It would be the best model she’d ever make.
And if she had to die in this world, then so be it.
Everybody dies.
Irina copied her Budapest project to a memory stick. Her mother had taught her to do the best she could, no matter what the circumstances, and she’d taught her well. A twenty-three year old nobody, given a chance at an immortal legacy the likes of which the world had never seen? Irina shuddered. She’d give birth to a new species: a transhuman, the first of its kind. Irina took out an old lace from her bottom drawer. Her mom had once called it “her lucky lace,” and she’d kept it ever since. She threaded the lace through the memory stick’s loop, then tied it around her neck.
Victor climbed up the fireman’s pole, offered Irina his hand, and pulled her up. The observatory’s dome was open, and summer winds blew in from the direction of the Danube River. Irina walked to where the dome parted, taking in the morning sun. This had better work.
“I called Mark,” Victor said. “He won’t do it.”
“What? What do you mean, he won’t do it?”
“I told you, my brother’s not that stupid. It’d take weeks for me to train you to be on par with us. He says we’d plan some way to cheat while we’re at it. He won’t do it.”
“That’s his only concern? That we’d cheat? God, you two are easy. Let me talk to him.”
“What for?”
“Just call him.”
Victor took out his phone, dialed a number, and handed it to her. Mark picked up on the second ring.
“Yes?”
“Hi, Mark. It’s me. No training. We do this now.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You think you’ll have a chance at us if you don’t learn the controls, so to speak? You’re much more than your physical body in there; it takes time to master the perspective that gives you. It wouldn’t be fair.”
“No training. You said we’d cheat. We won’t cheat. We do this now. Right now.”
He hung up.
“Are you insane?” Victor said.
“Look, it doesn’t matter if I lose. All that matters is you win. You win, I get what I want — I get a legacy, man. Go me. And fuck Mark’s conservatism. I live for art.”
“You live for art?”
“Yes… Victor, can I ask you something?”
“What?”
“Did you know I was sick?”
He didn’t reply.
“Vic, did you know I was sick?”
“Yeah, I knew.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What does it matter?”
“I’m asking, so you’d better think it does.”
“I didn’t want you to think I was looking for a guinea pig. I wanted you to see everything for yourself.”
“Guinea pig, huh?” She smiled. “Oink, oink.”
“That’s Porky Pig.”
“That’s the only pig you’re going to get, and I heard you’ve got a job opening.”
“Right. You’re a straight-to-business kind of girl, I see. Heh.” He nodded at a cluttered workbench. “I have the paperwork. Just sign, and you’re officially working for Dreamweb LLC.”
“Dreamweb LLC?”
“It was a short notice… there was a computer adventure game by the same name in the nineties; I thought the title fitting. Hope they’re not gonna sue.”
“And you did all this in an hour?”
“I know computers.”
Irina went to the workbench, looked through the contract, and found it without flaw. The salary alone was ten times the university stipend. The position? “Designer.” She made a mental note of the hefty life insurance sum Vic’s company offered in case of an employees’ death (no matter what the circumstances), and smiled. It seemed like he really did want her help. After she’d finished reading, she signed it, untied the lace from around her neck, and gave Victor the USB stick.
“That video game,” she asked, “did it have a happy ending?”
Victor took out a box of UF203 pills. He looked serious for a while. “Not really.”
Irina’s awe knew no bounds. She stood on the Moritz Zsigmond square by the stairs leading to the underpass across the busy road. The square itself was infinitely more detailed than the 3D model Victor had used for reference — cars drove on the road, people stood in little groups near a grocery shop next to them, a pair of would-be passengers ran to catch a departing tram… It was all indistinguishable from the real thing.
And why wouldn’t it? Victor had used their memories to shape this World-Space, and where memory had failed, he substituted it with their imaginations. None of that one-room inner courtyard crap here; the entire city was at their disposal.
“Where is he?” she asked.
“He’ll come.”
“You think it’ll be a sword fight? He seemed into the whole samurai thing.”
“Or a gunfight. He was into the cowboy thing too.”
“Oh.”
“Keep in mind, this is a truel. We’ll all be fighting against one another. The last man standing wins.”
“Or woman.”
“Or woman. But don’t expect any help from me. I’ll take you down first, so you don’t stab me in the back as I’m fighting Mark. Him thinking he knows better than me, that insolent pup.”
“What? You’ll get rid of me first? Shouldn’t we team up?”
“No.”
“No? Hey, if you want to be the number one macho, please, feel free to kill me after we take Mark on, not before!”
“Kill you?”
“Judging by last time, somehow I don’t think this will be a game of chess; I’m sure Mark has something bloody in mind. So yeah, we take him down, you kill me, you win, I win — I win, job well done.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why the fuck not?”
“The two of you talked. God only knows what ideas he put in your head. For all I know, maybe you two teamed up. He really wants me to stop working on this project. He’s like a man obsessed.”
“Trust issues, I see.”
“It’s called being careful.”
“It’s called…”
The ground rumbled and shook. The grocery shop’s windows shattered, glass shards flying onto the sidewalk. The tremors swept underneath Irina, and she stumbled toward Victor. She grabbed his hand for support.
A deep hum came from above, and Irina raised her eyes in time to see three blazing balls of fire falling from the sky. She blinked, and the fireballs hit the pavement, smothering the square in thick clouds of dust, smoke, and chipped asphalt blown free from the impact. The earthquake stopped. Irina rose to one knee. Victor sat up.
“You okay?” he asked.
When the dust had cleared, a walking tank stood on the twisted remains of a Budapest city tram, two legs as thick as Hummer jeeps, armored plates colored in urban camouflage. Its weight had crushed the tram like a potato.
The tank’s tower bent down at an angle, and Irina could see the open hatch on the top. Two weapon-bearing arms protruded from the tower’s sides; a machine gun with a barrel as wide as her head was mounted on one of the arms, and on the other sat what looked like an enormous missile launcher. A belt of missiles hung from the machine’s mechanized elbow.
She looked to her right, watching Victor get up from the ground. Another walking tank stood on the roof of a squashed burger stand behind him, this one smaller than the first, but with a cannon half the length of its body for one of its arms. An empty glass cockpit crowned its torso, offering the pilot a three-hundred-sixty degree view of the battlefield.
The third tank was of medium size, with a torso armored in plates of fused metals. Its legs bent backwards at the knees, giving it the overall appearance of a giant, tailless velociraptor armed for vehicular warfare.