The Place Where

by Rodion Pretis

  My main mission was to see as many people as possible. So they ask DH who I am, and he casually replied: “Brian? Ah, this is our attributed. A little gift from Sir David. ”

  In fact, this was indeed so, since it was the head of their corporation who played the surplus of Border members in the lottery - but Jeremy, of course, was by no means going to tell them how he won me because he was posing as a hero of Japanese comics.

  Henderson's value peaked. Companions widely smiled at him and said that soon he would become too big a lump to lead company with them, and then gathered in small groups to talk about him behind him.

  When the sun began to set, most of the women withdrew to put the children to bed or chat in the living room. The males crowded tightly around the burning coals of the barbecue to get drunk for real and exchange philosophical views.

  Perhaps DH at some point ceased to be the center of attention, or it was something else, but suddenly I felt a tingling sensation at the base of the skull, turned and saw that he was holding a remote control.

  “Brian,” he called. - Come here!

  I went. The others stopped talking and stared at me.

  “One more burger left from the barbecue, Brian,” he said. - Do you want to eat it?

  “No thanks, DX,” I answered in a direct tone. The men neigh and began to poke each other in the ribs. They had never before heard of him being called "JH."

  “Come on, it's all right, eat it,” he said, slapping a piece of dead cow meat into a slice of bread.

  “I don't eat meat, DH,” I said coldly. He already knew that.

  “Why is that, Brian?” Do you think this is inhumane? Do you think you're better than all of us?

  “I just don't like the idea of eating dead animal meat,” I said.

  He poured the burger with sauce and handed it to me.

  “You want to ruin our way of life, right?” You and your dorky friends - you want us to live in the Middle Ages again, right? Would you like us all to live in earthen shacks and eat grass?

  I did not realize then how drunk he was. It was probably not too wise to challenge him, but I did it.

  “All I want is to live in a world where the planet's resources are distributed more evenly and where everyone has the opportunity to fully reveal their potential as a rational creature,” I said.

  Do not forget that three months before that I had not even heard of the “Water Frontier”.

  He mockingly repeated the last sentence after me.

  “What about us here?” Are we not striving to reach our potential as human beings?

  I did not answer - it seemed to me that it would be better.

  - You see! He said, addressing the others. “I told you that he considers himself better than all of us!” - And again to me: - Eat this fucking burger! Or should I make you?

  I got together internally. He pressed a button on the remote control, and pain pierced me.

  The pain subsided. Some of his buddies laughed, while others looked down in embarrassment.

  “Will you eat this tasty burger, Brian?”

  “No,” I answered in as calm a tone as I could.

  He increased power. I fell to the ground, writhing on the grass and trying not to scream.

  It is all over. I looked up. JH stood above me, raising an eyebrow inquiringly and holding out a burger to me.

  “No,” I said.

  - Does anyone else want to have fun? - with a laugh he suggested to the audience, lifting the remote control over his head. No one was willing. He further increased power - perhaps to the maximum. This time, I screamed.

  The remote turned off. I only managed to wheeze:

  - Go ... on x ..!

  And then it exploded.

  “You miserable smelly fucking criminal!” You come to my house, like the Lord God Almighty, you mock us, you think that you, your mother, are above all of us! But who are you? What is your network? Nothing - you have nothing! You yourself are nothing! And damn it, I'll break you, you miserable piece of shit!

  He pressed the remote control again, and I started yelling like an elephant suffering from a toothache.

  It seemed to me that the pain lasted several hours, although it was only five seconds. When it was over, someone's voice said:

  - Chill out, Jeremy. Enough with him. Come on ...

  “Damn it, I'll break it, even if it is the last thing I will do in this life,” muttered JH, while someone was opening a new bottle for him.

  At dawn the next day, DH put his head in the garage door and said we were going to church. He handed me a suit - bright, bottle-green - and pushed me into the bathroom.

  Once again, they flaunted me. Finding out that I can drive, he even gave me the keys, but then decided that I could not be trusted with his precious four-wheel drive “Lada Ostrovnik”. It's a pity. I would scare him to the point of insanity, leading her carelessly; he still would not dare to use the remote control to stop me.

  Hinton Lee, with a population of two and a half thousand people, did not have its own church. We went to a village nearby for a primitive evangelical service - one that justifies human greed. No nonsense like “love your neighbor”, no “good Samaritans” or “turn your right cheek” - just not for this bunch. Instead, the vicar (or pastor, or whatever they call them) explained to us that the Bible is God's Instruction for the Use of Life.

  The day was sunny, and after the service we all lingered in the courtyard of the church to chat. JH spoke at ease with those standing up the social ladder, and Natasha exchanged platitudes with her friends.

  Regular church trips promised to be a wonderful pastime.

  Railway approached me and slapped me on the shoulder. For a moment, I did not recognize him, because he, like me, was washed and dressed in a suit. He belonged to the Chief himself and lived in fairly decent conditions in a room above Sir David's garage. Sir David had an extensive print and electronic library, and he allowed the Railway to use it when he was not busy, caring for two acres of his garden.

  Two more of ours approached us, also decorated, like a rich man's dinner.

  And then Mo appeared! She looked utterly washed and strong and healthy in her colorful chintz dress and straw boater hat.

  None of us recognized each other in the church, and now we were in a hurry to exchange news. I told them how DH tried to get me to eat meat. Mo looked as if she was ready to kill him on the spot.

  - Does he have a virtual suit? Asked the railway.

  “Probably,” I said. - He won me in a virtual game.

  - Any ideas what he uses to achieve realism? Asked the railway.

  I did not catch his thoughts.

  “Well, the senses are there, amplifiers ... Maybe drugs that increase sensitivity,” Mo prompted, smiling at him.

  I shrugged.

  “Okay, never mind,” said Railway. “Surely he's using something.” They all do that. Try to be in church next week. I will bring a couple of amulets for you.

  Mo and I began to chat. She also lived in Hinton Lee, the youngest of our owners. It turns out that Jeremy actually won both of us, but his boss forced him to transfer the second of the attributed - Mo to their junior local sales manager, Wayne Roberts.

  “He's shit too,” Moe said, “but it could have been worse.” So far, he has not attempted to rape me. My job is basically ...

  Three little girls ran up to Mo and a boy who was older than everyone, but no more than seven years old. They huddled near her feet, saying all at once, everyone tried to show her something or ask something.

  - Meet: this is the Roberts family. I'm their governess. My owners have too many children and not enough money. Does Jezzer have a dog? She asked, while the youngest girl was trying to climb her leg.

  Someone waved a hand, calling her with the children to him.

  “We walk in the park every morning, between ten and eleven,” she said, saying goodbye.

  JH came down to inviting me to Sunday lunch - as I understood it, this was an extremel
y important ritual among people in a regular well-paid job. Natasha laid out food from Marx and Sparks on plates. They wereted no more trying to get me to eat meat. On the table was also a bottle of some Slovak swill - HH was a member of the Drink Club at some Monthly Club or something. He said it was a great thing; for me, it was pure vinegar.

  After lunch, DH unbuttoned several buttons, put his hands behind the back of the chair and set about ranting. He lectured us that all unemployed were born idlers, and how he pulled himself out of the mud by shoe laces through a combination of hard work and orientation to the fundamental principles of morality. Those who have no work, no housing, no hope, you see, are financially poor because they are morally poor - the standard mantra of all complacent idiots from time immemorial.

  “Wouldn't you like to have all this, Brian?” He asked, waving his arm around him, sweeping his house, car, refrigerator, wife ... He did not wait for an answer. “You could, if you had the patience to work hard for that.” In this life, nothing will be given for no reason. You are a smart guy, there is still time - why don't you try?

  I could tell him that all this is just white noise, but preferred to remain silent.

  He shrugged.

  “I am the winner,” he said. - I just can't lose. By the end of your term here you will see everything with my eyes.

  Railway was right. Having loaded the plates in the dishwasher (the only thing he did around the house for the whole week), he took out a small onyx box from the cabinet above the sink, rolled out two tablets on his palm, swallowed them and left the room .

  He reappeared in a first-class virtual suit - a combination of a wire vest and black plastic sensor pads. He had one of these wooden Japanese training swords in his hand.

  Going out into the garden, he stood in the middle of the lawn, lowered his visor mask, and spent the next two hours fighting an emptiness that looked like an extremely angry overgrown beetle.

  The week passed quietly. Gezzer (as Moe called him) sat at work from nine to nine, Natasha watched TV, went to the store and played bridge with her friends. Faced with boredom, I convinced Jezzer to let me work in his garden. In addition, every morning I went for a walk with a wolf, whose name was King.

  In the park, I met Mo and those two of her wards who were too small to go to school. We talked and talked endlessly - most often about nothing in particular. None of us wanted to focus too much on our current situation. Naturally, we had to be careful; the most that we allowed ourselves was to shake hands, but nonetheless I really fell in love. And I liked to think that she too.

  On Sunday, we again met in the railway church and some of the others. He furtively slipped me two small objects.

  “You'll figure out what to do with them,” he said. - You don't need to remove the chip that is already there, just plug it into a neighboring port. I called him Hieronymus.

  I hid his “amulets” in my trouser pocket and immediately forgot about it until later that day Jazzer came out onto the lawn with his sword. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that the railway gave me a small plastic jar of pills and some lotion from which about a half-dozen thin contacts stuck out.

  On this day it was too late to try anything. In addition, although Jezzer deserved any nightmare that Iron John had prepared for him, more than a week has passed since that incident, and during that time I hardly saw him. I was in love, and if we discard the fact that I could not help myself in this sense, my life was almost tolerable.

  My trouble is that I calm down too quickly.

  Another week passed, and things were getting better and better. I met Mo every single day, and one evening Natasha, who had a remote control during the working day but who had never used it, even took me to the store. This was the first time we exchanged more than a few phrases - the truth is, I mainly said, spreading about my favorite writers. I don't know what she was able to learn from all this; I believe that she was just the first time I saw a human being in me, not a criminal. Maybe she felt that my education and the ability to subtly feel (ha ha!) Are also worth something. Be that as it may, she let me go into the bookstore using one of her credit cards.

  And then Saturday night came ...

  I did not know when Natasha would want to part with the card the next time and whether she would do it at all, so I disposed of her money to the fullest. At midnight, I sat in the garage, overlaid with my favorite science fiction classics.

  Jezzer and Natasha went off to a party somewhere, leaving me with an immobilizer set at twenty yards. This meant that if a fire broke out in the house or robbers climbed into it, I could not do a damn thing about it. Shit.

  I heard them return in the middle of the night, and was almost falling asleep when his screams came from the house.

  Then the side door to the garage opened. Behind her stood Jezzer in fashionable underwear, with a remote control in his hand. With his other hand he pushed Natasha in front of him. She was wearing a silk nightgown.

  - Well, look, there he is! He barked to her. - Come on, go! Go lie down in bed with him, whore!

  “Jeremy, don't!” She exclaimed, shedding tears.

  He pushed her hard so she fell over me.

  - Come on, do your job! Come on, Brian, serve her properly! You both want it, don't you?

  Somehow she got to her feet. Jeremy meanwhile poked around in the box, exposing it to the maximum.

  “What the hell is going on here?” I shouted, writhing in pain.

  - No need to act as an innocent baby! He barked. “I damn well understand what you started!” You're trying to get into my wife's trousers so that you can live better here!

  - What nonsense! - that's all I managed to answer.

  He turned off the source of my torment. Natasha tried to leave, but he blocked her path.

  “You think I'm a complete fool, right?” I requested a credit card report tonight, and what am I discovering? My wife spent seventy Estonian kroons in a bookstore! Yes, this illiterate cow for ten years has not read a single book! And now she lies, as always, as on every fucking Saturday, as if I had raped her, as if this did not give her any pleasure! But she is always glad to spend my hard-earned money on some worthless bum, just because he talked to her about literature ...

  “This is complete nonsense, DH,” I said. “I don't like your wife at all.” And I'm sure that she, too, can hardly like a scourge like me. She just wanted to ...

  But Jezzer did not listen.

  “What is your secret then?” You have a bigger member than mine, right?

  I snorted.

  - Well then, come on! - he said. - Let's tear her off together! Maybe she will like it, this frigid bitch!

  He tore off her nightgown and pushed it again in my direction, while pulling off his underpants.

  - Come on, Brian, come on, act! - he said. - Let's see what you are capable of!

  - Go to hell!

  He turned on the remote. I advised him to serve himself - which, of course, was exactly in his taste.

  “You're a weirdo, do you know that?” I told him. “Besides, as long as you keep your finger on the button, I still won't get up, even if I wanted to.”

  Natasha got off me again.

  “Sorry,” she sobbed, collecting scraps of her nightgown. “Forgive me, Brian.”

  I told her that she had nothing to do with it. This time, Jezzer allowed her to leave, after which he spent another five minutes tearing to pieces the books she bought for me.

  What he did to Natasha was disgusting, but overall it was not my business. I didn't know what was the relationship between them. What enraged me is the final act of vandalism. He destroyed knowledge, wisdom and culture. He was a Nazi, Philistine. The fear that he and millions of others like him had in front of books led us to a new era of barbarism.

  The next morning, when we were all going to church, I poured into the onyx box of Jezzer the tablets that the railway station gave me and slipped up to connect Jeronimus to the port on the visor of his virtual suit.

&n
bsp; When we were about to leave, Jezzer was suddenly urgently summoned to the office. With a grim and decisive look, he got behind the wheel and drove away, and Natasha lay down in bed again.

  I myself made breakfast and spent half a morning again gluing books torn by him. After that, I worked a little in the garden, borrowing an antique radio from the kitchen to listen to the radio at work. Towards the end of the afternoon news, I realized why Jeremy had left in such a hurry. LBM, a large diversified electronic corporation, extended an invitation to become its shareholders among South Cable employees, promising new networks and all kinds of modern services for private and commercial consumers, not to mention higher dividends.