КНИГИ КИРИЛЛА ПОТЁМКИНА

41. HARVEST. OBSERVER MODE

I crawled out of the pipe on the Russian side when the sky had already turned gray with the pre-dawn gloom. I tried to stand, but my legs gave way.

I was turned inside out. Black, viscous bile gushed from my mouth. My body burned. But not from heat — from emptiness. Regeneration in the icy water had devoured everything. My internal reactor, running on the biochemistry of the +Angi, was empty. I had become a squeezed lemon.

An absolute zero. In the energetic sense.

— «Battery depleted. Critical failure of life support systems,» — Lana’s voice sounded muffled, with static, as if through cotton. — «Executor… requires… nourishment… Urgently…»

— «Shut up…» — I wheezed, trying to crawl along the frozen grass. Ahead, about three hundred meters away, the roofs of some village or dacha settlement loomed dark. A timid plume of smoke rose from one chimney.

People. Food.

— «No,» — I said to myself. — «I will not…»

«Searching for source… Angonium… Deficit…» — Lana stuttered. And then she vanished. Her voice simply disappeared, as if she had been turned off.

Click.

Clank…

A bolt…

A ringing silence fell in my head. But it was not the silence of peace. It was the silence before a tsunami. From the dark depths of the subconscious, from those closed sectors to which neither I nor Lana had access, Something rose.

Ancient. Cold. Absolutely ruthless.

EXPEDIENT.

This was that very original code of the +Angi hidden inside me. This was the manifestation of that very Executioner, who was created, or implanted into me, by my current masters…

That very SETTLEANGMENTATION…

«DIRECT CONTROL. ASSUMING.»

My body jerked, arching like a bow. I tried to scream, but realized I couldn’t open my mouth. I no longer controlled my muscles.

My arms, legs, eyelids — all of this was now disconnected from my control panel. I remained inside. Locked in my own skull. A disenfranchised Observer, chained to a seat in a movie theater showing a first-person horror film. I saw everything and couldn’t close my eyes.

My body stood up. Its movements changed.

The human slouch disappeared, the limp disappeared. I straightened up. My shoulders squared. My head tilted slightly to the shoulder, sniffing.

The world changed.

My vision switched to a different spectrum. The trees, the grass, the earth — everything became gray, faded. But in the distance, where the smoke curled, I saw Light.

Bright, pulsating clots of crimson and violet colors.

Auras.

Emotions. Fear, greed, lust, malice.

«FOOD,» — flashed through my head. It was not a thought, but an impulse of animal hunger.

My body moved toward the village. It didn’t walk — it seemed to float above the ground. Silently. Predatorily.

«Stop! What are you doing?!» — I beat against the invisible walls inside my own skull. — «Don’t you dare!»

But the Executioner didn’t hear me. To him, I was merely disembodied noise, a ghost in the machine.

We approached the last house. An old log cabin. The windows were boarded up, but the door was ajar. A dirty SUV with an open trunk stood by the porch. Three men. Marauders. They were carrying things out of the house. A TV, some boxes, bundles of clothes.

They were drunk. Their auras blazed with the dirty-yellow color of greed and undisguised aggression. One of them, bearded, in a camouflage jacket, kicked a dog curled up by the porch. The mutt whimpered. From the sound of the little dog’s pain, the marauder’s aura flared brighter.

«DELICACY,» — the Something inside me assessed.

We stepped out of the bushes. The marauders noticed us.

— «Hey! Who the fuck are you?..» — the bearded one barked, grabbing the sawed-off shotgun slung over his shoulder. My body smiled. I felt my lips stretching into an unnatural, wide smile, baring my teeth.

— «Dinner,» — my mouth pronounced. The voice was deep, vibrating, resembling the grinding of tombstones.

The bearded man raised the sawed-off shotgun. A shot.

The Executioner didn’t even dodge. He simply shifted in space, as if a frame of film had dropped out of reality. An instant — and We were next to the shooter.

A strike. My arm, turned into a black spear, pierced the marauder’s hand, pinning the shotgun to the wooden wall of the house. He screamed. It was a scream of pain. Pure, distilled terror. For the Executioner, this was the smell of fresh bread. I saw crimson steam bursting from the screaming man. That very long-awaited Angonium. My body inhaled this steam.

Ecstasy.

An incomparable pleasure…

A wave of power rolled through my veins, washing away the fatigue.

«NO! DON’T!» — I screamed inside my own head-prison, looking at the man’s face twisted in terror. Whatever kind of scumbag he was, he didn’t deserve what started next.

The Executioner didn’t kill him immediately. Death is the end of the nourishment. And the Executioner was hungry. Very hungry.

He broke their bones. Sequentially, one by one. Slowly. Methodically. With a crunch that made me want to go deaf.

The other two tried to run. My body released from its back… tentacles?

No, they were more like cords of black liquid, which had become thick and plastic, lengthening and lashing out like whips. They wrapped around the fugitives’ legs and yanked them back. The men fell into the mud, howling in terror.

The scene turned into a veritable hell. I saw my hands. They were covered in black, pulsating slime. I touched the men, and where my fingers rested, the victims’ skin began to darken and blister.

I was drinking them.

Not their blood. I drank their life, their emotions, their ability to feel this world, as greedily as nectar.

I saw one of the marauders turn gray before my eyes. His face shriveled, turning into the mask of a mummy. His eyes sank into their orbits. At first, he screamed while he could. Then he just wheezed. Everything drained out of him: childhood memories, fears, his first love, his final treachery. All of this was converted into pure energy that filled me.

My internal «Self» wept. I tasted the flavor of their terror on my tongue. It was salty and metallic. I felt my body’s physical pleasure from every broken rib, from every dying breath. And that was the most terrifying part. My body was getting high.

It was climaxing!

It was getting satiated. I was becoming strong. Incredibly strong. The wound in my side closed instantly. My muscles swelled with hydraulic power. The price of this strength — three desiccated, twisted corpses by the porch.

When it was all over, silence fell.

Three ugly, skeletonized mummies lay frozen in the mud. They looked as if they had lain in the desert for a hundred years. Everything had been sucked out of them, even the moisture. The dog that had been kicked at the beginning sat under the porch and whimpered, covering its muzzle with its paws. The Executioner looked at it. There was little energy in it. Inefficient.

He turned away…

«RECHARGE COMPLETE.»

«PROTOCOL STANDBY.»

The grip on my personality’s throat vanished. The invisible bonds fell away. I collapsed to my knees right into a puddle of blood and mud. I began to shake.

Lana returned to the controls.

«Executor… Connection restored… What?.. What happened?» — her voice trembled. She had seen it too. And she was also scared. She, a program of the System, was frightened of what existed within her own code.

I looked at my hands. They looked clean. The black sludge had absorbed back in. But I felt a sticky, invisible dirt on them that could no longer be washed away by anything.

I looked at the corpses spread at my feet.

— «Lord…» — I whispered.

I jumped up and ran. Away from this house. Away from this village.

I ran until my lungs began to burn, although now I could probably run forever.

UNTIL THE TIME OF THE NEXT HARVEST COMES…

UNTIL THE AWAKENING OF THE EXECUTIONER…

I stopped in the forest, pressed my forehead against the cold bark of a birch tree, and howled.

Quietly, like an animal.

I was full. I was brimming with strength. I could move mountains. But inside me grew a black hole, gnawing out my soul.

— «Did you see that?» — I asked Lana when I could speak.

«Yes,» — she answered quietly.

— «Was that me?»

«No. That was the ‘Harvest’ Protocol. Emergency mode. I… I couldn’t stop it. I don’t have administrator privileges of that level…«

— «We are monsters, Lana.»

«We are survivors,» — she corrected, but without her usual confidence. — «You are charged. Your vitals exceed the norm by 200%. We can go…«

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. I felt like a fucking «Papuan» cannibal who had eaten his neighbors to avoid dying of hunger.

— «Alright,» — I said in a dead voice. — «Let’s go. If I’m already damned, then I have nothing left to lose.»

I stepped out onto an old military concrete road. Ahead, some Zaitsev was waiting for me. And now, after what I had done (or what was done by my hands), I was ready to meet even the Devil himself.

Because now — the Devil lived inside me.