A cup of coffee on the windowsill. Steam slowly curls above the dark, hot liquid. An ashtray nearby. I look down at the gray Saturday morning. The asphalt is black with water, the paths are brown with mud, bare wet trees, and fog between them. On the dirty, gray lawn, a pot-bellied man is walking a bull terrier. It's cold and dreary. November in St. Petersburg brings thoughts of the eternal.
I take a drag and exhale into the window, cracked open for ventilation. Alexander Vasilyev is singing a romance in my head. Today marks exactly five years…
It's amazing that my memory preserved this particular day. The last family trip out of town. We'll have a fight in a month and a half, a huge blowup over a trifle. She'll leave for her parents' for New Year's, and I'll stay alone and drink bitterly under the chiming clock. She'll come back after the holidays to get her things. Ahead there will still be pangs of conscience, doubts, hopes, a letter from the court, despair, some utterly pathetic attempts to reconcile, and in the end – divorce.
Five years… I know that, overall, I did the right thing, but the guilt haunted me for a very long time. And the thought that this shouldn't have happened. I threw myself into work, hobbies, sports, new relationships (twice), but every November 7th I noted, dryly and unemotionally, like an astrophysicist observing the center of the galaxy year after year, that the "black hole" inside had grown bigger, had swallowed something else during that time.
The alarm melody started playing. Eight-thirty, and I was supposed to just be waking up now, but I was already practically ready. There's no better day for a risky and extremely dangerous physics experiment. You're absolutely right! The astrophysicist in my mental imagery is no coincidence, because today I'm going to ignite a small sun.
If my calculations are to be believed, and they can definitely be believed, because, firstly, the sheer man-hours spent on double-checking speak for themselves, and secondly, I'm the best specialist in this field, at least in Eurasia… So, if my calculations are to be believed, controlled nuclear fusion is quite achievable "in a garage," and I want to prove it today. If the experiment succeeds – it's a guaranteed Nobel Prize. If it fails – the Kurgalsky Peninsula will disappear from the map of the Leningrad Oblast, but that can't happen, because I don't make mistakes.
Coffee finished. I'm in my camo. Rubber boots in the hall. Shotgun, hunting rounds, bread, sausage, canned food, and a bunch of other stuff in my backpack. There, at the very bottom – a small, inconspicuous pellet, the whole reason for this masquerade. What it is, and its true worth, only I know. Maybe some of my institute colleagues would guess, but they'd need to weigh it, measure it, determine its density…
Putting on my shoes in the hall, I caught a strange, unconscious feeling: not a memory, not a "déjà vu"... something like a "memory of the future." I froze in confusion, trying to figure it out, then left, and only in the elevator did I realize that for some reason I had switched off the main circuit breaker in the panel (something I'd never done before), and I had absolutely no memory of closing the apartment door.
Loading the boots and backpack into the "BelAZ" – you can mock all you want, but it's true: I have a Belarusian SUV! – I started the engine (that's right! – let those "Volkswagens" "start their engines"), pulled up the pre-planned route on the screen, took a deep breath, and set off. Three and a half hours of back roads ahead, avoiding police checkpoints on the main exits from the city. I know this is probably overkill, or even paranoia, and the probability of any unexpected trouble is vanishingly small, but I know I don't control my emotions well, and the police are taught to "read faces." And who knows how it would end if they just stopped me to check my documents.
I regretted taking the northern side of the Ring Road, along the dam past Kronstadt. Memories – "flashbacks," as you like to call them – haunted me. Here, by the navigation lock, we used to fish. Over there, by the forts before the turn to Kronstadt, we went for barbecues, baked salmon on coals and ate it in the twilight, watching the dying sunset. The interchange for Sosnovy Bor. I took my ex-wife and daughter there in early October to wander the sandy, sunny beach of the Gulf, to seek peace of mind by the sleepy, chilly water, to reflect on what really mattered. Back then, I was still hoping for something…
Why am I here? What am I doing in this "BelAZ"? (It really does sound funny...) And if we're talking about the big picture? Still hoping for something?
No! The Nobel Prize – that's for me. I've dreamed of it since childhood! And the truth, bitter as it may be, is that if it weren't for the divorce, there would have been nothing: no hobbies, no sports, no "Boeing" flights (it's a flight simulator – don't get the wrong idea!), no investments, no "country house," no this "BelAZ." There would have been no doctorate and this tiny nanotechnology miracle, which cost immense effort and is waiting its turn at the bottom of my backpack.
My institute has been working on nuclear fusion for several decades, its pulsed variety, to be precise. All these years we've been searching for a way to provide all of humanity with cheap and practically inexhaustible thermonuclear energy once and for all, and every ten years: we're almost there, we've practically found it. I don't need to tell you that, at the very least, this would be a global victory over hunger, poverty, inequality...
I'm the head of a group of theorists – the "anomaly hunters." Using simple tools – pencil and paper – we look for explanations for everything new, unusual, anomalous, and exotic that experimenters have discovered over sixty years. I defended my doctorate three years ago on the topic: "Effects of Anomalous Changes in Plasma Reaction Rates."
No one noticed then that my dissertation was missing its two most important pages, the ones containing the scientific breakthrough. You probably thought I literally tore two pages out? No, of course not! The work is formatted properly, according to all the canons, without a hitch, but it lacks the important conclusions, as well as some equation solutions and research results leading to those conclusions. This Saturday, I alone know how to ignite a star in the Leningrad Oblast, and I will ignite it.
The article is already written. It's only missing the experimental data that my laboratory's instruments will be recording tonight, while detectors all over Europe will register a burst of gamma radiation. They'll have quite a commotion over there, both the professors and the military. By the time they figure it out, realize it's not World War III, calm down, determine the time, direction, point on the map… All this will later confirm my priority in the discovery.
The Nobel this year, of course, is unlikely, but next year I plan to stay in Stockholm until Christmas, and then – forever. Maybe I'll miss my daughter less. "Spleen" started playing inside, and I lowered the window, pulled a cigarette from the pack, and lit up.
Along deserted roads, not always successfully avoiding unexpectedly deep potholes in the asphalt, past surrounding villages with wooden houses sunken into the ground, lopsided, darkened by rain and time, past fields overgrown with weeds, bristling with spears of dry hogweed, past half-ruined, long-abandoned farms, past rusted skeletons of tractors and combines on grass-covered lots of collective farms lost to history, I drove west.
I stopped at a village store, bought cigarettes, water. A local came up to me – swaying, "emanating" and dirty – asked for a hundred rubles for vodka. I gave him the bill and said nothing, remembering myself. Maybe he had been rejected, too.
I smoked, looked around. Gray sky, a big puddle in front of the store, around the corner – an overflowing garbage container, beyond it – a narrow street receding into the distance with lopsided wooden picket fences on both sides, along the edges – dried grass, beaten down by rains and fallen leaves. I tried to imagine what one could even do here from autumn to spring, and I couldn't.
There was still about an hour and a half to go to my destination, and I tried to focus on the upcoming experiment.
Arriving at the house, the first thing I did was light the boiler. Heated up some pearl barley porridge with stewed meat, made some sandwiches, and had lunch. While the house warms up, I'll nap for a couple of hours, then hunting until evening.
Licenses were bought back in early autumn. I'll wander the lakes and swamps until dark, stalking prey, maybe take a couple of shots, but the ducks and geese can sleep soundly. The real goal is to retrieve some WWII TNT from a hiding place under the cover of darkness. I spent two summers with a metal detector searching for shells, digging them up, and smelting the explosive during the white June nights, when the coals of a fire aren't so noticeable from afar.
Two kilograms, according to my calculations, should be more than enough to trigger the "detonator" – that very pellet – essentially, a tiny thermonuclear bomb.
Before sleep, I took the pellet down to the basement (or rather, a full-fledged underground floor with an entrance disguised as a pantry), which housed the laboratory, and spent half an hour installing the "detonator" in its working position. I also checked the charge of the backup power supply batteries, the ventilation, opened the drains, and started the nitrogen station, which produces liquid nitrogen from atmospheric air to cool the setup's core. I glanced at my watch – 12:56. Just in time – there'll be plenty of nitrogen by midnight. Now to bed, Sergey Petrovich!
Late autumn is good in these parts because the village, already almost abandoned, finally "dies out." In summer, city "dacha-dwellers" live here, who once bought land for next to nothing and built cottages, more than half of which stand empty. Prices have risen noticeably since then, but the distance from the city makes itself felt, and with the help of a trading "robot," mathematics, and some luck, I rather quickly scraped together the necessary sum in the Moscow Exchange futures market. The robot turned out to be so good that it was enough for the house, and I even managed to build the experimental setup faster than I calculated (luck played its part there).
Heading into the forest, rifle in hand and a large backpack on my shoulders, I noted with satisfaction that none of the neighbors had come today, so I didn't have to worry about uninvited guests at the worst possible moment. Also, there was hope for no power surges in the grid.
I had calculated the hunting route in advance so that by deep dusk I'd be in the right place by the lake. Looking around just in case, I crawled into the reeds (that's what the rubber boots were for), to where the TNT cache was hidden underwater.
I found it fairly quickly, though not immediately. Transferring the TNT to my backpack, I put the container back underwater (might come in handy again), got out onto the bank, trying not to make too much noise, and slowly, guided by the barely distinguishable silhouettes of trees, headed towards the house, suddenly catching myself with a slight feeling of "cottony legs," like in childhood when my friends and I were planning some "dangerous pranks."
When I reached the dirt road, I saw a light in the window of my house. I'd purposely left the desk lamp on in the second-floor bedroom. A single light. Means no one else in the village for sure.
Suddenly, two bright headlights flared right in front of me, and I was blinded for a few moments.
– Good evening, documents please, – a voice approaching from the darkness said sternly.
My heart sank, and I barely stayed on my suddenly weak legs.
– Ah, it's you, Petrovich… – said Valerka, the local cop, emerging from the darkness, sounding a bit disappointed.
– Hey, – I breathed out, extending my hand for a handshake.
– Shoot anything? – he asked after shaking hands.
– Alas. Not a feather, not a scale…
– You're out a bit late, – Valerka remarked. – And why are you wandering without a flashlight? You'll trip over some leftover 'echo of war'…
– It's… it's dead. Forgot to charge it, – my voice trembled almost imperceptibly.
– What's in the backpack? – his tone suddenly changed.
I hesitated for a moment, froze.
– Rounds, raincoat, hunting knife, dead flashlight… – I began to list, slowly pulling my arm out of the strap. – Want to see?
– Just kidding, Seryoga, – he smiled, patted me on the shoulder. – Charge your flashlight. Don't forget, – and he walked back to his car.
Only when the car door slammed did a wave of heat rush up my spine to the back of my head. Carefully exhaling, trying to look tired and unhurried, I trudged towards the house. I wonder what he would have said if he'd seen what was at the bottom of the backpack…
Right by the gate, my heart stumbled again when I noticed a barely visible greenish glow above the house, resembling the solar corona. What the hell kind of evening is this! Spindle-shaped wisps moved slowly, but not outward, inward towards the hemisphere. The phenomenon lasted maybe a minute and then suddenly vanished.
A vague feeling arose that this was somehow connected to the laboratory. Locking the gate, climbing the steps, entering the house, I ran through the most exotic explanations in my mind and couldn't think of anything. Corona discharge? All equipment is de-energized except the UPS and the nitrogen station. Cherenkov radiation? The "detonator" practically doesn't emit, and why would it? St. Elmo's fire? The weather conditions aren't right… Fine, I'll deal with it later…
The switch is to the right, right behind the hidden door in the pantry. A click, and the light flaring in the laboratory reflected off the glass and metal of the experimental setup located downstairs, right in the center. Inside the tangle of pipes, tubes, little pipes, cables, wires, and tiny wires, a strange structure was discernible, resembling a giant's ring stuck in the concrete floor, its setting holding a one-and-a-half-meter glass sphere instead of a precious stone. Sorry, not good with descriptions, but to me, it looks very much like it. Beneath the sphere – pumps and heat exchangers crowded in rows, on the pipes here and there – control valves with electric actuators. Above the sphere – a laser suspended from a crane beam.
Going down the steep, industrial-style metal stairs, the first thing I did was make sure the liquid nitrogen reservoir was almost full. Opening the glass doors one by one, I turned on the power to the server racks and automated control systems hidden under the stairs. On the tables along all four walls, instrument indicators lit up, lines of Linux booting scrolled on the monitors. Behind the dark glass door of a cabinet, the main control controller blinked with multi-colored LEDs, like a New Year's tree. If it boots without errors – everything will turn "green."
When the "tree" took on a "healthy look," I launched the control systems test on the workstation and went to the kitchen to heat up the classic pearl barley porridge with stewed meat, make sandwiches, and coffee. It's going to be a long night…
After dinner, I went upstairs to the bedroom and lay down on the bed, running through the plan in my head one more time. The automation is on, and now the phone receives messages about what's happening downstairs. There are still about 30-40 minutes before the nitrogen station finishes. I reached up, felt for the first tome I touched on the bookshelf above my head, opened it at random… "The path Hawkeye chose lay through sandy plains…"
Filling and starting the cooling system took forty minutes. Meanwhile, the automation was warming up the laser. When the cooling pressure stabilized, I started the automatic warm-up of the pipelines, thermal taps, and the working area at a rate of 2 degrees per minute. During startup, the setup consumes kilowatts of electricity and heat from the boiler, but these costs will be more than recouped later. The heat during the experiment will have to be dumped into the lake via a cascade of heat exchangers; the generated electricity will partially heat the atmosphere through a load module, partially be fed back into the grid. The "grid guys," by the way, will be very unhappy if they see negative consumption for the month. We'll try not to upset them. Actually, my setup could easily provide heat and electricity to the nearest five or six villages, but that's the next stage.
While the automation is doing its thing, I went to the distribution unit disguised as a shed in the yard, to "set up the circuit," check the transformers and inverters, and start the load module's cooling system.
After fussing around for over an hour, getting pretty cold (never mind, it'll be as warm as summer in there soon), I returned to the warm house and, making more coffee, went down to the lab. There were exactly 12 minutes left until the warm-up ended, and I calmly fortified myself before the most critical operation.
In principle, there's nothing terrible (for me) about loading the TNT. Firstly, the loading is automated, and when it happens, I'll "go for a walk." Secondly, the melting will be done with steam, which is much safer than the method I used to extract it. But, of course, TNT is TNT, and if something goes wrong, the house blowing up would be far from the biggest problem, because forensic experts would easily find traces of explosives. It's bad that Valerka saw me… Because my ancient SIM card in this phone, bought at a grocery store back when a passport wasn't required, along with the "left" Android account, is now no problem for them to, if something happens, "establish the whereabouts of Makoveev, Sergey Petrovich, on such and such a date." So it turns out there's not much point in "going for a walk" anymore…
Deciding to stick to the plan anyway, I unwrapped the plastic, carefully lowered the bricks into the melting tank, then closed the lid and tightened the bolts. Starting the automation, I turned off the lights in the rooms, locked the house, and went to the car. Maybe I'll drive to Kingisepp…
Forty minutes later, I parked the "BelAZ" opposite the Catherine Cathedral and walked towards the local Summer Garden.
The park was dark, cold, and dreary. I wandered along the paths, glancing at the temperature in the melting tank until I got bored. I sat down on a bench, lit a cigarette. Regretted the eaten porridge, when a burger and french fries would have come in very handy now.
A young couple passed by slowly, arm in arm: a guy in a short dark green hooded jacket and a girl with curly chestnut hair in a long black coat. Wincing, I looked away. How much longer will this go on?
Better to get back in the car than to scare the youth with a gloomy, unkind look.
After the successful TNT loading, which the smartphone reported, the setup automatically switched to leak testing mode. Now the working area is being filled with gaseous nitrogen to a pressure of 20 bar, which should not change by more than a thousandth of a percent over an hour. If it changes, instead of a launch and sensational headlines in world media, there will be a long and tedious search for the cause of the leak.
In any case, I need to get back.
I stopped at a gas station, finally ate a burger, and a little over an hour later, approaching the house, I saw the glow again. It was brighter and seemed to last longer. Again some vague, elusive guess…
Going down to the lab, I confirmed by the instruments that there were no leaks and the system was sealed, checked the operation of the main control loops on the graphs, and started the vacuum procedure. The ejectors started working, the pressure in the working area "jerked" with a lower discharge and began to slowly decrease. About another hour until the indicator shows "0.000 bar."
Vacuum… I smiled, remembering the bucket labeled in red paint "for vacuum collection," which the shift supervisor at Unit 4 (Leningrad NPP, of course) handed to me, a student intern, saying: "Go, Seryoga, down to the zero level, unscrew such-and-such valve on the condenser and collect some vacuum." A classic!
While the process runs, I tackled the final stage of preparation – checking the safety systems. This is the most critical part, and I've checked and rechecked them countless times. I think there's no need to reiterate what a thermonuclear explosion, even of such a laughable power, means.
At one in the morning, everything was ready. I went out into the yard and, lighting a cigarette, noticed how my fingers were trembling. All that was left was to click the "Start" button drawn on the screen.
The detonation of the TNT will cause the compression of the multi-layered pellet, and a microscopic nuclear explosion will occur. At the moment of the explosion, in a small volume at the center of the working area, temperature and pressure will reach stellar magnitudes for a short time, and the deuterium-tritium fusion reaction will begin. At that moment, the laser will fire, and almost simultaneously, the second TNT charge will detonate. The laser pulse, split by specially designed optics, will impart rotation to the plasma cloud around several axes simultaneously, creating a magnetic field of a special configuration in the plasma sphere, and the TNT explosion will amplify it many times over, creating conditions for the self-focusing effect (the missing pages of my dissertation) and the deuterium fusion reaction to occur. Roughly speaking, if you want the "layman's terms" version.
Flicking away the butt of my second cigarette, I thought that five years ago she would have been so proud of me… I spat, cursed under my breath, and went into the house.
The clock showed 1:15 AM. Launch!
The sun flashed in the basement, and a moment later a dull sound of explosions came, merged due to the imperceptible microsecond delay. A polarizing glass screen automatically lowered over the setup, but it was still as bright in the lab as on a July afternoon on a Sochi beach.
The star was burning!
I took off my glasses and watched the parameters on the monitor. The timer counted seconds – the plasma confinement time.
60 seconds.
120 seconds. Parameters normal. Via the "secret" pipeline, we're heating the lake. Went and turned off the lab lighting, no longer needed.
309 seconds. Power dumping to the load module began.
404 seconds. Grid synchronization. Negative power consumption.
1067 seconds. 143 kilowatts are being fed into the grid. Can't go over 150, otherwise the protection at the substation will trip.
1338 seconds. World record! All parameters normal! Radiation background normal! Everything is working perfectly!
I went upstairs and came back with a tripod. Journalists would sell their souls for such "newsreel footage"! Setting the smartphone in the tripod holder, fussing for a few minutes over the choice of angle – I wanted both the setup, the equipment, and the monitors with readings in the frame – I started recording and began to speak…
Probably, if I'd placed the camera differently, I would have noticed the moment when the spectrum of the man-made sun began to shift slightly towards the red and would have had time to do something…
Only when the white walls of the laboratory were tinged with sunset did I turn around and see that something was wrong with the star. The spectral shift was accelerating. Knocking over the tripod, I rushed to the monitors, trying to understand what was happening.
The warning alarm started wailing. Error messages appeared in a table on a separate monitor and poured out like from a cornucopia. The power fed into the grid jumped to half a megawatt and then instantly dropped to zero – the protection at the substation had cut the line. The gamma radiation indicator – a separate device hanging on the wall – went off scale, glowing red and also emitting a warning sound.
I still had time to flip open the transparent cover of the emergency stop button and slam it with my fist.
The lab was getting dark rapidly. Time stretched. Spindle-shaped wisps of greenish light appeared in the air, slowly moving towards the dimming star, which now resembled a just-heated, but now rapidly cooling bearing ball.
When darkness fell, I felt my heart stop.
Moving, I realized I was sitting, leaning back in my chair. The lab was semi-dark – monitors glowing. I slowly turned around. The star was gone. Instrument indicators showed normal. Silence in the lab. The automated system's equipment calmly blinked its green LEDs, running on backup power.
Slowly, I took out my cigarettes. Lit one.
Thoughts churned sluggishly. An awful fatigue washed over me. Something very serious had happened, but right now I had absolutely no strength to deal with it.
After smoking two cigarettes in a row, I carefully stood up, climbed the stairs, and flicked the switch. The lab lights weren't on backup power. As it turned out, there was no light in the rooms either. I remembered the village power line outage I'd seen on the power graph.
It was probably around three in the morning now. Going back down, I looked for the fallen tripod, detached my phone, which, fortunately, hadn't broken in the fall.
I felt an unbearable urge to go home. Figuring out if I could drive now, I started shutting down the equipment. I could spend the night here, get some sleep, and morning is wiser than evening…
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I imagined getting home, taking a shower, crawling under the covers, and sleeping until noon, then spending the whole next day ordering food and watching one movie after another, and my doubts vanished.
Locking the house and the gate, I thought that I really should take the disks with the data arrays, but imagining how hard it would be to dismantle the servers in the dark… No, thanks! Next weekend. Or even during the week. Now – home!
Sunday went exactly as I'd imagined: laziness and gluttony. I didn't want to remember yesterday's shameful failure, nor think about what had actually happened. I got home in two hours during the night, along the highway, not avoiding traffic police posts via back roads. My head was empty, and inside – only a feeling of wounded pride and loneliness, and also – self-pity, – as ashamed as I am to admit it.
Around nine in the evening, when another movie ended, I turned off the light and was about to go to bed when suddenly the intercom rang in the hall. Silently cursing all the neighbors and couriers in the world, I crawled out from under the covers.
– Yes? – I said gloomily into the receiver.
– Seryozha... it's us…
I mechanically pressed the button, and only then did my legs give way and my heart start pounding wildly. Pulling on my pants and T-shirt, turning on the light in the hall, I opened the door. A minute later the elevator arrived, and out ran Nadyushka with a joyful cry of "Daddy!" She quickly hugged me and ran to her room, shedding her shoes and jacket on the way. Tanya followed, stopping at the threshold.
A short, silent scene.
– Seryozha, forgive me… – she said. – You were right: we can't manage on our own…
My breath caught. I pulled her towards me by the collar of her coat and hugged her, and she put her head on my shoulder.
The rest of the evening was magical, like that first New Year's Eve of ours. Nadka was messing around in her room with the toys she'd missed so much. Tanya and I drank tea in the kitchen and talked about everything in the world. Our daughter kept running in to us. You could see how happy she was to have both a mom and a dad again.
Then we put Nadyushka to bed together, reading a fairy tale with parts until she fell asleep.
Finally, we came to our bedroom, turned off the light, and lay down.
– Seryozh... how about... we have sex… – she said quietly, shyly, almost breathlessly.
When silence fell, peace came – such a long-awaited peace! – and a feeling of infinite tranquility, making me terribly sleepy. It was as if a tight hoop that had been squeezing my heart had been broken. Tanya was practically asleep, her head on my shoulder. She whispered, "Sorry for this month," and fell asleep. I opened my eyes.
An elusive shadow of anxiety, lurking in the recesses of my subconscious all evening, was taking shape. Tanya's unexpected arrival, and everything that followed. The nagging feeling of irrationality, of the unreality of the last hours, even during that moment of intimacy, so longed-for and desired. Hell, forget the evening! Five years like a dream! Five goddamn years I regularly dreamed we were making love! Once I called my girlfriend by her name! And just now, just a few minutes ago, I believed it was finally over.
Carefully, so as not to wake her, I turned Tanya on her side, covered her with the blanket, took the cigarettes from the table, and left the room.
"Sorry for this month," – her words echoed in my memory again and again. What nonsense is this?!
I opened the window in the kitchen, pulled a cigarette from the pack with my teeth, flicked the lighter, and froze. The smell of smoke! When you come back from out of town, even if you've only been away for a day, the long-term tobacco smell hits you at the doorstep. I'd started smoking in the apartment about a year after the divorce.
Back in the bedroom, I quietly opened the closet where I kept documents, fumbled in the dark for the thick folder. In the kitchen, after going through all the documents twice, I still couldn't find the divorce certificate. I did find the marriage certificate. What nonsense! I remember driving to the registry office to get it!
Back to the bedroom, for the phone. "Gosuslugi" didn't offer an update – it demanded one! Login, password. Personal documents. Passport, SNILS, TIN, Certificates… It seems the state thinks I'm still married. Madness!
I checked all the documents one by one – everything matched everywhere.
Vehicle. Model: "Volkswagen Tiguan I". License plate: "О615РМ178RUS"
I remember choosing the car, almost immediately after the divorce, calling the manager, driving out of the dealership in the "BelAZ"! Typing in the URL from memory, I got a 404 error. A search for "BelMotors" didn't find anything at all! I typed "BelAZ Mara" into the search and read: "Independent designers have proposed their version of the first Belarusian SUV..." Searching for "BelAZ-75131" (the factory model number) returned mining dump trucks on both search engines, and there wasn't a single word about passenger cars on the automaker's website!
My T-shirt was soaked and stuck to my back. This is probably how people go crazy! I looked into the bedroom, then into my daughter's room. Both were sleeping peacefully. I urgently needed a smoke!
Putting on my jacket and boots on bare feet, I went down to the yard. Dropping one cigarette, breaking the second, I lit up on the third try, took a deep drag. My body was shaking with a fine tremor – whether from cold or fear. I felt for the car key in my pocket and pressed the button. Twenty meters away, the turn signals flashed. The "BelAZ" was standing where I'd left it yesterday. Exactly like the picture by the "independent designers."
Getting into the passenger seat of the car, I smoked one cigarette after another, trying to understand what the hell was going on!
My thoughts jumped from the obvious to the incredible. The experiment. The pompous "interview." The suddenly appearing redshift. As if the plasma cloud inside the setup – my man-made sun – suddenly, with tremendous acceleration, began to recede, reaching the speed of light in less than a minute. The "northern lights" appearing from nowhere, twice outside, and then right in the lab.
Generally speaking, a redshift suggests black holes. A similar effect should occur when an "external observer" approaches an event horizon. If, of course, I remember correctly… Where would a black hole of such mass come from in the lab to produce a redshift? Ultra-light objects like that exist only in theory. Their formation requires energies unattainable even at the LHC. Besides, they're the size of a proton. Such an object would fly right through the Earth, and we wouldn't even notice.
Wait! What does a black hole have to do with it? It has everything to do with it, Seryozhenka – a wormhole! Where you have one, you have the other! Hello, cosmologies of the multiverse…
Actually, it fits… And if this is the only explanation, the alternative to which is only my madness, then perhaps it's better to stick with it.
Several more times, as honestly as I could, I went over all the available facts in my head, trying to find explanations that excluded my moving through time or into a parallel universe (I'll have to figure out the details later!) and I found none.
A myriad of questions swarmed in my head: Where did the energy to create a wormhole (it probably was one) come from? How did I, along with the house and yard, "crawl" into it? Why did the "northern lights" appear long before the "transfer," and more than once? How to get back? Is it even possible? Where is the "parallel me"? How to explain the "BelAZ" to my wife? Where is the "Tiguan"? What to do with the hunting rifle (I checked – it's not on "Gosuslugi")? Will my wife and daughter notice the "substitution"? How fast will it happen? What about at work? What to do if the "parallel me" shows up?..
Not coming up with anything better, I went home for the rifle and "hunting accessories," hid everything in the trunk, then moved the car away from the windows, into the farthest corner near the transformer substation. Let it sit there until I figure out what to do with it.
I need to try to get at least a little sleep. Work tomorrow. Having another smoke, I went home to look for sleeping pills.
Talking during breakfast with my wife and daughter, I felt like a deceiver and a thief. I was scared. I had to think through every phrase.
I learned that here Tanya is still at "PeterTech," administering websites, but now she works remotely. In my world, my ex-wife got a second degree, threw herself into "psychoanalysis," and then left me. We take Nadyu to the same kindergarten near the house, and next year she'll start school. In my world, my ex-wife almost immediately transferred Nadyushka to a private kindergarten. There were other differences I hadn't noticed on Sunday: a different monitor and keyboard at the computer, different dishes, no cup that I'd bought myself after the divorce to replace a broken one… Looks like the cosmology of a multi-variant universe…
I risked telling Tanya a joke about psychoanalysts that I'd heard from my ex-wife. She just smiled briefly and started talking enthusiastically about work.
Before "psychology," my ex-wife had a period of workaholism. She used to make custom websites at night, wanted to start her own business, and then… she changed. There it is – the branching point of variants!
Time for work. Tying my shoelaces, I straightened up and saw a key with a "Volkswagen" logo on the dresser. Tanya came over to lock the door behind me.
– Well, see you tonight! – I took the key, kissed her, then demonstratively slapped my forehead: – Damn senility! Tanya, did you see the car yesterday? I have absolutely no memory of it, you know!
– Near the arch, on the right, – she smiled, and I left.
I felt more confident when I arrived at work. I caught myself even enjoying the feeling of "playing spy." There were differences here, of course. The same office, but it seems the "me here" had actually read that book on self-discipline and learned something from it.
The desk was tidy. There was a thick daily planner with neat and understandable notes, thanks to which I was able to get an idea of the current state of affairs within half a day. The file naming system on the computer was so elegant that I decided to "adopt" it too.
The institute's work was heading in a completely different direction, and I soon understood why when I found a working draft of an almost completed doctoral dissertation. It contained those two pages which I had removed in my world, and it turned out that the institute "here" was now practically entirely working "for me." Kind, trusting, and foolish Seryozha! Still building communism… "Happiness for all, and let no one go away unsatisfied"! An altruist! They'll squeeze you dry like an empty tube of toothpaste, and then throw you away…
I spent the whole day studying the contents of the computer, only interrupting for lunch, and by evening I'd learned everything I could about the work. They had almost finished building a setup operating on my principle and had made a whole bunch of "detonators" of various "calibers," which would allow them to study many types of reactions. The first experiments were supposed to start in the spring. I went to the huge laboratory hall and saw it all with my own eyes.
There was a folder left on the computer called "Personal," containing a diary. It was five in the evening. The file was password protected, but my standard password worked. And there was the answer to the question of where "the me here" was. I'd often pondered thoughts: "If only we hadn't had that stupid quarrel?", "If only she hadn't had that damned education?"
I don't know about the quarrel, but the answer to the second question was: my suicide.
I smoked right in the office, as if hit over the head with a dusty bag. The last entry in the diary left no doubt. When his wife left, taking their daughter, he took two weeks of vacation and told everyone at the institute he was going to Karelia to rest. I even know exactly where and how it happened, because I had thought about it myself, more than once. But somehow I managed…
I imagine what would have happened to Nadyushka if they'd told her daddy was no more. As for Tatyana, I'm not sure… I read a bit of the diary, hoping to find out what happened, but quickly realized it would take time. The end of the workday, time to go "home." It seemed my return to my own world was being postponed…
The whole way "home" (from now on, no more quotes – it's already understood!) I reflected on yesterday's "dirty sex with the widow." It made me shudder when that phrase came to mind. Tangled in self-accusations and self-justifications, in cosmology and philosophy, I finally calmed myself with the thought that he and I were the same person, and therefore his wife was my wife.
At home, I tried my best to play the role of a tired but contented family man back from work. To my relief, for Tatyana and Nadka, the happy family reunion was yesterday, and today was just an ordinary day. During dinner, we talked about everyday things. Tanya did the dishes, I played board games with Nadya. We put our daughter to bed (she wanted us to read to her together again), and went to bed ourselves.
– Want to? – she asked.
I didn't refuse.
Life was settling into its ordinary, measured rhythm, like any normal family. I, as a department head, had a lot of free time, which I devoted to reading the diary, hoping to find the reason for Seryoga's suicide. He had been writing for a long time and a lot, often about the same things in different words, heavily affected by some shock, and the family was literally hanging by a thread. He adored Nadyushka, desperately wanted her to have a normal family, and tried his best, but things just got worse. There was a lot of reflection on love, forgiveness, honesty. Philosophy, esotericism, spirituality, religion… Not like me at all!
There was stuff about physics here too. He jotted down ideas, either too raw or too bold to share with colleagues.
About two years ago, Sergey saw in the equations (yes, yes, from those very missing dissertation pages) the possibility of what I had literally stumbled into in the lab: a wormhole! I hadn't even come close to that (because I didn't want to share with anyone)! The institute was working for him, and he could calmly work on theory while I built the setup with my own money.
In the closet, I found a thick folder labeled "Singularity," containing sheets covered in formulas, doodled with graphs, complex geometric objects, and their projections. On the computer – MathCad and MatLab files, a started scientific article… It took the rest of that day and the next to study it.
The possibility of ultra-light black hole formation in high-energy subatomic interactions has long been predicted by theoretical physics. They've looked for such objects at the LHC, but so far unsuccessfully.
Sergey, based on those "anomalous" equations from the dissertation, refined the conditions under which the probability of relativistic objects arising increases sharply. He found two new exact solutions for electromagnetic fields in a vacuum in the presence of a black hole (unipolar induction and magneto-gravitomagnetic mechanisms), and based on them – a solution for wormholes, arbitrarily close to the limiting Reissner-Nordstr?m black hole.
To put it in human terms, at some point during the experiment, a subatomic-sized black hole formed in the plasma cloud, with an electric charge and a mass of several kilograms, which, due to Hawking radiation, should have evaporated in a few seconds and exploded, releasing a colossal amount of energy (remember E = mc2?). But the special configuration of electromagnetic fields in the reaction zone led to the emergence of a new object without an event horizon – a wormhole, into the spherical throat of which I, along with the house, car, and yard, ended up. Everything that fell into that sphere instantly swapped places with another part of the multiverse through the space-time tunnel, and the wormhole closed, but didn't disappear. And the equations say it can be opened again by repeating a high-energy interaction in its throat. For me, this meant a chance to return!
In Sergey's materials, there were only assumptions, mere speculations, about what was on the other side. Parallel worlds, independent of each other; a universe branching every instant, like a tree, into myriad variants; a multidimensional universe where our world is just a projection onto four-dimensional space-time…
If I'm to trust my feelings, the variant hypothesis fits best. Although, the "northern lights" appearing before the experiment started seemed to hint at the third option…
In the evening, I found Tatyana in the kitchen with a glass of wine.
– What's the occasion, Tanya?
– Trouble at work… Want some? – she raised the almost empty bottle.
– Don't feel like it, – I pulled up a stool and sat opposite her. – Tell me about it?
She was offended by her boss, who had scolded her because the company's websites had been down all weekend. I supported her, agreed that the boss had been unfair, tried to cheer her up. Then Nadyushka ran in, and we went to play with the dollhouse. Our daughter kept running to the kitchen, calling her mom to join us. It turned out that while daddy and daughter were playing, mommy had opened another bottle. Then came the bedtime story, and when Nadya fell asleep, Tanya was already asleep too.
On Thursday, after lunch, I found what I was looking for…
A little over a year ago. An entry dated June 7th.
He had pasted into the diary a photo of a notebook page, covered in a very familiar handwriting.
I am a hypocritical bitch. I'm good at making a good impression, making people trust me, and then using them. I lie constantly.
I am arrogant, conceited, and touchy. Many times I provoked my husband myself, and then played the victim and manipulated him. I'm good at that. I'm an egoist.
I work poorly. I spend most of the day on social media or doing other things, and then lie to my boss that the task was so difficult, that's why it took so long. But at home, I tell him how tired I am.
I steal money from the company allocated for advertising, submit fake reports. My boss gets complaints because of my poor work. There are rumors he might get fired.
I don't like playing with my daughter, spending time with her. I try to put that on my husband, while I stare at my phone or read books. I love reading, but I'm bored with my family, and it's always been that way.
I cheated on my husband with a mutual acquaintance, with a colleague at a corporate party, met strangers online and fucked them in hotels, and lied to my husband that I was visiting a friend. I know he loves me, and I manipulate him, use him as I please, but I don't love him myself, and never have.
I am a worthless piece of shit who has lost her human form. A dirty rat, an animal...
– F-fuck... – I grabbed my head, unable to believe it, ran outside and smoked by the entrance for a long, long, long time.
Sergey had accidentally found her notebook at home, couldn't resist reading it, and lived with it for almost another year and a half.
What a world of fucking diaries, damn it! Can't people once in their lives muster the courage to talk to each other, instead of talking to their sick heads, truly, sincerely, with love?! Oh, no! The other person is supposed to guess what I'm offended by! Some kind of total infantilism, hypersensitivity, and megalomania…
Going back in, I read on, already roughly knowing what would come next. Seryoga kept it all inside, told no one. Conflicting feelings towards his wife overwhelmed him, robbed him of sleep and strength: love, compassion, pity, anger, jealousy, guilt, resentment, fear. He was torn from side to side: from love to hate. Save the family or save himself? What would happen to Nadyushka? What would happen to her mother, slowly sinking to the bottom?
He started staying late at work, wrote lengthy soulful outpourings, sought God, sincerely tried to forgive his wife.
A little less than a year ago, she switched to remote work. In the evenings, wine appeared more and more often in the kitchen. A month ago, Sergey decided to talk to her, and it all ended in a terrible row: she blamed him for everything and left. And then he broke…
Finishing with the diary, I sat and smoked in the office again. Only now did I truly realize that this was also my story, and Seryoga's feelings crashed down on me like a tsunami, engulfing me, filling my soul with dirt, rubbish, mangled fragments of happy memories.
I'm never going back there! Poor Nadyushka… My eyes filled with tears.
Pulling myself together, I called Tatyana, said that today was the setup launch, and I'd only be back tomorrow evening. She lamented but agreed that work was work.
I need to calm down and come up with a plan. Tatyana is seriously ill – that's clear. The child cannot be left with her.
Suddenly the phone rang.
– Seryozha, sorry, I completely forgot! – Tatyana's voice sounded strange. – Nadyushka asked to stay at the kindergarten today, in the overnight group. She's been wanting to try it for a long time – remember? You don't mind, do you?
– Well, if she wanted to, let her stay.
I hung up. This must be that same God that Sergey had been looking for!
The plan formed by itself.
People like Tatyana vitally need to hit rock bottom, and I'll arrange an "urgent dive" for her.
Coming up with a plausible story to stay in the evening and work with the "pellets" wasn't too hard, but I had to sort out formalities – get permission. I told my colleagues I'd go out for dinner and came back about an hour later.
I spent the rest of the time honestly doing flaw detection on the "detonators," measuring layer thicknesses, double-checking their calculated parameters, and when I finished around eleven, I returned everything to the special storage. The substitution won't be discovered soon – a hunting pellet is indistinguishable to the eye.
Back in the office, I put Seryoga's papers in my bag, copied them to my phone, and deleted all the materials on wormholes from the computer, then went to the parking lot.
I arrived near the house around midnight. I turned off a bit earlier, left the "Volkswagen" in the neighboring courtyard. Circling the house, I entered the yard from the unlit side. Luckily, no one had blocked the "BelAZ."
I opened the trunk. Weapons, ammunition, all in place. Hid the "detonator" in the backpack, got in the car. Keys to my house in the glove compartment, enough gas. Half an hour to pick up Nadya from the kindergarten, plus three and a half to get to the village.
I took one last look at Seryoga's windows. The kitchen light was blazing brightly, and through the bare tree branches I could clearly see the "guest with the bare torso."
Hatred, rage, and disgust boiled up like black foam. Dirty rat! Scum!
I don't remember getting and assembling the weapon, loading the rounds, walking with the rifle through the yard, taking the elevator.
– Who's there? – a voice came from the apartment.
– Neighbor! You're flooding us! – I couldn't think of anything better.
The lock clicked open. A red beard appeared in the doorway.
I shoved the barrel into the beard and said quietly, but as menacingly as I could:
– Hands behind your head! Slowly back! Face down on the floor!
The pale-bearded man, in just his underwear, half a head taller than me, raised his hands and slowly backed away.
I slammed the door shut.
– Turn around! On your knees! Face down on the floor!
He turned and obediently lay down on the tiles.
The drunken wife came out of the bedroom, also in just her underwear.
A silent scene. Horror in wide-open eyes.
The barrel was lowered, aimed at the bearded man's spine.
– Dirty, vile rat! – I said slowly, with disgust.
– Seryozha-a-a! – she wailed, collapsing to her knees, curling up, hunching over, covering her face with her palms.
– Bored with family life? Tired of the "Groundhog Day"? Not enough drama? – I was winding myself up.
She whimpered, writhing on the floor. The bearded man lay still, barely breathing.
I felt disgusted. As if I'd stepped in vomit. I spat.
– That's it. I'm going to waste this prick right now. Live with that!
– No-o-o-o!!!
The barrel pressed into trembling, pale fingers desperately covering the red-haired head.
Click of the safety. The cool trigger.
It's going to get messy in here now…
On the dashboard, 3:00 AM. Nadyushka is asleep on the wide back seat, covered with my jacket, her own bundled under her head. About another hour to the house.
I need to get the setup running by morning. When we get back – we'll sleep in, and spend the whole weekend with Nadka, walking in the fresh air.
I didn't shoot. Screw you, esteemed dramatists, with your Chekhov's gun rule for the final act! Sinking to her level – it's not worth it.
Tanyukha was either born a bitch or is spiritually ill. If the former – she's already punished. If the latter – there's a chance she might want to get better.
Either way, it's none of my business anymore.
