Code. Part Two. Chapter One

The launch of ŚLOKA was accompanied by neither thunder nor lightning. It was as silent as sin. A single click. A single stroke, as elegant as a flourish of a pen beneath a death warrant.

And the virus began to flow.

It moved through the fiber-optic veins of the financial system not as a program, but as a rumor. Like a whisper passed from server to server, from wallet to wallet. It didn’t breach defenses; it insidiously convinced them that it was the very essence of the protocol. It didn’t infiltrate mining farms; it colonized them, becoming indistinguishable from the hum of the thousands of fans cooling the machine’s heart.

The first results arrived a few hours later. Lyosha’s call was saturated with a delight so poorly concealed the receiver seemed ready to choke on his happiness.

“It’s… it’s poetry!” he nearly shouted. “It works! The money just… appears! Like morning dew!”

He invited her to celebrate. Immediately.

The yacht was a monument to the idea that if you hurl enough money at tackiness for long enough, it will eventually surrender and pass for luxury. As bone-white as a dentist’s smile, it swayed at a private pier, while on board, champagne already bubbled in buckets the size of small barrels. Lyosha and Vasya met her on the deck, beaming like two brand-new rubles. They had traded their tracksuits for silk shirts with prints so violent they might have induced an epileptic seizure in a chameleon.

“To liquidity!” Lyosha proclaimed, handing Ayame a glass. “Tonight we play! Tonight — we live!”

She took a sip. The champagne was expensive, cold, and utterly soulless. Like everything else in this city.

“By the way,” Lyosha said, lowering his voice and fishing a phone from his pocket. “You can check for yourself. Miyako Ikeda no longer exists. Ayame Yoshikawa is listed as missing following a recent ‘accident’ at sea. You are now as clean as a newborn’s tear.”

“Newborns cry often,” Ayame remarked.

“Details, details,” he waved her off. “What do you call your program, anyway? Your… tool?”

“ŚLOKA.”

“Shloka?” Vasya chimed in; he had been silently attempting to smear black caviar onto a slice of pineapple. “What kind of crap is that? Sounds like some kind of ailment.”

“You may call it Kali Yuga,” Ayame said with a faint smile. “You might find that easier to understand.”

“Kali Yuga… sounds solid,” Lyosha approved. “And what do we call you now?”

“Ayumi.”

“To Ayumi! To Kali Yuga!” He raised his glass. “And to your five percent!”

They drank. Champagne gave way to ice-cold vodka, and vodka back to champagne. Vasya told an unimaginably tedious story about a real estate deal, Lyosha laughed, and Ayame observed. She felt the alcohol pleasantly blurring the contours of this absurd world, making it almost tolerable.

At one point Lyosha, already quite intoxicated, pulled her toward a large mirror in a gilded frame in the main cabin.

“Look!” he said, throwing an arm around her shoulders. “What a fine pair we make! I’m the beauty, you’re the brains. A perfect partnership.”

And then she saw it. For one fleeting fraction of a second, for a single heartbeat, his reflection in the mirror froze. It stalled. His smile turned into a motionless mask while he himself continued to speak. It was like a brief “lag” in a video game, a hanging frame.

She blinked, and the hallucination passed. The reflection became obedient once more, mimicking his every move. “The champagne,” she thought. “Too much champagne.”

“No,” she said, gently disengaging from his embrace. “You’re looking a bit… frozen.”

Lyosha roared with laughter. “Well, I’m from Siberia! We’re all a bit ‘frozen’ up there!”

He announced that he and Vasya were flying out tomorrow. Some business in Europe.

“But we’ll stay in touch,” he assured her. “You’ve done a wonderful job. Very… efficient. I think we’ll have more use for you yet.”

She nodded. But she knew something they did not. She knew they would never meet again. Not in this world. She watched these two successful, self-satisfied predators celebrate their victory and felt nothing but the cold detachment of an artist looking at a finished canvas.

They didn’t realize they weren’t celebrating the dawn of their triumph. They were celebrating the first day of their own funeral rite.

And she was no longer Ayame.

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