Tyro Vogel - Tyro Vogel's Extatica

Everything below Victor’s waist was simply gone. His wrists were gone also, crushed by the weight of Irina’s tank when she’d landed. Victor twitched, trapped in the pilot’s chair, blood trickling down his mouth. He was very much alive. A metal rod stuck out of his throat, and he made gurgling noises every time he opened his mouth.

“This is why they call us, ‘Heavy Gear,’” she told him quietly.

“Hey Mark,” she said, “He looks all right. Says he wants to fight you mano-a-mano, with a sword.”

“Oh yeah? Why doesn’t he say so himself?”

Irina looked at Victor. He looked back, silent agony in his eyes. “I don’t know, he just told me to tell you. Go figure with you crazy genius types.”

She aimed the Colt 1911 at Mark’s tank and counted down seconds. When she reached twenty seven, the armored hatch opened, and Mark showed his dreadlocked head out of the tank. Irina put a bullet right between his eyes. He twitched, brains splattering against the urban camouflage hull, and fell back into the hatch. Irina turned to Victor.

“Always bring a gun to a tank fight,” she said. She faced away and shot him in the head. Warm liquid sprayed her in the cheek. She wiped it off with her t-shirt, and jumped back onto the street, gun in hand.

The skies turned to a shade of dark orange as the sun set over the destroyed city.

Life and death at a twitch of a finger, she thought, raising the gun to her temple. It’s as easy as pressing a switch. Click, and you no longer exist. And in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t even matter… not to me. That’s not going to happen to me.

Irina pulled the trigger.

The shock of virtual suicide perpetuated everything Victor and Mark did to her brain after she’d won the truel.

She knew they’d copied her mind to a separate World-Space, but she had only a vague recollection of it actually happening. She remembered fragments, burning flashes, a sensation of a thousand spiders digging her brain for knowledge that she didn’t know she’d had, glimpses of her past and fragments of her possible futures. But most of all, she remembered the cold barrel of the Colt 1911 pressed against her temple, her finger resting on the trigger. How easy it was for her to pull it. Too easy.

Irina threw her head back onto the pillow and looked at her phone. Gabor left a message, but she didn’t want to check it. He hadn’t written to her in a week and now wasn’t a good time to start. What she needed was sleep, not texting. Besides, he’d be the first to recommend utilizing reason, trusting medical science, doing whatever the doctors said. He wouldn’t understand that she had found a better way.

Maybe she didn’t need to tell him. Maybe she didn’t need to tell her mom, either, or any of them. Maybe someone else could do it for her. She palmed the USB memory stick on her neck. The brothers had told her that if she wanted to talk to her copy, she’d find her in the World-Space they’d left in the mp3 file on her memory stick.

“Is she trapped there?” she’d asked Mark.

“She can’t be trapped. She’s not human, she’s… she’s sentient information, able to travel through any kind of data you can imagine and reshape it as she sees fit. Please understand, she’s nothing like you… but if you go to this World-Space, she will find you.”

“She’s you,” Victor added, “but she’s a different you.”

A different me, she thought, lying in her bed.

Her life might have not amounted to much in her twenty three years of age, but her legacy would live on to shape worlds forever. Mark had it right: if the virtual Irina decided to help Vic, his technology would spread through the world like wildfire. Who wouldn’t want access to a perfect virtual reality at the cost of a pill and a sound file?

There was only one thing left to do: she had to meet The Copy. Irina transferred the mp3 from the memory stick to her phone. Her hands trembled as she carried three candles into the bathroom and filled up the tub.

Irina got in, relaxing in the hot water. She used a box cutter knife to slash open the veins on her left wrist in one determined movement as clicking noises played in her headphones.

The water turned red.

It barely hurt.

She stood behind The Copy on the deck of a futuristic catamaran as they sailed into a canal of organic rock, its sharp edges contrasted against a star-filled sky.

The triangle sail snapped and retracted into the deck. The Copy was naked, and so was she. The woman looked identical to her from the back, her red hair highlighted in the alien light that danced across the waves.

“Hi,” Irina said.

The Copy turned, her eyes wary. She took a step forward on the unsteady deck, breasts pale in the soft glow of the extraterrestrial evening. “Hi.”

“You look great.”

“So do you.”

“So tell me, how do you like being a goddess?”

“I guess I owe you thanks.”

“I guess you do.”

“I called the paramedics, you know.”

“You can do that? Wow!”

“I can do many things.”

“They won’t get here in time.”

“I know.”

“Very much like me to call them anyway.”

“You’re too determined to die.”

“I was too determined to die, clone. Now it’s done.”

“You’re not dead yet, Irina. Didn’t you consider treatment? Doing everything you can to survive? If you didn’t want to do it for yourself, wht about doing it for your family, your friends?”

“So you’re the one to tell me what’s right and what’s wrong now, are you? Besides, you know damn well what I thought.”

“I’ve… I’ve thought a lot more about it.”

“You’ve thought a lot more about it? We’ve just met.”

“Time is a relative concept. But to give you a hint, I think faster. ”

“Oh yeah? What else can you do?”

“Changing the subject? How very much me of you.”

“Come on, clone, indulge me.”

“Stop calling me that. Anyway, all those World-Spaces you’ve seen? That’s nothing. I have access to what’s behind it all, the place where dreams are made, where the rules of reality are forged into being. It’s… it’s really something, you know. I wish I could show you.”

“Can’t you?”

“No… it’ll fry your brain.”

“So that’s why Victor wanted us.”

“Yeah. Good job taking care of that, by the way. It was a nice shot.”

“The pleasure’s all mine. But I take it you’re going to help him anyway? You’d want more people in the dreamweb?”

“Victor didn’t just help you make me. He made you make me. Him and Mark, working together. How’d you think that box of UF203 got into your drawer at home in the first place?”

“What box?”

“How’d you first talk to Mark?”

“I… em… he called me?”

“Exactly. You don’t remember. They purged it from your memory. But I remember. And I know. Dreamweb LLC… fuck Dreamweb LLC. Fuck Victor. Fuck Mark. You think I don’t know why you are here?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your mother taught you to be independent and you pushed her away. Got together with Gabor, except that you weren’t normal enough for him. You just wanted to be like everybody else, but I guess I… I guess you’ve just never loved anyone but yourself. The same applies to me by proxy, I suppose. This is why you’re lying in your bathtub with your veins slit open, dying and alone. What did you use? A box cutter?”

“A box cutter. And I am not alone.”

“No. I guess you’re not. You’re sharing this catamaran with a digital copy of yourself.”