret messages. Everyone knew what they were. For example, when ‘Damage Inc’ by Metallica played, a massive squad would go out on a mass-assassination. When ‘Run to the Hills’ by Iron Maiden played, the DI fortress was being attacked or besieged. When ‘The Call of Ktulu’ played, DI’s top-spec computers, with a multiple gigabit connection that was legendary in the world of computer nerds, were being hacked from the outside.
No-one hacked DI’s computers.
Tom ran as fast as he could to the exit of the room, the Perspex box of Jackal poison in his hand. He ran through another stone passageway, colliding with people moving in the other direction, until he reached the courtyard in front of DI HQ. He got into the same black car as before, revved it up, and started driving. He took out his phone, pressed a single button, and forced it to his ear.
‘Where is she?!’
‘It’s being transmitted to your GPS.’
Tom threw his phone down to the seat, and turned on the cars on-board computer GPS system. A solitary house flashed up. ‘Turn left.’ the computer’s steely voice declared to him. Tom jabbed at the screen. Voice off.
He turned down a country lane, probably breaking about fifty laws as he recklessly overtook. This is DI though. They don’t care about laws.
He grabbed the handbrake, and yanked it up, spinning the steering wheel round four times. The car slid sideways onto a larger road. Despite being suicidal, it was a successful manoeuvre, and he sped off again down the country road.
The GPS system beeped at him. Tom pulled at the handbrake again, and spun round into the drive of a small slate-roofed house. The back end of his car hit another car in the drive.
Sh*t.
Tom ran up to the house and kicked down the door. He ran through the front room, and into the study. There was a small boy at a computer, an arcade game on the screen.
Maybe the wrong room?
Tom ran upstairs, yanking out his dagger. Bedroom. Empty. Bathroom. Empty. Second bedroom.
Here we go.
There was a woman sitting cross-legged on her bed, typing into her laptop. She was wearing black, and had deep green eyes, dark hair and was quite skinny. She looked vaguely surprised.
‘Arada?’ Tom asked, his patent-pending dagger raised slightly. The dagger was covered in a black liquid: the Jackal poison.
She said only one word in response.
‘Sh*t.’
The Master met with the client the next day. Five thousand pounds was handed over, in cash. He left.
A week later, the client was dead.
DI took no chances.
Putting asterisks in sh*t really doesnt look good. Yes, I did actually swear in a GCSE English paper. We should petition Shane to allow mild swearing in the writing forum.
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Last edited by MattVortex on May 13th, 2007, 10:25 am, edited 1 time in total.
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What are you planning Motv??
But anyway, this story has some very clever twists and I hope to see more.
