Transreal Cyberpunk Read Online Free PDF Page B

long kilometers from Moscow. Even London, England, is twice as close to Moscow as Tunguska.
    A secondary-line engine hauled our string of cars to a tiny railway junction in the absolute middle of nowhere. Then it chugged away. It was four in the morning of June 26, but since it was summer it was already light. There were five families running the place, living in log cabins chinked with mud.
    Our ranking KGB officer, an officious jerk named Chalomei, unsealed our doors. Vlad and I jumped out onto the rough boards of the siding. After days of ceaseless train vibration we staggered around like sailors who’d lost their land-legs. All around us was raw wilderness, huge birches and tough Siberian pines, with knobby, shallow roots. Permafrost was only two feet underground. There was nothing but trees and marsh for days in all directions. I found it very depressing.
    We tried to strike up a conversation with the local supervisor. He spoke bad Russian, and looked like a relocated Latvian. The rest of our company piled out, yawning and complaining.
    When he saw them, our host turned pale. He wasn’t much like the brave pioneers on the posters. He looked scrawny and glum.
    “Quite a place you have here,” I observed.
    “Is better than labor camp, I always thinking,” he said. He murmured something to Vlad.
    “Yeah,” Vlad said thoughtfully, looking at our crew. “Now that you mention it, they are all police sneaks.”
    With much confusion, we began unloading our train cars. Slowly the siding filled up with boxes of rations, bundled tents, and wooden crates labeled SECRET and THIS SIDE UP.
    A fight broke out between our civilians and our Red Army detachment. Our Kaliningrad folk were soon sucking their blisters and rubbing strained backs, but the soldiers refused to do the work alone.
    Things were getting out of hand. I urged Vlad to give them all a good talking-to, a good, ringing speech to establish who was who and what was what. Something simple and forceful, with lots of “marching steadfastly together” and “storming the stars” and so on.
    “I’ll give them something better,” said Vlad, running his hands back through his hair. “I’ll give them the truth.” He climbed atop a crate and launched into a strange, ideologically incorrect harangue.
    “Comrades. You should think of Einstein’s teachings. Matter is illusion. Why do you struggle so? Spacetime is the ultimate reality. Spacetime is one, and we are all patterns on it. We are ripples, Comrades, wrinkles in the fabric of the ...”
    “Einstein is a tool of International Zionism,” shouted someone.
    “And you are a dog,” said Vlad evenly. “Nevertheless you and I are the same. We are different parts of the cosmic One. Matter is just a ...”
    “Drop dead,” yelled another heckler.
    “Death is an illusion,” said Vlad, his smile tightening. “A person’s spacetime pattern codes an information pattern which the cosmos is free to ...”
    It was total gibberish. Everyone began shouting and complaining at once, and Vlad’s speech stuttered to a halt.
    Our KGB colonel Chalomei jumped up on a crate and declared that he was taking charge. He was attached directly to the Chief Designer’s staff, he shouted, and was fed up with our expedition’s laxity. This was nothing but pure mutiny, but nobody else outranked him in KGB. It looked like Chalomei would get away with it. He then tried to order our Red Army boys to finish the unloading.
    But they got mulish. There were six of them, all Central Asian Uzbeks from Uckduck, a hick burg in Uzbekskaja. They’d all joined the Red Army together, probably at gunpoint. Their leader was Master Sergeant Mukhamed, a rough character with a broken nose and puffy, scarred eyebrows. He looked and acted like a tank.
    Mukhamed bellowed that his orders didn’t include acting as house-serfs for egghead aristocrats. Chalomei insinuated how much trouble he could make for Mukhamed, but Mukhamed only laughed.
    “I may be