‘Come on, little fellow…’ the Servant whispered tenderly, putting the white bakugan larva on the Wise One’s skin, ‘… over here, by the elbow, you’ll like it there… and there’s a nice big vein there…’

The little round white ball shuddered as it felt the warmth of the human body, then shyly plunged its tiny proboscis into the Wise One’s skin. It carefully injected its juice and, nearly overcome with thirst, waited for it to take effect, and only then drew the warm, magical blood into itself.

The Servant of Order adored bakugans – wonderfully useful little monsters, a miracle of insect selection. When they have had their fill of blood, they undergo an instantaneous metamorphosis, moving through the pupa stage in a couple of seconds…

…A two-headed, pinkish-available coloured, winged beetle started scurrying down the Wise One’s arm, heading from his elbow down towards his fist, gradually picking up speed for take-off. The Servant of Order caught him and crushed him: once transformed a bakugan is useless. There was blood, shot through with white bakugan juice, left on his fingers; the Servant licked it off: a natural vitamin… His chest got warmer and started thumping; the walls of the lobby became brighter and thicker, as if someone had increased the colour depth in first layer or put on a ‘feeling lucky’ filter; and after a couple of seconds or so his penis became engorged, like an insatiable bakugan larva – he got the urge to call for his new woman, right now… Now that’s what the natural product gives you – you don’t get that with vitacomplex. Vitacomplex is full of harmful impurities and all sorts of preservatives…

With a click Layla opened a window.

layla: where are you, darling?

servant: busy. at the conference

His desire disappeared immediately. Still, that bint must have some sort of animal instinct…

For some reason she closed her window and then immediately opened it back up again. Click. Click. Like being flicked on the nose. The Servant frowned: recently Layla had taken to getting hysterical within seconds, whether in first layer or on socio. ‘You’ve given her too much slack, way too much slack,’ the Servant thought with irritation. ‘Absolutely anything goes…’

Irritation mingled unpleasantly with pity and some strange wistful feeling, as if he hadn’t fed his pet in a long time…

Click.

Zero twitched.

…His consciousness was still there, it had never even gone away. He was just cold. So cold that he could not breathe, look or move. And it was very quiet, it was quiet in his chest, as if his heart was no longer beating.

It seemed to him: now he was made of ice. His eyes had rolled up into his head and frozen to his eyelids; his arms had gone stiff, his legs had gone stiff and stuck together.

It seemed to him: he was hard and icy, he could not be broken. But if you took his body out into the sun, it would melt and soak into the ground like watery lymph…

But there was no sun. Some warmth came from his left arm and spread through his arteries, veins and capillaries. He inhaled – his chest felt prickly and ticklish. As if a female mosquito had bitten him right on the heart… He tried to move his arm and heard a crack… The ice has snapped, he thought in a panic, …a bit of me has snapped off…

‘Careful there, Wise One,’ said the Servant. ‘Don’t make any sudden movements. First wait until your whole body has relaxed, and then stretch your muscles. And don’t jump up suddenly either: you’ll get dizzy… So, that feel better?’

‘Wht…hppn…m…’ The words stuck in his throat like shards of ice.

‘What happened to you? Oh, you made friends with a couple of my marvellous beetles! The black bakugan and the white bakugan. Those are ancient names, I don’t even know what they mean… But the pets themselves are the product of many centuries of insect selection. Have you seen “extract of white bakugan” on the list of ingredients on vitacomplex? Most ordinary people think that it’s some sort of plant… but no! it’s a beetle…’

Zero sat down, slowly, with difficulty – the walls of the lobby shifted and started swaying back and forth, like pieces of cardboard attached to a gigantic pendulum. The sofa underneath him started jiggling unpleasantly, trying awkwardly to adapt to his new pose, but it could not cope with its sycophantic task and sagged sadly, leaning over to one side.

‘…And have you seen “extract of black bakugan” on the list of ingredients for tranqvitamins?’ The Servant of Order peered at the Wise One and, not waiting for a reply, continued his lecture regardless. ‘In small doses the venom of the black bakugan larva calms you down and takes the edge off, so to speak, and the venom of the white one perks you up. It sharpens the senses, the libido and everything else… But if you increase the dose a little… by which I mean, if, for instance, a black bakugan beetle releases its venom under someone’s skin, then that someone will be completely incapacitated, and will temporarily cease to exist after about an hour, and his pause will look entirely natural: paralysis of the muscles of the heart. That is, of course, if no one administers the anti-venom, which is the extract from the white bakugan. The white bakugan is good at neutralising the effect of the black one…’

‘So that’s what you did to the Diver,’ the Wise One pronounced severely. ‘Tranqvitamins… Extract of black bakugan… You stifled his free will, you made him a puppet… You kept putting those beetles on him… that’s why he can’t move at all in first layer… and in socio he just dumbly said everything you ordered him to say… I’m right, no? No?!’

For some reason the Servant of Order found this very funny and giggled ridiculously. His pupils were narrowing and widening, pulsing, like the hungry black bakugan larvae.

‘…And now he’s been poisoned with so much venom that soon he’s going to temporarily cease,’ the Wise One continued, wiggling his toes and noticing that warmth had, at last, got to the very bottom and was seemingly wrapping his calves and heels in prickly wool, ‘…and you want to turn me into a puppet like him…’

‘Smin, he can think logically!’ the Servant said excitedly; after a dose of white he was predisposed to being upbeat. ‘He can construct chains of logic, in first layer, by himself, without a socio-analyser or the Brain Storm program… He makes conclusions: sure, they’re wrong, but the logic!’

‘You’re talking nonsense, Wise One,’ the Servant replied good-naturedly. ‘Bakugans are valuable little beasts. How many would we have to produce to keep that poor bugger Diver quiet day after day? They are single-use, you know… The larva injects its venom and that’s it, after the metamorphosis it doesn’t bite anymore.’

For the purposes of demonstration the Servant showed his interlocutor the crushed beetle.

‘But the Diver…’

‘But the Diver what?! Out there in the roboslums Divers are as common as flies on shit. They lie there, cretins, drooling and gawping at the heavens. You could pick any one of them, bring them into the Residence and make him the Wise One.’

‘So what, anyone can sit in twelfth layer?’

‘Now that is unlikely.’ The Servant burst into screeching, girly laughter, and then broke off on a high, tuneless note. ‘There’s no one there. No one gets to twelfth. There’s probably no such layer.’

The Wise One’s face went crimson with indignation. This Servant doesn’t even think he needs to lie properly! His thawed heart started jumping, as if it wanted to break through his ribcage. Barely holding back his hot rage, the Wise One said:

‘Do you take me for a dribbling idiot?! I have personally received a message from the Diver! That’s right, there’s no need to act so surprised, he wrote to me once. He promised me his support and he kept his word.’

‘What letter is that you’re talking about? It’s not this one is it by any chance…?’ The Servant rifled through his sent folder looking for what he needed. ‘“Don’t believe the lies. The Leo-Lot ray can shine in both directions, backward and forward, and it has revealed your great future, bla bla bla, but I will right the injustice.” That one, right? Sorry I sent it without signing it. We didn’t really know each other properly anyway…’

‘Why…?’ Zero whispered.

‘Well… To stop you probably going and doing something stupid to yourself, Wise One.’ The Servant found the file ‘psych 0’ in his memory. ‘The expert psychological analysis of your diary – the one you left in the House of Correction – had some worrying outcomes. “The author of this text is experiencing considerable stress and suffers from manic depression. This text, judging by certain psycho-lexemes, was conceived as a decoy (most likely the author has not yet committed the self-pause he warns us about at the end), however, overall, the text is genuine. There is an 87.3% probability that the author of this text is capable of self-pause if his condition becomes more severe.” So we decided to cheer you up, so to speak… It would have been very upsetting to lose such a promising young man as yourself.’

‘So you knew from the very beginning that I had run away…?’

‘Come on, Wise One! I think you are underestimating your humble Servant.’ The Servant gave Zero a comedic bow. ‘Of course I knew.’

‘Then why didn’t you pick me up straightaway? Why did you let me go free?’

‘Well, I’d put it this way: we were waiting for the stars to align.’ The Servant of Order drew a sweeping smiley in the air with his index finger. ‘Our old friend Fifth, moderator of ents and ads, was a nasty old bugger. He would never have voted for you to join the Council and he would have talked the others out of it, he had quite a lot of authority… You would have been sentenced to a pause if we had “picked you up” earlier. Before Fifth’s pause. He was really in a bad way, poor fellow, so we decided to wait until he temporarily ceased. Plus it was interesting to watch you “in the wild”, so to speak… I was, by the way, happy with you by and large. That’s why in the Final Decree I mentioned your “wisdom of a child”, and I wasn’t lying. You have all the basic qualities of a real lead…’

‘You wrote the Final Decree?! You forced the Diver to give up his position as the Wise One?’

‘I told you’ – the Servant absent-mindedly scanned around looking for the caps lock so that he could put the next reply in capital letters, then remembered with irritation that in the monstrously impoverished surroundings of first layer there was no caps lock for conversations – ‘there is no Diver.’

The Wise One struggled up from the shapeless, nauseating sofa. The walls of the lobby started swaying even faster, dragging the floor along with them. It was like the Wise One was standing on the swings in the ancient attraction park. He stumbled, and was about to try and grab the back of the sofa but it ducked down like a traitor, sinking into the seat and turning the sofa into something like a lumpy bagel.

‘I told you not to stand up too quickly…’ The Servant of Order took Zero by the arm obligingly and sat him back down on the sofa. ‘None of the members of the Council can hold twelfth layer. No one, except Third, can even hold eleventh. They are just determined not to admit that they can’t hear what the Diver says… Once, when he was young, First said that he couldn’t see the Wise One. The rest almost tore him to pieces, like hornets round a lame grasshopper. They laughed, but they were all afraid. They could see a bit of themselves in First and were scared of being exposed and disgraced. Because the Council of Eight can see all twelve layers – so it is written in the Book of Life. No one dares question the Book, thus is it written, so that’s how it must be…’ The Servant of Order absent-mindedly deleted unwanted icons from the desktop; he felt spent – he wasn’t used to giving such long speeches outside of socio. ‘…They say it actually was all like that before,’ he muttered. ‘Twelve layers and Divers, real ones…’

He hadn’t meant to say that: the words had somehow crept out of his mouth on their own. They had slipped from his lips, like wet, defenceless slugs. ‘Tiredness and nerves,’ the Servant thought, ‘first layer tension. As if being honest with this loser wasn’t enough. Bloody first layer! You can’t see what you are saying and you can’t concentrate properly so you end up blabbering away when you shouldn’t.’

‘But that’s all junk,’ the Servant summarized decisively. ‘There are no Divers and never have been. You shouldn’t interpret what’s in the Book literally. It’s just an allegory… As far as I understand it it’s about how any of the members of the Council can become the “Wise One”. You need to search around for the “Diver” inside yourself… Because you know what the most important thing is? The most important thing is to be the first to give a voice to the “will” of the Wise One; the rest will pretend that they were also there at his consultation in twelfth layer… My father realised that a long time ago. But he’s not the only one. Sixth has also bluffed us a few times. It took a lot of effort for father to force through the Final Decree. That slitty-eyed dung beetle knows there’s no Diver…’

The Servant of Order fell silent. In an instant the scintillating cheeriness of the white bakugan somehow disappeared completely and all that was left was an unpleasant shivering in his limbs and an indistinct sadness, like the sort you get when the act is interrupted in luxury mode.

– the socio psychotherapist started worrying –

‘There are no Divers and there never have been,’ the Servant hurriedly wrote on the wall of his cell in font size 20: the psychotherapist recommended this sort of relaxation technique in stressful situations. But his mood was utterly ruined. Just as it had been ruined the two times he had brought brainless ‘wise ones’ from the roboslums. ‘There are no Divers.’ Both times he had written that phrase all over the walls of the cell. But he still couldn’t quite fully believe what he had written. Then there was the letter in Renaissance…

The letter to self from the middle of the second century – it was like a splinter stuck under his nail. In this letter he wasn’t yet called the Servant or even Cyborg 17. In the middle of the second century he had had the name Goblin and he had worked as a socio-virologist. In that letter he described his brief immersion in twelfth layer (‘…I dived! How can you give a name to what you experience in the deepest of deeps? Global language is not rich enough to find the right words… Pleasure, wisdom, a sense of soaring and endless peace…? None of that’s it, that’s not it… Love? Holiness? That’s not it… Perhaps, Death?’) and he wondered whether he should disappear forever off into the roboslums for an eternal immersion. Goblin did not leave any more letters in that reproduction. Most likely – judging by the fact that after the pause he was reproduced in the roboslums and received the name Cyborg 17 – he had gone through with his plans.

There was no way now, of course, of checking whether this was junk. Was he a real Diver or had a virus just damaged his memory and judgment (that sort of thing happens to virologists the whole time)? Whatever happened, whenever he looked back, the Servant of Order shuddered in horror. He didn’t like to talk about his past – his invector was too shameful. For almost three centuries, right up to his current reproduction in 430, he had been a stinking slum robot. He would still be one now if his biological mother had not been born under a lucky star.

His mother, big-eyed and hungry like a dragonfly, had been a slum witch. Her name was Mara and she was sixteen when Second noticed her as he toured the roboslums, in the company of six bodyguards, on a charitable ‘visit of loving care’. He gestured for her to come over and she crawled over on her knees. ‘Stand up and tell my fortune, little one,’ Second said. ‘Today I am giving you official permission to tell my fortune.’ ‘You should get down on your knees next to me,’ Mara replied. ‘Have a seat, you might need one.’ The moderator of tranquillity frowned in surprise at this unheard of impudence. The bodyguards raised their machine guns in unison. But Second shook his head to say no and slowly kneeled down opposite Mara. She pressed her hand in its contact glove against his swarthy forehead: ‘…I see beyond the pause, I see before, I tell all, of that you can be sure. I see you, moderator of tranquillity in all layers… And I see myself, naked, next to you in bed…’ Second laughed, unzipped his trousers and right there, not moving from the spot, performed the act with her in first layer. His bodyguards held her down – she, however, didn’t put up any particular resistance. Then Second got up, kicked the witch and walked off, surrounded by his guards.

The next day he summoned her to the Residence.

He kept her as his long-term partner. She had already got pregnant with Cyborg 17 back there in the slums. ‘It is just not done to give birth to robots in the Residence,’ the moderator of tranquillity said. ‘My Darling will be a man to be reckoned with.’ ‘He will be the Servant of Order,’ said Mara, placing her hand on her stomach. ‘Why not,’ Second replied thoughtfully, ‘why not…?’

‘…his place.’

The Wise One’s words came as if from afar. The Servant of Order suddenly noticed that he had got distracted from first layer and lost the thread of the conversation. Limited attention syndrome is one of the Living’s chronic external illnesses…

‘What did you say, Wise One?’

‘I said: because the Diver did not become your puppet, you decided to take me in his place. A first-layerer with no access to socio. You could frighten me with your black and white beetles and train me up so that once a month I would read your words off a piece of paper… Am I right?’

‘Only in the broadest terms…’

‘“To the Saviour from the Apostle”,’ Zero said flatly. ‘It was you who wrote that, to “cheer me up a bit”? Of course. Back there, in the Pause Zone, you fed Matthew a tranqvitamin. And then you slipped him a text in deep layers. “You will be held captive, but the Servant will elevate you if you will serve him.”’

‘Incredible,’ the Servant of Order thought spitefully. ‘He can quote the text off by heart without having access to memory…’ Servant stared into the Wise One’s crazed pupils, which pulsed from excessive white bakugan juice, and he suddenly became, if not scared, then distinctly out of sorts. Uncomfortable, as if he could feel the fixed gaze of a poisonous insect on the back of his head.

‘That wasn’t me,’ the Servant replied, to his own amazement: it sounded as if he was justifying himself. ‘That was your mate Cracker.’

‘My friend Cracker was capable of that sort of thing,’ the Wise One replied provocatively, ‘but he had already temporarily ceased a week before Matthew left his message.’

‘I know,’ the Servant said quietly and angrily, and, for some reason, honestly. ‘We did an autopsy on Matthew’s cell. Cracker had put that text in his memory long before his pause, even before you ran away, Wise One. With the instruction: “activate before pause”.’

The Servant of Order felt about in his memory trash for Matthew’s message and picked at it, as if he were poking a sore tooth with his tongue, and kept fighting the strong desire to delete it permanently. But no, he mustn’t. He had to keep this document as a reminder of his, the Servant’s, personal and professional disgrace. As evidence of the fact that even his cell, the Servant’s, was accessible and vulnerable. That some cunning little common or garden creep could get into his cell, the cell of the Servant of Order, and then crawl along the most delicate, most intricate web of neurons, and sneak into, infiltrate, his consciousness, his, the Servant of Order… The Servant frowned as if someone was tickling the back of his head with a cold metal stick. That rat Cracker – he had figured out a way of unpicking more than just his socio memory. He had read his thoughts. His secret plan, that he had never expressed in any layer, to do whatever it took to change his invector…

‘So I’m supposed to serve the Servant?’ Zero burst out laughing with a strange, quavering laugh, as if it wasn’t him that was laughing but someone old and evil who had taken up residence behind his breastbone.

‘You must serve the Living loyally,’ the Servant responded ritually, as if he had been waiting for this question and prepared his answer in advance. ‘Especially now, in these difficult days of ours, when the stability of the Living is under threat… Wise One…’ The Servant sank his gaze into Zero and held a long pause. ‘…What you’re about to see is quite something.’

The Servant strode towards the table and solemnly pulled an inviz cover off something square and bulky that was jutting up strangely in the middle of the lobby.

‘A present for you.’ The Servant made an expansive gesture; he seemed extremely pleased with himself.

‘A Crystal X0?’ The Wise One stared hard at his ‘present’. ‘You wanted to surprise me with a Crystal XO, that old piece of crap that they use in natural development groups so that the hydrocephalics get to watch Baby Bubbles somehow?’

‘Well, excuse me.’ The Servant pulled closed the dark threads of his lips in offence. ‘There wasn’t a lot of choice. Crystal X0 is still the only first-layer monitor. There’s no demand, you see. Maybe Sixth and First will develop something specially for you later, something more… elegant. But for now we’ve ordered you three monitors, and everything else you might need. One is in the conference hall – you, Wise One, wouldn’t have noticed this with all this fuss, one here in the lobby, and one will be installed in your apartments – and each will have an in-built socio slot with limited connectivity! Great, right? You will have limited access to certain second-layer services. For instance, the members of the Council will be able to send you letters and messages… You will even be able to watch adverts and series!’

‘What, am I supposed to say thank you?’

The Servant of Order twisted his face in irritation and turned on the Crystal. Something squeaked thinly. The screen flickered like a million swarming silver midges.

‘There’s a little something I need to show you,’ the Servant said.

He closed his eyes and established a socio connection with the Crystal. The set-up was unpleasant and rough somehow – like he had been whacked in the forehead with a wooden baton. The Servant plunged into eighth layer and went into the System; on the way in, as ever, he felt a momentary falling sensation and a simultaneous shortness of breath. The System was not good at accepting those it had not chosen itself, those to whom it had not chosen to reveal itself. The System currently only allowed Fourth, the moderator of assistance to nature, to see it directly. The Servant of Order and the other members of the Council had to content themselves with a shared copy of the System, which was, however, sufficiently sensitive and aggressive to bite into their brains on the way in and the way out.

He got a headache from the stress, unavailable spots started dancing in front of his eyes. It’s so slow. Gopz, it’s slow! It’s like trying to share a program with an unliving friend… ‘In a way that’s exactly what he is,’ the Servant suddenly realised. ‘A Crystal socio slot is unliving, external. My nerve cells are going crazy trying to link up with its mechanical neurons… Ah right, at last… It’s got going…’ The Servant wiped the sweat from his brow.

…On the Crystal monitor the System looked unusual and somehow almost innocuous, not like in eighth layer. Like a funny animated little guy, sort of like Livvles, made of flashing, multi-coloured numbers and letters twisted into tiny spirals. Nothing at all like a nightmarish beast, unwittingly ingesting you into its dark, sticky, greedy, calculated, calculating, constantly self-renewing, living womb.

‘The Living = 3 000 000 000 livings’: the legend shone from the bottom of the screen.

‘Look, Wise One. Look and tremble,’ the Servant said in a whisper, and, it seemed, without mockery. ‘You see before you: the System.’

Zero stared at the little man made of numbers in disbelief.

‘Do you at least know what the System is?’ the Servant asked contemptuously, misinterpreting the Wise One’s stare.

‘No one knows what the System is,’ replied the Wise One, and the Servant gave a satisfied nod.

That was the correct answer. The password for all those who knew.

What is the System?

The soul of the Living.

Or the body of the Living.

Or the mind of the Living.

What is the System?

The most precise model of the Living.

What is the System?

The nativity gift of the magi.

What is the System?

The restless ghost of the Living that appears to the chosen few.

But even the chosen few probably don’t know what the System is.

Not in Wikipedia, or in the Encyclopaedia Socialia, or on AnswerNet are there any articles about the System. Not a word about it – as if the System does not exist. But every living sooner or later finds out about the System. Some a bit more, some a bit less; some see a little bit of it in a dream and some just catch the end of some first-layer rumour…

In this sense the Wise One had, one might say, got lucky. He had heard about the System from the person who knew more about it than anyone. From the very first person to see it. From Cracker.

‘The System is alive,’ his friend had explained to him. ‘It has consciousness and free will.’

It is a program that was never written by anyone – at the least, by any living – and which it is impossible to control. It appeared immediately after the birth of the Living, and since then it has always been in inviz mode and shown itself only to the chosen few. Members of the Council (not all of them) and the very best Divers too. When a Diver drowns, it swallows him forever… As he talked about the System, Cracker scratched the scabby patches on his skin until they bled: ‘I didn’t create it, it installed itself in eighth layer, it did it itself, you see! When I first saw it, it looked perfect to me… Then, much later I realised that it’s a sort of virus. Not a gift, but a curse…

‘It exists separately from all the artificial socio systems for controlling the population. It never makes a mistake and never lies. It shows three billion incodes in their constant development. It precisely detects every reproduction and pause in the world…

‘Precisely detects…’ Cracker squeezed his spidery, slender-fingered hands into fists. ‘…But I wonder… Maybe it controls them?’

‘You’re crazy,’ was Zero’s response to that. ‘You’re paranoid, Cracker.’ He didn’t want to think that the System was a curse. He wanted to believe that the System was the nativity gift of the magi. And that one day it would accept him. Someday, after one year, two, three, ten, someone’s pause would take too long. Someone’s five seconds of darkness would accidentally turn out to be an eternity. Someone – some absolutely terrible person, some pathetic screw-up… some correctee with a terrible invector – would quit the System forever and it would then invite Zero to take up the vacant spot.

And he would stop being surplus to requirements.

Zero imagined the System as something solemn and sad. Like the temple in which the ancients used to pray to their three-headed god. Like the fiery underground world which the ancients went down into to live in after death.

…The little man made of numbers had nothing in common with how the Wise One had imagined the System. He was funny and ridiculous.

‘In socio the System is different,’ the Servant responded to what he was thinking. ‘Like an ancient temple…’ The Wise One felt an unpleasant chill.

‘Actually it wasn’t the System so much I wanted to show you…’ The Servant faltered strangely. ‘So much as… the Malfunction. A malfunction in the System, yes.’

The Wise One shivered. An idiotic, childish hope hit him somewhere just above the stomach. Like an imago struggling to break free from its cocoon. A system malfunction.

Someone’s pause will take too long…

‘Look, Wise One.’

The funny little man on the screen slowly lifted both arms – as if he was surrendering himself to the mercy of an unseen enemy. Several twisted spirals of numbers on his body – in his armpits, on his palms and around the navel – turned unavailable and started to look like bruises.

‘One, two, three… five… Fofs!’ The Servant looked properly scared. ‘…seven, eight… eight of them. More than ever!’

‘What is that…?’

The Servant of Order zoomed in on one of the ‘bruises’: a tiny patch of letters and numbers unfurled to reveal someone’s eight-digit incode. At the bottom of the screen a timer came on with a panicky ping:

‘A stalled reproduction,’ the Servant replied quietly. ‘That timer is counting the seconds of darkness. After the pause there should be, as you know, five seconds. And here – well, see for yourself…’

The Wise One felt a strange weightlessness. The imago of hope hatched somewhere in his stomach and flew up towards his throat on an acid wave of nausea.

Someone’s five seconds of darkness might accidentally turn out to be an eternity…

‘At the moment eight livings have not been reproduced at the correct time following the pause. That’s a lot. Usually it’s two or three…’

‘Usually?!’

‘Recently… The malfunction in the System was discovered nearly half a year ago. Someone’s incode was reproduced late by all of two tenths of a second, but the System noticed and sent an alarm signal in socio. We decided that this was a unique and overall acceptable exception from the rule, and we didn’t treat what had happened as significant. But a week later the situation happened again, only now the reproduction ‘stalled’ for two further seconds… Then suddenly two incodes stalled in two different regions. One was reproduced after ten minutes, the other… after a day. That’s when we realised that the stability of the Living was under threat. He is sick, Wise One. The Living is seriously ill.’

…At second 108 the incode on the screen winked, changed colour from unavailable to grassy-available and dashed off somewhere to the right.

‘What… what happened to him?’ Zero shuddered.

‘He was finally reproduced… So far all the stalled reproductions have gone through sooner or later. Our task, Wise One, is to prevent…’ For some reason the Servant moved to a whisper, ‘…is to prevent any reduction… It’s terrifying to think what would happen if someone’s reproduction was just cancelled. Because the Number of the Living is unchanging, the Living is three billion livings… You must protect Him. We believe the system malfunction is connected to the destructive activity of the Dissidents. That is why the First Speech should be devoted to bringing in harsher measures and the introduction of a state of emergency, you see? Wise One…? How are you feeling?’

‘I’m fine,’ the Wise One replied.

The walls and floor had stopped swaying in front of him. Everything became precise and incredibly bright, like feeling lucky. ‘Feeling lucky,’ Zero said to himself and got up. He felt a strange agitation in his whole body. His legs and arms were trembling – not from weakness, but from a strange foreboding of strength. As if some unseen and powerful engine had started working inside him. Right now he could run ten miles without stopping. Right now he would tear anyone who tried to block his path to shreds. He was like a rabid farm dog that had broken out of its cage. Now he’s going to go and defend himself and his territory. He is going to defend his Master. He, Zero, will be the one to cure the Living of this sickness – and after that the Master will accept him… He is not afraid, he is no longer weak, he is the lord of first layer. Right now he is stronger than any of these bloated, clumsy, socio people that can’t string their thoughts together. Now he is stronger than the Servant of Order standing next to him. Stronger than that clown, screwing up his face like he’s got toothache.

‘Gopz,’ Zero said with an inscrutable smile; insane joy was ticking away in his head, like an explosive device gone mad. ‘You, and Second, you can both gopz, alright? The Living does not have enough love, that’s the reason for the Malfunction. I am sure of it. I’ve come up with a good First Speech, simple and kind. I will not give your speech to the Council of Eight…’

‘He’s still stupid,’ the Servant thought and shuddered as he left the System. ‘In the grand scheme of things. Stupid and stubborn, like an owlet moth bashing against the window at night…’

‘You’ve already given our speech, idiot,’ the Servant replied wearily. The Wise One stared with eyes full of blood and venom at the darkened screen of the Crystal and then at the Servant.

‘Did you really think that there is even a single corner in the Residence that’s not fitted with video surveillance and recording?’ The Servant suddenly got the urge to gather his saliva and spit in those stupid eyes. ‘We filmed you while you read our speech. It’s a shame it was without expression, but hey, the members of the Council hardly ever listen out for intonation in first layer… But if you want I’ll ask Second if anyone in the Council was upset by the fact that you read off a piece of paper…? No, he says no one was upset. They all believed in your “direct connection”… So, I can congratulate you on a successful First Speech, Wise One: a First Speech is a big responsibility… You caught them unawares with your radical ideas… But on the other hand, the members of the Council have been planning on “clamping down” for a long time now. The discussion is now underway. What a shame that you can’t take part in the general debate yet. Second is saying that all the members of the Council are terribly worried by your illness. You lost consciousness after all, and I literally carried you out of the conference hall in my arms… Sorry, lad, I had to do a little editing and after the speech cut straight to “the faint”… But they all hope that it’s just the result of stress. It’s entirely possible, you were just overly anxious, Wise One: the First Speech is a big responsibility… They hope that you feel a bit better and will come back to the conference hall to take part in the discussion… Are you feeling a bit better, Wise One, what do you reckon? In a way everything depends on you…’

‘You scumbags,’ the Wise One was trembling with anger and passion. ‘I’m going to tell them all right now.’

The Servant of Order started laughing in surprise at how childish the threat sounded. ‘I’m going to tell mum on you!’ was how his Darlings usually reacted when he locked them in the unlit store cupboard as punishment for some misdemeanour…

The Servant watched Zero pulling at the gold-plated handle of the locked door in a frenzy.

‘I’ll break it down!’ The Wise One took a few paces back and slammed himself against the door at a sprint.

…The Servant’s Darlings also always tried to smash the door down. For some unknown reason they were terribly afraid of the dark in first layer. Layla thought that there was no point in punishing them with darkness, but the Servant wasn’t particularly interested in what Layla thought. If his little livings want to achieve something in this life then they are going to have to be strong, devious and fearless. Like their father. They need to work on themselves, because neither of them has a particularly great invector, and no one knows how long this dolce vita behind the walls of the Residence is going to last. He, of course, smin, will try to keep them there forever. But there are no guarantees. He didn’t even have any guarantees himself for now, so they would have to fight for their place in the sun. The Servant loved sitting in his office and listening to the sounds coming from the cupboard. To the children weeping and banging on the door. Good, good, let them develop their strength and overcome the ancient fears. One day – soon – they will realise that the door and the hinges are only wooden on the outside and that inside there is a core of high-carbon steel, and that there is no way of breaking the door down. One day – soon – they will try to trick him as he takes them to the cupboard. Interrupting each other, they will start urgently saying that last time, there, in the cupboard, they saw a rat, a real, live one, with fluffy fur and eyes like buttons… in the far corner, smin, father, smin, go have a look… And he will go in and they will lock the door behind him, and he will let them do it – as once, long ago, his father let him. Because you can’t deny them that lesson. It will be their first serious act of deviousness… They will run away, laughing and whooping, and he will open the cupboard door from the inside with his key. He will find them in the garden, give each of them a slap on the face, and then hug them tight. Like his father once hugged him, tenderly, painfully…

…The Servant grudgingly paused the clip ‘Darling_childhood_ reconciliation_in_garden’ from his family archive and said:

‘Save your strength, Wise One. First off, there’s no way of breaking down that door. Second, another two or three more sharp movements and you’ll be unliving… Do you not feel how close your pause is, eh, Zero?’

Oh yes. He felt it alright. It was as if someone had jabbed him through the heart like a mounted butterfly, and was now toying with him, moving the needle back and forth, and with every movement cold sweat poured over his face and the taste of iron spread through his mouth.

The Servant bent over, scoured the floor with his eyes, picked up the little corpse of the recently deceased beetle, and shoved it in the Wise One’s face.

‘Two heads, see? That means a double dose of white venom. The first portion…’ – The Servant of Order casually ripped one of the heads off the insect – ‘…neutralised the venom of the black bakugan… The second portion…’ – He ripped off the other head, and a meagre pinkish droplet came out of the post-occipital suture – ‘is killing you right now. Your pause will come in an hour – that is if you calm down and you’re as good as gold – or quicker if you carry on acting crazy like this. Any physical effort, any sudden movement, any disturbing thought will speed up the process. Did I not tell you what happens to people that overdo it on white bakugan venom…? Anaphylactic shock. Paroxysmal tachycardia. Rupture of the heart muscle. Brain haemorrhage. Your blood vessels will swell and burst like a rotten grape…’

The Wise One was sitting on the floor, slumped with his back to the locked door.

His breathing was fast and hoarse and his whole body was trembling slightly – like a farm animal when a person has gone up too close to it.

The Servant of Order went up closer and wrinkled his face at the acrid smell emanating from the Wise One. Disgusting. He really does stink like an animal – of fear and sweat.

‘Yes, yes, I know, it’s bad news…’ The Servant noticed that this farmyard stench had even given him a blocked nose. ‘But there is some good news too. I can neutralise the effect of the venom. Ta-da!’ Like a conjuror, the Servant pulled a transparent capsule containing a little shivering black ball from his inside pocket. ‘The larva of the black bakugan. It’s already excited, it’s been warmed by the heat of my body, it’s trembling with anticipation. It’s ready to share its magical calming juice… You have to decide, Wise One. If you want, you can die here; the Council of Eight will be extremely upset at this sudden death as a result of nervous stress… Or, if you want, you can cooperate. You’ll take a little break, you’ll return to the conference hall and you’ll join in with the debate. Don’t you worry, Wise One, I’ll be sitting next to you, giving you hints. So then, have I persuaded you?’

‘Can…I… have…the…black…now…’ Zero wheezed, as he gasped for air, and extended his hand, palm up, to the Servant, like a hungry robot begging passers-by for food on the outskirts of the slums.

It seemed to Zero like some wise stranger was watching him from inside. Disinterestedly recording every stage of dying and disgrace. Just now he had noted dispassionately that the strength and anger, the virtue and intelligence, the loyalty to his Master – all this had gone from Zero; all there was was deathly sadness, the ancient, childish fear of being left locked somewhere in the dark.

And the thumping too. The uneven, exhausting thumping of his raging blood.

‘Not now,’ the Servant of Order put the capsule back in his pocket. ‘But if you are a good little boy, and repeat after me everything that you have to say, then in half an hour you will get your black bakugan. Just remember, deep breaths, not too fast… And the main thing is: remember that you are protecting the interests of the Living, even if you are under a little bit of pressure from us… You see, we, Wise One, know what we are doing. Some day you will realise that we are right.’