by Dima Zales
I choose a simple cheese sandwich and tomato juice for myself and a bag of trail mix and bottled water for Mr. Spock—without explaining there’s a hungry rat in the equation. As the woman leaves to get the stuff, I have Ada teach me how to disable the mental app windows and icons I don’t need, as well as how to disable her and Mitya’s angel/devil avatars.
“Thanks,” I say when I master the skill of manipulating the mental windows. “It’s distracting having that stuff around when I’m talking to people, but I don’t want to dismiss AROS entirely.”
“I’m so jealous.” Since I disabled his avatar, Mitya’s voice is now disembodied. “I haven’t even learned how to type with my mind yet.”
An idea that was swirling in my brain since we talked about face recognition suddenly jells, and I excitedly type, “Mitya, this Russian database Alex provided for you, can we use it to look up the kidnappers?”
“Well, yeah,” Mitya replies, “if you have a picture—”
“I have three.” I forward the email my cousin sent me and cross my fingers.
“I got the images,” Mitya says. “Running the first one now.”
I’m on the verge of biting my nails when he says, “Sorry, the first one isn’t working. Not enough of his face is showing for the algorithm to do its job.” After a pause, he says, “Same problem with the second one.”
I hold my breath because I know the ape-bison image is discernible.
“Finally,” Mitya says. “This last one worked—and the first name is indeed Anton, as the nurse said. I’m looking at the data, and it’s not pretty. You’re lucky to be alive. I’m sending you the details.”
In the silence that follows, I read the dossier on my new nemesis, whose full name is Anton Pintarev. His criminal career began when he murdered his elderly aunt, but because Anton was a minor at the time, he was sent to a special camp for violent underage criminals. According to what my mom told me about those institutions, they might as well have been called Crime Universities, especially since having a criminal record instantly disqualified you from active duty in the army and made it nearly impossible to find a job. Having a record was a more public affair in the Soviet Union than it is in the US. My understanding is that a criminal got a special stamp in his passport and an entry of “prison” in a special worker diary that functioned like a detailed resume back in that system. A year after Anton got out, he was promptly arrested for stabbing a man, tried as an adult, and placed in a real jail. When he was released in the post-Soviet Russia of the early nineties, he found himself in an environment where some of his unsavory skills were valuable, so he got to work and managed to avoid recapture and even thrive. There’s a list of crimes he allegedly committed, but the authorities couldn’t prove it was him.
As I read, my stomach churns with worry for my mom, because even if one percent of this list is true, she’s in the company of a genuine monster. When I reach the graphic details about Alina Petrova, a fourteen-year-old Anton is believed to have brutally beaten, raped, and killed, I stop reading and take a couple of calming breaths.
“This is bad,” I mentally type into the chat.
“I know,” Mitya says. “But keep in mind, they need the people they took hostage, so your mom should be safe.”
“Right,” I murmur to myself. “Like Mrs. Sanchez was safe.”
“Here you are,” the stewardess says. I didn’t even notice her approach, thanks in part to my dark mood. She pulls out the table expansion and sets down the tray with goodies. “Let me know if you need anything else.”
“Thank you,” I manage to say. “I will.”
The sight of food lifts my spirits by a fraction.
“Tell her you want her to stop flirting,” Ada says in a very un-angelic tone. I’m not sure if she’s serious or trying to get my mind off Anton’s file.
“Victoria gives an outstanding shoulder rub,” Mitya says, staying in his devil character. “She’s also an expert—ouch!”
Ada’s angel avatar doesn’t show it, but I bet Ada either kicked or punched Mitya in the real world. Somehow, even that kind of touch makes me jealous, which is ironic since jealousy led to Ada hitting him in the first place.
In an effort to reassure my friends I’m fine, and to take my mind off Anton, I type into the chat, “All right, kids, tell me about the other apps you’re going to write.”
Ada and Mitya give me the rundown as I start in on my meal.
“I have an idea outside the apps you requested,” Mitya says as I chase down the sandwich with a gulp of tomato juice. “I think I can improve on Ada’s brain boost stuff by creating a scheduling algorithm that would allow the three of us to better utilize the STRELA servers.”
He proceeds to explain his idea, which reminds me of when I took the Operating Systems course back at MIT. In that course, the hardest part was learning about the clever ways people come up with for sharing limited computer resources. Those resources can be shared between processes running on the system, or, more applicable to our server problem, cleverly allocated between different human users so the users are unaware they’re sharing anything at all.
“We should be able to test it on my babies first,” Ada says toward the end. “Once we do, keep an eye out for any oddities in Mr. Spock’s behavior.”
“Great,” I say disingenuously. I can tell she’s impressed with Mitya’s smarts, and I don’t like it. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to take my pill.”
“Good day—or night,” Mitya says.
I take my Ambien and give Mr. Spock his food and water.
As the rat eats, I decide to take a Percocet for the pain as well—no need for mental acuity while I’m sleeping.
Feeling properly medicated, I navigate my way to Amazon and use their cloud eBook app to do a bit of reading. I want to get the horrors of the dossier out of my head to avoid another nightmare. It only takes me a few chapters to realize that reading this way is yet another revolution the Brainocytes will bring to personal entertainment.
About ten minutes into the book, my lids grow heavy. I don’t fight the drowsiness, opting instead to dismiss AROS altogether and close my eyes.
Despite my earlier attempt to chase away the bad thoughts, my sleep is interrupted by horrific dreams that feature Anton Pintarev committing atrocities against Mom and me.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I wake up slowly. It takes me a minute to remember I’m on a plane and to realize that the motion I’m feeling doesn’t mean my bed decided to move on its own.
Actually, for a plane, the ride does feel rather bumpy.
I open my eyes to a surprise. Instead of flying in a plane, I’m riding in a car. At least that explains the shaking—Russian roads are infamously bad.
I reach into my pocket to check on Mr. Spock and feel reassured when he gently nibbles on my finger. Satisfied I didn’t lose the rat, I look around.
I’m in the back seat, and there’s a gigantic bald woman sitting next to me—or at least I assume she’s a woman based on her semi-feminine round features and D-size bosom. She’s staring intently at the neck of an unfamiliar black-haired guy sitting in the front passenger seat. The only person I recognize is Joe, who’s sitting behind the wheel.
In the back window, far in the distance, I see the airport I assume we landed at. On either side of the road is a bucolic Russian landscape, with its signature birch trees, oaks, and some pines. I spot a red squirrel climbing a tree—a sight that finally evokes something like nostalgia. I’ve always found the gray squirrels in NYC unsatisfactory compared to their cuter, pointier-eared, and more colorful cousins back in Krasnodar.
As I turn away from the window, I catch the woman looking at me with a stony expression. Now that I’m studying her closer, her lack of an Adam’s apple and the hint of makeup on her face assure me she really is a she, though I can probably be forgiven for having doubts given her shiny shaved head and muscle tone that’s about triple mine. A spiderweb tattoo adorns the rightmost side of her h
ead, evoking stories of spider females feasting on their males during mating.
Without any emotion, in a voice you can only get after at least a decade of smoking unfiltered Russian cigs, she says in Moscow-accented Russian, “Looks like Sleeping Beauty is up.”
“What happened?” I try not to gag as a wave of garlic breath mixed with stale nicotine assaults my nose. “How did I get here?”
“You walked,” Joe says, his blue eyes glinting in the rearview mirror.
“I told you he was sleepwalking,” the woman says.
Though I don’t recall being woken up, I bring up AROS and do a quick search on Ambien side effects to confirm my hunch that my memory loss is due to the drug.
“Where are we going?” I ask, rubbing my eyes.
“Levin texted me the location of Voynskiy,” Joe says, and it takes me a second to understand he means Mitya texted him where to meet Alex.
The front passenger guy turns around and grins at me. Looking at his weather-beaten face, I can right away tell he isn’t Russian. With his hawkish nose and Stalin-inspired mustache, he looks Georgian—which in this context isn’t the US state, but a country in the Caucasus mountains.
“I’m Gogi,” he says in Georgian-accented Russian.
If his accent weren’t enough, that name solidifies my theory on Gogi’s nationality. “Gogi” is as common a name in those parts as Ivan is in Russia. In fact, a fictional Gogi is often the butt of derisive Russian jokes about Georgians.
“I’m Mike.” I shake the man’s hairy hand. “Though you can call me Misha if it’s easier.”
“Good to meet you, Mike,” Gogi says, pronouncing my name as meek. “I can see the familial resemblance.” He tilts his head toward Joe.
“I’m Nadejda,” the woman says, but only after Gogi and I look at her expectantly for a few moments. “Regardless of whether it’s easier, you can’t call me Nadya, Nadyusha, or any other variant.”
Nadejda means hope in Russian, a fitting name since hope is probably what everyone feels when they look at her—as in, they hope to never piss her off.
“How do you know my cousin?” I ask, aiming the question at no one in particular.
They look at each other. Gogi must lose the staring match, because he’s the first to speak, saying, “It’s a long story.”
My prodding appears to have lessened their enthusiasm for socializing, and Gogi turns back toward the front while Nadejda resumes hypnotizing the back of his neck.
Re-enabling the avatars, I type into the mental chat window, “Are you guys up?”
Since it’s 8:14 a.m. here, it must be 1:14 a.m. in NYC.
“Of course we’re up,” Ada says as she materializes near Nadejda’s shoulder.
“Did you notice the new icons?” asks Mitya, who materializes outside the car window—not that it matters for his devil avatar.
I look closer at the AROS interface.
“There are new icons here,” I mentally type into the chat window. “Where do I start?”
“Try the face recognition app on her,” Ada says, pointing at the large woman next to her avatar. “You’ll need to launch that googly-eyed emoticon that Mitya designed as an app icon.”
I locate the icon and start the app.
Instantly, white ghostly lines crisscross every nook and cranny of Nadejda’s face. I’ve seen this sort of animation in crime procedural movies and TV shows, and I suspect this is Mitya’s flourish and has nothing to do with the actual way this face recognition app works.
Next, a box shows up in the air. It lists information, along with its sources, and I recall how Mom was reminded of the Terminator films when she had a similar process run inside her head two days ago. Thinking of Mom threatens to overwhelm me with worry again, so I focus on the information I acquired about my new acquaintance, Nadejda Vedrova.
Nadejda was born in Latvia, but according to her social media profile, she’s “of Russian heritage,” whatever that means. From the data in the Russian law enforcement databases, I learn she served in the SUV, a Latvian special tasks unit I’ve never heard of, where she was a sniper—something that surprises me, since she doesn’t seem like the type who likes working from a distance. I also learn she’s worked as a private security consultant all over Russia since 2009. In this context, it means she’s been a bodyguard for oil oligarchs and the like. That might be her connection with Joe, since he runs a similar business in the States, at least officially. From the Russian Wikipedia, I’m impressed to find out that at the age of twenty-three, Nadejda won gold in Greco-Roman wrestling, which explains both her physique and the “I can crush you” attitude she’s sporting. Finally, I discover she’s thirty-seven, widowed, and that her husband was killed by a criminal kingpin, who was later shot dead by a high-powered rifle under mysterious circumstances.
“Gogi?” I say in an effort to capture the man’s face. When he turns, I say, “Do you have any food scraps or water? I need to feed my little friend.”
Mr. Spock takes that as his cue to poke his head out of my jacket.
Joe sees the rat in the rearview mirror and just raises an eyebrow, as if he’s met people with white rats in their pockets before but didn’t expect me to be one of them.
Gogi’s reaction isn’t as calm. His eyes visibly widen, and he looks on the verge of asking a dozen questions.
The face recognition lines scan Gogi’s face, and a bio shows up in a comic-book balloon above his head. I don’t get a chance to read the details, though, because I’m deafened by a noise that sounds like a rabid hippopotamus picked a fight with a horny cow.
Mr. Spock swiftly hides back inside my pocket, and I get the urge to join him as the screaming continues.
“Nadejda,” my cousin grits through his teeth. “Shut it.”
The woman stops screaming, but her feet stay up off the floor and her eyes bore a hole in my pocket. There’s terrified fascination on her face, an expression that looks completely unnatural on her.
I note she stopped screaming as soon as Joe commanded it, so she might fear or respect him more than her rat phobia, or whatever that was.
“Here.” Gogi hands me a handful of sunflower seeds, a very traditional Russian snack. “Just make sure you keep your pet away from the lady.”
If looks could kill, Nadejda’s stare would’ve slayed Gogi, perhaps after torturing him first. However, her pride must win out over her irrational fear, because after a moment, she places her feet back on the floor and crosses her arms high over her chest.
I drop the sunflower seeds into my pocket, and as soon as I feel Mr. Spock eating them, I study the information the face recognition app found on Gogi—which turns out to be very little. He was part of the elite Georgian Special Forces, and in the early nineties, he participated in the War in Abkhazia. Apart from that, he was discharged after something he did during the conflict in South Ossetia in 2008, but the Russian databases don’t know what that something was, just that it was, and I quote, “an atrocity.” He’s deemed extremely dangerous and is on the Russian version of the no-fly list—only here, again, no explicit cause is given. Finally, no personal information is known about him, and not surprisingly, he has no social media footprint of any kind.
“Your cousin has nice friends,” Mitya says, his avatar flying about a foot outside the car window.
I’m about to chastise my friend for goofing off when something happening outside the car window catches my eye.
Actually, it might be more accurate to say my mind scans our surroundings and tabulates what it sees at a speed so blinding I can only assume it’s due to the brain boost.
Point number one is that we’re currently on a narrow part of the road cresting a hill. Point two, there’s a big ditch on either side. Point three, the critical one, is that despite these road conditions, a car is trying to pass us on the left.
Perhaps an unenhanced or less paranoid mind might dismiss all this and think the driver of the offending car is an idiot, but I don’t think that’s the ca
se, so I let my mind continue with its assessment.
Point four and five are that the car is a large black Mercedes M-Class with four men wearing sunglasses in the middle of a cloudy day.
Then point six happens. The car in question turns its wheels toward us, and it doesn’t take a brain boost to know what’s about to happen.
The car is going to intentionally ram into us.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Joe,” I shout. “On your left!”
My perception seems to sharpen, and everything becomes more vivid. I watch the approaching car and try to swallow my heart back into my chest. From somewhere, I recall my body is currently experiencing the Law of Inertia; if we hit the other car, my body will attempt to keep moving in our car’s original trajectory. With uncanny mathematical precision, possible scenarios play through my head, down to the number of tons of force I’ll experience in different outcomes.
At the same moment, I see my cousin grip the wheel so hard his knuckles whiten. His head turns toward the offending vehicle, and he jerks the wheel.
We swerve.
I start calculating our chances of survival as I glimpse Gogi reaching into the glove compartment.
Nadejda is already holding an Uzi, though where she got it from is beyond me. She slides down the backseat toward me and aims the gun at the window.
Before I can blink or do another calculation, the big woman grabs me roughly by my neck.
“What—” The rest of my question is cut off by her pulling my head down in some sort of wrestling maneuver.
Though I would usually find humor in the way my face ended up in the crotch area of Nadejda’s jeans, right now I’m too petrified for levity. I only have one overriding thought in my head.
I’m going to die.
A thunderclap booms above me.
Shards of glass fly everywhere, but Nadejda’s body blocks me from the worst of it.
“I think you’re being shot at,” Ada says, her avatar visible to me even though my eyes are squeezed shut. Her face looks as shocked as I feel.