Empire V Read Online Free PDF Page A

directed.
    â€˜Is there any danger?’
    â€˜None at all. Vampires are immune to any diseases transmitted by red liquid.’
    I did as I was told, and Mithra carefully deposited on my tongue a few drops from the test tube. I could detect no difference between the liquid and ordinary water: if there was anything alien it, it had no taste.
    â€˜Now rub your tongue against your upper gum, inside the teeth. You will see something after this. We call it the personality map.’
    I touched the palate with the tip of my tongue. Now I could feel something extrinsic. It was not painful, more of a slight tingling, as if from a low-powered electrical current. I took my tongue several times round the palate, and suddenly …
    Had I not still been strapped to the bars, I would have lost my balance. Without warning I experienced a blindingly powerful sensation, unlike anything I had previously known. I was seeing, or more accurately feeling, another human being from the inside, as if I had myself become him, as sometimes happens in dreams.
    Inside the aurora-borealis-like cloud within which the apparition presented itself to me, I could distinguish two contrasting zones, repulsion and attraction, dark and light, cold and hot. The zones overlapped at multiple points forming overlays and archipelagos so that the intersections sometimes resembled islands of warmth in a frozen sea, at other times icebound lakes in a temperate landscape. Everything in the zone of repulsion was unpleasant and painful – all the things this person did not like. The attraction zone, by contrast, contained all that gave him reason to live.
    I was looking at what Mithra had called his ‘personality map’. Indeed, I could sense an invisible path threading through both zones, hard to describe but nevertheless palpable, like rails along which, insensibly and involuntarily, the attention slid. It had been formed by traces of the mind’s habitual pathways, a furrow worn by repeated thoughts, a meandering trajectory of the mind’s daily cognitive processes. By studying the personality map for a few seconds it was possible to penetrate the subject’s most salient characteristics. I did not need Mithra to explain this to me; it was as if I had known it all along.
    This particular individual worked as an IT engineer in a Moscow bank and harboured a multiplicity of secrets, some of them shameful, which he kept from other people. But the most insidious, the most secret and humiliating of all his problems, was his inadequate grasp of Windows.
    He hated it, and had been hating many a version of this operating system for more than a decade already – as a long-term convict in the camps learns to hate several generations of guards. The depth of his hatred verged on the comic, to the extent that when Windows Vista came on stream he would be upset by hearing the Spanish expression ‘ hasta la vista ’ when he went to the cinema. Everything connected to his line of work was to be found in his zone of repulsion, and in the centre of this zone fluttered the flag of Windows.
    At first I thought that sex was the nodal point of the zone of attraction. But when I looked more closely, I saw that the chief source of joy in this particular life was, in fact, beer. Stated simply, the man lived to drink good German beer immediately after sex, and for this was ready to endure all the horrors of fate. He may not have known himself what for him was the key to life, but to me it was as clear as day.
    I cannot claim that the stranger’s life was opened to me in its entirety. It was more as though I stood at the half-open door of a darkened room, tracing by the light of a torch the images depicted on its walls. Whenever I allowed the light to linger on a particular picture it would momentarily expand and then dissolve into hundreds of others; this pattern was repeated again and again. Theoretically I could have accessed every single one of the