A few seconds later however, Victor still felt alive. He opened his eyes. Gabor’s body had been split from the top down, two piles of flesh smoking in the snow. An armored samurai with a naginata sword stood behind the corpse, his black metal mask in a sinister smile. Victor tried to speak, but no sound came.
The samurai slid the sword into the sheath upon his back and removed the mask. It was Mark. Always with the grand entrances, Victor thought.
“Hello, brother,” Mark said.
6
Revelations
“Let me tell you a story,” Mark said, as the mansion within the mountain dissolved like the snow under their feet and the landscape shifted, the skyline turning into a white space without walls or a ceiling. Irina sat cross-legged nearby, a laptop resting on her pale thighs.
Her thought node, Victor surmised, and looked over at his brother. Mark had traded his heavy armor for a pair of jeans and a Bruce Lee T-shirt. He looked younger without the dreads.
“What are you doing here?” Victor asked.
“Come on, big brother, don’t you want to hear my story?”
“He does,” Irina answered for him.
No, he didn’t. Victor wanted to erase Irina and Gabor and to prevent the singularity catastrophe Irina so desired, not to listen to another one of Mark’s sermons. What was he doing here? Mark and Irina had been working together, obviously, but to what end? What could a neo-human want from the man who’d dedicated the last two years of his life fighting dreamweb access on all fronts? Mark and Irina were antagonists to one another down to the bone, thought and deed, so their planning anything together was surreal.
Then an idea hit like a splash of cold water: what if Mark wasn’t Mark… what if he, like Irina and Gabor, was a disembodied consciousness inside the dreamweb? What if this Mark was another neo-human, a ghost, and his real brother lay dead somewhere in Prague, wrists cut open with a smile on his face, that same terrible smile Victor saw on Irina’s lips when he’d burst into her apartment two years ago?
No. It cannot be.
“I’m not dead,” Mark said as if reading his thoughts. “You, on the other hand…” He let the silence hang.
“I’m what?”
“What’s the last thing you remember before the dive?”
Victor thought, then answered: “The plane.”
“The plane, with nobody to fly it,” Irina said, and a chill ran down Victor’s nape. Irina snapped her fingers and the air around them rippled into a three-sixty degree view of Victor’s onboard office, the red digit 5 counting down the time before the crash — five seconds, four seconds, three seconds. “Did you think I’d just let you erase me?”
Victor watched himself slouched against the illuminator with Linda on his lap, who’d leaned into him in her dreamweb slumber as the seconds ticked away. The picture jerked, Victor’s seatbelts strained, and Linda’s body smashed against the ceiling. The illuminator cracked. Linda snapped open her eyes, but disappeared from view before she could scream.
“No!”
“No?” Mark said. “Linda knew the risks. You had no choice. What do you think happened to her when Gabor fried her on that mountain?
“How should I—”
“Exactly,” Irina intervened. “How should you have known that any of this was going to happen? Your brother was right: the physical reality was disappearing.”
Was? “But… not anymore?”
“Not anymore,” Mark said. “After Irina confirmed my suspicions that the dreamweb was damaging our world, she’d set out to kill you before you erased her thought node.”
“I succeeded, too,” she said. “Sorry, Victor. It was the only way.”
“But if I’m dead, how am I here? Wait — you went and uploaded me, Mark, didn’t you? You son of a bitch!”
“Don’t you talk about our mother.”
Victor took a deep, steadying breath and concentrated on his racing heart. It slowed down. He breathed out. “Okay. Okay. Fine. So now I’m like her.” Victor nodded at Irina. “Now you have to erase us. Cut access to the dreamweb. Planes are falling from the skies, man, people are fucking disappearing. You win. Shut it down.”
“Shut it down?” Mark said. “You think it’s that easy? All you need is a drug and some noise. Apparently you don’t even need the noise anymore. Congratulations. Good fucking job. It can’t be shut down. But it can broken — permanently.”
“What do you mean? What did you two do?
“You did everything yourself, Victor.” Irina stood up, her breasts bouncing from the sudden movement. “Why did you have to bring Linda to Prague? You knew it’d be dangerous.”
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Are you implying it’s my fault you crashed our plane and killed us? Really?”
“I’m not implying,” she said, menace in her voice. “She was my friend.”
Another image projected itself around them. Victor recognized the apartment Irina and Linda once shared when Irina was a twenty-three-year-old arts student. The two young women were sitting on a cozy-looking couch, both smiling, drinking coffee and sharing a joint.
“How well did you even know her, Vic?” Irina asked. “You worked with her every day. You fucked her every other day. But did you actually know anything about her?”
The living room faded to an image of a black-haired girl of about ten wearing a red dress with white polka dots. Young Linda held a dandelion in her left hand. She waved hello with her right (or perhaps, goodbye), and the picture disappeared.
“What happened to her?” Victor asked.
“I tried to copy her as well,” Mark said, “but Gabor got to her faster.”
“Is she dead?”
“Not any less than you are, brother. There’s no death in the dreamweb, not really. Only change. She’s all around us, a part of the web, an extension of the will of the world, so to speak.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Can I tell you my story now?”
“Mark, what the fuck, man! What’s going on? I’m dead. Made into a ghost. I get it. Linda’s dead. Made into… thin air, I guess. You said you managed to put this dreamweb business under control. How? What did you do, Mark? And what are you doing inside Irina’s thought node?”
Irina pressed up against Victor’s back and hugged him. Her body felt warm, eager. Her breath tickled his shoulder.
“Do you know the word ‘sonder’?” she whispered into his ear.
“Of course I know the word ‘sonder.’ What the fuck, Irina? Mark…?”
“Tell him, Mark. Tell him everything.”
Mark began, “Let me tell you a story, brother,” then he paused, reconsidered. “Better yet, let me show you a story.”
It was dark, but there was no mistake: Victor stood barefoot next to the apple tree in the Garden of Slaves, though something was blocking the sun. He looked up to a metal disc as big as a city that hovered in the sky.
Mark’s voice spoke like a movie narration inside Victor’s brain. “This was the beginning,” he said. “Genesis. The creation.”
The image zoomed round to show the flying disc in cross section. The spaceship was a labyrinth of machines, engines, storage units, automated science laboratories, rooms with caged animals, engineering bays, hangars, and infrastructure beyond human categorization. At the heart of the space-faring vessel was the command deck.
There, a man and a woman stood naked, watching the world below. They held hands, yet there was nothing romantic about their touch; they’d simply grasped one other like lovers on a sinking ship.