Sergei Lukyanenko - The Genome

“All you talk about is money,” Kim snarled. “Alex, the thing is that Edgar is a very rare kind of spesh. It was an experimental mutation. He is a spesh to create speshes.”

“A genetic designer?”

“Yup. You don’t have to change the body for this specialization. The eyes will never match an electron microscope, anyway. All the alterations were done to his mental processes. It was a project of the Edemian government… they had decided that Edgar didn’t need a body at all. That he’d be better off growing up in the crystal.”

Alex studied the girl’s face as she spoke. Was she lying? Didn’t look like it… she seemed to believe her own words. When she was telling him that first legend, she spoke with a smirk, as if to say, “Can you believe how stupid I was to have bought this stuff?” But now her voice held real sorrow. Kim believed what she was saying. And really wanted Alex to believe it, too.

“But why make it all so complicated?” he asked. “I believe that there are assholes in the Edemian government. Just like anywhere. They may be assholes, but they aren’t idiots. It has been obvious to everyone for a long time now that transferring a mind to virtual reality has a lot of drawbacks. The mind still feels the illusory nature of that existence and slowly the person… the human mind… goes insane. When the first human consciousness was copied into a machine, back in the twenty-first century, it was the computer genius David Kross. He managed to have a normal existence for thirty years. But then…”

“Yes, I know.” Kim nodded. “I’ve studied everything I could about the field. These weirdos were hoping to get the most out of Edgar. They wanted absolutely nothing to interfere with his work. They didn’t want him to have or do anything but work. They also wanted to make multiple copies of his mind, if the experiment was successful.”

“Then they shouldn’t have let him out into the common virtual space.”

“They didn’t. He broke out by himself. He’s a genius, Alex!”

“All right, so how come you ended up with the crystal?”

Kim smiled.

“It happened a year ago. Edgar organized his own abduction. He hacked into one of the military cyborgs that were guarding the lab with the crystal. The robot took the crystal, mailed it to my address, and then destroyed itself, along with the whole building. We were both sure that the trail was lost, and that the crystal was considered destroyed in the fire. I… I took care of Ed. I had a good computer, and I managed to hook the crystal up to it. We were still virtual friends, except now Edgar was free. I was thinking that as soon as I could work, I would quickly save up for a new body… any body. Ed said, ‘Make me a baby, or a geezer, just don’t make me a girl.’ Except I think at that point he was ready for anything… We would transfer his mind, and he could really be human again.”

“Then you could be sisters, like the Zzygou,” commented Alex. “Suppose I believe you. So something went wrong?”

“A month ago.” Kim tightened her lips. “I… I messed up. I told Mother about Edgar. I was sure she’d understand! But she reported me to that lab. That’s why I simply can’t go back to Edem! We managed to run away, but they’re looking for us.”

“Probably unofficially. This sure is fishy business.”

“The security agency always prefers searching unofficially.”

Alex drummed his fingers against the wall. The story Kim just told him was not completely impossible. Idiocy is universal. Someone could have thought up this idea of raising a genius-spesh in a virtual world. This genius could have deceived the security agency. An excitable girl-spesh could have fallen in love and run away to become a galactic fugitive.

But what irked him was the melodrama. Alex was ready to believe in any coincidence… but not when the chain of events so strongly resembled a soap opera for young, hysterical girls and their sentimental grandmothers.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” asked Kim bluntly.

“I don’t know. You , I believe. I think.” Kim’s features turned gloomy. “As for your body-less friend… How do you communicate with him, Kim?”

“Through the net.”

“You do understand that I have no intention of letting him into the ship’s network. Any other options?”

“Hook up to the crystal directly. His home is there… his own virtual world. Just talk to him, Alex! You’ll see right away—it’s all true!”

“You love him so very much?” asked Alex.

“Yes, I do!” Kim looked at him proudly. “But not the way I love you. You’re my lover. And Ed… he’s like a brother. Or maybe even a child. He’s so helpless, you know, inside the crystal. And there are many things he doesn’t understand, even though he’s a genius.”

“You got yourself into a colossal mess, Kim!”

“I know.” The girl nodded. “But I couldn’t act any other way.”

Alex almost let slip that everything would have turned out quite differently had she been an ordinary fighter-spesh. As soon as she was past the metamorphosis, she would have gotten such a boost of civic responsibility that she’d personally take “Ed” back to that hypothetical lab.

But Kim was not just a fighter. She was also a hetaera. Highly emotional, amorous, devoted… as long as she felt that someone needed her.

And that was where the whole thing got messy.

“My ethical side,” Alex slowly began, “does not predispose me to follow other planets’ laws blindly. That would be a very dangerous quality to have, and so I must make decisions based on universal human morality. But… all this is rather complicated, Kim. I must have a talk with your friend.”

“You have a neuro-shunt?” asked the girl simply.

“Most probably.”

He opened a desk drawer and, just as he expected, found a standard neuro-shunt, for reading books, watching movies, and making excursions into virtual spaces. It was a headband with a neuro-terminal microchip sewn onto it and a soft, plastic, sticky patch with a gel-port. The shunt was of a cheap variety. The headband and the sticky patch were connected by a thin extension of optical fiber. But Alex didn’t care.

Kim silently watched him put on the headband and reopen the processor panel. The feeder-fibers had already wrapped themselves around the giant gel-crystal, which sustained Edgar’s whole world. Alex had to separate them in order to hook the sticky patch to the crystal.

“Maybe I should be the one to go in first?” suggested Kim sheepishly.

“I’ll go first. You’ll go next.”

“He might get scared. He doesn’t know about any of the stuff that happened since we ran away from Edem.”

“I’ll calm him down.”

“Tell him I said ‘hi,’” Kim managed to add, right before Alex sat down in the chair and activated the shunt.

Each gate to a virtual world opens in its own unique way.

Some with a bright flash, a cascade of lightning, or a series of colorful rainbows.

Others with utter darkness, in which a world slowly takes form.

Whatever the world, a threshold is necessary—a place to prepare, to take the first couple of steps towards the nonexistent spaces.

The creator of this particular world, however, did not believe in introductions. Alex instantly found himself surrounded by the universe locked inside the gel-crystal.

He found himself standing on a riverbank, waist-deep in lush meadow grass, his feet sinking down into the soft, soggy mud. The river was straight as if drawn with a ruler, wide and unhurried, its cold clear waters rolling past languidly. About ten paces away was the edge of a thick wood of dark conifers. It stretched the length of both banks. Over the waters flowing toward the horizon, right above the middle of the river’s course, the sun was setting. Alex didn’t know if the terms “east” and “west” were appropriate in this situation, but he was sure it was evening.