…too much of pain to feel anything else… besides… at least anyth… gushes in over the edge… takes away the last drops of strength… nothing to withstand with… overwhelms… crushes the slightest ability to resist … struggle… hold on… the thundering avalanche sets the fragile shell in a dizzy whirl… this shell… this fragile…

pain… pain…

it’s… aaa……bigger… the ocean… larger than universe this… paaaiaaahhh… ooouuu… crushes… makes sick… tears innards unbearably… makes vomit the guts out…

ruthlessly… stops a split hair before the last edge… short of killing… that would free from this paaaiaaahhh… uuu… ooouuu… not be … not to be… not feel this paaaiaaahhh… oooooo… death will rescue from… from tortures by this monster of no pity… no mercy… doesn’t let overstep the line where it gives no… paaain…

no way to dodge… escape the pitiless demon of… paaain… aaahhh… no strength for shrieking… groans… no strength to whimper… wail… that choked maimed “aaahh” is all that remains too feelble too powerless to call out… reach for… beyond this … paaain… ooouuu…

no way to move… to wriggle like an earth worm cut in two… like any live animal seeking to adapt its crippled body to… paaain… aaahh… searching for the tiniest drop of ease in broken contorted convulsions… to dodge it somehow… for a split of second… befool this… paaain… aaahhh…

no hope… none to expect… there’ll be just… paaain… aaahhh… to the very end… o come it sooner… time disappeared… lost any meaning… each moment protracts longer than… this eternity of … paaain… ooouuu…

no space… nowhere to get away from this immobility deprived of death… crushing closed… walls of merciless… paaaiaaahhh… flattened the helpless subhuman squashed into a slave of all-conquering Paaain… Cruel Czarina Paaain…

a nothing… a prisoner… a slave… a broken toy of Her Majesty Executioner… a shell degraded in the squeeze of unbearable scathing fathomless abyss of paaain… aaahhh

oooooo… how it pains…

what… foooor?..

* * *

6

The blue wrapping, which V picked up from the table at Uncle Tom’s Cabin before Sally the Waitress brought the meal ordered by Lex yet after he was taken away, wrapped no chewing gum.

Only back home, V got it what his friend texted about by quick winks and flailing desperately his eyelashes when being detained. The message transmitted by some unknown code (yet, without doubt, not by that of Morse) concerned the chewing gum, which Lex had so awkwardly dropped on the table, and which was not there. Instead, the wrinkled wrapping covered a piece of thin cardboard cut like a make-believe bar of chewing gum and the little lamina of a memory card, side by side.

Tunar (*the basic File Manager on Debian/Ubuntu systems) disclosed two files present in the card of 2TB storage capacity:

1) eff_thoughts_008.txt file, and

2) a folder left Untitled.

(Technically speaking, any folder within a system is just another file for containing any quantity of files and folders.)

The Untitled folder contained thousands audio files, all of them in Vorbis format.

V clicked a couple of them, one after the other, at random, whichever happened under the courser's hoofs. Thru the mask mesh in both speakers streamed out the same impersonal flat drawl of artificial reader, unnaturally distanced and sexless voice-over.

V didn’t bother to tweak the pitch or tempo in the robotic diction, neither was choosen another dialect from the long list of options, he just left all as is. Moreover, the haphazard pieces did not sound like a cohesive narration. Neither was there any traceable intent to introduce the source of fragments not caring a bean who’d issued them before breaking to shards: a man? a woman? a youth? a snotty kid?

Yeah, at times there sure happened telling cues. For instance, hardly a brutal macho would complain of a too tight bra sillily donned when leaving for the office in the morning.

(Or could he after all, that macho? There are machos and machos, you know… more and more diversified. In the times of heated struggle for self-awareness of your hidden “it” and realization of “its” deepest instincts you’d better not grab hastily any assumption that comes you way. The bitch may turn scorching hot. We don’t need blisters, burns and stuff, right? And no sorting out with militant activists for tolerance are welcome.

Anyway, the weirdest prankster, life, can beat any sitcom with both hands tied and the brutal mudak of macho might have had his private reasons for putting a bra on first thing in the morning.

Not to mention the strange feeling that visited V more and more often of his belonging to a sexual minority of those who way back were called “straight males” but whose share in the overall number of those usable for sex dwindled hopelessly, globally, like the melting glaciers in the Alps, not to mention the tearful situation about Antarctica icebergs.

Damn priests! They triggered off the uncontrollable avalanche of the horrendous chain reaction by their ardent pulling for the missionary position in intercourse. God Almighty (so the clerics) approved just that one and only.

(The missionary position, for fuck’s sake!) And (went they on) whatever else modification to the “piston – cylinder” shebang was a devilish ploy, another of the serpent’s apples in Eden.

Of course, the flocks got unhealthy interested in the topic: hey! how many are them positions? Huh? And who gets more high at sex: from under or on top?

Way back, in the bucolically innocent days, folks just didn’t give an eff about hows-and-whys in the matter, morals were way robuster and simpler – whoever whomever wherever grabbed there they fucked them, on the spot, and the following morning no one gave a fuck in which position, namely, and what was the angle, geometrically, no time for trifles – harness your horse to the cart, gird yourself with the ax and – off with you! to the forest after the firewood. But now, thanks to the the clergy who brought it up, we are in this here deep shit. And I still haven’t even once mentioned pedophilia, have I? Fuck!

With a sad sigh, V clicked eff_thoughts_008.txt…

The endless stream of poorly punctuated lines, and words of innovative coinage, at times perversely ordered collocations, and other incongruences with the time-honored grammar and spelling rules. Looks like Lex had a good reason to call it a log, hardly if at all processed. To recon the text a transcript of the audio files from the back-to-back Untitled folder, in the same 2 TB card, stood well to reason. However, without a deeper submersion it was hard to decide which one in their tandem flagged off the notorious hen-egg dilemma.

At any rate, the stuff didn’t look a super text ready to make V a glamorous lighting house aloft the choppy sway in the ocean of pulp fiction. The fragments resembled mumbling to oneself in the manner of Leo Bloom responding to one or another hallmark or happening in the process of his indefinite aimless wanderings during the long-long day of June16, 1904.

Yes, it did look like a transcript of scattered thought, yet of how many thinkers? Were they interconnected? In any way? In what way? If, yes, of course. And who thought what? Who namely?

While reading, you felt at times like being carried off upon a kinda thought-floe, before you slopped over smack bang into another fragment, yes, everything turned different – the subject, the mood, the vocabulary.

Common to them all though was some elusive sincerity, and lack of coherent detailed description of actions in progress. Plus their terse offhandedness in telling why anh how, and absence of smooth logical flow which called for filling the picture yourself. Say, instead of “my interlocutor plunged into a lengthy exposition of his current plans and expectations…” there sooner would stand “will the shithead shut up? Ever?”

V resented the untimeliness of Lex’ pinch. So he was arrested? His lamb of a friend, Lex?

Ha! But what else? By all the canons of genre. And too sadistically by that. Took him away from the not devoured dinner!

Contradicting to his stock of common sense, V slightly touched the number marked “lex” in his phone. Simply out of habit. Just in case…

The mellow female voice once again explained it to him that the subscriber was out of reach. The proposal of the conference to the answering machine in Lex’ den after the following “peee”, V ruled out making no comment.

He switched his PC off and one whole minute watched the black monitor with his not seeing stare. Then he swerved the throne about and and got up to cross the room over, to the catty-corner.

From the drawer in the desk (downmost to the right) V extracted and put onto the desktop a small flat box looking like a compass case. He unclasped it and pinched out a tiny SIM card which substituted the one in his phone.

He had become another subscriber of obscure identity with the number unknown to anyone. Just in case…

* * *

7

V never was alone. Never. Even in a crowd of complete strangers did he have someone to get encouragement from, share impressions with, someone who understood him from half a word. Better than any companion was that someone because that was V.

What?! 2-in-1? Doubled? Cloned? Schizocleft?

Whatever. It was just V. Simple as that.

At times they could disagree on a petty issue of an abstract topic, maybe, on a couple of issues, those two Vs. Even a dispute could flare up between them, yet sooner or later there evolved, albeit shaky yet final consensus. Or else one of then had to shut up. As a last resort. Anyway, it stands to no reason, arguing with such a stubborn blockhead, right?

V didn’t gave much thought to why it would be that way. He just got used and felt comfortable enough without asking too many questions. After all an attempt at even most thorough, diligently all-aspects-included answer to any “why?” would no more than slightly scratch the surface of the slope in the mountain rising under the clouds, the Everest of all the possible causes and reasons for why that happened possible. And it’s also very likely, no scratch at all would be left there due to the incomparability of their masses—the mountain and a chance answer singled out from all the possible ones, fairly uncountable.

However, at this current moment they achieved an absolute harmony and both Vs acted unanimously, and they jointly opened their mouth (one for two) and their mutual jaw dropped in utter perplexity. Stack-overflowing bewilderment filled both of them…

(Damn it’s real hard to go down that road, the further the bumpier it gets, clogged with impeding blocks, more and more complicated and impassable turns the path thru the rank grass with the snakes of spelling rules, the thorny hyphens at ready to whip, to stick and tear out the roamer’s eye, and from behind the withered trunks of gloating ghouls ooze and drip from rotten fangs their sticky-stinky, green and pale poison of stylistic appropriateness, snarling scumbag assholes!

Woe me! No way for a hero to scamper over all those Indo-European roots and the land slides of vowel shifts – they are too many but our hero has just two legs for both of them.

Damn! Looks like the only option’s revving back into the lap of the orthodox grammar… but then, repentant sinners are always welcome,.. compare the fate of Giordano with that of Galileo and calm down)…

His stare (Attaboy! Already in singular, not “their”! You can conform to the basic requirements after all. Keep on behaving!) stuck to the monitor Philips which was addressing him personally:

“Look here, V, whenever there would pop up another prophet blaring out about God’s death and stuff, the best policy would be to check if the announcer was a certified coroner – don’t let them fool us by throwing their epilepsy fits.”

The nightmarish nature of the impossibly quaggy situation (how else would you characterize a snafu when, yes, mutely but still you are addressed by your monitor, in white on black, using your first name with a touch of brazen familiarity) was further aggravated by the fact that V knew his answer to this deceptive admonition. Yep, he knew it without even scrolling down to the next line, below the monitor frame.

What’s the use of fiddle-faddle tricks? He recognized his own thought, the thought thought by him a week ago. A fragment of his endless chatting with himself it was. They gossiped, yes, not constantly but often, mutely yet easy, like V to V.

But struck at last the star hour and he pronounces it aloud, using his anatomy speech apparatus, distinctly pronounces V his answer before caressing the wheel in the mouse’s back (exactly between its shoulder blades)—yes, yes, yes, pronounces aloud but not within his brain, pronounces before there will surface the line with his answer:

“The shocking truth, bro V, is I do not give a fuck about any wise advice like yours, when enjoying the resplendence of a line wrought craftily, so will you most kindly shut up?”

Yep. Exactly. Word by word, ditch it or like it. The line flowed up, the prove irrefutable that Lex’ story was not a blab of mind meandering on high, no fucking chance, the evidence was solid as a rock. The Firm he worked for was catching thoughts okay, from that… what-you'd-call-it, noosphere, eh?

Here it was, his, V’s, 2-in-1 thought got in the total catch of their gillnet. Welcome to the new shining world, V!

He leaned on his throne back busted and dull like a bum thrown out the back door, flabber-fucking-gasted by having rammed into the unthinkable discovery.

‘…so that’s how it stands…,' echoed along the curbstone newcomer’s convolutions of his brain, ‘…that’s where we are now… huh?. so what then?.’

Thinking was clearly out of whack. His tries at it slipped over and over again. Because of mute clangs in his middle ear. The vibration spread from the temporal lobes to the pituitary gland and back, yet neither lobes nor gland could hear, lost no less than he in the myriad-folded implications of the sprung-up situation, besides, they were devoid of ears.

And right then, rumbling deafeningly, rushes in the crush-all freight train of endless unpredictably all-embracing-and-overturning consequences to what had just been revealed to him…

For fucking sake! That’s simply…

There sounded the croaks of Samsung bleating its factory settings, cutting hazy, shell-shocked tries at thinking, from his pocket.

What the fuck! It cannot be! He hadn’t made a single call with his virginal SIM card! Not a fucking call from this here number!

Nonetheless, kicking off all hesitations, V answered. The moon-like map of Lex filled the screen. Disturbed and wiry. Too disturbed for the present phase of the full-moon.

’I can’t talk, V! Just believe me. Run! Right now! You’ve got maximum half-minute…

The screen died.

‘What the fu… Was not he arres… My number's compromi…???,' and a bunch of similar half-processed thoughts dashed ahead in their relay race while V—the phone shoved back in his pocket and followed by the 2TD card plucked out its slot in the PC—was running up to his apartment door.

On the landing V tarried a second reading the blinks of digits by the elevator door. After two more levels it would be here. He closed the door with his heart beating louder than the key-click.

V ascended the two stare-flights to the next floor and stopped. To watch. Unobservable.

The elevator slammed open opposite the door just locked by him. Three men in black, exchanging no words or gestures, stepped out. They acted like a well-trained team of professionals, each one performing his part in the routine.

The team stopped close to the wall by the doorjambs. Two of them took out their heats in an open businesslike manner. The third rang the doorbell which sounded within yet remained unanswered. With a disapproving smirk, he fetched from his inside pocket a small bunch of skeleton keys, gave them a sharp look and separated one from the dangling company.

The lock gave out a tame submissive click. The armed part in the team entered the apartment with their tools at ready, the locksmith stayed outside.

Now the specialists would see the working computer in V’s room. Then they would check his bedroom, kitchen, and the restroom, and then…

Carefully V took a soundless step backward…

* * *

8

So what? Whereto now? In two more floors the final stair-flight ran up to the roof entrance guarded by the door in its chastity belt constructed of a thick iron bar in combination with a weighty padlock, a kinda buckle. Some classically helpless dead end.

The obvious truth was further endorsed by the awry statement made with yellow-spray by a disappointed teenager explorer of the roof vistas—a young blade from the growth of the would-be juvenal delinquents. Across the sheet metal in the door surface—the both unforeseen and insurmountable predicament—the young (but having sipped already the bitter taste of disappointing infeasibility) stardust lover announced to all who might be concerned (including, possibly, his own self too) from the frontier pioneers who reached the impasse:

“come to get the fuck!”

To make the message clearer, the blade added a sketch—expressive, jerky, full of feeling (scaled 5:1, in the Picasso’s late period style)—of the middle finger stuck out in the renown bearing.

Some time back, V had an opportunity already to familiarize himself with the setting up there, after a recreational joint. The Moroccan flower awoke the spirit of a thoughtful adventurer and loving admirer of nature.

And then the four of them (two Vs plus those two freshly awoken guys (adventurer + admirer)—although now it’s hard to be sure who was the first to start the whole shit) challenged each other to venture for a mountaineering trek: the higher you get, the wider the vistas, you know.

So, they crawled out and dragged their asses up the winding stair-flights, higher and higher, without a single water-head along the whole trek. He could very easily thirst himself to death in that stressfully strenuous plodding up the unmotivatedly steep flights, yet he did it, already alone—the three weaklings lost on the way—and sympathized, wholeheartedly, both the young sociopath and his yellow graffiti substituting for the light in the end of tunnel, rather askew yet unmistakably sincere.

A classic life-size mouse-trap, there’s no better definition for the keyrdick of the sort he’d got into after the sudden phone call. Going down by the elevator was out of question – the locksmith-sentinel by his apartment door, one level down, would certainly intercept his trip with the ironic wink of his heat’s hole: ‘Whereto, boob?’

Looked like the kid’s prophecy began to come true and wherever you turn – “come to get the fuck!”. That was the one and only outcome forseeable while the racket of adrenaline and the cosmic silence of desperation inundated with their unthinkable mixture V’s veins and everything else they could rush into… made no difference… the final race…

The touch of a hand landing softly onto his shoulder all but tore from his guts a guttural squeak of a run down cub combined with a high jump up on the spot.

But no! Manly kept V himself in hands. Only his hair was hard to control and it bristled up in spikes, when he turned his forehead in minuscular drops of sudden perspiration to fixate his goggle on the soft oval of a young face looking at him from under the crisp stack of light brown curls, and also on the long tapering index finger put across her soft lips in the speechless call for restraint, against the backdrop of the open door to her flat.

She nodded her head towards the entrance in silent invitation. Without giving it a second thought, V followed that goddess from the machine.

(For the record, in the ancient Hellas’ theater they kept a male at that job: Deus ex machina. Alas, sexism was not invented yesterday. An indisputably ugly phenomenon is rooted too deeply, you can’t get rid of it at a couple of hey-hoo! Nope, it’s not as easy as overthrowing a czar who half year back gave up his throne. And no matter how hard the West, stemming by universally accepted estimation from the Greek foundation, swaggers of the emancipation reached by chicks in their gynaecea, birthmarks are still there.

So, what could be expected of the Eastern civilizations? From the stalwart fidels dreaming of their own harems, personal, unquestioning, and humble? They are not as far away from each other as blared by Mr. Kipling out, gynaeceum—harem, g—h. Hi there, Neighbor!

However, you can’t concoct a bestseller of preaching (the guy with his Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck forestalled you) just let’s leave the stuff to Monsieur Diderot or, for the sake of patriotism, to Count Tolstoy who also was a shrewd chop-chop-logic practitioner ..

Hell, no! We’d better leave His Excellency alone, his specialty menu all consists of anti-alcoholism sermons…

Some circus of screwed up freaks we’ve landed into, aren’t we? First, they send their innocent youth to the meat grinder in the Nam jungle or the Town of Bakhmut and then start seeing thru the press tons of didactic booklets to fight all-pervading addiction to drugs in their nations. Understandably though, they for centuries used to harness cart to the horse.

That’s why Leo Tolstoy had to bury his God-bestowed talent into the dunghill of the well-intentioned propaganda…

Besides, you have to make allowance for the changes in the audience. Twitter has drilled them and trained not to understand a thought longer that 280 characters, over which limit the thought starts leaking thru their ears and gives awful headaches to poor things. Whereas the classic used to pour out (when got into the groove after the proper dose of tea) passages which you can never ram into such Procrustes’ bed (280 ch.). So let the old man doze on…

Here! Here! (Invigorated mutual ovation.)

Bravo! All that is so pretty nice. You are smart. Huh? But who has to check and see that the story flow dried up like the Euphrates, eh? Environmental motherfucker, you!

Oh-ho! I beg your pardon dear Reader! Please, this way! Let us step over the threshold and enter the dwelling of the young beautiful savior… or, perhaps, a perfidious man-trap traitor? Right now each and every plot in the trade is steered by the bots of AI, you never can tell what bolt will fuck you from which blue…

Okay, we’ll see what’s what while it evolves, so – full steam ahead! Let us escape the fate of the Euphrates where even an ant would get none of their knees wet…)

They entered the hall and, to the cautious click of the lock, from farther within the apartment there sounded a voice:

‘What’s there, Lia?’

‘A pizza-boy got to the wrong floor, Auntie.’

‘Those boys get dummier each year! Come, close the window I’m chilly,’ went on the same exacting voice.

‘Alright, Auntie! I’m on my way!’

On its own accord and too eagerly to be restrained, the V’s right eye stuck to the slightly spherical glass in the door peep-hole. His palms splayed wide pressed to the plumb vertical surface of the door with the same feeling which brims you up when you caress the streamlined side of your pickup or Porsche and the police officer’s, touting his pistol, yells at you: ‘Keep you hands visible please, Sir?’

Two men swathed in the strange silence of abysmal depths barely accessible for divers crossed the landing behind the hermetic door of the decompression chamber. Four eyes in two separate stares of the scuba divers wearing no masks nor biting their snorkels (but with their heats at ready) scanned with crisscrossed glimpses of the hostilely peeled eyes the situation at the bottom swimming soundlessly by, like in a silent movie, past the V’s frozen, unblinking gaze from his eye clapped to the peep-hole, before getting out of his vision’s encompass.

He wiped the sweat off the brow and turned his face to Lia.

‘Hush!’ whispered the girl and also turned, yet her back to him, to walk with the lithe gait echoing a young panther pliancy, to the nearest door on the left. She never looked back to make sure that he followed her example. As though he had an alternative!.

On entering the room, the girl doffed her brown shoulder bag, dropped it on the spruce cot cover, and left at once.

It was a small bedroom of a person not too sucked in glamorizing decor. His look met no glossy posters appealing to a lover of gory brazenness or, on the contrary, the mellow grace so dear to a misty-eyed consumers.

Still and yet, the person was resolute enough to contribute a thing or two to the design of her home and who also knew her beans about the pop-art which fact was evidenced by the composition made up of computer standard laser disks (yes! the legendary DVD-RW of 4.7 GB! Who would believe they still exist!) to the right from the bed.

The swath of the wall of about two square meters was covered, like with kinda scales, by their thin radiant circles mounted, back-to-back, in close rows reminiscent of a knight’s shining armor or, maybe, the panoply on his comrade-in-arms, loyal steed…

Lia was back pretty soon. She carefully closed the door, turned about, and with an air of expectation looked at him, her rosy lower lip slightly pressed with the pearly rosary of her impeccable teeth.

Something vaguely familiar was there in her face. However, V was in a quandary as to what namely or when and where. To somehow quench his embarrassment, he attempted at an awkward smile.

‘Wow!’ said she. ‘Hi! At last, you did it, congrats!’

With the same irresistible gate she went over and sat down on the chair by the window.

‘Have we ever met?’ After a momentary hesitation asked he sinking onto the second from the couple of chairs in the room.

‘Ha! Twice! In the elevator.’

‘Ah-ha! Sure. I did feel that, yes…’ He shook his head reproachfully at his leaky memory. Now he definitely remembered.

She gave a nod of acknowledgment to his ability of recollecting.

‘Each of the rides up I thought to myself: “Let him smile, just smile, and I’d talk to him. I swear, I’ll do!” But each time you were too deep into your thoughts, which bailed you out – I didn’t want to distract.’

‘But how come… back there on the landing? I couldn’t hear you were unlocking the door.’

‘I had been gone almost but Aunt Silva called me for a second. I came back to tuck her in and returned to the door unlocked already. Just in time to see your troubled back. Why are you so suspicious, V?’

‘What?’ exclaimed V in an inconcealable stupefaction.

’It was cool, ain’t it? You should had watched your face that moment! Easy, man. No sweat. At times, when you see your buddy off, he happens to be too full of gratitude so a couple of levels, both downward and upward, could learn that some V lived about your floor. Once I spotted who made him so happy. You keep a distiller machine at your place?'

‘You’re very cute, Lia. Yet going out on the landing that moment… It was a suspicious move. Why did you help me out?. Or, sooner, saved me?’

‘Seems like I fell for you last year. That’s why. And now tell me what shit are you in?’

‘I wish I knew…’