If Desmond had found out the day before yesterday that the most vicious terrorists were sponsored by the government, and his mother in particular, he would have shrugged it off - so what? So he had to push the community into some kind of solution; if you cut down the forest, the chips fall where they fall. He himself was ready to push the cattle this way, just to raise his status and to change the purple stripe of his personal code into a white one.
Now, coming back from the psychologist, he saw this world from the inside: a wineskin full of maggots and spiders - not people. Disgusting, hypocritical... In his class a couple of people looked like people, the rest were nothing but pus. He is not a human being, and he has no idea if he is a human being or not a human being, but he is a human being, and he is a human being.
Even Linda seems normal only because she is in love with Desmond and thinks only good things about him. Used to want to lead the biomass, now wants to fence it off.
The psychologist said... Did she? Said? His/her name was Joe, he/she bore and gave birth to two children, but asked to be addressed to him/her in the masculine gender. And the youngest son was allowed to use the word "mother." Although such deviations, that is, peculiarities, were encouraged by society, in Desmond's family and among his conservative friends such a thing was considered savage.
So, the psychologist listened to the slander story, nodded, sort of empathized, but advised him to calm down and let the situation with Max go, so as not to spoil his characterization. No surprise, though: behavior that was more characteristic of a robot than of a human was increasingly considered normal. The little-emotional Desmond was fine with that.
The thought of Coker's bloody suicide had displaced his thoughts. He didn't want to believe that this was the same Cocker who had been dancing to his mother's tune... I didn't want to, but she was thinking of him all too obviously! The only thing unclear was whether he really sacrificed himself for the idea, or people like him - agents of the globalists, identifying the unreliable?
At the entrance to the dormitory, an old two-story building with stucco and plaster chimeras on the roof, Desmond stopped, wondering whether to go to his room or go home to interrogate his mother, to determine forever who the woman was to him, who played the role of loving mother, but in fact treated him worse than a passing bum.
There were several questions for her, a personal one - why so? And one that undermined the very foundation of creation - who ordered the attacks: the government or some other malevolent organization, just the mother being a double agent? Would he be able to ask correctly and read the answers in her mind.
Or was the decision to return home too rash? He has never come in the middle of the week. Should he say he forgot something important? A bank card, for example.
Right. In his room, Desmond sat down on his bed and dialed his mother. She didn't answer immediately, her voice impenetrable as always.
- Hello, Ma. I have a favor to ask of you. Would you mind looking in my room...
- I'm sorry, son, but no. I'm not home, and I won't be back until Thursday. Is something wrong?
Desmond rolled his eyes and mentally cursed.
- I forgot something. It's not critical. No father, either?
- Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.
- I see. I'm sorry, I don't mean to interrupt.
He pulled himself off the bed and ran his hands over his face as if he were washing his face. He'd never felt so disgusting in his life as he did now. Monday was a good time to study, but for the first time emotion overcame reason, and he couldn't bring himself to work.
It was enough to imagine that there were people in the library, too, with their thoughts, and it made him nauseous. What was there to do to calm himself down? Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out...
Concentrating on his breathing, he dozed off, plunged into a caressing darkness... and suddenly he popped right out in the middle of some action movie.
- Freeze! - Desmond darted through the open door of his office, followed by a trail of bullet holes in the wall.
The narrow-eyed man, who in this dream was his father, closed the heavy oak door, latched and locked it, but still he heard the thunder of gunfire and the scream of a badly wounded man. As he approached the table in the corner of the room, his father pushed against it with all his might, as if he wanted to move it.
Glancing at the door, Desmond backed away. More accurately, his body, which thought it was a girl, backed away! Wanting to look at his hands, but his body wouldn't listen, Desmond just sat in someone else's head and watched.
- Who is it? Are they shooting at each other? - he-she asked in some Asian language, somehow understandable.
- 'Help me,' his father wheezed, and he-she ran up to him, also stumped against the table, not sure why they were doing it.
There was a bang on the door. Another and another. There was a click.
...-take her alive. Cover up! - A crack was heard, and at that moment the table shifted with a clatter, as if someone had been crushed in the bones. With it, part of the floor shifted to the side, revealing a dark manhole.
"That's it! My father has something to hide! - Desmond read the thoughts of the girl he was. - And it's not her that's being attacked at all."
-
Open up! - shouted in English with a slight accent...
It was the
girl who thought the accent was light; in fact, it was terrible.
Neither in the United States, nor in Great Britain or Australia, was
it spoken that way.
The girl (her name was Gia) could hear no further as she descended the steep fire escape into the darkness. Her father had somehow closed the manhole, and total darkness reigned.
Her thoughts floundered. She couldn't figure out if the attack was because she'd hacked a Filipino mangosucker site (Desmond was glad he had an interesting role to play) and she'd been found out, or if her father's secret dealings were the reason.
And what about his mother? I wanted very much to believe that she and her sister would not be touched.
They went down a completely dark corridor. Grunting and groaning, her father fumbled for a switch, flicked it, and Gia found herself at the wall with two doors. She figured that the secret passage must go under the villa of the English, which meant that what was behind the door was also their domain. Or were they unaware of what their father was breeding under their house?
Clinging to his stomach with a bloody hand, her father opened the right door, and a cool breeze blew in her face, a crackling sound and a barely audible buzzing sound. Gia crossed the threshold and gasped in surprise. A giant mining farm, blown around by fans, occupied the whole huge (more than a hundred squares) rectangular room! What a father! She felt like a cockroach crawling between the microchips of a laptop.
- She wished they hadn't found an exit on the other side.
- Could they? - Gia asked, following him through the myriad of processors arranged in sections.
Once in her surroundings, she briefly forgot even about the firefight.
- They all can," her father muttered. - But they don't have to.
- Do they? - Gia asked. - Who? The police?
- Fucking globalists, MANGA fucking. - For the first time, her father cursed in front of her and waddled faster, almost running. - You mining? Share it. They can't all get drunk, bitches.
- So it's the cops?
- The ones above them. And they're above the law.
They walked down a narrow corridor to an iron staircase, and my father shined a flashlight upstairs.
- There's a sewer manhole in the middle of the road. If they're waiting for me at the top, keep walking to the next ladder.
Reaching up, he climbed up, and Gia was left in the dark. And the more her father moved away, the more uneasy she felt. She shivered and looked around, hearing footsteps in the distance. What if they were after her? They weren't supposed to shoot then; they needed them alive. Someone had yelled for her to be taken alive. Yet someone almost killed her.
Desmond was nervous, too; he knew that as soon as they found the manhole under the table, they would seal off the surroundings and capture the fugitives in no time at all.
The upstairs hatch rattled, and his father peered out into the light, climbed all the way out, and was gone. She wanted to call out for him, but Gia knew she couldn't. A guitar string shattered her hope, and the girl prepared to save herself, but she heard:
- Clear, come out.
Oh, thank God! Fuck you, mangososos! Smiling, Gia climbed up, squinted into the sun, and wiped away her tears.
The bright light made her eyes water and the picture blurred, but she could see that she hadn't seen many people coming and going, and there were colorful fences on both sides of the road, where the roofs of the villas looked out from under them.
- Hurry up. - My father nodded to a gray Suzuki parked about twenty yards from the hatch, with the driver standing beside it, his hand tucked under his jacket as if preparing to draw his gun. - My men came on the alert.
When the car was a dozen paces away, the father, walking on the side of the road, jerked a couple of times, and then there was a pop. Gia instinctively picked him up, noticing the bullet hole darkening in the driver's forehead, his head thrown back...
And then the smartphone rang. The dream dissipated, Desmond was himself again, looked who was calling, and grimaced: Martha. He didn't answer, sat down, rubbed his temples. The driver who'd been shot in the head stood before his eyes, and Gia's panicked thoughts swirled, that it was over.
What had happened to her next?
Desmond shook his head. Nothing happened. She melted away with his dream.
A moment's reset put his mind back on track, and Desmond headed for the library, which was in the modern building-the same one with the pool, gymnasium, and movie theater.
The strange dream drifted away, faded, and soon gave way completely to reality.
He walked at a leisurely pace, listening to the thoughts of the students who were within range of the ability. The Asian girl ahead of him was thinking in Chinese, and I couldn't read her thoughts, but I could feel them: she was homesick, she didn't like it here.
The
young teacher stomping toward her dreamed of melted cheese on toast
and a sweet cappuccino. Behind her followed three ninth-graders. The
skinny one wondered if her dance number would make the finals, the
fat one... That she would love to lose her virginity and ride a
handsome man like this blue-eyed brunette... I mean, Desmond. I
imagined it happening. He grinned and shrugged. Their third friend
was desperately jealous of the first's last birthday party, and was
thinking of a show for her party that would surpass it.
-
Hey, kid," the fat one called out to him and came up close,
licked her lips, opened her mouth to ask where the canteen was, but
Desmond didn't stop to answer preemptively:
- Sorry, dear, you don't need the canteen, you need the gym. Good horsewomen are never heavy--the horse tires quickly.
The girl flared up and stopped, and he quickened his pace and noticed Martha and her two friends on the threshold of the corps: Vicki, for whom Max had slandered him, and the dark-skinned Alice. The girls noticed him, too. "That's the last thing I need," he thought.
But Martha didn't throw a tantrum, she just smiled and dropped it:
- "I knew you were a codger and a... scoundrel.
The girls pulled themselves up like snakes before they threw themselves. Thoughts swirled in their pretty heads, angry and bloodthirsty.
- "Max says hello to you," Desmond returned the smile. - "Tell him thank you.
She turned pale and wide-eyed, and there was a moment of panic at the thought that the bastard had blabbed, but she kept on going:
- A vile slander! And since you believed him...
Slowing down, Desmond confirmed her hunch:
- Yes, the bastard blabbed. And you should not have turned down Hoffman. He wouldn't have believed you alone..." He paused when he read her mind. But even without telepathy, Martha looked at Vicki so eloquently that it was clear that the girl had shared these thoughts with her and now thought that she, too, did not keep her mouth shut.
- You're wrong, Vicki is just jealous of you, but she's not mean.
- You're... you're... you're a crazy jerk! - It came in the back of my head.
The refrain was Alice's thoughts that the best guy in school had finally dumped that doll.
There used to be a blissful emptiness in the place of idle emotion. But now not only other people's thoughts were seeping in, but feelings as well, and it was hard to separate his own from other people's. Desmond felt like a clam without a shell and avoided people.
In the library, he huddled in the farthest corner, surrounded himself with dictionaries and began to translate a popular Japanese blogger, thinking that in the near future neuronets would replace translators, and no one would need his hard-earned knowledge. Even now it is possible to talk to Papuans using a program on a smartphone.
Both doctors and teachers will be replaced by neural networks, as will those who work behind the assembly line. Only programmers and politicians will remain, the latter because the Ruskens are unlikely to learn purely human things: cunning, meanness, hypocrisy.
Harry and Dan wanted to see him in the evening, but Desmond wouldn't see them, didn't want to see Linda either, and turned off his phone. As he fell asleep, he wondered what he would do if he were offered to have his powers erased along with his memory. Would he agree to be his old self, cool and confident self?
Unlikely, because, first, it was an illusion, and he was just a gnat. Secondly, the abilities, yes, unpleasant, but they offer fantastic prospects, you just have to get used to the new inputs. And living in illusions is like wandering through a minefield at night. Now it is unlikely that anyone will catch him off guard. All that's left to learn is to learn to suspend ability when it's necessary.
He had guessed before that all in politics was not as it was shown to the electorate. Now he was fully convinced.
He fell asleep surprisingly quickly. But he woke up again from nothingness into a fantastic dream, insanely similar to reality. Two buttons appeared before his eyes: a blue "Enter" and a yellow "Exit".
He reached out and touched the blue one. The door to the unknown opened before him at once, and he stepped over the threshold.
A gust of wind swirled the fluff picked from the rippling dandelions, and a voice, either male or female, sounded in his head:
Hello, Luca! Welcome to Underwelt!
At first Desmond was surprised that he was now Luca. Then that he understood a foreign language, similar to Russian, but different. Polish? Serbian? Bulgarian? Doesn't matter, anyway, he is only an observer and can do nothing, not even - to dig into Luka's memory and understand what this strange place is - too colorful, too perfect.
Luca turned around, but the door that had closed behind him had melted away, and he was standing in the middle of a hilly plain, where the gray hair of the feather-grass fluttered in the wind, the flecks of poppies flew scarlet between them, and a little farther away pink flowers-gramophones the size of human heads-wobbled and jingled like hundreds of tiny bells.
Farther up were the higher hills, turning into snow-capped mountains like you see in cheap paintings.
Virtual reality?
It was more than real. The smell of grass, of flowers, the wind fluttering his hair and stroking his skin. Desmond tried the immersion capsules, the sensation wasn't that real, something kept getting in the way: the gel was cold on his skin, the bracelets were pressing, the mask too.
Or was it the new effect of the lenses? I don't think so either-"Dream" embellishes the existing world, not creates a new one. Meanwhile, a voice pouring in from everywhere continued:
Luca,
would you like to change your race?
Desmond mentally shuddered,
but Luca's body didn't react: the guy was a beta tester, but somehow
he was nervous... Of course! This is the development of a new toy...
not exactly ordinary, dangerous. Why dangerous? Luca, think about it,
please!
But the boy didn't think, he waited tensely. Nothing terrible was happening, and he slowly began to relax, thinking that everything seemed normal, and the fact that the beta testers, a bunch of young unnecessary orphans, were taken to a desert island - just a precautionary measure.
Luca, would you please tell me if you would like to switch races?
- And what might I become? - Luca asked in his own language, but Desmond understood.
When the voice called a race, its representative materialized next to him: light elf, dark elf, fairy, dwarf...
- I will remain human.
Luke, the game class will become available to you when you reach level 10. At the moment you have a standard set of characteristics.
Until you reach level 5 you will have an assistant. Do you want to visualize him in the form of a man or woman?
- A pretty girl," Luke joked, and in front of him the air thickened, taking on human shapes, ten seconds, and there was a tall blonde.
From Luca's thoughts Desmond realized that this girl was his doppelganger in female form.
It was obvious that the developers had tried to make the world as comfortable as possible, because there was nothing more pleasant than to meet your double. Surely the neural network will mirror Luka's behavior.
- Hello," the green-eyed beauty smiled and held out her hand, and on her shoulder was a painfully familiar birthmark, resembling the head of a triceratops-the same one Luca had.
Where had that spot, which had even migrated to sleep? While he pondered, the helper girl held out her hand to Luca, and he touched the palm of the girl's hand...
And he was paralyzed. He watched in horror as her body softened, a pixel wave rolled across her skin... And space exploded with a single word, red on black:
OPASNOST!
My throat tightened. My head exploded with pain. Desmond, gasping for air with his mouth open, jumped up on the bed, wet with sweat. His heart pounded as if it were about to burst through his rib cage.
What a realistic dream, in spite of all its fantasy!
What if it wasn't a dream? What if he had learned to pick up on someone else's thoughts, and a stranger boy Luca, his age, was now in trouble? Or maybe the events of the dream are happening, or happened in real life, Desmond and Luca once met, because not for nothing the guy has a birthmark, which is so ingrained in the memory, that Desmond recreated it with his computer assistant? There's something important about him. And I wish we could find Luca.
Forcing himself to calm down, Desmond adjusted the curtains so the lantern light wouldn't fall on his face, lay down, closed his eyes, and imagined the girl holding out her hand - he didn't know what Luca looked like - to see what was next.
But nothing came - Desmond slipped into a blackness where there were no dreams. And in the morning the dream no longer seemed so realistic.
Shower again, breakfast in the dining room. Top marks in Japanese and English. A former friend, Max, who not only didn't notice Desmond, but didn't even think about him!
Except it didn't take long for the traitor to relax, because the public, led by Dan, decided that Max had behaved like a rat and should be punished-so Dan thought and carried justice like a flag, his unconscious motivation was different, and it was given away by feeling.
Simply, Dan was making room for himself as a "beta", the "alpha" was still considered Desmond, who watched with interest as everyone tried to pick on Max, who at first was furious, but by the end of the school day realized that he had signed his sentence, faded away, only he had poisonous anger left in his mind... And besides anger - so much dirt and interesting facts about underage girls, parental cocaine and from friends' lives, which could well be used to destroy Max.
A couple of days ago Desmond would have been more than happy to do just that, enough to get someone's secret out of his memory. But now he had more interesting tasks: talk to his mother, try to find Luca on the Internet to make sure he didn't exist, and the strange dream was nothing more than a mind game. I wish I knew that Luca's last name!
After lunch, Desmond closed himself in his room, lay down comfortably, and meditated, hoping to look at the world through Luca's eyes again, to learn his last name, and to start looking. For a few minutes he balanced on the edge of sleep and reality, and then he slipped successfully into nothingness.
He
stood on the deck of a barge cluttered with containers, and once
again he was someone else, not Luca. This other was looking at the
gray water of the Celtic Sea, the color of the inclement sky, and
thinking that it would be much quicker to sail to St. Petersburg. As
soon as he, that is, she, thought about it, a detailed map of Great
Britain unfolded before her eyes, as if she had opened a tab on the
Internet. But this map, including the smallest details, unfolded in
her memory!
Yes, indeed, it's a stone's throw from Russia. But
because of the international isolation we would have to make a detour
and then fly. And Gennaro Panzutto would not drive a barge to, say,
Finland because of her alone. And Great Britain must be left as soon
as possible.
Well, here's another man hiding from someone. What kind of dreams are we having? You don't need to watch an action movie.
The girl on deck was damp and chilly, but going back to the cabin to the suspicious Muslim woman was the last thing she wanted. There were few who wished to leave England, and the barge would be packed to the brim with people. Among the illegal immigrants she saw several Turks and young whores, who had gotten to know each other and were chirping sweetly. The girls thought they would be dropped off in France, where they would join the harem of the Arab who had settled there. She, Maria, was being taken, supposedly for a rich Turk, but in fact she was sailing to her father in Russia under a false name.
She did not fit in with the company of minors, for in July she had turned eighteen, like Desmond, and was fully capable of travelling on her own.
- Hey, Rose," the ship's mate shouted from behind the container, "come to the shelter now. There is suspicious activity.
The girl did not react immediately, because she is not Rose, but Maria, but she woke up and ran to her quarters.
- Not there! Into the container! - Panic splashed in the man's voice. - In the one you were shown. Possible inspection.
Maria dashed toward the container with the pink stripe, and the young women of the oldest profession rushed there as well. She feared that she had been found out here too, and if so, there was nowhere to flee the ship, and she wished she had (too!) awakened her powers.
Who on earth was she to be so sure of her worth?
The assistant captain struggled with the container latch, peering overboard at the increasing dots of border boats. The girls huddled together, the very fat "suspicious Muslim woman" was the most nervous - apparently she was in trouble with the law.
The container was stuffed to the brim with packs of clothes. Illegals crawled into the cracks, hiding between the bales. The door clanged, and darkness fell.
At first Maria wondered if there were other people with abilities, trying to comprehend their nature (what a number!), then, when the voices came from outside, even thoughts froze, leaving only one: at least the danger has passed! So tired of being afraid.
My brain, which worked like a computer, gave out variants of events, but did not draw any conclusions, because anything could prompt the border guards to search: from clashes between criminal gangs to banal greed.
At first there was some swearing, but then the shouting died down, and there was an ominous silence. No one broke into the container to search it, but no one said the danger was over. Some one seemed to be speaking French nearby.
Was the ship arrested? What then? Jail and deportation? If fingerprints or retinal scans were taken, it would be instantly clear that Rosa's identity was false...
Once again, the smartphone prevented him from finishing the movie. Now it was Max calling Desmond. He didn't really feel like answering, but he knew he had to.
- What do you want? - He wheezed into the phone.
- Fucking asshole! - He blurted out a former friend. - You tell those mutts to get the fuck off me! Or else I...
- Come and talk to me," Desmond answered and passed out, sure that Max would chicken out.
His head was spinning with the name Gennaro Panzutto, which he typed into a search engine, and Google gave him dozens of links on Facebook and Twitter to personalities with that name.
One Desmond found in the U.K., and the hairs on his head began to stir. Is it also a coincidence that this Italian is in the shipping business?
Let's say Desmond heard about Gennaro somewhere, and the information stuck in his brain - they say it happens often. But the girl Maria wondered if there were other people with powers. Does she turn out to be like Desmond? Not only that, but she's in trouble for her abilities now, and her talent is something else, not telepathy. Maybe absolute memory.
It's crazy, isn't it?
The very first dream about the Asian hacker Gia came to mind, and Desmond googled: "Cyberattack. Philippines. Dream." The first two links were broken; the rest led to social media of disgruntled Dreamers who had been ripped off. So there was a cyber attack! But all the information about it was taken down!
And the cyberattack was carried out by the same Gia whose mind he visited. I wonder if she has superpowers, too. What about Luca? Just some X-Men he can smell.
Bullshit? So is telepathy bullshit. Desmond had the clues, so now he had to figure out what role he played in all this and what to expect.
One thing was clear: having superpowers was dangerous, Gia and Maria had discovered themselves and were now hiding... One was definitely helped by some powerful shadowy force from Russia.
The
world, which seemed coherent, suddenly disintegrated into... not
fragments, no. Into sections draped in red, purple, yellow cobwebs,
with the multicolored threads penetrating other people's territories
and intertwining so closely with the main ones that it was impossible
to tell them apart.
He used to look at the map and think, "Here
is ours, here is the enemy. The enemy must be destroyed. And now
what? How would "ours" behave if they knew he was a
telepath? And who controls "ours"?
Clearly, corporations... The MANGA Corporation. Five people: Jobs, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Hastings and Elon Musk to replace Sergei Brin who died in a plane crash. However, when the place of GOOGLE developer was taken by the owner of SpaceX, the "G" in the acronym was not changed to an "S," and MANGA did not become MANSA.
What forces oppose them? The retrograde anarchists - the faceless ones? But even at his eighteenth birthday Desmond knew that there are no popular rebellions and loners who successfully oppose the ruling system. There were well-orchestrated actions involving unsuspecting biomass, and such actions were led by people without heart or conscience, like his mother. He was going to become one himself, because he liked power.
So the faceless can not be uncontrollable loners. Who are their unknown leaders? A triad? A syndicate? Russian and Chinese dictates?
Desmond guessed who was behind the rank-and-file performers of the civilized world who thought they were the masters of life, behind all the color codes and digitization of personal data, behind the ministers and presidents - the five MANGA creators. Or is there someone even more powerful, to whose tune even they dance?
Why did Desmond's powers awaken in the first place? How could he contact the others, and if he should?
Shit!" He clutched his head in his hands. No matter what, talking to his mother was imperative. Not to find out the hierarchy in the ruling structures - she probably didn't know who was above her. We need to find out what the faceless ones are.
For the next hour he googled information about them, both in the normal browser and on the Darknet, and found that the leadership is skillfully hidden, if it manages to cover a cell, traces of the rulers are cut off. And who is the leader, speculations differed: from the Russian president or the late (in fact, not) Satoshi Nakamoto to the reptiloids - it all depended on how sympathetic the author of the article was to the anarchists. Most were inclined to believe that the faceless ones were the citadel of terrorism, and therefore subject to destruction.
Where in this tangle of intrigue was room for Desmond?
He gritted his teeth and staggered out of the room, almost bumping into Max, who was puffed up with anger, on the threshold of the sleeping quarters. He hadn't chickened out after all.
- You," Max poked Desmond in the chest with his finger. - If you don't stop following me, you're done for, okay?
Desmond took a step to the side, glanced at the camera just above the door to the sleeping quarters.
- Who was stalking who, that was the question.
Max, however, didn't believe it, and he was out for blood. For a guy, blessed by his parents and fate, who had never been denied anything, the boycott seemed an immense humiliation and the collapse of almost his whole life. He longed for Desmond's painful death, and talking to him was pointless.
- If anyone else looked at me funny...
- Cool it. - Desmond pushed his former friend aside and headed for the parking lot.
- I swear you'll be sorry! - A low voice echoed in his back, and Max wanted to finish him off furiously.
Hatred seeped into his mind, an inky cloud. If Desmond hadn't been counting it now, then, stingy with emotion, he wouldn't have thought it possible to have feelings that could strip a man of his reason. He came to his senses only in the parking lot, where the skinny, unkempt school janitor was silently swearing and trying to start the old Dodge-neon.
And there was anger again. Harnesses of venomous thoughts wove snakes. Sensing attention, the woman looked at Desmond. Her eyes were acid green, altered by augmented reality lenses, her skin flabby and grayish. The social code band on her wrist was yellow.
- Damn major," she thought. - Why was this puppy so lucky to be born and not me, forced to serve him?
- Is there anything I can do for you? - Desmond smiled; he wondered how she would react.
- Like you can," she snapped mentally, thinking it was a dead battery, and her lover always had some kind of cigarette lighter in the trunk that a major wouldn't have.
A class enemy, then. Well...
- Probably it's the battery," he repeated her thoughts, "but I don't have a cigarette lighter... Or a starter," he read the thoughts again. - If it is, it should start if you push it, and anyway...
- I can't do shit. I have an automatic.
She crawled out from behind the steering wheel, her hands at her sides, bellowing in anger... And suddenly her features were different: her eyes hardened, her pupils dotted, her thoughts displaced by the one thought she hadn't been able to read. She reacted more as a feeling, a need, a feeling of unease, mechanical, and it was Desmond who had reacted when he saw the threatening presence of the cleaning woman.
He was uneasy. What was the matter with her? Was it the effects of drugs? It was as if a demon had possessed her, not thinking like a human being.
After a few seconds of silence the janitor thawed out and spoke:
- Thank you for your participation.
She
even managed to smile, no trace of anger left! It was as if something
calmed her mind against her will. What? A shiver ran down her
spine.
Desmond walked back to his car. What had reset the
janitor's mind? He got behind the wheel, started the engine, and for
a long time before his eyes stood the changed face of the woman.
Among his classmates and teachers Desmond had never seen anything
like it.
He wanted to make sure it was a one-time incident and not a mass phenomenon. So Desmond didn't go racing through the streets, as he had done before, to feel alive. He didn't go to a club where people wanted to fight in the ring. He went to see people. Not the well-fed, contented classmates, but the ones he rarely crossed paths with, the scum living on the edge of poverty.
One could, of course, look out for security guards at malls and waitresses at cafes, but it was more correct to find a cluster of lumpen people. In principle, there aren't many of them in Georgetown, a city of economic prosperity, no Harlem-type slums, and he wouldn't go there, either.
But there was the subway, where Desmond had never been before in his conscious life, so he stood at the subway entrance, unsure. Skewered, unkempt people passed by, all of them happy thanks to their augmented reality lenses. They saw not crocodiles and behemoths, but radiant beauties and beauties walking beside them.
Desmond would have loved to stay on the surface, but the contact with passersby was too brief, he could not get into his thoughts properly, so he decided to go down.
The highest level he read on the social code of the subway regulars was green, mostly everyone here was yellow, and there were some who didn't have a tattoo on their wrist at all! Standing on the escalator, Desmond instinctively adjusted his sleeve, hiding what was his pride: his social status.
Avatars were more real to these beggars than they were to themselves; they didn't see themselves as real, which meant why wash their hair? Let it hang in tangles. Why wash their clothes? What was the point of washing clothes anyway? You put on a robe covered in grease and gird yourself up like that violet-lensed girl in front of you, smiling at her own thoughts, and life is good! People around her will see a luxurious dress with a company logo, albeit a digital one, but bought for a fee, not everyone can afford one. The girl in the robe comes from Macedonia on a green card, she's in love with some Jacob, and she doesn't care what he's really like, because thanks to the Dream universe, they can be anything they want. She was thinking in an unfamiliar language, but Desmond understood it, just as he did in his dreams.
In the shabby train, among the guests from Eastern Europe, Arabs, blacks, and narrow-eyed people, he felt like a black sheep, as if they were about to identify him as an outsider, to pounce and tear him apart. They were all young and thought of Dream. No strangeness, other than the fact that they were bloody virtuals, Desmond didn't see it in them.
No one cared about him, except an Arab boy of about thirteen, with red lenses a la the devil, standing at the end of the carriage.
- Rich! Anything in his pockets, I wonder? Probably not, it's all on the card, and stealing the card is bad. Although all sorts of other things can be, for example, a smartphone.
The boy, fascinated by the dilemma of whether to steal or not, stared at the victim. He turned his head and stared at the teenager, wrinkling his nose. He looked away at once, continuing to watch with his sideways vision.
- He's got me, hasn't he? No shit, but how? He sure did. He's staring at me.
And then something happened. The boy's thoughts and feelings were cut off, there was an alien, businesslike interest. Emotions faded, his features sharpened-just like the janitor's. Desmond looked away, chilling, but not disengaged from the boy. There were no thoughts in his mind! There was something unreadable, some kind of background noise, like, I guess, getting into a processor.
The guy scanned Desmond's gaze for half a minute, then went back to his old self, but he wasn't as worried anymore, and was sure he had no reason to go to jail, and that the rich guy was weird, better to get out of trouble.
Desmond reached the terminus. The passengers had changed a few times, but he hadn't noticed any other oddities; they were all the same: grimy, wearing lenses, living in their own flawed world, given by Manga.
Before, Desmond hadn't delved into why the retrogrades had given up on the Dream. He thought they were loonies, of which there had always been a certain percentage in society. Let's protect the SEALs! Down with globalization! We are against personal codes, social statuses and digitization! Lenses tear people away from reality!
Now, after seeing what paupers had become, already repulsive, Desmond understood the retrogrades and shared his concerns. The beggars had indeed become cattle. After all, amid the global crisis and scarcity of resources, the poor, even more impoverished, usually...
Understanding
made my heart snap into a gallop.
Usually he protests at
rallies. But now - not a single protest in the civilized world. And
those who are outraged are vanishingly few. And it's not about
improving financial literacy, as the propaganda says. People have
simply stopped being interested in such stupid things as economics
and politics, they have their own world, the Dream. A world that
benefits the dominant corporation.
In the opposition bloc, it's the other way around, the unrest never subsides, the disgruntled throw themselves at the police, burn themselves, and have bloodbaths. Desmond guessed what those protesters had in common: they were all brainwashed and enslaved by a program that made them hate the government and their country, destroying it from within.
Desmond imagined for the first time what the world would be like when MANGA destroys Russia and China, and involuntarily shrugged his shoulders.
People like him - young, handsome, daring - feel good about themselves. The likes of him have a future, they are interested in life, they do not seek oblivion in the Dream. As long as the corporation is concerned with the majority, it doesn't care about status citizens. But when the last retrograde is silenced and the last faceless one is killed...
What will the world be like?
World domination has been dreamed of since ancient times, and now the time has come when these dreams can be realized by giving people illusions. Most disgusting of all, Desmond found no place in this new society for himself and his kind. For the time being they are comfortable, but then, when there are no other enemies left, it will take no more than twenty-four hours to eliminate them.
The stages of accepting the inevitable changed with whirlwind speed, stopping at depression. So much for a bright future, nothing to say.
He forced himself to keep watching the passengers, noticing suspicious things only once: the dark-skinned guy's thoughts faltered, he looked around at the people standing next to him and became the same.
So the phenomenon was taking place after all. And today Desmond attracted the attention of observers twice. Not to mention, if someone was watching him through the eyes of the Dreamers, it was suspicious enough that he'd gone down to the subway and been riding aimlessly back and forth.
So if big brother is watching, it's best to leave the subway and act natural. Feeling a chill between his shoulder blades, Desmond headed for the exit of the car so he could transfer to another branch and hurry back to school.
It was rush hour, crowded, and Desmond felt like he was in a hornets' nest, where an awkward movement and a swarm would pounce on an intruder. It seemed that other people's attention was drilling the back of his head, but he turned around and the passengers seemed to be minding their own business, not looking at the suspicious guy, too slim, too clean, not wearing lenses.
At the station he noticed a pretty Asian girl with ultramarine eyes that radiated radiance. She didn't look like the others. Overly groomed. Tastefully dressed: short skirt, snow-white blouse, black vest, a scarlet rose around her neck instead of a butterfly. She was staring at the screen of her phone and was more than twenty meters away from Desmond-it was impossible to read her thoughts.
She ran her fingertips through her hair, glanced at Desmond with interest, and stared at the screen again.
Desmond had forgotten about her in the carriage, but remembered when he saw her at the station: she was walking behind, and again too far away, and again too defiantly staring at the screen. A suspicious person. Needed to linger at the escalator to keep up with her and get into his thoughts.
The girl, however, leveled herself with him, smiled, stood on tiptoe, and spoke:
- You're too much of a show-off, little brother.
- My own. What's he doing here? Didn't answer "and hello to you, sister." Wrong.
- And hello to you, sister," Desmond corrected himself.
- We're ours after all!
What a stroke of luck! He was going to talk to his mother to clear the air, and the opposing side found him! But why was the girl wearing lenses? Or had he miscalculated and the Dreamers had nothing to do with it?
- Dangerous. Soon they'll start shooting us off one by one. - She pointed a finger to her eye. - It's a good imitation, isn't it? I've got a couple of backups.
Desmond thought of the Dream as a beggar's paradise, so they wouldn't notice his lack of lenses unless he was hanging around poor people, but he didn't refuse.
- I'd be very grateful.
The girl took him under her arm. From his thoughts he knew that her name was Gianni, she was a recruiter, she took a liking to him, but she had no right to risk it: faceless people should not know each other's faces, so she should disappear in a minute.
- Explain what's going on," he whispered in her ear, playing dumb, Desmond expected to find the answer in her mind.
- We've been signed," she answered. - 'Many will die, we must hide.
That they have to hide, a hundred percent, including from each other, because it is not clear who serves the idea and who is recruited, like Cocker, who committed an attack under the direction of his mother.
- Wait a minute. - Desmond grabbed her arm. - I've seen them change when... Anyway, they're watching through people. But how?
- They wrote a script. I don't know how, but it's there. Through the lenses. The lenses somehow break the brain if you use them for a long time.
-
That's what I thought. I know who's behind it, and I can help...
-
Remember: Gianni Boo. Bye!
Kissing him on the cheek, the girl ran off, leaving the scent of raspberries and a clear container of bright blue lenses floating. Desmond got in his car and immediately Googled Gianni Boo, expecting to find her social network, but found nothing, swearing. Well, how did he want to?
This is all very, very strange. It's an idiotic recruiting system! What kind of recruitment is it when you have to know the password? Where do you get it? Or do the faceless have different algorithms for dealing with new converts and existing converts?
Desmond's mind exploded, so he got behind the wheel and drove to his place. He left the car in its usual spot, glanced up at the roof of the sleeping quarters, barely visible in the distance above the vegetation of the park, where the lights were already on, and headed there. Though no one was around, the sense of another's presence lingered with him, and Desmond gazed into the neatly trimmed bushes of boxwood, shapely bushes, redwood trees brought here from various parts of the world.
A gang of girls, about ten years old, rushed from the futuristic building with a swimming pool and a gymnasium one by one with laughter and squeals, and a fat boy with a water pistol jumped out at the threshold and shouted:
- Hold it right there, you retrogrades, here I am!
He was answered with a joyful bellow.
At ten o'clock at night, as Desmond, yawning, was about to go to the shower, his mother called and spoke in a faltering voice:
- "Son, here's the thing..." Desmond tensed; he'd never heard her so happy before. - I hope you don't mind. I've been invited... The whole family has been invited to a fundraiser! On Sunday! Elon Musk himself will be there to give a speech. And the president!
Desmond couldn't wait to go to sleep. She was excited about the invitation like it was a miracle.
- What kind of event? - he clarified, already guessing that the audience there will be high status, with very interesting thoughts in the gray and bald heads.
- It's a charity event! - She exhaled in the tone of a girl in love. - The president himself and his family! Elon Musk! One of the singers. The money will go to the rebels in Russia. Or Tibet... it doesn't matter, the important thing is that we were invited!
- Are you surprised?" said Desmond, just to keep the conversation going.
- Yes, I'm more than surprised. It's at least a Senators-level event!
- Of course I'll go with you," Desmond reassured her, thinking it was just someone of status who'd said no and she'd turned up. Or maybe she was being rewarded for a successful operation. - Father...
- Of course he's coming. The main condition is the presence of the whole family.
- I'm very happy for you... for all of us.
- Good night, son.
Desmond said goodbye to her, took a shower, laid down and closed his eyes. He wanted to sleep, not browse the reality of people he didn't know. But fate had other plans for him, and his dream of hacker Gia continued from where it had been interrupted.
His father's bullet-riddled father was slumped over, Gia was holding him. Or rather, his hands are holding him, and his mind is racing, panicked. It's getting harder and harder to hold. The man begins to twitch in agony and pulls out of her hands. The driver lies on the ground, staring glassy-eyed, fidgeting with his feet in polished boots.
Gia rushes to the car, hiding behind it, trying to figure out who shot her.
On the opposite side of the road, a wrought iron gate with angels begins to part.
- Gia, don't do anything stupid! We mean you no harm! - comes from there.
Of course, she doesn't believe it. She looks at the key in the ignition, opens the door with a jerk, hops on the seat, and squeezes the gas, turning around for a last look. Two men in balaclavas raise their rifles and open fire on the wheels, hitting the back one, but Gia keeps control of the car, flies on, demolishes the barrier near the checkpoint and flies out onto the highway, where her Suzuki joins the traffic.
All the while, Gia was driven by reflexes; she wasn't thinking. After driving for a while, she turned right and abandoned the car in the yard. She got out and looked around: along the road and beyond were two or three-story favelas, wired like cobwebs. Palm trees swayed, the wind blew garbage bags down the street, and an alcoholic lay by the curb. A second man, swaying, tried to pick him up. Two unsupervised naked children, about three years old, were paddling in a puddle, and chickens were paddling a little to the side.
Gia turned her head, meeting her gaze with the alcoholic. The picture froze and crumbled. Desmond opened his eyes, wiped away the sweat, calmed his breathing, and stared at the ceiling. Just now he was in Manila, inhaling the scents of urine and sewage, being chased by unknown assassins. And now he was safe.
The wind outside the window howled, scraping against the glass with the branches of the bushes. Once all but two of the modern school buildings had belonged to a wealthy manufacturer, and it seemed that the windows had not been changed since the century before last; they opened inward, as had been the custom in the olden days. The three-foot ceilings, the oak doors, and the stumpy trees in the park made it look like a Hogwarts, not a modern school.
Thoughts
returned to the Filipina. Why was Gia so taken with her? Had they
calculated that she was the one who had put down that site? If he had
learned to sense his own kind, what was her talent? She certainly
wasn't a telepath.
I was reminded of the blurring of
people on the subway. If there is a script that reacts to strange
behavior and triggers and transmits information through the lenses to
the command center... Then it's over. It's impossible to hide...
At that very moment the window flew open - Desmond instinctively fell from his bed to the floor - and a shot rang out.
"Did they get me, too?" - flashed through his mind.