3

From the outside, the city looked like a living being, a collective mind of tens of millions of minds merged into one common goal - to live, multiply, gather a supply of resources around itself, which later, or maybe here and now, can be spent on improving conditions for life, reproduction and further concentration resources. It is easy to guess that it was all just an illusion. There was no collective mind, most of the desires and needs of even a single individual in this city contradicted each other. Children interfered with a career, a career interfered with personal life, one cannot save and spend at the same time, and no expenses for an empty and formal in their temporality and chimera improvement of one's own life have ever paid off.

People liked to mindlessly accumulate and spend money on nonsense. They could not even decide on who or what could make their life even a little happier. But the pleasure centers in their brains worked regardless of the wishes of the owner. Get drunk in a nightclub or spend half a year's salary on a box of rusty iron? Start a family with a completely alien person, whose only objective dignity was belonging to the opposite sex, obeying the call of instinct or social institutions? Work half your life, paying for abstract square meters in a concrete anthill? Jail your boss, fire a subordinate, kill a promising project because it could pose a threat to your position in the office?

Most of these people lived to live and worked to spend. Without a special purpose, without the slightest thought about why they live.

What from the outside looked like the solidarity work of many people, in practice turned out to be an ocean of endless and senseless struggle for something that ten years later would be blown away by dust in the wind, leaving only memories of the irretrievably lost pre-war “consumer boom”. A temporary surge in the birth rate will be forgotten even faster. This city was developing its once-gifted resource before our eyes, but its inhabitants do not yet feel it, reading vague reports in the news about how a thunderstorm is swelling across the ocean, which will forever conserve their personal world in eternal opposition to poverty that is slowly choking them. If not financial, then cultural. Live, people, seize the moment that will not return.

Ten years ago, when everything was just beginning, it looked different. More optimistic, despite all the deplorable introductory. Then it still seemed to him that the task was simple and feasible. He was under the illusion that his mission after his return was good, at least that it did not contradict the desires of these people.

Unite for the sake of future generations, start moving into space for the glory of all mankind.

At that time, he had not yet thought about the fact that the future is something for which one has to step on the throat of specific people and entire nations. That the future is something to kill for.

If he could not think about the consequences, if only.

But the cursed gift of foresight remained with him forever, an ominous shadow of a beacon somewhere behind his right shoulder, guiding him forward with an iron hand, pointing with his finger warning of the inevitable.

He found associates for himself, but alas, there were so few of them. Most of his people in this world remained blind and deaf puppets under the control of the simplest instincts. The same as the rest of the inhabitants of the city slowly plunging into a catatonic sleep. Some of them were capable of much more, but at the first glance at the next candidate, he could only sigh. Too late, useless. This world has already irrevocably corrupted what cannot be fixed. The mother poisoned her children by the millions, she did not know how otherwise. No one taught her otherwise. Greed, pride, universal resentment of circumstances and the habit of self-justification in the worst of their intentions. We are not such, Life is so. Mother is like that.

Can these people be blamed for this?

He was warned that this would happen. He did not believe then. But now, ten years later, he no longer doubted that it could not be otherwise.

The same Marat, could he become something else? He had all the talents to become an excellent manager - Marat truly saw beyond his own nose, sensibly assessed people, knew how to recognize an approaching thunderstorm in time, was not so fixated on money-grubbing, like his kind, but he would not have opened Marat and spans of those long-term plans that he built. It was immediately clear that if this one believed, he would immediately begin to figure out how to use what was revealed to him for his own good. And just give him free rein - he will immediately try to seize the initiative.

It was too expensive to fight with your own golems as well. So let him follow him, let him try to find out what is behind the mysterious "kid", as Marat called him to himself. The end goal was more important. The same Marat was smart enough not to go where they would easily cut off your tongue, or even your head, for excessive curiosity.

He understood everything correctly, locking himself that evening in his own huge apartment in a house on the embankment. A red lantern in the bathroom, a thick envelope with photographic paper in slightly shaking hands. Everything is fine, no one is trying to throw him, it's just time to complete their small project. One of dozens and hundreds of other similar projects. It's time to step into the shadows.

And here he stands and looks at the city through the high windows of the evening Sheremetyevo, waiting for his jet to be refueled. Issues resolved, bridges burned, roads back cut off. The "kid" had already two hours plunged into a sweet dream on board the battered "Tu-154". Soon he will disappear from sight forever, transferring to another flight in Istanbul. Another name, the Israeli "darkon", you can't dig.

He will first have to complete his business in one seven years as a flooded Yakut kimberlite quarry. That is both a temporary mask and a network of shell companies, created, among other things, by the efforts of Marat, who is reliable in the sense of diligence. Even this jet would never occur to anyone to associate with the name of the "kid" who urgently flew away on a Turkish flight.

Here is our fugitive.

Just look in the right direction. Distance is not a hindrance.

Calm heartbeat, deep sleep. In business class, it is not customary to constantly bully those who sleep with intrusive aviation catering. Only a glass of cheap sparkling wine fizzles out in the recess of the armrest.

Something is wrong. The "kid" always avoided chemical stimulants. The glass was half empty, as was the next chair, although the same glass was warming in the armrest.

A canvas of events obediently unrolled before his eyes, to which he would have reacted long ago if he had not instead plunged into idle reflections about the night city glowing on the horizon.

A shadow leaning over the "kid", a short prick in the neck, darkness instantly falling on him. The passenger drank from the exhaustion and fell asleep himself, it happens. But that his neighbor has been occupying an economy-class latrine for ten minutes now, without showing signs of life, and here it would be time to suspect something was wrong.

As one should have noticed, the shadowing of the effector on registration. Here are those two, one of which is now cooling down on a narrow aircraft toilet, crossing the border of the Black Sea at an altitude of nine kilometers.

Too difficult. If they wanted to hurt, they would hurt. At least right at the airport. And so - too many traces. So whoever did this was sure that just poisoning was not enough. Yes, and the "kid" is, he is still alive, only peacefully sleeping. It's not a poison, but a powerful sedative. Methaqualone in half with barbiturates. So why then all this?

He missed the ignition, but when the rocket went off course, his defensive instincts immediately signaled even at this distance. Teachings, Ukrainians have exercises there today. The crystal world flickered under his gaze, but he was not satisfied with the answers. We need active measures.

The warhead mistakenly left the trajectory, capturing a civilian side. Remote activation of the self-destruct system did not work - the squib detonated abnormally. Someone was very thoughtful.

Then he reached out right from here, for a thousand kilometers, intercepting control of the kavees's propulsion centers. Turn off the autopilot, sharply lay the steering wheel turn under the control automation hysteria. It is dangerous, it will go into a tailspin, but time is short, and the rocket is getting closer.

The clumsy civilian “carcass”, packed to capacity with pax, obeyed tightly, and a flash flared fifty meters on the starboard side, cutting the tail and wing to shreds with striking elements. Then an uncontrollable fall began. A minute and a half of the scraping of torn metal under the howl of air currents inside the depressurized cabin.

Everything is useless, the one who did it foresaw everything.

The image of the impending blackness of the night sea faded away somehow at once, without a trace.

Turning to the guard, frozen at a distance, he made a gesture understandable to everyone in the air, sticking out his thumb and little finger at his ear. The tube is as simple as possible, push-button, these do not twist in the stomach so much, and this one will not burn out ahead of time. A couple of seconds of conversation can be tolerated.

Exactly two beeps while the keys are being exchanged. And only then the voice on the other side, as always, coldly hostile.

- I'm listening.

We complete the mission.

A barely perceptible incredulous pause in response.

- Fully?

- Yes.

- Received.

That's all.

He had to leave quickly, which meant he didn't have time to figure out which of his golems had just gone out of control. Perhaps it was Marat, perhaps someone else. They have just collectively signed their own death warrant.

He turned to the city.

In a sense, all these people were also condemned.

Never resisted what was done to them.

Obediently becoming a fodder base for his prudent manipulations.

They lived well, ate well, better than ever before in their lives. They got everything for nothing, but they thought they deserved it all. After all, they worked so hard to get it all. They worked sitting astride an oil pipe across the continent, which they did not lay, the fruits of which they did not consume, the money for which they did not even get. Just one day, what a coincidence, oil prices in the world skyrocketed out of the blue, and while the same sheikhs took advantage of the moment to rebuild their economy, to build new financial flows, build new technological chains, establish industry and tourism, build kilometer-long towers of glass and concrete, they just sat and thought that it would be like this forever. Not imagining where this manna from heaven fell on them from, who controls them and why, and what will happen,

When he manages to drink dry all the free resources from this country, and then he will go further.

Alas, from now on, he will need these resources here only for one thing - to start building the Cyrius in the icy depths of the flooded Yakut pit, and woe to those who dare to become an obstacle to this construction.

The time for mercy is over.