Ирина Пименова – No Names, No Signs. Technology I Virus I Life (страница 3)

«Where is the second one? There were two of them! Absolutely the same as one», but she never asked.

The next morning, a little windier, he came in to her room and told her to get dressed, get ready for the trip, and gave her a pill. The tablet was not very large, white, without a name on the shell.

«Swallow it if you want to be all right,» he said with hidden menace, looking at her intently.

She made an awkward movement, and the tablet fell on the blanket, but still did not roll away. She picked it up and held it in her hand. He was distracted for a moment, and she threw her over the head of the bed, pretending to swallow.

A bright ray of light entered the darkened room through the curtained window. The day promised to be sunny.

They got ready, went out into the yard and got into the car. Completely unaware of why and where she was going, she looked around as if in a fog. There was no one in the yard this early morning.

It turned out on the way that they would stop by some camp. There were many strangers. No one spoke to each other, they wandered in a large park, as if they had forgotten something and were looking for a loss. There were many trees, but everything was visible. It became clear that they all were being watched closely.

Suddenly Yara saw her mom, she walked towards her hurriedly.

– Where have you been? – Yara felt something bad is happening. She couldn’t speak openly, scream and run away.

They sat down on a bench. Mom had a rolled-up newspaper in her hands. Yara took it and began to write in the margins with a pen that had come from somewhere on the bench: «Mom! I was forcibly detained and taken away. Help!»

Mom read it. Her face didn’t change. She nodded slightly, stood up and walked away. Yara did not follow her, she just watched her mother, slowly, moving away. Her skirt was rustling and shimmering in the sun. Mom used to wear a light jean midi and summer white sandals with high heels, with a clasp pulling the ankles.

For some reason Yara felt a little better. Yara gave the news and maybe they will help her.

Soon, many of them were gathered together on the square in front of the main entrance. The square had three long streets, two of which were side and stretched along not high, one-story wooden, very long building with one corridor. It had many glass doors to the camp’s territory and out.

That building stretched along the camp like a boarder. The third street went in the park.

A terrible wind rose, nature itself became the personification of the fact that something bad was happening. The dark, almost black trees’ crowns were bending under the onslaught of the wind; they shook from side to side, like old burlap. It became cloudy and cold.

People were gathered at a low, one-story, wooden building with one long corridor, from which glass doors exited to the right and left – back to the camp and out. This building stretched along the perimeter and, as it protected the camp. People passed through these doors, leaving its territory. The glass in the windows rattled every time the doors were opened. With a strong gust of wind, the doors slammed mercilessly, and the glass in them rang desperately.

After a while, when everyone had gathered and the hostel was empty, the observers, making sure that everyone had come and no one had escaped, began to load everyone into several large buses. Leaden clouds and a strong wind accompanied this procession. The wind blew in her face, blowing and tossing her hair.

Yara kept thinking on what kind of pill it was and how it was supposed to work, and whether the people who were with her took it. Suddenly, a terrible thought occurred to her. It was not mom, but her double, the same as her father. She felt even colder, loneliness and uncertainty fell at once, and her feet became heavy. She barely got on the bus.

***

She had this dream often. It was painfully sticky. She felt cold wind, fear, and danger under her skin. It has already become a habit for her to go to the pool after it to remove this numbness.

It wasn’t a memory of how she happened to be at the space station. However, some feeling, albeit unreal, but a connection, prevented her from clearing her mind, and in order to shake herself up, she went swimming.

The swimming pool was a nice feature of the space station. For this, not a very modern station, a swimming pool was truly a gift. The artificial gravity contributed to the complete illusion of earthly habits. Alone, at nights, when the pool was at her full disposal, she «made» more than one path there.

She tried not to recall her arrival at the space station.

They were put on a flyer, and after a short time, they were already standing in the arrivals area, next to the huge, unremarkable, gray-metal docking airlock. What was surprising to her – the huge crowds of people, operators, porters, and pilots. Well, exactly, neither more nor less – an ordinary airport.

She did not remember her group only that it was a flock of peers, huddling fearfully to each other, not understanding anything and abandoned, apparently in a fuss. Only a few minutes later probably the only normal person in this entire buzzing hive, with an open face and specific information, approached them.

This is how she met her shift commander. She was always drawn to direct, honest people who have an inner need not to leave and not to keep others in the dark.

They were invited to a quiet office at a different radius of the station and explained how they would live here.

That’s how she stayed at the space station.

By that time, large-scale rumors were already circulating, acquiring more and more speculation about the capture of the planet by an unknown mind.

However, no one wanted to believe. After all, life went on as usual, ordinary. Only the rate of unexplained deaths was rising year by year. The reasons were attributed to personal tragedies, illnesses and financial failures. Rumormongers were seen as obsessed with crazy conspiracy theories.

Immediately upon arrival, they were offered the opportunity to fly to the Moon for good. There was a well-developed scientific colony. More importantly, it was isolated from the outside world. Yaroslava did not want such a future for herself. Once upon a time, when life was still normal, she flew there on vacation on an excursion. She no longer remembered what those scientists were doing, but the constant, dense darkness that accompanied her from the window of the hotel forever repulsed even an attempt to settle there in her.

Everything was alien, even the artificial sky of the lunar orangery did not resemble the real sky of the Earth – high, infinitely blue and windy.

The colony itself was interesting. From above, it looked like a huge octopus with long legs – tunnels that stretched in different directions bizarrely for many, many kilometers.

People have created large, closed, one-level rooms connected with each other by diametrical corridors and gateways between laboratories, orangery, residential compartments, places for recreation and entertainment.

Going out in the morning for a run or a walk with a dog or a beloved cat, through such tunnels one could go far into the lunar landscapes not entering the open, still hostile, space. The orangeries, with their solid and transparent dome, brightened up the lunar desert, interspersed with craters or mountain ranges of a monotonous black and gray color. The Moon has never been terraformed and people have never created nor an atmosphere neither a landscape reminiscent of Earth. There were such scientific projects at the beginning of the century, but those who captured the Earth’s satellite for mining were not distinguished by a romantic desire to turn the Moon into the Earth. Some even thought it was for the best. The Moon should remain the Moon, and not the likeness of the Earth.

Yaroslava remembered the bewitching feeling of the vast, starry distances, although illuminated by the Sun, but so cold and dark that she preferred the space station.

Chapter 5

Many years ago, circa in seventies of the XXI century, the founders of the project «Station» had the opportunity to use old one in orbit. It was a transit point for scientists, colonists and just travelers into deep space. Some of the bright minds began to realize that something inexplicable was happening on the planet, as if an invisible enemy was taking over… no, not the territory, but the consciousness of people, making them absolutely controllable puppets. Although, people continued to live as if nothing had happened – go to work, send their children to school, and go on vacations.

However, painstaking, analytical work was carried out in quiet offices of military research centers. They wanted to study global changes in the minds of the population. It soon became known that this misfortune struck more than one country. Some kind of force spread its «tentacles» across the planet, changing society slowly but surely. So slowly that people had time to get used to the new, albeit absurd reality that they could not seriously think about, well, at least three years earlier.