The Observer Effect. November 3

The morning broke cold and transparent as glass.

Polina stepped out onto the porch — Alexey was already sitting on the bench, the book on his lap. He clearly hadn’t slept all night: his eyes were red, his movements slower than usual.

“What do you think?” she asked quietly, so as not to shatter the fragile morning silence.

Alexey slowly turned his tired but lucid face toward her.

“It’s astonishing,” Alexey said. “When you read it a second time, knowing your grandfather wrote it, the triptych seems even more fascinating and profound. I kept catching myself thinking: how did he manage to create such a world, so alive and real? It’s not just a description of events — it’s as if he built the history himself, brick by brick, through the fates of his characters. It’s astounding how he could forge an entire world out of nothing, out of thin air. So realistic that you believe in it more than…”

He waved his hand vaguely toward the snow-capped mountains.

“Yes,” Polina agreed. “Grandfather always said that history isn’t what happened, but how we remember it. He wasn’t just describing — he was creating.”

“More than creating,” Alexey picked up, a new, tense note entering his voice. “The reader becomes more than just an observer. By empathizing with the characters, the reader creates this world alongside the author. Forces it into existence. Just like in quantum physics — a system collapses into a definite state only at the moment of observation. As long as you’re looking, everything exists; it vanishes when you stop seeing it. It seems he understood this intuitively.”

He stood up and paced across the porch.

“Why do you think I came here… To try and see the world again. In Moscow, these past few years… nothing mattered to me besides blueprints, code, and schematics. Everything became somewhat flat, like on an old monitor screen. But here…” He fell silent again.

Polina listened to him, and in that moment, something strange happened to her. She felt, almost physically, how Alexey’s figure, standing there, momentarily became somehow… faded. As if his outlines grew less distinct, and the colors of his clothes less saturated, as though he were losing color against the backdrop of this morning light. Maybe it’s just exhaustion, she thought. Or maybe something else.

At that moment, Sergey appeared in the yard, out of breath, his hair disheveled and his eyes wide with fear. His face was chalk-white.

“They found the elder!” he gasped. “He’s… different somehow. He’s silent, won’t respond to anything, and he’s just all… gray.”

“And the dog?” Polina asked quietly.

“No…”

November 3 →
← A Road of a Thousand Years
← Paths
← The River