Tyro Vogel - Tyro Vogel's Extatica

On some level Irina knew everything around them was an illusion, yet she found little courage in the thought. She pressed her naked back against Victor’s. Another endless moment later, wind rushed into the courtyard. The fallen ninjas turned to ash as the wind swept them away. She shielded her eyes.

When she lowered her hand from her face, a man of Victor’s height stood a few meters away from them. He wore full samurai armor, with red chitin plates protecting his shoulders, torso, and legs. A black metal mask covered his face, its lips crooked in a grin. She saw his eyes through the eye slits — the unmistakable blue of faded cobalt. Victor’s eyes! A nōdachi was strapped to the man’s back, a sword so long it was traditionally used against horsemen rather than infantry. The man unsheathed it.

“You!” Victor shouted, rushing him. He unleashed a fury of blows against the armored samurai, each strike deflected with such ease as if Victor was a toddler with a willow branch. Sparks flew as the blades met over and over again, the samurai’s defenses impeccable. Finally, the samurai grew bored of the game. Victor dived in for another strike, the armored man side-stepped, and thrust the sword through Victor’s chest, using its length to full advantage. Irina watched as more than eighty centimeters of steel came out of her lover’s back. The samurai kicked Victor off the sword. He fell to the ground and remained still.

She backpedalled. The swords that once littered the ground before the demon samurai’s entrance had been turned to ash along with their owners, the only remaining katana still in Victor’s grasp, too close to the advancing samurai. Irina had nowhere to go. The samurai raised his sword and came at her with a strike of bone-shattering strength. Sharp steel bit into her shoulder.

Waking up to the real world was sudden and disorientating, yet not at all unwelcome. Irina sat in Victor’s observatory, trying to catch her breath. She felt the back of Victor’s head against hers. He was panting too.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I… I think so. What the fuck was that?”

“That,” he said, his voice bitter, “was my brother.”

“Your brother? This is your brother? What the fuck is wrong with him?”

Irina’s body continued to tremble with fear, shock, confusion, and pain. She’d never felt razor-sharp metal slice through her flesh before; she hoped, she’d never have to again. Victor’s brother had a lot of explaining to do.

Victor stood up, removed the headphones from Irina’s neck, and leaned against one of his workbench tables, looking exasperated. He remained like that for a half a minute. “His name’s Mark,” he finally said. “He’s my younger brother. We grew up in an orphanage, he and I. Our parents died when he was seven. I was fourteen. It wasn’t good for him. Even then, he didn’t like my looking after him. He’s like that, very independent. I think he dropped out of uni just to spite me. Even moved to Prague a few years back. He’s a genius chemist, you know. The UF203 is his invention. I just helped on the… technical side of things. Found a way to program how your brain perceives reality after his pill jettisons you into the next world using nothing but sound, that sort of thing. Come to think of it, I’m not bad myself.”

“Except you’re not psychotic, as far as I can tell.”

“Mark’s not psychotic. He’s a big joker that’s who he is. He does do an awful deal of psychedelics, most of them of his own design, but he’s always been able to keep a lid on it.”

“So far.”

“Look, I’m sorry about what you went through, but you have to understand… we had to experiment a bit before we got everything to work the way we wanted. There was UF202 and 201 and 200 and… and I don’t even want to go into what we tried on ourselves over the past few months. We’ve never had any issues; when it comes to chemistry, Mark knows his stuff. He was probably just testing some crazy theory.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. What he did to us there you’d call it a ‘psi-hack,’ I guess. Remember how I told you when you take UF203 you get blasted into a different dimension? Well, it should be possible for a foreign entity to jump in on the action — to psi-hack whatever virtual reality your brain’s constructed for you. I bet it’s even easier to jump somebody who’s sharing their World-Space.”

“Sharing a ‘World-Space.’ Is that what we were doing?” Irina got up. “That was not fun, Victor. Not fun at all.”

Victor lowered his eyes. “Again, I’m sorry. My brother can be eccentric at times. Runs in the family, I suppose, though you can’t deny that the part before he decided to jump us was at least a little bit fun, can you?”

Irina blushed and said nothing.

Wait , she thought, ‘ Decided to jump us?’ That meant Victor’s little brother sat in his chair somewhere in Prague, sharing this World-Space with them, watching Victor fuck the shit out of her until they were done and only then did he decide to add some ninja action to the mix. It was an uncomfortable thought.

On the one hand, none of it actually happened; she and Victor did not, technically, have sex. By this logic, Mark did not really ambush them; it’d been all in their heads. On the other hand, she’d felt Victor’s touch on her “imaginary” skin as if it had been own. She’d felt his breath, her hands bound by the black gi , felt Victor inside her… her head spun. She’d had enough adventures with unstable, drugged-out men for the evening, real or otherwise.

“Can I at least give you a ride home?” Victor asked.

Irina considered what waited for her at home. She and her friend Linda rented a two room apartment close to the arts faculty building, although Linda was rarely there this early in the evening. A relief, but it also meant Irina would be left alone to face the knowledge of her impeding death. Breast cancer wasn’t incurable, yet she wasn’t sure optimism was the right approach. Doctors couldn’t tell her if she had three years or three months to live. There would be tests, of course. Medication. Observation. Chemotherapy. She shrugged, vowing to call her mother in the morning.

“Of course,” she said, “I’d love that. And I’ll have your number while we’re at it.”

Victor smiled.

She asked Victor to come up, but he kept the motorcycle’s engine running and quoted some pressing business before riding off. Too bad for him. As she’d had expected, Linda wasn’t home. Irina left her tennis shoes under the coat stand by the door and raided the kitchen for bread, mayo, chicken and cheese. The way she figured it, she had to live life while it lasted. So, chicken sandwich in hand, she went to her room.

It wasn’t exactly small, but it was more cluttered than it had any right to be. Art books spilled from her bookshelf and onto the bed, sharing it with a half a dozen sketchbooks of half-finished drawings; notebooks she’d filled with scribbles during class littered the floor, most of them thrown atop discarded clothes. Irina ignored the mess as she sank into the leather IKEA chair by the desk. She closed the window curtain and turned on her laptop.

What she needed was an escape; a magic button she could press to make all the bad things go away; a wizard’s wand she could wave and — abracadabra — cancer was again something that only happened to others.

Irina gave her bed a critical look as her computer booted up. She’d spent more than a few interesting, sweaty nights with Gabor here… granted, he’d been doing most of the sweating, but their sexual life had had its moments. He was such a nice guy. Ex or not, she’d have to tell him about her cancer before it was too late. She owed him at least that much.