Belgrade Noir

Her husband had received an invitation because he had been placed on the list of some of the major NGOs that followed the work of the most promising coders and openly recruited their services for foreign technology giants. Aleksandar Vranješ had previously programmed several interesting apps for mobile platforms. The most popular among them was the Trailblazers platform intended for drivers navigating Belgrade’s chaotic traffic. Trailblazers’ algorithms had enabled autonomous vehicles to monitor the situation and constantly report to each other where they were going in order to optimize traffic flow, and had significantly reduced traffic congestion. As he liked to say, these algorithms had definitely put him on the map — which the invitation to the residence of His Excellency proved. This had happened at a time when the two of them would go for days without uttering a single word: he was buried in work and programmed at night and slept during the day; she went to work, moving through the day like a zombie, sleeping at night. A depressing time. The time after Mina.

The only thing she remembered from this reception — which she’d attended unwillingly — was Isak. Amid the throng of officials and the waiters who were clumsily dragging themselves through the crowd carrying trays with canapés and cocktails, she tried to find her way to the nearest chair, where she planned to stay until Aleksandar had had enough of chatting with the IT team and took her home. At some point she snuck out to a room on the ground floor of the residence. As she looked around, slightly perplexed, she became aware of someone’s presence.

“Would you like to get out of here too?” asked large man in an elegant jacket and a light-colored shirt without a tie. She looked up at his face — he was much taller than her — and saw a mild frown creasing his forehead.

A man who knows that you don’t say “Wanna,” but “Would you like,” she thought to herself.

“Are you okay?” he asked, looking sincerely concerned.

How terrible I must look, if he only took one glance at me and figured out that I wasn’t feeling very well, she thought. I like his voice

.

“I can’t stand the crowds,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s stifling in here.”

“We’ll take care of that.” He smiled and Marija realized that it was hard for her to look away from his warm eyes. How old is he, she wondered, in his fifties?

He gently took her by the arm and led her through the corridor. He opened the door, which allowed in a refreshing breeze and the scent of late spring. “Here, this way,” he said, and they continued to an illuminated garden.

“Sit down. I’ll get you something to drink.” He paused as she obediently sat on a wooden bench near a white gravel path. He noticed the expression on her face. “Maybe some water…”

She put her fingers on his hand and smiled, now more naturally. “Campari and juice, please. If they have it.”

He nodded. As he went back into the house to find an open bar and bring her a drink, she felt that something had irreversibly changed. She accepted the change as a life-saving exit.

More than three years had passed since that evening. More than three years of their secret relationship, and almost as long since Aleksandar became a leading developer in Lero Technologies, the main investor in the Alter Ego Inc. start-up.

“I won’t bother you with details,” said the director as he walked next to her. “I’m sure you are familiar with the basic principles of the procedure.”

They walked between glass boxes in which men and women in white coats stood by unusual machines, hospital beds on wheels, computer workstations, and chairs that reminded Marija of well-equipped dentist offices. In some boxes, these machines — 3-D printers she now recognized — were painfully, slowly forming something that, she realized, feeling the hair on the back of her next stand up, looked like different parts of human bodies.

The director stopped and pointed to a long glass wall and motionless figures behind him. She gasped. There were a few dozen of them. They stood motionless. They were naked like old classical statues, but were made of a material that was so convincing that she couldn’t help thinking that someone was detaining these men and women, making them stand so stiffly with no hope of ever being allowed to move.