As a rule, Lance Purusha didn't care about the politics of his marks. He was a professional, and his work was to take them out of this world. The rationale behind his client's desired kills interested him not at all. Something about this target bothered him, however. She was apolitical, a research scientist in medicine, and there was something dirty in the notion of killing her that he quite simply couldn't shake this time. Watching the massive Sunrider make its way down to the luxurious hotels along the shore, he reviewed his info on her, again and again, looking for something she had done that could justify taking her out.There wasn't anything. She had recently been appointed Director of innocuous research on Artificial Intelligence and Human-computer interfaces. His clients saw all Artificial Intelligence as a threat, he did not. It just made better robots to fix his house chef systems or change the grav units in his aircar. In as many centuries as people had been predicting the doom of mankind from AI menace, nothing had transpired but mundane menial tasks or equally mundane sophisticated data processing made easier.His molecular disruptor, a top of the line custom job, commonly referred to as a "Disser", included a silencer and a scope, with a tight beam focus and half a kilometer range, if his interface was spot on. The same interface technology his employers railed against, they saw no problem in using to destroy those creating the technologies.He had seen the likes of his employers on the hypercasts, though he would never actually meet them since he was hired through an intermediary. The anti-technology-anti-AI movement, glowering back at the main thrust of Human civilization from backwater worlds, was always completely comfortable with utilizing the technologies of the current day while lamenting earlier, simpler times. The hypocrisy was so thick you could dance on it.The atrocities they propagated on lawless worlds abounded with as much variety and imagination as one could create-accept that, truly you couldn't make that stuff up...