On the second of March, 2030, on the pedestrian street of Loachin, a menacing man sat behind a table with his hands folded and looked at the young man in front of him the way a butcher looks at a carcass on a hook.
"Does the kid even understand what it means to borrow five million from me?" he said. "The interest is steep."
The young man kept his eyes down and let his teeth chatter a little. Hank, he thought. Boss of the Ocean Gang. The man who runs this street. Out loud he said only, "Since the mister agrees to lend me the money, let the interest be as high as he likes."
"All right. Four percent a month." Hank spread his fingers on the table. "Five million now. Seven back in six months. And you put up a deposit of equivalent value."
The young man took a folder out of his jacket and slid it across. "The documents for my apartment."
Hank turned the pages slowly, and the corners of his mouth did something that was not a smile. The house was a bit old. On today's market it would fetch three, maybe four million at the very most, he said. Privately he was thinking something else entirely: a spacious apartment, more than a hundred and forty square metres, handed over as collateral at that rate of interest. A fat sheep had walked into the slaughterhouse on its own four legs and asked politely to be tied down.
"But I'm not giving five million for this shack," Hank said.
"At least four!" The young man's voice cracked upward. "Four million. Listen — I went to a fortune teller. She read my luck and said good fortune is coming for me, that I'd soon hit the jackpot and pay everything back tenfold."
"Three and a half," Hank said. "Any more than that and I end up in the red."
"Then shake on it. I'll return everything soon. Very soon."
He believes it, Hank thought. He is playing the naive fool for me and he does not even know he is doing it.
"If that's how it is," Hank said, "I'll expect four million in three months. If there's no money, I take the apartment. Agreed? Then write the receipt. You'll have the funds within three days."
"I agree." The young man paused. "But I have one condition."
The tone had changed. It was suddenly, unexpectedly serious, and that alone was enough to make Hank sit up and listen. Ten minutes later the young man walked out of the building alive and with the money, thanking the gentlemen warmly for their cooperation.
In reality our hero was a complete bastard. Out on the pavement he laughed to himself, short and mean. The apocalypse is about to happen, he thought. Who is going to pay back a measly loan like this? Who is going to be alive to collect it?
Now that he had money, he needed to prepare properly.
He did not intend to live the way he had lived the last time. In his past life a monstrous cataclysm had fallen on the world and rewritten the ecosystem of the Earth from the ground up. Solar radiation of an intensity nobody had measured before drove the average temperature of the planet to fifty degrees and plunged humanity into a terrifying thirty-day apocalypse.
Behind him, in the office, Hank was explaining himself to his assistant.
"He agreed to the higher percentage just to get his hands on the money today."
"Boss." The assistant frowned. "Wasn't that house worth more than four million? We knocked him down to three and a half and he agreed so easily. Isn't that a catch?"
"I've seen enough gamblers in my time," Hank said. "They'll do anything for money. Anything at all."
Out on the street the borrower was sneering at the pavement. He had tricked the bandits. He pulled up his bank account on his phone and looked at the number for a while, and felt cool. It seemed that even borrowed money could give a man confidence.
He knew what was coming for that number. In the past life the land had dried out, the plants had died, animals had died, and order had collapsed behind them. Resources became scarce, and for a crumb of food people would commit any atrocity you could name. In a world like that, having reserves meant having unlimited power. He had watched former billionaires and famous singers wag their tails and beg for a mouthful of something to eat.
He had a great many complexes, our hero, and he had money in his pocket for the first time in two lifetimes, and the two things went together beautifully. He was still busy showing off to nobody in particular when he noticed the cafe on the corner.
Ice Assassins. The legendary parlour. In other words, a popular ice cream shop.
He got angry immediately, because he remembered that in his past life he had bought exactly this ice cream for his girlfriend. By some miracle a simpleton like him had managed to get an incredibly beautiful girl, and he had paid for the privilege one overpriced scoop at a time.
He went in and, deciding to make a display of it, asked pompously for ten of every type.
People started whispering at once. "Seriously? Ten pieces of each kind?" "Remember, it's just ice cream." But in their world this ice cream stood on the same pedestal as truffles, and ten of everything was not a small sentence to say out loud.
The employee behind the counter looked at his ordinary clothes, decided he did not look like a rich man, and asked whether he was confident in his choice. They carried only the elite varieties, she explained. Ten servings of each type would come to more than twenty thousand.
One of the women waiting by the display cabinet snorted. "He looks like a pauper. If he actually pays, I'll kneel down in front of him."
He really did look like an ordinary thug off the street, so it was an easy thing to say.
Our hero turned out to be a very malicious young man. He decided on the spot to make an example of the stranger.
"I gave her a chance to leave gracefully," he said, loud enough to carry. "She asked for this. Today she is definitely going down on her knees."
He turned his phone around and showed the counter his bank balance the way a man shows a winning hand, as though he had earned a single coin of it himself, and asked for all of it to be packed.
Then the manager came out, and the manager did the arithmetic. What a big shot. He had bought up a month of earnings in one fell swoop. The ice cream was expensive, certainly, but there were only a handful of buyers a day; most people came in, stared at the price cards, and left again.
Shawn had no financial literacy whatsoever, which is how he came to spend a million on ice cream in a single afternoon. It was not his money, though, so he could spend it, Shawn decided, and that settled the matter.
He would transfer three hundred thousand as a deposit, he told the manager, and everything in the warehouse could be delivered later to this address.
Then it was time for the real performance. He turned around to the shop and shouted that he was paying for the ice cream — all of it — and people could take whatever they wanted.
He had never heard of charity in his life, and he had certainly never heard of a stash, because showing off was more important to him than money. Schadenfreude was the man's governing trait, and he stated his terms plainly: he expected a bow from the girl.
He got it. Having got what he wanted, Shawn walked out to the park.
He sat on a bench in the early spring sun with the tub balanced on his knee and ate his ice cream slowly, and he said out loud, to nobody, "No wonder they call it assassin. The taste is simply top notch."