The Observer Effect. November 5

They found him the next morning, at the foot of the cliff the locals called the “Demon’s Finger.” But it was no longer Sergey.

What they were looking at was an installation. A cruel, meaningless piece of art created by a dying reality. He lay on the rocks not as a man, but as a broken doll, discarded by an angry child. His body was bent at an impossible angle, one arm reaching up toward the sky he had never managed to touch.

And the colors. God, the colors. In this world, which had almost forgotten what color was, his death was a scream. The blue of his jacket wasn’t just blue — it was a toxic, synthetic, sickly ultramarine, a color that doesn’t exist in nature. It burned against the backdrop of the gray rocks like spilled chemical dye. And the blood… it wasn’t red. It was the color of an overripe cherry, thick and lacquered, as if someone had knocked over a can of enamel. It didn’t soak into the stones; it lay upon them as an alien, glossy stain. The blood, if it even was blood, didn’t look like blood — more like a patch of rust on old iron that no one had cleaned for years. Even the earth beneath him seemed not to be earth, but broken glass or scattered salt, glittering under the dull sun. His face was turned to the sky, and his eyes reflected the sky — not blue, but faded, like watercolors washed out by rain. His mouth was slightly open, as if he were trying to say something, but the words had gotten stuck somewhere between his throat and the clouds.

Nearby, a few meters away, lay the Starlink terminal. Black, shattered, resembling the chitinous shell of a dead giant beetle. Its small LED, the indicator of life, was not a steady glow. It was pulsing. Pulsing slowly and steadily, at a perfect interval. But its color was wrong. Not green, not red, not white. It was purple. A neon, toxic color that Polina had never seen on any electronic device.

This was not a tragedy. This was a glitch in the code. A bug. A visual error in the rendering of reality, which had decided to demonstrate its agony in the ugliest way possible.

The villagers who approached, their faces indistinguishable from the surrounding stones, related everything simply and matter-of-factly. They had been looking for a stray yak. Saw a bright spot. Walked over. He had probably climbed up during the night. Slipped. Fell. Their words belonged to the old, comprehensible world. But they had absolutely no relation to the surreal tableau lying before them.

And then, after the initial shock, came the true horror. Not metaphysical, but nauseatingly practical.

What were they supposed to do with the body?

This question hung in the thin air. Dmitry Stanislavovich, a man of protocol and order, was the first to vocalize what was spinning in everyone’s head.

“We must… we must follow procedure.”

But procedure no longer existed.

Notify the parents… but the phones are silent. Contact the embassy… but the embassy is an abstraction, existing somewhere out there, in a world that might no longer be. Repatriate the body… but there are no planes, no roads, and no homeland as they remembered it.

They stood over this bright, screaming stain of death, and understood: His death was a fact. It was material. It was a problem that had to be solved.

November 6 →
← A Road of a Thousand Years
← Paths
← The River