Neural Web

by Dima Zales

  “Great,” I say sarcastically. “With three measly drones, you’ll be able to watch a live feed of my funeral from three angles, assuming Kostya buries me instead of liquefying my corpse in acid or something equally gruesome. I assume you failed to free Joe from his control?”

  Muhomor looks down, and Mitya avoids my gaze.

  “I didn’t think so.” I show my displeasure by poofing out of VR in a wisp of virtual smoke.

  In the real world, we stop next to a set of heavy red doors, and my Nixon-masked guide pokes me painfully with his gun and then jabs it pointedly toward the entryway. Working completely in sync, his masked partner opens the doors. I enter of my own volition before I’m forced to do so.

  The large room is empty of all furniture, and the ultra-polished hardwood floors reflect sparkling light into my eyes with unpleasant intensity. This must’ve been a dance floor before Kostya appropriated the space for his revenge. The room is also familiar because I’m now looking at it from two angles.

  It’s the room on the TV screen that Mr. Spock is currently watching.

  The doors behind me snap shut, and I focus my gaze in the middle of the room where a single figure stands, a knife in each hand.

  My earlier guess was unfortunately correct.

  This is my cousin, Joe.

  His Siberian icicle eyes show even less emotion than usual, zeroing in on me like two blue lasers. Instead of recognition, all I see is a “target acquired” type of acknowledgment.

  Sunlight glints off the two blades as Joe menacingly lumbers toward me.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “Is that you?” Mr. Spock asks worriedly.

  “It’s me, buddy. Joe and I are just sparring. Just like that time in the dojo.”

  “I didn’t like that time,” he replies.

  I don’t have to remind him this is an understatement. The one and only time I took him to see me train, he threw the rat equivalent of a hissy fit. I always left him at the Furry Ritz after that. The fact that he remembers that fight at all is telling; his long-term memory isn’t as good as a human’s.

  “It’s a lot like your dominance games with the other males,” I remind him. “No one will get hurt.”

  “But you’re the alpha,” he states, and despite everything, I’m warmed by my friend’s high regard.

  “Sometimes you must remind the other males that you’re in charge. Remember your disagreement with Chekov?”

  “Yes.” His Zik message is full of guilt over biting his friend’s ear. “I did give him a peanut later.”

  “You’re the best alpha,” I reassure him. “For now, can you do me a favor, bud? Go enjoy Alan’s Rat World for ten minutes or so, but keep your eyes open. This way you won’t see what happens, but I can still see the TV screen.”

  “You are smart,” he replies distantly, the way he does when he submerges himself in my son’s VR version of rat paradise.

  In the time Mr. Spock and I telepathically converse, Joe makes it halfway across the room.

  This part of Kostya’s revenge is elegant in its devious simplicity. One of us—likely me—is about to die. Joe and I are the two people Kostya blames for the death of our father. I suspect he blames me as the leader and Joe as the executioner. He probably doesn’t care that it was Joe alone who both decided and enacted our father’s fate.

  What Kostya doesn’t realize is that he, Boris, and the rest of them are not going to get the big spectacle they anticipate. This fight will be over before anyone gets the popcorn, because every single time I’ve faced Joe in the gym, he’s beaten me in a matter of seconds. I mean that literally. Unless he was purposefully toying with me, my record against Joe is four seconds and five milliseconds, and even that I only achieved thanks to Battle Mode. Those fights were also bare-handed. My survival probability shrinks significantly with each knife in Joe’s hands.

  “Please tell me you can fly a drone through that window,” I say to Mitya and Muhomor.

  “The three I mentioned are still nineteen minutes away,” Muhomor says. “Give or take.”

  My heart drops to my feet, but I keep a poker face, determined to die with at least some dignity.

  I enable Battle Mode.

  Joe draws ever closer. Lines begin to show up in Augmented Reality, ideas for my actions and Joe’s possible reactions to them. Not surprisingly, time seems to slow, though I think it’s more of a trick of adrenaline than my superfast cognition this time.

  I have a decision to make. If I enable the Emotion Dampener add-on, I won’t have the problem I had when I fought Gogi—hesitation at hurting someone I care about. Should I willingly turn myself into a monster? Is there even any benefit to playing Kostya’s game and hurting Joe, when the winner will ultimately die along with the loser?

  “Joe is controlled, you’re not,” Muhomor tells me privately. He must’ve guessed at least a part of my dilemma. “He has no chance, while you do, albeit a small one.”

  Cognizant that I’m taking advice on ethical behavior from Muhomor of all people, I nevertheless turn on the Emotion Dampener.

  “How many seconds should Emotion Dampener be on?” Einstein asks. This is a safety feature to make sure I don’t remain a psychopath once the fight is over.

  “Set it for eight seconds and ten milliseconds,” I reply. “That’s double my estimated time for survival.”

  Counting the moments, I try to imagine what fighting with Emotion Dampener will be like. I will probably be like a Viking berserker—

  “Emotion Dampener enabled,” Einstein states.

  The world around me transforms.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The Opponent is a leap away.

  He has two knives, which is a huge advantage. But I can see his movement from two vantage points, a tactical benefit I need to leverage. His right knife hand is the dominant one. Battle Mode estimates he will thrust with it first; the TV view shows me his shoulder blades twisting in confirmation.

  I sidestep and slightly pull back. At the same time, I strike the Opponent’s forearm.

  The knife clanks on the hardwood floor and slides toward the door. Though the weapon is behind me, the TV view shows that I have no chance to get it—but neither does the Opponent.

  I don’t need Battle Mode to show me that the left knife is about to slice at my mid-chest. I’m already reacting. I grab the Opponent’s left wrist, successfully trapping it. With as much intensity as I can, I strike the Opponent in the groin. My plan is simple: the intense pain should force the Opponent to let go of the weapon, after which I can use the knife to carve the Opponent like a Thanksgiving turkey.

  The groin strike doesn’t cause the Opponent to let go of the weapon. Either he’s wearing a cup, or Kostya’s control enables him to withstand this intense pain. I surmise the latter, since that was the case in the fight with Gogi. This presents a problem, because outside of the ideal scenario in which I kill the Opponent, much of my strategy relies on inflicting copious amounts of pain.

  So now I need to focus on killing him as fast as I can. If that’s not possible, I need to cause the kind of damage that would make fighting physically impossible despite the mind control—for example, broken bones or severed limbs. Ripping out the eyes probably wouldn’t be as strategic, because Kostya could still control the Opponent via camera views, but if the opportunity presents itself, I will gouge out the eyes to test this theory. Once the Opponent is thusly handicapped, killing him should be trivial.

  I scan Battle Mode’s recommendations and pick one unlikely to be anticipated, because it will cause minor harm to me. I pull back with my hands while bringing my head toward the precious knife. Stretching my jaw muscles like a snake, I take a vicious bite.

  My teeth grate against the metal of the knife, but I ignore the pain of enamel scraping off and rip my head so violently to the right that my neck muscles spasm in complaint.

  The Opponent’s grip on the knife loosens, and I find myself with the weapon in my mouth. I let go of the Opp
onent’s wrist with my right hand while simultaneously tightening my grip with the left. I claw at the knife in my mouth. As soon as I feel the plastic hilt in my palm, I thrust the knife at the Opponent’s right eye. My goal isn’t to blind him but to penetrate the brain—a very efficient way to kill.

  Unfortunately, the Opponent acts as I would in his position. Ignoring the potential damage, he grabs the blade.

  I could twist the blade to inflict maximum pain, but that isn’t a motivator in this fight. I try another gambit. Letting go with my left hand, I wrap it around the Opponent’s knife-holding hand and squeeze. If the knife is sharp enough and I apply enough force, I should cause the hand to cleave in two—a useful handicap.

  As expected, the Opponent ignores the pain, curls his other hand into a fist, and throws a punch at my face.

  I throw my head back to reduce the impact of the punch, but the maneuver doesn’t help. The fist smashes into my chin, sending me to the verge of consciousness. Abandoning the plan to cleave the Opponent’s hand, I let go with my left hand and rip the knife from his grasp with the right.

  Blood pours from the Opponent’s palm, but not fast enough to provide any advantage anytime soon.

  Battle Mode shows me an opportunity. If I toss the knife just as the line shows, I’ll pierce the Opponent’s heart with a high probability of instant death.

  I arc my arm as instructed and begin to throw.

  I’m mid-throw when the world around me changes again.

  “Emotion Dampener disabled.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Once a human body begins to perform an action, it’s hard to stop. I hope that my highly trained and enhanced mind will be able to accomplish what regular free will cannot.

  In the end, I only tweak my action very slightly as I let go of the knife, but the adjustment makes all the difference. Instead of piercing Joe in the chest, the knife scrapes his flesh, leaving a small gash that bleeds instantly.

  Now that my emotions are back, taming my sympathetic nervous system is like riding a bull at a rodeo in hell. Ignoring the deafening pulse in my ears, I can’t help but focus on how appalled I am at what the Emotion Dampener made me do and think. I initiated it because I thought that Joe would kill me so quickly and easily that Emotion Dampener might give me a slightly better chance at survival. As it is, I survived double the time I thought I would—but I find it hard to believe it’s because of Emotion Dampener.

  I nearly maimed and killed my cousin, something I don’t think I could live with (though I guess “living with it” is a purely hypothetical concept under the circumstances). At the very least, I don’t intend to give Kostya the satisfaction of becoming a monster for his viewing pleasure.

  “You should delete the Emotion Dampener code from our source control repository,” I tell Mitya. “I’m never using that atrocity again.”

  “I’d also add taking advice from Muhomor to your ‘never’ list,” Mitya replies.

  “If by some miracle I survive long enough to need advice, I’ll only ask for yours,” I tell him.

  My cousin tries to punch me in the face. Specks of blood from the earlier knife wound trail the path of his fist like a tail following a comet. I block the punch with my forearm and reflexively counter with my elbow into his jaw.

  The way my elbow screams in pain tells me he’ll likely need surgery if he ever wants to chew again; even his strengthened bones couldn’t have helped in this case. Despite the massive pain Joe must now feel, his expression doesn’t change at all.

  The realization finally clicks into place.

  “Dude,” I tell Mitya telepathically. “The reason Joe hasn’t killed me already is because I’m not actually fighting Joe. I’m fighting whoever is controlling Joe—the puppet master, so to speak. Luckily, that person isn’t as good a fighter as my cousin.”

  “This also explains why Gogi didn’t fight like himself,” Mitya says instantly.

  On the TV screen, Joe begins to move his leg, so I step back from his kick. Now that I know what to look for, I’m certain my theory is right. This wasn’t Joe’s kick—he would’ve never been this sloppy. This was Kostya’s (or whoever’s) attempt at a kick.

  This small droplet of good news in the sea of bad reinvigorates me like a full night’s sleep and a gallon of coffee. I execute a combination of moves I never would’ve dared with the real Joe, finishing with a punch in the pit of his stomach. My fist strikes his solar plexus with an audible smack. Joe’s body doubles over and draws in wheezing breaths.

  This is my chance to knock him out—the only way out, outside of the heavy-handed ideas I’d had during the earlier Emotion Dampener insanity. I grab Joe by the hair and prepare to slam his face against my knee.

  The tightening of Joe’s neck muscles on TV is my warning that I’ve failed. I try to regroup, but it’s too late. He rips out of my grasp and uses his momentary advantage to put a foot behind me and push.

  On the TV, I watch myself fly toward the wooden floor in a wide arc. The fall seems to proceed in slow motion, and I even have a moment to calculate the odds of breaking my back when I land. I decide such an eventuality is unlikely.

  I also realize my earlier mistake. A typical solar plexus punch hurts so much that the victim is unable to think for a moment—but in Joe’s case, that didn’t apply because Kostya doesn’t feel Joe’s pain. Also, a typical solar plexus punch knocks the wind out of the victim, but the Respirocytes swimming in Joe’s system ensure his body has enough oxygen to throw me to the floor.

  The good news is that these same Respirocytes should help me in a millisecond.

  I land on the floor, the pain jolting through my nerves like a creaky wooden roller coaster. Despite knowing I’m not lacking oxygen, I’m unable to stop my body from desperately gasping to replace the air that cowardly escaped my lungs.

  The TV screen shows Kostya preparing for another move that the real Joe would never do.

  With a colossal effort of will, I override my uncooperative biology just in time to roll to the side of a wrestler-style slam that’s just as likely to hurt him as me. There’s a loud bang as Joe’s elbow hits the floor; it sounds as if he’s cracked either the wood or his bone. At least it wasn’t my ribs.

  Judging from my earlier fight with Gogi, Kostya must have some experience with wrestling, which makes me deeply regret ending up on the ground. I try to jump to my feet, but Joe’s already next to me. Even without Battle Mode assistance, I can see that he wants to grab my right arm in a judo-style lock.

  My counter is pure textbook and proves Kostya isn’t as good of a fighter as I feared, because Joe’s body ends up under mine. I spot his leg on the TV screen and realize that if his kick connects, I’ll be singing falsetto for a while. I block the kick instantly and do my best to intertwine his legs with mine while grabbing both of his wrists.

  In theory, I should be able to hold him this way for a while, but Kostya must realize it too. He makes Joe do something that no sane fighter would: he headbutts me at an angle that will be much worse for him than for me.

  Joe’s already damaged jaw crashes into my forehead, making me see an explosion of sparks where his bloody face should be. When my vision comes back, Kostya repeats the headbutt; this time, it’s Joe’s forehead that hits mine.

  The concussion and the blood in my eyes make it impossible to see what’s happening until I check out the TV and see Joe’s head connecting with mine again. The impact makes the world around me seem unreal. I recognize this sensation—it happens every time someone (usually Joe) knocks me out.

  I’m not the only one affected. Joe’s body slackens under me, and on the TV, I see him pass out—right before my own world goes completely blank.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  I wake up to a loud hum.

  “You have been unconscious for twenty-three minutes,” Einstein’s voice says too loudly in my aching head.

  The hum seems to intensify, and I realize that I’m someplace dark—at least I can’t seem to detec
t any light through my closed eyelids. Before opening my eyes, I check on my family via the EmoRat app.

  Mr. Spock is clearly bored. The room is quiet, and judging by the unmoving boots of the three guards, they must be motionless as well.

  “Hey, bud, you’re doing an excellent job as a guard,” I tell the rat. “Keep it up.”

  “You’re back,” Mr. Spock says excitedly. “I called after I was done with Rat World, but you didn’t respond.”

  “I was a little busy,” I say. “I still am, but we’ll have a long talk soon.”

  “Okay,” Mr. Spock replies. “I’ll wait.”

  A Zik message from Mitya interrupts, full of paranoid urgency. “Don’t show them you’re awake. Join us in VR.”

  I do as my friend suggests. Three people are in the VR room now: Dominic, Mitya, and Muhomor.

  “Dominic,” I say in lieu of a greeting. “Please tell me you’re about to barge in and save us.”

  “I’m about half an hour away.” Though this VR version of Dominic is free of the exoskeleton and bionic arm, he’s still a formidable presence in the meeting room.

  “He’s running on foot through a shortcut in the wilderness.” Mitya looks at Dominic’s giant form with admiration. “We should give him a huge bonus when this is all over.”

  “What about the robots?” I ask.

  “Twenty-five minutes until arrival.” Mitya puts a map up on the big screen to point out the dots representing Dominic and the robots.

  “What are the blue and yellow dots following the robots?” I ask after examining the map.

  “The police and the news. It’s not every day that someone reenacts a scene from I, Robot in upstate New York.” He puts up a view of the robots marching uphill in unison, sunlight gleaming off their metallic heads.

  “They won’t be here in time either,” Dominic says. “They’re lagging behind the robots.”