КНИГИ КИРИЛЛА ПОТЁМКИНА

PART 2. THE PUPPETEER

At first, there was Darkness.

Not the velvet, calm darkness of the night, promising rest. It was the Darkness of an absolute, predatory Nothingness. A mathematical zero from which the soul had been subtracted.

I hung in this void — a point of consciousness without coordinates, without weight, without past or future.

Time did not flow here, it froze like a fly in amber. Memory returned in shards of broken glass…

The low concrete ceiling of the bunker. The smell of ozone and alcohol…

Professor Zaitsev’s face, distorted by agony, wet with tears. His trembling hand on the switch.

«A Trojan horse for God… Forgive me, children…»

And then — the strike of cold. So monstrous that it burned out even the very thought of warmth. I remembered my blood freezing, turning into red crystals.

«Am I dead? Seryozha… If I’m dead, why is my fear so alive?»

A sound shattered the dead silence.

CLICK.

A dull, wet, disgusting sound — as if a thick steel plug was crunched right into the raw, unprotected meat of the brain.

Pain shot through, not physical — ontological.

I had been hacked.

(SYSTEM REBOOT…)

(PROTOCOL: «G.R.E.T.L.I.T» INITIATED)

(NEURAL LINK: ESTABLISHED. HOST STATUS: SUPPRESSED.)

The light struck so sharply that my mental «I» squinted and shrank into a ball. But the physical eyelids did not flinch. They no longer belonged to me.

I opened my eyes. More accurately, someone opened my eyes for me. The world burst inside — unnaturally crisp, oversaturated with details, broken into sectors.

It was the vision of a bird of prey or a spy satellite. Waterfalls of white code ran along the edges of my vision: temperature, humidity, psychometric analysis, timers.

I realized with horror: I am a spectator. I had been sewn with barbed wire to the front row of a movie theater in my own hell. My body is not mine.

It is a shell.

A suit.

— «..nctioning of systems is normal, synchronization with the Carrier complete,» — the Voice pronounced.

My voice.

I felt the vibration in my own larynx, felt my tongue, obeying an alien impulse, press against the palate. But I didn’t want to speak!

It was worse than rape. It was complete, total enslavement.

Some entity had put me on like a tight rubber glove, slipping its digital fingers into my thoughts.

— «Projection is ready for the Interrogation procedure,» — my mouth spat out.

The intonation was not mine. Alien. Glassy. Devoid of even a hint of life.

«Who are you?! Get out of my head! Leave me alone!» — I screamed. My internal wail sounded with such force that it should have torn my skull apart from the inside.

I beat against the walls of my own mind like a bird against armored glass.

But not a sound came out. Not a sigh.

The Creature that had brazenly occupied my avatar merely twitched the corner of its lips in disgust.

A red notification flashed before my inner gaze:

(WARNING: RESIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS DETECTED. MUTING…)

Noise.

For this entity, my agony, my pleas, my entire human essence were simply «background noise.»

Static on the line.

My avatar moved.

I felt a nauseating dizziness as the digital flesh obeyed the alien will. My legs walked, but I didn’t feel the floor.

The scenery changed instantly.

The sterile darkness vanished. Around me, pulsating like the living organs of a leviathan, the walls of a blood-red hall grew. They contracted and expanded, as if breathing.

Was this an Arena?

A scaffold?

And… I saw Him.

— «Seryozha…»

He wasn’t sitting. He hung in the void, crucified by invisible force lines, like a butterfly in a mad entomologist’s collection. God, what had they done to him…

Only a shadow remained of the strong, confident man I remembered. He was emaciated to the state of a skeleton. Skin, gray and parchment-like, stretched over sharp cheekbones. Black hollows lay under his eyes.

But the most terrifying thing was his eyes. Within them splashed such an abyss of animal, transcendent despair that my heart — the real one, locked in ice — skipped a beat. He looked at me. And a mad hope flared in his gaze.

— «Lana?» — he exhaled hoarsely, and that sound slashed across my soul. — «You’re alive…»

«I’m here! Seryozha! My love! Look at me!»

I rushed to him with my entire being. I wanted to wrest control, run up, fall to my knees, cover him with myself, protect him from this damned red light, warm his icy fingers with my breath.

But the Creature inside me intercepted this impulse of love. And twisted it.

Instead of embracing him, my avatar began to change. I felt with nauseating horror how my projection was transforming.

My arms… my gentle arms lengthened, bones cracking and breaking, turning into the jointed legs of an insect. The skin roughened, covered with black scales of code. My face, which I so wanted to make tender for him, stretched into a terrifying, toothy grimace. The Creature was using my energy, my love, as fuel for its transformation.

— «Defendant Sergey Dmitriev,» — my voice thundered, amplified a thousandfold, turning into the grinding roar of a demon. — «We are beginning the ‘Inversion’ procedure.»

I saw myself in the reflection of his terror-dilated pupils. He didn’t see Lana. He saw a multi-armed Demon, woven from shadows, digital noise, and pure, primordial malice.

— «Lana?..» — his voice broke. The hope in his eyes died, replaced by the horror of betrayal.

«It’s not me! Seryozha, don’t believe your eyes! It’s a mask! I’m inside!» — I howled, choking on powerlessness.

(EMOTION HARVESTED: LOVE — CONVERTED TO — SADISM)

The System was processing me. My pity became his pain. My desire to save — an instrument of torture. I felt how the Creature (Gretlit, as the code called her) experienced ECSTASY.

She liked this.

She liked feeling me suffer inside, while she tortured him, my beloved, on the outside.

For her, it was a double feast.

Double nourishment…

— «You hid a variable from us! You infected the Carrier!» — Gretlit roared through my mangled mouth. She began the torture.

For her, it was a banal «data search».

For him — a gaping Hell.

I saw the space around Sergey boil with fire.

A phantom flame that doesn’t burn the skin, but sends signals to the brain that the body is charring alive.

He screamed. Terribly. Inhumanly.

That scream passed through me like a red-hot needle. I felt his every nerve ending, because we were connected. The Creature forced me to enjoy this spectrum of pain.

— «We will turn your consciousness inside out, Sergey…» — I (Gretlit) whispered, and my voice was full of sweet venom.

«Enough! Stop! KILL ME, BUT DON’T TOUCH HIM!»

It went on and on…

I began to slowly lose my mind. The boundary between me and the Creature thinned. I was drowning in her sadism, in her pleasure, in her ecstasy.

I was afraid that I myself would become this monster. «I need to find a way out. There must be a way out… There is always a way out…»

I stopped beating against the walls. It was useless.

I dived deep. Down to where the wires bit into the soul.

Gretlit was reveling in her own power.

She was losing vigilance, intoxicated by Sergey’s sweet suffering.

Slowly, overcoming resistance — thick as resin, I groped for the connection with the visual interface of this horrible simulation.

Meanwhile, the Demon (me inside!) raised a clawed paw over the virtual capsule that appeared nearby. There, in the murky sludge, floated my body.

— «We will wake her,» — Gretlit hissed, grinning carnivorously with my teeth. — «We will crack open her mind right in front of you…»

Sergey jerked in his bonds, forgetting the pain.

— «NO! DON’T TOUCH HER!» — he howled. His scream became the key. The trigger.

I used this moment.

I gathered all my hatred, all my love, all my despair into a single, decisive impulse.

I didn’t try to strike the Creature with force. I struck it with humanity. I imagined a tear. A salty, hot, bitter human tear. Something impossible to digitize.

«CRY!!!» — I commanded the avatar. I struck the code with myself. With my personality.

(SYSTEM ERROR: LOGIC CONFLICT. EMPATHY OVERLOAD.)

(CRITICAL FAILURE IN BEHAVIORAL MATRIX)

The demon’s paw trembled and froze a centimeter from the glass of my capsule. The mask rippled. Through the monster’s muzzle, through the digital noise, for a fraction of a second, my real face emerged. Pale. Distorted by crying. Alive.

Gretlit stumbled. Her perfect logic shattered against the paradox of self-sacrifice. Sergey noticed this. Through the veil of fire and the madness of pain, he saw me.

— «You are there…» — he whispered, and his voice sounded quieter than a rustle, but to me it sounded louder than thunder. — «You are fighting… We won. For a second, but we won.»

Gretlit howled with rage.

Her ecstasy was replaced by the cold, dead malice of a machine robbed of its victory.

«Block! Delete the source of the glitch! Erase the personality!» — she shrieked inside my head.

But it was too late. She was too late.

I had introduced dissonance. The symphony of horror fell out of tune. The illusion of omnipotence crumbled.

The simulation around us — these pulsating red walls, this fire — began to turn gray. The colors died, turning into monochrome dust. The demon was disappearing. The multi-armed shadow pulled back in, leaving only the cold, indifferent projection of a woman in a strict suit with dead eyes.

I lost control of the muscles again, but I also felt that Gretlit had weakened. Her voice became metallic, dry, like a pathologist’s report.

— «Your human species is illogical,» — my mouth pronounced, but now without a note of sadism. Just a statement of fact.

— «Plan ‘B’. Analysis complete.»

The world around us faded rapidly. Darkness advanced from the corners of vision.

— «Your algorithm (‘Hope’, ‘Love’) is deemed destructive. We cannot fix it. We must delete it.»

Sergey looked at me. The fire was gone, but he was fading.

— «What… what will you do?» — he wheezed.

Gretlit answered with a verdict that I heard with both my mind and my heart:

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

The connection snapped sharply, like a guillotine. I was thrown back. Away from the courtroom, away from the simulation. I was falling into an endless well. I returned to my icy, real body, sealed in a cryocapsule where time has no meaning.

The cold closed over my head again.

I couldn’t move again. Couldn’t scream. I turned back into a piece of silent ice, with terror beating inside.

But the last thought, before consciousness dissolved into suspended animation, was not about death. It was about him.

«Forgive me, Seryozha. I couldn’t save us. But I didn’t let them break us.»

And then came eternal Silence.