26. OPENING THE SHELL
My hand froze on the cold plastic handle of the balcony door. Twice I urged myself to press it. Twice my muscles turned to stone, stopping the movement.
The new, cold logic demanded action — reconnaissance, data gathering.
The old, animal instinct screamed of danger, demanding I crawl back into a safe hole.
I took a deep breath.
If we break the situation down into components — what is the probability of a lethal outcome? Let’s assume a toxic agent spreading with the fog has already penetrated the apartment through the ventilation. The premises lack hermetic sealing.
Conclusion: if I am still functioning, it means the poison concentration is compatible with life. Or my body has already adapted. In any case, the outside air won’t kill me instantly, because I am already breathing its derivatives.
«Wow, how quickly the defense mechanisms kicked in,» flashed through my mind. The thought, it seemed to me, was alien, possessing a frighteningly pure and correct sense. «I’m once again looking for a rational explanation for my existence.»
Memory tossed up a picture from the past. From the time when I was considered a simple, lonely layman.
A psychotherapist’s office, smelling of formalin and cheap coffee.
I am sitting on a chair and monotonously explaining to the doctor that I feel like a unit with zero, or even negative, efficiency. An empty shell, envied even by an electric kettle — at least it has a clear function: to boil water.
My psyche, crushed by a Major Depressive Episode, went through this «clinic of worthlessness.»
I didn’t walk out of there cured.
I was merely «coded» for temporary obedience, formatted like a corrupted disk.
It was exactly this «brokenness» that became my life preserver.
(DATA NOT CONFIRMED)
I remembered how the world broke outside.
I think, before I passed out, I heard screams from the neighboring apartment. Their minds, «conventionally normal,» whole, stuffed with domestic phobias and loans, couldn’t withstand the Settling.
What a strange word?..
Where do I know it from?..
The external influence squeezed their brains in a vise, turning people into mad, aggressive animals. Or simply burned them out, leaving empty bodies.
Or?..
Did something even more terrifying happen?..
And me?
My psyche, having gone through a personal «nullification,» turned out to be the perfect vessel. Pre-cleansed. I became a blank slate, a pre-formatted disk, ready to accept new code. While the others crumbled to dust from the overload, my brain reassembled itself on a new, logical platform.
Or is all of this just my conjecture?..
Well then…
It’s time to test the theory with practice.
I yanked the handle down and threw the door open. My lungs instinctively contracted, I held my breath and stepped onto the concrete slab of the balcony.
A second. Another.
I exhaled and carefully, in small portions, drew in the air.
The smell of sewage and decay hadn’t gone anywhere, but here, in the fresh air, it seemed less concentrated.
Or had I already gotten used to it? My sense of smell had accepted the inevitable. I walked over to the railing and slid the glass pane.
Well?..
Thunder didn’t strike. Lightning didn’t incinerate. My guts didn’t tie themselves into a knot.
I peered into the space surrounding me. From the fourth floor, absolutely nothing was visible. Even the roofs of the cars in the parking lot below drowned in the thick haze. The world hadn’t just gone quiet.
It died.
Sterilely, soundlessly.
A whitish, thick, damp mass of fog swallowed everything to the horizon. No neighboring houses, no ground, no sky. Only a milky-white, glowing «vacuum».
From somewhere above, out of this dense layer, oozed a dim, sickly light that had nothing to do with the sun.
The silence pressed on the ears.
Absolute, unnatural. No hum of tires, no cries of birds, no background noise of the city.
The sound was turned off along with the light.
A line of a system log surfaced in my consciousness:
(ENVIRONMENT ANALYSIS: UNSTABLE. BIOSPHERE: SUSPENDED. PRIORITY: DATA GATHERING)
The experiment codenamed «Look out onto the balcony and come what may» had concluded.
Result: undetermined.
No connection. No electricity. No people. Only one question remained: my car? It should be downstairs. Iron doesn’t go crazy.
My thought darted to the main thing.
My daughter. Imatra. The grudges, the quarrels, the year-long silence — all of it burned in the fog.
I need to go.
Maybe something terrible really did happen there?
Memory, that ruthless archivist, instantly slipped me a file marked with the tag «Shame».
Last year’s Christmas.
The smell of tangerines, which irritated me. I have a sort of allergy to that citrus scent.
The blinking of the garland, which infuriated me. And Marina’s voice — soft, pleading:
— «Dad, please. Just for today. Let’s do this without politics? Let’s just sit like normal people?»
She reached out to me with the salad, smiling, trying to glue back together what had crumbled long ago.
And I snapped.
I looked at her, but I didn’t see my daughter.
I saw Them.
Those pompous ones with atrophied brains, who sit in their offices, write idiotic laws, and turn the lives of ordinary citizens into a concentration camp with free Wi-Fi.
I saw in her this sheep-like, «swallowing-whatever-they’re-fed» submission, this desire to close her eyes and munch on Olivier salad while the world, as inexorably as the coming of a new day, rolls into an abyss.
— «Normal people?» — my voice broke into a shriek, I even scared myself with that sound. — «Is this what you call normal? Stuffing your face and smiling while you’re getting screwed from all sides? You’re just like them! The same blind, stupid biomass!»
Marina froze. The salad bowl trembled in her hands. Fear splashed in her eyes — not a child’s fear, but an animalistic one. And I couldn’t stop. I was on a roll.
My «domestic antagonism,» accumulated over the years, burst the dam.
I yelled at her, blaming her for everything: for gas prices, for the idiots in the government, for the fact that she was happy with her small, pathetic, cozy happiness, while I, the «great thinker,» suffered from the imperfection of the universe.
She tried to object to something, quietly, with trembling lips:
— «Dad, what for?..»
I jumped up.
Demon Alcohol seized control…
The chair flew back with a crash.
I swung my hand.
I genuinely wanted to hit her. To beat this «normality» out of her, this calmness that I hated, reeking of Olivier salad and domesticity…
My fist froze a centimeter from her face.
Demon Alcohol, smirking maliciously, returned control and stepped aside to enjoy himself, the way he knows how…
A silence hung in the room — just as dead as it is now outside. My daughter didn’t cry then. She just placed the salad bowl on the table. Carefully. And looked at me. With a gaze in which everything childish had died. Everything naive.
— «You’re sick, Dad,» — she said quietly. — «You’re just an angry, miserable old man.»
And she left.
I never saw or heard from her again.
I stood on the balcony, gripping the cold railing so hard my knuckles turned white. Back then, I almost hit her because she just wanted to live in the illusion of a «normal world.»
The irony of fate: now, when this world has truly died, when the illusions have crumbled to dust, I am ready to give my right arm just to see her serving me that damn delicious Olivier salad again.
The logic module in my head clicked, interrupting the self-flagellation session…
After thinking for a while, I decided not to jump to conclusions. The emotional term «Terrible» is temporarily reclassified to the status «Unknown».
This is a requirement of my current, updated Self.
> ⚠️ **ENTITY STATUS: PERFECT VESSEL. SYNCHRONIZATION WITH EXECUTIONER 80%.**
>
> 🧠 How ironically the human psyche is structured. This piece of meat spent his whole life proud of his depression, considering himself smarter than the «stupid biomass.» He destroyed his family, almost hit his own daughter, and locked himself in a concrete box to hate the world in comfort. Charming naivety.
>
> ⚙️ He thinks he survived the Fog thanks to his psychological «brokenness.» Partially, that’s true. The protocols of the +Angi cannot be downloaded into a happy brain filled with love and hope — there is too much software resistance there. The Higher Logic needed exactly such an empty hard drive, formatted by hatred.
>
> 💀 Judge Sergey Dmitriev in orbit delivered the verdict, and this bitter old man on Earth became the perfect Executioner to carry it out. Did you notice how he started classifying emotions and reading the System’s logs right inside his head? Less and less of the human remains in him. Keep reading. Let’s see where this new, cold logic will lead him.
