Goznym: Leyla

G. Prompted by Phil Hall

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by J.W. Wood

This thing came from Russia, like Tetris, vodka and socialist realism. One day nothing – the next, it’s all over chatrooms, the streets, the clubs. They say you hit the singularity when you’re on it: full interface between man and machine.

It’s a drug, right? And what a drug, what a drug. Here’s what you do. Drink a ton of water, eat a big meal. Lock the front door, then pop the pill. You’ll need a headset with biometric sensors on your temples and forehead. Get one from a military hardware site. Or get it from your Uncle – I really don’t care. Once you drop, you got five minutes til you come up. While you’re waiting, hit the DarkNet. OnionWare is what you want. Then search for Goznym: Leyla and download.

By the time you’ve installed, you should be coming up. Feel every atom in your mind splitting. Like the acuity and speed of coke, only with more clarity and accuracy. Or like coming from every pore in your skin. But better. Most people use those new biometric gloves too. You know, 3D haptic whatevers. Using a keyboard and mouse don’t cut it, fam.

Anyway, once the GUI’s up and you’re in, the world’s your slimy mollusc. What can you do? What can’t you do. Leyla puts your mind at CPU speed. Full connection with your PC’s processor. And if you’re wearing sensors, she blends in your imagination. So you’re doing what you never thought you could – billions of calcs a second – and the machine’s got what it never had – our way of thinking.

Games? Haha, games. I heard novices swallow Leyla then smash every level of Battlefield VII first time. And not just games. Some people write school papers on it – I know a guy who designs houses on it. Dude who got electrons to move like they’re at absolute zero, only at room temperature? Yeah, him. Transformed computing. He was off it on Leyla when he did the calc.

And you can bump, no problem. Once you think you’re slowing down, take another hit and bump it up and bump again. I never heard anyone OD’d. And no, I don’t know how it works – no-one does. They said Russian military intelligence. A plot to destabilise the West. Paranoid shit, bwai!

So you’re going to ask me about the downside. The comedown. How bad is that withdrawal? The truth? There is no withdrawal. Well, no physical withdrawal. See the only thing about Zimming (that’s being high on Leyla) is how you feel after.

Like you wake up next to your girlfriend after Zim-sex, and she looks less hot than she did when you were on it. Or you go for a walk after coming down, staring at all the fucking morons who think they are dope because they’re rich or beautiful or good at tennis or something. Who gives a shit? Reality looks like nothing when you hit the singularity, trust me.

There’s memes going off about it. I mean, the other day I’m walking through this outlet store, right, and there’s a guy stacking shelves with toilet brushes or lightbulbs or some shit. And he’s got this T-shirt on under that terelyne uniform they give you in those places. Cos his uniform is unbuttoned, I can see the T-shirt says, “FRIEND OF LEYLA.” So I give him a nod and a wink and he smiles back. As I’m walking past him to the grocery section, we fist-bump and the dude looks content – like someone else knows.

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So yeah, I’ve had sex on it, also. And last time I did, she stayed over. We met in a zimmer chatroom. She was on it when we met up IRL, I could tell. But then, so was I. When we got back to my place, I strapped up with the gloves and the headset – wireless, of course. She just went rough: that’s when you just drop the pill but don’t take the headset and gloves et cetera. How was it? Unbelievable. Like we were in one of those cheesy seventies-style kaleidoscopic movies. And I was CPU-enhanced, too, via wifi to my four-quantum-processor-enabled, dog’s-balls-and-dick desktop setup.

And now, the next morning, the comedown arrives. Could I remember her name? I remembered the works – her name, her star-sign, where she lived, all that. She rolls over in bed. I’ve still got the haptic gloves and the headset on, but nothing else. My dick is dragging like the flag of a defeated army.

“C’mon”, she says. “Take those things off and let’s do it old-style.” But making love in normal human mode ain’t where I’m at. So I jump up and walk over to the table where my computer is to pull on my pants and shirt. “Hey! You’ve still got your gear on!”, she yells. No shit, Stephen Hawking. Right then, when she’s staring at me, I get an idea.

“I’m going out to buy you breakfast.”

I size her up for a second. Coffee and croissants and orange juice, I think that’s her thing. I offer to procure her the same and she smiles, traces of smeared lipstick around her mouth, mascara smudged up below her eyebrow.

“You’re so sweet”, she smiles, wrapping herself in my sheets and lying back, hair pillowing behind her. I smile and mock-bow, throw on my Chuck Taylor hi-tops and hit the street. I want to connect to the local free WiFi when I’m zimming. No, no-one’s done it before. But then, no-one is not me. I can handle it.

After I shut the front door to my block, I reach in my wallet and pull out a pill of Leyla from where my credit cards used to be. I drop the pill, then plug my headset into my mobile and link up with the local area network. Then I bluetooth my gloves to the phone and get on OnionWare. One search later, my phone is downloading Goznym. Fuck virtual reality. I’m about to hit the hyper-real walking down the street.

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I’m coming up again. I can feel it as I reach the main drag in my neighbourhood. You always know: you feel sharper, you can smell and taste more. I hook up to my PC through the headset. I’m transmitting and receiving. I observe the paving stones, the patterns of the bricks in the walls.

I think about what masonry techniques they must have used when building these places last century then I think about Italian and Polish builders based on the census records I just accessed thanks to Leyla.

Then I’m at the bakery to acquire the croissants.

“Morning Love”, says the lady behind the counter. Late fifties. I diagnose stage 2 atherosclerosis on the basis of her girth and complexion. Then I check the longevity profiles. Maybe ten years more if she’s lucky. So I decide to be nice.

“Good morning. Could I please have two croissants and two large Americanos?”

“Of course you can, darling. I like your little hat.”

She’s pointing to the sensor helmet. Irrelevant. I ignore her. I note the flourescent bulbs in the chiller cabinets – ineffective nineteenth-century device to ward off infection. There’s probably more e coli virus in the corners of that fridge than in a body dead two weeks. I take the baked goods and the coffees off her and smile. I exit the bakery. To my left, there’s some drunken idiot who stinks like a dirty urinal.

“All right, buddy? I like the gloves, my friend. Got any change for me? I need a drink.”

I hate the fucker. He’s scum. So I size him up, say nothing.

“Hey! What’s with the hat? Is it Christmas or something?”

I calculate the probability of someone seeing me if I hit him. Elevated.

“I’ve got something for you.”

“Ah, fantastic!”

I see his creased, work-worn features. I assess him as chronically addicted to ethanol. I put down the croissants and the coffee on a half-height wall and deviate my body to be less visible from the main street. As predicted, the inebriate steps towards me anticipating his gift. I pull him towards me gently and use my foot to unbalance him.

“Careful! Don’t slip up!”, I smile, then pick up the croissants and coffee. I still need to acquire orange juice, so I calculate the fastest route to the local supermarket based on traffic flows then reject this in favour of the intuitive approach – run across the street. When I reach the supermarket, experience persuades me to avoid the masses as I walk towards the chilled juices. I acquire the orange juice, and start thinking about orange farming. So I search orange groves in South Africa, Israel, Spain and Florida as I wait at the self-check-out. I barcode the orange juice and wave my mobile at the terminal to pay.

I take the plastic bag because it’s quicker if not cheaper to do so then I’m wondering about plastic recycling and the ethics of that so I start looking up how long and how expensive it is to recycle a single bag and how much energy it needs and as I’m walking out of the supermarket I’m having an internal four-way debate with myself, evidence based of course, as to whether it’s worth it.

I want to get home and put these comestibles in front of that woman I’d slept with. So I rearrange the foodstuffs inside the plastic bag and walk as quickly as I can, allowing for the risk of spilling the hot coffees in my gloved hands. I reach my street and as I walk back down the street I observe the species of birds, the current state of foliage of the trees. I start two searches running on bird species and the deciduous patterns of trees and fauna at this latitude.

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I’m think about the building techniques I observed earlier so I run a search for building styles in this city and another one on the original topography 00011 then I get home and I wonder whether the birds have returned from winter migration E”£%£$^$%^&ly and think aqbout romani££ po%$^try and whether I should drop some lines to impress her and John Donne comes to mind mark but this flea deciduous trees at LAT 51 swallows typically not before April how little that which thou deni’st me crenellated influence 00010101011110

I need to come 10101 down I need to come down I get in the house and she’s still 010111 asleep in bed. I drop the goods and I want to take off the headset 01101 but she wakes up major programmes of renovation in the Southern part of the city (^& from the nineteen eighties onwards modernised the buildings but in many ways compromised their 1011 character and she’s still naked and the bed is warm.

“So sweet of you to buy me breakfast.”

She pats the bed beside her and Ovid ovid who the fuck is Ovid In summer time and in mid-heat of day 01101010111101100101011011 I have no control (*(^&£$” I take off my Chuck T’s and drop my pants%£$ and I’m beside her and I’m on top of her and I’m thinking 00101 about hygiene of my matress how statistically ten million bedbugs and$£^£$%^&% litres of my spent seed are crusted on it and I’m inside her and the 0011 kaleidoscope runs and I hear £$%£$%^&%^ 1970s film music and I wonder why wasn’t even £$%£$%$£ born then the African Swallow climate change has meant lower leaf counts for most %^&%^&%^species of tree and we’re moving faster together and I’m not 01010011 wearing a condom fuck and one door open, the other half-shut stood the coffee will be getting cold alert 01101 alert cold cold no and I’m coming 0-0010101011010” and I roll off her and I wonder what we have done. I wonder where we are going. What have we created?

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Born in Paisley, Scotland, and raised across the United Kingdom and Canada, J.W. Wood is an internationally acclaimed author and poet whose work spans poetry, thrillers, and short fiction. He earned his degree in English at the University of Cambridge, where his debut book was published with university sponsorship and launched with a national reading tour. He subsequently refined his craft alongside literary luminaries, studying under Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, and Sir Geoffrey Hill, before spending two decades as a global copywriter and content strategist across Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

His published works include the poetry collections The Theory of Everything (2006), The Anvil’s Prayer (2013), and the award-nominated titles Inextinguishable (2008) and The Emigrant’s Farewell (2016, Saboteur Award nominee). In 2011, his breakout thriller Stealing Fire sold out two print runs in six weeks and was selected for the Rome Film Festival.

Recently, he won the 2024 Strands International Fiction Award and was shortlisted for the Mystery Writers of America’s prestigious Edgar Allan Poe Award. His short fiction collection, Captcha This!, was released in 2025 by AN Editions.