When the assassin asked for an updated map of the city her local contact linked her to a forum; the assassin was too good to discount their advice just because she didn’t understand it. The forum turned out, secondarily, to not be a forum but a combination of multidimensional debate, collaborative puzzle game, and something akin to fan geography. Primarily, they had taken upon themselves to rename city streets on an almost daily basis.
For some unfathomable reason — but what was more quaint than explainability anyway? — city systems took their ground data from their database, which meant the address the assassin had been given was no longer accurate – it was the address of some place, and it would always be, but which one would seldom stay the same for long.
No good assassin gave up in the face of epistemological instability, and no really good assassin lacked a certain eye for data analysis. It was a matter of looking at the archives of the forum-that-wasn’t-a-forum and tracking the changes around the time the assignment had been set up. This was made harder by the fact that there was no deliberative process: people in the forum just pretended the street names were what they wanted them to be, and they became the right names if enough people went along with them. In the particular case of the assassin’s target this shift had depended on the reputation among forum members of a very successful plot engine designer whose romantic life could and had been subject to intense community debate that was yet to die for good. Still, the assassin was relatively sure she had identified the place that had carried (suffered the opprobrium of) the address at the time.
The house was around the block from the place that now had the original address. As far as the assassin could tell this was either a coincidence or an in-joke. Entering posed no problem, nor surprising its lone occupant as he was eating grapes in the luxurious kitchen.
The assassin said the target’s name, just in case; it wouldn’t have done to kill somebody’s boyfriend.
“No, not for a long while,” said the man, and seeing by her frown that the assassin wasn’t a local, he linked her to the name directory forum, which she skimmed while keeping him on her conceptual sights.
It was, if anything, a livelier environment than the cartographical non-forum: taking, giving, forcing, asking, or making up names was bound to lead to stronger emotions, dirtier politics, and more intimate art. There was a philosophical point there, or maybe a joke, or they were role-playing a game or test-running a way of life. It wasn’t clear to the assassin, but it posed a problem: as in any anonymous computable contract, she depended for payment on the verification of city systems.
The assassin ceased the hand gesture than everybody in the world understood meant I have a defensibly innocuous set of parts and access to nearby systems that I can use in very short notice to hurt or kill you (being able to use house robots to kill somebody was less useful than it otherwise would have been if you couldn’t threaten to do it). “So how do people find each other?”
The man shrugged. “Your friends know you, and why would you want anybody else to find you?”
There was nothing she could say to that. The hit was clearly a bust. The assassin was too professional to either kill the right person for no fee or to get a fee for killing someone who only happened to have the right name.
Besides… “The weather seems nice. How would one go about getting a place here? Property databases must be a mess.”
“Eh, it’s like everywhere else, I guess, when you get down to it. You get introduced by friends.”
“And how does one make friends?” No really really good assassin, statistical analysis showed, was good at it.
The man smiled and offered her a grape.