Mr. Abraham King, as Irving noted while reading the report for his latest mark, was quite a character. After all, not every day does someone lead a revolution that nearly topples one of the most influential governments in the Trans-Dimensional Federation. "And that's why I'm here," he thought, leafing through the report. He dressed in his dark green, tactical army body armor - the slim helmet hugged his face as he looked around the room, and the bulletproof vest had automatically fitted itself around his chest as he waited on the bench. He wore his duty belt slightly loose around his waist so that it would sag on one side to make it look like a cowboy on one of those cowboy shows that were made a few hundred years ago. The suit eerily reminded Irving of what the armies of the early twenty-first century Originem-Earth had used. Regardless of the suit's appearance, nothing had been left to chance for safety and precaution. As trans-dimensional teleportation had, and always would be, he imagined, a risky affair. As Irving had always envisioned it as akin to surfing tsunami waters, and hoping he would end up at his destination by chance. 

He regarded the empty portal ahead of him. A giant, gaping, metallic hoop adjoined to a bolted-down platform. It was like a silver, empty mirror frame that awaited a sheet of glass that never came. Only the wall color filled the void. The portal room and the compound it lay inside of resembled a massive, gray concrete block. Outside the empty portal, the walls were colorless, like a prison wall, except for the black, thick, shiny one-way mirror on the opposing wall to him that separated the room and the portal control panel from each other. 

From the report details and his briefing, the target, after his revolution failed and before a dimension-wide manhunt could capture him, slipped away to some unknown dimension in the vast outreaches of an unknown region far away from the far-reaching grasp of the Federation. The only way they could track him was the location chip embedded into every citizen’s carotid artery at birth. “Thank god they did,” Irving muttered to himself as he recollected that key-point presentation. “It wouldn’t be much of a mission. Now would it?”

He quietly shuffled through the file of his soon-to-be adversary. The light that signaled the portal preparation turned on with a “Blarng!” and a green flash. “Are you ready, Irving, sir?!” barked the portal operator into Private Irving’s intercom. “Ready!” he shouted. At that moment, the four-sided concrete world lit up into a milkier tone of gray, and near-blinding light gradually filled the room as the summoned gray hole filled up the once-gaping portal frame. He, at once, grabbed his laser pistol and stuffed the file into his suit. And after giving the portal controller a salute, he dashed into the portal.

***********

A new foreign world greeted him when he stepped out of the furious tides of the Inner-Dimension. In front of him was a great green lawn that sprawled around him like a bright green rug around the mid-morning sun, and a stream far off in the distance seemed to cleave the world into two perfect, identical halves. Vegetation and rocks dotted the landscape. He could also see the vague outlines of fauna in the distance going about their daily lives, although his mind might have been misinterpreting or playing tricks to fill the gaps in the sparse landscape.

It seemed to be an untouched landscape, like some sort of utopia or that place where pets’ souls go after they die. The only fingerprint of humankind in this place was a white, green-roofed, two-floor house that was within walking distance of the portal. “That must be the place,” Irving mumbled to himself as he mentally prepared for the job ahead. He started on his way to the house; his pace was a combination of a walk and a march. 

***********

When he arrived, it was around noon - or at least it seemed to be from his point of view. From his rudimentary calculations, he had only walked half an hour to this place. Earth - or its equivalent here - was a tad bit closer to the sun than it was in most dimensions. But what was the use of calculations and observations and pondering, anyway? After all, he had a job to do. And in his mental code of honor, the job came first, and the questions came second. 

Someone greeted Irving when he had only opened the door a little over halfway. “So, who might you be? Friend? Foe? Or somewhere in between?”

He opened the door all the way. There was, in the living room window to the right of the front door, a kid - looking no older than sixteen years old or so - in shorts and a black tee shirt with a design of a technicolor eye on it. He was in a comfy-enough-looking, red and black armchair, facing a window that overlooked the front lawn and the path Irving took. 

“I have been watching you for a while, as you can see,” the kid said, “since you exited that portal, anyway. I repeat, friend? Foe? Or somewhere in the middle of the spectrum? Although I find most people in the latter camp rather than the former two. But I digress.” 

“Are you, by chance, Abraham M. King?” Irving asked out of principle. “Yeah, yeah, I am.” The kid said. 

“I can’t say what camp I am - by your terms, I mean,” Irving finally said. “But I’m Lt. Private Robert J. Irving, and I’ve come here …” 

“To kill me, I know,” Abraham said abruptly. “It’s obvious what you’re in here for by what you were wearing and the way you came here. It would’ve been easier if you’d told me upfront.” 

“Since you already know, aren’t you going to run?” Irving asked King. In his mind, he had stored trillions upon trillions of memories of runaway targets - some notable ones off the top of his head. Like the time he had to chase a fugitive at top speed of his multi-dimensional cruiser, through multiple dimensions, before catching them. And ended with most, if not all, of them meeting the business end of his plasma sniper. 

“Well, to be honest,” King spoke in the soft tone of solemnness. “Most people see you as foes. They treat you as people would treat death if it were a person of flesh and blood. As a person whom they wouldn’t want to meet ever. Certainly, I was one of those people once upon a time. I don’t see you as a foe, more of a … natural force - like the wind, or the rain, or a wildfire. Like death itself in a way, and probably just as uncaring, cold, and unreasonable - if that's how they trained you, you know what I mean?”

“You can say that, yes,” Irving replied with a shrug.

“Although,” King continued, “I was inaccurate when I compared you to a natural force. You are a tool. A tool forged for death, like steel in forging a new knife, and manipulated to be an extension to the powers that are, to eradicate those they deem a nuisance to their plans. But that’s why you’re here. Am I right?” 

“Yeah, sort of,” Irving responded. Irving, in all his time serving, knew for sure he had rarely seen someone like King in his work. Most people would usually try to delay him in his duty, to see if they could stall the hands of death before they could ever reach them. But Mr. King seemed to be no-nonsense and completely unafraid of death, and seemed accepting of his demise. “Quite a strange one indeed,” he pondered. 

Irving asked King, “Why aren't you afraid of what I'm going to do?”

“Well, the answer is simple,” King nonchalantly answered. “I don’t have it in me, if that makes sense. I've lost my fear of death; there's nothing left to hold on to, nothing to make me change my mind. I wanted to ask you something about your report. Did anyone say anything about the condition of my body after you killed me?”

“No, nothing specific,” Irving said in acknowledgment after a moment of consideration. “They wanted proof, a photo of your body perhaps, or better, your identity chip - just to make sure I did my job.”

“That’s good. Can I ask for something?” King requested.

“What would that be?” Irving asked in reply.

“Can you, by any means, bury me in the backyard?” King asked Irving, “You can do what you need. Take my chip from me or that photo of my corpse. All I want is to be buried out there, in paradise. Where at last, I’ll be one in an ocean of green like I always wanted. To sleep forever in where life grows in and around me. Can you please do that for me?”

“Yes, very well, I’ll see to it,” was Irving’s response.

“Good, now you can do it,” King said as he got up from his armchair.

“Ok, any last words?” Irving posed to King.

“I guess I have a few words, yeah,” King said as he stood there looking at the window.

“Well, where I came from,” King began, “We didn’t have this stuff. It was like those comics I used to read, Nausicaӓ, and Neo–Tokyo and that planet in Dune - except without those worms and the weird space people. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” Irving muttered quietly as he raised his rifle to make the shot. 

“Yeah,” King replied as he fought through the tears welling up in his eyes and the ball in his throat, “You know acidic lakes and stuff that we have to treat thoroughly before we drink, deserts that make the Sahara seem like a sandbox, trees that are basically corpses, and temperatures that kill millions every year. That’s where I come from. And you know what?” Irving could feel the anger swirling up in King, along with the sadness that made a cocktail of pain, remorse, and agony.

“You know what? This all could have been avoided if the leaders centuries past were gutsy enough to make sacrifices. They would not face the sacrifices for the most petty and superficial reasons. They would not stomach the ‘pain’ of their companies not making as much money as would be humanly possible, the ‘humiliation’ of not bringing maximum profits to their shareholders, as well as the utter ‘insurmountable, agony and terror’ of having eleven instead of twelve zeros in their accounts. Although you know what?”

“What?”

“I think it may be the system that raised them that's to blame. A system fueled by greed and malice, of taking and killing and stealing, of hoarding. That may be a greater evil than anyone can ever deal out, a belief that robs people of their judgment and humanity and makes them get what they want and don’t need above all else. You can do it now. I’ve made my peace.”

“If that’s all,” Irving responded as his finger wrapped around the trigger. He slowly squeezed the trigger as he mentally prepared himself for the shot. 5… 4… 3… 2… 1… Peesssw. The room erupted in a mixture of a roar and a chirp as Irving did the deed. King, clutching his chest, shambled onto Irving’s shoulder in limp hops. “Nolo… esse… amplius,” King groaned in a hoarse whisper as he came near the embrace of death. 

Then, the body of Abraham M. King, the teenage revolutionary who nearly toppled Dimension 6149, slid off Irving’s shoulder and fell, crumpled, onto the ground. His eyes displayed the coldness and lifelessness of a doll; his mouth was open slightly, so that from a distance, it looked shut, and his skin had turned to the color of chalk. 

***********

There was something off with that boy, Irving thought to himself as he made his way to the portal. Something that separated him from the millions upon millions of people who will become mere numbers on death statistics. Something that made him feel like Brutus to his Julius Caesar, or something like that. Maybe it was because of his unnatural acceptance of his death, or his last words, or it was because of something else he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Regardless, he did this job. He had his photo of the dead body to take back as proof.

He buried King in the backyard like the target requested. Not too far from now, after he filed this dimension into the database, trillions of people would come here in a sort of gold rush. Either to colonize it and start searching for anything precious this dimension might have, or somebody would make it a tourist destination and market it as “The Resting Place of Rebel Abe King.” It couldn’t concern him which road this place traveled. All he wanted to do was to take a break and get this one off his mind.