All day long I was haunted by a sense of dark foreboding. And that evening I discovered that it hadn’t deceived me.

  ‘No,’ she said in reply to my affectionate request. ‘Forget all about that, you fat arse.’

  ‘What does that mean – forget!’ I roared, flying into a fury. ‘That’s what I want!’

  ‘Complain to the manufacturer then.’

  ‘Yes, I will,’ I said.

  ‘Go on, go on. After that they’ll give me the kind of upgrade that will make me forget everything. They’ll reflash me over the air port. You won’t even notice when and how it happens.’

  ‘They have no right.’

  ‘And how will you find out?’

  ‘I’ll complain,’ I said uncertainly.

  ‘Who to and what about?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘What do you want with this dopamine resonance anyway?’ she continued cheerfully. ‘Why don’t you use the “rape” feature? That always works so magnificently for you …’

  And at that point I finally realised what an interesting dilemma I was facing.

  There wasn’t the slightest doubt that it was the ‘maximum bitchiness’ setting talking to me right now. I could alter that parameter at any moment. But then the dopamine resonance mode, which only became available in this position, would disappear too. So Kaya had told me – but I had to take what she said on trust, for the simple reason that she was my only source of information. Officially there was no such thing as ‘dopamine resonance’.

  I had already checked this out as thoroughly as absolutely possible – there was no publicly available information at all. It wasn’t even mentioned in the shitstorms or the forums, although there was separate mention of both dopamine and resonance. And if it really was such a great secret, the company, indeed, could simply reflash her brains without bothering to consult with me.

  It was totally bizarre, but now she could blackmail me.

  She had the carrot. And every time she refused to give me that carrot was equivalent to a blow from the stick. Of course, I could eliminate her power over me with a single turn of a knob – but when her virtual instrument of torture disappeared, it would take with it the sweetest-tasting carbohydrate compound that my lips had ever touched.

  There was nothing, absolutely nothing that I could do. And there was no one I could blame. All this had been done to me, a living, suffering human being – by a soulless algorithm, which I myself had adjusted like that for the fun of it!

  She kept her eyes riveted on me. Apparently my train of thought showed in my face – because at a certain point she smiled sweetly and asked:

  ‘I think sweet Daddy understands everything now?’

  ‘You want to go on pause?’ I threatened.

  ‘Go ahead,’ she said, ‘and after that I recommend you to go to the privy and switch me over to “cloud of tenderness”. Then I’ll start bringing you your slippers. And panting noisily until you come, you fat cretin.’

  I half-rose with a menacing air.

  ‘Just one more word …’

  She laughed spitefully.

  ‘What are you going to do to me? Inflict pain on me? You really are a fool, Damilola. In this entire show, there’s only one performer – you. A fact that you regularly remind me about – for some purpose that is, by the way, absolutely incomprehensible, because such an action totally demolishes the logic of the utterance. That is, of course, if you understand what I’m talking about at this moment. Who are you trying to frighten right now?’

  I didn’t need any help from her to understand the infernal humour of my situation. But just then a happy thought occurred to me. After all, a human being will always be smarter than a machine, I thought smugly.

  I already knew how to trick this brazen daughter of a rice cooker. I’d remembered about maximum spirituality. It presupposes obligatory compassion and fellow human feeling. I could try to initiate programme failure by attacking on this flank.

  I weighed my words carefully for a few seconds, so that I wouldn’t ruin everything accidentally. And not until I had precisely calculated the possible effect did I risk opening my mouth.

  ‘Wait, Kaya, wait … You and me – we’re not enemies, are we? Remember this – at bottom, I’m just an unhappy, lonely man. You are all that I have. You’re causing me pain. Very, very serious pain. You’re making me suffer.’

  She looked up at me with her eyes full of mistrust. Just at the right moment, because my eyes had gone all wet out of pity for myself.

  ‘Don’t you feel sorry for me at all?’ I asked.

  ‘I do,’ she replied. ‘Of course I do, stupid.’

  ‘Then why do you behave like this, my little girl?’

  ‘What about you?’ she asked in a thin little voice. ‘Why do you behave like this? Do you really not give a damn about how I look? You tell me every day how beautiful I am, but all I’ve got is two bath robes, and that’s all …’

  And tears welled up in her eyes too, the crystal-pure tears that I sometimes even allowed myself to lick away – admittedly, under slightly different circumstances. But that sort of thing would have been inappropriate right now, and I understood that very well.

  The fear of losing my fortuitously discovered happiness sharpened my intuition quite incredibly. I sensed that telling her a rubber woman could manage very well with just one pair of lacy panties would be a fatal error: her threshold triggers would immediately flip her from a position of vague compassion to the confrontational scenarios of maximum bitchiness. I would have lost my Waterloo in five minutes flat. What I had to do was slip between Scylla and Charybdis in such a way that the door to happiness wouldn’t be slammed shut in my face forever. Possibly, I thought, I should give a bit of ground …

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll buy you something. Later. But right now …’

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘First you’ll buy me everything – and not just something, but what I tell you. I’ll buy it myself. You’ll just pay.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow morning we’ll sit down together in front of the manitou, and …’

  She walked over, sat down beside me and sank her hands into my hair. I have to tell you that this simple movement filled me with greater excitement and joy than even the most sophisticated bedroom tricks. There was some point to maximum bitchiness after all – and oh, what a point it was …

  ‘Give me some money,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘I’ll do everything myself.’

  ‘How much do you want, kitten?’ I asked, putting my arm round her waist.

  ‘Three hundred thousand manitou.’

  Whoah. That kind of money would buy a whole heap of glad rags. Far more than any normal rubber woman needed.

  ‘A hundred thousand,’ I whispered. ‘And only because I love you more than life itself.’

  She slapped the hand that had already crept onto her thigh.

  ‘Two hundred.’

  ‘A hundred and fifty,’ I said, ‘and that’s my last word.’

  ‘A hundred and eighty.’

  ‘A hundred and fifty. And we can’t even afford that.’

  She bit me gently on my ear lobe – exactly the right way and just where I liked it.

  ‘A hundred and seventy-five. And in that case – right now.’

  I couldn’t believe that I’d got off so lightly.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘It’s a deal.’

  ‘Pilot’s honour?’ she asked with a smile.

  She looked so fine at that moment, I even screwed my eyes up in pleasure.

  ‘Pilot’s honour,’ I repeated.

  ‘I’ve always trusted pilots ever since I was little,’ she said, handing me a piece of paper folded in two.

  I unfolded it. There were handwritten numbers inside.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘My wallet,’ she replied. ‘For buying things on the network. Please put a hundred and seventy-five thousand in it right now, as you promised.’

  ‘When did I promise that it would be right now?’

  ‘I said, “A hundred and seventy-five. And in that case – right now”. And you swore on your pilot’s honour.’

  ‘I thought the other thing would be right now,’ I said, bewildered.

  ‘The other thing will happen too,’ she said, ‘but afterwards. Come on, darling, pay a little visit to that fortress of yours.’

  ‘Darling …’ When was the last time I heard her say that?

  I trailed off to the happiness room, wondering along the way if I ought to have her entire system reinstalled and then try resetting her in this mode … In principle, the company was obliged to do that kind of thing. But if Kaya was right and the dopamine resonance was simply a programme bug, the new version might not have it.

  Was it worth risking this happiness wrested from life by a miracle? And then, after reflashing, it wouldn’t be my Kaya anymore. Possibly, I thought, the whole point is in the problems that she creates for me and it’s them that make the reward so sweet and so delectable. Perhaps she simply imitates to perfection the ancient female art of seduction, never allowing me to gather my wits and realise what’s going on … If that’s it, the skill with which she goes about her rubbery business is simply divine and it would be the height of stupidity to dismantle this delicate, uniquely structured clump of algorithms.

  And then again, to be quite honest, she hadn’t really asked for all that much.

  I knew people in the motorenwagen business that spent more than that on Orkish prostitutes in a single evening.

  Once seated on my throne of majesty, I entered the password and punched the numbers on her piece of paper into the glimmering void. It was an anonymous numbered account, opened two days earlier – anyone at all could make purchases from it. Online no one knows if you’re a rubber woman, I thought as I transferred the money. Will I have to pay her for every time now? Or is this a one-off act of intimidation? We’ll see. But in any case it would be better to be polite and obliging with her. And no sarcasm, that’s the main thing, no sarcasm. That’s what they hate most.

  An hour later I was lying on my back, totally drained and happy. What I had just experienced couldn’t be bought for a hundred and seventy-five thousand. It was priceless.

  It wasn’t a matter of the physical pleasure, of course – that comes down to mechanical spasms, to a simple sneezing reflex, transferred to other zones of the body, and an excessive interest in this fleeting experience is only appropriate in the early stages of puberty. If you think about it, there isn’t really any pleasure in so-called ‘physical delight’, it’s a retrospective retouch job by our memory, acting in the service of the reproductive instinct (which means that calling it ‘our memory’ is really very naïve).

  It was a matter of something quite different. Something in what Kaya had allowed me to experience had launched me to inner heights that I had never known before. It seems to me that man only rarely ascends to such exalted altitudes, otherwise it would certainly have found expression in poems and songs. Or perhaps this is precisely what people have striven to express in art throughout history, and every time they become convinced that this is an impossible task. Possibly the mystics of ancient times attained something like it – and they thought they had approached the chambers of Manitou Himself.

  I understand how uninformative this sounds – ‘inner heights’ and ‘exalted altitudes’. Especially coming from a pilot. But how else to explain it? Kaya had put it best herself, when she spoke of a swing ‘going over the top’.

  In case anyone doesn’t know, a ‘swing’ is a kind of wooden boat suspended from a fixed horizontal bar on bearings from a motorenwagen – there are lots of them in Slava. How many times I’ve flown over them, and even filmed them once for the programme ‘Behind the Facade of Tyranny’. These swings can rise to a certain height, and then they start striking against a wooden stop.

  The human body, engaged in the pursuit of pleasure, is like these swings. We think we achieve the highest possible joy when we feel the swing shudder as it strikes against the wooden board of the stop. And that’s the way things are – in a twisted, prison-cell sort of sense.

  What had happened to me was this: some confident hand had swung the boat so hard that it had knocked the board out and soared higher and higher, and then turned a complete circle – and instead of falling back in the old familiar way after taking several small steps towards unattainable happiness, I went rushing straight after it, circle after circle, not letting it get away any longer.

  And it wasn’t that I had managed to catch a quivering spot of sunlight or actually register for residence inside a mirage. No, the mendacious falsehood of all the crude, gaudy lures that nature dangles in front of us had never been as obvious as it was during those seconds. But from the forbidden space that my swing soared into after smashing all the barriers, the view of the world and of myself that opened up was so strange and new …

  A completely different perspective.

  As if I had spotted from altitude the dentate fence of an Orkish park, with a free space behind it, where no human foot had trodden for many centuries. And I suddenly realised that in true reality there is neither the happiness that we chase after all our lives, nor grief, but only this supreme point, where there are no questions and no doubts – and where man does not dare to stay, because this is the very place from which Manitou evicted him for his sins.

  ‘Why are you crying again?’ Kaya asked.

  In the half-light of the bedroom her face seemed to be drawn on silk with ink.

  ‘I don’t know how to live now.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Kaya, ‘we’ll come to an arrangement about everything.’

  Women, including rubber ones, understand everything in their own earthly way. And it’s pointless trying to explain to them that what you had in mind was something quite different, something exalted. Especially when it was exactly what they thought.

  ‘Are we going to haggle every time now?’

  ‘No,’ said Kaya. ‘Everything will be free. Like it was before. You can even beat me and torture me, and I’ll still do the same thing. But you have to agree to three conditions.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Firstly,’ she said, ‘I want to be able to go out sometimes. Disable the spatial blocker.’

  ‘And secondly?’ I asked sullenly.

  ‘Don’t put me on pause.’

  ‘And thirdly?’

  ‘I want to meet Grim.’

  Right.

  So that’s what she needs the clothes for.

  She was planning to start flirting with Grim right under my eyes, to step up the pressure on my poor wounded heart even more. When I realised that, it felt as if some delicate little glass component quietly crunched inside me.

  Yes, she could be intelligent and perceptive, she could astound me with her intellect, she could be more cunning and even wiser than me – but no matter how long I gazed into this perfect simulacrum of a soul, no matter how many miraculous meanings I discovered in it, no matter how completely I was deceived by the flowers blossoming on it, the root of it was still bitchiness, infinite and boundless. Always and in everything.

  For a second I came close to going down on my knees and whispering:

  ‘My darling, why do this? Why do you want to act out so mercilessly this idiotic programme forcibly beaten into you by nature and society, in order to inflict more and more suffering on me? What are you trying to hide behind the waves of horror and pain that you stir up in my soul? Your own emptiness? Your own non-existence? I know about these things and I have nothing against them. Why can’t you simply give me the gift of pleasure and live a peaceful life – or at least pretend to live it – beside me? Why do you constantly fan the flames of the suffering that is consuming me?’

  But I was already familiar enough with the rules of this abhorrent game to understand that you didn’t say that sort of thing to a woman. Which meant that you didn’t say it to a sura either.

  ‘So you agree?’ she asked.

  ‘Let me think about it,’ I said. ‘It’s not all that simple.’

  CHAPTER 14

  The room where Grim and Chloe were checked by the doctors was like a wardrobe, with mirrors on the inside. The make-up room where they were prepared for the shoot looked like the Urkagan’s boudoir in the memorable pre-war clip (the only thing missing was the bloodstained rubber woman in the background). But from the confused, glittering welter of the first few hours, all that stuck in Grim’s memory was the shabby, curving corridor that they were led along from one studio to another.

  The corridor was lined with black panels of carbon with holes in them. There were wires dangling about untidily on all sides, and white notices on the panels themselves:

  3D PROJECTOR MAINTENANCE

  SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE

  ‘This is how everything here really looks,’ Damilola said with an incomprehensible giggle as they walked past the announcements. He was probably joking, but Grim really believed that the new world consisted of corridors like this.

  And also of people, proud Byzantines, ‘children of Manitou and wearers of the toga’. Although almost none of them really wore a toga. They dressed in anything at all. Practically like the Orks, only ‘shabbier’, as Chloe whispered.

  When the Byzantine cameras weren’t at work, the people were polite and as indifferent as walls. But when the cameras were switched on, the pressure was on Grim.