I knew it was a mirage. But even so it gave me a thrill.

  Usually she railed against me and our world. Moreover, she berated everything at once – politics, culture and religion. Often she would allude to something forgotten and arcane. But if I started asking her about it, the newly kindled spark of meaning would rapidly fade, as if she had lost interest in the conversation. And then Kaya would astound me with a succinct, casual aside – and what a mercy it was that at those moments Manitou wasn’t listening to her. Although, of course, He had heard everything – since I had.

  To put it simply, spirituality was a way of rescuing our alliance from satiety and apathy, which, alas, is something many users are only too well acquainted with.

  If your sura functions in one of the factory-set modes designed for boors and philistines (something like ‘Homely Comfort No. 7’, ‘Downy Bliss’ or ‘Mist of Tenderness’), in the morning she’ll bring you coffee and a croissant in bed, smile and ask:

  ‘How did you sleep, dear?’

  And you’ll look at her and wonder if her eyes are glinting as they should, and if her legs are attached correctly. And whether you ought to send her in for restyling, or to have her mouth widened by a couple of sizes.

  But Kaya constantly kept me on the brink of a nervous breakdown – not to mention the strain on my intellectual capacity. This securely protected my emotional core against bedsores.

  On the first day of the war, when I had to get up a bit earlier and prepare for the sortie, she woke me up at precisely five-thirty in the morning with the following revolutionary gabble:

  ‘You’re all loathsome, fat hypocrites. You pretend to be protecting the Orks against the regime that you yourselves installed, but what you really do is just shoot them from the air so there’ll be a bit of variety in the news about your porn actors’ plastic surgery. That’s worse than hypocrisy, it’s … beneath all contempt. You’re vile, vile, vile … Do you hear, you swine? Wake up when you’re spoken to!’

  Even if you remember that it’s merely a talking alarm clock (I set her for five-thirty myself the previous evening), by the end of a speech like that you can’t help but think about an answer. Of course, I’m not Bernard-Henri Montaigne Montesquieu, but I can dispute a point too – after all, I’ve learned a lot from my partner.

  ‘What are you talking about, sweetheart? Down there, among the Orks, evil reigns. It’s always been there, for many centuries. And all of them, without exception, are smeared with it. I can pick off any one of them from up in the air, and always get it right – any attack there is a precision strike. True, we only intervene when we have … hmm … our own agenda. But even so, that’s better than if we did absolutely nothing at all. So there aren’t any moral problems here. And if any arise, I assure you that our sommeliers and discoursemongers will resolve them in five minutes in the very first newscast.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ she said, wrinkling up her little nose and looking up at some point on the ceiling. ‘Only it’s not just the Orks I feel sorry for. I feel sorry for you – you poor, fat little fool.’

  ‘Why am I a fool?’

  ‘You think you’re better than them. Better than those Orks. And even better than me.’

  This was getting interesting.

  ‘Better than the Orks – I’d say so,’ I said. ‘I don’t think you’d swap me for an Ork. If only because an Ork couldn’t afford you, ha ha ha …’

  I like it when I manage to crack a good joke. I know I’ve done it straightaway – Kaya smiles at good jokes. And since I didn’t deliberately set that parameter, her verdict can be trusted.

  ‘And as for who is better, you or I,’ I continued, ‘that’s simply the wrong way to pose the question. You’re neither better nor worse. You’re different, other. And one must learn to accept the other as he or she is in himself or herself.’

  I simply repeated something that Bernard-Henri had said. During the previous war he liked to talk a bit about ‘the Other’. And sometimes about some kind of ‘outsider’ too. The Orks usually didn’t understand him – they simply didn’t have enough time for that, just between you and me. I didn’t understand it either. But then again, I wasn’t listening all that carefully – I was looking into my sights. But even so, it stuck in my memory.

  ‘You think,’ Kaya said sadly, ‘that I’m just a talking doll designed for masturbation. And you’re right there, you fat swine. Your mistake lies elsewhere. You believe that Manitou dwells within you. And that makes you something qualitatively different from me.’

  ‘Well, doesn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ Kaya retorted. ‘You’re the same kind of masturbation machine as I am. Only you’re a useless one, because you don’t do it to anybody. Do you understand that? I do it to you, but you don’t do it to anyone at all. All that daily droning and shuddering of yours is a total waste of time.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ I said.

  Kaya laughed at that.

  ‘And on top of that you’re a fool as well. I’ll explain some time later. Right now it’s time for you to go kill people.’

  That sounded offensive enough to make my jaw muscles tense up, and rouse the spirit of stoicism in my breast. There’s nothing so bracing as a fresh insult first thing in the morning.

  Well hello, world, I thought to myself. Thanks for those kind words. And now to work.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, stuffing my feet into my slippers. ‘We’ll talk later. Brew up some coffee. Daddy’s got to fly out soon.’

  ‘I hope you choke on your coffee, you butcher.’

  That’s the way it is every day at our place.

  In the happiness room I struggled for a few seconds with the temptation to switch on the control manitou in order to alter her settings – to take her off maximum bitchiness. And temptation won – the sense of insult was just too strong. I switched on the manitou and entered the password.

  Large red numbers started flashing in front of my eyes.

  30.00

  29.59

  29.58

  For the first ten minutes I honestly intended to wait it out and do everything I’d planned. But then it hit me that I’d be late for the war. And, even more importantly, I’d be signing my own capitulation. If a machine could defeat me, then I was exactly the same kind of machine and she was absolutely right.

  I turned off the manitou and started mulling over the sortie.

  By the time I left the happiness room, I was completely calm. As soon as I sat down at the table, Kaya served me coffee and toast with jam – she makes superb toast. I patted her condescendingly on the back, and even a little bit lower down – and she didn’t shy away. Her instincts really are infallible. She looked slightly embarrassed, as if she was concerned about what she’d said earlier.

  While I ate I watched the news on the manitou.

  First they showed a logo with our slogan:

  ‘… the CINEWS of thy heart …’

  This elegant quotation from the ancient poet Blake never occupied the screen for more than a split second. Legend has it that Blake died in poverty. But if he had lived for a thousand or so years longer, just one line from his ‘Tiger’ would have made him and all his kin rich forever: that quote twinkles on millions of manitous many times every day.

  I was hoping that they would show my damsel yet again, but instead of her they put on the big hit of the pre-war season – a short, blurred (to make it look as if it was taken with a nanodrone camera) video recording of Torn Durex at prayer. During the last twenty-four hours it had been shown at least twenty times.

  The recording had been made in a luxurious bedroom with signs of recent debauchery; copious amounts of red filler had bled through onto the skin of the cheap SM-sura lying on the bed. The Orkish Kagan was kneeling in front of a massive gold spastika and whispering ecstatically, ‘Manitou! Make it so that the rubber woman feels pain when I stub out a fag against her!’

  Since the viewers had already seen in the news the tragic fate of an identical sura, photographed on temple celluloid, they believed the clip. The conspiracy theorists, naturally, claimed that it was a digital fake, paid for by the producers of Armagnac (there was a bottle of Liquid Diamond, standing in a conspicuously advantageous spot in the foreground). But I was certain the shoot was genuine, although it was staged: before they fly over to London, the Orkish Kagans clutch at any opportunity to make a quick quid one last time. Not because they’re short of funds, but purely out of greed.

  Well all right, I thought, Damilola’s feeling mean right now, and he’s bound to shoot something really good. The kind of thing people will talk about for a long, long time.

  It was time to fly out. I gave Kaya a smacker on the cheek and went off to Hannelore’s control unit.

  Usually I put Kaya on a couch beside my flying saddle. But this time I didn’t even invite her – I just switched on the control manitou. I was sure she would sit down in front of it, of her own accord, as soon as I took off. It promised to be a stressful and dangerous day, and I put her completely out of my mind as soon as I put on the battle goggles and lifted off from the maintenance deck.

  When I closed in on our armada, the entire aerial strike force was already in the air and I felt blithe and jittery at the same time, the way I always do before a battle shoot. I was surrounded on all sides by a barrage of at least a hundred battle cameras – every now and then, one or two of them would peel off from the pack, bank into a turn and drop down into the grey lens of the camouflage cloud.

  I prefer to descend in a slow spiral: the pilot who maintains high altitude has a far better chance of shooting an exclusive. That’s one of the secrets you only come to understand with experience. But the nose-diving cameras really do look beautiful – the spectacle of it induces a feeling of absolutely unfettered freedom, and it strikes terror into the Orks. And to top it off, they hear the infernal shrieking of our air brakes.

  No one had engaged maximum camouflage today – as the temple news channel put it, ‘The knights of Manitou are going into battle with their visors raised.’

  I wonder what a visor is. The on-screen dictionary doesn’t explain this word separately, it only gives the general meaning of the idiom: ‘with one’s visor raised – honestly, openheartedly’. But I’m sure that in ancient times the meaning of the expression was less exalted than that. Probably a ‘visor’ was some special kind of spy balloon or periscope that was raised up in the air when castles were stormed. Say, to detect treasure though the window of a tower. This way everything’s clear.

  I don’t often think about such things, but it had just occurred to me that we – the informational and combat elite of mankind – must look very strange in Manitou’s eyes: a hundred men in opaque goggles of various designs, squirming about on their flying couches, performing strange movements with their arms and legs. A shot from the on-board cannon is a minute movement of the fingers lying on the control stick; a manoeuvre by the camera hurtling through the air is a faint twitch of the calf. And we’re all dressed any way we like, and some are probably wearing nothing but their dirty underpants, because they work from home.

  But by the way, where are we really, we work-from-home pilots? Within the confines of our rooms – or in the Orkish sky? And where is that sky – all around my Hannelore or in my brain, to which it is relayed by electronic extensions of my eyes and ears?

  I remember Kaya tried for a long time to pump into me her ancient wisdom on this subject. I probably didn’t really understand much, but I did remember something, at least.

  In her opinion the answer depends on what exactly we call our self. If it’s the body, we’re in the room. If it’s our attention and conscious awareness, then we’re in the sky. But in reality we’re in neither one place nor the other, since our body cannot fly through the clouds, and our conscious awareness can’t come from anywhere but our body. And there simply isn’t any answer to this question. For, as Kaya says, any object or concept disappears and evaporates if we attempt to grasp what it actually is. And this applies in its entirety to whoever is making the attempt to grasp.

  Whatever she might say, I find it hard to accept something like that about myself. I’m this person right here, all the time, and that’s what everything else starts from. But that elusiveness of the essence definitely applies to the suras that, I am quite certain, are sitting in front of many pilots’ control manitous at this very moment.

  To understand who they are is impossible.

  You can only describe their appearance and behaviour.

  Most of them are creatures of a tender age, often with wise, unchildlike eyes, because maximum spirituality is terribly fashionable these days. I think they include not only boys and girls, but also two or three ewe-lambs, thoughtfully chewing on nothingness in front of an aiming sight flying through the clouds. And you could probably find an old man with an old woman too – there are models like that in the catalogue.

  And that raises a very intriguing question.

  When the pilot removes his goggles after work the sura tells him what she thinks about what she’s seen (it must be especially interesting to converse with a sheep, set for maximum spirituality). Naturally, all her reasoning is pure simulation. The sole listener and viewer here is always the owner of a sura, and he animates her with his attention.

  But when the pilot is hard at work, who is it that is looking at the manitou as they sit beside him? How does Kaya know that I’m a ‘butcher’ when my attention is not focused on her? Or does she simply know that after what she has seen she’s supposed to say these words to me? But who is it inside her that knows? A riddle, an inscrutable riddle. Clearly it’s best simply not to think about it.

  Especially at work.

  Entirely engrossed in these thoughts, I almost snagged an immense trailer with a fluorescent inscription surrounded by multicoloured hearts.

  !!! NICOLAS-OLIVIER LAURENCE

  VON TRIER – 85!!!

  The trailer was blundering straight across my camera’s line of flight, absolutely certain that I would turn aside. But of course – Nicolas-Olivier himself was flying to his anniversary film shoot. I managed to get a good look at the trailer before it dived into the clouds.

  It was pretty big – a whacking great cube of metal, the size of a good Orkish house. They say that Nicolas-Olivier has a personal gym inside it. Which he is hardly likely to need, on account of his age.

  The trailer was decorated with moving portraits of him in his most celebrated temple film roles. The largest of them was from the three-part franchise The New Batman, depicting him in his canonical role – wearing a baseball cap and holding a war club (in Church English it is called a ‘bat’, hence his famous nom de guerre). He stands there, with the club seemingly casually stuck under his arm, but in fact it’s to make his bicep bulge out further.

  The first part was shot a very long time ago, when the bicep was genuine, not made of silicone, and the age of consent was hovering in the region of forty-two, or something like that. The second part was made about ten years ago. And in the interval he’s played many other roles. But Nicolas-Olivier owes his image to this epic saga – something like the final hero of mankind, who fights the Orks with their own weapon and wins.

  We’ve started this war in order to shoot the fourth part of the franchise, in which he squelches the Orks with his wooden club beside the Hill of the Ancestors.

  Well, not only for Nicolas-Olivier’s sake, of course. Free people don’t start wars just because one solitary actor is approaching the menostop, even if a couple of news channels do assert that he is universally loved by the people.

  But if his producer convinces other producers to finish shooting the franchise flops, the ones they have left on their hands, and sign the rest of the super-rich old farts (of the type, just between you and me, that should be in the crematorium, not in snuffs), well, then a war can very easily start. Especially bearing in mind that the vast Orkish expanses abound with things that a decent man’s conscience can never accept – should this very man suddenly happen to see them on his manitou while he’s drinking his evening tea. You understand what I mean.

  That’s precisely why these decorated trailers shaped like pyramids, parallelepipeds and other octahedrons are on their way downwards right now. And every one is displaying a carefully thought-out sequence of images, beaming into ambient space the major milestones in the life and art of the patched and re-patched darling of the movie industry, the one who’s sitting inside.

  After passing through the clouds, they don’t engage their camouflage either – that’s the kind of day it is. Their visors are always raised – they’ve already detected everything that can be grabbed. That’s not surprising – if you count up the number of people who feed off the movie business, it turns out that we all have our snouts in the trough, and some of us twice over.

  I slipped into the clouds and flew Hannelore for a couple of minutes without any visual information, simply from the data on the manitou. It’s actually safer in the clouds like that, when there are heaps of our people around. And when I dived out of the clouds I was stupefied, even though I knew what I would see.

  Every time I forget how beautiful a war looks from high altitude.

  One of our crack discoursemongers compared Slava with a stain left on a wall by cockroaches living behind a cupboard for a long time. A very precise description – absolutely dead on. But cutting a bright dash at the very centre of this stain is the Circus: an immense green circle, surrounded by a yellow, white and blue hoop – that’s what the monumental circus wall, the no-go zone and the water-filled moat look like from altitude. At the centre of the circle there’s a small green bump that looks like a hairy nipple. That’s the Orkish Hill of the Ancestors, overgrown with coconut palms. There are other weeds growing on it too, but on the rest of the area large plant life is eradicated by flying mowing machines.