Code. Part Three. Chapter Three

The drive through the Moscow suburbs was a journey through a painting from which life was being slowly scraped away.

There were no ruins here, no fires, no overt signs of panic. Instead, there was only the quiet, viscous horror of a normalcy stripped of its substance. Identical prefab panel blocks stood in endless rows, like lines in a code that had ceased to execute. People moved along the streets, but their motions were mechanical, purposeless — like clockwork toys whose springs were winding down. From the car window, Ayumi watched a playground swing slowly swaying in an empty lot, though there was neither a child nor a gust of wind to move it. It was a memory-world, a world of afterimages that had not yet realized it was already over.

Polina’s ex-husband, Alexander, lived in one of these panel boxes in Balashikha. He was a thin, exhausted man with eyes from which all light had long since vanished. He greeted Ayumi without surprise, as if he had been waiting for her his entire life or, conversely, was no longer waiting for anything at all.

The apartment was small, nearly empty. He offered her tea. The tea was warm but entirely devoid of flavor. Just warm water with a faint hint of rust, lacking even the familiar tang of tap chlorine.

“Polina flew to Tibet,” he said, his gaze fixed not on her, but on the dust motes dancing in a weak shaft of light from the window. “With a small group. She wanted to find some mountain village she’d read about somewhere on the internet. Her parents said there’s been no word from her for weeks.”

At the word “Tibet,” an image flashed in Ayumi’s mind. Unbidden, like a system glitch. A little girl in brightly colored clothes standing in the middle of a snow-covered yard, catching falling snowflakes on her tongue. But within this perfect, almost pastoral scene lay a flaw that twisted it into a nightmare: the snowflakes were as gray as ash.

“Do you have his book?” Ayumi asked, driving the vision away.

“No. Only some old notebooks. Notes, rough drafts. You can take a look.” He nodded toward a dusty stack on a shelf. “Polina said her grandfather kept rewriting his triptych until the day he died. Changing things, adding pieces. And he was constantly messing around with some program on his old computer. He said he was writing a ‘dictionary for the world’.”

Ayumi picked up the topmost notebook. Yellowed, crumbling pages. Faded ink. It was a diary. The early 1980s.

October 12, 1983. Institute No. 26.
Argued with the guys about the Project again. The idea is insane, of course, purely theoretical. To build a Deus ex machina. A digital system that, in the event of a global collapse — a nuclear war, for instance — could restore civilization. Not the infrastructure, no. Restore the essence. Culture, humanity, memory. We took the Hindu cyclicality as a baseline, the four yugas. Each era has its own cycle, its own rules. Hence the shlokas in the core. They must become more than just data; they must be the axioms of the new world.

November 2, 1983.
All of this is nonsense, of course. Spoke with Misha today. We simply don’t have the computing power. We wouldn’t have enough punch cards in the entire institute to describe a single library. All the institute’s computers linked together couldn’t process even the prologue. But the idea itself… it’s beautiful. I’ve named our protocol Meihua. I’ve just started writing my novel, so I’m trying out compression algorithms on its text. I will turn prose into pure structure. Into pure digital code. Into a backup copy of the world.

Ayumi closed the notebook. The puzzle clicked into place. Cold, monstrous, perfect. This hadn’t been the delusion of a crazed programmer-hippie. This was an abandoned but fully armed project conceived by Soviet geniuses, biding its time, waiting for the world to grow into the processing power required to trigger it.

She finished her flavorless tea.

“Alexander,” she asked, keeping her voice as steady as possible. “In your ex-wife’s grandfather-in-law’s book… was there a character named Ayame Yoshikawa?”

He looked at her, showing something resembling interest for the very first time.

“Yes. The daughter of the protagonist from the third part, The River. She died. Burned alive during the American firebombing of Tokyo in March of forty-five.”

Ayumi stood up. The sense of doom that had stalked her entire life had finally taken shape. She bore the name of a dead child from an unread book, and that name had become the key that unlocked the door to nothingness.

She had to fly to Tibet. The girl catching gray snow on her tongue wasn’t just a vision. It was the sole remaining singularity point, the last path left in a dying world. The only node still holding together the fraying fabric of a dissolving reality.

Part Three. Chapter Four →
← Code\Coda
← A Road of a Thousand Years
← Paths
← The River
← The Observer Effect
← The Battle of Bun’ei