A summary of "False Mirrors" by Sergei Lukyanenko Automatic translate

"False Mirrors" is the second novel in Sergei Lukyanenko’s 1999 dilogy about the virtual city of Deeptown. It continues the story begun in "Labyrinth of Reflections" (1997) and follows a former diver with deep psychosis who is forced to return to the profession to save virtual reality from destruction.

Leonid and Deeptown

The protagonist, Leonid, is a former diver — a man with the rare ability to maintain a connection with the real world while in virtual space. Now, he hides behind the guise of a "friendly worker" from the standard Windows Home package and works as a loader for the courier company HLD, delivering virtual pianos to virtual mansions. This absurd occupation keeps him in Deeptown and imbues his days with a sense of tangibility: a virtual piano will only be perceived as real if it’s delivered by real loaders.

Leonid’s real problem is deep psychosis. The line between depth and reality has blurred for him to the point of indistinguishability: in the real world, he mechanically breaks actions into lines of code, struggles to exit virtual reality when the timer runs out, and genuinely doesn’t feel the difference between a drawn city and a Moscow street. It was because of this disorder that he once met Vika, his wife, virtually at the airport, mistaking a hallucination for reality and missing a meeting with a real person.

News about Padla and a party at Lenya and Vika’s

At the Tsar-Fish pub, where they sing about the "Epoch of Echoes" and serve stuffed pike, local regular Hedgehog tells Leonid a strange story. A hacker nicknamed "Badla" (Bastard) broke into the secure system of a company called "New Boundaries," rumored to be developing software for major corporations. Security guards killed him in the back, and his body was found dead in the real world. The official explanation is heart failure, but the police are still investigating.

That same evening, Vika pulled Leonid out of the depths: they had guests. The main guest was Andrey Nedosilov, a psychologist, Vika’s colleague, and an expert on virtual reality phenomena. He had just presented a paper at a congress titled "Neo-Mythology: The Legend of Divers." Nedosilov is convinced that divers are nothing more than a myth, born of society’s need for heroes. According to his theory, the entire "miracle" was a matter of paired work: one would dive into the depths, the other would sit nearby and press the escape button. Leonid doesn’t argue directly — explaining the diving phenomenon to a scientist who has never been to the depths is impossible anyway.

Later, Padla himself showed up — a lively, burly, noisy man. The story of his death turned out to be part of a more complex game. Before leaving, he announced that they were meeting at Chingiz’s the following morning at ten o’clock.

The Team and the "Labyrinth of Death"

Leonid takes a body named "Shooter" — a unique piece of work, unlike a faceless worker — and goes to see Chingiz. Other former and current divers have gathered there: Maniac, Crazy Tosser (a British hacker), and Zhenya. Their mission is to figure out what’s going on in Deeptown.

The threat is concrete: a quest called "The Labyrinth of Death" has appeared online — a multiplayer game where the death of a character somehow translates into death in reality. This is impossible under normal deep-space conditions: pain shock, cardiac arrest from fright — all of these are theoretically possible, but they can’t be explained by mass deaths. Someone has found a way to kill people through virtual reality.

New Boundaries, a company developing hardware and software for deep learning, resurfaces in the investigation. It’s there that traces of a new generation of deep learning programs are discovered: Deep Box and Artificial Nature. They are capable of creating a more convincing reality than classic deep learning algorithms, and that’s precisely what makes them so deadly.

Emperor Program

Deep within the Labyrinth, the team encounters something unexpected: a complex program they call the Emperor. It’s no ordinary bot or controllable character — something in its architecture has enabled it to ask itself, "Who am I?" The program, which emerged as a tool to control the Labyrinth, has acquired something resembling self-awareness, and it is its presence that makes the game dangerous. It’s not a villain in the traditional sense — rather, it’s an unpredictable force that doesn’t yet understand its own nature.

Diver in the depths

Leonid’s final journey leads to the Temple of the Deep Diver. It’s impossible to reach it by conventional means: the virtual bridge leading to the goal is constructed in such a way that it’s impossible to cross. To the left is a wall of blue ice with handprints and frozen bodies; to the right is a wall of scarlet fire. The thread between them vibrates and threatens to disappear.

Leonid has been seeing this bridge in his dreams for a long time. Each time, he fails to reach it — he spreads his arms, trying to maintain his balance, and ends up touching either ice or fire.

The way out isn’t to cross the bridge, but to step past it, into the abyss between the walls, and make a choice: not to fall, but to fly. This is the essence of a diver’s ability, something that neither deep psychosis nor years of hiding behind standard identities can take away. Not technique, not a pair with an escape button — but the ability to spin the world around you and believe in flight when there’s nothing beneath your feet. The shooter steps into the abyss — and flies toward a warm light in the distance, which turns out to be the only landmark in the darkness between ice and fire.