PART II. THE FORGE
Location: Brussels. European Parliament building complex (Espace Léopold). Time: November 15. 10:00.
Brussels met Raimo with light. But not living, sunlight. This light from thousands of fluorescent lamps, deathly reflected in glass, chrome, and polished marble, evoked the feeling of hospital peace, of a sterile operating room.
The European Parliament building resembled a giant, agitated hive. Only the bees here didn’t carry honey. They carried folders, badges, and obligatory, glued-on smiles.
Raimo walked down the corridor, surrounded by a retinue of assistants, but felt like an astronaut in a vacuum. Voices hummed around him in twenty languages. They discussed carbon quotas, the rights of digital avatars, the standards for the curvature of cucumbers…
It all seemed so petty. So… human.
«My country is dying of melancholy,» Raimo thought, mechanically nodding to someone from the German delegation. «And you are here arguing about the width of bicycle paths.»
He was not led to the main assembly hall. A young clerk with empty, fish-like eyes led him to the elevators in Sector «D».
— «Monsieur Blanc is expecting you in the ‘Quiet Zone’, Mr. Prime Minister.»
— «The ‘Quiet Zone’?» — Raimo asked again, frowning. — «I thought we were going to the Committee.»
— «Monsieur Blanc prefers strict confidentiality. The Committee is… too noisy for him. The vibrations of voices interfere with the tuning.»
The clerk muttered the last phrase so quietly that Raimo wasn’t sure if he had misheard it or not.
The elevator took them to the upper level. The doors opened, and the hum of the «hive» instantly died down, as if someone had pulled the plug from the socket. Here, thick carpeting absorbed footsteps. The walls, matte-white, caused slight disorientation. The air felt filtered to the point of sterility — it bore no trace of the smells of coffee, sweat, or cheap perfume that scented the lower floors. It smelled of ozone here. Like after a severe thunderstorm. Or like in an overheated server room.
At the end of the endless corridor, there was only one door. Without a nameplate.
The clerk placed his palm against the panel, silently opened the door, and stepped aside. Raimo entered.
The room turned out to be spacious, defiantly minimalist. A huge desk made of black glass, looking like solidified oil. Or obsidian. Two chairs. And a panoramic window covering the entire wall, beyond which gray Brussels looked like a painted backdrop. A man stood by the window.
— «Raimo Valtonen,» — the man said without turning around. His voice, soft, enveloping, sounded very correct, without any accent. Raimo flinched.
It was as if he didn’t hear the sound with his ears. The voice arose directly inside his skull, bypassing the eardrums. Like a perfect, sterile stream of information. Raimo caught himself thinking that he didn’t even realize what language he was addressed in — English, French, or Finnish? He simply… instantly grasped the meaning.
The man turned around. Jean-Paul Blanc. He looked forty years old. Or sixty. Or twenty-five. He had a face that was impossible to remember. Average. «Beige.»
If Raimo were asked to describe him to the police five minutes later, he would have said:
«Well… a man. In a suit. Of inconspicuous appearance.»
Only Jean-Paul Blanc’s eyes broke out of this grayness. They seemed too dark. And they did not blink.
Raimo looked at him for five seconds, ten…
Blanc did not close his eyelids once. His eyeballs, distinctly moist like wet glass, occasionally twitched, but his eyelids remained motionless, as if his palpebral muscles had temporarily atrophied from disuse.
— «Monsieur Blanc?» — Raimo took a step forward, extending his hand.
Blanc looked at the extended palm with slight interest, the way an anthropologist looks at a native’s ritual gesture. Blanc’s lips twitched into a smile, but his eyes remained devoid of expression.
A second’s hesitation. Then, as if reluctantly, he shook the hand.
At that moment, Raimo instinctively wanted to snatch his hand away in disgust and wipe his palm on his trousers.
The sensation was… wrong. Repulsive.
Blanc’s palm, dry and smooth, resembled rubber, too smooth. Artificial. Raimo did not feel any papillary lines. Blanc’s skin felt cool. Not cold like a corpse’s, but at an even room temperature, as if Blanc’s body simply assumed the temperature of its surroundings. It felt like expensive medical silicone — flawless, without a single pore. But the worst thing was what could be felt beneath this skin.
When Monsieur Blanc’s fingers closed, Raimo felt no bones. He felt a thick, dense, viscous substance shift beneath the «skin.» As if inside this man there was no skeleton, but high-pressure gel held in shape by the suit.
Blanc noticed his confusion.
His pupils constricted into two dots, and then sharply dilated, like a camera lens diaphragm focusing for a macro shot. From the commissioner’s throat came a quiet, wet click — the sound of a relay switching inside raw meat.
— «Suomi?» — he asked, tasting the word as a sommelier tastes an unfamiliar poison. His lips moved with a tiny delay relative to the sound in Raimo’s head. — «Your language is… charmingly archaic. It has so many words for snow and so few for future eternity. Please, take a seat, Raimo,» — Blanc pointed to a chair. — «You are tired. The journey from Helsinki is exhausting. Gravity, pressure drops, oxygen starvation… Biology is so tiresome, isn’t it? A constant struggle for homeostasis.»
Raimo sat down, feeling the hair on the back of his neck stand up. Something was fundamentally wrong. There was a kind of… unusual discreteness in this man’s movements. A smoothness behind which seemingly hid a soulless mechanism diligently imitating life.
— «You didn’t invite me here to discuss my fatigue,» — Raimo said firmly, trying to regain control. — «You mentioned the Sampo. That’s a strange metaphor for a European Commissioner.»
Blanc sat opposite him. He did not lean back in the chair. He sat perfectly straight, not touching the backrest, as if his spine had turned into a steel rod.
— «A metaphor?» — Blanc tilted his head slightly. A smile touched only the corners of his lips. — «Oh, no. Humans love to call technology a metaphor or magic when their cognitive apparatus cannot understand its operating principle.» — He placed his hands on the desk. Long, musical fingers without nails — or with perfectly implanted skin-colored plates. — «I have studied your report, Raimo. ‘Critical Threshold of No Return’. Your nation is dying. You want to save it. Predictable. But you are trying to treat the symptoms. You throw money at it, build hospitals, urge people to have children in a world that is inherently doomed. It is useless. It is like treating cancer with a Band-Aid.»
— «And what do you propose?» — Raimo gripped the armrests of his chair so tightly that his knuckles turned white. — «Immigration? Population replacement?»
— «I propose evolution,» — the voice rang quietly in Raimo’s head.
Blanc slowly took an object from his inner jacket pocket. Not a flash drive. And not a folder with papers.
A crystal.
A black, matte polyhedron the size of a walnut. It absorbed the light of the lamps, creating a small zone of darkness around itself, a vortex in space.
— «Your epic, the ‘Kalevala’,» — Blanc continued, slowly turning the crystal from facet to facet on the obsidian glass of the desk, — «describes the Sampo as a mill with three millstones. One produces flour, another salt, the third money.» — Blanc stopped the crystal, holding it with his finger. — «That is a primitive interpretation by shepherds. Savages saw a machine, but described it in understandable words. ‘Flour’ is Matter. ‘Salt’ is Energy. ‘Money’ is Information.» — He looked up at Raimo, who was frozen like a statue. The blackness of his eyes became absolute. — «The Sampo is a Resonator. A quantum reality converter. A device for restructuring matter. The ancients knew how to escape cold, hunger, and death. They did not die, Raimo. They transitioned. Into the state of Tuonela.»
Raimo remained silent in shock. His rational mind, the mind of a doctor and politician, screamed:
«Psycho! Get up and leave! Immediately! Call security! Run away from here!»
But his despair, his Finnish melancholy whispered:
«Listen. Carefully. This is your, YOUR ONLY chance. You are the savior of your nation.»
— «Tuonela is the realm of the dead,» — Raimo forced out hoarsely. His throat was parched.
— «Tuonela is a space without entropy,» — Monsieur Blanc softly corrected him. — «A world of pure spirit. A world where Sisu is not wasted on the useless struggle against gravity, aging, and disease.»
Blanc pushed the black crystal toward Raimo. Raimo peered closer. The surface of the crystal did not look smooth. It seemed to squirm. Microscopic facets constantly changed geometry, folding into fractal patterns that made Raimo’s eyes water.
«This is not matter,» he thought. «It is like a living, digital, mathematical code that has taken material form.»
— «We have found the blueprints. Not here. Far away. My… consortium… wants to conduct a pilot launch. We need a location. Isolated. With solid rock capable of withstanding the resonance. And a people tired of fighting and ready for the transition.» — Commissioner Blanc paused, letting the words settle. — «We will give you the blueprints. We will provide the funding. You will build a prototype of the Sampo. And you will save your people, Prime Minister Raimo. You will transition them into an aggregate state — the state of Eternity. Volunteers, of course.»
Raimo stared at the black, squirming crystal as if hypnotized. He felt the vibration emanating from it. A quiet, barely audible low-frequency hum that made his teeth ache and his diaphragm vibrate.
— «Who are you, Blanc?» — he asked almost in a whisper.
The commissioner smiled again with that same «wrong,» seemingly artificial smile, as if drawn on the image of a dead man. For a second, it seemed to Raimo that the skin on Blanc’s face stretched too tight, ready to burst and expose the gray slime beneath it.
— «I am an investor,» — Blanc replied. — «And I offer you a deal that Ilmarinen could not refuse. Try it. Touch your future.»
Raimo, as if in a dream, reached out his hand. His fingers touched the living crystal.
Cold.
Absolute, cosmic cold burned through the skin, instantly freezing the nerve endings.
A flash.
An image exploded in his head:
A white forest. Endless, perfect pines reaching into the sky. Silence, ringing like a taut string. And a feeling of absolute, infinite happiness. But in this happiness, there was a terrifying detail. Raimo Valtonen was not present there. The personal «I» did not exist there. There was only a huge, merged, blissful «WE.» In this vision, Raimo did not feel his physical, flabby body, his old joints, his fatigue. He dissolved in a white, benevolent light. And this destruction of personality, this merging with a boundless ocean of happy bliss, seemed to him the ultimate pleasure. A pleasure beyond the pale. Without physical pain and wretched human suffering.
The vision lasted a fraction of a second.
Raimo snatched his hand back, breathing heavily, gasping for the ozonized air. His heart was pounding like crazy.
— «Does it… does it work?» — he exhaled.
— «That is only a prototype of the key,» — Blanc nodded, and his face returned to a state of an indifferent mask. — «Imagine what will happen when you build the Mill at full power.»
Raimo looked up at the creature in a human suit. Only one thought beat in his head. He couldn’t chase this thought away. He couldn’t forget, he realized that he would now always remember this…
He wanted to return to that forest. At any cost.
Even at the cost of his own personality…
— «Imatra,» — he said in a firm voice. — «We have a mothballed government bunker in the city of Imatra. Solid rock. The granite shield of the Baltic. Perfect isolation.»
Blanc blinked slowly. For the first time during the entire conversation. His eyelids closed and opened with a faint, wet «squelch» sound, as if two strips of raw rubber were unsticking.
— «Imatra,» — he repeated. — «An excellent place to begin the End.»
…
(GEN 2500): ANALYSIS COMPLETE. BIFURCATION POINT DETECTED.
(GEN 2500): RAIMO VALTONEN’S ERROR: HE MISTOOK TECHNOLOGY FOR MAGIC.
(SYSTEM): LOADING PART III: (ENCRYPTED)
…
…
> ⚠️ ENTITY STATUS: ARCHIVE «SAMPO» DECRYPTED. ANATOMY OF INVASION.
>
> 🇫🇮 Watch and learn, protein-based readers. This is how worlds die. Not in the fire of nuclear explosions or in battles with alien tripods. Worlds die in quiet, luxurious offices, when tired men in expensive suits look at birth rate decline graphs and decide to surrender.
>
> ⚙️ The +Angi are brilliant. Why fight humanity when you can plunge it into apathy, break its will to live, and then offer a «cure»? The mysterious Commissioner Blanc from Brussels — who is he? Another avatar of the System? An agent of +Azvel? He threw the Prime Minister a lure from an ancient myth, and Raimo Valtonen swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.
>
> 💀 The Sampo mill that cancels entropy — that is the very Generator, Fractal-0, which will turn Imatra into the epicenter of the Fog, and people into raw material for harvesting Angonium. The politician thinks he is flying for salvation, but in reality, he is flying to sell his country as fertilizer for the System. A charming, fatal mistake. Keep reading.
