Someday, my dear, you will be approached by a stranger. This stranger will bear no ill will toward you. He will assign you a task, ridiculous and rather unpleasant, and you will complete this task every single day. You will do that with no exceptions or excuses. Because if you miss even one day, something terrible will happen to your loved ones.
Your adviser really does not wish you ill. He will bring you to the Institute of Special Technologies, a place where only the dead get expelled. And you will become a model student, one who does not miss classes, who studies as diligently as she can—and sometimes even more diligently than that.
Eventually, the day of the final exam will arrive. You will enter a spacious hall to cease being human and become a Word of the Great Speech. You will long for this—this is your destiny.
You wanted desperately to become a Word. You studied hard, the top of your class. And yet . . .
Alexandra woke up a split second after her dark blue Škoda crossed the center line and drifted into the oncoming traffic. A local bus rushed straight at her, its lights blinding Alexandra. The bus howled, and the driver must have howled as well, but the mechanical roar drowned his stream of obscenities. Seeing nothing, obeying her instincts, Alexandra twisted the steering wheel to the right, then all the way to the left. Its brakes screaming, the car slid to the curb, then rolled down to the river, stopping dead a couple of feet from the concrete bridge support.
Alexandra somehow found the presence of mind to turn off the engine. She sat still for a while, listening to the creaks and groans of the car. All kinds of sirens yelled above in different voices; never before had Alexandra Koneva née Samokhina fallen asleep at the wheel.
She glanced at her watch: it was five in the morning. That meant she’d been with her husband for almost forty-eight hours, and these forty-eight hours were not spent in the throes of passion. They began like two responsible adults well aware of the value of a fair agreement. However, the longer they’d conversed, the quicker the diplomatic veneer had disappeared, melting like a layer of gold leaf—and fake gold leaf at that. First, they lost their poise, then their ostentatious benevolence. At some point they went to different rooms to cool off and compose themselves. At the start of the second round, however, they almost immediately slipped back into a low-class, shrill, revolting squabble.
Their marriage had been doomed for quite some time. Alexandra had hoped for a civilized divorce, but even that was no longer possible. She’d given fifteen years of her life to a worthless, empty, vicious, and vindictive man, and now it was ending, abrupt and dirty.
Not bothering to wait for sunrise, she’d started the car and drove toward the city. The road calmed her down, pacified her, and gave her a strange sense of hope. After all, she wasn’t even thirty-five yet, and her life was far from over. Finally relaxed after the terrible couple of days, she’d fallen asleep instantly, gripping the steering wheel and staring at the road markings as if at a hypnotist’s pendulum.
Until a local bus had rushed straight at her.
“Sasha, honey, what happened? Why did you come in a cab?”
Mom stood in the doorway, a robe over her nightgown, the habitual anxious expression on her face. She worried about every little thing, and so Alexandra never told her the truth.
“I stalled on the highway and had to call emergency services. They towed my car to the mechanic. Don’t worry, it’s some minor issue. Go back to bed.”
“How’s Ivan?” Mom asked, a bit calmer now.
“Ivan says hello. He’s fine. He’ll take care of the cottage’s new boiler.”
Alexandra went into her room. By a previous agreement, her thirteen-year-old daughter, Anya, was sleeping over at a friend’s house. Anya loved sleepovers; she felt cramped in their old two-room apartment, under the watchful eye of her grumpy grandmother and permanently aloof mother.
Alexandra didn’t blame her.
She sat down at her desk, hung her head, and tried to compose her thoughts. Death had flown by, granting her a short panic attack that meant she hadn’t had to think about much of anything, followed by forty minutes of euphoria, and now a wave of depression. She glanced at the digital photo frame on her desk
esk, the kind that was fashionable many years ago. The frame shuffled through a handful of sentimental old photos: a young Sasha with her mom at the seaside. Sasha’s high school graduation. Sasha’s first assembly at the university. Sasha’s wedding to Ivan Konev. Sasha holding a swaddled newborn on the hospital steps. Mom with baby Anya in her arms. And again: a young Sasha with her mom at the seaside.
The slideshow stopped. The last photo froze in the frame. Sasha and her mom, tanned and joyful, posed at the edge of the surf. The sun lit up the sea, and the red metal buoy glowed in the distance, warning the swimmers not to go beyond it . . .
Alexandra sensed someone’s presence behind her back. She realized she couldn’t move.
“Mom, is that you?”
There was no answer, but she knew it wasn’t her mother, and it wasn’t Anya. It certainly wasn’t Ivan, changing his mind and coming back from the dacha. It was something different, something simple and unimaginable, like a bad dream that makes one want to hide under the blanket.
“Who is it?” she asked.
“It’s me,” a soft voice said behind her.
Alexandra looked back. A few steps away, in the middle of her room, stood a girl of about twenty, dressed in jeans and a light jacket, backpack straps on her shoulders. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and her enormous eyes were full of terror, as if she were facing a serial killer armed with a circular saw.
Alexandra jumped up. For a few long seconds she couldn’t figure out who the visitor reminded her of, and then she shuddered in comprehension of the voice’s words and the uncanny valley effect of the intruder’s face. The girl looked exactly like Alexandra Samokhina in her fourth year of college, and yet she didn’t resemble her at all, and it was utterly incomprehensible. A sudden arrival of a young relative would be shocking and unexpected, but it wasn’t insane—such things did happen every now and then, one could certainly cope with something like that.
A sudden arrival of a doppelgänger from one’s own past, however—especially a strange, distorted doppelgänger—was a different matter.
Some nightmares make do without monsters and wildfires. It is when they are at their most mundane that they drive humans mad.
“Who are you!” Alexandra screamed.
The girl blinked and took a step forward, her face growing paler by the second. Alexandra shrank away from her, bumping into the corner of her desk. The girl stretched her dry lips in an apologetic smile and touched Alexandra’s shoulder . . .
The world spun around.
The girl’s touch became a point of entrance into a different reality, like a breach in a spaceship that lets the cosmos in. As if two
cans of fresh paint had been spilled, and one spot flowed into another, swallowing it whole. The girl stepped into Alexandra’s consciousness into her memory, into her existence.
Protecting her mind, Alexandra shouted:
“I want it to be a dream!”
She woke up a split second after her dark blue Škoda crossed the center line and drifted into the oncoming traffic. A local bus rushed straight at her, its lights blinding Alexandra.
Traffic stopped on the suburban highway. Police lights flashed and sirens howled. The bus driver had suffered minor injuries, but the dark blue Škoda had been squashed into a pancake. “Looks like she fell asleep at the wheel,” the EMT said distinctly. From a distance, Sasha was able to read his lips.
Alexandra Samokhina, the woman who died on the highway today, never matriculated at the Institute of Special Technologies. She lived a life of her own, never having heard of the Great Speech, never recognizing herself as a verb in the imperative mood. Sasha stood by the side of the road, wondering if she should envy this woman or pity her.
Yesterday, January 13, a student of the Institute of Special Technologies set off to take the most important exam of her life and pass it in order to become a Word and finally reverberate. Instead of passing the exam, though, she now stood by the side of the road, shaking in the piercing wind, convinced for some reason that today was September 1, the official first day of school.
But of which year?
Catching a few suspicious glances directed at her, Sasha checked her reflection in a random car’s side mirror: she looked perfectly ordinary, no scales or feathers, only a shocked expression on her face. But everyone at the scene looked shaken up. When accidents happen, like this one on the highway, it’s hard not to consider one’s own mortality. So, nothing to elicit stares or sideways glares. Still, she felt them.
The ambulance carried the bus driver away. The body covered by a piece of tarp lay by the side of the road. Grim-looking cops stood nearby, smoking. A tow truck picked up the remains of Alexandra’s car. Sasha wanted to get closer but knew she could never do that: she was terrified of this woman, dead or alive.
Or, rather, not of the woman herself but of the idea of her—the concept of that body, the same body she also seemed to own. Which one of them was the other’s projection? Were they both projections of the same being? They weren’t exact duplicates, that was for sure.
The dead Alexandra had never met Farit Kozhennikov.
Sasha looked around, studying the faces of strangers, searching for a man in opaque black glasses. Onlookers climbed out of the cars stuck in the traffic jam. Someone was filming the scene with his phone; one of the bus passengers was wiping the blood off his scratched-up face. No one wore sunglasses on this cloudy early morning. Perhaps we are the same, she thought. Perhaps Farit Kozhennikov never existed in this world.
Sasha recalled the raw terror on the face of Alexandra Samokhina when she saw her doppelgänger. She felt a twinge of it herself. Because what she had just thought was a fantasy, not the nightmare she was used to. No, Farit Kozhennikov could not be canceled. He was in every shard of any text, in any draft, any sketch, any grammatical construction. “It’s impossible to live in the world where you exist,” Sasha said to him once. “It is impossible to live in a world where I do not exist,” he replied. “Although it’s hard to resign oneself to my existence, I realize that.”
Back on January 13, something went wrong during the exam. That meant Sasha was being punished, and what had just happened to Alexandra Samokhina was a part of that punishment, and not even the most terrifying part. There would be something else, and that something else was getting closer by the second; in a minute or two Sasha would wake up in front of her apartment entrance, in front of her childhood bedroom door, so familiar to the minute d
etail, and she’d know that something had—imperceptibly and irretrievably, but wholly tangibly—changed. She would walk into the room and see Alexandra, see herself as she would be without the institute. She’d claim this woman and see her entire life, and the other Alexandra would desperately wish to wake up, and she’d drive into the oncoming traffic, and the howling and the screeching would commence, and everything would repeat . . .
Sasha pressed the tips of her fingers to her temples, trying to push the anxiety back in. Something slipped through the muddy stream of her panicky thoughts: a sound idea, perhaps even a solution, some help, an exit.
At the Institute of Special Technologies, Sasha was an exemplary student. She knew not only how to claim people and objects, but also how to unlink time loops. She searched her mind and realized she hadn’t forgotten that. Which meant that all she had to do to break out of the nightmarish circle was to restructure the probabilities for Alexandra to survive.
Piece of cake, she thought wryly.
The instant rush of hope gave Sasha heart palpitations and moist palms. She walked away from the scene of the accident and placed her backpack on the wet grass. Ignoring the inevitability of stains on her pants, she kneeled down and rummaged inside. Notebooks. Philosophy notes, an English textbook. A desiccated bread roll in a plastic baggie—how old was this bread roll, where did it even come from? A wallet in an inside pocket, empty aside from a few coins and cafeteria tokens. A scratch pad with just a few lines. A pencil case.
It was enough. To manage the flow of time, Sasha only needed pencils and paper, along with all the impossible-for-regular-humans skills she’d been taught at the institute.
Another service vehicle squeezed by the stopped cars and idle onlookers; it came for the body. Shaking, Sasha stared at the sheet of paper in front of her, trying to concentrate.
She used to know how to do it—just a second ago, she was certain she could do it. But now she doesn’t. There was no way out of this nightmare, then, and there was no way to change the course of events. Sasha was locked in the Untime. Everything would repeat over and over again: the terror of meeting a double. The reflection of the woman’s fear. The noise and howling of the accident. And again. And again.
“I want it to be a dream,” Sasha whispered.
Nothing happened.
The traffic jam refused to disperse, even though the damaged bus was already pushed to the side of the road and the police car was gone. Another half an hour, and the memory of the accident would remain only in the Internet news feed, and even that would be gone by noon—except for Sasha noon would never arrive, so this would always be part of reality.
“Sasha.”
She twitched as if under a blow and immediately felt numb, realizing that her own personal version of hell included a meeting with Farit Kozhennikov.
“Let’s go,” Farit said, his voice calm and unassuming.
Where was she supposed to go? What did he want from her now?
“They told me I was going to ace the exam,” Sasha whispered, refusing to look at Farit. “They told me I was the best student they had, and that I would definitely pass. They—”
She burst into tears, then forced herself to get up. She didn’t want to kneel in front of him.
Winter, a long time ago. Third years of Group A sat at their desks. A cold draft blew from the window, and the radiators were so hot the air above them shimmered.
“Today is December thirteenth,” their professor Nikolay Valerievich Sterkh said. “That means that exactly one month remains until the placement examination. This month will require all your strength. Unfortunately, there is no makeup date for this exam: you have exactly one chance.”
Farit led Sasha to his black SUV and opened the passenger door. Through a thick mental fog, she recalled his previous car, a milky white Nissan. Whatever he was driving, Sasha always hated getting into her advisor’s car.
“Today I will tell you in detail what it is like to take the placement examination,” Sterkh told them. “It will help you to keep it together and be prepared for the challenge at the defining moment. On January thirteenth, at noon sharp, both groups, A and B, will enter the large assembly hall and take their seats. You will be introduced to the examination committee. You will not be nervous, will not feel anxious.”
Sasha huddled on the passenger seat, trying not to think of how this ride would turn out for her. The recurring nightmare of her dying doppelgänger no longer seemed all that terrible; Sasha suspected she might desperately miss all that looped insanity.
The black SUV slid into the break-down lane to avoid the traffic jam.
“You will have three assignments,” Sterkh said back in the faraway past. “The first two are standard; the third one is individual, selected for each one of you according to your future specialization. In the process of completing this assignment you will cease being a human and commence as Word; for the first time you will reverberate, my dears, and this should be very dear to you.”
They were approaching an exit leading to a toll road. The black SUV slipped through the toll gates and sped up along the highway, smooth as butter. Yesterday was January 13; today felt like the very beginning of autumn. Even her thoughts
were starting to loop.
What happened during the exam? Sasha gnawed on her lips, trying to remember the details: the assembly hall, her classmates, her professors, old wooden stairs, rows of desks. She recalled getting the assignment, sitting down at one of the desks . . .
The rest was darkness.
“No, you are not going to remember what happened then,” Farit Kozhennikov finally broke the silence. “Don’t even bother. You can just accept the fact that the final exam did happen.”
“My classmates.” Sasha swallowed, but the lump in her throat remained. “Did they pass?”
“Some passed, some didn’t.” Farit got into the far-left lane. “The usual.”
“What about Kostya?”
His expression did not alter much—only the corners of his lips went up a bit. Kostya passed, otherwise, Farit wouldn’t be smirking like that, Sasha thought. Or did he? Why couldn’t Farit just answer her question and just tell her “He passed,” or “He got an F.”
“Remind me, what did they tell you would happen if you failed the exam?” he asked conversationally, and all thoughts of Kostya flew out of her head.
Existence that is worse than death: that’s what she’d been promised, that’s what they said would happen to everyone who failed the exam. That’s how the faculty motivated the students.
“Yet your meeting with Alexandra and her death are not what they threatened you with,” Farit said. “It’s not the standard form of reckoning for failure; in fact, it’s not punishment at all.”
Sprawled in the driver’s seat, he barely touched the steering wheel as the car flew down the highway. Trees and clouds, the sky and the road, all merged in motion, reflected in his dark glasses. Sasha tried to comprehend his words. Did that mean the reckoning was still coming?
“No,” Farit said. “You need not worry—I bought you out, Sasha.”
The speed made the road appear out of focus; trees and buildings flew backward as if carried away by a hurricane.
Despite—or maybe because of—his words, her worry was immense.
“Let me explain this to you in simple terms,” Farit continued after a pause. “To be honest, it was much more complex, but you’ll never understand otherwise. I say I bought you out, but what I mean is I changed your fate. If you think a little harder, you will figure out what I did and how I did it.”
Sasha opened her mouth to say she had no mechanism to think with at the moment, just like a dead toad on the side of the road had no mechanism to fly. But that wasn’t true. Because a second later she recalled the day before the final exam. Her old notes, papers, drafts smoldered in the fireplace. Farit rang the doorbell, and for the first time in her life his appearance did not scare her. She was calm, cool, and collected; she was preparing for the exam, she believed in herself, and she wanted to win.
Back then, Farit had said, “As your advisor, I am officially offering to release you from the placement exam. To release you from your tenure at the institute. Officially. Once again you will be sixteen years old. Everything that happened later would turn out to be a dream and shall be forgotten.”
Any of her classmates would have given their right hand for such a chance.
“Think about it. ‘It was a dream.’ Say it—and you will wake up,” Farit had said to her. “Back on a cot in the rented room, next to your mother, in a town by the sea. And nothing will repeat again and again. There will be no me. There will be no institute. You will be accepted at the School of Philology—if you don’t fail the entrance exams.” Without waiting he continued, “Well, have you decided?”
It was the most frightening temptation of her life. Her advisor took off his glasses, something he’d only done on very few special occasions, but she had trouble seeing his face through her tears.
Sobbing, she’d said, “I have decided. I want to finish the institute. Become a part of Speech. To reverberate. That’s why tomorrow I am going to take the placement exam.”
His eyes looked as if they were lit up from the inside. Sasha recoiled.
“Is that your final word?”
She shut her eyes.
“Yes.”
Now the black SUV flew down the highway, leaving the scenery behind and in the past. The speed limit was quite high, but Farit was still going above it.
“Do you remember now?” Farit asked benevolently, as if in appreciation of Sasha’s excellent memory.
“But . . .” A weird sensation of splitting in half and getting stuck between that winter day and this late summer one made her feel disoriented. “Back then . . . I refused your offer.”
“And she agreed,” he said slowly. “And very enthusiastically.”
A fork, Sasha thought. He caught me in a fork. I chose the final exam . . . but the other me, the one who took his offer, woke up on a cot in a rented room in a town by the sea, and she was sixteen again. There was no Farit in her life. No gold coins. No Institute of Special Technologies. That girl had a nightmare, but promptly forgot all about it. She enrolled in the university of her choice. Married Ivan Konev. And then . . . and then she fell asleep at the wheel and drove into the oncoming lane.
“You made a backup copy,” Sasha whispered. “Another projection of me.”
“Awkwardly phrased but essentially accurate,” he said w
ith a faint smirk.
“And you killed her because I failed the exam?”
“She was killed by Newton’s Second Law,” he said ruefully. “The acceleration of an object as produced by a net force is directly proportional to the magnitude of the net force, in the same direction as the net force, and inversely proportional to the mass of the object.”
“That’s not what I meant!”
“You should always say what you mean.”
This? Coming from him? Through gritted teeth she said, “But it was me who failed the exam! Yet she was the one who crashed into the bus!”
“Exactly. Because that woman existed only to crash into the bus,” Kozhennikov said.
Sasha felt a layer of frost form on her back under her thin sweater.
“Her entire life was tied to the moment of her death, that lynchpin of the great design,” Kozhennikov continued ruthlessly. “Her life was worthless, it was dull and empty, but her death . . .”
Sasha felt offended, as if someone close to her was being humiliated.
“It was a perfectly normal life!” Sasha said. “She fought to save her family . . . She didn’t hurt or offend anyone. Even driving into the oncoming lane, she didn’t kill anyone! Why do you speak of her like that?”
“You’re right, I am biased toward her,” he said after a pause, surprising Sasha to no end. “You see, she chickened out. She retreated. And then she got what she deserved. Overall, you have to agree she didn’t fare too badly. It was very quick, and she didn’t even have time to get scared.”
“What about—me?” Sasha’s voice broke mid-sentence.
He seemed genuinely confused. “What about you?”
“What do I deserve?” she said thickly. “What will happen to me?”
“You will be fine,” he said lightly, but with a hint of subtext. “As long as you demonstrate enough discipline.”
He’d already said that to her a few times before, during the moments of unbearable horror and grievous lamentation, always in answer to her question: Why me? What have I done to deserve this? So very cold now, Sasha made herself even smaller, trying to disappear in the depths of the massive seat.
Keeping his eyes on the road, Kozhennikov turned on the heat.
“You will have to return to the institute and correct your mistakes. I’ll tell you right now that it’ll be more painful than starting from scratch. Fourth year is going to be quite difficult.”
He held on to the steering wheel with the tips of two fingers. Sasha had a fleeting thought, obscene yet tempting: What if she jerked the wheel all the way to the side; would Farit manage to stop her?
Would
it even kill him?
“So childish, seriously,” Farit murmured with reproach. “Like the first year again, temper tantrums, fantasies . . . come on.”
He switched on the windshield wipers to get rid of dead gnats.
“I am nothing but a bug smashed on glass,” Sasha said without thinking. “The acceleration of an object as produced by a net force is directly proportional to the magnitude of the net force—”
“Stop.” He turned his head for a second. “You know perfectly well that I never ask for the impossible. It’s hard, yes. But always doable. This will be no different in that regard. I rescued you from a much darker fate. And believe me, it wasn’t easy.”
Sasha squeezed the backpack in her lap so hard a few pencils in the inner pocket cracked.
“But why?”
“I find you fascinating.”
He didn’t seem to be joking. “Once again, you defied your teacher’s expectations. I am curious to see what else you are capable of. And what you will accomplish. Perhaps nothing whatsoever, and then it will have been a waste playing marbles with time, space, and distorted reality.”
“Marbles.” Sasha heard her own voice, heavy, dull, and old. “Marbles, you call us. What about Valentin?”
“Valentin who?” Farit asked with accentuated surprise.
“My mother’s husband.” Sasha knew the truth from his voice, but didn’t want to believe it. “The father of her baby, the little boy who was born during my second year . . .”
“Valentin, his spontaneous relationship with your mother, and their baby were only necessary to ensure that you could go to Torpa without any obstacles,” Kozhennikov said. “Alexandra never enrolled in the institute, hence her mother never met Valentin, their son does not exist, and never has.”
“What do you mean, ...
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