Fire of the Dark Triad Page 17

  A soft female voice called his name and then said, “Hello. I am interactive software designed to give you access to information about Earth and to explain the goals of operation Renaissance. Before we begin, you can change your preferences. Speed of responses, gender …”

  A list of options appeared in front of his eyes.

  “Default,” interrupted Hilgor, “no, wait. Change the interaction mode to casual speech.”

  “Done. Do you want me to walk you through the tutorial, or do you prefer to direct me with questions?”

  Hilgor thought for a second. Then he asked, “Is our interaction recorded or transmitted?”

  “It’s your personal experience. Earth privacy laws don’t allow this sort of information to be disclosed.”

  Hilgor had to admit that this question was rather stupid, considering that he had no way to verify the response, but he decided to go with the simple theory that the program was telling the truth.

  “Show me the night sky from Earth’s livable area.”

  “Hilgor, there are no unlivable places on Earth. Be more specific.”

  Hilgor almost bit his tongue. Of course, there was no reason to assume that there was any correlation between the two planets. “Show me the sky from the equivalent of my geodesic position,” Hilgor didn’t know why it was important. But he needed to see it.

  The curtain of fog lifted, revealing the expanse of the night sky. It was the same as the one he saw from Reish’s place. And, of course, the Milky Way was there too.

  Apparently, the program was smart enough not to wait too long. It said softly, “The subspaces containing our planets are exact clones, Hilgor. Earth and Y-3 are identical except for the slight climate and some minor geographical differences.”

  It did help. He was able to think again, albeit not very rationally.

  “What is there, on Earth, in this place?” he was surprised at how steady his voice was.

  “It’s a nature preserve,” and forests, meadows, green hills with huge grazing herds of deer and bison quickly flashed in front of his eyes.

  “They are not extinct,” he said.

  “Excuse me?” asked the voice.

  “Never mind … how is it called, my home lake, the closest of the five?”

  “It kept its ancient name – Erie.”

  Hilgor took off the mask and circled around the room.

  Riph lifted his head and hesitantly wagged his tail, but realizing that Hilgor wasn’t paying any attention to him, went back to sleep.

  Hilgor made two more laps, abruptly stopped and commanded himself to snap out of it. After all, the explanation was logically consistent. He took a deep breath and reached for the mask again.

  This time it didn’t seem strange or frightening, and he kept the feel of the old leather handle of the armchair as a reference point to reality. Hilgor asked, “What happened? Why didn’t you send help here after the war?” He forgot that he was addressing the program.

  “It was your internal war, Hilgor. By that time, the old world hadn’t had any official contact with your planet for centuries. The Earth’s population didn’t even know it happened.”

  “And unofficial … contacts?”

  “Well,” said the voice almost reluctantly, “you can imagine, there were always security considerations.”

  At this point, Hilgor decided to give up the initiative in favor of comprehension.

  “Go to lecture mode. One hour. Main fact level, no informational branches.”

  Hilgor opened his eyes and looked at the clock. It was 6:38 in the morning, exactly one hour since he set the mask down on his nightstand. He looked at it with a growing sense of respect. Whatever technology it operated, it kept its promises; it made Hilgor fall asleep instantaneously, and it tuned his brain to wake up exactly as specified. Incidentally, the quality of his sleep far exceeded anything he had ever managed to achieve by any natural or artificial aid.

  Hilgor stretched and quickly rose to his feet. He had to step over Riph on his way to the kitchen, and the dog shifted with a sigh conveying that it was completely uncivilized to be disturbed at this hour.

  Chewing on the tasteless breakfast biscuits, whose state of semi-staleness was frozen in time from the moment of creation, Hilgor went through a mental review of the information the program had provided last night; facts packaged in concise narratives, maps, charts, live footage, still images.

  Hilgor stood in front of the window, finishing his second cup of designer caffeine drink. It was raining again, and the pale shade of the sky added to the drab grayness of the buildings, making the city even gloomier than usual.

  Earth had just watched them die. They had offered no help. But by now, he knew the complete story and struggled to figure out whose moral side he was on, or even if there was a side.

  He thought about the methods used on Earth to stop the virus epidemic. It was impossible to miss the familiar pattern. Mechanical efficiency of quarantine levels. Moral efficiency of not treating the sick to fund anti-virus research. Emotional efficiency of mass disposal of dead bodies.

  Earth didn’t seem like an evil super-civilization anymore.

  Hilgor took the empty cup to the kitchen and stood for a while, staring at his distorted reflection in the surface of the water dispenser cylinder, and going over the main narrative points once again. He had to admit that as hard as he might, he couldn’t pinpoint any inconsistencies in the story. It didn’t mean that it was true, he reminded himself. But how was he supposed to find out for sure? It was a closed logical loop, and no one could help – it was on him to make the judgment call.

  That meant that he had to jack up his mental capacity to the maximum level. And that, in turn, meant that he had to visit the transportation hub.

  He threw on his waterproof cape and went outside.

  After a short walk, he came to the familiar shape of the terminal building – a huge uneven dome adorned by giant tuba bells of aerial transport entrances.

  Hilgor approached a ground gate, went in and headed straight to the dispatch machine. His destination was on one of the highest levels, hidden behind the dense web of crisscrossing walkways, and the system assigned him a personal transporter.

  The automatic system carried Hilgor up several spiraling levels to the entrance of a small convenience station. There his temporary vessel slowed down, its handle folded in, the blue light faded and the platform blended with the floor surface.

  Hilgor stepped inside the shop, made his way between the shelves with miscellaneous travel necessities, passed two small tables at the window and greeted the middle-aged guy in a security uniform behind the low counter. Despite the longevity of their acquaintance, Hilgor knew almost nothing about him except for the fact that he was washed up on this transit hub long ago under unclear circumstances. The man lazily rose from his seat and walked to a frosted glass door in the back. Hilgor followed him to the familiar windowless den through the rows of small airtight drawers along the walls.

  Law enforcement turned a blind eye to the trade and consumption of illegal substances inside the terminal hub, a tribute to either the lenience of the authorities, or more likely, a calculated efficiency.

  “What’s your strongest today?” asked Hilgor.

  The owner pulled out one of the drawers, and the pungent smell of roasted coffee beans filled the small room. The guy scooped some, and then opened the doors of a white cabinet in the corner, where an antique, pre-war metal apparatus was squarely sitting on a lower shelf. He played with the settings on the control panel, muttering something about unusual humidity. A thick smell hit Hilgor as the viscous, dark brown liquid started slowly half-pouring, half-dripping from a small nozzle into a white cup underneath. Hilgor took the cup from the guy, sipped the drink and nodded contently. The owner acknowledged with a dry smile. Hilgor beamed him the money and walked out of the back roo
m. Both tables were empty; he sat at the closest one and slowly finished the espresso.

  The business of growing natural coffee beans was illegal on Y-3. Greenhouse space was too precious, the synthetic version was chemically identical, and the actual difference was really just a question of faith. Hilgor felt the sharp bitter taste on his lips and sighed, enviously thinking of the vast fields of Earth’s coffee plantations, flashed at him yesterday among other images. In a couple of minutes, the familiar sensation kicked in. All of the dusty and frosty windows in Hilgor’s mind started opening, letting light into the dim corners. He savored the feeling, firmly convinced that the artificial version never created a result of the same purity.

  Waiting for the full effect to take place, Hilgor watched people glide up and down the spiraling walkways behind the window of the convenience shop. There were three distinct categories: regular commuters in their invisible bubbles of transit trance, focused consumers and suppliers of the illegal trade shops and gawking thrill-seeking onlookers from all over the city. They all shared, however, the same sad signs of living on an island surrounded by a contaminated desert. Their faces were grayish, their eye shadows were deep, their bodies looked fragile.

  Hilgor just shook his head at the sheer absurdity of the operation – “Renaissance.” Contaminating the physically and mentally perfect population of Earth with genetically compromised people from technologically and scientifically inferior worlds sounded like a perverse joke.

  Hilgor admitted that the bait to lure him to Earth worked perfectly; he couldn’t turn away the gift of freedom dangling in front of him. He didn’t want to end up like Deait, Reish or the senior members of the Guild with that extinguished look in their eyes. He couldn’t just walk away from the offer. But he couldn’t leave his entire life behind to plunge into the complete unknown either.

  Hilgor rubbed his forehead in frustration. Brute mental force, even fueled by good coffee, didn’t work. He impatiently tapped his fingers on the table. There must be something that could help, someone who would know the right answer. And suddenly, Hilgor realized who it was. He put the empty cup on the table and got up.

  In several minutes, he was sitting on the hard plastic bench of an underground train.

  Fewer and fewer people remained in his car as the train approached the end of the line, and by the final stop, Hilgor was alone. He stepped out on the austere platform and looked around. It had been twenty-three years since he had come here, but nothing seemed to have changed.

  He headed to the main access tunnel and for a while walked inside the empty passageway. The sound of his steps echoed loudly against the concrete walls, bare and smooth except for the large engraved letters Y-3, a code name for one of the dozens of fallout shelters hastily built during the last years of the pre-nuclear crisis. Y-3 was the only place on the planet that had survived the war.

  Generally, Y-3 rules didn’t allow wasting space for memorials, but demolishing the Old City would have been perceived as sacrilege, a bad omen, an insult to the generations who brought life back to the surface, so, as the centuries passed, the place continued to retain its ambiguous status. Some people still came here to pay homage, and the Survivalist Church used it as a place of worship, but most of the time it was deserted.

  Ghost city – he would have thought that it was haunted if he had believed in ghosts.

  He passed through several open metal gates, now perpetually stuck in their previously airtight frames, and the tunnel opened onto a huge cavernous space, the first section of the underground living complex.

  Hilgor rode the elevator down and walked on a street between identical buildings, stretched far from the floor to the ceiling.

  His steps evenly punctuated the silence, echoing in the brightly lit rectangular canyons, but suddenly he heard a strange change in the pattern, as if an extra beat had been added to the hollow reverberating sound. A hot wave of fear flooded his mind as he twirled around.

  There was nobody in sight as far as he could see along the straight mile-long passage. He stood motionless, holding his breath. Then he turned and continued walking, still not convinced that it was the fault of his disturbed imagination.

  He kept nervously glancing over his shoulder all the way to the former animal grounds, but once inside, his attention switched to the task of not getting lost in the multilevel stacks of empty enclosures. Surprisingly, even after so many years, he remembered the way into this maze well enough that it didn’t take long for him to find what he was looking for. With a churning feeling in his chest he recognized the cheetah, with its serious gaunt face and intense eyes, looking at him from a picture on the cage wall.

  He never came here, even in his thoughts, since the day of his eleventh birthday. That memory was locked and buried as deeply as possible.

  The visit to the Old City had been his father’s present. Hilgor was fascinated by animals back then, by both the real living creatures that had survived the new climate conditions and by those that had become extinct.

  That day, the two of them spent most of their time in the big cat area, touching the very stones where paws used to brush the ground, looking at the pictures, watching the information videos. Holding hands, they imagined, eyes closed, that these magnificent creatures, now gone forever, were still pacing the narrow pens.

  Hilgor’s mother couldn’t join them that day. A space program lead, she was gone, as always, to the unknown and unfriendly world of missile tests, control center emergencies and production deadlines. His father was his best friend, his guide and a guard against anything bad that could ever happen in his life. Like everyone else, he had a job. He did routine technical maintenance on a section of the Wall, which he performed with mechanical accuracy. He didn’t talk about it much.

  That day, on Hilgor’s birthday, in front of this very cage, Hilgor felt that something wasn’t right. They were watching the footage of a running cheetah, a blur of black spots on yellow grass, its flexible body coiling and uncoiling like the flying tip of a lashing whip, its eyes locked on its doomed target. Cheetahs hadn’t survived the underground years, and Hilgor recalled the sharp sorrow realizing that no miracle in the world would ever bring these fascinating sprinters back. He looked up at his father, searching for consolation, but choked on his words, feeling even more unsettled by the unfamiliar blank expression on his father’s face.

  “Why would they care to survive if they couldn’t run anymore?” his father didn’t seem to be addressing anyone, just looking at the screen with unseeing eyes. In a moment, as if awakened from a trance, he turned to Hilgor and tightly hugged his slender shoulders.

  He committed suicide the next day by crashing his air capsule into the Wall at full speed.

  Hilgor stood motionless, staring at the cheetah. He had his answer. He couldn’t live the rest of his life knowing that he had been given a chance to break free and let it slip away.

  Why would they care to survive if they couldn’t run anymore?

  He accessed his private files from his wristband and posted, “Meet you at my place.”

  The traffic was light, and it didn’t take him long to get home. And of course, Nick was already there, leaning on the door of his apartment.

  They walked inside and stopped in the middle of the living room, waiting for Riph to calm down and settle in the corner.

  Hilgor didn’t need Nick’s surprised look to understand that he was projecting a completely different person now. Hilgor finally realized that for the first time in his life, he had the power to call the shots that really mattered. Feelings of confusion, creeping fear and desperate desire to stay in control were gone without a trace, as if they had been swept away by a magic spell.

  “I have more questions,” he said firmly.

  Nick simply nodded in response and sank into the couch.

  With slight irritation, Hilgor realized that the intended interrogation wouldn’t
go as planned. There was nothing he could do about the irrational fact that he liked Nick.

  As if on cue, but probably just concerned by the tension in Hilgor’s voice, Riph got up, jumped on the couch and put his head on Nick’s lap.

  Traitor, thought Hilgor, you aren’t making it easier for me. He sighed and continued, “How did you find me?”

  “My programs determined that your unit was producing incomparably superior results. I went through everyone’s private files, all eighty-five people. You were the only one who had just math, tons of unpublished personal math research in your secret files. It was an aberration. I have learned to pay attention to aberrations. So, I was right …”

  “Speaking of aberrations, what about Deait?” asked Hilgor. “His mathematical output is outstanding; your program should have caught it.”

  “Nothing about him. He didn’t pass the test.”

  Of course, thought Hilgor. I am not even good enough.

  “But, Nick, Deait is good for real. Your program made an error.”

  “Hilgor,” said Nick patiently, “I doubt it made an error. Remember, we don’t know what this program is looking for exactly. Your math talent is clearly connected. But maybe by itself it’s not sufficient? You have other things in your personality. And don’t look smug. Let me ask you this question – is Deait a good person?”

  “He is one of the nicest people I know.”

  “Well, don’t take this as an offense, but let me inform you that I have been doing this for a while. And from my subjective experience, this program only chooses charming, self-centered assholes of different degrees …” Nick paused. “Trust me, there is an active political debate on Earth right now about all of this, but you and I have practical matters to attend to – Del.”

  “From the tutorial I learned that I could bring a partner,” said Hilgor.

  “It’s the law. You can bring her.”

  Nick gently removed Riph’s head from his lap, got up from the couch and walked to the window. Without asking permission he pushed the window wide open. “There’s one more thing,” he said, turning around.