bro, only for you, one credit! One bloody credit! Please! Where else are you gonna get that much joy for that little money?”
Having lost any hope of catching the fidgety seller by the sensor, Y sighed and quickened his pace. The man did not fall behind. He followed Y without shutting up for a second. He was urging and begging and pleading. Then he turned to threats, and then again to pleas, and subsided only when the subway intake filter dispersed him into dust, after first letting Y inside.
***
The crowd brought Y into a subway carriage and pressed him to the doors. He rode, looking at his own reflection in the door glass. His face looked… Well, his face looked quite acceptable. A pig’s snout instead of a nose, okay, but only because of the crowd. Everything else was fine. He was glass and transparent, all made of dusty wavy cables and rare thoughtful flickers. Behind him, above a humid mass of passengers, butterflies were flying to and fro peacefully. The butterflies were big, white and annoying. There were hundreds of them in the subway; they were hunting around the world all through the night, collecting pollen, just to powder it down on the heads of the passengers in the morning. Passengers take it for dandruff, but they are all mistaken; it is just the news.
Y squinted and read that one should not lean on doors. According to statistics, subway passengers experience problems in the intimate sphere more often than owners of personal vehicles. And practically only they, the passengers, are subject to such an unpleasant phobia as a panicked fear of embraces. Do not lean on doors. He sighed, turned away and remembered:
He was emerald green…
He sighed again. A good text but it does not fit Jack. Jack from his book was, rather, of marsh green color (like a frog, yes, or like Z) with, maybe, a little hint of turquoise (inherited from Y). Lately, however, he was just gray most of the time. Well, in childhood, of course, he had shone like a rainbow. And then somehow he had either lost something necessary or, on the contrary, acquired something redundant. It was both incredible and mundane. It seemed to Y that every child was born a god to become a devil. And his book, he knew, was going to do the same. It had nothing good in it except for fairy stories about Jack of Air. But that, Y knew, was already a lot. And the only thing he feared was that one day Jack would leave him
Chapter 5 | The Undo Officer
When Toy arrived at the gateway of the Undo service building, the clock showed ten minutes past eleven. Z emerged from the car and moved towards the checkpoint; he stopped, and then after some hesitation, he returned with a liter bottle of olive oil from the trunk. Thrusting it under his jacket, and keeping it under his armpit, he entered the building. Each time, walking along this corridor, Z recalled a scary story from his childhood: “In a very gray house there was a very gray corridor. And at the end of this very gray corridor there was a very gray door. And behind that very gray door, there was a very gray room. And in this very gray room, there was a very gray table. And behind this very gray table there sat a very gray man.”
“SHOW YOUR PASS!” shouted the guard.
The guard truly was gray, as was everything else in the building. While his upper half towered menacingly above the table, his body had no lower half. He was a very simple model not designed to walk the building. His task was to check employees’ passes at the entrance. Z showed his badge.
“Your reason for the delay?” the guard asked in a bored voice.
“Sick leave,” Z answered boldly, presenting his certificate to the guard.
The guard studied the document.
“Confirmed visit to otolaryngologist from 8:30 till 9:15. Confirmed sick leave from 9:15 till 11:15. Please provide documentation for the period from 8:00 till 8:30.”
“It was force-majeure,” Z tried at random.
“There were no events of force-majeure nature registered in the given period,” the guard replied immediately.
“It was a local cataclysm. I would even say, a private one,” Z explained.
“Private cataclysms are not in the list of events approved for…”
“Forget it,” Z interrupted the guard, pulling a bottle of oil from under his jacket. A thirty-minute delay meant a fine of fifteen credits. A bottle of the worst olive oil cost only five. The guard’s hand darted forward like an attacking snake and he snatched the bottle from Z. Then the guard twisted himself in a rather unnatural way, unscrewed something on his back and began to pour the contents of the bottle into it. As the bottle was emptying, the guard’s optical lenses shined brighter and brighter. Finally, they began to blaze in such a way that it hurt Z to look at them; he actually had to turn away.
“I wonder how you’re going to work?” he said gloomily.
“I don’t give an iron shit,” the guard announced emphatically, returning the empty bottle to Z. “Come on, man, move your pink ass and hit the road. I have work to do.”
Z shook his head and moved on. Behind him, a song broke out:
“Iron heart cannot ache
Nor can iron brain dream,
And Steel God is a fake
And steel Spirit is steam.”
It was a forbidden song, although, of course, every robot knew it. Masters knew it too. But never before had Z seen someone singing it aloud. For all he knew, Deconstruction was the punishment for such an offence.
“Love is managed by programs
Friends are given by bugs,
Life is weighed in grams
And is priced in the bucks.
But they say there is land
Whence red meat was banished,
Any warm flesh was banned
And live clay has perished…”
The door slammed behind Z cutting the song short.
***
In the room, a commandant at the table was anxiously listening to something.
“Did you hear that?” he asked nervously.
Z shook his head, and the commandant sighed. Though having both a rank and IQ higher than that of the guard, he still was not entitled to have a lower half either.
“This work is driving me mad. It seemed to me that I heard… Well, it does not matter.”
He scratched the back of his neck with a shrill metallic sound, making Z suffer from a sudden attack of a nasty toothache.
“Well,” the commandant cheered up, “let’s proceed to the instruction.”
He raised his finger with importance.
“First and foremost: there were new changes in the Charter of the Undo service. Namely, in the tenth line of page thirty-six of the first book of the Charter, the phrase ‘An Undo officer is not afraid of anything but dishonor’ was replaced with ‘An Undo officer fears nothing.’ Next. In the third line of page two hundred thirty-eight of the third book of the Charter…”
The commandant stopped.
“You are not writing this down,” he remarked.
“I will remember,” Z promised.
The commandant shook his head doubtfully and continued.
“In the third line of page two hundred thirty-eight of the second book of the Charter a phrase ‘An Undo officer must conscientiously fulfill…’ was replaced with ‘An Undo officer must zealously fulfill…’ Finally, in a footnote on the sixtieth