Бесплатный фрагмент - Echoes of Oblivion

Echoes of Oblivion

From the Author

Memory is a ghost.

She whispers stories to us that we would rather forget. It shows us faces we will never see again. It holds us captive to what was, keeping us from stepping into what could be.

What if one day all the ghosts disappeared? What if there is absolute, blessed, terrifying silence?

“Echoes of Oblivion” is an attempt to look into that silence. Into a world that has received the greatest gift and the greatest curse — a chance to start from scratch. But on that clean slate, old ink bleeds through, and in the ensuing silence, a new, strange echo is born.

This book doesn’t give answers. It just asks questions. About what makes us human. About the price we pay for knowledge. And what is scarier: remembering everything or not remembering anything.

Welcome to a world where the past is the enemy, the future is a fog, and the present is but an echo of what has been lost forever.

Zohar Leo Palfi

PROLOGUE

Time: Approximately 200 years after the Blackout.

Location: Settlement at the foot of a rusty space elevator skeleton.

The old man sat by the fire, his face a map of wrinkled roads. The children, whose eyes had never seen light other than fire and stars, drew closer. The night was cold, and the old man’s stories warmed better than any cloak. He was the last of the Guardians who remembered the Great Saga by heart.

— Tell me again, Grandfather,” the girl with the scorched grass hair asked. — About the Age of Glass Eyes.

The old man did not answer at once. He slowly reached his bony hand toward the fire, and in its light the dull metal on his wrist gleamed. It was a bracelet, simple and smooth, without a single pattern. The children had seen it a thousand times. He had never taken it off. No one knew that this bracelet had once been more than just metal. It was a screen. It showed his wife’s pulse, her location, her laughter translated into colored charts. It was the thread of their personal web. Now it was just cold iron, a reminder of ghostly warmth. This bracelet was his personal scar, his entry point into the Great Saga.

The old man nodded, his gaze drifting into the darkness, to where the lights of giant cities once shone.

— In those times,’ he began, his voice creaking like an old tree, ‘people had a common soul. It lived not in their bodies, but in the invisible Web that entangled the whole Earth. Their memories, their dreams, their love and hate — everything flowed through this Web like blood through their veins. They thought they had conquered loneliness.

But it was a strange loneliness. Imagine, children: you are never alone, not even in your head. Your every strong emotion — fear, joy, shame — echoed faintly in millions of others. Your embarrassing failure on an exam was made public online, becoming a fraction of a percent in the overall failure statistics. Your secret crush could be analyzed by algorithms and compared to another person’s “compatibility profile.” The web gave togetherness, but took away the right to secrecy. It was a warm, cozy cocoon that prevented you from making a single free movement.

They thought they had conquered death. They forgot that any spider’s web is only for one purpose — to catch flies.

He paused, letting the words soak into the silence.

— They called it knowledge. But knowledge without wisdom is poison. They remembered everything, but understood nothing. And one day, their shared soul became sick. It was tired of remembering. And then came the Great Silence. A disconnection.

The children held their breath. They had heard the story dozens of times, but it still mesmerized them like a tale of ancient gods and monsters.

— People woke up in their bodies like strangers. Their heads were empty, like this jug without water,” the old man tapped the clay vessel beside him. — And they had to learn everything all over again: to make fire, to grow bread, to trust each other. And most importantly, to tell stories. Because when everything is taken away from you, the only thing you have left is the story of how you lost everything.

He looked into the burning eyes of the children.

— Do you want to hear the Saga of the Beginning of the End? The story of how it all happened? The story of the Librarian who tried to save the books, the Builder who believed only in stone, and the Prophet who wanted to burn the very word “memory”?

The children nodded in agreement.

The old man took a deep breath, taking in the smoke-scented air. He looked at their young, pure faces and felt a pang of guilt. He would tell them the Saga, as he had told it dozens of times. But he would again leave out the most important part. The fourth person in the story. The Phantom who had pulled the string. About why the smile on the Librarian’s daughter’s face was not only happy, but a little frightened. But children don’t need to know that yet. The saga needs to be told in order.

The children nodded in agreement.

The old man took a deep breath, filled his lungs with smoke-scented air, and began his story.

— It all began at the golden hour, 5:34 p.m., when one man who loved books more than people looked up at his daughter’s smile frozen in mid-air…

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part I: The Beginning of the Age of Oblivion

Chapter 1 — Awakening: 17:34, June 16, 2045

Chapter 6 — Children of Oblivion

Chapter 7 — Stripes and Scars

Chapter 8 — Parched Creeks

Chapter 9 — The Search for the Shards

Chapter 10 — Preacher of Oblivion

Chapter 11 — The Stone Family

Chapter 12 — First Harvest

Chapter 13 — Memories in the Night

Chapter 14 — The Stone Codex

Chapter 15 — Two Faiths

Part II: The Renaissance (50 years later)

Chapter 0. Hungry Winter (25 years after the Shutdown)

Chapter 1 — The Oblivion Generation (50 years after the Shutdown)

Chapter 2 — Guardians of the Oral Word

Chapter 3 — Echoes of Old Voices

Chapter 4 — Memory Markets

Chapter 5 — The Rise of the New Science

Chapter 6 — The Digger’s Way

Chapter 7 — Dead Cities

Chapter 8 — The Origins Project

Chapter 9 — Whispers in the Ruins

CHAPTER 9.5. The Shepherd and the Storm

Chapter 10 — The Doctrine of Purification

Chapter 11 — Grandfather’s Inheritance

Chapter 12 — Trial by Faith

Chapter 13 — Rise of the Machines

Chapter 14 — The First Grains of Doubt

Chapter 15 — Lost Portraits

Part III: Truth and Consequences (100 years later)

Chapter 1 — The Great Dilemma

Chapter 2 — Controlling the Narrative

Chapter 3 — Forbidden Zones

Chapter 3.5. The weight of the new sky

Chapter 4 — Lines of Resistance

Chapter 5 — The Ancestral Cipher

Chapter 6 — Clash of Ideas

Chapter 7 — Architect of Oblivion

Chapter 8 — The Cry of the Echo

Chapter 9 — Choosing a New World

Chapter 10 — Crossroads of Memory

Chapter 11 — The Last Battle for Knowledge

Chapter 12 — Recovery

Chapter 13 — Echoes of Eternity

Chapter 14 — New Stories

Chapter 15 — Dawn of Memory

Part I: The Beginning of the Age of Oblivion

Chapter 1: Awakening: 17:34, June 16, 2045

Fragment of lost information: transcript of a speech by Kevin Tsang, CEO of Chrono-Synaptic Corporation, at the World Economic Forum, February 4, 2045.

“…We don’t use technology anymore. We are technology. Our memories, our connections, our history are no longer ephemeral pulses in gray matter. They are a crystal clear, verified, eternal stream of data. We have digitized the soul of humanity, placed it in an indestructible cloud, and thereby defeated oblivion. We have become the gods of our own history. Nothing. Never. Will not. Lost…”

Elias Vance loved this hour. 17:34. The golden section of the day, when the world was still humming in its work rhythm but already anticipating the evening peace. The sun, slowly slipping toward the horizon outside the window of his apartment on the 73rd floor of London’s Charade, cast a molten amber over the room. It played on the facets of his water glass, on the holographic dust particles dancing in the air, and on the smooth, almost invisible surface of his augmented reality lenses.

The water in the glass was real, from an alpine glacier, with a slight tang of ozone-a small luxury in a world where almost everything was synthesized. Elias appreciated such things. They were anchors, keeping him in physical reality, keeping him from finally dissolving into the streams of information he curated.

The world for Elias has always been multi-layered. The top layer was real: old, favorite paper books on the shelves, smelling of dust and eternity; the warm wood of his desk under his fingers; the weight of real glass in his hand. The lower, always active layer is digital: translucent windows of news feeds, stock quotes, a chat room with his daughter Lena constantly hanging in the corner of his eye, and, of course, his main project — Mnemosyne, a worldwide archive of verified historical data. He was not just a historian. He was the Archivist of humanity. His job was to ensure that the past had no white spots.

And in this work he found a bitter, almost perverse pride. He, a connoisseur of paper books, despised the superficiality of the digital age, yet he was its high priest. It was his algorithms that helped Mnemosyne weed out “false memories” and “emotional distortions,” creating a perfectly clean, sterile, objective history. Sometimes, rereading the old, yellowed Herodotus with its rumors, myths, and outright fabrications, Elias felt like a god correcting the mistakes of a naive but lovable child. He wasn’t just preserving the past. He castrated it, stripping it of its living, contradictory flesh and leaving only a calibrated, safe skeleton. He was part of the very system that promised to defeat oblivion, and he secretly believed it was right. That belief was about to betray him.

He took a sip of water, and his lenses obligingly displayed biometric data at the edge of his field of vision: hydration 98%, mineral balance normal. The world for Elias hadn’t been a whole for a long time. It was a palimpsest, a layering of realities. The upper, physical layer was his refuge: the smell of old books, the warmth of wood, the heaviness of glass. But all his life, work and communication took place in the lower layer, in the augmented reality, woven from trillions of data streams.

Right now, through the wall of his apartment, he was seeing translucent “archival ghosts” — reconstructions of events that had taken place on this very spot. Here is Lord Nelson discussing the plan for the Battle of Trafalgar. And here, already from Elias’s personal archive, is a holographic print of his daughter Lena’s laughter when she was very young. He could run it and the room would fill with phantom childish laughter. Memory ceased to be an internal process. It became an interior element. The whole world was a living, breathing museum where everyone could be their own curator. Elias smiled. It was a good world. Orderly. Eternal.

— Dad, can you hear me? — Lena’s voice, clear and a little distorted by digital compression, sounded right in his head thanks to the neural interface. Her face flickered in the air in front of him — smiling, framed by dark hair. Beside her, five-year-old Leo, his grandson, was bouncing around.

— Loud and clear, sweetheart,” Elias smiled. — Leo, show Grandpa your new cyberdragon.

The boy enthusiastically held the toy up to the camera. The dragon flapped its holographic wings, and Elias’s room was filled with myriads of virtual sparks.

— He breathes fire! And sings songs from the Legends of Orion! — shouted Leo.

— Impressive. Almost as impressive as Homer…” Elias started to say, but stopped short.

Something happened.

It wasn’t like a sound or a flash of light. It was a sensation. A sudden, chilling draught in the deepest part of his mind. It was as if someone had tugged at the invisible thread that bound him to the world, and it had snapped with a soundless snap. For a moment it seemed to him that he was falling into an endless void. Gone was the background noise — not the street noise, but the internal noise that everyone was used to — the subtle hum of the Net, the whisper of trillions of thoughts, data, lives. The world inside his head became sterilely quiet.

It wasn’t like a glitch. Not like a broken connection. The image of Lena and Leo didn’t shatter into pixels. It just… froze. Frozen in a perfect freeze frame: their daughter’s smile, their grandson’s delight, the rainbow sparks of the dragon.

— Grandpa, do you remember the lullaby you sang to me when I was little? — Leo asked suddenly, distracted by the toy.

— Of course I remember, my good man,” Elias smiled, and opened his mouth to launch from his memory the very tune his father had sung. Simple, old, non-digital…

But he couldn’t.

17:34.

Elias blinked. The image didn’t disappear. It hung in the air like a fly caught in amber.

— “Oracle, connection diagnostics,” he said aloud.

Silence.

The home assistant’s voice, a polite and omniscient synthetic baritone, did not respond.

— “Oracle?” — Elias repeated, feeling the first chill run down his spine.

He took off the lenses. The frozen image of his daughter and grandson disappeared. The room became flat, devoid of the usual information noise. Bare walls. A desk. Books. And silence. Not just the absence of sound. It was a deafening, absolute, vacuum silence. The silence of the Net.

He listened. Outside, outside the window, the rustle of electric cars could still be heard. But it was the wrong sound. Naked. Devoid of the invisible conductor that synchronized their movement. It was the sound of chaos that had not yet realized itself.

Elias walked over to the communication panel on the wall. The screen was black. Not off, not in sleep mode. It was dead. As if its very soul had been taken out of it. He pressed the power button. Nothing. Again. Nothing again.

Panic hasn’t come yet. It’s confusion. A global disruption? That hadn’t happened in thirty years. Backup systems, decentralized networks, quantum redundancy… The system was designed to withstand a meteorite, a solar storm, even a nuclear strike. It couldn’t just… shut down.

He walked over to the window. The view he knew by heart had changed. The skyscrapers stood their ground, the perpetual motion of electric cars on the magnetic tracks below continued, but something was wrong. The giant advertising holograms that turned London into a neon dream twenty-four hours a day were extinguished. The façade opposite, where the globe in the Chrono-Synaptic logo was forever spinning, was now nothing but a gray, lifeless concrete wall.

And then he saw it. The electric car in the middle row suddenly lost traction on the magnetic strip. It didn’t crash, it didn’t explode. It just slid smoothly off the track and slowly, almost lazily, crashed into the guardrail. Followed by another one. And another. The autopilots, controlled by the unified transportation network, were shutting down. The people inside, who were used to trusting the machine, panicked and grabbed the hand wheels that many of them had forgotten existed.

Fear began to come up his throat like an icy barbed wire. Elias turned back to the table. He needed knowledge. He needed information. It was his craft, his essence. He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes, trying to access his own memory, that last bastion that no one could take from him.

“The First Punic War. Causes. Carthage and Rome. The Dispute for Sicily…”

The facts were there. Dry as bones. But something was gone. Details. The names of the consuls. The exact dates of the battles. He knew he’d known them until five minutes ago. He could have named them in his sleep. Now in their place was… a hole. An unpleasant, throbbing void.

It was like trying to read a book in which all the proper names and dates had faded. The skeleton of the story remained, but the flesh was gone. He felt the contours of the missing knowledge like an amputee feels a phantom limb. It wasn’t just “forgotten.” It was “cut off.”

He tried something else. Poetry. His favorite is Yates. “The Second Coming.”

“The falcon is circling, circling in the funnel…”

What’s next?

“The falconer’s voices cannot be heard…”

He knew those lines. He could feel their rhythm. But the words… the words scattered before they could form. They were like sand slipping through his fingers. He tensed, trying to grasp them, and felt a strange, dull pain in his temples. It wasn’t a headache. It was the phantom pain of an amputated memory.

With horror, he realized. It wasn’t about the Grid. It wasn’t the electricity.

Something happened to them. All of them.

He tried again. The simplest one. His late mother’s face. He closed his eyes, trying to conjure up her dear features, her kind smile. An image emerged. But it wasn’t her.

An unfamiliar Asian woman with a short haircut and tired, longing eyes looked at him. She was dressed in the uniform of a factory worker, and for a split second Elias smelled the phantom odor of machine oil and ozone. He had never seen this woman. He didn’t know her. But her face was in his mind, in the place of his mother’s face, clear and real.

He shrieked and opened his eyes. The stranger’s face was gone, leaving behind a nauseating sense of intrusion, as if someone else had just walked through his soul in muddy boots.

It wasn’t just oblivion. It was...replacement. Substitution.

He rushed to the bookshelves. His hands, trembling, fumbled for a heavy volume of Herodotus’s History. Paper. Real. Eternal. He opened the book at random. The words were there. Black letters on a cream-colored page. He could read them.

“Xerxes, hearing this, rejoiced and answered…”

He read, but the meaning was slipping away. The name “Xerxes” was just a sound. He knew it was a Persian king, but the whole vast, complex web of associations that linked that name to thousands of other facts — to battles, to culture, to geography, to the consequences of his campaigns — that web had thinned and torn. He looked at the word, and it was empty.

It was like waking up after a serious illness, where you recognize your reflection in the mirror but feel no connection to the person looking back at you.

He looked out the window again. Down below, the chaos was growing. People were getting out of stopped cars. They weren’t screaming. They weren’t running. They stood in the middle of the frozen streets, looking around with the same expression on their faces. The expression of a lost child who suddenly realized he had let go of his mother’s hand in a huge, unfamiliar crowd. They looked at their dead phones, at the extinguished shop windows, at each other’s faces, and the same mute question fluttered in their eyes: “Who am I? Where am I? What am I supposed to remember?”

A man in a business suit was pointlessly pointing his finger at his dark communicator. Then he raised his head, looked up at the skyscraper where Elias lived, and his face contorted with the horror of realization. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t make a phone call. He couldn’t remember where he needed to go. His home, his job, his life-all were dots on a digital map that had just disappeared.

And that’s when the worst of it began. The man in the suit opened his mouth to scream, but instead of screaming, a perfectly pitched Hindi phrase came out of his throat. He was startled by his own voice and fell silent, clutching his throat in horror. The woman next to him, who was trying to help the fallen man, suddenly froze and began to make strange, rhythmic movements with her hands, as if conducting an invisible orchestra, tears streaming down her cheeks from the music that only she could hear.

Elias looked at it, and his blood ran cold in his veins. He recalled the stranger’s face in his memory. He realized everything.

The wave that hit them wasn’t just a wave of oblivion. It was a monstrous failure in the exchange protocol. The web didn’t just break. It burst, and all its contents — trillions of souls, memories, skills, emotions — spurted out in all directions like blood from a severed artery. And those bloody, alien splashes settled in the heads of the survivors, mingling, displacing, driving them mad.

And then Elias Vance, the Archivist of humanity, the keeper of trillions of terabytes of its history, realized a chilling, apocalyptic truth.

It wasn’t that they lost access to the data.

It was much worse than that.

The data has lost access to it.

The wave he felt at 17:34 was not an electromagnetic pulse. It was a wave of oblivion. It swept across the planet, washing out not servers or hard drives.

She was washing out their souls.

The world didn’t end with a bang. It ended in silence. A deep, all-encompassing, collective sigh, after which nothing but a faint, fading echo remained in the memory of mankind.

Echoes of what they once were.

Chapter 2: The Silence of the Net

A fragment of lost information: from the children’s educational program “Smart World,” episode #214, “What is Memory?”, 2042.

“Imagine that your memory is a huge, magical library where every book is your memory! And the Internet, our faithful friend, is a super-librarian who helps you find any book, even the oldest one, instantly! It never gets tired and never forgets anything. With him, our memory becomes limitless! Isn’t that a miracle?”

Elias Vance stood in the middle of his apartment, and his world, which ten minutes ago had been humming with trillions of invisible connections, was now deafeningly silent. The silence was pressing on his ears. It wasn’t just silence. It was the absence of the background hum of civilization, that ubiquitous, low-frequency omm that came from a planet entangled with technology. No one noticed it while it was there, but its disappearance left behind a gaping acoustic wound. The world didn’t just go silent. It exhaled.

He looked at his hands. The hands of a historian, accustomed to the touch of touch screens and light gestures in virtual space. Now they seemed helpless, alien. He forced them into clenched fists. A physical effort. A real one. The muscles responded with a dull, unfamiliar ache.

His gaze fell on the books. “History” by Herodotus. Nearby, Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations,” Machiavelli’s “The Sovereign,” a tattered volume of Shakespeare. They used to be artifacts, a sentimental hobby, a tribute to a bygone era. Now they’ve become weapons. They have become the only anchors in an ocean of oblivion. There was more reality in their typographic ink and yellowed pages than in the dead city around him.

Outside, beyond the panoramic window, confusion was changing to panic. People who had gotten out of their frozen electric cars huddled together like frightened sheep. Their faces were contorted with a grimace of cognitive dissonance. They tried to speak to each other, but words were hard to come by. Elias saw one man in an expensive suit gesticulating furiously, trying to explain something, and then suddenly he was silent, staring into the void, as if he had forgotten not only what he wanted to say, but the very language he was speaking. His mouth opened and closed like a beached fish.

Some began to scream. Incoherent, animalistic cries of despair. Others just sat on the cold pavement, arms around their heads, rocking back and forth. Their inner world, their identity built on a foundation of digital connections, photos in the cloud, search history and saved playlists, collapsed. They woke up in their own bodies, like in an unfamiliar house where all the furniture was gone. They were ghosts in their own lives.

Thirty kilometers from the center of London, in a quiet suburb, Matvey Kamen put down his hammer. He stood in his shed, smelling of fresh shavings, tar and machine oil, and looked at the frame of the wooden boat he was building for his grandson Leo. “A house should stand on the ground, not on a cloud,” he liked to say, which only elicited condescending smiles from his children who lived in “smart” apartments. His house stood on the ground. And now, when the world was collapsing, his house was still home.

He distrusted this new world from the beginning. Not because of retrograde, but because of instinct. He’d seen people become fragile, dependent. How their hands lose their grip and their eyes lose their ability to see beyond the screen. He had seen his own son, David, a brilliant programmer, unable to start a fire without an ultrasonic lighter. Matvey wasn’t angry, he was sad. He felt that humanity had traded its power for convenience. And now the convenience was over.

But his sadness was colored by bitterness of guilt. He, a builder who made houses of stone, had failed to build a bridge to his own son. All his attempts to teach David to work with his hands had run into a polite but impenetrable wall of digital superiority. “Dad, why chop wood when you can optimize the heat supply by 12% and save energy?” — David used to say. In their last argument, just a week ago, Matvey had shouted in his hearts: “When your numbers turn to dust, you’ll come crawling to my stone!”. He didn’t want those words to prove prophetic. He wanted his son to prove him wrong. And now, as the world crumbled, Matvey felt not triumph, but only the emptiness of an unspoken apology. His strength was his curse; he was right, but at what cost?

The silence caught up with him here. He hadn’t paid much attention to it at first. The old radio, always blaring jazz, just went dead. Then the lights went out. The automatic gate wouldn’t open. “Another substation malfunction,” he thought angrily.

But then he tried to remember. He wanted to carve the Odal rune on the bow of the boat, the symbol of heritage and home that his father had taught him. He saw it clearly in his mind-a diamond with two tails at the bottom. But when he picked up the chisel, the image blurred. Fingers that remembered hundreds of movements didn’t know which one to make first. It was a knowledge that lived not in his logical memory, but in his muscle memory. And it was gone, as if amnesia had struck the muscles.

It wasn’t just the rune. He tried to remember his father teaching him how to lay a brick wall. He remembered the movements, but not his father’s words, not his hoarse laughter when young Matvey dropped the trowel. He remembered the fact itself, but he had lost the warmth of that memory. And it was as if all the furniture had been taken out of his house, leaving bare walls. He had built houses, but his own inner home had been looted. That was why his decision had become so firm: he would build with what he could touch. Out of stone. Of wood. Of something that would not betray.

He looked at his hands in bewilderment. The strong, calloused hands of a builder. They always knew what to do. Now they seemed foreign. He tried to remember the face of his father, who had taught him this rune. The face was there, but the name… his father’s name flickered at the edge of his consciousness and slipped away like a frightened bird. The fear he felt was cold and ancient. It was the fear of losing his roots.

He stepped out of the barn in confusion. His wife, Anna, stood in the middle of their perfect lawn, which was being mowed by a robotic lawnmower, now frozen in the middle of the lawn like a prehistoric green insect.

— Matvey…” she whispered. There was the same fear in her eyes that he had seen in the eyes of a frightened doe in the woods years ago. — I can’t call the children. I… Matvey, I can’t remember their number. I don’t remember their names.

Matvey squeezed her hand. Her knuckles were ice cold. His own memory worked the same way. He remembered having a son and a daughter. He remembered their faces, their laughter, the warmth of their childhood embrace. But their names...they were on the tip of his tongue, prickly and elusive. He knew he loved them more than life, but he couldn’t name them. This emptiness was more frightening than any silence.

At that moment, he saw their faces in his memory with crystal clarity: here was the son, frowning his eyebrows in concentration over some digital puzzle of his. Here was the daughter, laughing, with eyes full of light. Loving them was a physical ache in his chest. He couldn’t name them, but he knew he would die for them. And that knowledge, that feeling, was the one thing that the wave of oblivion could not wash away. It didn’t live in memory. It lived in the blood.

— Nothing,” he said, and his voice sounded surprisingly solid, like the rock their family was named after. — We’re here. We’re together. Go inside. Lock the doors. I’ll check the supplies. The age of the smart man is over. The age of the strong has begun.

In his world, the world of physical objects, things were simpler. There’s water in the well. There’s canned goods in the cellar. There’s an axe and a stack of firewood. There’s his grandfather’s double-barrelled shotgun in the safe. His memory of survival, the one passed down from generation to generation not through the Net but through blood and experience, was there. And he realized: their family was no longer a project. It had become a clan again.

In Trafalgar Square, at the foot of Nelson’s Column, stood a man named Jonah. Until 5:34 p.m., he was a nobody — a street preacher, an urban lunatic whom everyone ignored by turning off the sound of his voice in their audio filters. He shouted sermons about the sins of the digital world, about the Tower of Babel of information, about humanity drowning in data and losing its soul. He was white noise to them.

Now the white noise was gone. Only his voice remained.

Jonah looked at the confused, devastated faces around him. He saw their fear, their pain. But he felt no fear, no pity. He felt triumph. Ecstasy. This was what he had prayed for. The Great Purification. The divine pressing of the Delete button.

He saw the young woman shaking her dead communicator in panic, crying and repeating the same word: “Pictures… my pictures… my son… I don’t remember his face…”

Jonah walked over to her. He put his hand on her shoulder, and she flinched, feeling the touch of a stranger unmediated by technology for the first time in years.

— “My child,” he said, and his voice, amplified by the general silence, echoed across the square. — Why do you want the pictures? The man you saw in them is dead. That life was a lie. An illusion. God took pity on us and erased our shame. He gave us the greatest gift of all… the gift of Oblivion.

Jonah looked at her, and there was no sympathy in his soul. He remembered his past life. He remembered standing in the gleaming lobby of Chrono-Synaptic, presenting his energy grid optimization project. And how Kevin Tsang himself, walking by with investors, had cast a quick glance at his tablet and told his assistant loud enough for Jonah to hear: “Another dreamer. Make sure his social rating won’t even allow him to take out a loan for a coffee maker.” That phrase, forever written in his digital file, closed all doors in front of him.

But that wasn’t the worst part. Worse was that the Network wouldn’t let him forget. Every morning, his personal assistant offered him “refresher courses” based on his “low performance rating.” Every time he logged on to a social network, an algorithm would slip him success stories of people who had worked on projects similar to his own. And once, as an elaborate torture, the system suggested he buy a 3D model of Tsang’s office as a “career motivating souvenir.” The Web didn’t just remember his humiliation. It poked his nose into that wound daily, methodically, with the soulless smile of an algorithm. She wasn’t just an archive. It was a personal, eternal, digital hell.

She haunted him in his sleep. The net made it impossible to forget anything. She was an eternal accuser, an eternal reminder of his humiliation. And now she was silent. He felt as if the red-hot shackles had been removed. He wasn’t just free. He was avenged.

Several men turned at his voice. A light flickered in their empty eyes. Not hope. A new, eerie sense of purpose. Their agonizing minds clung to any idea, even the craziest, that could explain what was happening.

— Rejoice! — Jonah raised his voice, spreading his arms as if embracing this whole broken world. — For we are free! Free from the weight of the past! Free from likes and dislikes, from digital debt and fake friends! We are a clean slate! We are the first people of a new world! Memory is a disease! Forgetting is healing!

And people listened. They listened because his words, as wild as they were, offered a way out. They turned their loss into gain, their weakness into strength, their terror into holy awe.

In his apartment on the 73rd floor, Elias Vance pushed aside a heavy oak desk and barricaded the front door with it. He realized it wouldn’t hold for long, but he needed time.

He walked along his bookshelves, running his fingers along the leather and cardboard spines. Shakespeare. Dante. Homer. Plato. The Bible. The Koran. Dostoevsky. That was all that was left. Not just stories. They were blueprints of the soul. Instructions on how to assemble a human being.

His own memory, the memory of a scientist, had been destroyed. He could no longer trust what he knew. But the letters on the paper didn’t lie. They were here. Physical proof that humanity knew how to think, love, suffer, and hope long before they invented the silicon chip.

His mission had become terribly clear. He was no longer the Archivist of the past. He was to be the seed of the future.

He picked up a blank sheet of paper and a real fountain pen from his desk, another of his atavisms. His hand trembled, but he forced it to obey. He had to start writing things down. Everything he could still remember. The names of his children. The face of his grandson. The first lines of poetry that still lingered in his head. He wasn’t writing for himself. He was writing for someone who might find these sheets a hundred years from now.

Because in that deafening Silence of the Net, he realized one terrible thing. Oblivion is not just the absence of memory. It is a vacuum. And nature, as he vaguely remembered from some book he had read long ago, does not tolerate emptiness. And if he and others like him didn’t fill that void with bits of old wisdom, something else would.

Something new.

Or something very, very old and dark that had been waiting patiently in the very depths of the human soul all this time while the hum of the Net drowned out his whisper. A voice like Jonah’s.

As Elias wrote, the lights of London slowly dimmed outside the window, and the first real night in a hundred and fifty years descended upon the city. A night full of stars and fear.

And on this night, on the other side of town, in a small apartment piled high with medical reference books, another woman was awake. Her name was Lena. She was a doctor. And she was Elias Vance’s daughter.

She had just experienced hell in her clinic. She had seen patients hooked up to life support systems die when they were disconnected. She had seen her colleague, a brilliant surgeon, suddenly forget how to hold a scalpel and start reciting poetry in ancient Greek out loud. She saw a nurse go into convulsions, screaming out someone else’s name and address in another city.

She didn’t know what had happened to the world. But she did know one thing: her father, Elias, the reclusive historian who always talked about the fragility of digital civilization, was in his tower. And her brother, David, a brilliant programmer who lived outside the city with his retrograde father, was trapped, too. In her mind, like three lights in a raging ocean, there were three dots: her father, her brother, and her son Leo, who was now with David. Her family.

She looked at her dead communicator. There was no connection. But she was a doctor. She knew how to heal, but also how to think. And she knew that in the first hours of chaos, it was not the strongest who survived, but whoever got to their own first.

After packing all the medications she could carry into her backpack, she left the clinic. She didn’t know if she would reach her father downtown. But she knew she could try to make her way south, to her brother’s house. To the home of Matvey Stone, who, she vaguely remembered from conversations, had built himself a “fortress for the end of the world.”

So, on the first night of the new world, the three threads of history began their movement. The librarian, locked in his tower of knowledge. The Builder, fortifying his home with his family. And the Physician, a woman who at that moment made the decision to become the link between them. Their paths had not yet crossed, but they were already inextricably linked.

Chapter 3: The First Days of Chaos

Fragment of lost information: excerpt from high school social studies textbook, Foundations of Civilization 2.0, 2044.

“The social contract of modern society is unique. It is no longer based on physical strength or birthright. Its foundation is an interconnected information infrastructure. Trust, reputation, access to resources are all functions of your digital footprint. The loss of access to the Web is tantamount to social death. Theoretically, the collapse of this system would lead to a regression to the most primitive forms of organization based on tribalism and violence. Fortunately, this is only a hypothetical scenario…”

On the third day after the Shutdown, the city began to make new sounds. The silence, deafening at first, was replaced by a cacophony of regression. Instead of the steady hum of electric highways and the rustle of drones, there was the crunch of broken glass underfoot. Instead of music from flying pods — rare, desperate screams, quickly turning into gurgling silence. And at night, as the primal darkness unfamiliar to the townspeople descended, there were dry, jagged pops. A sound Elias Vance’s ancestors knew all too well. The sound of gunpowder.

Hunger proved to be the quickest and most effective teacher. He taught his first lesson at the windows of the automated supermarkets “Kwiki-Mart”. Behind the impenetrable polycarbonate, in the steady light of emergency diodes, lay mountains of food. Pyramids of canned food, vacuum-packed synthetic meats, rows of clean water bottles. They were there, two centimeters away. But the door, controlled by a dead central server, wouldn’t open. And then people, who yesterday had been law-abiding citizens, picked up stones, pieces of rebar, torn-off road signs, and beat on the transparent barrier like moths against the glass of a lamp. To no avail. Civilization locked its storerooms and died, leaving the keys in a nonexistent cloud.

Elias Vance watched it from his tower window. His 73rd floor had gone from status symbol to curse. He was trapped, on an island in the middle of a stone sky, and hell was unfolding below. He stopped looking at people. He looked at the city like a map. Here were the small stores, the family stores, the ones run by old retrogrades who didn’t trust full automation. There were already flocks clustered around them. They weren’t like gangs. They were just neighbors, who two days ago had said hello in the elevator and now fought with primal fury over a can of stew.

The physical hunger was nothing compared to the informational hunger that was devouring Elias. His own memory, his internal archive, was stricken with “digital leprosy.” Facts were scattered, names turned into sounds. He sat down at his oak desk, picked up a real pen, and began to write. It was a race. A race against time, against the chaos outside and the entropy inside his skull.

“How to purify water. 1. Boiling. Kills almost everything. Must wait for the ‘white key’. 2. Steeping. Long. Unreliable. 3. Chemistry? Iodine? Chlorine? I don’t remember the dosage. Dangerous.”

He wasn’t writing history. He was writing a survival manual for a humanity that had lost the ability to live.

“The simplest knots. Straight. Eight. Bayonet. What was a bowline for? To… to get people out. Yeah. A noose that doesn’t tighten.”

On the fourth day, they came for him. The heavy, methodical blows on the armored door of his apartment sounded like a sentence. The voices were rough, devoid of the overtones of civilization.

— Hey, up there! We know you’re up there! Get rich from the tower! Open it or we’ll break it down! You sure have food! And water!

Elias froze. His barricade of desk and bookcases seemed like a child’s toy. He looked around his library. His treasure. Plato. Herodotus. Shakespeare. Dante. All the wisdom of the world. And what of this could he counteract with scrap and hunger rage?

The blows came harder. The door rattled, the metal squealing protestingly. He had minutes. He couldn’t save everything. Choices had to be made. What was the most important thing? What to pass on next if he didn’t survive? His gaze darted from the heavy volume of History to the elegant binding of the sonnets. Useless. Beautiful, but useless.

And then he saw it. A small, unassuming book in a tattered paperback he’d bought at a flea market out of nostalgic whimsy. “Boy Scout Survival Guide.” 1985 edition. Starting a fire by friction. Building a shelter. Water purification. First aid for fractures. How to distinguish edible berries from poisonous ones.

Practical Knowledge. Survival Concentrate.

With a feverish haste that made his fingers cramp, he grabbed the book, his scribbled sheets, and a small but razor-sharp paper knife. His apartment had an old, bricked-up ventilation duct, an atavism left over from the builders of the last century. He’d discovered it during renovations and wanted to fix it, but kept putting it off. Now it was his only way to escape.

The door flew inward with a deafening crack. Without looking back, Elias ripped open the ventilation grate and ducked into the dark, dusty, oblivion-smelling womb of the wall. The last thing he heard was the roaring and stomping of his apartment, the sound of tearing books and shattering glass. A new world was breaking into his home.

He crawled through the narrow, dusty crawlway, and every crack of tearing paper echoed in his heart with physical pain. They weren’t just books. They were voices. The voice of Plato arguing about the ideal state. The voice of Shakespeare mourning his heroes. The voice of Dante leading him through the circles of hell. And now these voices were silenced one by one under the boots of barbarians fighting over a can of synthetic beans. In that moment, Elias Vance, the Archivist, hated humanity. Not the ones who were busting down his door, but everyone. All those who had traded the eternity contained within these pages for a momentary comfort that vanished like morning fog. And he vowed that if he survived, he wouldn’t be saving people. He would save the things that made them human, even if they didn’t deserve it themselves.

Dozens of kilometers to the south, in his house, which he had built with his own hands, Matvey Kamen loaded his grandfather’s double-barrelled shotgun. The cartridges were old, but he cared for them like a family heirloom. He, too, heard voices and saw packs prowling their suburb. But his house wasn’t an ivory tower. It stood on the ground. Firmly.

His family was packed. Son David and daughter Lena and their spouses and children had managed to reach their parents’ home in the first few hours before the roads turned into death traps. Ten people. Ten lives.

David, pale, clutched the heavy axe in his hands. His fingers, accustomed to smooth keys, did not know how to grip the rough axe-head properly.

— Daddy, maybe we can talk to them? Give up some of the food?” his voice, the voice of a programmer and negotiator, trembled.

— “You don’t talk to wolves, son,” Matvey replied, keeping his eyes on the street. His gaze was as heavy as the stones in the foundation of his house. — You show your teeth with them. Or they’ll eat you, David backed away, feeling helpless. In his world, any problem was solved by negotiation, by compromise, by finding the optimal algorithm. He instinctively tried to “scan” the faces of his attackers, to assess their threat level, to make a psychological profile… and realized that his brain, honed for solving the most complex problems, was failing in the face of simple primal rage. His skills weren’t just useless, they were harmful. They forced him to analyze when he should have acted. He looked at his father, who didn’t think but just knew what to do, and for the first time in his life felt not condescension for a “retrograde” but burning shame for his own fragility.and then your family.

When the first group of five approached their wrought iron gate, Matvey didn’t wait. He raised his rifle and fired into the air. The rumble in the dead silence sounded like the voice of God. The attackers, ready to break through the fence, froze. On their faces hungry rage was replaced for a moment by a primal fear of the loud sound and the promise of death.

— The next charge will not fly into the sky! — roared Matvey, and his voice seemed to vibrate with the earth. — This is my land. My home. Let’s go away!

They wrinkled their brows, looked at each other. There was no easy prey. They retreated, disappearing into the twilight.

That evening, as they sat around the fireplace, the only source of light and warmth, Matvey gathered the whole family together. The wood crackled, casting fluttering shadows on their faces.

— Listen to me,” he said, and his voice was quiet, but everyone caught his words. — The world you knew is dead. Bury it. Different rules now.

He paused, looking around at everyone.

— Rule one: we are not a family. We are a clan. Stone. We breathe together, we die together. No one survives alone.

— Rule two: Every hand has a job to do. David,” he said to his son. — Your computer is dead. Your axe is alive. From tomorrow you’re in charge of the firewood. Lena, — he looked at the doctor’s daughter. — Your clinic is now in this room. You are responsible for everyone’s health. One scratch can kill. Anna,” he nodded to his wife, “you are the keeper of the hearth and supplies. Not one crumb, not one drop must go to waste.

He looked at his frightened but attentive grandchildren.

— And your job is to learn. But not what you’ve been taught. To learn to watch, listen and memorize everything we do.

He rose to his mighty height.

— And rule three. The most important. We don’t just survive. We live. We will gather here tonight. And we will tell stories. We’ll sing the songs we still remember. We will not let the chaos eat our souls. This is the Code of the Stone. And from now on, it is our only law.

He wasn’t just protecting his home. He was founding a civilization. Tiny, harsh, but his own.

Far away from them, in the ruins of an industrial city, in a square littered with garbage, the Prophet of Oblivion Jonah found his flock. They were the most lost, those who had nothing but debt and digital shame in their past lives. They gladly accepted the nullification. They looked at him, and there was empty hope in their eyes.

— They cling to their past! — he shouted, pointing to the hulk of a burning luxury electric car. — They weep for the pictures in dead cell phones! They mourn over names they can’t remember! Fools! They don’t realize what a gift they’ve been given!

He jumped up on a concrete block, spreading his arms like a crucifix.

— God took pity on us and pressed “Delete”! He erased our shame, our pain, our rotten history! He gave us the greatest gift of all — the gift of Oblivion! We are a blank slate! We are the Adam and Eve of the new world!

The crowd murmured, absorbing his words like dry earth absorbs water. He was giving them meaning. Simple. Clear. Intoxicating.

— But the filth of the past clings to life! — Jonah continued, his eyes burning with fanatical fire. — It hides in their temples! In their libraries! In their museums! In their data repositories! In every scrap of paper on which their lies are written!

He gave them their first order.

— Find these temples! Find these nests of contagion! And bring them here!

An hour later they brought him the first books they had found in the looted neighborhood library. Jonah picked up one of them. Ironically, it was the very same sociology textbook. He opened it, looked at the flat lines with disgust, and threw it to the ground.

— Fire! — he roared. — Purify the earth with fire! Memory is the disease! And we are the cure!

The first bonfire of books soared into the sky. The pages twisted in the flames, the letters blackened and disappeared. The crowd looked on, their faces expressing ecstatic release. They weren’t just burning paper. They were burning their insignificant past, their pain, their guilt.

Jonah saw this. He understood with the instinct of a great demagogue that what they needed was not only destruction, but also creation. The building up of a new faith.

— Every burned page is a sin forgiven! — He shouted, raising his hands to the sky, black with smoke. — Every letter turned to ashes is a broken chain! We do not destroy! We are cleansing! We are performing the great ritual of burning away the filth!

He grabbed a burning charcoal and drew a simple symbol on the ground in front of the fire — a crossed-out ear.

— This is our sign! The sign of the Great Silence! A sign that we will no longer listen to the false voices of the past! From now on, you are no longer a faceless mob! You are the Purifiers! And this is our first sacred act!

The people caught up to his cry in ecstasy. They repeated the new word, “Purifiers,” like a prayer. They tore off their old identification bracelets and threw them into the fire. Chaos had gained more than an ideology. It had acquired a ritual, a symbol and a name. A new, terrifying church was born.

Chaos had an ideology. Hunger and violence had a higher purpose. A holy war against memory had begun. And its first, most fierce fire was already devouring words.

The first winter after the Shutdown was a great filter. It killed not so much with cold as with despair. Cities deprived of central heating and power supply turned into icy tombs. Millions died silently, in their apartments, without realizing what had happened. It wasn’t the strongest or the smartest who survived. It was the most stubborn who survived.

Elias Vance spent this winter on the move. He had descended from his tower like Dante into hell, floor by floor. He saw traces of lives suddenly cut short, scenes of struggle and silent extinction. He had learned to be a shadow. Learned not to break codes, but locks. Learned to distinguish the sound of a marauder’s footsteps from those of a hungry refugee. His target was the British Library. A beacon in the icy desert. He reached it in the spring, exhausted, frostbitten, but with a backpack packed not with canned goods but with the most valuable books he could carry. He wasn’t the first. Inside, in the huge reading room, dimly lit by a fire built in a metal trash can, sat several of the same ghosts. They weren’t talking. They were reading. They were the first Archivists.

Matvey Kamen spent the winter under siege. But the enemy was not man, but nature. His home became an ark for his entire sprawling family and a few neighbors lucky enough to be nearby. The first weeks were hell. David, his programmer son, was helpless. He didn’t know how to chop wood, didn’t know how to fix a leaky roof. A wall of misunderstanding grew between father and son. The turning point was the night when little Leo began to have a high fever. Lena, a doctor, could not do anything without medicine and equipment. And then Matvey, remembering how his grandmother treated him, went into the snowy forest and returned with willow bark and some herbs. He himself boiled a decoction, and he himself drank it to his grandson. And Leo survived. That night David took an axe in his hands for the first time and chopped wood until dawn. Silently. Stubbornly. He began to learn from his father. Stone Fort was born not of the Code, but of shared fear and shared work.

Jonah spent the winter wandering through frozen cities. He didn’t hide. He went to the most dangerous places — to the spontaneous markets where people were killed for a can of canned food, to refugee camps where disease was rampant. And he preached. His teachings of the Great Purification were a balm for souls who had lost everything. He gave them meaning in their suffering. He didn’t offer food. He offered something more — justification for their losses. He gathered around him the most desperate, the most embittered. He taught them not only his faith, but also discipline. He turned the crowd into an army. His first Purifiers were not fanatics. They were survivors who found a warmth in his words that no campfire had ever given them.

Chapter 3.5. The Road of Glass

Fragment of lost information: a message from a survivalist forum, 2043. “The main rule in the first 72 hours is to get to the ‘assembly point’. No heroics, no saving the world. Just get to your own. Because after 72 hours, the world you knew will be gone. And you may not have any of your own left.”

David Stone, a brilliant programmer, never thought that the most difficult task in his life would be to drive thirty kilometers. When the Network died, his smart apartment on the outskirts of London was reduced to a concrete box. His wife, Sarah, cried and their young son, five-year-old Leo, stared fearfully at the dark screens. David knew only one thing: he needed to go to his father. His father always knew what to do.

They stepped out into the street. The chaos had not yet taken shape; it was like Brownian motion. People wandered aimlessly, staring at their dead communicators, trying to speak, but often shutting up half-heartedly, forgetting what they wanted to say. This wasn’t panic. It was a systemic hang-up of humanity. Their electric car, like thousands of others, stood dead. But there was another car in the garage, an old, pre-flood Jeep with an internal combustion engine that his father-in-law, a retrograde like David’s father, kept “in case of a zombie apocalypse.” Everyone laughed at him. Now no one was laughing at him.

And then she came up to them. Lena. His sister. Elias Vance’s daughter. David barely recognized her. She was a doctor at a clinic nearby, always organized, elegant. Now her white coat was stained with blood, her hair disheveled, and cold, focused terror in the eyes he remembered laughing.

“David?” — Her voice trembled but was firm. “Father… he’s in “Charade. I can’t get in touch with him. And you… your father lives outside of town, right? He has a well. And land.”

They understood each other without words. In this new world, their fathers, the Historian and the Builder, were the two poles of hope. They pooled their families — two cars, leftover food — and decided to make their way out of the city together. Lena to her father, David to his.

The road was hell. Not because of the gangs — they’d show up later. It was the confusion. Cars without autopilots collided. People who had forgotten the rules of the road took to the highways. But the most frightening thing was different. They saw a man in an expensive suit trying to pay for gas at a still working gas station with his dead communicator. When he saw that it didn’t work, he didn’t get angry. He sat on the ground and cried like a baby. He didn’t remember what money was. Elsewhere, a woman was desperately trying to soothe her child by humming a tune to him. But it wasn’t a lullaby. It was a synthetic drink commercial jingle stuck in her head like a shard of glass.

It was Lena who saved them when they were stopped at one of the roadblocks spontaneously organized by frightened policemen. “Where are you going?” — The cop asked with blank eyes. David started to babble something about his father, about home. But Lena stepped forward. Her medical authority, even in this situation, was palpable.

“I have medical supplies in my car,” she said firmly and simply. — Antibiotics, bandages. I’m a doctor. And he,” she nodded at David, “has blueprints for a water pump in his head. Give us a ride, and maybe tomorrow you’ll have clean water and help for the wounded. Stop us and we’ll all die of dysentery here.”

She wasn’t lying. She had simply culled from their shared knowledge what had become the new currency. Practical utility. And they were let through.

They never made it to the Charade. The city center was already impassable, turned into one giant traffic jam where despair turned to violence.

“I won’t make it to him,” Lena said, looking up at the smoke rising above the skyscrapers. There was unbearable pain in her voice. “Go to your father, David. Save your family. Save Leo. Someday...someday we’ll find mine.”

“No, Lena, we can’t leave you!” — David protested.

“You can. And you should,” she looked him straight in the eye, and there was steel in her gaze. — Here in this old school,” she nodded at a building nearby, “there are dozens of wounded already. They’re my patients. My father is a historian; he saved the past. My job is to save the present. This is my post. Go away.”

So the children’s paths parted. David, heartbroken and bearing the weight of this choice, took his family to Stone Fort. Lena stayed in the suburbs, taking some of her medical supplies and organizing a field hospital in the old school building. She was the daughter of the Archivist. Her mission was not to save books, but people. This act, this self-sacrifice, would become one of the first legends of the new world. And David, for the rest of his days, would carry the guilt of leaving, leaving his sister behind in this hell. This guilt will be the fuel for his future obsession — to build a world where this will never happen again.

Chapter 4. The Librarian’s Sanctuary

Fragment of information lost: tweet from @UrbanExplorer_Alex, January 12, 2045.

“Went into an abandoned library downtown today. Dusty! But what a thrill! The smell of old books is like a time machine. Funny how this was once the main source of information for people. #retro #analogworld #history”

Seven years after the Blackout. Seven years of silence, hunger, and fear that had slowly been replaced by a fragile, ugly semblance of order. The world no longer screamed in terror. It groaned with exhaustion.

Elias Vance survived.

His refuge was the British Library. Not a gleaming modern building, but one of its old, forgotten vaults, deep underground, which he had reached through a network of ventilation shafts and service tunnels. It was a labyrinth of steel and concrete, smelling of centuries of dust and decaying paper. To most survivors, a useless tomb. For Elias, the Ark.

The first few months were hell. Not because of hunger or cold. It was the loneliness and silence, broken only by the rustle of his own footsteps and the creaking of shelves. He fed on what was left in the staff vending machines, drank water from the fire suppression system. But his main occupation was wrestling with his own memory. He would walk along the shelves, pick up a book, read the title — A History of the Decline and Destruction of the Roman Empire — and try to remember anything but the author’s name. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes not. Every grain of knowledge recovered was a victory. Every gaping hole was torture. He was king in the realm of dead words.

He had changed over the years. His professorial gentleness was gone, giving way to a wiry, wary thinness. His hands, which had once fluttered over the touch panels, were rough and calloused from working with metal and stone. But his eyes… in their depths, they still burned with the unquenchable fire of a guardian.

He wasn’t alone.

Little by little, one by one, he found others. Those who were not looking for food, but for meaning. The first was Aaron, a former violinist who had gone mad with silence and had come to the library in search of sheet music to make music sound again, at least in his head. Then came Maya, a medical student who remembered scraps of anatomical atlases and was desperate to recover the knowledge so she could treat people with something more than herbs. Behind her, an engineer, a carpenter, a teacher. They were shards of the old world, drawn by the gravity of this incredible repository of knowledge.

They’ve made a life for themselves. Outings during the day. In the evening, work. At night, duty at the barricaded entrances. They learned to make candles from wax found in the church cellars. They planted a small vegetable garden on the roof, where sunlight penetrated through a ventilation shaft, and grew meager herbs and mushrooms there. It was a fragile but stubborn civilization in the heart of a dead city.

They called themselves “Archivists.” There were no more than twenty of them. During the day, they made forays up into the “Wasteland,” as they called the ruins of London, in search of food, tools, and, most importantly, other books. Every book they found, from a poetry book to a technical reference book, was celebrated as a great victory.

In the evenings, by the light of homemade grease lamps, they did their main work. They read.

They read aloud, one at a time, so that the knowledge penetrated them not only through their eyes, but also through their ears, becoming fixed in their memories. They copied the most important, most fragile books on whatever material was available — on the back of old advertising posters, on pieces of bark, on dressed rat skin.

— Water, water, water, water everywhere, but there is no drop to drink,” Aaron read in a trembling voice from the miraculously surviving volume of The Tale of the Old Mariner. The listeners seated in the circle of light absorbed every word. They weren’t just listening to poetry. They were learning. They were learning metaphors, rhythm, how to describe despair and hope with words. They were rediscovering language.

But their community was not idyllic. The knowledge they were saving was not only light but also poison. One day, while reading an old psychiatry textbook, one of them, a former teacher, went mad. He began to see symptoms of the diseases described in himself and others, sowing paranoia and distrust until he had to be isolated in one of the distant vaults.

Disputes arose. The Pragmatists faction, led by Ezra, an engineer, argued that only useful knowledge should be saved and rewritten: technical manuals, medical atlases, survival guides. “Poetry will not feed us, and philosophy will not protect us from raiders,” he said at evening councils.

Elias, on the other hand, was leading the Humanists. “If we save only the blueprints and formulas, we will only build a more efficient anthill,” he replied. — And what I want to save is not the anthill, but humanity. Poetry, philosophy, even the darkest pages of history — this is what distinguishes us from machines and beasts. It’s our soul. And if we lose it, what does it matter if we survive or not?”

This dispute was their main internal war. Every book they found became the subject of a debate: to save or to ignore? And every outing was not only a search for food, but also a struggle for the ideological future of their small, fragile world.

Elias was their leader. Not because he was the strongest, but because he remembered more than anyone else. His personal notes, begun in that apartment on the 73rd floor, had grown to dozens of homemade notebooks. It was The Book of Elias, a desperate attempt to reconstruct the skeleton of history, science, and culture.

— They’ll come for this,” he said one evening, pointing to the racks going into the darkness. — Those who fear it. The prophets of Oblivion. They call themselves the Purifiers. They burn books. They believe memory is poison.

— But why? — asked young Kira, who had been born a year before the Disconnection and had no memory of the old world. Her world was here, in the dungeon.

— Because knowledge gives power,” Elias answered, looking at her clear, curious face. — And whoever controls the past controls the future. They don’t want people to remember that it’s possible to live differently. That it is possible to be free, to question, to doubt. They want obedient sheep, and books turn sheep into shepherds.

He did not add, but thought: “Maybe they are right about something? Maybe the weight of all our bloody, complex, contradictory history was too heavy? Maybe oblivion really is a gift.” He chased those thoughts away like heresy. But sometimes, in the darkest nights, they came back and gnawed at him from the inside.

He knew that their refuge would not last forever. Rumors of “librarians” keeping “forbidden words” were already spreading across the Wasteland. Sooner or later, the Purifiers would find them. And then they would have to fight for the right to remember.

A few dozen miles to the south, in the settlement that had grown up around Matthew Stone’s home, life flowed differently. Their community, which the surrounding survivors called “Stone Fort,” had grown. It was now a fenced-in settlement of two hundred souls.

Matvey, now called simply “Father” by everyone, established a strict but fair order. “The Code of Stone became their constitution. Loyalty to the clan, hard work, mutual aid. They had their own forge, their own mill, their own fields. They didn’t read poetry by candlelight. They mended plows and smoked meat.

His grandson, Leo, the boy with the holographic dragon, had grown up. He was twelve. He didn’t remember the Internet or virtual reality. His reality was the calluses on his hands from working in the fields, the weight of the axe and the smell of freshly baked bread. He was strong, agile, and silent.

One day, while patrolling the perimeter with Father David, they came across a stranger. He was lying unconscious by a stream, exhausted and wounded. He wore strange rags and clutched a dirty, tattered bundle with a dead grip in his hand.

They brought him to the Fort. Lena, Matvey’s daughter, their only doctor, examined him. Multiple bruises, exhaustion, fever. But the wounds had been treated, albeit crudely — someone had cauterized them with red-hot metal. This man was fighting for life.

When the stranger came to his senses, he saw the stern face of Matvei Stone above him.

— Who are you?” Father’s voice was like the creaking of a millstone. — Where do you come from?

The stranger, thin, with a mad glint in his feverish eyes, tried to sit up. He was one of Elias’s Archivists. His name was Ezra. He was an engineer.

— From London… from the City of the Empty…” he wheezed. — They found us. The Purifiers…

Ezra told them his story. He told them about a dungeon full of books. About people who were trying to save not their lives, but the memory of humanity. He told of the attack. Dozens of fanatics, led by the Prophet of Oblivion, stormed the library. They carried torches and hammers. The archivists tried to defend themselves, but they were too few.

Ezra spoke, and his voice trembled not only with weakness but also with guilt. He was the leader of the Pragmatists. On the day the Purifiers attacked, he was just arguing with Elias, arguing that they should barricade the entrances with racks of poetry and fiction to save the tech sector. “These fairy tales are useless, Elias! We need schematics!” — he shouted moments before the first battering ram hit the door.

Elias then looked at him with his tired eyes and said: “You are wrong, Ezra. Schemes teach us how to live. And fairy tales teach us why to live.”

When the fire started, it was the technical archives that Ezra had tried so hard to protect that were the first to go up in flames. And the way out was through the philosophy section, which he despised. Elias, retreating last, shoved a roll-up into his hands. “Run, Pragmatist,” he said without reproach, but with infinite bitterness. — Run with what you find useful. And find those who can build it. Maybe you’re right. Maybe that’s the place to start.”

— They were burning everything,” Ezra whispered, tears streaming down his cheeks. — They were smashing shelves, tearing pages… screaming that it was poison, that it was the filth of the old world… Elias… he told us to run. Split up. To take something with us.

He clutched the roll-up he hadn’t let go of all this time.

— He gave me this. He said it was more important than my life. He said to find those who build, not destroy.

Matvey looked at the package. David, his son, carefully unwrapped it. Inside, wrapped in several layers of oiled cloth, were two things. The first was the tattered Boy Scout handbook. The second was some scribbled sheets from The Book of Elias. They didn’t have poems or history on them. They were blueprints. A simple windmill to generate electricity. A water pump. A diagram of a primitive printing press.

David, a former programmer, looked at the hand-drawn blueprints and his eyes widened. This was technology. Not digital, not cloud-dependent. Real, made of wood and metal. Technology you could touch.

— Electricity…” he whispered, looking at his father. — We could… light the houses. Run the pump.

Matvey Kamen was silent. He looked at the exhausted Ezra, at the blueprints in his son’s hands, and two feelings struggled in his soul. The first was distrust. Everything about the old world had brought only chaos. His way was simple: land, hands, power. The second was pragmatism. He was a builder. He saw the benefits. A wind turbine could make life easier for his people. It could give them an advantage.

— Give him food and water,” he said at last, turning to his wife. — And let him rest. We’ll decide what to do.

That evening, the first serious dispute broke out at Stone Fort.

— It’s dangerous! — spoke one of the elders of the community. — This man has brought death after him. If the Purifiers found them there, they will look for the others. They will come here!

— But this knowledge…” David objected. — Father, it can change everything! We can not only survive, we can evolve! That’s what you said-not to let chaos eat us up!

For the first time since the Shutdown, Leo, Matthew’s grandson, raised his voice at the adult council.

— He brought the book,” the boy said quietly. — I saw it. It has pictures of how to make a fire without matches. How to make a shelter in the woods. It’s useful.

The boy’s words, his unclouded, practical way of looking at things, impressed Matvey more than all the adult arguments. He looked at his grandson. Leo was the future of the clan. And if he saw those leaves as a benefit, not a threat…

— He’s staying,” Matvey announced his decision. — We’ll build that wind turbine. But we’ll reinforce the sentries. We’ll be ready.

It was a turning point. Stone Fort, a bastion of survival, unknowingly took a step toward the knowledge it despised. For the first time in seven years, Book and Stone began to find common ground.

Meanwhile, in the burned and desecrated British Library, Jonah, the Prophet of Oblivion, stood in the midst of the ashes. His followers, the Purifiers, were dragging the charred remains of books and throwing them into the general pile. The victory was complete. But Jonah did not feel joy. He felt anger.

As he stared at the pages writhing in flames, another scene came into view. The glittering, light-filled lobby of Chrono-Synaptic’s headquarters. He, then not Jonah, but a humble technician named Silas, standing with a tablet in hand, waiting his turn for a presentation. He had developed an elegant algorithm to optimize city power grids that could save millions. He believed in his project. He believed that knowledge and technology were the light.

And then Kevin Tsang himself walks past him, surrounded by an entourage of investors. The God of this world. Tsang casts a fleeting, bored glance at Silas’s tablet screen. He doesn’t even stop. “Another dreamer trying to build a bridge out of fog,” he tosses to his assistant loud enough for Silas to hear. “Make sure his social rating won’t allow him to take out a loan for even a coffee maker. We don’t need dreamers, we need doers.”

The laughter of the entourage. The click. It was the sound with which his life broke. That phrase, forever recorded in his digital dossier, closed all doors in front of him. The net, that eternal archive, made it impossible to forget anything. It was an eternal accuser, an eternal reminder of his humiliation. The knowledge he believed in became his prison. The technology he worshipped became his executioner.

And now, looking at the fire devouring the books, he felt not triumph. He felt vengeance. He wasn’t just burning paper. He was burning Tsang’s world. The world that had humiliated him. He wasn’t just giving people oblivion. He was giving it to himself. And that made him the most dangerous man on Earth, because his holy war was deeply personal.

One of his lieutenants brought him a surviving scrap of page.

— Prophet, we found this in their leader’s office.

Jonah took the scrap. It was a leaf from the Book of Elias. It didn’t have a diagram or a poem on it. It had an entry on it, written in Elias Vance’s hand.

“June 16, 2045. 17:34. I remember this moment. It wasn’t like a glitch. It was a wave. A purposeful one. Like someone had turned a key. What were they hiding? What was so dangerous that it had to be erased from the memory of all humanity? Project Origins. I vaguely remember the name. ‘Chrono-Synaptic.’ Kevin Tsang. I have to remember…”

Jonah crumpled the sheet. He knew those names. He knew this project. In his past, forgotten life, he hadn’t just been a street preacher. He had been a minor technician at the Chrono-Synaptic Corporation. And he remembered things that others didn’t. He remembered the fear in his superiors’ eyes before the launch of the Istokov. He remembered the whispers of “uncontrollable consequences.”

His doctrine of “purification” was a lie he created to survive and lead people. But at the heart of that lie was a grain of truth: The shutdown was not an accident. Nor was it an act of God.

It was done by human beings.

And Jonah knew that if men like Elias got to the truth, their fragile new world would crumble. And his own power would disappear.

— He survived,” Jonah hissed. — The Librarian survived. And he took the questions with him.

He turned to his followers.

— Brothers! Sisters! The purification is not complete! The foulness has spread! The archivists have fled, taking with them the seeds of poisonous memory! We must find them! Find them and burn every one of them! Every leaf, every word! Until there’s not even an echo of the old world left!

The hunt is on. The hunt is not for food or territory. The hunt for the very idea of the past. And all the tracks led south, toward the community that had dared to shelter the fugitive with the book.

Chapter 5: The Spark of Memory

A fragment of lost information: from correspondence between two historians in a closed academic forum, 2041.

“The question is not WHAT we remember, but HOW we do it. The pre-written era valued oral transmission, training memory to incredible limits. Printing created the ‘external hard drive,’ freeing the brain but making knowledge vulnerable to fire. The digital age has created the illusion of immortality of information, but what if the network itself, the very ‘brain’ of humanity, one day falls ill with amnesia? We will not return to the Middle Ages. We will return to prehistoric darkness.”

Change has begun at Stone Fort. Slow, almost imperceptible, but irreversible. Ezra, the Archivist Engineer, had recovered. Under Matthew’s supervision and the guidance of his son David, they began building a windmill based on Elias’s blueprints.

It wasn’t easy. The blueprints were just a concept. There weren’t enough tools, not enough materials. But it awakened something that had been dormant for seven years — ingenuity. They learned to smelt metal from old machine scraps. They were turning gears out of hard wood. David, whose brain was accustomed to operating with abstract codes, was surprised to find that the laws of physics and mechanics were just as satisfying to him. He saw his calculations turn into real motion, into the creaking of a working mechanism.

In the evenings, the construction site by the hill became the new center of the community, replacing the hearth in Matthew’s house. People brought food, sat around, and watched David and Ezra argue over blueprints, drawing them out with a stick on the compacted earth. It was like a ritual. Like the collective creation of a miracle. The women began to recall scraps of knowledge from a past life: one remembered her electrician grandfather talking about wire cross sections, another something about bearing grease from an old educational movie. Humanity’s memory, shattered into fragments, was beginning to slowly reassemble around a common, understandable goal.

It was like a strange, collective fever. One woman, who had been a clothing designer in a previous life, suddenly realized that she remembered how to calculate the tension of sailcloth for the blades because her grandfather had been a yachtsman and had once shown her an instructional film. She didn’t remember her grandfather’s face, but she remembered the angle of attack of the sail. The former office clerk who had never held anything heavier than a stylus had discovered that his hands themselves knew how to mix clay and straw to insulate wires, a foreign, peasant memory that had come to him in a dream. They were like a broken receiver that catches the scraps of dozens of radio stations. Their own memories had been erased, but the echo of the memory of all humanity lived on in their muscles and intuition. They weren’t just building a wind turbine; they were assembling it from the ghosts of other people’s experiences.

The Fort’s youth, including Leo, huddled around Ezra when he took a break from work. He didn’t preach. He just told stories. Told about stars that were actually giant suns, not just lights on a black blanket. He talked about how people flew to the moon. He talked about the music of Bach and the paintings of Van Gogh.

For the children who had grown up in a world confined to fences and fields, these were revelations. Their world was suddenly vast, deep, and full of wonder.

One evening, Leo approached Ezra.

— Tell me more… about the dragons,” he asked.

Ezra smiled. He didn’t go on to say that dragons were a myth. He started talking about dinosaurs. About the giant lizards that once ruled the Earth. His story was scrappy, full of gaps, but it lit the fire of imagination in the boy’s eyes.

— Why did they die? — Leo asked when Ezra had finished. His eyes burned with curiosity.

— A big rock fell from the sky. Very, very big,” Ezra struggled to find simple words. — It changed the world. It got cold. There was nothing to eat. They were too big to hide. Too strong to change.

— Like us,” Leo suddenly said quietly.

Ezra looked at the boy. He didn’t understand.

— Well, in the old world,” Leo explained. — Grandpa says we were too strong. Too smart. And we couldn’t hide when things changed, either. We’re like dinosaurs?

That childish but frighteningly accurate analogy made Ezra’s breath catch. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

— No, Leo. We’re not dinosaurs. Because we can learn. We can remember. That’s our difference.

But the main miracle was David’s transformation. At first, he was just a journeyman, barely able to tell the difference between a nut and a bolt. But one day, looking at Ezra’s chaotic blueprints, he suddenly saw more than schematics. He saw an algorithm. A logical structure.

“Ezra, you’re doing it all wrong,” he said, picking up a coal, “You’re trying to build one big system. You’re trying to build it in modules. Like in the code. This node is responsible for energy conversion; it should be independent. This one is for distribution; it should have its own fault-tolerance protocol.

He began to redraw the circuit, but not as an engineer, but as a software architect. He was creating not a mechanism, but an operating system out of wood and metal. Ezra looked at him in amazement. He, the keeper of old knowledge, saw a new science being born — not a simple copying of the past, but a synthesis of it with the logic of the digital age. David did not abandon his past. He applied it to a new reality. And in that moment, he ceased to be just his father’s son. He found his own path, the path of the software engineer of the new world. For him, the wind turbine was more than just a machine. It was his first working code, written not on a screen, but on the body of the earth.

But not everyone in the Fort was happy about the change. The old men grumbled.

— He poisons our children’s minds with fairy tales,” one of them said to Matvei. — They should be thinking about how to survive the winter, not about bones in the ground and flights to the moon. Your Code talked about work, not talk.

Matvey Kamen felt uneasy himself. The order he had constructed was simple and clear. Ezra’s knowledge brought complexity, questions, doubts.

At night he lay awake, listening to Anna’s breathing. He stared up at the dark ceiling and thought. He was a builder. He built houses, walls, a community. He built with whatever was at hand — stone, wood, clay. And this Ezra… he built with things you couldn’t touch. Words. Ideas. And Matvey didn’t know which was stronger. His wall that could protect him from the marauder? Or the idea in his grandson’s head that could force him beyond that wall? He felt that the world had become bigger than his Fort, and it frightened and yet vaguely attracted him at the same time.

But he saw his grandson’s eyes light up. He saw his son David regain the purpose in life that had been taken from him. He saw the simple hope of an electric light bulb inspire the entire community.

And he couldn’t stop it. The spark of memory had been lit.

Elias Vance was shaving through the ruined suburbs, heading south. He was alone. After the fall of the Library, he had lost contact with the other surviving Archivists. He had become a ghost, a shadow in the ruins. His shoulder bag held his most precious possessions — the few surviving books and his own, ever-expanding notes.

He learned to sleep in rubble-strewn basements, to eat canned beans that had expired decades ago, and to filter rainwater through the fabric of his shirt. He grew thin as a chip, but his mind was as sharp as a razor, honed by constant danger and a single-minded purpose. Every night, before he went to sleep, he pulled out a picture of Lena and Leo-the real one, the paper one he always carried with him. He would look at their faces and whisper: “I’ll find the answer. I promise.” It was his personal code.

He survived with knowledge he himself had saved. He knew where to find canned food in the rubble-strewn cellars, how to navigate by the sun, how to avoid the most dangerous gangs. But his main goal wasn’t finding food. He was looking for footprints. Traces of what had caused the Blackout.

“Project Origins. Chrono-Synaptic.”

Those words became his mantra. He knew that the corporation’s headquarters were in the closed science city of Prometheus Park, west of London. Getting there alone would be suicide. But he had to try. Because he realized that just saving the past wasn’t enough. You have to understand who tried to destroy it and why. Otherwise, history will repeat itself. Even if no one remembers it.

One day, hiding in the ruins of an old church, he saw them. A squad of Purifiers. They moved fast and organized, like a pack of wolves. They weren’t looting. They were looking for something. One of them had a smoking torch. Another had a backpack with a scrap of a familiar binder sticking out of it.

Elias froze, blending in with the shadows. He saw them interrogating a lone vagrant, showing him something Elias couldn’t see. The vagrant shook his head fearfully. Then one of the Purifiers slapped him, and they moved on.

Elias waited until they were out of sight and crept toward the spot. The tramp was gone, but there was a dropped object on the dusty ground.

It was a crudely drawn portrait. A portrait of Ezra.

Elias’s heart sank. They’re not just looking for books. They’re hunting his men. One by one. And they know them by sight. So they had a traitor. Or they captured someone alive.

He leaned against the cold wall, and a wave of not fear but icy clarity came over him. His mission had changed. He’d gone to Prometheus Park as a historian to find answers. Now he realized he had to go there as a soldier.

But what could he do against the torch-wielding fanatics? He was old. He was weak. He had no weapons. His only weapon had always been knowledge. And in that moment, he knew how to use it.

He stopped just looking for books. He started looking for vulnerabilities. He no longer looked at ruins as artifact repositories. He looked at them as a tactical map. He recalled scraps of knowledge not of poetry but of chemistry — what burns, what explodes, what poisons. His mind, accustomed to systematizing history, began to systematize chaos, looking for weapons in it. He, a humanist who mourned every burnt book, began to think how to transform knowledge into fire himself. This transformation terrified him, but he understood: to save a library, sometimes you have to burn down part of a city.

Now his mission had changed. He had to do more than just get to Prometheus Park. He had to find his people before the Purifiers did. And he knew where Ezra had gone. South. Where there was rumored to be a community of strong and independent people. Where they built, not destroyed.

At Stone Fort, after two months of grueling work, a miracle happened.

It was a windy fall day. The blades of the wind turbine, assembled from trash and genius, slowly, creaking, began to turn. David and Ezra stood by the makeshift generator. The wires stretched to a pole in the center of the settlement, on which hung a single car headlight.

The wind picked up. The blades spun faster. Something in the generator howled, sparked. Suddenly the headlight flashed.

Dimly at first, then brighter and brighter, flooding the square with an even, pure, white light.

The people gathered around aghast. Many children born after the Disconnection had never seen artificial light other than fire. They looked at the lamp as if the sun had descended from the heavens. Adults who remembered the old world wept, unashamed of their tears. It wasn’t just a light. It was an echo. An echo of a lost civilization. Proof that they were not just feral animals, but humans. People who could tame the wind and turn it into light.

Matvey Kamen stood back, looking at the jubilant faces of his men. He looked at his son, who was hugging the alien engineer, at his grandson, who was gazing at the lamp with rapt attention. And he realized that the elders were wrong.

Ezra didn’t bring them danger. He brought them hope.

The people gathered around aghast. Many children born after the Disconnection had never seen artificial light other than fire. They looked at the lamp as if the sun had descended from the heavens. Adults who remembered the old world wept, unashamed of their tears. It wasn’t just a light. It was an echo. An echo of a lost civilization. Proof that they were not just feral animals, but humans. People who could tame the wind and turn it into light.

Matvey Kamen stood back, looking at the jubilant faces of his men. He looked at his son, who was hugging the alien engineer, at his grandson, who was gazing at the lamp with rapt attention. And he realized that the elders were wrong. Ezra hadn’t brought them danger. He had brought them hope.

But at that very moment, on a hill a few miles away, a sentinel from the Purifier squad, peering into the darkness through old binoculars, froze. He saw it. Not a campfire. Not a torch. A steady, unnaturally bright light in the middle of the night wasteland.

He lowered the binoculars and turned to his commander, a man with the symbol of a crossed-out ear scorched on his cheek.

— “Found them,” he said. — “They’re here. The scourge is here.

The commander nodded, his face expressionless. He pulled not a torch from his belt, but a strange device, an old-world artifact they had adapted rather than destroyed. It was a field repeater. He pressed a button.

— To the Prophet,” he spoke into the microphone. — Source found. Sector Gamma 7. They’ve turned on their lying light. They are trying to resurrect the Web. They are trying to bring back the disease. Awaiting orders.

From the repeater, after a brief hiss, came Jonah’s calm, confident voice.

— Do not attack. Do not scare them off. These aren’t just heretics. This is a symptom. The core of the disease is somewhere near. Surround it. Observe. I’m coming.

The hunt was over. The war was about to begin. And the light of hope that was lit in Stone Fort became a beacon for friends as well as enemies, drawing to itself all the forces that fought for the soul of this new world.

Chapter 6. Children of Oblivion

Fragment of lost information: from a lecture on military strategy, West Point, 2038.

“Modern warfare is a war for information. Deprive the enemy of communications, blind his satellites, erase his databases, and his army becomes an uncontrollable mob. But what if the war of the future will be fought not for control over information, but against the very idea of information? It won’t be a war of armies. It will be a war of fanatics against librarians. And it will be far more brutal.

Jonah, the Prophet of Oblivion, arrived at the foot of the hill overlooking the Stone Fort on the third day after the light had been seen. He brought with him the core of his army — a hundred of the most loyal, most ruthless Purifiers. These were not just marauders. These were soldiers of a new faith.

They were the Children of Oblivion, a generation that the Disconnect caught at a young, malleable age. They didn’t remember the past with nostalgia. They remembered it as a time of confusion, of pressure, of digital noise. Jonah’s teaching gave them simplicity, purpose, and a sense of belonging. They didn’t just forget the old world, they hated it.

Among them was a girl named Riya. She was seventeen. She vaguely remembered the old world: perpetually tired parents chained to their work terminals; school, where she was constantly compared to others on digital metrics; the feeling of being alone in a crowded virtual space. Disconnecting for her was liberating. Jonah didn’t just give her food and security. He told her that her pain, her loneliness, her hatred of the old world was not a weakness, but a sign of being chosen. He told her that she was a healthy cell in a sick body. And she had believed him with all the strength of a desperate soul. Now she was ready to die so that this nightmare would never return.

Sitting next to her was a guy named Caleb, the same guy who would later infiltrate the Fort. He didn’t remember the old world, but he bore its scars. An old medical database had been found in their community. With the help of one of the “repentant” techs, they learned how to use it. And Caleb learned that in the old world, he had been diagnosed with “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Type 2. Predicted social adjustment: low.” He was signed up in advance, before he was born, to be a loser. For him, the Disconnect wasn’t a catastrophe, it was an amnesty. It erased his sentence.

Others bore different scars. A girl whose parents had divorced in the old world, and whose Family Network profile was labeled “single-parent child,” barring her from elite schools. A young man whose genetic scan showed a predisposition to depression, causing insurance companies to jack up the price of his “life support package.” They hated the old world, not for its technology, but for its soulless, mathematical cruelty. For turning their lives into a data set and rendering a verdict before they’d even had a chance to live it. Jonah had not seduced them. He only gave a name to what they already felt. He told them that their hatred was righteous.

— Look,” Jonah said, pointing to the distant light of the Fort. His voice was quiet, but everyone caught his word. — They’ve lit their false light. They think it’s progress. But it is a cancer. It is an echo of a world that should be dead. Every word they read, every diagram they draw is a nail in the coffin of our clean, new future.

He turned to his followers. Their faces, lit by the flames of the torches, were young and stern. There was no doubt in their eyes.

— We will not attack head-on,” Jonah continued. — Their walls are strong. Their leader is stone. But stone can be cracked from within. We will slow in them the seeds of their own poison. Seeds of doubt.

His plan was insidious. He knew that in every community there are those who are disaffected. There are those who fear change. He sent forward his spies — not warriors, but “whisperers.” Their job was to infiltrate the Fort under the guise of lone refugees and start spreading rumors. “The stranger has brought a curse…", “Because of this light we will be found and killed…", “The old world was evil, why are we bringing it back?”.

And he prepared to strike at the sorest spot of all. The children.

At Stone Fort, the euphoria of a lighted lamp was replaced by mundane chores. The wind turbine provided electricity for only a few hours a day, and it became the most valuable resource. Lena was able to sterilize the instruments. David and Ezra began working on a primitive radio transmitter — a crazy dream to contact other islands of civilization.

But the seeds of doubt had already sprouted. The old men, frightened by the stories of the cruelty of the Purifiers brought by the new refugees (Jonah’s spies), began to murmur openly.

Light created inequality. Families whose houses were closer to the central square could pull a wire and get light for an hour in the evening. Those who lived near the walls were left in the dark. Quarrels began. “Why them and not us?”. David tried to explain about the losses in the long wires, about the power of the generator, but his words, full of unfamiliar terms, only increased suspicion. The technology that was supposed to unite was beginning to divide.

Leo saw it with his own eyes. He saw his best friend, the blacksmith’s son, looking enviously at the miller’s house, where the light now burned in the evenings and they could work longer. “Before, we were all equal in the dark,” he said to Leo. — “Now there are ‘light’ and ‘dark’. He saw women whose husbands were working on the construction of the wind turbine start demanding extra food because their husbands were “doing more important work.” The unity forged in hunger and fear began to rust at the first glimmer of comfort. Matvey’s grandfather taught him that strength was in the stones. Ezra had taught that strength was in knowledge. But Leo saw that both could be the cause of discord.

— Matvey, you’ll ruin us all! — shouted the old blacksmith at the council. — You harbored a snake, and now its relatives are crawling towards us! We’ve got to kick that engineer out! Destroy the windmill! Turn off the lights!

Matvey stood his ground.

— We don’t hide in the dark like rats,” he replied. — We are building. If they come, we will meet them.

But he felt the unity of his community was cracking at the seams.

Leo, his grandson, became Ezra’s chief disciple. The boy absorbed knowledge like dry earth absorbs water. He had already learned to read syllables, using the Boy Scout Handbook as a primer. Ezra, seeing his hunger for knowledge, took a risky step. He told Leo what he had only told Elias-about his vague, fragmentary memories of Project Origins.

— I don’t know what it was, Leo,” he said quietly in the evening, looking up at the stars. — But I remember it was something huge. Something that was going to change humanity. And something went wrong. Catastrophically wrong. Elias believed that the Disconnection was no accident. He believed it was done on purpose.

It was too complicated for Leo. But one thing he realized: somewhere out there in the world, there was a secret. A great mystery. And it had to do with why the world was the way it was.

It was at this point that Jonah’s plan came to fruition.

Two children from the Fort, playing by the creek outside the perimeter, did not return for dinner. The community rose to its feet. Search parties combed the woods all night. Matvey, David, all the men of the Fort searched for the children.

Leo found them.

He knew the forest better than anyone else. He followed tracks that no one else had noticed. He found them in the ravine. Alive. Scared. But not alone.

There was a man sitting next to them. Not the Purifier with the torch. He was a young man, not much older than Leo himself, dressed in the same simple clothes as the people of the Fort. He was calming the children, telling them a story.

— They got lost,” the boy said as Leo came up with his axe at the ready. — I found them and built a fire to keep them warm.

The guy was one of the Children of Oblivion. He played his part perfectly. He was brought to the Fort as a hero. He told them he’d run away from the Purifiers because he couldn’t stand their cruelty. He was believed. He was fed and kept in the community.

And at night he did what Jonah had sent him to do. He found Leo.

— I hear you’re interested in the old world,” he said when they were alone. — They tell you stories about going to the moon and all that crap. Do you want me to tell you the truth?

He told Leo another story. The story Jonah had concocted. That the old world was a world of pain, where people were slaves to machines, where children were taken from their parents and forced to stare into screens that burned out their souls. About how the Disconnect wasn’t a curse, but salvation.

— That man, Ezra, and his librarian friends. they’re not saving knowledge. They want to bring back the old prison. They want to put the digital shackles back on all of us,” he whispered. — And the Prophet Jonah wants only one thing: for us to be free. For children to grow up on the land, not on the net.

Saying that, Caleb almost believed his own words. He hated the old world with all his heart. But looking into Leo’s clear, trusting eyes, he felt a prick of something like conscience. Here in this Fort, for the first time in many months, he slept peacefully without fear of the raiders. He ate the hot chowder Anna Stone held out to him without asking who he was. He watched David, a man from the world of numbers that Caleb despised, with calluses on his hands fix a generator not for himself but for everyone. In Jonah’s world, there was righteous fury and iron discipline. But here there was… care. And that simple, uncomplicated care frightened him more than any sermon. It made him doubt. But he chased those thoughts away. Doubt was a luxury he could not afford. He was a soldier. And he had orders.

— Look for yourself,” Caleb nodded toward the square where the adults were arguing. — That light… did it bring you joy? Or quarrel? Ezra talks about the stars, but he’s building a car that makes the neighbors at each other’s throats. He speaks of knowledge, but his knowledge brings war to your walls. The prophet teaches us that some knowledge is like poison. They look beautiful, but they kill from the inside out. Don’t you see that? It has already begun.

The words were like poison to Leo’s soul. He was a child of the new world. He didn’t know the old one. And this terrible but simple and understandable story resonated with him. He remembered his grandfather Matvey saying that the old world was rotten. He’d seen adults arguing over a windmill. Maybe this guy was right. Maybe the light isn’t hope, but a trap?

The next day, when Ezra came to him with a new homemade book on which he had drawn the planets of the solar system, for the first time Leo showed no interest. He simply nodded and walked away, citing business. Ezra was left standing alone, clutching the book in his hands. He felt cold. Not from the wind. From the boy’s gaze. For the first time, he realized that the war they were fighting was not just outside, but here, for this child’s soul. And he might be losing.

That night Leo could not sleep. He sat on the roof of the barn, looking up at the stars and at the lone lamp burning in the square. The light, which only yesterday had seemed like a miracle to him, now looked like the warden’s eye. He remembered Caleb’s words. And he remembered the words of his grandfather, Matvey, who had often said, “Every chain begins with one, the shiniest link.” He didn’t know who to believe. But he realized one thing: the adults, in their struggle for the “right” future, forgot to ask him, a child of this new world, what kind of future he himself wanted. And he decided that would no longer just listen. He would watch. And draw his own conclusions. The war for his soul had indeed begun. But now he was going to become not an object in it, but an independent player.

In the soul of a twelve-year-old boy, his own, most terrible war had begun. A war between Ezra’s tale of the wonders of science and a stranger’s whisper of freedom from them. A war between loyalty to his grandfather and a new, frightening truth.

Jonah got what he wanted. He didn’t just lay siege to Stone Fort. He had laid siege to the soul of its future leader.

Chapter 7. Stripes and Scars

Fragment of information lost: quote from Robert Oppenheimer’s diary, July 16, 1945.

“We knew the world would never be the same again. A few people laughed, a few cried. Most were silent. I remembered a line from Hinduism’s holy book, the Bhagavadgita… ‘I am Death, the great destroyer of worlds.’ I guess we all felt it, one way or another.”

Elias Vance moved along the Purifiers’ trail like a hunter. He was only a day’s journey from them. In the night, he saw a faint but constant glow in the distance: the Stone Fort. And he realized that’s where all the threads led. That’s where Ezra had run to. That’s where the Purifiers were going, too. He quickened his stride, driven by a bad feeling.

His body protested, but his will was unyielding. Each burning mile brought him not just closer to Ezra, but closer to the epicenter of the struggle. He felt it with the intuition of a historian. Great battles always take place where not just armies but ideas collide. And this little light in the night was the bonfire to which all the moths of the new world flocked, both those who carried the light and those who carried the darkness.

In the Fort itself, tensions had reached a fever pitch. Jonah’s spies, the “whisperers,” had done their work. The community was split. Some saw Ezra and his knowledge as salvation, others as a curse that brought the wrath of the fanatics upon them. Matvei Stone tried to keep order with an iron hand, but his authority was shaken for the first time. People looked at him with doubt.

Leo was silent. He avoided Ezra, but he did not join those who demanded that the engineer be banished. He carried around the poisonous words of the “savior” and didn’t know who to believe. His childhood was over. The first, deepest scar was appearing on his soul — the scar of betrayal, real or imagined.

The attack began at dawn.

Jonah did not storm the gate. He used fire and cunning. Dozens of flaming arrows, sheathed in grease-soaked cloth, flew through the fence. They weren’t aiming at people. They were aiming at wooden houses, at the grain barn, at the hay barn. The things that made up the life of the Fort.

The community, torn by internal quarrels, was unprepared. Panic broke out. People rushed to extinguish the houses, pushing each other, acting at odds.

— This is punishment! — shouted one of the blacksmith’s supporters. — For the light! Break the windmill!

Several men, mad with fear, actually rushed to the mast with axes. David blocked their way, holding a heavy wrench, the only weapon at hand.

— Out of the way! — He shouted, his voice filled with the fury of an engineer defending his creation. — Help me put it out!

At the same time, Lena, his sister, was already dragging the wounded to the stone basement of the house that was least affected by the fire. “This way, get all the wounded here! Anna, bring clean cloths and boiled water!” — she commanded. The war was being fought on several fronts: with fire, with the enemy, and with her own fear.

And at that moment, the Purifiers struck. The main group attacked the main gate, distracting David and his few fighters. A second, smaller force, led by Jonah himself, entered the Fort through a gap in the perimeter fence that his spy, the one who had “saved” the children, had told him about.

Their goal was not capture. Their goal was to destroy the symbol. They were breaking through to the wind turbine.

Matvey Kamen with a double-barrelled shotgun stood in their way. Only a few old men who were faithful to him stood beside him.

— Get back! — He roared, his voice overlapping the crackling of the fire. — This is our land!

— Old man, you are defending the defilement! — Jonah shouted, his face contorted with righteous anger. — We have come to set you free!

— I am free in my own land! And you bring only death!

What Matvey had always feared had happened. The battle raged not on the walls, but in the heart of his home. His men fought not only the outsiders, but also each other — those who were trying to protect the windmill and those who were shouting in panic that it must be destroyed to appease the attackers. Chaos was winning.

Ezra and David, fighting off the main group at the gate, saw the breakthrough.

— They’re coming for the generator! — David shouted. — Father is alone!

Ezra, an engineer rather than a warrior, froze for a moment. But then he looked at the fruit of his labors, at the fragile hope they had built, and grabbed a heavy metal crowbar.

— I’m with you! — he shouted.

They rushed to Matthew’s aid, cutting through the crowd of frantic residents and fanatical Purifiers.

But David didn’t just rush into the fray. As he ran, his brain, accustomed to working with systems, feverishly analyzed the chaos of the battle not as a junkyard but as a failure in the network. He saw not people, but nodes. Not screams, but information noise.

— Ezra! — he shouted on the run. — The generator! Overload it!

— What? It’s going to explode! — The engineer didn’t understand.

— No! Not an explosion! Pulse! Short-circuit the main cable to the body! Create a short circuit!