1 Chapter 1. Death and Oblivion

A RED MESSAGE appeared on the projection screen:

Radiological hazard. K-coefficient — 20%%%%%

Assessing radiological environment...

At that the system froze, displaying a spinning wheel. Either the readings were too complex, or the on-board computer had failed.

My traveling companion put aside the tablet on which he had been watching idiotic stand-up shows for the whole flight. For a full hour and a half, I'd been forced to listen to loud cackling and jokes in Tatar, Russian and Chinese. They were just as bad in every language. I even started getting annoyed that the cabin's soundproofing shielded us from the sound of the rotors. Their whirring would have been better than those attempts at humor.

My traveling companion stood up and opened a cupboard. "Size?"

I stood up too and grabbed a radiation suit for myself.

He smirked. "You soldiers give yourselves away with details like that." "I don't know what you mean."

"The fact that you didn't trust me with the choice."

I unfastened the suit. Within twenty seconds, exceeding the standard time requirement, I'd put it on and checked it was functioning.

"My dad taught me not to trust strangers. Sorry, but this is the first time I've met you," I sat back down, keeping the controls in view.

My traveling companion followed my gaze. "And you always keep an eye on the controls."

"Maybe I've never seen a combat helicopter piloting itself."

"You've seen it all," he zipped up his suit (almost making the standard time). "And you know full well that if we're shot down now, your best bet is taking the controls."

"Isn't the chopper equipped with reactive defenses?"

"Of course, the defenses will shoot down a missile in flight, but that's why they have gamma emitters built in. After the missile explodes, the EM pulse knocks the computer out of action. It won't be able to perform an emergency landing. That's why you're sitting there ready to jump into the pilot's seat. Anyone who's served knows that."

By the last sentence, I was listening through the earphones of my radiation suit. I wanted to answer that the on-board computer would crash even without an EM pulse, but I kept silent. The conversation was pointless enough as it was. We were swapping obvious facts, feeling each other out to find out who was hiding more about themselves.

He picked up a tablet and brought up the map on the projector panel. "Beginning descent."

The symbol of our Mi-200 SU moved through an area crosshatched in yellow and black. Formally, the land belonged to Chinese Kazakhstan, an autonomous republic incorporated within China. In practice, it belonged to nobody. It had been several decades since the last nuclear bombing. The place would be highly radioactive for centuries to come.

There was no better place to set up an unregistered access point to Adam Online. Even if they followed the signal, it would lead them to the edge of a deserted zone. Then no electronics would determine the precise location of the pod: too much interference.

The map disappeared from the projector panel and the lower camera came up on the screen. It showed the remains of a ruined town, with broken streets like cut veins. The sun had not yet risen, so the camera was in night mode, making the ruins seem even more lifeless.

"Don't tell me the pod is on the surface."

"Relax, bro," my companion replied. "It's so deep underground, you can hear Satan knocking from hell."

* * *

The beginnings of dawn barely tinted the lifeless sky. The city ruins drowned in blue. I stood on the ground by the helicopter's open cargo hatch.

"Look over there, under the bricks," my companion said from the depths of the cabin.

People like him were called "landlords." They owned "landings," buildings containing unregistered log-in systems for Adam Online. And people like me, who wanted to steal their way into the virtual world, were called "squatters." Or, considering the quantum nature of the extranet — QUANTers.

Beneath the pile of bricks was the end of a hose with a fluid transfer mechanism. The hose pulled easily from a hole in the ground. The landlord brought a second, similar hose out of the cabin. We connected the ends to the two tanks of dissociative electrolytes occupying half the helicopter's cargo compartment. On the sides of the tanks, apart from inscriptions in Tatar, Chinese and English, were stickers bearing the crest of the Kazan People's Republic.

The contents of the tanks began to pump into underground vats.

"Grab your things and follow me," the landlord told me.

I took my backpack from the helicopter cabin and got my pistol from the side pocket.

"Who are you planning to shoot out here?" my escort asked over the radio. "Everything's under control."

Hesitating a little, I put the pistol back. I placed my backpack in a protective bag. The backpack was shielded against radiation too, but I didn't want to risk it. If my injection syringes took a dose of radiation, I'd never return from the taharration.

I threw the backpack onto my shoulders and hurried to the ruined store building. The helicopter remained on the town square, surrounded by an overgrowth of yellow thorns, its cargo doors wide open, the hoses stretching out like lines for an intensive care patient. No wonder it was such a mess inside.

The landlord and I climbed through broken windows. The store was completely overgrown inside with thorns and twisted trees reminiscent of saxaul . The scraps of an ancient coca cola advert hung limp. A cloud of insects rose into the air. There were no animals in the radioactive zone, but there were bugs, hornets and butterflies aplenty, pollinating who knows what and how.

Walking through a swarm of gnats as if through mist, we reached the wall. The landlord cleared away some creeping plants and opened a disintegrating door, revealing a stone wall. He grabbed a protruding stone and pulled at the wall. It opened like an ordinary door. Behind it, a dark corridor with steps leading down.

"Took me and my partners three months to build this landing," the landlord said, walking down the stairs. "Then I lived here alone for a month with the building droids. Cobbled together the infrastructure for connecting to the extranet."

A bulb came on in the corridor, illuminating the cage of a lift. The landlord tapped a code into a tablet to unlock the doors.

I looked back. The insects had settled back down onto the branches. Pink clouds hung in the triangle of the broken storefront as if in a picture frame. My last glimpse of the real world for a long time. Even if it was a sad world with high background radiation, like these abandoned lands of Chinese Kazakhstan.

* * *

We took off our suits and left them in the airlock after we went through the radiation scrubber. The landlord walked into the dark emptiness and pulled a switch with a loud crash.

The lights came on slowly, those that came on at all. Pumps and air vents spluttered into action along with them. The air in the underground room filled with dust.

"See, brother, the air is filtered and purified," he barely held back the urge to sneeze. "We... we refine oxygen from water we get from a well. The hydrogen left over from producing oxygen goes to the power system. Like on a lunar station, bro."

"What's up with the electricity?" I pointed at the blinking lights. "My pod going to work like that?"

"Please. The computer and pod have a separate generator, and the battery can last two months in emergency mode."

Along one wall stood two gyroscopic cells; orbs of yellowed plastic three meters in diameter. The brand looked to be LG. Hmm. Who needed gyrorbs these days, apart from the underage and the crippled? And besides that, why keep them in a landing? Medical cupboards and valves for dissociative electrolytes lined the other walls. Building droids gathered dust in the corners.

There was a separate cabin at the room's center. The landing itself. It stood out with its bleach-white cleanliness. Thick air ducts stretched up to the ceiling. I looked through the square window and examined the taharration pod covered in a plastic sheet. An old droid started crawling into the room.

A message appeared on its screen.

Sterilization: 34%.

"What do you think?"

"Pod looks great."

The landlord approached the door of the landing. At its center was a projection screen. He waved his hand, opening the computer interface. I approached and called up the system information.

— NELLY —

Quantum Computation Platform

20445 MgQ-bits (Last date checked: never)

Model Name: QCP

Model Identifier: QCP 6.2

System Release: 100.07

(Server upgrade unavailable. Please check firewall settings. Reconnecting 3… 2… 1…)

Hardware UUID: 8D9DBA65-21FA-5629-8A59-46ECF5708B77

…

"Six-two?" I exclaimed. "Seriously? This computer is ten years old."

The landlord took offense as usual. "Look here, brother. How old are you in standard years?"

"Thirty-six."

"Why were you sent for this, instead of a twenty-year old kid? Right, because you're experienced. A major? A captain? Maybe even a general, huh? You guys in Moscovian Rus rank up pretty quick."

"What are you driving at?"

"New doesn't always mean better. And 'new' doesn't necessarily mean 'reliable.' Alice here has sent so many people to the other side that you have nothing to fear, she's the most experienced around. She's amassed so many human consciousnesses that..."

"Computers don't keep binary arrays of human consciousness."

"Eh, nah, bro, even the scientists that invented taharration technology can't explain all that confusing quantum stuff."

"They can, you just don't understand it. No offense. Never mind, relax, six-two it is."

I decided not to annoy the landlord. For the next few months, my body would be floating in a pod of dissociative fluid. If the landlord decided to throw it in the garbage, my consciousness would have nowhere to come back to.

The droid signaled the end of the sterilization process and exited the pod room.

The landlord pointed out a cabin in the corner. "It's time, brother. There's a shower and a changing room in there. I'll prep the injection."

I nodded toward the backpack. "I have my own. In the pocket next to the pistol.

"See, that's just what I'm talking about, brother... You won't even trust me with the injections. Why do you guys — CIA, NSA, FSB, or whoever — even need us landlords? Even ones as high-class as me."

I shrugged, entered the cabin and started to get undressed. The landlord droned on behind the door, rummaging through my backpack. "Why, I ask? When the details of the hundred-year story of the Mentors broke, you all bolted into the extranet to find them. That's no secret. They talk about it in all the Rims. The one who finds the Mentors may be able to achieve digital immortality. So you hide from each other. Try to infiltrate the extranet under the guise of petty criminals. But you can't fool me. I'm no tech support droid, heh."

I turned the valves. The pipes coughed, spluttered out some dust onto me.

"Oh, that's right, I forgot. There's a pump on the wall there, pump the water yourself. Couldn't make a normal water pipe. Like I said, was building on my own."

* * *

Taharration , the copying of human consciousness, was a complex operation. The human body was immersed in a pod of dissociative electrolytes and put into stasis. All life functions were frozen. The dissociative molecules melded into every cell of the body, creating its digital copy, which was then scanned by the QCP, the quantum computing platform. A virtual model of the individual, sometimes called a 'binary array' (although there was no binary code involved) was processed and forwarded to the extranet. Usually to Adam Online, the largest virtual world.

Adam Online was better than reality in all respects. The air, the food, the entertainment. The work paid better and was more fun. After all, a quest to seek out some item was more alluring than the manufacturing of real items at a real conveyor belt in a real factory.

According to the statistics, over seventy percent of the planet's population was in stasis at any given time. They floated in pods or in their own homes, or in a district MTC department: a Municipal Taharration Cluster, a pathway to Adam Online for the poor. A building full of tightly packed torpedoes, in each a naked and bald human being.

People lived in a virtual reality, earning virtual millions, or roaming the endless zones of Adam Online, imitating trade, and earning billions through it. They traded user-made skins, upgrades, weaponry, and gear.

The place used fake money in a fake economy, creating real added value that could be used to produce an even greater number of artificial objects: new skins, new weapon modifications, new structures. The gigantic flywheel of the digital economy encompassed almost the entire population of the planet.

To bring it back to reality, the QCP converted the consciousness back again and rewrote it into the body via the dissociative electrolytes. The old consciousness was overwritten with the new version, the one that had lived in Adam Online.

Ordinary dissociative fluid preserved its conserving properties for between five and eight thousand hours, depending on its quality. If one failed to return to the body in that time, then the decay process began and prevented reintegration. High-quality dissociative fluid, such as the fluid in which my body now floated, could support stasis for almost a year.

But a year is an unattainable time.

The limitation was not in the electrolytes, or the powers of the QCP. It was in the human consciousness itself.

It could not exist in a virtual world for an unlimited length of time. It could never truly let go of the fact that it once had a real body.

After eight thousand hours, people gradually began to lose themselves. Their consciousness was subjected to so-called informational entropy. All memories of life before entering the pod began to disappear. They would lose the ability to think logically, would confuse cause and effect. All the symptoms of schizophrenia began to set in.

Those subjected to this entropy ignored the fact that Adam Online was an artificial reality. They forgot everything that happened to them before taharration. They believed that they had always lived in Adam Online. They fought, died and were reborn in respawn towers. They refused to accept tales of the real world. Laughter was their only response to those that insisted that their bodies actually lay in some pod somewhere. In the end, the consciousness of these people decayed and melted away in the virtual universe.

Death reached humanity even in an attempt to trick it by hiding in a digital copy.

That's what happened to my Olga. That's what happened to all those too weak to face ultimate annihilation. They preferred infinite virtual rebirths, which, in the end, all led to the same unavoidable point: death and oblivion.

You cannot cheat death by digitizing your life. But everyone wanted to.

As more and more people failed to return, QCP software was updated with a forced log-off mechanism. In addition, when the game session reached 7900 hours, the player received debilitating debuffs. Living in Adam Online became harder with each passing hour. Even a gust of strong wind could kill a character at the maximum level. The threat of losing all one's accumulated resources and experience was stronger than the threat of losing one's life. Adamites returned to their bodies before being forced to log off.

A pleasant side effect of taharration was an increased lifespan due to stasis. People aged roughly five months per year. The body's expiry date was pushed back. This led to decreased birth rates, solving the problem of overpopulation and insufficient resources more effectively than the last nuclear war. Why hurry to have kids if you have two hundred years full of adventure ahead of you?

Living two hundred years is good. Living forever is better. But informational entropy prevented that. If the Mentors had truly found a way to neutralize it, then everything would change. For the sake of immortality, we would kill each other both online and off. Just like we once killed each other over land, over oil, over the neighboring tribe's livestock.

Man has always been able to find a reason to strike his neighbor before his neighbor strikes first.

Don't you think?

* * *

Completely naked, I sat on the edge of the pod. It was filled with a thick blue liquid. It was warm. The scent of pine overwhelmed the stench from the tub. My face and bald head were covered in a neurotransmitter net. The landlord's tablet was on the chair in front of me, showing the progress of the scan. ALICE was calculating how much space and time the digitization of my existence would take up.

The landlord brought in the last bucket and poured it into the pod. Even the dissociative fluid had to be added manually! What did he even build in those three months?

"Done," the landlord said, wiping sweat from his brow. "Gonna inject yourself too?"

"Nah, you do it." I presented my arm. I had to show him that I did trust him after all.

He took the syringe from the box, put it against my vein, waited for the green light and pressed. I felt drowsy right away. I could barely move my lips. "There's a card in the other pocket in the backpack... Bring it here, please."

The landlord left, then returned looking at the card. "Wife, daughter, sister?"

"None of your business. No offense. Put it on the chair. Switch off the animation."

The landlord placed the card next to the tablet. He switched the animation mode off. Olga froze, strolling to somewhere in the distance, above the lens.

ALICE blinked through the tablet.

Process complete. Ready to taharrate.

I turned, easing my legs sluggishly into the pod. The dissociative fluid gently cooled them. The landlord took the neurotransmitter net off my head. "From here on, we do it like we agreed. I'll stay here a week. If you show no signs of resurfacing, then I'll pack my bags and head home. I'll destroy the lift... and fill the shaft with sand. Haven't changed your mind?"

"I need safety. Who knows who might be wandering around here? There could be nomads."

"I'll launch the defense system here, in the hole. Three fully equipped Cassies will be in the building. They'll be the ones that dig you out after the mission is over."

"Which Cassies exactly?"

"CAS-4-M, the M is for modernized. Old machines, but again, reliable. One even has a flamethrower. So don't you worry. They're all already configured to detect your voice and appearance. In other words, they'll recognize you, don't fret. There's a Cassie buried at the surface too. It'll destroy the whole building if there's a threat of infiltration. Then you'll be really covered up, no digging you out. But how you'll get out isn't my problem, got it?"

"Okay."

"Good luck, brother."

I lowered myself into the pod silently. The dissociative fluid seeped into my lungs, sank into my stomach in a chilly blob. I resisted the urge to come back up. I wasn't used to sensations like this. For some time, I watched the world through a blue fog. The blurry face of the landlord flickered above me. Something loud struck the bottom of the pod, probably the droid checking the hermetic seal. It would do that every forty minutes for days, months...

The dissociative fluid flowed through my veins, working its way through my body, seeping into every cell. My metabolism slowed, and my sense of time along with it. I saw one of the lights flicker: it slowly went out, turning red.

I went out with it.