Game of Tag. Fantasy

After his departure, in fifteen minutes, his personal PC turned on and someone entered the AO system, someone was deleting the DNA data of the twenty-first participant remotely.

NOVOSIBIRSK, DECEMBER 25, 2036 THE RESEARCH INSTITUTE OF ELECTRONIC INSTRUMENTS, PISAREV STR, 53

It was very cold in the basement of the building. The staff had to warm up, drink hot tea and put on “underpants’. This winter, as forecasted by the meteorological satellites, was the coldest one in a century.

Nechesov Aleksandr had been the Head of the laboratory for five years. And only the last eight months he had been really enjoying the process. He and his six subordinates managed to derive “living water’ and reproductive nanorobots in it. The robots were made on the basis of a genetic engineering and the new discovery, known as “celestial metal.” A unique alloy with special properties, the one of which is self-replenishment.

At the beginning of the work, there were ideas about an eternal engine, about self-replenished sources of energy.

But now all these ideas have become secondary. Today, Aleksandr managed to give a steady shape to the material for as much as three minutes and eighteen seconds.

Now he was standing in the corridor, smoking his smelly cigarette, thinking that something was missing, something that would allow nanorobots to act more efficiently and keep the form for a necessary, infinite time.

“Most likely, I had mistaken at the very beginning. Choosing not a living bacterium, but mechanical robots. But working with a living tissue is dangerous and pointless; we finally do not receive a new kind of contagious diseases, but create technical materials.” Reflecting on that, it seemed to him that he had almost found that eternally elusive truth. He looked at his watch – it was half past two. Today he should not be late. Irishka was waiting for him at their home, the institute allocated one-room apartment, as soon as he brought the old man a certificate of his wife’s pregnancy.

He threw the cigarette butt into a bucket and headed to the sanctum sanctorum – to the second laboratory. He could not wait to check one of his many guesses.

If in the corridor there was a bitter cold and twilight, then in the laboratory itself, thanks to the warm floors and human breathing, it was warm and, of course, imported lamps that worked better than domestic ones.

“Lenochka, have you wrote a report on the fixation of stasis substance from the test tube no.17?”

“Yes, Aleksandr Nikolaevich, but I must admit that the effect lasts only for zero point three percent longer in mineral water, in contrast to a simple chlorinated one’, the lab assistant was clearly disappointed.

“You cannot be optimistic, Lena, for progress sometimes lies in billionths of the whole. So we need to keep working. Have you already had tea?”

“No.”

“Then I will start boiling the water. Do we still have your jasmine tea from the Celestial Empire?” saying this, he was already pouring water into the kettle. Put the kettle on, put it in the socket, pressed the button – that is all the work. He wished that everything was so easy.

Lenochka flew into the cubbyhole for the tea.

Aleksandr could not tear his eyes from the bubbles in the kettle. He felt that only a little bit separates him from the touch of something great, a little more is needed, perhaps, something was just preventing this, something was unwilling to open the door for him, behind which his, Aleksandr’s, discovery was hiding.

Lenochka, young and, undoubtedly, the most talented student of the group, brought the tea leaves.

“Ah, here is the tea! I took cookies and sweets.”

The kettle already boiled water, and he began pouring boiling water into the glasses. Because their white uniform was very old and burnt, no one was afraid of making it dirty, his laboratory was known as “piggy-wiggies’ among the colleagues.

At one point a glass of boiling water slipped from his hand and fell on a metal table. The chips flew through the laboratory and hurt his forearm. There was a deafening sound of the breaking glass. From the waist down, everything was filled with hot water. It is good that his trousers and uniform saved him from burns.

Lenochka squealed and instinctively covered her face with hands and pulled back, afraid of chips falling into her violet eyes.

“Ah, damn! So burning!” Aleksandr screamed.

“You are bleeding! Need to stop it, is it very painful?”

“No, Lenochka, it is all right, I just did not expect,” clamping the cut, Aleksandr was trying to stop the bloodshed. Blood dripped onto the floor, it was on the table, and blood drops were on test tubes with “dry’ nanorobots.

“Lena, we need to clean up here,” he said as calmly as possible. “Bring me a bandage and a sterile cloth for flasks. Hurry up! Do not stand there without any movement! That is what we got for drinking tea’

They debrided and bandaged the wound, washed the table, the floor and all the drops on the flasks.

They spent then another hour to wipe everything over again with a special solution.

But it was too late. Space scales have already shifted from spiritual development to technology. Their movement was incredibly large-scale, thundering lightning in the eternal emptiness of the cold faceless something.

Megatons of gas were scattered throughout space with the size of millions of light years away. And all because in the test tube no.36 9/1 microscopic nanorobots absorbed life-giving moisture – human blood with an unidentified mutation.

NOVOSIBIRSK, DECEMBER 26, 2036 THE RESEARCH INSTITUTE OF ELECTRONIC INSTRUMENTS PISAREV STR, 53

Aleksandr was in a hurry to get to work earlier: It was necessary to finish his monthly report before lunch and then hand it over to the old man.

The alarm clock went off at 06:03; he stood up, trying to be as quiet as possible, so as not to wake his beloved. She was beautiful in her light sleep. “Wow, I never believed that a woman is becoming more beautiful in a delicate condition, but now I am convinced of it.” He took the things and walked barefoot into the bathroom.

“Do not go barefoot, a-ah, or I will be the wife of a genius having a cold,” Irina said, yawning and pulling the blanket over her.

“Hello!”

“Hey.”

“I thought you were asleep.”

“I will not miss your morning kiss, my love.”

He put the things on the edge of the bathroom and went back to the room. She smiled so tenderly at him that it made his heart hurt.

“I guess I will be late with the report today,” he said, slowly bending over her.

An hour later, having parked in a closed parking lot, he remembered that today they were to deliver a new batch of nanorobots. “If there are no results in the next three months, then this delivery will be the penultimate one. Hmmm, well, then I will be kicked out of science, and I will, at best, teach students-idiots.”

Having closed the front door, he handed over his coat to the dressing room.

The cloakroom attendant, granny, seemed to have seen alive Khrushchev, Galina Ivanovna, only shook her head after him. “He comes at the crack of dawn and leaves after midnight.”

It seems his steps echoed throughout the building. He descended into his abode “Closed Laboratory No. 2. For particularly important research.” It was much colder, but it was created this way. Numerous resistors, cables, even a mini-electrical substation – all this was being cooled.

“So, turn on the light, put the briefcase on the second chair.” He sat on a chair in front of the table and sighed heavily, he hated to write all this bureaucratic mess, called “report.”

But money is an important part of science, he understood it like no one. No wonder he was the youngest boss, the most talented and probably the luckiest one because he did not show promise, he did science here and now. He liked to create. An idea came to his mind – and after a couple of months, an almost completely written and expertly proven thesis appeared.

Everything was so easy: speaking several foreign languages, knowledge of physics, chemistry; engineering, astronomy, higher mathematics and so on, and so forth.

Being the youngest and most unsociable student, he tried to prove several “Tasks of Centuries’, some kind of mathematical puzzles for crazy professors. Against the background of constant fatigue, he had a hypertensive crisis, and his parents sent him to a boarding house, where his most important discovery happened. He met Irishka and her mother Oksana Pavlovna.

They seemed to be acquainted for ages. They could sit under the linden for hours on the bench and talk about everything in the world. Irina did not pretend she was really interested in everything he was telling about the cosmos or molecules; she absorbed it with wide-open eyes. At the beginning of the acquaintance, her mother was not happy with her new friend, but after learning that he was a talented boy and already at 17, in the 4th year, a laureate of mathematical sciences and a winner of numerous competitions, from the family of professors, she calmed down and let them enjoy summer and each other.

They had their own summer. Then he surprised his parents by the decision to transfer from Moscow to Novosibirsk. And they understood his character, knowing that he was an intelligent boy, and did not limit his choice, for which he was grateful to them all his life. And yet, sitting on that same bench, he realized: to be truly happy it is not enough to search for the solutions of the universe or mathematics, there must be a person who can support you during the search or share the joy of succeeding. So he practically moved to Oksana Pavlovna and Irishka. His bank account allowed him to pay all the bills of the young student. He first began to spend money received for the first places in scientific competitions.