КНИГИ КИРИЛЛА ПОТЁМКИНА

37. THE FOG ZONE

The pain, like a red-hot drill screwed into the back of my head, disappeared. It was replaced by a crystalline, ringing emptiness. The heat vanished, the despair disappeared, the stench evaporated. Only peace remained.

The absolute serenity of an operator who has gained full control over a complex mechanism.

I am the Executor of the Sentence. I am the Executioner.

My eyelids lifted.

The first thing the updated sensors registered was geometry.

The ceiling. A perfect rectangle. The joints of the slabs form flawless straight lines. The angle of the walls’ junction is ninety degrees. This strict mathematics acted on my consciousness like anesthesia. It calmed me. Any deviation from the norm, any curvature or asymmetry was now perceived by me as a system error causing a phantom itch in the frontal lobes.

I lay on my back, submerged in a black, oily substance.

The tar, which only recently had been devouring my flesh, now seemed like a warm, cozy cradle. It didn’t burn. It was completing the compilation of the code. The liquid absorbed into my pores, merging with my circulatory system. I felt alien molecules embedding into my cells, strengthening the overall structure. I became part of the environment.

I turned into a predator.

«ARCHIVES. OPEN. DAWN.»

The code flared in my consciousness like a neon brand. The voice of the +Ang, duplicating the phrase, sounded not like an order, but as a statement of an indisputable fact. The mode is switched. I stood up. The movement came out smooth, hydraulically precise. The black sludge flowed off my clothes, leaving no traces, and gathered in a regular, almost perfect circular puddle on the floor.

Order.

I stepped toward the door. The doorframe had dried out from age.

The angle of inclination — eighty-seven degrees instead of ninety.

Irritation pricked my brain. Incorrect. Inefficient. I hit it with my shoulder, correcting the frame, widening the passage to the required dimensions.

Better now.

Silence reigned on the stairwell. But it was not the absence of sound. It was the absence of Life in its old understanding. A floor below, on the steps, lay what used to be called the human-spider.

The arachnid construct froze. But it didn’t just die. It was slowly disappearing. Wisps of whitish steam rose from the monster’s carcass. The flesh of the human-spider was losing its density, disintegrating into atoms. The parchment skin turned gray, crumbled, and soared upward, replenishing the thick milk hanging in the air.

— «Sublimation of biomass,» — the Module obligingly prompted. — «Return of resources to the ‘Storage Medium‘. The Fog. This is not weather. This is a Farm. This is a suspension of DNA, memory, and dissolved organics.»

I inhaled this air. It was nourishing.

Descending, I registered an open door on the first floor.

Apartment number 12.

The doorway — even. Acceptable. I went inside. In the center of the room, in an old velour armchair, sat a woman. The neighbor from downstairs. I used to know her. Maryana.

She sat up straight, hands resting on her knees. The posture — symmetrical. This pleased the eye. She wasn’t sleeping. Her eyes were wide open and staring into nowhere, but a soft, blissful smile was frozen on her lips. The signal «Dawn» had hit her point-blank. Her skin was flaking. Tiny scales of epidermis tore away from her shoulders, cheeks, and arms. They didn’t fall to the floor, but, caught by an invisible draft, smoothly rose to the ceiling, turning into fog. The woman was disintegrating alive. The surface of the armchair beneath her was already soaked with dark moisture, but her face expressed absolute, narcotic happiness.

— «Fixation of Angonium emission,» — the Module commented dryly. — «Harvest of emotions complete. Carrier utilization.»

Her body vibrated, giving the System the last thing it had left — the energy of suffering converted into the pure ecstasy of death. It was logical. It was expedient. But somewhere deep down, under layers of alien code, human disgust stirred. I suppressed it.

Emotions — are garbage. And I am not a garbage collector. I am the Executor.

I exited the building.

Kauppakatu street. Location — Lappeenranta. By the calendar — December. The time of deep depressive freeze.

Everything in its place…

But the city met me not with frost, but with a damp, sticky sultriness.

The fog here stood like a wall. It seemed denser than inside the house. «Fatter». Richer. It swirled, greedily licking the walls of the buildings, lustfully digesting the plaster and stone. It radiated heat, like any living organism — the nauseating heat of decomposition, turning the Finnish winter into a rotten, dripping thaw.

It squelched underfoot. The snow, which should have lain like a white carpet, had turned into a porous, gray, shapeless mush. The snowdrifts along the walls had settled, soaked with black moisture, and resembled clumps of dirty cotton. Here and there on the asphalt, «half-decayed» islands of ice still remained. I stepped on one.

Crunch.

The sound seemed too loud in this cottony silence. The ice looked as if it had gone rotten inside, as if water saturated with rot had frozen already poisoned.

I looked around. The geometry of the street was broken. A lamppost bent at an unnatural angle. The curbstone, uprooted from the frozen ground, crumbled into sand. The asymmetry of the ruin, the incorrectness, cut the eye.

I winced.

Right by the entrance, blocking the sidewalk, a gray sedan stood frozen. It was stuck in a snowdrift, which was now rapidly melting, forming an oily, ugly puddle around the wheels. The bumper rested against a bench. The hood was dented — a clear violation of form. I walked closer. Light steam was rising from the car.

The fog reacted with the metal, heating it up. A network of pulsating, blue veins covered the hood. The iron looked soft, like melting wax or cartilage. The driver’s door was wide open.

Inside sat a man. Or what had now become part of the car. His winter jacket — a puffer coat — had fused with the upholstery of the seat, turning into a single synthetic membrane. His gloveless hands were not holding the steering wheel. They were flowing into it. The skin of his palms had merged with the plastic of the braid, the bones of his forearms, probably, had fused with the steering column. But he was alive. No steam came from his mouth — the temperature of his body and the environment had equalized. But the driver’s chest rose and fell in the same rhythm with a dull, squelching sound coming from under the hood. The «inhale-exhale» of the engine. Frost had frozen on the windshield from the inside, but now it was streaming down in dirty tears, revealing a view of the empty, glazed eyes of the creature.

The driver’s head turned toward me. Slowly, with the crunch of breaking ice on the collar. The car suddenly jerked. The wheels, frozen into the icy mush, spun helplessly, splashing black-and-gray slush. The driver opened his mouth, and instead of a scream, there sounded a hoarse, choking squelch of a car horn, now mounted somewhere deep in his larynx.

— «Technological dead end,» — I assessed. — «Mobility zero. The environment is aggressive to mechanics.»

I turned away. The mechanisms are dead. The era of machines is over. Now only biology works. I looked at my feet. The heavy Finnish boots were sinking in the gray mess, but I didn’t care. The cold didn’t penetrate the armor. My muscles were warmed up and ready for work.

My path lay to the east. To the border. Along the road stood the blackened skeletons of trees, thick water dripping from their branches. Snow, ice, fog, and flesh mixed here into a single substance.

The Module drew a route vector before my eyes. A straight red line cutting through the city map. A perfectly straight line through the December rot. I slowly moved along it, leaving deep footprints in the melting snow of weeping Lappeenranta.