Tyro Vogel - Tyro Vogel's Extatica

No. It cannot be.

“I’m not dead,” Mark said as if reading his thoughts. “You, on the other hand…” He let the silence hang.

“I’m what?”

“What’s the last thing you remember before the dive?”

Victor thought, then answered: “The plane.”

“The plane, with nobody to fly it,” Irina said, and a chill ran down Victor’s nape. Irina snapped her fingers and the air around them rippled into a three-sixty degree view of Victor’s onboard office, the red digit 5 counting down the time before the crash — five seconds, four seconds, three seconds. “Did you think I’d just let you erase me?”

Victor watched himself slouched against the illuminator with Linda on his lap, who’d leaned into him in her dreamweb slumber as the seconds ticked away. The picture jerked, Victor’s seatbelts strained, and Linda’s body smashed against the ceiling. The illuminator cracked. Linda snapped open her eyes, but disappeared from view before she could scream.

“No!”

“No?” Mark said. “Linda knew the risks. You had no choice. What do you think happened to her when Gabor fried her on that mountain?

“How should I—”

“Exactly,” Irina intervened. “How should you have known that any of this was going to happen? Your brother was right: the physical reality was disappearing.”

Was? “But… not anymore?”

“Not anymore,” Mark said. “After Irina confirmed my suspicions that the dreamweb was damaging our world, she’d set out to kill you before you erased her thought node.”

“I succeeded, too,” she said. “Sorry, Victor. It was the only way.”

“But if I’m dead, how am I here? Wait — you went and uploaded me, Mark, didn’t you? You son of a bitch!”

“Don’t you talk about our mother.”

Victor took a deep, steadying breath and concentrated on his racing heart. It slowed down. He breathed out. “Okay. Okay. Fine. So now I’m like her.” Victor nodded at Irina. “Now you have to erase us. Cut access to the dreamweb. Planes are falling from the skies, man, people are fucking disappearing. You win. Shut it down.”

“Shut it down?” Mark said. “You think it’s that easy? All you need is a drug and some noise. Apparently you don’t even need the noise anymore. Congratulations. Good fucking job. It can’t be shut down. But it can broken — permanently.”

“What do you mean? What did you two do?

“You did everything yourself, Victor.” Irina stood up, her breasts bouncing from the sudden movement. “Why did you have to bring Linda to Prague? You knew it’d be dangerous.”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Are you implying it’s my fault you crashed our plane and killed us? Really?”

“I’m not implying,” she said, menace in her voice. “She was my friend.”

Another image projected itself around them. Victor recognized the apartment Irina and Linda once shared when Irina was a twenty-three-year-old arts student. The two young women were sitting on a cozy-looking couch, both smiling, drinking coffee and sharing a joint.

“How well did you even know her, Vic?” Irina asked. “You worked with her every day. You fucked her every other day. But did you actually know anything about her?”

The living room faded to an image of a black-haired girl of about ten wearing a red dress with white polka dots. Young Linda held a dandelion in her left hand. She waved hello with her right (or perhaps , goodbye ), and the picture disappeared.

“What happened to her?” Victor asked.

“I tried to copy her as well,” Mark said, “but Gabor got to her faster.”

“Is she dead?”

“Not any less than you are, brother. There’s no death in the dreamweb, not really. Only change. She’s all around us, a part of the web, an extension of the will of the world, so to speak.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Can I tell you my story now?”

“Mark, what the fuck, man! What’s going on? I’m dead. Made into a ghost. I get it. Linda’s dead. Made into… thin air, I guess. You said you managed to put this dreamweb business under control. How? What did you do, Mark? And what are you doing inside Irina’s thought node?”

Irina pressed up against Victor’s back and hugged him. Her body felt warm, eager. Her breath tickled his shoulder.

“Do you know the word ‘sonder’?” she whispered into his ear.

“Of course I know the word ‘sonder.’ What the fuck, Irina? Mark…?”

“Tell him, Mark. Tell him everything.”

Mark began, “Let me tell you a story, brother,” then he paused, reconsidered. “Better yet, let me show you a story.”

It was dark, but there was no mistake: Victor stood barefoot next to the apple tree in the Garden of Slaves, though something was blocking the sun. He looked up to a metal disc as big as a city that hovered in the sky.

Mark’s voice spoke like a movie narration inside Victor’s brain. “This was the beginning,” he said. “Genesis. The creation.”

The image zoomed round to show the flying disc in cross section. The spaceship was a labyrinth of machines, engines, storage units, automated science laboratories, rooms with caged animals, engineering bays, hangars, and infrastructure beyond human categorization. At the heart of the space-faring vessel was the command deck.

There, a man and a woman stood naked, watching the world below. They held hands, yet there was nothing romantic about their touch; they’d simply grasped one other like lovers on a sinking ship.

“Meet Surl Adiz and Surl Adiza,” Mark said, “the progenitors of all life on Earth, and the technology they’d brought from their homeworld.”

The spaceship melted into the background. Grass turned to sand.

Half a hundred men dragged a stone monolith across the desert toward a pyramid on the horizon. Others studied papyrus scrolls as they inspected the work. Some men just stared at the sky.

“These beings taught us astronomy, navigation, the principles of language and mathematics; in essence, they’d taught us about the dreamweb. They’d always been a part of it, on a much deeper level than we ever were. Imagine telepathy, imagine feeling every life form around you and knowing the connectivity of all things, at all times. Imagine how that feels.”

“Must be nuts.”

“Well said. It is nuts. But not for them. Their race is ancient, attuned to the whispers of the world. We humans, on the other hand…”

The pyramid faded from the horizon, and the sand turned to a cobblestone road. A massive tower stood in front of them, its top hidden in the clouds, birds circling it and singing songs to the wind.

“They gave us a gift,” Mark said, “and we threw it away.”

A low rumbling came, and the ground began to shake. Irina’s hands tightened around Victor’s waist. He kept his balance.

“In our arrogance, we decided we could be like them,” Mark went on, “that we could be one with the stars, that we could be more than they ever were. The creators decided we must be put back in our place.”

A stone fell away from the tower, then another. Its wall cracked, and a part of it slid down, disintegrating into small pieces, while thunder roared through the air. Dust enveloped them, finding its way into Victor’s ears, nose, hair. He shut his eyes.

“So they limited our connection to the dreamweb, almost like turning a valve to the least possible setting; no more telepathy, no more bonding with fellow living creatures, no more magic. And still, we humans remained deeply spiritual creatures. We always knew the world was more than the eye could see. On some level, most of us understood that death was but a change; the assimilation back into the immaterial, the ultimate dreamweb dive. The mystics and the shamans knew it best. Quite a few chemistry students knew as well, like Yours Truly, for example. Open your eyes.”