Unreversible

Unreversible
Emil Akhundov

The book is set in St. Petersburg in the 2030s. Technology has become indispensable in people’s lives, so much so that the entire world is plunged into industrial darkness, leading to the destruction of the world and society. This is the diary of a man who worked for the company that first released robots and got rich in it. Years later, he realizes that very soon there will be no trace of the world. Victor tries to somehow change the world by defying security measures. Will he succeed?

Unreversible

Emil Akhundov

© Emil Akhundov, 2021

ISBN 978-5-0053-1489-5

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

Disclaimer

All events and characters are fictional, any coincidence of names and events with real ones are coincidental and have no relation to real life.

Age restriction 16+

Instagram of the author: @emilakhundov

0. Intro

Greetings, my dear reader! My name is Victor Drozdov. On this chilly spring day, I finally finished my novella. It is more like an artistically edited diary or even just a rambling description of the events I experienced. I have gathered all the materials together solely because I have free time, and I intend to publish this diary for a good purpose: I sincerely hope that my ambiguous story will help you to avoid the mistakes that I, and with me, the whole world, have made.

1

May 29, 2039

I am sitting under a young apple tree in Obukhovo, which for some reason has already decided to bloom, and I breathe in the sweet smell of its flowers. I enjoy the aroma, because all around me there is clean air, which we haven’t had for maybe fifteen years, and the green lawn on which I am sitting was something mythical and unattainable, and a year ago I could not have imagined it. The behavior of the kids around me was amazing: the kids weren’t running around squealing with delight, no, they were walking barefoot on the grass, and the expressions on their faces were as if they were waiting for the green luxury under their feet to disappear into a cloud, and they would have to try to catch that cloud with their hands. It was a fairy tale, and I was sitting right in it.

It’s very funny how ordinary things that we’re used to can one day become real happiness or even a miracle that absolutely everyone will marvel at. After all, if you think a little bit, everything that we have, have been and will be, has some share of this very miracle, but we just do not see this miracle in our hands, and treat it as if it is just an ordinary thing, a thing that is owed to us by right. And as a marketer with more than fifty years of experience, I can safely say that the real value and usefulness of a certain product can only be known one way – by losing it. And I must say that in the same way we almost lost the whole world. For me, as for any old man, the common lawn is not just a delight for the nostalgic soul, it is a living example that everything can be fixed, even the most terrible and profound mistakes. And now, on this very day, I can say that we’ve managed to get it right. Although no, not “we,” but one person with whom I had the good fortune to work side by side long ago.

And the whole paradox of my story is that the man who, incidentally, planted this apple tree with his own hands first took everything from the world: the air, nature, work, and almost life itself. We were too carried away by technical progress, and he was the one who successfully refined this idea and promoted it to the masses, but no one thought of the consequences.

I have known this man for more than twenty years, and even at my advanced age I cannot fully understand him or give even the slightest objective assessment of his actions. I can only hope that I can fully convey to you the true story, which you will not find in textbooks or documentaries. A story where the main hero and the main villain are one and the same person who, in fact, never aspired to these roles.

This phenomenon of the human race is called Boris Voropaev. The story of him is worth beginning with the fact that this guy never gave a damn about his position in society or the opinion of others, he just did what he thought was right. He always worked for his personal comfort and free-wheeling pleasure of the projects he implemented. It is worth saying that he celebrated the completion of any, even global, projects in a very peculiar way – he would recline in his chair, throw his legs over the computer system unit that was on the floor, and lay there for a few minutes, then immediately start a new project. Before I met him, I never would have thought that there was a man who did not know how to express joy at all. But as for Boris, he always tried to show his superiority over others at every opportunity, and I must say, on every occasion he could afford it.

Somehow magically he was able to do absolutely everything he wanted to do, from writing magazine articles to all kinds of business analytics. And if he started drawing something like a logo, his work was always recognized as one of the best in some international contest. Don’t ask me how he did it – I can’t explain. At first I thought that it was just my luck and I was looking forward to his mistake, but after a few years I gave up hope, because his work was perfect, in fact he was so efficient that he pulled the whole company together, which became a real monster of the world market. It would have been a talent if Boris himself had acknowledged the existence of talent-he always said it was just a trained skill, that’s all. But the amazing thing is that he did not work for the money.

Even before I met him, he had already managed to make a fortune! His attitude toward money was also striking. For me money is a direct means of existence, but for him it is just an opportunity. Let me try to explain. Let’s take a sports car… He didn’t need it, but he must have understood that he could buy it at any time if he wanted to. And on top of that he had an excellent education, a brilliant lively mind, and the broadest thinking I’ve seen in more than seventy years of my life. He had plenty of ideas and energy to bring them to life. And his most important characteristic was his incredibly explosive nature. Though not without difficulty, he knew how to manage it. Sometimes it seemed that he was about to explode and something terrible would happen, but Boris always stopped in time, as if he himself was afraid of the consequences of what might happen when he lost his temper. I always thought that Boris was a kind of walking paradox that contained all the possible opposites in the world, but I guess people are telling the truth: “Great men are not of this world, indeed.

However, I must admit: all the good that exists in our world is the merit of people of the same kind as Boris Voropayev. Only such vitality and such genius mental abilities could have given us, mere philistines, all the joys of technological progress that we enjoy. All this is presented to us as something ordinary, although in its essence it is a miracle, a miracle that he or people like him did, not you and me. We simply benefit from other people’s achievements, and only because those people have shared them with us. In other words, your coffee machine in the office is a gift to you from someone who doesn’t even know you exist, it’s not something you rightfully deserve. The sooner you grasp this wisdom, the sooner you can create something like this.

However, it would be wrong not to mention the duality of this world, which means that everything has a downside, and usually it is directly proportional to merit. Everything bad that has ever happened to the world is the fault of those same people. It’s not the fact that they planned it or didn’t know there were risks, it just happened. We can’t change the past, we can only write it down in a history book, hoping it will stick in people’s minds. But the great misfortune of it all is that these textbooks are written by people who cannot always correctly assess all the circumstances. They unwittingly distort the facts with their thoughts and comments, and this distorts history as a science, turning it into a certain set of dates and facts that are simply repeated from age to age, without showing the whole picture and the original essence.

This has happened a thousand times, and nothing has changed. People are still the same selfish people who think that everything is within their power, and even knowing the bitter experience of the past, they repeat old mistakes, with only one difference – each time the consequences are more tragic and large-scale.

I don’t know whether I was lucky enough to experience the apogee of humanity’s tragic experience or whether I was just lucky enough to have the most serious one ahead, but I hope that the true story will make you think about the consequences of the actions of most people in general and yours in particular.

2

It seems to me that Hollywood screenwriters, in my carefree youth, simply provoked our future with their countless attempts to show a possible version of the apocalypse, although sometimes they were close to it. And yet the future was far worse than they could have imagined: black, dirty, without sunshine or hope that things would ever get better.

The sun had long since been obscured by the thick black smog that emanated from the countless automated factories that only produced industrial robots for a variety of purposes. These factories were everywhere, even school and hospital buildings became manufacturing facilities, where 24 hours a day, nonstop, some robots made others. Most people didn’t even know that there was a sun, that it continued to shine as it did a few hundred years ago. The smog was so thick that it showered people with dust that resembled cooled ash, like snow, which slowly killed every living thing on the planet.

The birds were the first to suffer. This “black snow,” as it was popularly dubbed, clogged the lungs of birds during flight, and they suffocated right in the air. Scientists were never able to say whether the birds died from suffocation or from falling from great heights and crashing to the ground. I might add that a couple of months ago I saw a whole flock of dead pigeons, and the sight clearly showed me my future, which I was definitely not happy about. I admittedly panicked, but there was nothing I could do.

Immediately after the birds, the amphibians began to die when this dust began to clog their skin pores. This species adapts very quickly to the changing environment, but even it could not adapt to such aggressive conditions. And soon all the animals that lived and fed outside began to die. They simply had nothing to eat. There were more and more homeless animals – keeping them was getting harder every day. Back then I could still see green leaves on the trees, they were as rare as emeralds on a mountain trail, but soon those were gone too, and the world was finally plunged into darkness.

The seas and oceans, too, were changing their color to black, and any body of water that had once been inhabited by life now emitted the sickening smell of dead fish. We quickly realized that if we did nothing, we would simply wipe ourselves off the face of the earth. By this point, we had not yet had time to master space, so we had to somehow fix the situation on our planet. So the Green City Rocha Corporation appeared in this world, and it was they who designed the world’s first eco-city that was not subject to industrial catharsis, but could also withstand it. A perfectly integrated city in a certain place and with a complete infrastructure capable of autonomously maintaining the entire life-support system was designed, as if nothing bad had ever happened.

In the beginning we were promised that such cities would appear all over the world and that our species, humanity, would be saved by these projects, but it soon turned out that this salvation would be very selective – based on the availability of money and power. Such a city was initially an expensive project with high operating costs. You bet, because it was an artificial ecosystem that dispersed smog and provided sun, nature, and clean, oxygen-rich air – it simply could not have been cheap! In its own way, it was a kind of life raft for the wealthiest people. A total of 78 cities of this type were built, and together they accommodated only about six million people. It became obvious to everyone that most of our species was left behind the fence and could only wonder how well they lived in such cities.

I was lucky: when they built such a city in St. Petersburg, I was able to buy a house there for myself and my daughters. A few decades earlier I had come to work for AGV Solutions INC, which produced various kinds of industrial vehicles, though that was not the name of the company at the time; I had no idea what it would all lead to! It was in that company that I met Boris, who not only looked up the new AMR product from the Western military, but also figured out how to use it for civilian purposes. This was the starting point for the hopeless future, only we did not know about it at the time – we were too busy counting the profits.

I’ve already talked about the endlessly manufactured robots everywhere. Like anything new, these robots were received with a lot of skepticism at first, but very soon they were able to prove their usefulness and quickly became a necessary part of life. We launched this product in the late fall of 2019 in test mode, but already in the spring we had about 40 different robots that performed various household functions – we started with robotic snow blowers, then robotic sweepers, and so on. The point was that we launched them very timely, just before the snowy winter, when the city seemed to be drowning in snow, our robots helped utilities, and then it was off: government contracts, hundreds of private appeals and thousands of corporate appeals – we hit the jackpot. At the time, everyone was already mentally prepared for this kind of technology, so it was not something out of the ordinary, but rather the opposite – these robots literally became part of life. Everyone had an automatic coffee machine or a robot vacuum cleaner at home, and once our hardware proved its reliability, it immediately became the most desirable purchase for everyone. Boris was right again.

AMR robots were faster, more accurate, and cheaper than any human – no wonder there were queues for them in the automation era, when such a robot cost as much as a mid-level manager’s annual salary!

One thing we didn’t take into account was that with every release of a new robot, dozens of people were losing their jobs, and we were releasing them by the thousands, endlessly celebrating our success. Starting with the simplest functionality, we constantly evolved, and soon we had robots for every profession, including doctors. Completely unknowingly, we destroyed entire social classes on which the world and society rested. People were losing their jobs, their incomes, and just the meaning of their lives – no one needed them at all. This is where the biggest problem of humanity came to light. Because at all times we use other people’s labor and do not think about our dependence on them, so of course we underestimate what other people contribute to our lives. It began a long time ago, and every year this trend gained momentum, and at some point we simply lost the boundaries of decency and morality and drowned completely in the depths of our own selfishness.

I met Boris when he was already a dollar millionaire and did not need a paycheck, but after our acquaintance and further events, he simply became golden. I have already told you about Boris’s completely strange attitude toward money; nevertheless, he always repeated that work should be paid regardless of the circumstances, and he conducted his business on the basis of profit sharing among all whose labor resulted in those profits. I, too, as a rank-and-file employee in his department, was entitled to enormous payments, which I set aside for a rainy day, except that I didn’t think the phrase would ever be taken terribly literally. The days would indeed become rainy days.

By the way, we had no money left by then, only “coins,” which were a kind of digital currency. It wasn’t tied to anything of value, it was just some points that could be issued in any quantity as needed. It was more convenient for the corporations that came to power around the world after the budgets of all countries had become so scarce that states lacked the funds to even declare default, and social policy had gone into oblivion altogether. All those corporations that were the first to enter the robotics race could no longer traditionally compete with each other and still support the entire population, they had only one option – to consolidate resources and costs.

This is how the “Council” came into being, an organization that has been given power over the world, and I’m willing to bet that the people at the “global” table did not intend for this to happen. You can ask any businessman about how government works, and the answer will go something like this: “It’s as much a business enterprise as anyone else, only with huge social obligations.” And frankly, that’s a pretty good definition; stick to it, and everything in this state will be fine.

That’s how it was in the beginning: we had urban farms built where fruits and vegetables were produced and sold at throwaway prices, just like other necessary products. People who didn’t make it to the eden began to receive living allowances and were even able to eat a full meal of freeze-dried food from a tube. Slowly, our life began to resemble that of a developing country of the century before last, but even this was a great cause for joy. There were still many problems – expensive medicine, lack of sunshine – but we were getting proof that someone smart and powerful was taking care of us, and that was the main thing.

But the world had changed, and the most important reason for the people’s unrest was the fact that we could be given any amount of coins, but we received very little of them. The corporations were ruled by finance, and the heads of these companies knew this distribution of wealth and weren’t going to give it up, there was simply no other alternative that everyone could accept.

No one doubted that the list of gold companies had completely sprung up in the new generation of cities, once they had been built. The price of real estate in these cities was exorbitant – the average person had to not eat, not drink, and completely set aside all his income for about four hundred years to buy the cheapest apartment, unless it went up in price during that time. I fortunately had the means to move to a new city, and I saw what happened next with my own eyes. Some people, through talent and experience, can anticipate future events and use them to their advantage. I was not such a person, but I was saved by both chance and a lack of wastefulness.

It turned out that the head of Green City Rocha was talented enough to exploit the current state of affairs for his own self-serving ideals. As soon as the robot began to smoke the earth and the air, Vlad Taleco understood where this would lead, and impatiently awaited the change of power and the fall of the current world order. He knew very well that merchants, unlike politicians, had no such fear of power, and as soon as they were all in the cities under his control, they became his hostages. Some resisted him and were brutally murdered, and some simply agreed to give him power, but somehow, Vlad Taleko in one day subjugated the whole world and called himself Emperor Clement the First. It was from that moment and stopped all attempts to somehow make a life for all those who could not afford to live in the cities, which were named “Eden”. Their lives were reduced to one simple choice: to die here in the dirt and soot or to live under the pure sun, but to give up all the best human qualities.

3

Vlad Toleko was able to intelligently plan everything and become the sole ruler of the entire planet. No one could get to him, no one could challenge him. If the corporations somehow helped the poor, he did not care about those people who could not afford to pay for life in Eden. He even stopped supporting projects that had been successfully implemented by the previous government. Moreover, he imposed such a financial burden on private corporations that there was no way they could help the people who needed it. Now, they had only one chance to exist normally – to work in the Eden, doing the dirtiest work for which it was a pity to use robots.

Most were less fortunate – they could buy shares in companies for koins, and thereby provide a comfortable life for their grandchildren, if they had children at all. They could provide private services or streaming services in order to get financial support from other users. Some of them were good at it, while the rest had only to indulge in dejection or banditry – the world had become a perverse version of the capitalist’s dream: goods produced and sold themselves, while it was possible to provide any additional services without taxes. The market was living on its own, and in the absence of a regulator, this could not end well. Now several thousand criminal syndicates were organized in this world, which could steal income from the already poor people with impunity, and if the bandits were caught by the security service, which everyone called “guards”, they were simply killed right there, so as not to waste time.

This is how robots reduced absolutely everyone in a few years, from ordinary workers to internationally respected managers. The ironic thing is that ordinary workers were being laid off by efficient managers who had no idea that they too would soon be replaced by robots, and the workers, in turn, tried to warn everyone else that this would happen because they had already had a lot of grief from mass automation. But no one would listen to them, either out of pride or unwillingness to change anything, but it didn’t matter. This led to the most amazing phenomenon: total class equality for the vast majority of people, who were equally dissatisfied with it.

So every few weeks a new revolution broke out somewhere and was mercilessly strangled by the authorities. This was handled by Ido Brims, security advisor to the new government. A former intelligence general who knew neither mercy nor compassion. If he suspected that anyone was even thinking of overthrowing the new emperor, that person disappeared without a trace. Perhaps it was only because of him and his “guards” that none of the uprisings ended well for their participants.

That is how we ended up in a world where black ash fell from the sky every day instead of snow, where there were no birds, caterpillars, or wild animals, not even stray dogs. The rich could only work for the sake of work, and many tried to just survive somehow, and some were just resigned to it. If some realized that they could not survive, there was only one thing left for them: utilitarian oblivion. They just watched black snow fall from the sky, people fighting over oxygen tanks, and waited for who knows what. They often collected postcards that were free and were nostalgic for the days when they could see a living tree or hear birds sing. They would just look out the dirty windows at the smoky city and disappear into the world of their memories.