The morning is beautiful, sunny and bitterly cold. We get into two taxis and go to the address of the apartment we rented. The city is magnificent, if somewhat in need of restauration. The apartment is ready for us, despite the fact that it's only 8 in the morning. It's spacious and pretty, although the toilet keeps growling in an ominous horror-movie way. We drop our luggage off at the apartment and go outside.

"Breakfast?" suggests Tarja, and we walk down Nevsky, looking for breakfast and taking in the views. There is a little bridge with four statues of a naked guy trying to abuse a horse.

The breakfast we find is moderately evil and contains sausages that none of us dare to eat, Imodium nonwithstanding, but the views make up for it. After the breakfast we disperse to the cultural thingies, as Timo has put it, of our choice, and I end up going to the Hermitage with Rudy and Tarja. The building is amazing, but I get tired of the paintings at some point, excuse myself, and go check out the architecture on the other side of the river. There are two red columns there, and a number of museums I decide to leave for later. I take a tram to St. Isaac's cathedral, and run into Jamie and Katie at the cathedral's doors. They highly recommend the place, and I go inside. It's very impressive, even though it doesn't really fit my idea of a cathedral.

By 3 o'clock we reassemble near the monuments to the naked zoophile and his horse and start looking for dinner. The dinner, when found, is not particularly good but is much better than the breakfast. Afterwards Tarja suggests that we try to figure out which museums might still be open, but nobody else feels like it, and she doesn't feel like running around the museums on her own.

We move to another place for coffee and drinks, and sit there for a while, trying various local combinations, some of which are pretty foul. At some point Jamie wanders off to the department store across the street to check out the local electronics selection, looking rather pessimistic about it. The rest of us order more drinks and just sit there, looking at the street though the big glass wall. We should probably move our asses and go see some more local architecture, but it is quite cold. Besides, the architecture that we see out of the window is magnificent in itself.

Suddenly an explosion rips through the department store that Jamie just went to. A fireball shoots out of several second-floor windows. There is a lot of screaming, all around us and in the street. Katie jumps up and starts running towards the store, the rest of us following and yelling that this is a really bad idea.

The department store is still somewhat on fire, but not badly. By the time we get there even Katie realizes that there is no chance of getting in because of all the people trying to get out. Some of them are burned, some strangely wet, a lot are bleeding and most seem to be unharmed but terrified. We try to search the crowd for Jamie, but do not see him. We reach for the phones, all five of us simultaneously, and try to call him. A recording informs us that the phone is out of area or switched off. I start feeling sick.

This is really, really not good. He often forgets his phone on silent, but the phone is never off. I know something has happened to him. On the other hand phones are a lot more fragile than humans. Suddenly I get a very strong and quite irrational feeling that he is alive and not badly hurt. I think this is what they call wishful thinking.

Katie gets an SMS. She reads it and gets a "WTF" expression on her face. We look at her expectantly. "I got a message saying that he is more or less OK," she says. "Not from him, though. What country code is 45?"

We don't know. Rudy looks at the actual SMS and reads it out loud: "Don't worry, he is not badly hurt". Katie calls somebody, asking them to find out who the number belongs to, and where it is.

Lots of fire trucks, ambulances and police cars come, seal off the area and tell everyone to stay away. Nobody really goes away though, people just back off a little and keep looking. Ambulance crews start carrying the wounded out. There are dozens and dozens of them, and no way to see whether Jamie is among them.

Some guy in a suit addresses the crowd and tells us that they will put up a board with the names of the killed and the injured and the names of the hospitals they took the injured to. The crowd insults him and his ancestors.

Katie gets another SMS. Some Russian number, but signed 'Jamie'. He says that he only needs a few stitches but the line is very long, and gives us the address of the hospital.

It takes a lot of effort, but we manage to catch a cab. The cabbie does not want to fit five passengers in one car, but we give him an extra twenty and he agrees. In the car Katie tries to call the hospital, and after seven or eight attempts they answer.

She asks them about his condition, and seems to be relieved at their answer. Then she asks them about the specific nature of his injury, and suddenly becomes all quiet and round-eyed, thanks them quietly and hangs up.

"Are you gonna tell us anything or are you just gonna sit there?" growls Rudy before she even had time to hang up.
"He is gonna be OK," says Katie, "but either my Russian is failing me, or they just told me that he has a piranha up his ass."

This silences the rest of us for a second. My unruly brain is showing me the horrible visions of Islamic terrorists stuffing their bombs with toothy live piranhas and Jamie bending over in a very unfortunate moment.

"A live piranha or a dead piranha?" asks Timo.
"I don't think a piranha can survive in there for a very long time," answers Rudy.

Katie's friend calls back, telling her that the first message came from an unlisted number in Denmark. Not much help there.

In the hospital they tell us to look for Jamie in the hallway, among the lightly injured. The place is very crowded, people lying on the gurneys and sitting on the chairs. I scan the crowd for his face until I realize that a man who has just been injured in the butt is not likely to be lying on his back, much less sitting on a chair.

He sees us first and waves at us. We come over. He is lying on a gurney on his stomach, engaged in an animated conversation with a little old lady who is sitting in the row of chairs next to him and showing her middle finger to the world. His hair is dripping wet, and on a closer observation so are all his other parts. In one hand he has a big pickle jar with water and a few goldfish swimming in it. With the other hand he keeps absent-mindedly plucking seaweed out of his hair and putting it in the jar.

Katie's Russian has apparently failed her at least a little, because the piranha is not up his ass, but embedded in his buttock. It's rather big for a piranha, too. Jamie and the old lady are discussing various ways of baking fish in the oven in a rather difficult mix of English, Russian and German. There are several dead goldfish lying on the gurney in front of him.

"Hi, guys," he says, "this is Maria Yal... Yak..." he gives the old lady a "help me out here" look.
"...Yakovlevna," the old lady reminds, and nods to us all.
"...Yakovlevna, and she brought me some water for my goldfish," he concludes the introduction, pointing to the pickle jar.
"Where did you get the goldfish, anyway?" asks Katie.
"In my hair. The fucking explosion dumped the contents of several aquariums right on me. Amazing how long goldfish can survive in the hair if it is properly wet."
"Did the piranha also come from the aquariums?" asks Katie.
"Yeah. The poor thing probably just wanted to hold on to something before dying, but did it have to be my ass? Anyway, grab some chairs. It's gonna take a long time here."
"Can't we just pull the sushi out of Jamie's ass and go?" asks Rudy.
"No. I tried already. It really hurts."

We sit down and the fish recipe conversation continues, much enhanced by the fact that now three of us can actually speak both English and Russian. Maria Yakovlevna informs us that she is a retired teacher of math, and that she went to the store to buy a frying pan when the bomb exploded and injured her finger. However, as she proudly tells us, this gave her the opportunity to nick the frying pan without paying. She shows us the pan, and Rudy laughs and says that she is his kind of girl.

"If I were stealing a frying pan, I'd steal a better one," Timo tells me in Finnish.
"When the building is on fire you really don't have the time," I point out.
"Hey, do you want to keep the fish?" Jamie asks Maria Yakovlevna, "I don't think we will be taking them to Finland." Katie translates.
"No, they are too much trouble."
"I can take fishes if you don't want them," says a middle-aged guy on the opposite bench in passable English, and the jar with fish changes hands with a lot of mutual thanks.

After a couple of hours of waiting everyone is annoyed, and Jamie is clearly in need of a blanket and a cup of tea, neither of which is to be found anywhere.

"Argh, my ass is really sore," he says for a hundredth time.
"Remembers that Raid miniseries that we watched last month?" asks Timo.
"Yeah. It was fun."
"Remember that guy called Perse-Arska? 'Arska the ass'?"
"Yeah?"
"Well, if you don't stop the whining right now you are in serious danger of being called Perse-Jamie for the rest of your natural life."

Jamie does not look particularly scared. Soon after that some nurses come for him and wheel his gurney into some room. We all try to follow, and they wave us away.

"I am not going anywhere," declares Katie, "I am his wife. Besides, he does not speak Russian."

They concede the point and let her into the room. The rest of us just stick our heads in the door. A nurse tries to approach Jamie's butt with big scissors.

"Argh! What do you think you are gonna do with these?"
"We need to cut your pants to get to the wound," she says in Russian, either understanding his question in English or guessing its meaning.
"No fucking way!" he also understands her intention without a translation and grabs the scissors away from her, "These are the only trousers I have with me! Didn't have time to pack properly."
"This is me favorite shirt! This is me only shirt!" quips Rudy from the doorway.

A doctor mutters something about sedatives and starts approaching Jamie with a syringe. At the moment he seems to be well-attuned to the dangers of the world around him without any translations.

"If you try to stick me with that thing I'll kill you! And I'll sue you! Not necessarily in that order!"

Katie gestures for the doctor to back off for a second, and pats Jamie on the head.

"You are being unreasonable, love. Let the doctors do their job. I am sure they have trousers in Russia."
"Promise?"
"Promise."
"I can go and buy you new trousers while you are here," volunteers Timo.

Jamie relaxes, gives the nurse her scissors back and gestures for her to go ahead, says "sorry" in Russian and starts giving Timo instructions to buy sweatpants of the appropriate size. In the meanwhile the nurse cuts his jeans from the waist down to the fish and gives him a shot of some anesthetic in there.

"Try to choose a store without terrorists," I tell Timo.
"Also without piranhas", adds Jamie.

It takes doctors less than five minutes to remove the fish, wash the wound, put four stitches in it and some adhesive bandage on it, and give him some prescriptions for painkillers and antibiotics. Doctors refuse to give him the piranha, roll their eyes at his questions of whether the wound is going to leave a scar and tell us to go away.

I go to a pharmacy, and the rest of them stay in the waiting area awaiting Timo and the pants. When I come back with the drugs Timo is already there, and Jamie is wearing rather horrible-looking green sweatpants and berating himself for not asking Timo to buy some underwear too, although he has a few pairs in the apartment. Rudy assures him that he'll make it to the apartment without underwear, and off we go.

"Argh," says Jamie when we are finally there, scratching furiously, "someone must have put itchy powder in these."
"Probably the same terrorists that blew up the store," smiles Katie.
"I don't think those were terrorists," says Jamie.
"Oh, for fuck's sake," growls Rudy, "now you don't believe in Islamic terrorists, next thing you are gonna be voting for Livingstone. They said it was Islamic suicide bombers on the radio when we were in the cab."
"I do believe in Islamic terrorists. It's just that they are, like, ferocious-looking guys with big beards who want 72 virgins. I saw the guy who did it, and he did not look very Islamic to me, no beard, no virgins, no nothing."
"They only get the virgins after the bombing," points out Timo.
"You saw the bomber?" Tarja is incredulous, "Why didn't you talk to the authorities?"
"I suspect it was the authorities."
"Paranoid much?"
"Yeah, but that doesn't mean that they didn't do it."
"You should probably go to bed and rest," says Rudy, "lie down, I'll make you some tea."
"Yes, tea, thanks," answers Jamie, pulling his almost-dry t-shirt off and revealing some very large bruises, "but I don't feel like resting. Timo, do you have any non-itchy trousers I can borrow? I wanna buy a new pair or jeans, and then I want some bread and circus. But first a shower and some tea."
"Yeah," nods Timo, going to our room to look for pants.
"What kind of bread and circus?" asks Tarja.
"Creamy pastries and WLAN should do."

After the bomb and the piranha we don't feel like arguing with him, and stroll down the Nevsky again. We find jeans and a liquor store, of which many of us are in sore need. After a little while we also find a little place with delicious pastries, atrocious coffee and tolerable WLAN. We eat some pastries there, and take some more home.

At home we make better coffee, drink and watch TV. The bombing is the big news of the day, of course. 14 killed, 136 wounded, of which 41 seriously. Chechen terrorists suspected. We have some drinks, and then some more drinks, and feel better, or at least I do. Nobody wants to discuss plans for tomorrow.

I decide to go to bed early, and Timo follows right after me. The others look rather subdued too: Katie is watching TV, Jamie is curled up on the sofa with his laptop, and Rudy and Tarja are whispering something to each other on the other sofa. Timo and I go to bed, but not to sleep.

"What are we gonna do tomorrow?" he asks.
"Don't know. Something. Not shopping."
"Not in that store anyway. I wish we were home already."
"Yeah, me too."
"Some vacation."
"Blame the terrorists. If they are the terrorists."
"We really should tell somebody if Jamie saw something."
"Dunno. If he is lying or mistaken, there is no point. And if he is telling the truth, who are you gonna tell? What are you doing? I am not in the mood."
"Me neither, but it might make us feel better."
"Yeah, very romantic, thanks."
"We aim to please," he says in English.
"That would make a good slogan for a shooting range."

There are very few bad moods in the world that an appropriate touch in he right place cannot cure. When we are done I am feeling a lot more cheerful until I think of tomorrow. Oh well, we can always come back early.

* * * Community's IRC channel

<Sarah> Hi
<Sarah> What's going on? The backlog is huge.
<Elina> Jamie was in that bombed store in St. Petersburg; he is not seriously hurt.
<Nate> You wouldn't believe it: a big fish hit him right on the ass and got stuck there. Doctors had to pull its teeth out with pliers.
<Sarah> LOL
<Hanne> Did anyone actually see the moment of the bombing?
<Else> No, but I saw a few seconds later: it was dark and he was lying on a huge pile of clothes and trying to feel his butt with his hands. There were several big aquariums on the second floor, and lots of people on the first got hit by aquarium debris.
<Diego> Hi
<Diego> LOL (the fish)
<Diego> Do you think he did it?
<Hanne> Unlikely. The police found RDX there, so it was probably natural.
<Diego> I kind of resent the use of the word "natural" to mean everything that is not related to the Skills. What are we, unnatural?
<Hanne> Sorry but you know what I mean.
<Sarah> In any case there are people who can make explosives. Using the Skills, I mean.
<Elina> This is a very rare Skill. About 70 of us can use the Skills to blow things up, but there are only 5 people who have enough chemical Skills to actually generate RDX. Terrorists are a lot more common.
<Sarah> He is a weird-looking guy, BTW.
<Hanne> Weird? Looks like a fairly normal Scandinavian face to me.
<Sarah> Yeah, but the combination of that and really dark eyes and hair. Do Scandinavian people ever come naturally in this color?
<Hanne> They sure do, even though it's not too common. You should've seen Else before she went gray.
<Else> His hair seems a little bluish, so it's dyed anyway.
<Sarah> Where is he now?
<Elina> In that apartment, reading something on his laptop.
<Diego> Anyone try to break into his computer?
<Nate> Wei and I tried. We can't.
<Diego> I thought you were a computer genius.
<Nate> He is not even online right now.
<Nate> Diego, breaking into people's computers is much harder than in the movies. There is a Skill for almost everything, but not for decrypting a good encryption.
<Nate> And this guy is a pro. *You* go and try to break into BOFH's computer.
<Diego> Ok, ok.
<Nate> Our best bet is to look at the keyboard when he is typing the password. What is he doing now?
<Hanne> OMG, he is reading this channel!
<Nate> Impossible. Real-time?
<Diego> Ahaa, "can't break in"...
<Hanne> Nate: what do you mean?
<Nate> Hanne: is he reading what we are writing right now?
<Hanne> No, it's from a few hours ago.
<Diego> How did he get in?
<Elina> I did not even tell him we had a channel.
<Sarah> He can be any one of us.
<Nate> Or any of the lurkers, there is like a hundred of them.
<Hanne> Yeah, but was he one of us all along or did he replace somebody and what happened to them?
<Diego> We all need to See each other with Sight, now.
<Nate> That was a relief, but how do we know about the lurkers?
<Elina> I think it's much simpler, and one of us is sending him the logs. One or more of us.
<Else> Elina, you are cynical.
<Elina> I prefer the term "experienced".
<Sarah> Should we try to find out more about his family? I mean, parents and siblings?
<Else> At this age there is not a lot of point in it. But it would be nice to find out about the wife. It's hard though, we tried already. She has a blog but never says anything useful there.

* * *

We wake up when the lights go out, after having fallen asleep with the lights on. It's not the whole block, because there are some lights in the street. We try to search for our clothes on the floor, decide to forget it, and go to look for the fuse.

The living room is much darker than the bedroom. There are only two little greenish-blue lights on the wall across from us, like two eyes. Either this room has electricity, or those work on batteries. Except that they don't look like LEDs, they look like actual eyes, sort of like a cat's, but a little brighter, and their light does not seem to be reflected from anywhere.

"Look," I whisper to Timo, "those look just like eyes!"

The lights blink.

"Hey guys, do you remember where the fuses are?" asks Jamie from the darkness. "My bad, I thought this grid here could withstand the dishwasher and the kettle simultaneously, but guess not... Hope these are automatic fuses. This darkness is scary."
"Get over here right now," Timo whispers. "There is something glowing on the wall next to you, looks like eyes."
"Where?"
"You probably can't see it from there, get over here!"

He comes up to us.

"Eyes? Where?"
"On your face, Jamie. On your face. Blue. Glowing."
"Oh. Bugger."
"Who are you and what did you do to our Jamie?" asks Timo. Under the circumstances it's really not funny, especially since his voice is trembling.
"Not funny. There has been really weird shit happening. But glowy eyes is a new one."

For a second I consider telling Timo to run, and wonder for how many seconds I can stop glowy-eyed Jamie if he decides to give chase. Kind of hopeless, really, considering that I couldn't even stop him on a normal day. For another second I look around for weapons, just in case. The next moment I feel deeply ashamed: one of my oldest friends, who is also sort of family, is clearly having a problem - I am sure that eyes that glow in the dark qualify as such - and my first reaction is to assume is that he became some kind of an evil alien creature. I hug him, trying to comfort him, at the same time aware of the possibility that he is indeed an evil alien creature. Timo is apparently thinking along the same lines, because at first he recoils and then pats Jamie on the back.

We make out way to the bathroom and the bathroom mirror, so he can get a look at himself. Only the irises are glowing, and the glow is neither very strong nor constant, getting stronger and weaker.

"Bugger," he repeats. "Let's go find the fuses."

I find the fuse, and it is automatic. In the bright light things don't look as scary, even though the fact that Jamie has clothes on and Timo and I are naked becomes a lot more obvious. At least his eyes don't glow anymore.

He is less shocked than I would be if I were him, and he turns the dishwasher off and the kettle on, and sits down on the sofa. We come really close and stare at him, which probably looks pretty comical.

All kinds of ideas about evil demons, posessions, clones, aliens and similar creatures come to my mind. Also bites by radioactive spiders, or, more appropriately, radioactive piranhas. I stare at him harder, cursing in my mind every sci-fi and fantasy movie I've ever seen. There are scars on his cheeks that, after some pretty good plastic surgery and 14 years, are only really visible to people who know where they used to be and where to look. They are still there, and I assume that anyone who'd make such a perfect clone would make sure to make normal non-glowy eyes, too. Argh, damn all the sci-fi to hell, what am I thinking...

"Looking for the scars?" he grins, "Yeah, they are still there."
"Take your contacts off," says Timo.
"Need a mirror," says Jamie, gets up, and goes to the bathroom, "come on in".

He takes the brown contacts off - his eyes are, or rather used to be, dark brown - and looks at us with blue-black eyes, approximately the same color as his hair. This is extremely disturbing, although not quite as disturbing as some of his funkier contacts. He sighs and puts his contacts back in.

"How long has this been going on?" I ask, "have you been to a doctor or something? Did you hair also start turning that color? Is that why you dyed it?"
"About five weeks. Yes, I have been to a doctor, and he said something along the lines of 'holy shit', took some hair, blood and piss for tests, wrote a diagnosis that basically said 'the man's hair and eyes are turning blue for no reason, now that's really weird', and told me that I am pretty much ok otherwise. And yes, my hair started turning that color."
"All over your body?" Timo is curious.
"Hmm, everywhere where I used to have black hair. The blond hairs," he runs a finger over the blond hairs on his arm, "remained blond, though I half-expected them to become sky-blue. But the glowing eyes are a new development."
"Could it have something to do with the piranha? Are you scared?"
"I was, but then I ran into some people who know that this has happened to a few dozens more people and nothing dramatically bad came out of it. So now I am just sort of concerned. About the social and cosmetic implications, too. I don't think the piranha has anything to do with it."
"It's a beautiful hair color, and a lot of people have funky colors nowadays."
"Yeah, but it's a pretty awful eye color. Hey, the tea is ready."

Timo and I grab some towels for the sake of public decency, and we have some tea. At some point Katie comes out of their room, sleepy and wrapped in a towel.

"Why are you all drinking tea in the middle of the night? Is there any left?" she pours herself a cup and sits down with us, "Damn, who ate all the biscuits?"
"There are still some cream puffs left," points out Jamie.

Katie gives him a hairy eyeball that makes it perfecly clear what she thinks about the husbands who eat all the chocolate cookies during the night and offer their wives some unworthy cream puffs. I wonder whether I should tell Katie anything about Jamie's problems. On one hand, it's his own business. On the other hand, she sort of deserves to know, and he more likely than not decided not to worry her. But than again this kind of things is hard to conceal from one's own spouse.

"My eyes started glowing in the dark," Jamie tells her.
"Oh. Bugger. Show me," she certainly sounds like she already knows about the other problems.

They go to the bathroom for a minute, then come back. We all finish our tea and go to our respective beds.

"Wow," says Timo, "I thought this kind of thing only happened in the movies."
"Me too. I kept thinking about evil aliens and demons and suchlike. But it is after all just our Jamie with glowing eyes."
"You've watched too much Buffy. If there is such a thing as too much Buffy. Maybe he is a special cookie-eating demon?"
"Not funny. Hope he is gonna be OK."
"I hope so too. Do you know what Katie does for a living?"
"Some kind of biological research. Why?"
"That much I know, but do you know what exactly?"
"She never talks about it. Are you asking whether she has anything to do with it? She would never..."
"Not even if he asked her very nicely?"
"Not even then. Shit, what if this thing is contagious?"
"Eek."