"Your order: a scoop of light, another of dark and," he swallowed enviously, "a scoop of Elven ale, 5142 brew. Enjoy your food."
"Cheers," Zena raised a spoonful of burgundy Isabella.
Chapter Twenty
M oscow. Max's apartment. Current time.
Max's mom Anastasia Pavlovna was finishing her daily manipulations over her son's body. She'd already changed the almost-dry diaper, wiped his skin with a damp sponge, massaged his main muscle groups and replaced the saline bags on the automatic IV drip.
She swept away an unwanted tear and stroked her boy's cheek, dry and scratchy like parchment. He was so gaunt. Not everyone would have recognized him as the once-cheerful young man who could have lost a few pounds. Between his deadly disease and the extended coma, they had eaten his body on the inside and transformed it on the outside.
Anastasia Pavlovna glanced at the dozens of sensors that covered her son's body stretching their bundled cables to a massive console brought into her apartment by the Chronos workers.
It had all changed so quickly. After Max contacted her, she had barely made an appointment when a couple of young and aggressive sales managers stormed into her apartment, pitching to her in the best traditions of neuro linguistic programming. Good job they were followed by a very nice girl called Olga, apparently a friend of Max', who came running after them—very sweet, intelligent and strangely sad. They would have made such a nice couple. Anastasia Pavlovna would have loved to sit with some grandchildren while she still had time.
The girl had easily overrun the two. Under their pained stares, she had crossed out half of the contract's clauses fighting for the best offer plus some extras on top from their VIP reserve. Anastasia Pavlovna had herself heard one of the managers whisper in Olga's ear, "You stupid idiot, what do you think you're doing?" She had very nearly asked the bully to leave her house at once and only the sight of her son's pale face had stopped her from doing it there and then.
She hadn't waited for the money transfer from her boy. She signed the contract on the spot and paid the deposit out of her own savings including her 'funeral money'. That didn't matter so much, really. As long as her boy was all right, money would take care of itself. Besides, hadn't Max told her he was earning a good wage in that AlterWorld of his? He definitely made enough to rent that lovely cottage for her. He also had some very no-nonsense friends: one of them, Vladimir, was even now sitting by the kitchen window monitoring (as he called it) the front door. She'd told him so many times it wasn't worth the trouble, told him she was too old to be bodyguarded like that. But he wouldn't listen, would he? He was always one step behind her, turning his head this way and that, checking the surroundings. A fine young man, even though he'd never offered to help her with her shopping bag. 'I'm awful sorry, ma'am,' he'd say, 'but my hands must be free at all times.'
Recently two more had joined him. Oleg usually stayed in the car. Constantine came late at night to replace one of the other two. It would be a good idea to cook some meat balls for them, you couldn't expect them to stay fit on all those pizza orders and rice cakes wrapped in synthetic seaweed.
The heart monitor beeped, its alarm disrupting her thoughts. On its screen, the neat curves gave way to sharp peaks and scary dips. Her son's heart missed another beat, and again, followed by a long pause. The monitor's anxious whine grew as the peaks straightened into a thin horizontal line. Come on now! Start beating! Hold on, son, keep on fighting!
An emergency call light blinked, summoning a Chronos resuscitation team. The hospital's remote operator hooked himself up to the resuscitation equipment that crowded around the headboard of the capsule. The day before, she'd had to sign a hospital waiver and pay for the VIP-class home care. Without that, they would have taken him away to some hospice where he'd have faded away like any other coma sufferer.
The operator sent the charge command to the defibrillator and activated the pulse generator. The sharp click of the jet injector startled her. An empty adrenaline cartridge rolled across the floor.
"Clear!"
Her son's body arced, convulsing. The autosampler methodically injected the contents of the first-aid container into the IV drip. On the monitor screen, the hospital doctor's face frowned, concerned.
"Clear!"
Whiffs of smoke rose from the capsule's sensitive electronic components. There had to be a cutoff system there that disabled any non-core hardware, but it didn't seem to have worked. Again the jet injector clicked, sending an empty atropine cartridge spinning across the parquet floor.
"Clear!"
The monitor was still whining when the corridor filled with the stomping of many feet. The Chronos men were the first to arrive.
Hope in her eyes, Anastasia Pavlovna looked up at the hospital doctor on the monitor screen. He turned away momentarily, then forced himself to answer her stare, shaking his head. Then the monitor blinked, the picture replaced by a list of the resuscitation procedures. The arriving ambulance crew took over from him. He switched off.
Half an hour later, Anastasia Pavlovna sat at the table, barely responsive, clutching some sedatives in one hand and an official pen with a built-in ID check in the other. She wasn't even looking at what she was signing: the death certificate, the ambulance crew report, the burial certificate that stated her son's body was to be laid to rest cryogenically. She was almost happy she couldn't see or hear much: the last thing she wanted to hear now was the squelching sounds of a machine that was pumping extra liquid out of her son's body, replacing it with cryoprotective solution.
A text ringtone made her jump. She froze. This was the tone she'd assigned to messages coming from her son's number.
Not yet knowing what she was doing, the mother looked up at the comms bracelet. She touched the screen, opening the incoming message. A wide smile lit up her face.
He's alive! My boy's alive! Oh, thank you, AlterWorld, thank you!
* * *
We were finishing our alcocreams when my chest seized up quite painfully. I winced, rubbing what had to be the heart area.
"Whassup?" the ever-observant Zena asked.
"Dunno. Feels like my heart's just played up."
Her eyebrows rose. "You're not going to become the first perma who popped his clogs from a heart attack, are you?"
"I hope not," I smiled back, concentrating on my body sensations. The pain seemed to have subsided, or was it my imagination? My nerves were like live wires with all the recent events, and the shock I'd received that morning could have well added its pound of flesh. I was surprised I wasn't hearing voices yet, let alone suffering phantom pains.
Her stare unfocused briefly, then she was back with us. "He'll see you in ten minutes. Are you ready?"
"Yes, ma'am!"
"Good. Freckles, finish your mojito and give Max a lift to the Guild. And you can show him to the office. He doesn't have much time."
"Sure," the female wizard mumbled, clinking her spoon as she scooped out the last of her soft-green poison of choice from the bowl.
In theory, virtual liquor didn't have intoxicating properties. But in practice... It could simply have been brain chemistry playing up; alternatively, the drink could trigger existing subconscious reflexes, but it was a fact noticed by many: the alcohol did affect you. Some more, others less, but no one was a hundred percent immune to its effect apart for some die-hard teetotalers and rehab rats whose subcortex didn't possess the necessary neural links.
That explained the fact that the girls were just tipsy enough to move to the next stage of the dating game, some quite prepared to skip it and move directly to the inevitable horizontal stage. Yeah, right. Bomba especially could use a strong male hand. The other girls weren't exactly beauty pageant material, either. Having said that, the time spent in AlterWorld had somehow changed my perception of beauty. To my eye they seemed quite cute even if a bit homely, though had I met their team in real life, I was guaranteed a few embarrassing moments complete with a pair of soiled pants and some early gray hair.