Tyro Vogel - Tyro Vogel's Extatica

“You? You mean, you and Mark?”

This conversation is over , Victor thought. The sensation of Irina’s presence grew thick like the air before a storm, and the pulsating worldspaces around him faded until only one remained: a green ball of energy, constantly morphing its shape.

Tentacles of light reached toward Victor’s consciousness…

Victor instinctively threw the heavy plane down, and the IL-2’s engine roared. Bullets flew past his wing, one tracing a black skid mark across the paint. This was no good. The IL-2 wasn’t designed to dodge two enemy fighter planes at once. He looked in the mirror. Two Stukas were coming at him from the clouds.

Irina, you bitch .

Victor threw the throttle to the right, dodging another spray from the Stukas’ cannons, then threw his plane’s nose up and took a sharp turn. As the Luftwaffe planes passed him, he aimed for the closest one and pressed the trigger. He got lucky; he hit the German aircraft straight in the engine. It went down like a butterfly caught on fire.

The remaining Stuka wheeled around and came at Victor from the front, its oversized landing gear giving it the appearance of a hawk going in for the kill. Victor pulled the trigger. The enemy fired in return. They threw their planes side to side in a death dance; two pilots who’d never known defeat. The distance shortened. Bullets flew. One tore through Victor’s left wing, and he started to trail smoke. His guns stopped; he was out of rounds. Apparently so was the enemy, for he’d also ceased firing as they closed in on each other with the determination of the already dead.

The planes met in mid-air. Metal bent. Something hit Victor in the chest, and the cockpit erupted in flames. Irina’s voice sneaked inside his mind through the pain.

“I win.”

Victor tore the helmet off, a high-pitched ringing piercing his brain. He touched his ears and his fingers came back wet with blood. He struggled from the chair, but fell to his knees after the first step. Countless seconds of pain later, he realized Linda stood in front of him, the heavy door open wide behind her. She was saying something.

Linda helped him up from the floor. The ringing in his ears turned to absolute silence. Victor pointed at the blood running down his cheeks, and Linda touched him on the neck, then took out her mobile phone and dialed a number. A doctor, Victor hoped.

Linda hung up, typed something on the touchscreen, and turned the phone for him to see. It read: She is uploading Gabor.

“Fuck!” Victor couldn’t hear himself, so he said it again. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” It was useless. Irina had made him deaf. The horror of this thought hadn’t fully sunk in, but he had little time to waste feeling sorry for himself.

He grabbed Linda’s phone out of her hand and typed: Plane. Prague. 1 hour.

This is your captain speaking , scrolled the text across Victor’s smartglass illuminator beside the First Class passenger seat. We have reached the altitude of ten thousand meters, estimated time of arrival to Prague: forty minutes. Enjoy the flight.

Victor brought up the source code for the alpha version of Dreamweb LLC’s newest product — a light pattern designed to stimulate the brain into a dreamweb dive. He wrote the algorithm on the way to the airport. His sales team would be ecstatic; now even the deaf could enjoy the hidden world he and Mark had discovered. He himself didn’t give a damn. All that mattered was getting to Irina’s and Gabor’s thought nodes before they did any more damage to themselves or to others.

A little late for that now , he thought. Victor opened another window on the screen — a camera still from the Bogazici Institute of Istanbul, where Irina had uploaded Gabor’s consciousness — which showed a chair and a helmet above it. The helmet, and the entire room in the capture, bore the trademarks of a neurotech research lab, shining floors and sterile metallic surfaces abound. Under the helmet, a young blond man lay dead. According to the Institute’s security detail, Gabor had washed down three packs of tranquilizers with a bottle of Russian Standard, to join Irina in the afterlife in more ways than one.

Victor closed the window and reviewed the code, which refused to produce any effect. He’d earlier taken three capsules of UF205, and had stared at the lights dancing across the smartglass for half an hour straight. Yet his mind refused to leave his body. Belief , he thought. Across thousands of years of human history, there were always those who’d balanced the scales by turning the world one shade lighter at a time. And they truly believed they could do it; they believed in the goodness of the world first, and the goodness in themselves later. They were the happy people, humanity’s martyrs.

Belief is what I need .

He started to work. Every keystroke became another building block for the logic loops of faith, transcribed in the language of mathematics. By the time he finished, his Armani shirt was soaked in sweat. He swallowed a capsule and pressed “play.”

Nothing happened. The plane shook.

The door to his on-board office flew open and Linda rushed in, her face twisted in panic. “It’s happening! The pilot’s gone!”

“What do you mean, gone?”

“Gone, disappeared, stopped existing. I was talking to him and then, in the blink of an eye, he—”

“The co-pilot?”

“Flying the plane. For now. He’s in shock. Victor, we have to do something.”

Focus , he thought. Focus, focus, focus . “Get over here.”

Linda took a hesitant step forward, and Victor grabbed her by the wrist, pulled her down to her knees. “What I’m going to tell you is very important,” he said. “I need you to suck my dick.” He almost added, The fate of the world depends on it .

“Victor! Did you hear what I just said?”

“Yes! And you?”

She nodded.

He unzipped his pants and pulled them down past his hips, along with his underwear. Linda looked him squarely in the face, and then at his limp penis, and crawled closer. She ran her tongue down his shaft; her lips lingered on his balls, gentle kisses rocked by turbulence. Victor opened the pillbox, took the fifth capsule for the day, and stared at the lines of light as they weaved impossible geometric patterns across the smartglass. Linda’s mouth closed over him as he grew harder, willed himself to believe, to turn the sensation of pleasure into the faith he so desperately needed. He concentrated on the blood pulsating through his veins, on the beating of his heart, on the Zen state of pure love of a dream within a dream.

He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he was somewhere else.

His name was no longer Victor. He was Surl Adiz, and he remembered his every reincarnation over three thousand Standard Galactic Years of existence. His latest form had been that of Man, one of the few sent to discover and colonize new worlds; a mission to create Man, where no Man had been before. His partner, and the only other crew member on their terraformer-class vessel — the female Man, Surl Adiza — entered the observation deck.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she said, looking at the third planet light years from a star the planet’s new inhabitants would surely call The Sun.

“Do you think it’s worth it?” he asked. “Creating another race in our image? How well do you think we did, if we have to roam the galaxies to plant the seeds of doomed civilizations?”

“They’re not doomed,” Surl Adiza replied. “They have a choice.”

Victor beat his small yellow wings furiously as he flew over the river dividing The Garden of Slaves. His butterfly senses were attuned to the movement of the wind, not self-observation, yet he knew through the ancestral memories of his insect body he’d once been Man, and the people who worked in The Garden were not.