The Living (20 page)

Is this what you expected from me, Cracker my friend, when you performed the miracle, when a spasm gripped your throat? That I would become a creepy little bastard and spend my two weeks of freedom in a mirror mask, trying to find out what the great future that lay in store for me was…? And then I let myself get caught, asleep, without yet having figured anything out? Though that’s not quite true: there’s no doubt about my future now. Solitary in the Special Unit. Sentenced to pause. Darkness.

What did you see in me, my friend: a cowardly animal being taken to the slaughterhouse, eyes shut in mortal fear…? No, not that. You believed in me. You wanted me to turn the world
upside down. You pushed me out of captivity, equipping me only with a nonsensical message: ‘Fight the Monster.’ You wanted me to find all the dissident lists in the Service for Planetary Order’s database. Beneath the merciless corrective light, through the mouths of those in your service, you told me that you had created the dissidents yourself. All that spam, that virus that kept forwarding itself – you, Cracker, launched it all into
socio
… It was only later, you said, only later that they actually did appear. The dissidents. You just prepared the ground for them. Now the dissidents send out ‘threats’
themselves
and call them ‘chain letters’. And wait for me to come… You said that there were even some Thousanders among the dissidents. You wanted me to friend them and get them to follow me. You wanted me to get Thousanders, so that they would bring their thousands. You said: ‘They’ll get you of course, But you will injure Him.’ You thought I would sacrifice my life for your obsession. Sorry, Cracker. My life is short compared to yours – sorry, I got selfish. And now I’m giving it away just like that… If you knew, you would probably unfriend me…

Ef’s friends, some of them are my enemies, and all the rest are just strangers. His friends blink their pulsing, available mouths mockingly at me, inviting me in. Cracker’s cell is not lit up, there is only a little timer counting down the time until the birth – 265 days remaining
.

I say to the womb.

the womb argues,

It’s dumb, the womb. And stubborn. There’s no point in arguing with it. I don’t argue, I just delete the friends. In turn I plug up the hungry, greedy mouths.

I delete 229 friends from my list. Only one is left.

No. When you are wearing handcuffs and you’re about to cease existing, you really want at least one friend…

The entrance to her cell is getting smaller, evenly, drowsily, but it swings open as I come nearer.

Why not? She might as well be my final, one and only friend. Someone might as well love me, even just a bit, in
luxury
mode, as a final send-off.

…I
create
the land, the grass, the flowers and the shrubs, the trees and the stones, the hills and the gullies, and the pine
cones and the moss, the fallen leaves, the mushrooms rotting beneath them, and a lot else besides…

I
create
myself – in the form of a white-eyed wolf, one I saw at the farm once.

I
create
her – in the form of a white-eyed female who loves my scent…

I’ll have time to inseminate her before the end of the world begins.

…Before the man sitting to the left of me chokes on his coughing and snoring and temporarily ceases living. Before the womb, which believed that I was him, vomits me to the surface in disgust.

She hasn’t touched her food for a day now. Because I don’t play with her anymore, I don’t stroke her or play fetch with her.

I can’t. I’m also depressed. I’m a rubbish dog-owner. I hope when they get the beetle out of her, everything will be like before. But until then I won’t play with her whatever happens… Not now.

Not right now, when I’m looking at another document created with her help.

Page designers determine the size of the font and the encoding of the text. If the encoding doesn’t match the one set in the reader, what you see is

…I choose
visit to vet
from the menu and send 200(!) unics to the right account. The Association of Game Raters fleeces you pretty mercilessly for veterinary services, even though the quality is, to be frank, not great: the reception room loads without a right-hand wall, the vet isn’t at all 3D – she’s all dull and flat, like a squashed beetle, and her facial expressions are limited, like a slum robot.

‘Welcome, dog-owner,’ she says through the unmoving
half-moon
of her mouth. ‘As you are here, you cannot be taking good care of your
dog
, which has led to her developing some illness. How can I help you?’

‘My dog is healthy. She’s just picked up a parasite. I want to delete it.’

‘Oh!’ Her face is stretched into a grimace for a second, so badly drawn that it could mean anything, from abhorrence to sympathy, and then straightens out. ‘Picking up a worm is very bad. It is good that I can help you. Deleting worms is a simple operation. It is a paid service. 100 unics for every
socio
-worm.’

‘It’s not a worm.’

‘Oh?’

‘It’s more like a beetle.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, really. Spyware.’

‘I have never experienced a dog with spyware.’

‘Now you have.’

The vet makes her mouth round – probably to spit out the next ‘oh’ – and freezes. My dog, emboldened, sniffs and licks her frozen face, then goes over to the non-existent right-hand wall and, cocking her head to one side inquisitively, looks into the endless blackness.

‘What a con!’ I say to the vet, but she just sits there, her rounded jaw hanging low, and doesn’t come out of her
paralysis
, even to say goodbye.

The superpro looks like he could be her twin brother, only instead of a black thatch of hair, he has an oval pink bald spot and glasses on his nose. In contrast to his less-qualified colleague he casts a shadow, has better facial expressions and his study loads fully.

He examines
dog
and takes an x-ray (another 100 unics flows out of my
socio
account). He hangs a series of x-rays on the wall of his office. What’s there on the slides doesn’t look too good: a little patch of white in the dog’s brain, absolutely tiny – but it has slender little legs extending out in all
directions
, shackling all her internal organs.

‘Bad news, I am afraid,’ says the superpro. ‘It would be dangerous to delete the beetle. Look, it has grown into all the vitally important areas. It is involved in nearly all the
dog
’s active processes… But there’s some good news too. The beetle presents no threat to the
dog
’s health. On the contrary, in a way it is even helping her. It is making the
dog
more active and
intelligent. All your
dog
’s applications, such as vision, smell, intuition, curiosity, ability to learn and ability to sympathise are superbly well-developed… Judge for yourself, the beetle program is friendly.’

‘It’s spyware. It’s not friendly to me.’

‘In this game we look after the health of cats and dogs. We do not deal with the problems of
dog-owners
and
cat-lovers
. This is dealt with by the Psychological Service for Assisting the Population.’

‘Can you at least say when information was last downloaded from the beetle?’

‘300 unics,’ the superprofessional replies, and an entirely first-layer expression of cynicism appears on his round face.

I transfer the money silently and he lights up with a pleasant smile.

‘The last download was on 15th July 471, 12:00.’

The time of Zero’s death. The time of the last message sent by Ef… Let’s suppose Zero’s self-immolation in first layer
distracted
the planetman from following me in second. Why then didn’t he download the rest later, the most important bits?!

‘How much will deleting the beetle cost?’

‘I see no reason for the operation,’ the superpro says.

‘And what if I, say, triple your fee – will you see one then?’ The expression ‘deeply offended’ appears on his face.

‘The
dog
is inoperable,’ he says hostilely through gritted teeth. ‘Don’t worry, she’s completely healthy. All the best, no death, come again.’

The veterinary clinic shoves me and the dog back into the viscous between world.
Dog
tumbles about and yaps away – she loves going for walks in the depths, she likes the sensation of weightlessness. She twitches her paws playfully, inviting me to play with her.

‘She is a spy,’ I say to myself. ‘My
dog
is a spy. She is not my friend. A sneak.’

I wait for
dog
to turn away from me and then I go back to my cell.

Alone, without her. I leave her tumbling in the
socio
-emptiness
.

She will notice that I’ve gone, and get scared and start to look for me in the depths – but that won’t last long.

She won’t see me killing her.

And I won’t see her ceasing to live.

Why did he not download the most important bits? The things I did when I was thrown out of the fresh grave that formed in place of Lot’s cell? The things I did when the darkness swelled up inside me and burst like a septic boil. When I woke up in my cell and
dog
was licking me with its painted-on tongue. When I was turned inside out in first layer and the autodoctor was overflowing with recommendations:
you appear to have been an accidental witness to someone’s
socio-
pause… this can cause considerable physical and mental stress… please consult a psychotherapist immediately… if nausea continues, call an ‘ambulance’…

I didn’t call an ambulance. Instead I called up a ghost.

I collected everything left in
socio
by my predecessor into one file – everything that Leo had ever said, written, thought or worked out… I thought at the end of the day if a ghost can play me at chess, why can’t he talk to me heart to heart? A ghost can make a move, based on the logic of his previously played games. A ghost will give me answers based on the logic of his previously lived life. Based on the make up of the brain that once invented the Leo-Lot ray.

I shut off everything in my memory except for the video function and ‘leo memories’, and I felt like I was losing my consciousness bit by bit. As if a voracious swarm of termites was gobbling up my thoughts, memories and habits, leaving yawning emptiness in their place… Then, devoured, empty,
with fragments of someone else’s memory in my head, I lurched randomly back and forth through my cell, unaware,
unremem-bering
, completely disoriented.

My
dog
– that part of her which was stored outside my memory – crawled after me sadly and tried to whimper. My
dog
became a skeleton again, through which I could see her internal organs. The form in which she had been downloaded initially. I had installed the fur and the whole exterior manually,
separately
, and now all those settings had been wiped…

…I had no childhood. No home. No body. My life was tiny, cold and precise, like a snow crystal. I was made of symbols. I knew a lot of scientific theories and chess openings. But I had no idea how to use all this, who I should play against and why.

Even now, when I watch the video, I feel
that
chill. It’s like I’m standing in a breeze with my back to an open window. I’m standing and watching myself amble casually, randomly into my
socio
home cinema. The screen was turned off and my face was reflected in the twinkling black rectangle. The face of a man of about forty, whitish and half-transparent, as if pets had spun his skin from spider webs.

‘Who’s there?’ I asked in a man’s voice and replied to myself, ‘Leo.’

‘Why are you here?’

‘I think you want to ask me a question.’

‘I don’t remember what it was.’

‘Let’s figure it out,’ I said. ‘Either you are interested in my scientific work, or my personal life, or my chess – that’s all that I am made of. Personal life can be eliminated straightaway: those memories take up no more than five per cent, and they are all quite vague. As for chess: if you had wanted to play against me, you would just have started a game. Therefore, all that’s left is science – but the records of my chess moves only answer for my logical thought. Which means that I have to
create
something for you. What is it?’

I hold the pause for a long time and then say calmly, ‘The formula for the compound. The one used for the injection in the Leo-Lot ray experiment.’

I didn’t know exactly whose words these were. Mine: could I rack his first-layer memory and recall why I summoned him, or perhaps they were his words after all? Probably his. He and his dead chess brain had probably worked out in advance what I expected from him.

Whatever it was, I froze for two and a half hours (158 minutes 37 seconds according to the clock on the video) and all that time the
dog
’s skeleton desperately nuzzled me with its bony nose. Then I started moving again, created a new file and wrote the formula in it.

I said out loud to my reflection, ‘Sorry. There is a five per cent chance of a mistake in the formula.’ After a little while
socio
suggests I restore all settings.

I saved it.