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his sister got worse and her surgery was quickly scheduled. Even though he still didn’t have the money.

That was when Isaac made the decision. He knew that his creativity level was high and

having sold his orange energy, he'd have enough money for surgery, for buying his own house, and for many other things. He definitely would never forgive himself if his sister died, he wouldn’t want any money then. Better to be a Happy with a zero creative index than a smart guy whose wealth cost the life of the only person he really cared for.

So yes, this was the other side of professor Linkś Einsteiner - thousands of gifted people turned into ruck. But was this a price too big, since wars and diseases that had took away millions of lives every year, were now things of the past?

Isaac felt like hypothesizing about the other donors, who they were, where they came

from. The old man clearly decided to supplement the provisions of his pension or maybe was just a patriot. Very straight-backed, in spite of his age, not slouching at all. He was probably not from around there, since many people came over from other places to download and then stay. The hobo most likely was also looking for money, tired of living in a tent. Even with a climate as beautiful as in Monaco, living outside must not be that nice. The plain-looking goofily dressed guy was trifling a photo of some girl, so probably the reason was like Pascal’s, and he was in love.

Isaac never had time to finish this thought. The hobo-looking guy suddenly jumped up,

grabbing everyone’s attention, pulled out a crucifix and started yelling: ”May the Lord be with us!”, as he began throwing smoke-puff explosives.

That was when Isaac made his unsuccessful attempt to flee…

“The doomed one!” These words tolled in Isaac's head like an alarm bell. Scared and

adrenalized, he froze, not moving a finger. His eyes saw nothing. He hated himself for this pathetic attempt to flee. It was not him he worried about – it was Vicky. If he got killed now, she would inevitably die too. How could he have acted so stupid, not even knowing if the terrorist had accomplices or if the door was open? How could he risk Vicky's life so recklessly?

“Please, don’t kill me!” he mumbled huskily, closing his eyes tight.

No answer. He slowly opened his eyes. The smoke was clearing, no more tears, and when

he cautiously looked at the terrorist, he couldn’t help smiling: the thing pointing at him was …

the cross! Not a gun, just a usual crucifix! Water, smoke and fear portrayed the big black thing in the terrorist’s hand as a pistol.

The terrorist beckoned him to get to his feet and suddenly gripped the receptionist girl by the throat. With his other hand he held something to her back and shouted:

“Where is it? Where's the Einsteiner?”

The girl gasped and fainted, not falling on the floor because the terrorist was holding her.

The security guard, still on his feet, looked as if he absolutely didn’t know what to do, too scared to move.

“Let her go,” the old man who was among the donors suddenly said with a firm and calm

voice, “She’s just an office worker, not likely to know anything. My name is Colonel Joyce. Tell me what is it you want?”

“What I want is to destroy this devil’s machine. I want to tear its devil’s heart out!”

“Hmmm,” thought Isaac. “Yet another religious fanatic and it looks like he’s genuinely

insane to boot.” He stood there obediently, gradually recovering his wits, the panic was receding.

The TV sometimes reported attacks on the Agency. But only rarely, and besides, when you watch something on TV it doesn’t occur to you that the same thing could actually happen for real.

The colonel got up off his chair and asked the guard in a commanding voice:

“Where’s your central computer?”

The guard shrugged in uncertainty, and the old man addressed his question to one of the employees.

“Over th-th-there,” the woman gasped out, stammering through her tears, and waved her

hand in the direction of a big futuristic-looking silver computer standing in a room, separated from the reception hall by a glass wall.

The terrorist pushed the woman aside and in two rapid strides reached the back office

door and kicked it open. He lifted the computer above his head and slammed it down hard onto the floor. Ripping the wires, he furiously raised it again and again above his head and slammed it onto the stone floor until it fell to pieces. On some of those pieces he stepped in anger, as if trying to reduce them to dust.

The security man was still standing there, glued to the ground.

“Everyone down on the floor, cover your heads! Don’t do anything!” roared the colonel,

getting down.

The ferocious power in his order sent everyone tumbling unquestioningly to the floor,

even the security man obeyed. The only left standing was Isaac who didn’t want to piss the terrorist off again.

The hobo carried on smashing the computer in the office, frenziedly ripping out wires and various attachments. Isaac could hear something grating and plastic splintering and through this racket came the howling of a siren out in the street and brusque voices. The police! He remembered that the station was just a hundred meters away. He heard the sound of breaking glass and then a monstrous blow to the head knocked him off his feet and he lost consciousness.

It took a while before Isaac could think clearly, his head was buzzing and spinning and he felt slightly nauseous. They were dragging him somewhere, with his arms in handcuffs painfully twisted behind his back. A van, a police station, iron bars slamming loudly, and his

consciousness fully recovered once he was in the cell. “Never mind, they’ll figure things out,” he thought wearily and slumped onto the metal bed. Still feeling a bit sick, he closed his eyes and instantly blanked out.

He dreamt of a war…. a big war. He didn’t know who was fighting whom or why, but he

saw a nuclear explosion, the plane falling. Whole districts were set on fire. He saw a lot of

different cities without names, and all he knew was that one of them was Paris. Isaac observed the immense, towering conflagration from a hill about thirty kilometers away. He couldn’t make anything out clearly, but he knew for certain that it was Paris. He was gazing, spellbound at the appalling spectacle, when suddenly some soldiers drove up, six or maybe eight of them.

There was no fear, he calmly emptied his cartridge clip into the first two, grabbed his automatic and killed the others. He did it absolutely dispassionately, quickly and without a single hitch, feeling slightly frustrated that the bullets – they were bright blue, he could see them quite clearly – flew through the air with a strange slowness. Darkness. The picture had disappeared.

Isaac was somewhere between sleep and waking, and he even started trying to analyze his dream, still without waking up:

“In real life he was not capable of murdering someone, but this wasn’t the first time he killed in a dream. What can you say about the life of a man in whose dreams cities burn, wars are fought and planes crash?”

Someone was prodding Isaac insistently in the side, and he finally woke up. He just

wanted to be left alone to sleep. His head was filled with some kind of soft goo, weariness had eaten its way into his thoughts and settled there, but his annoying neighbor wouldn’t stop. The drowsiness in Isaac’s eyes gradually dispersed and he recognized who it was. He was in the same prison cell as the terrorist. Isaac knew there must have been some sort of mistake!

The hobo woke up Isaac, and was attentively looking into his eyes.

“Hey, how are you doing?” he inquired.

“Fine.”

“That’s good, good. You sure?”

“Fine,” Isaac repeated angrily.

The stranger gave him another searching look.

“What’s your name, lad?”

“Fine,” hissed Isaac again and closed his eyes.

“My name’s Mr. Elvis. I’m the Messiah, I fight the devil. I’ve saved you. We’ve got

to…”

Isaac heard the stranger speaking on and on. He opened and closed his eyes repeatedly,

without attempting to understand what this madman was driveling about. His head hurt badly enough already.

Suddenly he felt something on his palm, something hard and prickly. Tried to turn away, but Elvis jerked him rather sharply by the shoulder.

“Hey, you? Don’t you understand? I’ve been speaking for half an hour and you still don’t understand?”

“What? Yes, I understand, I do,” Isaac gasped out. Anything to get this guy off his back.

“What does he want from me? Hell, I’m in here because of him. Someone clubbed me

over the head because of this asshole. I wish those thickheads would get on with figuring this all out. Maybe I need to go to hospital,” – Isaac’s thoughts flowed sluggishly through his head. He closed his eyes. He felt being shaken by the shoulder with crude determination.

Elvis continued spitting his words: “Hell spawn! Heart of the devil! Cursed machine!

This devil will bring sorrow upon you. I saw the light, the determination in your eyes. They will take this away from me…”

It was some kind of a hideous dream! A waking nightmare! Isaac tried to stand up and

call a policeman, but the attempt to get up gave him such a sharp pain in his head that he groaned out loud.

“God has no need for soulless bodies, and then the end will come…” Elvis went on

raving, as if nothing had happened. “Are you listening to me?”

The hobo didn’t look like he was going to give up. He seemed blinded by his own

insanity.

“Orange energy is people’s souls, don’t you understand? He’s taking away our souls. That is what makes us humans.”

“Screwball talk. Roaring. Roaring in my head. Everything’s weird, and I need water,”

Isaac thought.

“Well then?” Mr. Elvis was certain what he’d said was convincing, even though Isaac

hadn’t grasped a single thing.

A sharp pain in Isaac’s shoulder woke him up completely and he concentrated.

“And only by tearing out the devil’s heart and destroying it, can I complete my mission.

What you have in your hands is absolute evil, destroy it, burn it.”

Only now did Isaac finally realize that everything happening was real and he was holding an object that looked like a piece of a microcircuit. Of course! It was from that computer, a piece of the board with some kind of circuits and chips on it.

“Henri Cavalier, get out here.”

“My name’s Mr. Elvis!” the crazy messiah growled, then he turned to Isaac and added in

a whisper: “Remember what I told you. Burn the heart of the devil. Promise me. And then the victory will come.”

Isaac nodded, and his thoughts immediately flew to Vicky. “Oh, God! The surgery, the

money for the surgery. Oh, God! I’ll be too late. Where am I? Oh, God! Vicky!”

It was a nightmare: the jail cell, the policemen running around, Elvis. Isaac hammered

desperately on the bars several times with his hands, but no one took any notice of him. Only once did a doctor come, examined Isaac’s head, shone a little torch into his eyes and said indifferently that it was no big deal, Isaac would live. He left, leaving behind some kind of prescription. A nightmare, only it wasn’t a dream.

“Isaac Leroy!”

Isaac opened his eyes and stared at the policeman who was shining a little torch in his face. Isaac took an instant dislike to him, first because the torch was shining in his eyes, and secondly, because shining a torch in someone’s eyes was quite abusive. Especially since he was innocent.

“Out you come!”

The attempt to stand up gave him a dull, aching pain. Isaac sat back down again.

Something pricked his hand. The computer board! He stuck the hand holding the piece of board in his pocket. “What a fool I am,” he thought. “What did I take it for? If they find it, I’ll never beat the rap.” The words of Mr. Elvis came to his mind.

“Come on, move it, you little shit,” Isaac heard the same malicious voice say. “I’m not going to hang out here all night because of you.”

The policeman walked into the cell and put handcuffs on Isaac. They walked down a long

corridor and turned into an office.

“Patrice, take the handcuffs off him and bring him something to drink,” the officer sitting in the office told the policeman who had woken Isaac up so crudely.

“Good evening,” Isaac heard the dry voice say, this time speaking to him.

“Evening,” Isaac mumbled, his hands had turned numb, as he kept them in his pockets.

Feeling the piece of the board in his hand and realizing how dangerous his position was, Isaac clutched it tightly and pushed it deeper into his pocket.

The pocket was strangely empty. Although, why was that strange? They’d probably taken

everything he had as a safety measure. His belt was missing too, now he understood why his trousers kept slipping down during the short walk. He wondered where Mr. Elvis had been hiding the board. They must have searched him. But that was a fanatic for you; he would give his life for the cause, so hiding a microcircuit was no big deal.

The policeman was confident:

“I’ve already gotten to the bottom of everything, but we need to run through a few

formalities, so let’s get started quickly and then you can go home.”

Isaac nodded again. He didn’t understand what these formalities were, he wanted to find out as soon as possible how Vicky was, and dump the dangerous object that was in his pocket.

“So, first name?”

“Isaac.”

“Surname?”

“Leroy.”

“Age and date of birth.”

“Twenty-nine, 28th of December.”

“Parents’ names?”

“Alexander Leroy and Anna Kramer.”

Isaac kept on and on answering questions. It was ok, but he wanted to sit down. He kept shifting from one foot to the other.

The officer looked up from the report.

“I’m sorry, have a seat! I don’t usually stand on ceremony during an interrogation. A

habit – pardon me, sit on the chair.”