– Lenia…
– You could just exit, or could beat all the records.
– No, I couldn't.
– But why?
– Haven't you understood yet? – surprise showed in his voice.
– You didn't want to kill?
– Yes.
– But all that wasn't for real!
– For you.
– I won't ever be able to be like you.
– But this isn't necessary at all, Gunslinger.
– You know, – I said fighting the temptation to turn around, – Once, for just a second it seemed to me… only for a second… that you're Messiah. Do you understand?
Unfortunate is very serious.
– No Leonid. I wouldn't like to be your God. Neither of those that you created. They are too cruel.
– Just as we are.
– Just as you are, – echoed Unfortunate with sadness in his voice.
– Is it a dream? – I asked after a while, – Everything I see around?
He was silent for very long, the one behind my back who asked me not to turn around.
– No Lenia. Even if it is, it's not yours.
I understood.
– Thank you.
I wasn't cold, maybe because he wanted so. The gray grained snow didn't burn me, and neither did foggy jets. Maybe it was easy for him, maybe required an enormous effort? I don't know.
– Did you have time to escape? – I asked.
– Yes. We're driving through the city now. Vika gives one address after another to the driver… Looks like she doesn't know what to do.
Unfortunate paused for a moment, then added:
– And she's crying also.
Orange bands whirl in the sky, an eternal dance below the hot blue sun. Maybe it's beautiful after all…
– Tell her I'm alright.
– Is it true?
– I don't know. Will you help me to get out of here?
Unfortunate didn't answer.
– Will I be able to get out?
– Yes. Probably.
– Tell Vika that everything is alright.
– She won't believe me.
– She will. She have almost understood too. Tell her that there's a "Polyana" company in the Russian district of Deeptown. It owns just a single house, a kind of dull concrete 12– story building. Wait for me there, by the second doorway, in exactly one hour.
– Anything else, Leonid?
– No. That's all.
– It'll be very hard, Gunslinger. – Unfortunate stammers, – You're accustomed to fight the Deep. The force and the push. You're a good swimmer, you always managed to surface from the whirlpool. But now it won't work.
– Aren't you accustomed to rely on the force?
– Depending on what force, Gunslinger…
Something touched my shoulder lightly, either in parting or to reassure.
And then the orange threaded sky fell on the snow covered ground…
I rise – in droplets of colors, in kaleidoscope of sparks. The deep program works. I still can't see my body.
Only a faint memory of the touch lives in me.
I still remember that world, I'm still living there, in an alien distant dream…
– What the hell are you doing, Dibenko? – I whisper into the crazy silence. – We can't… we can't treat him our way.
He can't hear me, the accidental creator of the virtual world, he continues his pursuit after Unfortunate, a hunt for the miracle but I must find him to explain how wrong he is…
I close my eyes and stretch my hands to the sides. Colorful flashes behind closed eyelids – the deep program continues to envelope my brains.
First of all – be calm. There's nothing demonic in it, it's a sparkling trinket, the one that hypnotizers rotated before their patients' eyes – that's what the deep program is. A trinket of the electronic age. There's no border between the dream and the dream within the dream. It's me who builds these barriers, who convinces himself that he's drowning.
But now – it's time to surface.
– Abyss… – I whisper almost tenderly, – Abyss-abyss…
We were building it, placing bricks of computers on the cement of phone lines. We raised a huge city. The city that has neither good nor bad in it – not until we come.
It was hard for us in the present. There, where the passion of many days of somebody's program cracking and of many months of writing our own is not understood. There, where they talk not about falling prices for a Meg of RAM, but about rising prices for bread. In the world where the killings are real. In the world where it's so hard for the sinners and the saints and the common people alike.
We built our own city that doesn't know borders, we believed in it's being real.
Time to surface.
We wanted miracles and we inhabited Deeptown with them. The Elvish glades and Martian deserts, labyrinths and cathedrals, far-away stars and sea depths, a place was found for everything.
But now – it's time to surface.
We got tired to believe in kindness and love, we wrote the word 'freedom' on our banner believing in our naivety that the freedom is superior to love.
Time to grow up.
– Let me go, abyss, – I ask, – Abyss-abyss… I'm yours.
Part 5. Unfortunate
0
In the beginning – it is dark.
All the colors of the world have gone in an instant.
I didn't notice when and how it happened. The deep program just was here, but now there's nothing at all.
Maybe this is how divers die, falling to the very bottom of the virtual space, burning down their brains and not perceiving anything anymore?
But the darkness fractions into the mesh of tiny squares, changes brightness and colors return.
I'm standing with my forehead pressed against the wall, the drawn wall of the drawn house.
Weird. Looks like I've entered the virtual space without turning the deep program on at all, but I'm not just looking on the helmet's screens, I'm kinda really here! It's just the world isn't real anymore, it became drawn and cartoon-like.
I step back from the wall, squares merge turning into brown rectangles: bricks. I look at the sky – dark bluishness with sparse stars. Houses and palaces are lined along the street, looking like kids' drawings: sharp contours filled with colors. This little house is the brick one, this fence is wooden, fur trees in the garden… Steel tubes with yellow patches on their spikes are stuck along the street – lampposts… Fake, just a fake. More decent parts of the city are drawn better but I'm somewhere in the suburbs now, the world around was created with simple programs and is maintained by weak servers.
But the funniest thing is that I'm quite real myself! The shirt sleeve torn in the fight, scratched hands… I raise my hand closer to the eyes and can see every hair, a dirt under nails and the skin bruised against fingerbones.
A real human in the cartoon.
I start to shiver. This is something new, it never happened before. What did the deep program do to me, been run a thousand times? What did I do to it when surfaced from insanity?
The sound flows closer from behind. I turn around and see the bus moving along the street: a huge two storey rattletrap, made of glass almost completely. The bus is drawn pretty thoroughly, even its wheels are rotating. Caricature faces are glued to the windows: kids, adults, elders. The Deep-Transit's emblem is on the bus' side.
I just stand, gasping for air, looking at the motionless faces. Well, why would they be different – mimicry can be expressed only by very good, tuned programs, aimed for the single user. These are just tourists.
The bus stops, the people exit it awkwardly, an elegant gentleman dressed in bright– red overalls is in front: the guide. All men are dressed absolutely the same in suits with ties, just a single black guy in the group is in jeans and t-shirt. All faces are indifferently well– shaped, like a second line villains' in kids' cartoon series. The women are all in luxurious dresses, much better worked out than their faces, wearing jewelry. Also a flock of kids with cartoony big eyes and a group of elder men and women dressed in blinkers and with cameras. The guy in the wheelchair is the last to exit the bus with the help of others.