Andrei knits his brow, he never saw me in this body and makes precautions.
– Hey man! – I say in a scary whisper, – What's wrong? Tortured by taxes again? The racket filched your file stuff? Just tell, we'll find…
Andrei leans over the bar and shouts:
– Ah! Haven't recognized you! Just look how you've grown! A real man!
Vika hesitates nearby patiently, obviously feeling out of place. Just like I did in the brothel's recreation zone.
– You want it as usual? – asks Andrei and outstretches his hand towards the bottles.
– Gin-Tonic, fifty-fifty, – I smirk, – It's me, it's me. We'd like to sit somewhere above the river. Alone.
Andrei frowns slightly and looks under the bar, at the terminal.
– Are all channels busy? – I'm horrified.
– We'll find one for you, – decides Andrei. He pushes some button, – A penny deal… Oh, what a perfect timing! Sudden disconnect, one channel's free! Go ahead, quick!
I grab Vika's hand and pull her to the stone wall of the restaurant. In the tambour I order:
– Individual space for us two. No access to anyone else.
– Acknowledged, – whispers the ceiling, – No access. You're guests of the restaurant. "Three Piglets" wishes you a nice rest.
– How cool, – says Vika ironically, – And you're their permanent customer?
– Yes.
I don't tell her all the tiny details, like about that little diver's fraud when I found and kicked some racketeers' butts. They stole original financial files from restaurant's owner. If I failed to persuade that gang of undereducated hackers, Andrei would have to fork up quite an amount… either for racket or for Deeptown's tax inspection. But in this case… everything ended in peace, even racketeers were happy… to get out of this so easily.
We enter the autumn.
Vika stops for a second looking around, picks decayed leaf from the ground, crumbles it in her hands, touches the tree trunk.
I wait. Usually I waver the same way when I enter unfamiliar virtual spaces. I also usually leave the deep to evaluate the real look of the landscape. Vika can't do that but spatial designers must have their own methods.
– Beautiful, – she whispers, – Maybe Carl Siegsgourd himself worked. I'm envious.
– Yours is not worse. – I console her but Vika shakes her head.
– Not in everything, he has an excellent sense of measure, while I can be carried away easily.
She kicks fallen leaves in childish manner, they slowly fly up and fall down again. Their flights are over already.
– Let's go, – I take her hand and lead her to the river. The table is laid for a banquet. The specialty of the house – fried pork 'a-la Piglet' is on the table in a big plate, also my favorite mulled wine and decent set of other wines.
Vika doesn't look at the table, she stands by the steep looking in the distance. I stand by her side. The stream washes over leaves of a fallen tree on the opposite bank. Looks like it was a storm lately. This space is alive too, just as Vika's mountains.
– Thank you, – says Vika and I feel great. I think I yet should show her the sea shore and the part of old Moscow that are adjoined to the restaurant but all this – later. I'm sure that we'll yet have time for that.
Otherwise why is everything?
– You know, I leave my space very seldom, – says Vika, – I don't know why.
She hesitates, then goes on:
– Maybe I'm just afraid to meet those who comes to us… to see them as the ones they can be– kind, cheerful, nice people.
– Why?
– Then it'll be true that all people are bifacial. You know, we're a garbage can Leonid. The one in which all shit which was accumulated in peoples' souls is dumped. Fear, aggression, unsatisfied desires, disdain to themselves. I think your "Labyrinth" is the same in this way.
– It's not 'mine'. I'm there for business.
– Then it's easier for you. But who comes to us? Milksops who can't wait to become men… who grew tired of being ones, some guys pissed off by their girlfriends with a wish to swagger… Some of them come and try all albums. They say: "We must try everything in this life."…
Again I restrain myself and don't ask why the hell does she work there then.
– Why do we drag the worst that we have in the future with us? – says Vika
– Because it does exist and we can't do anything about it. Just imagine that everyone around us are gentlemen in tuxedos, ladies in evening dresses, everybody speak in clever beautiful words, are nice and civilized…
Vika laughs softly,
– I don't believe in this.
– Neither do I. No society change, be it technical, social or a complex one like the Deep, ever changed individual moral principles. Everything was postulated: from disdain towards the bond-slaves to brotherhood and equality, from ascetism to complete license. But the choice was always made individually. It's stupid to say that virtuality have made people worse than they were and it's naive to hope that it'll make them better. We were given an instrument and it depends on us whether we'll build using it or crush skulls.
– Wrong instrument, Lenia. Everybody understand that they are really at home or at work, sitting by a computer in a helmet or just gazing at the screen and therefore everything is allowed. It's a game, a mirage.
– You're speaking like Alexandrians.
– No, I don't like their approach either. I have no wish to turn into the stream of electronic impulses.
– Vika… – I put my hand on her shoulder, – It's not worthy to guess or worry. The Deep is only 5 years old. It's yet a child. It grabs everything it can reach, speaks nonsense, laughs and cries irrelevantly. We have no idea what it'll grow into, we don't know whether it'll have brothers and sisters that will be better. We just must give it some time.
– We need to give it a goal, Lenia. We have dived into this world without defining for ourselves what have we left behind. Being unable to live in one world we have created another one and we don't know where to go, what to aspire to.
– The goal will appear, – I say without great confidence, – Again, just allow it some time… let the Deep to become aware of itself.
– But what if it did already? – says Vika mockingly, – …and became alive? Like in imagination of those people who never been here? Maybe there are people here among us that don't exist in real world? Reflections of void? What if you or me don't really exist at all? And what if all our ideas of reality are just fantasies of the Net that became alive?
Suddenly I feel scared.
No, I don't think that I don't really exist.
And I'm almost sure about Vika.
But I think I know the candidate for being the 'reflection of void'…
Vika goes on as if wishing to drive me crazy:
– Just imagine how it can happen. Hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of computers are already plugged into the Net permanently. Flows of information rush between the continents, accumulate on different hosts/routers, in machine memory. Nonexistent spaces live according to their own laws, change. Leaves are falling, our steps leave traces, our voices start avalanches. Information copies over, becomes tangled, mixes. Docile programs create plaster casts, shells but who knows how soon those shells will be filled with real intelligence?
– Any hacker will die of laughter listening to you, – I say in a 'wooden' voice.
– I'm not hacker. I just see what is going on around and I try to imagine what would somebody who came from nowhere think if he appears in Deeptown being sure that he is alive and real? Grimacing buffoons? People running around in "Labyrinth" and cheerfully killing each other? Psychos having fun in brothels? Everything that exists in reality we have here too. The sky and the Sun, mountains and seas, cities and palaces. Spaces within spaces, the mixture of times and nations, merits and vices. Everything! Everything and nothing. We need only what we hate in real life. Death, blood, fake beauty and borrowed wisdom. So what might the Deep think of people if it learns how to think?