КНИГИ КИРИЛЛА ПОТЁМКИНА

INTERLUDE SAMPO (TUONELA ….)

PART I. THE TEMPTATION

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Location: Helsinki. Government Palace. Prime Minister’s Office.

Time: November 14. 16:30 (though outside, it’s already dead of night).

The sleet — räntä — wasn’t falling. It was suspended in the air.

It wasn’t weather. It was a state of the city’s soul.

A gray, sticky aerosol that coated granite embankments, corroded pedestrians’ boots with reagents, and turned the neon signs of Aleksanterinkatu into blurred, weeping stains.

Raimo Valtonen, Prime Minister of the Republic of Finland, stood by the panoramic window of his office. The glass was bulletproof, soundproof, but it couldn’t shield him from the cold. The cold didn’t come from the street. It came from the tablet lying on the Karelian birch desk.

Raimo turned away from the window. He was fifty-five, but the mirror reflected an old man. Nasolabial folds as deep as scars. Eyes the color of Baltic water in October — faded, bottomless. A perfectly tailored suit sat on him like a shroud.

He approached the desk and activated the screen again.

A graph. A simple red line. It didn’t jump up and down like a living person’s cardiogram. It crawled down smoothly, steadily, with mathematical inevitability, toward the bottom right corner. To zero.

«Report of the Committee on Demographic Security. Forecast for 2035: Critical Threshold of No Return.»

— «We are dying,» — Raimo said to the silence. His voice sounded dry, like the snap of a branch. — «We are simply… ending.»

Raimo closed his eyes and for a second, instead of wet Helsinki, he saw a dusty lecture hall in the University’s old wing. 1988. Professor Aarnio stood behind the lectern. A strange old man with eyes of different colors. One — ice blue. The other — black, like a bird’s pupil. Students whispered that with the second eye he saw the Underside. Colleagues called him mad, and students feared him to the point of shivering.

He didn’t teach folklore. He taught… the structure of reality.

— «You read the ‘Kalevala’ like a fairy tale, Valtonen,» — the professor’s rasping voice seemed to echo right now in the Prime Minister’s empty office. — «You look for metaphors. But Lönnrot didn’t write poems. He recorded an algorithm.»

Raimo remembered how the chalk trembled in Aarnio’s hand as he drew the diagram of the Mill on the blackboard.

— «The Sampo is not a metaphor for wealth. It is a technological singularity. Three millstones: Matter, Energy, Information. Whoever starts the Sampo will cancel entropy. He will stop time.»

…

Then, thirty years ago, Raimo had laughed. He was a young cynic, a future doctor, a future politician. But then Aarnio disappeared. Simply dissolved, leaving only a stack of blueprints in his office that the police dismissed as a madman’s ravings. And Raimo’s life turned into a straight upward line.

Too straight.

He looked at his reflection in the dark glass.

He was fifty-five.

He had never started a second family.

His wife, Elina, had left ten years ago. Quietly, without scandals.

— «You are empty, Raimo,» — she had said then, packing her suitcase. — «You’re supposedly here, but you aren’t. Yesterday I woke up and saw that you seemed not to be breathing. You lay with your eyes open and, it seemed to me, didn’t breathe for almost an entire hour. I didn’t feel for a pulse, I was very, very scared… And in the morning, as if nothing had happened, you were drinking coffee and smiling your fake smile. You know, sometimes I think you’ve worn that smile since birth. I’m leaving because I’m afraid of waking up dead next to you one day.»

She was partly right. A kind of vacuum always formed around him. His career was a series of incredible, frightening strokes of luck. When he ran for parliament, his main rival, the charismatic leader of the «Greens,» simply… went silent the day before the debates. Doctors diagnosed sudden aphasia. The man simply forgot words. Suddenly lost the ability to speak…

…

(SYSTEM FLASHBACK: YLE TV1 ARCHIVE)

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DATE: 12.03.20XX. LIVE BROADCAST. DEBATES.

…

Raimo remembered that evening. He stood at the podium, expecting imminent collapse.

His rating had dropped to 12%. His opponent — Matti Virtanen — had 48%. Matti was a brilliant orator. He opened his mouth to deliver the final speech on forest protection… and went silent. Raimo saw his eyes. They held not fear, but absolute, childish incomprehension. Matti opened his mouth like a fish thrown onto the ice. Only a wet, inarticulate wheeze escaped his throat.

At that moment, Raimo felt a cold touch at his temple. An invisible voice whispered:

«We have erased the Linguistic Module. Speak, Raimo. The silence is yours now.»

And Raimo spoke, and he had been «speaking» ever since. While Matti Virtanen was taken to a clinic where, until the end of his days, he drew black circles on white walls.

…

When Raimo aimed for the Minister of Health seat, the incumbent minister, a sturdy man of forty, entered a monastery on Valaam. No reason. Simply left the keys on the desk and drove away. Raimo always felt that someone — or something — was clearing the path for him.

Not killing. Not bribing.

But creating «insurmountable complications» of a mystical nature. As if an invisible Gardener were pruning branches so that one single tree would grow strictly upward.

To this moment. To this office. To this collapse…

He slid his finger across the screen, scrolling through pages.

Dry figures behind which stood empty kindergartens in Lahti, closed schools in Oulu, nursing homes overflowing with bodies that no one was there to bury. Because the funeral services sector was underfunded…

Depression level: +18% over the last year. The vaunted Finnish happiness was vanishing before his eyes…

Youth suicide rate: reached a historical maximum. Antidepressant consumption: ranked first in Europe.

Finland didn’t scream. It didn’t revolt, didn’t burn in revolutions.

It was simply fading away quietly, politely, with Scandinavian correctness.

It was lying down in a snowdrift and falling asleep. The famous Sisu — that mythical Finnish resilience, the will, the stubbornness to live despite everything — was evaporating. It had left along with the generation of grandfathers who stopped tanks in the snows of Karelia.

The new generation didn’t want to fight. Didn’t want to have children. It… It wanted… peace.

Headphones and virtual euphoria…

Raimo poured himself some water. The glass trembled in his hand, clinking against the carafe. The ring of crystal seemed deafening. He was a doctor by his first education. He knew what the terminal stage looked like.

Patient: Nation. Diagnosis: Atrophy of the will to live.

Treatment: None exists.

— «There must be a way out,» — his political ego whispered. — «You’re the leader. You promised your voters a Rebirth.»

— «There is no way out,» — his cynical medical self replied. — «Entropy cannot be canceled by an act of parliament.»

The phone buzzed on the desk. A secure line.

Raimo winced. He didn’t want to talk to anyone right now.

He wanted to pour a glass of Koskenkorva, turn off the light, and watch the wet snow bury Senate Square. Bury the monument to Alexander, bury the Cathedral, bury the history of this small, proud, unwanted people.

He picked up the receiver.

— «Valtonen.»

— «Mr. Prime Minister,» — the secretary’s voice trembled with tension. — «Confirmation from Brussels. The emergency summit on climate migration has been moved to tomorrow. Your presence is mandatory. Commissioner Blanc insists on a personal meeting.»

— «Blanc?» — Raimo frowned. The surname seemed familiar, but somewhat… slippery. It didn’t stick in his memory. — «Who is that? Ecology? Energy?»

— «Jean-Paul Blanc. Head of the Committee for Long-Term Development. He says… he says he has a solution to our ‘Northern question’.»

Raimo froze. The «Northern question». That’s what the depressive extinction of Scandinavia was called in the corridors of power.

— «What solution?» — Raimo asked dryly. — «Grants? One-time subsidies for migrants? I’m fed up with that.»

— «No, sir. He said…» — the secretary hesitated. — «He said it… strangely, sir. It was as if he wasn’t speaking. It sounded like… like a tape recording. Or speech synthesis. He asked to convey that he has the blueprints for the Sampo.»

Raimo felt a chill run down his spine.

Is this a joke? A mockery? Sampo.

The magical mill from the «Kalevala».

The source of endless happiness, gold, and flour. That which the epic’s heroes forged, stole, broke, and lost at sea. No Brussels bureaucrat should use that word.

It’s their word. Finnish. Sacred.

— «What did he say?» — Raimo asked again in an icy tone.

— «He asked to convey verbatim:»

«Ilmarinen forged iron, but we will forge Ether. Come, Raimo. The mill awaits.»

Silence hung in the receiver. Raimo looked at the red line on the graph. The line of death. And then he looked out the window, into the darkness where invisible clouds pressed down on the city.

In his soul, scorched by statistics, something ancient suddenly stirred.

Not hope. No. Curiosity. The terrifying, greedy curiosity of a drowning man thrown not a lifebuoy, but a double-edged knife.

— «Prepare the flight,» — he said. — «I’m coming.»

He hung up. Water flowed down the glass, looking like tears. Or melting ice.

Raimo Valtonen didn’t know yet that he had just signed the death warrant for five million people. He thought he was flying for salvation. After all, in stories, the Sampo always brings happiness.

Though, no one remembers at what cost.

…

(GEN 2500): ANALYSIS COMPLETE. BIFURCATION POINT DETECTED.

(GEN 2500): RAIMO VALTONEN’S ERROR: HE MISTOOK TECHNOLOGY FOR MAGIC.

(SYSTEM): LOADING PART II: (ENCRYPTED)

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