Code. Part One. Chapter Three

Taxis in Dubai are always a lottery.

You might end up with a philosopher from Kerala who spends the entire journey discussing the meaning of life and discounts on mangoes, or you might get a silent Pakistani who glares at the road as if it had personally betrayed him.

Today, Ayame drew the latter. The driver ferried her through a labyrinth of identical streets where even the palm trees looked as if they had been grown in test tubes. Outside the window was a city built by people who had likely never read Borges, yet managed to construct the perfect labyrinth nonetheless. The Pakistani, with the eyes of a martyr, listened to Bollywood pop at a low volume — a kaleidoscope of screeching synthesizers and ecstatic wails that sounded like the soundtrack to a cheerful, Technicolor apocalypse.

Ayame stared out at the passing skyscrapers — those glass headstones — and thought that, in essence, the soundtrack was a perfect fit.

They met her at a villa that was so provocatively modest that its anonymity screamed louder than any neon sign. It featured artificial turf the color of a sick parrot. Beige walls. Catalog furniture devoid of any sign of life, taste, or simple human presence. This was not a residence. It was a safe house, furnished with the indifference of a man prepared to burn his bridges — and the house itself — at a moment’s notice.

Her guests from the previous evening were waiting on the sofa. The brute, who introduced himself as Vasily (“But you call me Vasya”), and his more loquacious companion, Alexey (“And I’m Lyosha”). Both wore gold chains around their necks thick enough to moor a small yacht. On their wrists sparkled watches whose cost could have covered the foreign debt of a small African nation or bought the house along with its owners and their descendants unto the seventh generation.

“Why here?” Ayame asked, surveying the sterile living room. “I thought your kind preferred penthouses with views of their own egos.”

“We’re here to work, not to play,” Lyosha replied with a stone face. “The playing comes later.”

Ayame allowed a ghost of a smile to touch her lips. It was so Russian. Even their modesty was a form of aggression. She sat in the armchair opposite them.

“Can I pour you something?” Lyosha asked, gesturing toward a bar stocked with bottles bearing recognizable labels.

“Vodka?” Ayame inquired with light irony.

“Well, yeah.”

“No, thank you. It’s too hot.”

“Well, if you change your mind… we have everything here except the meaning of life.”

“I’ve already tried the meaning of life,” Ayame replied, her tone level. “I wasn’t impressed.”

“So, the work,” she said. “You wanted to discuss a tool for liquidity enhancement.”

“The tool, yes,” Lyosha nodded, while in the background, Vasya opened a can of energy drink with a thunderous pssh that echoed in the silence like a gunshot. “We need a program. A virus. It needs to penetrate the accounts of our… partners. And bit by bit, very discreetly, transfer funds to us. Like…” he snapped his fingers, searching for a metaphor, “like moisture evaporating from a carpet. So that no one notices anything until it’s too late.”

“And most importantly,” he added, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, “no traces. No entries in the blockchain that can be tracked. The transactions must be… ghosts.”

Ayame remained silent, letting the absurdity of the moment fully unfold.

“So,” she said slowly, with deliberate emphasis, “you want me to violate the fundamental laws of cryptography, break the immutable nature of the distributed ledger, and, essentially, cancel mathematics. Just like that. On a Tuesday… It is Tuesday, isn’t it?”

“Yes. And you’ll have to try your best,” Lyosha said grimly, his gaze growing heavy.

“You’re asking for the impossible,” Ayame replied sarcastically. “Perhaps you’d also like the money to arrive by itself in a suitcase while the police bring you coffee?”

“Just do your best,” Lyosha repeated. “You know why.”

Ayame’s internal world — that quiet, perpetually rain-drenched backwater — froze for a second. She looked at them — these barbarians in expensive suits, these children playing with matches in a powder keg — and her sense of fate was replaced by a feeling of intoxicating, almost artistic contempt. They didn’t understand what they were asking for. They weren’t asking to pick a lock. They were asking for a key that would abolish the very concept of locks.

And what is in it for me?” she asked, returning to their primitive game.

“You can write yourself in for five percent. We’re not stingy,” Lyosha allowed magnanimously. “But that’s not the main thing. The main thing is we solve your problem. Miyako Ikeda, Ayame Yoshikawa… all your old names will ‘die.’ They’ll vanish from every database. To every police force in the world, you will cease to exist.”

“Well, one of them has to remain,” she drawled with a slight smirk. “And if I refuse?”

Vasya stopped drinking his energy drink and looked at her. In his eyes, there was nothing but boredom and the physical capacity to end her existence. No — it was more as if he were calculating exactly how long her disappearance would take.

“Then you die for real,” Lyosha said.

Ayame stood up. The deal was struck. Not with them, but with herself. She would build their tool. But it would be more than just a virus. It would be a work of art. A poem written in Assembly. A requiem for their greed.

She called a taxi and, standing in the doorway, turned back.

“Your English is quite good. What other languages do you know?”

Lyosha gave a self-satisfied grin.

“Russian. For everything else, there are online translators.”

Ayame nodded, as if she had heard something of vital importance.

“कथायाः आरम्भः, मध्यः, अन्तः च भवेत् । किन्तु तस्मिन् क्रमेण न अवश्यम्.”

They stared at her like two rams at a new gate.

“What’s that, Thai?” Lyosha finally asked.

“No,” Ayame replied, and her voice carried the kind of warmth lava has before an eruption. “It is Sanskrit. It means: ‘A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. But not necessarily in that order.’ I’m going to work. Now you can go and play.”

She walked out, leaving them bewildered, trying to digest a phrase that was not just an answer, but an epigraph for their own obituary.

Part One. Chapter Four →
← Code\Coda
← A Road of a Thousand Years
← Paths
← The River
← The Observer Effect
← The Battle of Bun’ei