A Billion Ways to Die by Chris Knopf

requirements. He thought that would do fine.
    Inside the package were a driver’s license, birth certificate and five years of tax returns confirming the bona fide existence of an entirely made-up person.
    For the rest of the week, Natsumi committed herself to lying on the windy beach while I hid away in the room assembling documents to support a new identity for her, mostly secured through legitimate channels, a few forged.
    I used some of that time to move money around. While I had given all of Florencia’s embezzled funds back to her insurance company victims, I still had plenty left over from selling the agency itself, along with whatever assets we owned together before she died. As a further backstop, I had a warehouse in Connecticut full of vintage guitars. With a ready market, I could peddle individual guitars as needed, providing a foolproof source of untraceable, tax-free liquidity.
    Every financial action comes with risk. But the biggest risk was being too static. The cyber bloodhounds who paid attention to these things looked for too much activity or too little. It was best to convey the appearance of normal day-to-day commerce. Whether I’d followed a wise strategy, or success thus far had been a lucky illusion, I still had most of the money I’d accumulated since slipping into a shadow world of my own making.
    We were going to need it.

    “W HAT ARE you thinking?” Natsumi asked when she opened her eyes and saw me staring at the ceiling.
    “Our captors gave us a priceless lesson in asymmetrical conflict.”
    “Which is?”
    “The more powerful always win. You can’t hide from them forever. We’re tricky and resourceful, but their capabilities are overwhelming. Partly because they can do things we can’t even know and probably never will.”
    “That’s bleak.”
    “There’s good news. They confirmed that my dead guy status is still intact. For now.”
    “Which is why you’re worried?” she asked.
    “They have my fingerprints, DNA and crystal clear photos. It’s only dumb luck the fingerprints and DNA have never found their way into anyone’s database. As for the photos, I might think I look a lot different from how I used to look, but not to a computer loaded with facial recognition software.”
    “You’re saying they have all the dots, they just haven’t connected them to Arthur Cathcart,” she said.
    “And when they do, it’ll lead directly to fraud, embezzlement, extortion, international terrorism and murder.”
    “That’s all you’re worried about?”
    The open hotel window looked out over the broad beach and light green ocean beyond. Hot, dry, salt-soaked air blew in and mussed up the gauzy curtains. I had come to an agreeable accommodation with warm climates, at odds with a lifetime in cold, cranky places like Connecticut, Boston and Philadelphia. Being aware of any kind of weather—searing sun, mists, winds and willful cloudbursts—was a new thing for me, a person whose attention was once rarely diverted from the printed page, the computer screen or a legal pad covered with equations.
    I’d loved that world of the abstract and remote, the feast of facts, oceans of knowledge too vast ever to be entirely known. I hadn’t chosen to leave it; the impetus was a bullet passing through the outer neighborhoods of my brain’s frontal and parietal lobes. Somewhat mangled, I still managed to live, something the neurologists at the time said was incredibly lucky, a word I still had a hard time reconciling with the actual experience.
    Unless it was this newfound ability to notice the outdoors. To possess, however fleetingly, a Buddhist’s mindfulness in lieu of a state in which one is merely full of one’s own mind.
    But I knew life in the virtual world was no guarantee of survival in the material. And looking over at Natsumi, with the sheet pulled up to just below her eyes and waves of jet black hair spread out across the pillow, I also knew that simple survival was in itself a form