Tyro Vogel - Tyro Vogel's Extatica

“What? What do you mean, he won’t do it?”

“I told you, my brother’s not that stupid. It’d take weeks for me to train you to be on par with us. He says we’d plan some way to cheat while we’re at it. He won’t do it.”

“That’s his only concern? That we’d cheat? God, you two are easy. Let me talk to him.”

“What for?”

“Just call him.”

Victor took out his phone, dialed a number, and handed it to her. Mark picked up on the second ring.

“Yes?”

“Hi, Mark. It’s me. No training. We do this now.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You think you’ll have a chance at us if you don’t learn the controls, so to speak? You’re much more than your physical body in there; it takes time to master the perspective that gives you. It wouldn’t be fair.”

“No training. You said we’d cheat. We won’t cheat. We do this now. Right now.”

He hung up.

“Are you insane?” Victor said.

“Look, it doesn’t matter if I lose. All that matters is you win. You win, I get what I want — I get a legacy, man. Go me. And fuck Mark’s conservatism. I live for art.”

“You live for art?”

“Yes… Victor, can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“Did you know I was sick?”

He didn’t reply.

“Vic, did you know I was sick?”

“Yeah, I knew.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“What does it matter?”

“I’m asking, so you’d better think it does.”

“I didn’t want you to think I was looking for a guinea pig. I wanted you to see everything for yourself.”

“Guinea pig, huh?” She smiled. “Oink, oink.”

“That’s Porky Pig.”

“That’s the only pig you’re going to get, and I heard you’ve got a job opening.”

“Right. You’re a straight-to-business kind of girl, I see. Heh.” He nodded at a cluttered workbench. “I have the paperwork. Just sign, and you’re officially working for Dreamweb LLC.”

“Dreamweb LLC?”

“It was a short notice… there was a computer adventure game by the same name in the nineties; I thought the title fitting. Hope they’re not gonna sue.”

“And you did all this in an hour?”

“I know computers.”

Irina went to the workbench, looked through the contract, and found it without flaw. The salary alone was ten times the university stipend. The position? “Designer.” She made a mental note of the hefty life insurance sum Vic’s company offered in case of an employees’ death (no matter what the circumstances), and smiled. It seemed like he really did want her help. After she’d finished reading, she signed it, untied the lace from around her neck, and gave Victor the USB stick.

“That video game,” she asked, “did it have a happy ending?”

Victor took out a box of UF203 pills. He looked serious for a while. “Not really.”

Irina’s awe knew no bounds. She stood on the Moritz Zsigmond square by the stairs leading to the underpass across the busy road. The square itself was infinitely more detailed than the 3D model Victor had used for reference — cars drove on the road, people stood in little groups near a grocery shop next to them, a pair of would-be passengers ran to catch a departing tram… It was all indistinguishable from the real thing.

And why wouldn’t it? Victor had used their memories to shape this World-Space, and where memory had failed, he substituted it with their imaginations. None of that one-room inner courtyard crap here; the entire city was at their disposal.

“Where is he?” she asked.

“He’ll come.”

“You think it’ll be a sword fight? He seemed into the whole samurai thing.”

“Or a gunfight. He was into the cowboy thing too.”

“Oh.”

“Keep in mind, this is a truel. We’ll all be fighting against one another. The last man standing wins.”

“Or woman.”

“Or woman. But don’t expect any help from me. I’ll take you down first, so you don’t stab me in the back as I’m fighting Mark. Him thinking he knows better than me, that insolent pup.”

“What? You’ll get rid of me first? Shouldn’t we team up?”

“No.”

“No? Hey, if you want to be the number one macho, please, feel free to kill me after we take Mark on, not before!”

“Kill you?”

“Judging by last time, somehow I don’t think this will be a game of chess; I’m sure Mark has something bloody in mind. So yeah, we take him down, you kill me, you win, I win — I win, job well done.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Why the fuck not?”

“The two of you talked. God only knows what ideas he put in your head. For all I know, maybe you two teamed up. He really wants me to stop working on this project. He’s like a man obsessed.”

“Trust issues, I see.”

“It’s called being careful.”

“It’s called…”

The ground rumbled and shook. The grocery shop’s windows shattered, glass shards flying onto the sidewalk. The tremors swept underneath Irina, and she stumbled toward Victor. She grabbed his hand for support.

A deep hum came from above, and Irina raised her eyes in time to see three blazing balls of fire falling from the sky. She blinked, and the fireballs hit the pavement, smothering the square in thick clouds of dust, smoke, and chipped asphalt blown free from the impact. The earthquake stopped. Irina rose to one knee. Victor sat up.

“You okay?” he asked.

When the dust had cleared, a walking tank stood on the twisted remains of a Budapest city tram, two legs as thick as Hummer jeeps, armored plates colored in urban camouflage. Its weight had crushed the tram like a potato.

The tank’s tower bent down at an angle, and Irina could see the open hatch on the top. Two weapon-bearing arms protruded from the tower’s sides; a machine gun with a barrel as wide as her head was mounted on one of the arms, and on the other sat what looked like an enormous missile launcher. A belt of missiles hung from the machine’s mechanized elbow.

She looked to her right, watching Victor get up from the ground. Another walking tank stood on the roof of a squashed burger stand behind him, this one smaller than the first, but with a cannon half the length of its body for one of its arms. An empty glass cockpit crowned its torso, offering the pilot a three-hundred-sixty degree view of the battlefield.

The third tank was of medium size, with a torso armored in plates of fused metals. Its legs bent backwards at the knees, giving it the overall appearance of a giant, tailless velociraptor armed for vehicular warfare.

Mark walked out of the underpass and joined them by the grocery store. Irina looked around. Not a soul in sight — automobiles sat abandoned on the road; the recently busy streets, empty of people. A tense silence hung in the air. Mark nodded to them and headed for the biggest tank, climbed up the ladder on its leg and, without uttering a word, lowered himself into the hatch.

“EACH OF US TURNS AND WALKS IN A STRAIGHT LINE FOR TWENTY MINUTES,” Mark’s voice boomed from his tank’s speakers, so loudly it made Irina’s ears ring. “THEN, WE BEGIN. LAST MAN STANDING WINS.”

Right, she thought, the rules of engagement: shoot the other guy first. I can do this.

Victor climbed into the tank with the freakishly long cannon and closed the glass cockpit over his head. For a few seconds, Irina watched him check his control panels, then turned to face the tank the brothers had left her.

Iron bars were fused to the velociraptor robot’s leg as an improvised ladder. Its entrance was in its side, two meters above ground. Irina climbed up, trying not to look down, and pushed through the open hatch.