One day Radzinsky and I stayed in the lab long after closing hours, so driving all the way to the residential zone didn’t make much sense. Instead, we got trashed in a roadside bar, watching a nature documentary on TV and listening to rolling thunder outside. Just before I was about to go, Greg proposed a toast to Milos. I told him, “Go screw yourself,” grabbed my jacket and left hurriedly.
“Hey!” Radzinsky hailed me in the almost-empty parking lot, his raincoat left in the bar. “Do you seriously think that we are responsible for the Spot?”
I stopped and looked up at a patch of clear sky among the rain clouds, a meteor shower glowing there like a swarm of fireflies.
“Hell no, pal!” I replied without turning, red trickles of Martian rainwater dripping from my chin. “I think it’s another Milos from a faster reality making his Long Jump.” As I was walking away to my car, I remember wishing that the red rain could be real blood, and that Radzinsky had drowned in it first.
Milos Kovacs was supposed to become the first faster-than-light traveler. He had all that was needed to become a legend: perfect health, a peaceful mind and a shining smile. We had everything prepared for him: the accelerator warmed up, the coherency point tested on different sequences of quantum events, the entry and exit points calculated. We chose the safest parallel reality for him. Time coefficient 18, just enough to reach the speed-of-light barrier after an entry at the speed of 10,000 miles per second. He was supposed to stay there for three days, reach the exit point, and then be picked up by a distant space probe. After his return to the solar system five years in the future he would be praised as a hero.
I was the last person to shake Milos’s hand before they helped him put on the suit and sealed him in the bubble. I already knew his girlfriend had just found out she was pregnant, but I wasn’t supposed to tell him that until the jump—nobody wanted him to be distracted.
He never returned. His mother received an official letter saying her son had died during an aircraft flight test.
Three days after the jump, an anomaly appeared three light-days from the solar system. A microscopic black hole that set the doomsday clock at 10,000 years. We nicknamed it the Spot and immediately tried to forget about it.
And now that its gravitational pull has turned the solar system into a killing ground, they said, humanity needed a working long-jump technology even more desperately.
A week before the new long jump, they selected three candidates out of ten potential pilots. I was among the chosen ones (“as the most experienced,” said the official report). Three days later, the name of the first long jump traveler-to-be was announced. My name. No explanations followed, and all I could do was to accept congratulations from the project members as they shook my hand and clapped me on the shoulder.
Immediately I grew distant from them. The candidate pilots saw me as a father figure; they were all too young and too politically correct for me to enjoy their company. Most of the lab personnel, on the other hand, remembered me from Sektion VI, and each time they greeted me in the morning with a smile, I saw a reflection of Milos’s face in their worried eyes. Forbidden to drink, I started to treat my anxiety with a virtual reality simulator, spending late hours in the IT lab under the supervision of psychologists. I don’t think they liked what they saw: in my simulated encounters I was having long quiet conversations with a gestalt of Milos, cheap Indian cigarettes glowing between our yellowed fingers in the dark.
“You must love the new software, to spend so much time online!” our lead programmer Afu said to me two days before the jump. He was a rare new face in the project, so I didn’t mind his presence.
“I do,” I answered. “This sim is much better than the one we had ten years ago.”
“Everything now is better than ten years ago! Except living standards, I guess.” Afu’s laughter resounded under the low ceiling of the lab. I looked around the labyrinth of flat transparent screens, only to find out we were alone in the room; everyone must have gone to lunch. “But seriously, this sim is the cutting edge. A continuous build.”
“Continuous build? What’s that mean?” I sat on the armrest of the sim chair, trodes hanging down from its headset like the aerial roots of a banyan tree.
“Means the gestalts and locations you create don’t stay static after you go offline. They keep exploring themselves, slowly.” Afu turned to me in his office chair. On the screen behind his shoulder I saw a screenshot of my last encounter with Milos’s gestalt.
“They live their own lives after I log off? Creepy, if you ask me.” I did my best to smile.
“It’d be creepier if they didn’t, trust me.” He followed my line of sight and nodded at the screen: “Remember the first thing your virtual friend told you today?”
“He told me to shut up and just smoke with him. He didn’t say why. I actually didn’t get to ask him what I wanted. Why did he say that?”
“I’ve no idea. Something happened in his virtual life overnight.” Afu opened a log on his screen and scrolled up, looking for an answer.
“Don’t bother. I just thought the gestalts were there to entertain us, make us feel better during the flight.” I imagined being locked in the bubble together with my gestalt of Milos for five years. My left eye started to twitch.
“If we wanted to make you feel better, we’d just give you drugs, tons of them. The sim is there to help you keep your sanity, no matter how crappy you feel.” Afu finally gave up on scrolling through the log and turned back to me. “The entertainment industry is never gonna need continuous builds. They need a pleasure-delivering conveyor belt for overstimulated people. But you’re a different case. For the next five years, the virt-sim is gonna be your only way to socialize. Now, imagine having any of your fantasies at your demand. Powerful muscles, weak enemies, obedient women. Your angels and demons. That’s—”
“A definition of madness …” I muttered.
“Listen, what’s with your left eye? If the new implant they installed is bothering you, we’d better fix it before the jump.” Afu stood up and approached me, staring at my twitch.
“That’s all right.” I crossed my arms and turned my head aside. “It’s … I just thought of that guy from my encounter. Do you know who he was?”
“Yes, they told me about Kovacs. I figured it was him.”
“Back then, ten years ago, we didn’t have continuous builds, just plain all-you-wish-for virt-sims.” I remembered talking to Milos’s psychologist after the jump, how she said all of his encounters were serene and bright: hanging out with his Chinese girlfriend on a tropical beach or hiking with his father in Antarctic boreal forests.
“Then I hope he died fast. Madness is a nasty thing,” said Afu, his voice suddenly plain and serious.
I picked up my sweatshirt silently and headed to the door, zigzagging between cluttered desktops.
“Ulysses!” Afu called me when I was in the doorway. I stopped and gave him a dark look. The programmer was standing with a see-through tablet in his hands, a screenshot of Milos’s sunken face on its screen. “Ulysses, I’m not your physician and I’m a dilettante in psychology, but … You’re almost forty, you have an eye implant, you’ve had a drinking problem, and your virtual encounters disturb even me. And I’ve worked with virt-sims in prisons and rehabs, so believe me, I’ve seen messed-up things.”
“You want to know why they’ve chosen me and not Hafiz or Den?” I asked.
“Yes. That experience thing—I’m sorry, I don’t really believe it was the decisive factor.” He shook his head apologetically.
“Think about what we did to Kovacs ten years ago and what we’re doing right now. How would you sleep at night, knowing that you sent a healthy young boy on a mission like that, Afu?”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have started this.…”
“Hurry up, you’ll be late for lunch.” I left the lab and slammed the door behi
nd me.
The night before my flight I couldn’t sleep. I imagined Milos spending days in a sealed spherical capsule, knowing that he’d already missed his exit point. After the first week of panic and despair, he would have started spending almost all of his time in the virt-sim, just to avoid complete isolation. He’d hope that the bubble wouldn’t miss the other three emergency points we’d set up for him and eventually he’d be detected and saved. But time passes by, and nothing says his journey is over.
After months of living in the imaginary worlds that his consciousness and the AI have been building for him, Milos feels so lost in the layers of artificial dream that he quits simulation and swears to never return to it. He starts a journal and three days later deletes it. He wants to commit suicide, but the quantum immortality phenomenon has already excluded all chances for him to die until he is seen or measured by an external observer. He starts to understand the Bible.
He knows that as he was flying through the alternate universe, his capsule’s mass quickly grew to an infinite number due to its speed, thus becoming a black hole. It will take it trillions of years to consume the galaxy, but inside of the bubble he will hardly be in his thirties by that time. Sometimes he wishes he could see the universe aging behind his window; but there are no windows and no sensors in the bubble, and he is trapped inside for eternity. He starts a journal and three days later he breaks his tablet to pieces.
Thirty years later he is a lonely madman still struggling to crack the capsule from the inside, although he knows that it’s impossible. He keeps several journals and regularly deletes some of them. He knows he is a god.
In the morning just before my jump, they told me that Radzinsky had died of a heart attack. Somebody made a joke that they should’ve sent Radzinsky long-jumping instead of me: then Greg would have lived at least until the exit point. I didn’t laugh. And not because I didn’t hate Radzinsky.
When Hafiz was helping me into my suit, I asked him whether he wanted to swap with me. He didn’t answer, just flashed a warm young smile at me, the one Kovacs was known for. Hafiz must have thought it was a joke.
“Never mind, boy,” I said. “I already pulled off that trick once on Milos. Not this time.” And I smiled too, my lips thin and dry. Hafiz just stared at me, his white smile slowly vanishing.
There was no ceremony, no last words. Fists clenched to keep my hands from shaking, I stepped into the black bubble. The suit rustled in joints like crumpled paper as I lay down in the recliner chair and fastened the seatbelts tight around my chest, taming my aching heart. For half a minute I heard dull scraping and clunking as they sealed the capsule from the outside. I felt I was being buried alive.
Now, as I’m writing this journal, it’s been seven Earth years, ten months, and thirteen days since I missed my exit point. Five of these years I’d spent together with Nancy, in the world I used to call virt-sim.
We first met on an underwater highway near Dubai City. I was a frequenter of that location in the sim, fond of taking long relaxing drives along the transparent tunnel that crawled down the bottom of the Persian Gulf. Depending on my mood, the deep waters above my head changed their qualities. After quarrels with the gestalt of Phoebe they were often dark and oily, full of garbage and dead dolphins; rarely, when she’d let me spend a day with Owen, the sea became azure and lucid, prehistoric armored fish apathetically staring with their giant round eyes at the racing cars.
But on that day everything changed. I was returning from a meeting with Owen, after he’d told me he just didn’t want to have me in his life anymore.
“Why didn’t you follow us to Earth? Why did you give up?” he’d said to me, adolescence cracking in his voice.
“But we are on Earth,” I persuaded him, a Lunar Japanese fighting arcade flashing wildly around us.
“That’s not it. It’s a different place. And you’re different!” he’d shouted, and I had gone offline, only to bite my lip and log back on to the empty dark dome of the arcade and a fuel-cell SUV waiting outside to take me to the undersea highway.
Owen’s voice was still resounding in my head when I nearly hit the woman. She was just standing on the road, in the middle lane, cars sweeping past her and the frozen waters of the Gulf looming over the tunnel. She wore nothing but a purple silk nightgown and a yellow biker’s helmet. Her hands were spread in a desperate acceptance of quick death.
My car stopped just an inch from her, the bumper slightly pushing her in the hips. She stood there for a second, honking cars flashing past us, and then collapsed on the SUV’s hood. I immediately forgot I was in a virt-sim; I jumped out of the car and ran to her.
“Are you all right? How did you get here?” I was shouting. She did not answer, her back shaking from sobs and whimpers. Carefully, I took off the girl’s helmet and lost my ability to speak. It was her. Nancy Ye, Milos’s old girlfriend …
After that first meeting with her, I spent an unhealthy amount of time in the sim in one session, not noticing the artificiality of the places that surrounded us. I took her to one of Dubai’s hospitals, but in the parking lot she wiped away her tears and asked me to drive her home.
“Okay. Where do you live?” I asked, as the black Arabian sky unfolded above the transparent roof of the car.
“Not my home. Yours,” she said and looked at me with her dark Oriental eyes.
“Does Milos know where you—” She didn’t let me finish.
“Don’t mention him around me! Just … take me home.”
I shrugged and brought her to a hotel by the plaza. A square-built Ethiopian greeted me in Arabic at the reception desk, his deep voice booming in the vast empty hall, and I led Nancy down the long corridors of the skyrise decorated with Babylonian statues and bas-reliefs. We entered a room without a number; Nancy went to a corner and collapsed, surrounded by bronze statuettes of scaly lions and winged bulls.
That night, curled in the corner, she told me Milos had changed after she’d given birth to a stillborn child, and now that he’d left her, nobody knew where he was. Touched by her Taiwanese accent, words were rolling down Nancy’s lips like pearls, and I was just nodding silently, staring at a giant pyre blazing on the screen that covered an entire wall of the living room.
I knew where Milos had gone to. To the dark. The same dark which was consuming me now.
“Do you think Hafiz is smoking Indian cigarettes with my gestalt, back there on Mars?” I suddenly asked Nancy melancholically, and she looked at me in confusion, her bronze skin drawn tight around the sharp cheekbones. We both fell silent.
The first week Nancy didn’t want to leave the room. She wasn’t crying or talking; she just sat on the leather sofa in front of the TV, Al Jazeera news shows flashing on the giant screen on mute. Each time I entered the room, I was painfully aware of the sounds of my steps, the rustling of my jeans, the pumping of my sluggish heart. I would put a bowl of cereal with warm milk on a glass table before her, but she refused to turn her head away from the TV. Then I’d leave her alone, only to come back again ten minutes later to find the bowl empty and Nancy hugging her knees on the sofa, her brown face blank and cold.
I spent the whole week almost entirely in the sim, going offline only for food, sleep, and hygiene, until migraines forced me to take a two-day break. When I entered Nancy’s shelter again after going back online, she just pounced on me from the dark like a hungry cat on a sparrow. Her nails plunged into the bulk of my back, and I felt a kiss of violent passion on my lips. More feverish kisses followed; she started untucking my T-shirt, and we stumbled deeper into the shadows like two struggling ghosts …
I was still inside her when Nancy fell asleep on me, our legs intertwined, cool sweat gleaming on our skin. We lay there on a Persian carpet, breathing quietly, two silver silhouettes under the voluptuous moonlight.
Going offline was like a drug crash after that night. My numb fingers would tear off the trod
es from my head, and the picture would start blurring into focus: a dirty-gray blob of a capsule that was my reality, all my reality, all there was and would ever be. My eyelids would be itching and there’d be a throbbing pressure deep behind my eyeballs, but I would keep blinking until I could make out shapes. Screens, locks, microclimate panel, the soft padding of the bubble’s innards. I’d rub my face long and hard, and it would bring back the smells; the air was filled with the sick sweetness of greasy hair, intermixed with old sweat. Gravity was not crushing me down, but every motion was still followed by an ever-present aching pain in my joints. With mouth open and face blank, I’d drift in zero gravity like a mannequin, and I would count the minutes until I could go back online again.
By the fourth year of my relationship with Nancy I was hardly spending four hours offline daily, even though the notion of “day” had completely lost meaning for me by then. I’d abandoned exercise trodes and workout machines for good, and seeing my muscles atrophy in zero G didn’t bother me. Just like I wasn’t bothered by the stench of piss and foul breath that followed me around the capsule. On the rare occasions when I did look in the mirror, I saw a gaunt-faced old man with a gray beard split into uneven dreadlocks. The only ritual I still fanatically observed was shaving my pale skull, for it was where the virt-sim trodes needed to be attached.
But in the sim, in the sim it all didn’t matter. I was fresh and well dressed there; my skin was soft and tanned; I liked to smile and eat jelly beans. All thanks to Nancy.