He felt Irina’s presence before he’d heard her voice.
“Hello, Victor. Admiring the view?”
“Nothing freaky going on, you say? Why is everyone afraid?”
“Mark’s propaganda. I told you. You don’t believe me. It saddens me. Let’s play a game.”
“No more games. This is serious—”
“Everything’s a game,” she said. “You told me so yourself. You win this one, and fine, I’ll buy into Mark’s paranoia, get the EU parliament to join you on your mad quest to limit the dreamweb, do everything until your brother’s proven irrefutably wrong.” Victor noticed the emphasis in her voice. “But if I win…”
“You want me to upload myself.”
“Precisely.”
“This is bullshit. You have to help me anyway. I own this company! No games. Just do it.”
“You don’t own me, Victor. I am not some thing you can order around. You let me run your corporation, and look where it got us. Five million subscribers in less than two years! A branch in every country that matters! Enough money to buy anything and anyone we want. I know what I’m doing, and you’d better believe it. Amuse me. One last game. Please?”
“I’m not uploading myself.”
“Fine. You won’t have to. You win, I do what I said: we start losing money until your fool of a brother is put back in his place. I win… well, if I win, I get my satisfaction. Besting my creator has to got be worth something, right?”
“Satisfaction?”
“That’s right. Satisfaction.”
“No more games, Irina. You don’t want to help me, that’s fine, so be it. We’re more than capable of looking into this ourselves.”
“You? You mean, you and Mark?”
This conversation is over, Victor thought. The sensation of Irina’s presence grew thick like the air before a storm, and the pulsating worldspaces around him faded until only one remained: a green ball of energy, constantly morphing its shape.
Tentacles of light reached toward Victor’s consciousness…
Victor instinctively threw the heavy plane down, and the IL-2’s engine roared. Bullets flew past his wing, one tracing a black skid mark across the paint. This was no good. The IL-2 wasn’t designed to dodge two enemy fighter planes at once. He looked in the mirror. Two Stukas were coming at him from the clouds.
Irina, you bitch.
Victor threw the throttle to the right, dodging another spray from the Stukas’ cannons, then threw his plane’s nose up and took a sharp turn. As the Luftwaffe planes passed him, he aimed for the closest one and pressed the trigger. He got lucky; he hit the German aircraft straight in the engine. It went down like a butterfly caught on fire.
The remaining Stuka wheeled around and came at Victor from the front, its oversized landing gear giving it the appearance of a hawk going in for the kill. Victor pulled the trigger. The enemy fired in return. They threw their planes side to side in a death dance; two pilots who’d never known defeat. The distance shortened. Bullets flew. One tore through Victor’s left wing, and he started to trail smoke. His guns stopped; he was out of rounds. Apparently so was the enemy, for he’d also ceased firing as they closed in on each other with the determination of the already dead.
The planes met in mid-air. Metal bent. Something hit Victor in the chest, and the cockpit erupted in flames. Irina’s voice sneaked inside his mind through the pain.
“I win.”
Victor tore the helmet off, a high-pitched ringing piercing his brain. He touched his ears and his fingers came back wet with blood. He struggled from the chair, but fell to his knees after the first step. Countless seconds of pain later, he realized Linda stood in front of him, the heavy door open wide behind her. She was saying something.
Linda helped him up from the floor. The ringing in his ears turned to absolute silence. Victor pointed at the blood running down his cheeks, and Linda touched him on the neck, then took out her mobile phone and dialed a number. A doctor, Victor hoped.
Linda hung up, typed something on the touchscreen, and turned the phone for him to see. It read: She is uploading Gabor.
“Fuck!” Victor couldn’t hear himself, so he said it again. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” It was useless. Irina had made him deaf. The horror of this thought hadn’t fully sunk in, but he had little time to waste feeling sorry for himself.
He grabbed Linda’s phone out of her hand and typed: Plane. Prague. 1 hour.
5
Air
This is your captain speaking, scrolled the text across Victor’s smartglass illuminator beside the First Class passenger seat. We have reached the altitude of ten thousand meters, estimated time of arrival to Prague: forty minutes. Enjoy the flight.
Victor brought up the source code for the alpha version of Dreamweb LLC’s newest product — a light pattern designed to stimulate the brain into a dreamweb dive. He wrote the algorithm on the way to the airport. His sales team would be ecstatic; now even the deaf could enjoy the hidden world he and Mark had discovered. He himself didn’t give a damn. All that mattered was getting to Irina’s and Gabor’s thought nodes before they did any more damage to themselves or to others.
A little late for that now, he thought. Victor opened another window on the screen — a camera still from the Bogazici Institute of Istanbul, where Irina had uploaded Gabor’s consciousness — which showed a chair and a helmet above it. The helmet, and the entire room in the capture, bore the trademarks of a neurotech research lab, shining floors and sterile metallic surfaces abound. Under the helmet, a young blond man lay dead. According to the Institute’s security detail, Gabor had washed down three packs of tranquilizers with a bottle of Russian Standard, to join Irina in the afterlife in more ways than one.
Victor closed the window and reviewed the code, which refused to produce any effect. He’d earlier taken three capsules of UF205, and had stared at the lights dancing across the smartglass for half an hour straight. Yet his mind refused to leave his body. Belief, he thought. Across thousands of years of human history, there were always those who’d balanced the scales by turning the world one shade lighter at a time. And they truly believed they could do it; they believed in the goodness of the world first, and the goodness in themselves later. They were the happy people, humanity’s martyrs.
Belief is what I need.
He started to work. Every keystroke became another building block for the logic loops of faith, transcribed in the language of mathematics. By the time he finished, his Armani shirt was soaked in sweat. He swallowed a capsule and pressed “play.”
Nothing happened. The plane shook.
The door to his on-board office flew open and Linda rushed in, her face twisted in panic. “It’s happening! The pilot’s gone!”
“What do you mean, gone?”
“Gone, disappeared, stopped existing. I was talking to him and then, in the blink of an eye, he—”
“The co-pilot?”
“Flying the plane. For now. He’s in shock. Victor, we have to do something.”
Focus, he thought. Focus, focus, focus. “Get over here.”
Linda took a hesitant step forward, and Victor grabbed her by the wrist, pulled her down to her knees. “What I’m going to tell you is very important,” he said. “I need you to suck my dick.” He almost added, The fate of the world depends on it.