Jennifer Haze Does Not Exist

[Mel Rose]

2:01am

She was awake again. She sighed, looking at the boring ceiling of her suite. Who was Jennifer Haze, indeed?

What horrid chain of events let her to this place, to this suite at the top levels of the Intercontinental hotel on New Tokyo, a place where just a night costed about as much as the bottom ninety percent of Sirius made in a month, and yet it made her so unhappy?

Fifty.

The grim reality of a five being the first digit of her age for — she glanced to the clock — the past two hours. It was a moment that something clicked. What was she thinking?

A job of an assassin is a dangerous and self-denying one. No family, no friends, no home, no trace, no life, nothing. Only cash. And greed. It was not even real, anyway. It was just a number on her bank account.

She chuckled to herself. A bank account! It was a legitimate business, after all. She paid taxes in Liberty, on all the policemen and navy soldiers that she shot down. It was through a shell corp, laundered and properly untraceable. But it was done for a reason. All of the money she had was clean. Everything was ready in case she decided to retire.

That ever-increasing number enticed her very much.

Her first attempt at a retirement did not work out. She spent time on the OSC liner Hawaii, a couple of months of that, and then the cash ran out. It had turned out that with the inflation and all, she could not just sit on it all the time. She had to make more with it, else it would be eaten up by the ever-increasing inflation.

The usual way women her age ensured safe retirement was by having children. But that option was taken away from her, first by the jail time, then by the line of work she chose and the lifestyle she had to lead because of that choice. And now...

Fifty.

Too late for kids. As if she could find a man who would date her, even if it were possible. She laughed to herself in the dead of night. The number fifty was firmly etched in her brain.

Maybe she should have gone into business instead? That's something that scales. There are jobs that scale, that one can be good at, teach others, take a part of their money, and then the business grows. Repair jobs, construction, trade.

Assassinations were not like that. They were more like — she tried to look for a better example but her consciousness went to the most extreme one first — like prostitution. Strictly limited by the time and opportunity that she had. No matter how good one is, there is an upper limit to how much an assassin — or, indeed, a whore — could earn. She felt like she was firmly at that limit, at least for the assassination part.

The only ways from here were down or sideways.

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Jennifer Haze Does Not Exist :: Filing Cabinet :: Swords into Plowshares
Liminality :: Good in Red :: Past to Present :: Fish of the Sea