КНИГИ КИРИЛЛА ПОТЁМКИНА

44. A FAKE TRIAL?

(AWAKENING IN HELL)

I sat in my chair on the probe «Mediator».

Time had stopped for me. Or it simply didn’t exist here.

I waited meekly. I had nothing else left to do. Only to stare into the void and hope I hadn’t made the most terrible mistake in the history of my species.

Lately—if the word «time» is even appropriate here—I had begun to doubt my own reality. Maybe I was sleeping? Maybe I was lying in the Kashchenko mental asylum, pumped full of haloperidol, and there are no +Angi, no threat from space? And in general—there is nothing.

Except my madness.

Humanity is just living its life, grilling kebabs, giving birth to children, fighting for resources, remaining in blissful ignorance that the axe of a ruthless executioner is raised above its head.

I had a long wait ahead of me. Sometimes it seemed—an absolutely immeasurable time—an entire century. Those very hundred years of «submission», which were supposed to, according to the +Angi‘s timer, begin after the Generator’s launch. A hundred years in the mode of suppressing those very basic «demo-sins», which, as my captors assured me, would lead to the inevitable self-destruction of humanity and the death of the Cradle (Terra). Or restarting it for hundreds of years «fallow» to grow a new mold of reason.

But is such an outcome really so certain?

Sitting in this sterile silence, I began to argue with myself. Sometimes serious doubts rolled over me. Look, we’ve been living somehow for at least a few millennia. Tearing at each other’s throats, yes. Tirelessly shitting in our own home, yes.

But we are developing!

Albeit slowly, albeit in fits and starts, albeit extremely inefficiently, ruining nature in our wake, as the +Angi are convinced, because we constantly brake true progress with our own stupidity. Because we unleash endless wars out of nowhere and exterminate our own kind with some animal ferocity for mythical ideas, resources, or just because. For our own whims. But we are living somehow! And we’ve even flown into space. Although only to near-Earth space for now. But everything is ahead. I hope.

Maybe the inevitable expansion into space and settlement on other planets is exactly what will save us from this insurmountable—again, according to the +Angi—limit of development.

Yes. I managed to negotiate with these entities. I convinced them not to burn us, but to «cure» us. I saved humanity from immediate Annihilation or the Cycle of Rebirth. But I felt no particular joy about it. Quite the opposite. A black, sticky anxiety grew inside me. Maybe I should have stood my ground, to the end? Maybe if I had told them to go to hell, they would have backed off? Maybe they only respect strength and defiance?

Maybe my stubbornness would have been exactly the trigger that would have allowed them to retreat.

Maybe they were bluffing all this time and intentionally misleading us?!

Maybe they only needed one thing—to break the Witness’s will, to force him to voluntarily put the slave collar on the neck of his own species?!

And now—I gave them the code myself! And doomed humanity to eternal slavery under the supervision of impassive machines.

What hundred years?

It’s almost funny…

Only I don’t want to laugh…

How did Nasreddin Hodja put it?

«In a hundred years, either the donkey will die, or the padishah.»

Only in our case, we will all die.

Suddenly, my reflections were interrupted.

The Cube of Light before me, which was supposed to become a soft indigo at the moment of the generator’s successful launch, symbolizing acceptance and the beginning of a new era, flared up. But not blue. It blazed a blinding red. The color of arterial blood. The color of catastrophe. This clearly didn’t look like the light of Activation. This was an alarm signal!

— FAILURE! — The Voice, which I was used to associating with Lana, shattered the silence. But now it was no longer the soft female voice of her projection. A thunderous, thousand-voiced digital wail rang out, which seemed to emanate from the very walls of the module, from every atom of the hull, from my own brain. — CARRIER REJECTED!

The walls of the «probe module» trembled. Reality rippled, like the surface of water into which a heavy stone has been thrown. The image of space outside the porthole began to disintegrate into pixels, exposing a yawning blackness behind it.

— «What?» — I whispered, pressing myself into the chair, which suddenly became as unstable as fog. — «Failure? But the code… ‘ARCHIVES. OPEN. DAWN.‘… I gave you the correct key…»

— «THE CODE WAS CORRECT!» — the Voice roared, and its sheer power nearly burst my eardrums. — «THE CARRIER IS UNSUITABLE!»

The projection of Lana +Ang appeared before me, but she was «glitching.» Her beautiful face distorted, melted, turning into a terrifying mask of inhuman fury. Her eyes sank into their sockets, her mouth stretched in an unnatural scream.

— «It rejected him! Fractal-0 recognized our Protocol and burned out the Executioner! The core defense system activated countermeasures!»

— «But how…» — I was stunned, my thoughts tangling. — «Zaitsev… He…»

— «ZAITSEV!» — the Voice of the +Ang struck my consciousness like an electric whip. — «This is all you. You knew! You hid the variable from us! You and your damned ‘Hope’! It wasn’t just a defense argument. It was a virus! You infected the Carrier (Executioner) with cognitive Dissonance!»

The walls of the «module» completely dissolved. Disappeared. I was no longer sitting in the chair. I was falling. Or floating. I was hanging in absolute, icy emptiness.

The probe «Mediator» did not exist.

It was a stage set that had just been dismantled as no longer necessary.

— «Were we… convincing?» — the Voice of the +Ang now sounded from everywhere, full of venom, mockery, and some twisted triumph. — «Your ‘module’? Your ‘Trial’? Your ‘Cube of Light’? All of this was a simulation, Sergey. A primitive virtual reality created for your weak, limited, stupid human mind. We gave you a toy so you wouldn’t go mad before the designated time.»

Dim lights ignited in the darkness before my eyes. I saw myself. My real, physical body. Pale, emaciated to the state of a skeleton, eyes closed, covered in frost. It floated in a vertical, transparent cryocapsule filled with a cloudy yellowish liquid. I looked tangled in dozens of tubes and wires. Needles entered my skull, my spine, my veins. I was not a Witness on a diplomatic mission. I was a lab rat. A SPECIMEN. A captive who was being studied, dissected alive.

— «Lana…» — I whispered soundlessly (or thought?), as my gaze slid to the side. I saw a second capsule next to mine. In it, just as pale, frozen, stuck with needles and wires, looking like a sleeping princess from a terrifying fairy tale, rested she.

In a crystal coffin…

The real Lana Kubysh.

My Lana…

That’s what actually happened on the ISS.

If, of course, that happened in reality… I strongly doubted it…

They didn’t just «contact» us. They took us. As biological material.

Or… Or they didn’t take us… Everything was mixed up in my head…

— «She is our leverage,» — the Voice of the +Ang ruthlessly stated. — «And you are our mistake. You are no longer the Judge, Sergey Dmitriev. You are the prime accused.»

I tried to scream, to break free, to smash the glass of this damned capsule, but in this mental «void» I had no body.

I was merely a point of consciousness, crucified before my tormentors.

— «Your Executor failed the mission. Your ‘hero’ Zaitsev defeated us at the cost of his worthless life,» — the Voice oozed with blood-curdling fury. — «He broke our Carrier. He forced our system to reject our control. Now you will understand why your species must be erased. You are chaos. You are an error in the equation.»

The «probe-module» simulation returned, but now it looked different. It was a true, sophisticated nightmare.

The blood-red walls pulsated, contracted, seeming to press from all sides, like the stomach walls of a leviathan!

— «Why did the Generator reject the Protocol? What did Zaitsev know about the Guardian Race? What trap did you hide in your ‘Hope’? Answer!»

— «I don’t know! I told you everything! I hid nothing!» — I screamed in despair.

— «LIE!»

The voice deafened, shook, its vibrating volume penetrating me to the liver. If such a term exists—»acoustic concussion»—then this was it. Every word struck my exposed nerves like a hammer blow.

The floor beneath me disappeared, and I plunged into the ‘hellish’ continuation of this diabolical simulation, only to me it was indistinguishable from reality—into a boundless sea of pure, extreme pain.

It lasted an eternity…

I experienced the «Nullification» procedure, which they had demonstrated to me earlier, over and over and over again. But this time it brought not a blissful emptiness, but a flesh-devouring, insatiable fire.

I was disassembled into atoms and reassembled, only to be burned again.

— «We will turn your consciousness inside out, Sergey,» — whispered the Voice of the +Ang, insinuatingly, directly into my brain, while I writhed and prayed for unreachable death. — «We will find every hidden file. We will find out exactly what you and your creator hid from us.»

I screamed, choking on phantom blood, and suddenly saw the projection of Lana +Ang changing shape next to me.

She… She was no longer… a woman.

Through the features of my beloved, the guise of a completely different creature emerged. A hunched, multi-armed demon woven from shadows and digital noise. It burned with primordial malice. But the most terrifying thing was not that.

It was experiencing… PLEASURE?!

I felt its emotions. Its ECSTASY!!!

It enjoyed torturing me. This was not cold machine logic. This was SADISM of the highest order, incomprehensible to the human mind.

They fed on my pain just as the Executioner fed on Angonium on Earth.

I am dessert to it, a delicacy, DELIGHT.

The demon slowly placed its clawed hand on the real cryocapsule of my Lana.

— «And if you don’t tell,» — it hissed, grinning predatorily with a thousand tiny teeth, — «we will wake her. Right now. And she will go through all of this together with you. We will make you watch as we crack open her mind, dissect her feelings, absorb her suffering…»

— «NO! DON’T TOUCH HER!» — I howled.

The pain spiked, crossing the limits of what was possible. I was losing my mind.

— «We did not get what we wanted,» — suddenly the torture stopped. Just as abruptly and unexpectedly as it began.

The simulation calmed down again, but now it seemed to turn gray and die. It became black-and-white.

Lana +Ang (again in the guise of a woman with dead eyes) towered before me.

— «Your human species is illogical to the very end. Zaitsev defeated you. And you are useless.»

The projection’s voice changed—became indifferent, metallic, devoid of emotion.

— «Plan ‘B’. Our analysis is complete. Your algorithm (‘Hope’, love, self-sacrifice) is deemed destructive, uncontrollable, and hostile. We cannot fix it. We must delete it. Your Trial is over, Sergey. You have lost.»

— «What… what will you do?» — I wheezed the question, feeling my consciousness slowly fading.

— «We are initiating Annihilation. The Cycle of Rebirth is launched. The Earth will be cleansed by our fire.»

The simulation went out. My consciousness, scorched by pain, torment, and the terrifying truth, slowly sank back into the icy darkness of cryosleep. I was shutting down in inescapable, hopeless terror, fully certain that humanity would very soon be—or already was—DESTROYED!

Because of me…

I couldn’t protect it…

My last thought was to unpack, to revive a memory.

That very one, the real one.

I managed to catch it…

Which I had hidden even from myself until now.

Or had my module hidden it from my human consciousness?

«Zero-Level Echo» (True Memory)

..he world blinked. The stars outside the porthole blurred, turning into white stripes of a barcode. The control panel crumbled into pixels. Pain struck my temples—not that cosmic pain from G-forces or from the +Angi‘s torture, but a different kind. Cold. Surgical. Smelling of alcohol and ozone.

Reality cracked, and through it emerged Another Place.

I did not see space. I saw the low, white, rough ceiling of a bunker. Concrete. Fluorescent lamps, buzzing like a swarm of agitated wasps. I am not in a spacesuit. I am absolutely naked. I am so cold my bones are cracking. My arms and legs are chained to a metal table with steel bracelets. I cannot move even a millimeter.

— «Lana?..» — my voice sounds hollow, as if my mouth is stuffed with cotton. I can’t feel my tongue. I turn my head (it costs me titanic effort, my neck feels like wood). She, my Lana, is nearby. She is lying on the adjacent table. Just as defenseless. Chained. Around her shaved head is a crown of black wires and sensors. They bite into the pale skin like snakes. She looks at me sadly. There is no fear in her eyes. In them is an ocean of tears she cannot wipe away because her hands are bound.

— «I love you, Seryozha,» — she whispers. Her lips barely move, blue from the cold. — «Remember us. Please, remember us… We won’t die… We will become stars…»

A Shadow leans over us.

A man in a white coat and medical mask. He has tired, dead eyes, surrounded by dark circles from insomnia.

Our «father». Our mentor. And our executioner.

Professor Yuri Zaitsev.

HE is not that hero from the barricades… A different one… The real one…

A cynical scientist, ready to do anything for the sake of his madness.

He keeps his hand on the massive switch of the cryogenic freezing system.

— «Forgive me, children,» — he says. His voice trembles, but his hand is steady. — «This is not death. This is… a dreamless sleep. You are our only chance. You are a Trojan horse for God… if he exists…»

He throws the switch…

IMPACT.

Not current.

Ice.

Cold pours like liquid nitrogen straight into my veins, into my brain, into my soul.

I feel my blood freezing. Feel my name being erased, disappearing. My childhood. My first flight. My love. Lana. Everything turns into white, indifferent noise.

— «LANA!!!» — I scream, but the scream gets stuck in my throat, turning into a digital, ringing silence. I can’t even inhale.

The last thing I see is her eyes. They fade. Glaze over. Become empty, like those of a beautiful, broken doll.

Soulless…

And then—Darkness. Eternal, infinite, and… mine.