![]() You get pictures of their face and body, the address of their home and their workplace. Here is how it works: You receive a target, another player who’s signed up for the same experience. That systems thinking cannot save me, that the world is not game-designed. I have paid sixty pounds for the terror of hunting and being hunted, and for the excellent lesson that I am not at all a good hitman. I am playing a game called Street Wars, a city-wide watergun assassination tournament. In the building’s lobby I notice I’m disarmed: Somewhere along the line, all the water has leaked out of my pistol and spilt down the gutter of my back. “Good morning,” I say, with no choice but to step into the elevator behind him, ride it down and down. "Every time one of us leaves the house, the other one of us has to clear the yard, wielding a double-barreled super-soaker."“Good morning,” says a man who is not my target, smiling at the lady jogger in his elevator bay. I’m going to black out, I think academically, as steady footsteps creak ever closer to me. I call the elevator, and then I hold absolutely still, inoffensively postured with my phone casually to my ear and my weapon in my damp hand, tucked at the nape of my spine. Fuck.ĭown the hall and around the corner, I hear the soft click and ensuing moan of an opening door. ![]() because it’s a good ten minutes before I think to look for them. It’s a good thing there are no security cameras here…. I feel deeply I am in a place I do not belong. I reach the target’s floor and I stand in his elevator lobby, my phone is rattling in my hand, my knuckles are adrenaline-locked. When a resident emerges through the apartment building’s big security door I sidle in without a second glance, unremarked upon. Probably this isn’t an ideal place to wait. A white-bearded man walks past, looks down at the bizarre interloper and frowns a little. I spot a low little garden wall across from the entrance and make a graceful dive behind it, crouching low in the mulch under a bush where I can’t be seen. The huntBy 7:15 I’m running up an alley outside the target’s building. ![]() Already a cold little trickle is running down my belly. I take off, sprinting down the gray sidewalk, gray English morning, toward the bus stop. ![]() We clear the laundry closet on each floor. Grizzled but alert my partner escorts me downstairs, pointing double barrels into the dark of our flat’s stairs. Where, after all, would she hide the gun? In the dark I pull my hair back, I change into black jogging gear. You’ve stolen uniforms, made improbable mustaches out of cat hair. You have been virtually aiming your whole life. Calculating the most efficient way to achieve the objective is what you do. Or you play video games, and therefore you are a systems thinker. You’ve learned from their mistakes, and you will know, when the time comes, how the spatter analysis should read, how not to leave your epithelia as you step soundlessly over the threshold of your victim. Or you think that you’re smarter: You shout reproachfully at the criminals on the forensics shows, the careless ones who get caught. You would, you reason, be more likely to be calmer under pressure than most. Maybe you think you are just a bit braver than everyone else, steadier. I am in genuine fear of being shot.Įveryone thinks they would make a good hitman. Eventually I break down and prepare the meal of the desperate: Two frankfurters scavenged from the back of the fridge, boiled limp and naked. As I write this, I’m starving, but I dare not go out for food.
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