Belgrade Noir Page 22

  When she got up the courage, Marija entered the room and turned on the overhead light. Marija 2.0 turned her face toward her, smiled, and stood up.

  “You got a nice tan,” she said. “Much nicer than mine. I suppose everything went well? Was Isak a chivalrous lover, a man who will take care of you?”

  Marija gulped, then panicked. This was totally wrong. This shouldn’t be happening. If the programmed return of her artificial copy went wrong—what else could have gone wrong?

  “You know,” continued the woman in front of her who was—and was not—her, “Aleksandar and I had a long, long talk.” She smiled, staring into Marija’s eyes. “And we agree on what is to be done.” Marija 2.0 took a step toward her.

  “Mom . . . Mombasa!” she shouted. “Mombasa!”

  “You were interested in singularity. I have something to tell you about singularity. But we don’t have time for that.” Marija 2.0’s smile was now wider but didn’t reach the woman’s eyes.

  “Mombasa, motherfucker!” Marija yelled. “Momb—” She backed up against something and turned around. Her husband stood right in front of her and smiled, just like the creature she was trying to retreat from.

  She felt a sting in her neck and looked at Aleksandar’s hand. She saw a plastic syringe full of clear liquid and a long glittering needle. She lifted her hand toward the spot where he’d injected her and stared at him with disbelief. Then she crashed onto the parquet floor.

  The worst of it was that she was aware of everything.

  Her eyes were open, she could see, she could hear what was going on, but she couldn’t move or feel anything while they removed her clothes and redressed her. She heard her phone ringing, how Marija 2.0 answered it. “Yes,” she confirmed to the director. “She is here. I used the safe word. You can come for her.”

  Aleksandar looked at her for the last time before he left so the members of the director’s team wouldn’t notice him as they were coming out of the apartment. He peered at her with complete indifference, like she was an object, before he disappeared forever from her sight.

  She didn’t feel someone else’s hands lifting her onto the hospital bed, but she heard voices that mumbled an apology and greeted her copy. She watched the concrete ceiling of the hallway as they pushed her toward the elevator, then a clear night sky with the reflection of the ambulance’s rotating lights, before the view was replaced by the inside roof of the ambulance. The door closed. Her companions were silent while the vehicle moved with the sound of the siren. She tried to estimate how long it would take until they reached Učiteljsko Naselje, and then she gave up. She wondered how this new her, Marija 2.0, would explain to Isak why she had changed her mind. And what would she tell Tamara and her other friends?

  I will disappear and nobody will notice. Because, of course, I will still be here.

  At some point, her pupils narrowed in the presence of the glaring light of the laboratory. The director’s face appeared before her.

  “Perfectly faithful to the original,” he said with undisguised admiration. Marija heard his words, saw the bright light and his face, but she still couldn’t feel her own body, she couldn’t move, blink, speak.

  “Are we following the plan?” someone asked outside of her field of vision, probably one of the technicians.

  “Yes,” the director replied. “The object is to be recycled. We’ll look for an error in the software. There is certainly a trace somewhere, something that will indicate the moment when there was a deviation from the programmed behavior.”

  “Look,” said a technician, his finger touching her right eye, then immediately removing it, shining with moisture.

  “Tears,” the director said. “Unusual.”

  While the technician pushed her on the stretcher toward a small room, he closed her eyelids. Now she had only hearing left—the crunch of rubber wheels on the floor, the distant buzzing of the appliances, and the quiet hum of the air conditioners—and smell: a sweaty technician tilted over her, traces of the cigarette she had smoked on the way from the airport, and hints of the heavy, sweet smell of the expensive perfume that she had used that day, spraying it on her neck, behind her ears, on the insides of her wrists. If she could move her facial muscles, she would have smiled ironically to herself.

  It was the perfume she hadn’t parted with in more than three years.

  Mombasa.

  THE RAT

  by Misha Glenny

  Dorćol

  Miloš calculated that on average, during a six-day week, he was completely bored roughly 61 percent of the time. Eighteen percent of the time, he was able to distract himself by playing Xenonauts 2. He was impressed by the transition from the original Xenonauts which featured 2-D sprites. Although he loved these sprites, like most Xenonauts devotees, he was surprised and genuinely impressed by the transition to 3-D graphics in the updated version.

  As long as his boss wasn’t around, he could play. The assistant manager, Jovana, didn’t care, while Bane was so in awe of Miloš that he wouldn’t dare snitch.

  The remaining 21 percent of his time was taken up dealing with customers. This being Knez Mihailova, a notable proportion of the customers were well off. Miloš had quickly noticed that there was no apparent correlation between wealth and intelligence. The richer the client, the more they struggled with their smartphones. Almost all had mastered turning the device off and on. Beyond that, most could usually manage phone calls, WhatsApp messages, SMS, and playing music. But even these simple functions still baffled some.

  Miloš pondered long and hard as to why people were so stupid, but he struggled to come up with any answer. It didn’t really bother him. Quite the contrary—their incompetence provided him with endless entertainment. Whether selling a new phone or just swapping a SIM card, he had ample time to install the custom malware that he had written which acted as a Remote Access Tool (RAT). The customers, of course, had absolutely no idea what Miloš was up to. Nor did the service providers, nor did Google or Apple, who had created the environment in which Miloš liked to play.

  Instead, the customers squealed with delight when Miloš got their shiny new phones up and running and demonstrated how to play Flappy Bird which, again to his surprise, they considered to be some form of achievement (here I differ from Miloš as I believe that Flappy Bird is irritatingly difficult and that Miloš underestimates his facility with this game—of course, by his standards the Flappy Bird trick is indeed unremarkable).

  Having safely built his RAT a new lair on the customer’s device, he would stroll back home across Studentski Trg and down Dositijeva before he arrived at his father’s large, ghostly apartment.

  Here he would start remotely scanning the contents of his latest victim’s phone. His favorite sport was going through WhatsApp. He had noticed early on that people were invariably less discreet and less inhibited on WhatsApp than they were on their normal messaging apps.

  He calculated that 73 percent of users talked with disarming frankness about sex in their exchanges. Roughly 18 percent would regularly send explicit photographs or videos of themselves. These were not always what one might expect. One middle-aged man sent short videos of himself eating breakfast naked. Miloš concluded that the recipient was another man. The morning fare consisted of a bowl of fruit. After the recipient had viewed the video, he would send back one word—the name of a new fruit. And the next morning, the sender would once again sit at his breakfast table, but with the new fruit.

  Miloš watched this ritual for about a week before getting witlessly bored. But it did give him a few days of contemplation. Whichever way he considered it, intellectually or emotionally, he simply couldn’t grasp why anyone would derive the least pleasure from this activity, although, he noted, the fruits were ever more exotic, and it had inspired him to track down and sample a passion fruit. Not as easy in Belgrade as you might think, even these days.

  Blackmail, threats, and passive aggression were almost ubiquitous on the WhatsApp exchanges. Again,
this perplexed Miloš. Why were people so unpleasant to each other? What satisfaction did they derive from this? And did his relative calm mean that he was too ordinary?

  In truth, he knew he was far from ordinary, but the vicious and cruel emotional habits of so many humans were still something he could not fathom.

  Leaving aside the monstrous intrusion into others’ privacy, his examination of the phones was vital to sustaining Miloš’s good humor. Ever since his mother died when he was fourteen, his emotional life had all but atrophied. His father, whom he suspected of having had a role in his mother’s death, showed no interest in Miloš whatsoever. Recently, Miloš had been researching his father’s past to discover that his rise to wealth and notoriety had coincided with the eleven years of Miloševic’s turbulent reign.

  The more he understood his father, the less he liked him. Yet he was entirely dependent on him financially. His father barely exchanged any words with Miloš. But he was generous and did not use money as a tool to blackmail or control his son. There was always food in the house, and on those rare occasions when Miloš asked for something extra, his father gave it to him without hesitation. But in exchange, his father made it clear that he wished to have no relationship with his son beyond this. Miloš was alone.

  Miloš sometimes came home to find his father entertaining his rather crude, unpleasant colleagues. There was business in the air, but Miloš didn’t know what, nor did he inquire. Sometimes, instead of a business colleague, the visitor would be an impressionable young woman draping herself around his father. Just as he couldn’t quite understand the stupidity of wealthy people, he was dumbfounded that any woman who was more or less his own age would want to engage in any kind of sexual interaction with his father.

  One spring morning, Miloš was at work alone. No colleagues, no customers. He smiled and settled into his chair to explore the Farm in the American Midwest. He had received intelligence that aliens had recently landed. He suspected they may have been preparing for an all-out attack. Again, he was called upon to save the earth from executors of the dreaded Supreme Intergalactic Court.

  In the distance, he spotted one and began to creep toward the target with exactly the requisite stealth to ensure that the alien wouldn’t be alerted to his presence. His finger was on the trigger of his laser grenade launcher—the alien perfectly in his sights. Hit this guy and Miloš will have delivered perhaps a fatal blow to the aliens’ tactics of establishing their forward base in North America. But accuracy was everything . . .

  “Good morning.” The interruption caused him to lose his balance. The alien’s head turned. Miloš had no choice but to cut, run, and lose most of the data from the session.

  Inside he was seething.

  Then he saw the customer. Never had anger dissipated with such rapidity and such sincerity. If this is a dream, Miloš thought, then let me never wake up. Unlike so many young women Miloš had observed, there was nothing artificial about her. No hair dye, no spray-on tan, only the merest hint of makeup, the most discreet jewelry, deep green eyes set in features symmetrical enough to launch a thousand Xenonauts.

  Miloš had to close his half-open mouth consciously. It had momentarily suffered an unexpected attack of lockjaw. Pulling himself together, he inquired how he could help her.

  As effortless as she was in her appearance, so was she in verbal exchanges. “Why, thank you. I do hope you can sort this out. My iPhone appears to run out of power in less than an hour. Is it time to ask for an upgrade?”

  “Normally, madame,” said Miloš before clearing his throat, “I would suggest that you invest in an expensive upgrade. Under pressure from my superiors, you understand. But, in all honesty, you probably only need to replace the battery. It’ll take an hour or so, but once I’ve done it, it should be as good as new.”

  “That is so very kind of you,” the woman replied.

  “You’re most welcome,” said Miloš with exaggerated politeness.

  She pulled the iPhone out of her back pocket, placed it on the desk, and then with those green eyes seizing Miloš’s gaze, she gently waved goodbye. “See you in an hour . . .”

  As he examined her iPhone, unrestrained desire surged through Miloš’s body. The phone requested a code. He tapped in 0000 and the lock screen dissolved to reveal the woman’s secrets. Notwithstanding his sudden infatuation, he muttered his familiar rhetorical question, “Why do they make it so easy?”

  * * *

  That evening, his usual saunter turned into a breathless sprint down Dositijeva. Once home, he kicked off his shoes and walked quickly through the large, empty apartment until he reached his bedroom. He switched on his computer and immediately accessed the phone remotely.

  She was twenty-five years old. Along with Serbian, she spoke English, Italian, and German. She traveled a lot but he could find nothing about her employment. He realized that this was her personal phone and she must have used another one for work. Her friends were not just Serbian but from across Europe and the US.

  He hesitated before entering WhatsApp but eventually got up enough courage. He knew that this would reveal much about her intimate life. He was torn between his vision of her purity and his barely controllable desire to soak in the imagined reality of her sexual being.

  Just as he decided to finally click on the app, an alert flashed on his screen. The remote phone had been attached to another device. Miloš rushed to his laptop and flipped it open before feverishly typing in various commands. Within a minute, he had access to her desktop. Using the RAT, he activated her camera.

  Her bedroom was predictably elegant. Minimalist but not austere. Above a luxurious but tasteful sofa, there was a poster of a giant cat smirking and holding a gun. Below this, a small table upon which sat a large metal statuette—a man in a great coat smoking a cigar. Miloš zoomed in. Underneath the bust on a little plinth was the inscription: Comrade Tito. To the left was what looked like a walk-in closet and to the right side of the computer, Miloš assumed there was a door leading out of the room. Against the wall, a large double bed.

  Katarina started playing something on her iTunes. Miloš had never heard the song although he identified it as German. So he looked on her computer—Udo Lindenberg, “Unterm Säufermond.” She was lying on her sofa, and as the melancholic sounds floated over her, he focused on those green eyes and realized that she had begun to cry.

  He was frozen with a sympathy that he couldn’t articulate. Least of all to her. As the song came to an end, she left the room, returning with a large glass of red wine. Miloš longed to be there to offer her comfort. But, real as this was, it was mediated by virtual deception.

  At this point, Katarina started to remove her top. This was too much for Miloš to process and he slammed his computer shut.

  * * *

  Try as he might, Miloš could not keep away from her computer. Each time he watched her undress, he would wait a little longer before slamming down the top of his computer, overcome with guilt and anger at himself. At the same time, he felt betrayed because her WhatsApp messages indicated that she was having an affair. Her lover had yet to pay a visit to her apartment, but Miloš suspected it was only a matter of time.

  Xenonauts 2 still provided a healthy distraction. The latest version was proving to be a magnificent challenge. He would play with intense concentration for two hours and then he would return to Katarina. By now, he knew every contour of what he considered her celestial body. Deep inside, his conscience was telling him that what he was doing was infernally immoral. Unfortunately, burning desire could outmaneuver his conscience. When at work, he distracted himself by thinking of ways in which he might approach her, how he might declare his resolute, adamantine, and eternal love. Should he casually bump into her as she was leaving her apartment? But what would he say? Hey, miss, you remember me? I fixed your iPhone. Fancy a drink? Preposterous.

  Perhaps he could research fine red wines and present a rare bottle to her as a gift. There was something about this idea that
appealed to him. He could get the necessary cash from his father.

  But he couldn’t quite complete the plan in his head. How would he actually fashion a situation whereby giving her the bottle of wine would not appear, well, weird? Would he suggest that they drink it together? Or simply walk away with a euphoric smile on his face? These were details he had yet to finalize. But he felt that he had at least a seed of an idea.

  Newly inspired, Miloš flipped open the lid of his computer. It was six thirty p.m., around the time that Katarina usually arrived home. He was in luck. The RAT told him her computer was already on. He switched on the camera. Early on, he had programmed the little green light at the top of her Mac only to turn on if she used it. So, as he was watching her, she would be ignorant of his presence.

  As soon as the familiar room came up on his screen, he noted that something was odd. Something was distorting the image of the room which was by now seared into the screen of his mind. Then he spotted it. There were two glasses by the now familiar bottle of French wine. Not one.

  Miloš’s insides began to churn. He’d known that this moment would come at some point. He’d known he would have to watch his beloved Katarina have sex with somebody else. In his mind, he didn’t reproach her for it. How could she carry any blame? She was unaware of the depth, the sincerity, not to mention the existence of his passion for her. He believed that once their friendship and companionship were established, then the cursory carnal pleasures that her other male friends delivered would disappear into the woods.

  Suddenly, Katarina returned, switching off the main bedroom light as she entered before flicking another switch. Her bedside lamp threw but a modest dull circle of light across the left side of her bed. The lamp was beyond Miloš’s field of vision and so it was only the dark shapes of Katarina and her friend that he observed in a state of controlled frenzy as they impatiently removed each other’s clothes. Miloš was close to tears as he watched her being defiled and dishonored. But he could no longer restrain himself and less than a minute into the event, his reluctant excitement was seeping stickily into the keyboard.