Анатолий Шигапов – EXPIRATION DATE (страница 12)

Dear Senator, many deputies have reported technical difficulties in confirming their credentials. Some delegations have been delayed at airports due to weather conditions. This is force majeure, we must take it into account. I propose postponing the vote to the next quarter.

Next quarter?! We will be dead by the next quarter! - Collins pounded his fist on the podium, and the echo rolled through the hall, but no one flinched. The deputies simply averted their eyes, shuffled papers, pretended to be busy.

The vote was postponed. The bill was defeated de facto, without even reaching a count. Collins gathered his folders, placed them in an old leather briefcase, and walked toward the exit. Each step cost him great effort - his knees buckled, his back ached. He felt not just defeated - he felt like the last person who still remembered what victory was.

In the empty marble corridor, hung with faded state flags, he was met by a young man in an impeccable dark blue suit with a gold pin on his lapel - faceless, polite, professional, one of those who appeared from nowhere and disappeared into nowhere.

Senator Collins? - he said in a melodic, emotionless voice. - Allow me to introduce myself, I am a consultant for the private firm "Atlantic Partners." We have been following your career and your initiatives. We would like to offer you a long-term contract. Compensation - two million dollars annually, bonuses for participation in closed hearings, full benefits package, office in Manhattan. You would no longer have to speak in this empty building. You could truly influence processes.

Collins looked at him as if at a ghost. He opened his mouth to answer sharply, with an insult, with a spit - but stopped. He saw his hands: wrinkled, covered in age spots, with trembling fingers. He saw his reflection in the display case glass - a tired, broken old man. He could no longer fight. There was no strength left in him, no anger, only emptiness.

I will think about it, - he forced out, barely moving his lips.

The young man smiled - mechanically, with his lips only, not his eyes:

Of course, Senator. We will await your response. We need you very much - as a symbol, as a voice, as a bridge between eras.

He turned and walked away, disappearing around the corner as silently as he had appeared.

Collins remained alone. He looked along the empty corridor, where once there had been the sound of crowds, reporters, lobbyists, citizens with petitions. Now there was only an echo, and wind blowing through cracks in the windows, and dust slowly settling on the floor tiles. He stood there for several minutes, then slowly walked toward the exit, no longer looking back at the Capitol, which had ceased to be his home.

He would never return to this hall again.

SCENE 3. ECONOMIC STRANGULATION

September 2070. New York. Manhattan.

The city once called "the pulse of the planet" now resembled a giant concrete mausoleum. Its celebrated skyscrapers, which only a year ago had shone with mirrored facades, had turned into dark obelisks whose outlines were barely visible against the leaden sky. The shutdown had begun exactly at midnight, without warning, without declaration of a state of emergency - simply a click, and the world plunged into silence. First the garish neon signs of Times Square went out, then the streetlights along Broadway, then millions of windows in residential towers, one by one, as if someone were blowing out candles. The last to disappear was the light at the top of the Empire State Building, and since then the city had lain in pitch darkness, broken only by the dull crimson glow of emergency beacons on hospital roofs - and those were already running out.

Charles Davis sat in his tiny room on the sixth floor of a dilapidated apartment building in the Bronx. He was seventy-two, but he still worked as a courier - though now he delivered not envelopes and packages, but five-liter canisters of technical water dropped by rare cargo drones running on solar batteries. The delivery drones, once swarming over the city, had long been silent - their batteries were dead, and there were no charging stations. Now Charles carried water on his bent shoulders, descending and ascending dark, trash-filled staircases, each time risking a fall and breaking something - at his age, bones no longer healed properly.

He sat on a sagging chair by the only window facing the courtyard. Beyond the glass - absolute, dense blackness, only occasionally punctuated by the yellow tongues of candles lit in apartments across the way. Their light was dim, unstable, and diminished every evening - people burned them sparingly, by the minute, but paraffin lasted only three or four nights, and no one had reserves of candles. At the bottom of the courtyard, where children once played basketball, a makeshift camp had sprung up - several polyethylene tents, wood-burning heaters whose smoke hung low and smelled sharply of soot. But even there, fewer and fewer people appeared - many simply stopped coming out.

It was now the third day without electricity. Without heat, without sewage, without communication, without news, without hope. Manhattan and the surrounding areas had become a giant prison without walls - bridges blocked by automatic barriers, tunnels flooded, ferries not running. People were locked in their apartments like in cells, trying to stay warm with several blankets and hot tea brewed on gas burners - but the gas cylinders were also running out. Panic was already seeping through locked doors: somewhere cries were heard, children crying, dull thuds against walls - people were breaking furniture to light fires right in their rooms, risking burning alive.

On the streets, at human height, "Locust" drones silently swarmed - small, fist-sized, with pulsing red lights scanning every movement. They patrolled blocks along preset routes, their cameras peeking into windows, their speakers broadcasting recorded voice warnings: "Curfew. Stay indoors. Exit is forbidden. Violators will be neutralized." And they indeed neutralized. Charles had seen it with his own eyes: last night, a man about forty came out of the entrance across the way, empty-handed, perhaps just wanting to stretch his legs. A drone swooped down, the red light blinked three times - a warning. The man did not stop, perhaps he did not hear, perhaps he was drunk. Then the drone silently detached a small charge from its body and dropped it at the man's feet. The explosion was quiet - a pop, like a firecracker - but enough to shatter his shinbone. The man fell and screamed, the scream echoing through the empty streets, but no one came out to him, no one called an ambulance, no one even looked out the window. He lay on the asphalt for over an hour until he stopped moving. In the morning, cleaning machines obeying the same drones removed his body.

Charles thought of the elderly locked in their tiny cells. Of children begging for food. Of the sick who could not get medicine because pharmacies were sealed and doctors did not make house calls. Hospitals ran on backup generators, but diesel fuel ran out with each hour. Incubators for newborns had already been turned off in most perinatal centers - infants died within hours without warmth and oxygen. Elderly people froze to death right in their beds, covered in all the clothes they could find - neighbors found them only by smell when passing by their doors. Charles remembered Jacob, his friend who had left for New Eden three years ago, dreaming of work and stability. He had not heard from him since - no message, no call. Charles sometimes caught himself thinking that Jacob might be dead - or simply "shut down," like useless accounts in old databases. He did not know which was worse.

Charles stood up, picked up two empty five-liter bottles of dark plastic from the floor. He walked into the corridor - dark, smelling of damp plaster and mold. The light bulbs had long stopped working, so he groped his way, holding the railing, step by step, counting flights: sixth floor, fifth, fourth. In the basement, where there used to be a laundry, an old water pipe still survived, rusty but still yielding a thin trickle of icy water - it came from the city reservoir, which had not yet been shut off because the pumping station ran on mechanical drive. Charles placed the bottles under it, waiting for them to fill with murky, cold, rust-smelling liquid. It could be drunk if boiled, but there was almost no firewood, so they drank it raw, risking infection.

In the basement he ran into a neighbor - Mr. Goldberg, an eighty-year-old man who lived on the first floor and had not yet lost the ability to speak in full sentences.

Charles, - said Goldberg, wrapped in several woolen blankets, his voice dropping to a whisper. - Charles, I heard on the loudspeakers from the city administration… They broadcast on a frequency almost no one picks up. The shutdown will last at least another week. Maybe two. And I've run out of candles; I only light them for ten minutes a day to see if I'm still alive. And I have no warm clothes, just one shirt, a jacket…