No one enrolls in this institute of their own volition. And yet, every year on September 1, students gather for the first day of classes. At the institute, the price for a failed class is the death of a loved one, the price of a failed final exam is a fate far worse than death, and fear is the lead teacher, stern and merciless. Students are asked to complete mental exercises that push the human brain far beyond its limits. As they perform these exercises, students cease to be human beings, transforming into Words of the Great Speech.
The Great Speech is the only true reality. All objects and actions submit to Its grammar. The Great Speech demands more and more new Words, and so every September, first years gather in the assembly hall and sing the old academic hymn, “Gaudeamus Igitur.”
This is how things worked until a new student, Sasha Samokhina, stepped over the threshold of Torpa Institute of Special Technologies. She is a special Word; she is Password. She can manufacture new realities and destroy old ones. Sasha wanted to create a new world according to her own design—a world without fear.
But something went wrong.
Part I
“If you press the red button, the hamster in the cage will die.”
“Got it,” the first year said, nodding. He was freckly, plump, and very diligent.
“Press the button.”
The boy looked at her in confusion. He blinked, his eyelashes very light and very long, and pressed the red button. The small brown hamster twitched, fell on its back, and stopped moving.
“Why did you press the button?” Sasha asked, holding it together.
“You told me to,” the first year said in surprise. “You’re the professor, I am doing what you told me to do.”
Sasha demonstratively looked at the clock.
“Session is over. For next time, exercises four, five, and six on page eight.”
“But Alexandra Igorevna . . . I can’t do these exercises. No one can. No one understands any of this. Not exercise one, not two, not—”
“I am your professor,” Sasha reminded him. “And as you noted, you will do what I tell you. I don’t want to hear ‘I can’t.’”
He wanted to argue but took one glance at Sasha and gave up immediately. Sad and disappointed, but not scared, he wrote down the assignment and left with a quick good-bye. Sasha didn’t think he’d learn anything for their next session. He’d look just as blank.
Sighing, Sasha opened the cage, pulled out the dead hamster, and placed it on her desk.
She leaned over, pressing her palms against the edge. She claimed the desk, then the tiny cooling body. The hamster began to tremble. Sasha completed the metamorphosis, separated the animal matter from herself, and walked away from the desk to look out the window. Outside, young, recently planted linden trees glowed in yellow.
Someone panted heavily behind her back. Sasha turned to see a second year perched on the desk. The girl looked miserable, her face as pale as watered-down milk.
“Your thoughts?” Sasha asked.
“I don’t like it,” the second year said, sniffling.
“I didn’t ask if you liked it. What are your thoughts?”
“Alexandra Igorevna, I don’t understand. What do you want me to do?” the girl said. She was on the verge of tears. “I don’t like being a hamster, and I don’t like dying.”
“Do you remember being given the same assignment last year?”
“Yes . . .”
“And do you remember pressing the button?”
“Because you told me to press it!”
“Session is over. Your homework has been sent to you electronically. See you on Thursday.”
Avoiding Sasha’s eyes, the second year said good-bye and left, but not without difficulties. She had trouble passing through the door and took half a minute to position the frame so she could squeeze through. Once the door clicked shut, Sasha leaned over the recently painted windowsill, opened the window, and lit a cigarette.
Sasha knew she was now that annoying person lighting up anywhere and making everyone breathe in secondhand smoke. Yet no one dared to reprimand her. She smoked during lectures, during department meetings, and anywhere else the mood struck her. If only they knew the danger wasn’t cancer. No, the danger was that whenever she was lost in thought, the cigarette smoke would fold itself into a nebula, a new galaxy system; it would glimmer dangerously, and Sasha would have to pull herself together to avoid destroying gravity on campus. And yet, without smoking, there was no way she could ever teach a single class.
ly when it was necessary. The hamster test was one of her inventions.
There were many things the school handled differently now, including the application process. Now prospective students received acceptance letters; some arrived via email, some landed in tin mailboxes. Once accepted, they all matriculated—as before, no one had the option of refusing. But not because of fear for someone’s life. Rather, acceptance letters automatically took away their will; there was no fear, no evil, and no choice. She remembered Farit talking about the ramifications of this setup, but Farit was not to be trusted—especially since Farit no longer existed.
Once again, out of habit, she approached the whiteboard and picked up a green marker. She drew a line: the horizon. She blinked, remembering something long gone, something that was unpleasant at the time, but—she knew now—was uniquely precious.
Here was the initial impulse: Password reverberates; the new world opens up. Galaxies form, the sun lights up on the periphery, the first cell divides on the third planet . . .
Sasha dropped the marker, leaving the line unfinished.
“As you know, Alexandra Igorevna, yet another incoming class is a disaster,” Adele said. “All first years are going to fail their winter finals. The second years are a bit stronger, but half of them are having trouble recovering from deconstruction. How will any of them pass their third-year final?”
Adele had a deep, velvety contralto; she spoke with authority and conviction. The more trouble the department was in, the more elegant were her choices of perfume and makeup. Sasha had no idea where Adele found her bespoke jackets, suits, designer bags, and shoes, but she also didn’t care enough to find out.
“They are incapable of making an effort,” Adele continued. “They are wet noodles, not real students. Zero motivation, no matter what song and dance we’re performing in front of them, no matter how hard we’re trying to engage them.”
“They are showing quite a bit of potential in Phys Ed,” Dima Dimych said. He was perched on the desk, one leg crossed over the other. “Incidentally, I’d like to bring up the pool question again.”
Sasha looked at him without saying a word, and Dima immediately backpedaled.
“I mean, I know it’s not the most convenient time, but we talked about it at the end of last semester . . .”
Still silent, Sasha lit another cigarette. Dima wrinkled his nose and stopped speaking; a devoted athlete, he despised smoking.
Adele, unfazed, spoke again.
“The issue isn’t just a matter of passing, but who is passing. The grammatical composition is unbalanced. There is a dramatic shortage of verbs. And most of the verbs we do have are in the conditional mood. Very few are in an indicative mood. And we do not have a single imperative one.”
“To put it bluntly, the Great Speech is degenerating, and the grammatical structure is declining,” Portnov said quietly. Unlike the others, he’d remained unchanged, and even his jeans, sweater, and glasses were the same as Sasha remembered from her own first year at Torpa. It made it all the more painful to see how much Portnov was changing from the inside. He held it together—he resisted the simplification of the Great Speech—but now and then he would get stuck like a second year during a routine exercise. Watching him, Sasha knew: every time he struggled, yet another block of meanings would break off, disintegrating into incoherent lowing, and eventually ceasing to exist. And so would Portnov himself.
“We will have to sift and eliminate,” Adele said, knocking on the desk as if calling to order. “Let us keep one group, even if it’s only ten people, but the ten capable of mastering the curriculum.”
“They won’t make it,” Sasha said softly. A smoke ring glimmered dangerously, folding into a flat spiral with a dark cloud in its center. Sasha flapped her hand, forcing the emerging projection to disperse.
The room fell silent. The basement had no windows, so no noise came from Sacco and Vanzetti Street—no birds singing, no passing cars. The only sound heard was the humming of an old air-conditioning unit.
“This world that I created has a built-in defect,” Sasha said. She winced at the inexact and false nature of human words, so inefficient in describing the processes of true Speech. “Yes, this world exists, and it’s not that
bad—some people enjoy it. It even has some ability to develop. But Speech cannot be fooled.” She looked at Portnov. “Oleg Borisovich is right: all of us can see what’s happening with the grammatical structure.”
“Shocking,” Dima said, batting his eyelashes.
“We will recruit a new class,” Sasha said, putting out her cigarette. “Dmitry Dmitrievich, you will have to give up your current champions, because the recruiting efforts will take place last summer, three months ago.”
“We’re just running in circles,” Portnov said, wiping his glasses with the hem of his sweater. “Our students are the product of their reality; you simply don’t have anyone to choose from. Another round of recruiting won’t solve anything.”
“It will if I execute a grammatical reform,” Sasha said.
Adele stared at Sasha like at a shiny shop window. Dima Dimych rocked back and nearly fell. Portnov narrowed his eyes.
“Are you planning to bring back prerevolutionary orthography?”
I am so lucky to have Portnov at my side, Sasha thought. Even as tired, wounded, and disintegrating from the inside as he is right now.
Dima swung his feet in their white sneakers, seemingly hypnotized by the bright yellow shoelaces.
“Dmitry Dmitrievich, please sit up properly,” Sasha said. “You’re attending a department meeting, not hanging out at a street corner.”
“The local athletic society has a nice pool,” he said, reluctantly moving to a chair. “We can get hours for the students, and we won’t even need to pay—it’s just paperwork.”
“And what sort of a reform are you proposing?” Portnov cut in, returning his glasses to the bridge of his nose.
“I am not proposing anything,” Sasha said. “This is my will.”
At half past midnight, she ran out of cigarettes. Portnov showed up at twenty to one with a new pack.
“You smoke too much,” he said disapprovingly, as he lit up his own cigarette with Sasha’s lighter.
“At least that’s something I excel at,” Sasha said.
window onto Sacco and Vanzetti, or Montmartre, or into space, but she didn’t bother. What she needed was nowhere to be found.
“This new reform of yours is quite an interesting way of getting things done,” Portnov said, straddling a chair. “You are an assassin of reality. Everything is happening the way you wanted.”
“No,” Sasha said. “The world, as you see it, is not real. And the way you imagine—it doesn’t even come close.”
He nodded appreciatively, smirking at the memory of the very first Specialty lecture for Group A and the first year named Alexandra Samokhina standing by the blackboard and staring into the darkness behind her blindfold. Today, she paid him back.
“The world exists the way you created it, Samokhina. Once a book reaches its audience, it’s too late to rewrite it.”
“Thank you for the cigarettes,” Sasha said by way of dismissal. “I’ll get you another pack, I promise.”
She went up to the entrance between the two stone lions. Their faces had been worn out by frequent touching, but the right one still looked sad, and the left one—teasing, full of mirth. The lions gazed up into the sky, as if waiting for Orion’s Belt to appear in the winter. Sasha held on to the tiny building as her place of strength, even though she could have lived—or rather, existed and functioned—anywhere.
She went up to her room. It reeked of cold cigarette smoke. A vintage table was littered with pencil drawings; dozens of them were pinned and glued to the walls, like in an investigation room at a police station. All of them were Sasha’s self-portraits, and all were different. Some looked exactly like photographs, others like children’s doodles, yet others resembled caricatures or butcher charts. A jumble of pictures had very little to do with a depiction of an actual human; some were perfectly symmetrical, some shapeless, some had nothing but a squiggle in the middle of the page or a single dot where the sharp point of a pencil punctured the paper.
But all were her.
The autumn morning was approaching. Sasha opened the door of the tiny balcony bound in yellow grapevines and looked up at the sky, at the same point in the distance as the stone lions. The constellations shifted; Orion ascended. Snow covered roofs and pavement: February had arrived. Sasha inhaled the frosty air: the world became brighter, and the grapevines turned a lush green. It was now late June.
The old clock struck seven. Sasha recalled another clock, a different house, different circumstances, and she locked up the memory until another day. She took a hot shower, warmed up a sandwich in the microwave, and made a pot of coffee. She smoked two cigarettes in a row and thought of buying a new pack for Portnov.
Dressed in a white linen suit and a pair of flat sandals, Sasha left her apartment and walked to work. Sparrows shrieked in the bushes. Two charter buses were parked by the entrance to the institute.
Sasha nodded to the guard and walked toward the courtyard located between the main building and the dorms. The courtyard was crowded: the new second years, equipped with colorful backpacks, duffels, and an occasional guitar, were leaving for their summer internships.
Some of them kept shifting from foot to foot, others stood still. They smiled or frowned. They kept touching their ears, cheeks, and noses making sure all their body parts were still intact. Now and then they touched each other, not to encourage or ask for attention but only to make sure that the world and the objects within it remained material.
All this made sense to Sasha, as she saw them from the inside: with noses on the backs of their heads, eyes on their bellies, broken attachments, cause-and-effect relationships, and twisted logic. This was just the regular destruction stage in the process, something every student had to go through during the first years of their education. If they worked hard, they would put themselves back together, and the Word would once again peek through the human shell.
She didn’t like thinking of the alternative.
Sasha walked along the line of students, watching their faces. Some looked right through her, some smiled hesitantly. But she didn’t care about their expressions. Rather, Sasha gritted her teeth, knowing most of them were frozen inside, lacking dynamics. And all of them looked like embryos inside their golden
eggs, perfectly still and perhaps already dead. Were these the students Adele called “a bit stronger”? Because, if so, then the first of September this year was going to be a disaster. If they didn’t truly apply themselves—to their full potential, not like last year!—they would remain crippled, lose their minds, fail their exams, and die.
Sasha barely resisted the urge to cancel the summer internships and send the students back to the auditoriums. Everything had to go on as usual, and today was June 26. They had plenty of time. Adele finished the roll call, waved her hand, and the students, one by one, trudged toward the street, to the charter buses. Clad in a leisure suit, a bag of volleyballs on his shoulder, Dima Dimych led the way, chatting with the girls. The girls giggled.
Adele looked at her questioningly.
“I am leaving,” Sasha said. “By September 1, we’ll have a new class and a new motivation.”
Adele nodded to show that, while she did not quite believe in Sasha’s mission, she still wished her luck.
Sasha had very few memories of Torpa in the summer. She’d always spent the best months of the year someplace else. The only thing she remembered of Torpa in the summer was a bag of dried linden leaves and flowers that made such good tea for the colder months.
The old linden trees had dried up not so long ago, and new, slender ones appeared in their place. This year most trees had lost their blooms early, and only a few bees still buzzed around.
Sasha walked to the oldest part of the town, which looked more like a village than a town. She slowed down in front of a house that boasted a huge fir tree behind the fence. A single silver thread hung off its top, too high to reach or simply forgotten when the decorations were put away after New Year’s Eve. Inside, a ball bounced off the fence and children shouted: grandkids were visiting their grandparents. The youngest girl was four, and the eldest, twins, just turned eighteen.
rying to look as different from each other as possible. One was half naked, dressed only in worn-out swimming trunks, the other donned a pair of ironed jeans and a polo shirt. One was explaining to his little cousin that she was not allowed to step over the line as she threw the ball, while the other sat in the gazebo with a tablet balanced on his lap, his dour expression demonstrating how sick and tired he was of his younger relatives, including his brother.
The boys looked exactly like Yaroslav Grigoriev: two perfect projections. A clear case of paternity with no need for a test. Their mother, father, grandparents, aunt and uncle, cousins—everyone was alive, and this noisy family was perhaps the best thing Sasha had managed to create in the new world, where Password had reverberated.
Both boys were smart and talented, and both were slightly immature. Recent high school graduates, one was already accepted to the Polytechnic Institute, and the other had chosen biology. Both longed for separate summer vacations, with their own friends, instead of spending time in Torpa. Here, everything was sweet and familiar, but they were so sick of it now that they were practically adults.
They had something else in common, though, and that always made Sasha pause: inside of them both, she saw a glimmer of something more. A scent of hot resin. A sound that tasted of a drop of alcohol on one’s tongue. All signs that both were potential Words, the instruments of the Great Speech.
They could have been left alone, allowed to remain human, to live their lives, and never learn the truth about the institute. Sasha had considered it exactly a year ago, standing by the same fence and looking at the boys, and she told herself it was too early, they had another year.
But now it was almost too late.
The Great Speech did not tolerate simplification. Should the Torpa Institute of Special Technologies fail to produce a new generation of strong, well-prepared graduates, the world would go mute and cease to exist—it was that stark. And Sasha, the creator of this sweet, kind, dying world, would be forever suspended in emptiness and loneliness. It would be a punishment fit for an assassin of reality.
A punishment she still wasn’t sure she deserved . . . or craved.
She walked away just as the cheerful voice of Anton Pavlovich, the twins’ grandfather, called from the porch:
“Lunch! Borsh, meatballs! And cherries! Go wash your hands!”
Unnerved by the sound of Yaroslav’s father’s voice, Sasha walked a couple of blocks, sat down on a bench, white with poplar fluff, and lit a cigarette. In one uninterrupted move, she drew a self-portrait: the spiral arms of a new galaxy and a shadow of an aircraft passing over a nucleus. A winged silhouette that had nothing to do with aerodynamics or physical matter in general. Thinking about it, she didn’t notice someone approaching until they sat down by her side.
“Hello,” she said without turning her head.
“Did you summon me?” he asked softly.
Sasha glanced at him; the summer sun glinted in his mirrored dark lenses. He was the same as before. Maybe a bit older.
“I did . . .” Sasha said, hesitating. “Are you mad at me?”
“No,” he said, throwing his head back, poplar branches and floating fluff reflected in his glasses. “You won fair and square. And now you don’t know what to do with your victory.”
“I am a functional Password,” Sasha said dryly. “I’ll figure it out. Perhaps not right away, but I will.”
“You’ll figure it out,” he said, taking off his glasses. When he looked at her, his eyes were perfectly human, tired, and so familiar that Sasha flinched.
“Where is he?” the man sitting next to her asked softly.
“He’s happily married, he has two sons . . .”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Slowly, Sasha handed him her drawing. He put his glasses back on and moved the paper away, like someone farsighted. After a minute, he looked back at Sasha.
“This is the original projection,” Sasha said, clearing her throat. “A starting point where I had reverberated. The world is built on the concept of planes never crashing. But—”
“But to live is to be vulnerable,” her interlocutor recited, quoting something that was said a long time ago.
ar from the load-bearing structure, but I did not replace it. I thought that love as an idea would hold up the entire structure, but—it turned out in the world without fear, love is not enough.”
Her companion looked back at the drawing: a shadow of an aircraft passing over a galactic nucleus.
“Are you trying to reach him?”
“There is a part of me left in him,” Sasha said. “A tiny shard. I have to get it back.”
A very long minute had passed.
“I will help you,” the man sitting next to her said finally. “You can count on me.”
“Thank you,” she said, finally exhaling. She coughed, and the cigarette smoke merged with the billowy poplar fluff and tried to fold into yet another galaxy, but Sasha waved her hand, chasing it away. She put out her cigarette.
“Thank you, Kostya.”
While Sasha was making coffee, he washed the ashtrays and took out the trash without being asked. He never commented on the state of her room, but when Sasha viewed it through his eyes, she realized how long it had been since the last time she’d cleaned it. However, just yesterday it was October, and now it was June: time moving backward ruined things, piled on trash, and left a felt-like layer of dust on tables and floorboards. He didn’t judge, though: there had been times in Kostya’s own life when old trash accumulated in piles both inside and outside.
And then she looked around through his eyes again, this time paying close attention. She realized Kostya remembered this room from a January day in the past, when there was a decorated tree, and a fire was lit in the small fireplace, when Sasha and Kostya were happy. It was just one night, a few hours before the exam in which failure would result in a fate worse than death.
“I’ve always thought the world was structured in a very dumb way,” she said, forcing herself to abandon these unnecessary thoughts. “Until I took it upon myself to build one. I expected an ethical molecular hydrogen production, a benign formation of galaxies, lovely volcanoes, cheerful amoebas, a sincere Mesozoic era, an affectionate Middle Ages, and so forth and so on. I thought the Great Speech would sound different, yet just as perfect. I thought . . .” She paused, knitting her eyebrows. “You see, Kostya—all these billions of years are but one syllable. One squeak of an infant. A hole made by a pencil point. The real time, the history and development—they are all here in Torpa. And the real meaning is here as well.”
Kostya said nothing, waiting for her to continue.
“I captivated them with the joy of creativity,” Sasha said. “I awakened their curiosity. Transformed their learning process into a game. They loved each other, loved the whole world, but they kept breaking, Kostya. Only a few of them made it to the third year, and all of them failed the final exam.”
“Are you saying you know where you’ve made an error?” Kostya asked delicately.
“I didn’t make an error, though—I did exactly what I wanted to. But Password is just as much of a part of the Great Speech as a noun, conjunction, or preposition. I am the source of the universe, but I’m also just a cog in the universal mechanism.”
Sasha lit another cigarette; when she exhaled, a faint spiral of a new universe floated around the room.
“I can manifest matter in any form,” Sasha said. “But I cannot manifest Speech. I can only build it from scratch.
“Sit down, the coffee is getting cold.”
“There is a bit of a draft,” Kostya said, nervously watching the smoke spiral.
“Don’t worry about it, it’s just a picture,” Sasha said, waving away the ghost of a galaxy. “Sit down.”
Kostya sat down but left his cup untouched. Sasha glanced at the grapevine outside the window. Kostya waited.
“The Great Speech needs new Words,” Sasha said; her voice suddenly seemed hollow, dull, and no longer young. “But human beings, even gifted ones, cannot become Words for the sake of kindness, beauty, love, thirst for knowledge, or a box of chocolate. I loved my students; I offered them all sorts of carrots. And now I want to manifest a stick.”
“And abandon your main goal, the world without Farit and everything he symbolized?”
“Farit is gone forever. But I must preserve the Great Speech and build a new balance for it. That means finding balance within myself.”
She fell silent. Kostya reached across the table and placed his hands over hers.
“Do you want to save the Speech or bring back your pilot?”
“It’s the same thing,” Sasha said, gently freeing her hands.
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