A summary of Sergey Lukyanenko’s "Labyrinth of Reflections"

"Labyrinth of Reflections" is a 1997 novel, the first in a cyberpunk trilogy about the virtual city of Deeptown. Lukyanenko created it as a result of a debate about the nature of the genre, wanting to prove that cyberpunk could be not only asocial and rebellious but also lyrical, with living characters and moral questions at its core. The book is written in the first person — a rarity for Russian science fiction of the time — giving it an unusually confessional feel. Along with the novels "False Mirrors" and "Transparent Stained Glass," it forms the "Deeptown" cycle.

In 1998, Labyrinth of Reflections received the Big Zilant award at the Zilantcon festival.

The world of depth and its structure

The action takes place in the late 1990s. A former Moscow hacker named Dmitry Dibenko, now living in the United States, created a small program — "deep" — that affects the user’s subconscious, making virtual reality indistinguishable from real life. By accidentally posting it online, he changed the world: the Ukrainian programmer became the first to truly immerse himself in the game "Doom," spent several hours playing, and emerged covered in bruises and with a broken keyboard. A week later, the entire planet was in turmoil.

Using this technology, Microsoft, IBM, and the internet built Deeptown — a virtual metropolis with twenty-five million "permanent residents." It houses the offices of all major corporations, restaurants, brothels, hacker districts, and private enclaves for any price. Entering Deeptown requires a helmet and a special suit; the deep-tech software makes the simulated world completely tangible — complete with warmth, pain, smells, and fatigue.

One in three hundred thousand users maintains a partial connection with reality in the depths and can exit it voluntarily, at any time. These people are called divers. The protagonist and narrator is Leonid, a St. Petersburg artist from a bankrupt computer game company who became a diver by accident. There are about a hundred divers in the world; their existence is not widely known.

Theft in the Al-Kabar neighborhood

Leonid works freelance as a burglar and mercenary, performing sensitive tasks in virtual reality. The novel opens with a mission: he’s paid to steal a file from the gated community of Al-Kabar, a transnational corporation controlled from Switzerland by its director, Friedrich Urmann. The community is decorated in Arabic style and protected in an ingenious manner: the only entrance is a horsehair bridge over a precipice, guarded by a stone monster. A person with a functioning subconscious is unable to cross it — the brain automatically perceives the abyss beneath their feet.

Leonid, dressed as Ivan Tsarevich, hires a werewolf diver (a partner in wolf skin), barely gets past security, and meets with Urman himself. Urman not only recognizes the diver but also hands him a file — the "Apple" — containing the development of a new cold cure. Urman deliberately sacrifices the valuable program, asking him to hand it over to his competitor, Schellerbach, and then come to him for a discussion about permanent cooperation. Al-Kabar needs the divers.

They have to fight their way out: guard programs block the channel, and a three-headed dragon is chasing Leonid. His partner sacrifices himself as bait, and Leonid escapes with the stolen file.

Virus and Maniac Warning

In reality, while sorting through the retrieved file, Leonid discovers an unknown virus. He passes it on to his friend, Maniac (Sasha), a virus specialist. He calls back immediately: the virus was his own. It’s a "return-addressed postcard" — if Leonid had gone online after the infection, every message he sent would have carried an invisible packet with his real IP address directly to Al-Kabar’s security service. Maniac sends an antivirus; the danger is over.

A restaurant, a brothel, and a live Vika

That same night, Leonid returns to Deeptown. At the Three Little Pigs restaurant, a strange girl sits down next to him — blonde, dressed in white, with a good taste in Chilean wine. She asks his name: she thought she might be looking at Dmitry Dibenko himself. He’s not; the girl disappears.

Later, in Madame’s virtual brothel, Leonid leafs through a "workers" album and comes across a photograph: a girl on a wooden veranda, a forest and a yellow lantern behind her. Her face is an exact replica of the image of his Windows Home program, which he himself has nicknamed Vika. He pays forty dollars "for the night" and finds himself in a night garden in front of a small cottage. The girl sits down next to him — the same one from the photograph. Leonid asks to call her Vika; she agrees without protest. A conversation about technology, stars, and virtual reality ends with them both falling asleep on the grass under a blanket.

The Costume Madame and the Uncovering of Secrets

Madame leads Leonid into the "dressing room" — a room with nickel-plated hooks on which hang dozens of empty-eyed female bodies. These are all the disguises Vika has tried on in her work. The moment is transparent: the girl exists deep within as a professional mimic, and Madame wants Leonid to understand this. Vika herself, before his very eyes, swaps bodies with Madame.

Later, when the truth about Leonid — that he’s a diver — becomes known to Vika, a quarrel breaks out between them. She’s angry that he didn’t tell her the most important thing. He replies: he was afraid of losing her because no one likes divers — they see the virtual world without illusions, as a digital mosaic. Vika falls silent and admits that she, too, is a diver. She had kept it a secret for the same reason. They are both divers, and this discovery changes everything. For the first time in her life, Vika didn’t emerge from the depths in the brothel — that night in the garden with Leonid.

The Loser and the Corporate Hunt

Parallel to the personal story, another plot unfolds: a certain man exists in virtual reality, known to everyone as "Loser." He hasn’t emerged from the depths for three days — not because he doesn’t want to, but because he can’t. Two major corporations are hunting him, including Dibenko himself, who is willing to sacrifice his greatest treasure for him. Loser denies that this is his only value: he claims to be even more valuable than the hunters realize. Vika the diver is convinced he’s simply a stimulant user. Leonid doubts it — he has no traceable communication channel.

Mountains and the search for a way out

In the final scene, all three — Leonid, Vika, and Loser — find themselves trapped in a closed virtual space: a mountain landscape that Vika once created as a personal refuge. The system is isolated; there is no normal entrance from the outside. Loser wanders the slopes, touching pine trees and picking up pebbles — like a city dweller experiencing nature for the first time.

Vika explains: when the program created the mountains, it "stole" fragments from open servers and left undetectable loopholes. Finding one of them would allow them to escape. They leave the ruined hut in search of this passage, while Leonid still has one last trump card left: the combat virus "Warlock-9000." Using it is dangerous: enemies will discover the trace.