I follow the band, any direction can be correct – if directions exist here at all. The rain thickens, the crystals become thinner turning into needles. I lower my head to protect the eyes and keep walking. I like what's going on for some reason: somebody fights with somebody.

It means I have a chance.

Neither distance nor time here, all measures are merged. Maybe one hour have passed, maybe three kilometers.

Maybe the madness have come.

The band soars ahead but its movements are slower and less sure. It's just an orange rag now, tattered by the rain. The last leap – and it falls down raising the geyser of white dust.

Is it over?

I stand over remains of my strange guide. What now? No more guiding line. I close my eyes – and hear a weak distant sound. Deep program doesn't work with sounds! They say, or maybe these are just rumors, that Dima Dibenko's computer didn't have a sound card.

I keep walking.

The sound becomes louder but not clearer. The forest stream can babble like this, or the distant surf, or the candle flame. Whatever, even if it's an echo of the Big Bang! I need this sound, this lack of silence!

One step, another.

Even through the closed eyelids I can feel that something have changed.

I open my eyes. The world's colors seem to be faded. The emerald rain have lost its brightness, became pale: not gems but dirty bottle glass is pouring down from the sky. The white dust under my feet is barely seen.

And the blue star is shining ahead. A splinter of the blue sky.

Either it became bigger or I grew smaller, but the sparkling blue sphere is right above me now. I stretch my hands touching warm rays, and fall into the star.

The wind.

The cold wind blows into my face.

I rose from the snow-covered ground. Wherever I look – the plain, flat as a table, no horizon can be seen. The sky is covered with orange tangling threads, a blue light streams through them. And also – foggy jets flowing above the ground, changing brightness and density, flying against the wind and soaring up to the orange mesh of the sky.

I shook the snow from my knees and looked at my hand. A strange snow – crystals are too big, friable and not sticking together. They hiss on my hand and fly away in a light smoke.

– I'm glad you came Lenia, – says Unfortunate from behind.

I didn't have time to turn around, he almost shouted:

– No… don't!

The plain enveloped in fog, the cold wind, the crumbly snow… I swallowed the lump that stuck in my throat:

– Unfortunate… thank you.

– I had to help, – he replied very seriously, – At least to try. You rescued me after all.

– Not very successfully…

– But you've led me out. I felt bad there…

– I can guess that. But you could pass "Labyrinth" in an hour… in 10 minutes.

– Lenia…

– You could just exit, or could beat all the records.

– No, I couldn't.

– But why?

– Haven't you understood yet? – surprise showed in his voice.

– You didn't want to kill?

– Yes.

– But all that wasn't for real!

– For you.

– I won't ever be able to be like you.

– But this isn't necessary at all, Gunslinger.

– You know, – I said fighting the temptation to turn around, – Once, for just a second it seemed to me… only for a second… that you're Messiah. Do you understand?

Unfortunate is very serious.

– No Leonid. I wouldn't like to be your God. Neither of those that you created. They are too cruel.

– Just as we are.

– Just as you are, – echoed Unfortunate with sadness in his voice.

– Is it a dream? – I asked after a while, – Everything I see around?

He was silent for very long, the one behind my back who asked me not to turn around.

– No Lenia. Even if it is, it's not yours.

I understood.

– Thank you.

I wasn't cold, maybe because he wanted so. The gray grained snow didn't burn me, and neither did foggy jets. Maybe it was easy for him, maybe required an enormous effort? I don't know.

– Did you have time to escape? – I asked.

– Yes. We're driving through the city now. Vika gives one address after another to the driver… Looks like she doesn't know what to do.

Unfortunate paused for a moment, then added:

– And she's crying also.

Orange bands whirl in the sky, an eternal dance below the hot blue sun. Maybe it's beautiful after all…

– Tell her I'm alright.

– Is it true?

– I don't know. Will you help me to get out of here?

Unfortunate didn't answer.

– Will I be able to get out?

– Yes. Probably.

– Tell Vika that everything is alright.

– She won't believe me.

– She will. She have almost understood too. Tell her that there's a "Polyana" company in the Russian district of Deeptown. It owns just a single house, a kind of dull concrete 12– story building. Wait for me there, by the second doorway, in exactly one hour.

– Anything else, Leonid?

– No. That's all.

– It'll be very hard, Gunslinger. – Unfortunate stammers, – You're accustomed to fight the Deep. The force and the push. You're a good swimmer, you always managed to surface from the whirlpool. But now it won't work.

– Aren't you accustomed to rely on the force?

– Depending on what force, Gunslinger…

Something touched my shoulder lightly, either in parting or to reassure.

And then the orange threaded sky fell on the snow covered ground…

I rise – in droplets of colors, in kaleidoscope of sparks. The deep program works. I still can't see my body.

Only a faint memory of the touch lives in me.

I still remember that world, I'm still living there, in an alien distant dream…

– What the hell are you doing, Dibenko? – I whisper into the crazy silence. – We can't… we can't treat him our way.

He can't hear me, the accidental creator of the virtual world, he continues his pursuit after Unfortunate, a hunt for the miracle but I must find him to explain how wrong he is…

I close my eyes and stretch my hands to the sides. Colorful flashes behind closed eyelids – the deep program continues to envelope my brains.

First of all – be calm. There's nothing demonic in it, it's a sparkling trinket, the one that hypnotizers rotated before their patients' eyes – that's what the deep program is. A trinket of the electronic age. There's no border between the dream and the dream within the dream. It's me who builds these barriers, who convinces himself that he's drowning.

But now – it's time to surface.

– Abyss… – I whisper almost tenderly, – Abyss-abyss…

We were building it, placing bricks of computers on the cement of phone lines. We raised a huge city. The city that has neither good nor bad in it – not until we come.

It was hard for us in the present. There, where the passion of many days of somebody's program cracking and of many months of writing our own is not understood. There, where they talk not about falling prices for a Meg of RAM, but about rising prices for bread. In the world where the killings are real. In the world where it's so hard for the sinners and the saints and the common people alike.

We built our own city that doesn't know borders, we believed in it's being real.

Time to surface.

We wanted miracles and we inhabited Deeptown with them. The Elvish glades and Martian deserts, labyrinths and cathedrals, far-away stars and sea depths, a place was found for everything.

But now – it's time to surface.

We got tired to believe in kindness and love, we wrote the word 'freedom' on our banner believing in our naivety that the freedom is superior to love.

Time to grow up.

– Let me go, abyss, – I ask, – Abyss-abyss… I'm yours.