Corporation

4

Boulevard Saint-Germain in early May is especially good.

The elms had already blossomed, sheltering in their transparent shade those who wanted to eat on the side table of the cafeteria, and the first spring rains beat down the annoying spring dust. Noisy Chinese tourists, of course, have not gone anywhere, but in the mornings it’s still too cool for the bulk of them, and what’s the point on Monday, after yesterday’s collective races on Cham de Mars, which is literally a kilometer away from here, to rise before eleven? Except in caring for the freshness of croissants, but it is unlikely that this public will be so worried about pastries.

Another thing is if you are a doctoral student of Science Po, then such an early wake-up is quite reasonable for you, and this time there are quite reasons to change the usual scooter for the city for a leisurely walk three blocks from the campus to the native laboratory.

It’s so quiet here except in winter during infrequent snowfalls, when there are no people who want to knead the slurry of the sour abyss with sneakers, but now it’s a completely different matter, plus the temporary absence of burning from burned cars, which is a separate pleasure nowadays.

Gilbert turned around, twitching his nose suspiciously.

No, it seemed.

Like many on campus, he stood up for social justice, and gladly supported the struggle for the rights of the new French, gender equality and other anti-transnational occupé, but lately it has become fashionable to smash first the outskirts, and now the center against increasing excise taxes on gasoline, and such a decent citizen can not approve. The carbon footprint with the taste of already literally burnt tires, hovering in the air, fit so poorly into Gilbert's ideas about beauty that you involuntarily start to grumble - these again.

But the weekend for once passed without excesses, so all the more so - it's time to take a walk.

Trying not to smear himself with custard, Gilbert washed down the croissant in small sips through the lid, burning himself on his usual noisette. How many times he asked the barista to dilute the coffee to normal temperature, all to no avail. A slight pinching on a scalded tongue over the years became for Gilbert as much a part of his daily ritual as the automatic filling of a T-shirt into his underpants. Tried to change the cafe - did not help. The Parisian baristas were as relentless as their damned coffee machines.

So, in the fight against the temperature of coffee, randomly placed scooters, random aromas from uncleaned trash cans, and yes, still no, no, yes, and the smell of scorched flickering in the damp air, his usual morning passed. Nothing should distract Gilbert from the relaxed routine, get up, get dressed, thoughtfully scratch the red stubble growing every day of the week before leaving, and not think about anything until the very door to the lab.

Regularity eventually became Gilbert's only salvation. While you are chewing, or while you are walking, or while you are sniffing, you do not think about the black silhouette in the bright opening. And you don't start falling into this silhouette, like into a bottomless well.

Phew, come.

Rubbed with hundreds and thousands of palms, the brass handle closed the heavy vintage door behind Gilbert's back with a resounding blow, immediately cutting him off from the deaf voices of the corridor. Ahead, only the green light of the containment flickered, separating the purity of the lab from the rest of the world. The daily ritual habitually continued by putting on a jumpsuit on a bare foot. Having smoothed all the seams on the chest and sleeves, it was necessary to tighten the elastic bands of the respirator on the back of the head over the gossamer cap. Ballet shoes, which were worn inside instead of shoes, he puts on last. That's it.

With a slight hiss, the shutter of the pressure hatch closed behind him, the exhaust hummed, carrying away the remnants of street dust with a stream of air. As long as his ears habitually clicked from the inevitable pressure drop, Gilbert once again wondered why they, IT people, were forced to go through all this ritual, they could just as well work opposite the server room, in an ordinary room with windows outside, through which they could street dust could be flying, as well as the aroma of fresh pastries from the nearest cafe on the corner.

No, you don't think, Gilbert was only glad of these familiar white walls, where his gaze inevitably rested, at the slightest attempt to be distracted from work, into an empty sterile nothingness. This helped maintain proper concentration. But the rest, why are they suffering?

Gilbert nodded mechanically to the habitually gloomy Riyad sitting opposite. No, perhaps let Riyad suffer.

Don’t think that there was not the slightest trace of racism in this wish of his, especially since Riyadh, with all his Moroccan origin, looked with his whitish eyebrows and pale skin, perhaps the most notorious white supremacist of their laba. If there was something in this prejudice on the part of Gilbert from the appearance of a colleague, then the reason for this was the stony face with which he spent most of the day. And Riyad never greeted at the door, which annoyed me even more.

However, in their engineering group, he was the most experienced ku-programmer, and therefore let him show everyone at least a blow, the main thing is that the project moves. For the sake of the project, they were shoved here, drumming on the touch keyboard with sterile silicone gloves. Although their development had a purely practical meaning - not like theorists from neighboring labs - it remained in many ways akin to shamanism.

Emtijsteel, a monothreaded heterosteel discovered ten years ago by their lab supervisor Professor Tuganov, still contained too much that did not obey formal logic. A heteroalloy of iron and carbon, which does not conduct electricity at all, but at the same time is almost impervious to heat and capable of displacing magnetic fields like a cold plasma and therefore changing its structure during primary synthesis depending on the orientation and conformation of external fields, emtijisteel was able to become incredibly strong and flexible at negligible density, outperforming monocarbon or all-metal fibers by orders of magnitude.

Monothread steel in the literal sense of the word could be programmed at the nano-level, and for the discovery of these properties, Professor Tuganov and his colleagues were eventually given the Nobel Prize in Physics two years ago, but the award itself was not without scandals - the results of their labs often did not want be reproduced in the experiments of colleagues overseas.

“Se magician,” Professor Tuganov said, chuckling, with his funny Russian accent, but, taking pity, he nevertheless pointed out to his colleagues another mistake in their calculations. In inexperienced hands, heterostal did not want to grow, and where it did reach the macro level, it still did not show the breakthrough results that were expected from it.

That is why Gilbert, Riyad and the rest of the ku-programmers sat here, across the wall from the cooling chamber of the coherent unit, so that the chain between the developer, who calculates the parameters of the heterosteel programmer, and the engineer, who implements the obtained conformations into a working assembly, remains minimal. Sometimes it seemed to Gilbert that just by looking at the blue flicker of the coherent block, they were able to guess in advance whether it worked or not. Riyad was definitely capable of something like that.

How many times Gilbert watched the same picture - hearing the click of the collapsing ku-matrix behind the wall, this guy became even more gloomy in his face (if it was even possible) and immediately, throwing a laboratory pencil at the wall out of sheer annoyance, left the development room, taking there to yell at the collectors. How did he manage to give out such decibels through a respirator.

At times, Gilbert felt ashamed of himself. You, man, are simply incapable of such emotions about your work. Came, worked, left. Look, it’s immediately clear why Riyad was invited to the lab to Professor Tuganov himself, such specialists as he, go on the fingers of one hand all over the world. They called me to the industry, but I didn’t go to a good rate. What are you?

On Friday, after the shift, the engineers at the drunken shop blurted out a couple of times - Professor Tuganov himself was busying for Gilbert, but they didn’t really believe in this. And, as they say, purkua? In fact, he was still the most useless in their group. He sits like that, wipes his pants, one unsuccessful assembly after another, no passion, no imagination. For days on end, he only knows what to look at himself in the navel, if only not to break loose, if only not to break loose, if only not ...

An uninvited thought, as always, took itself into my head. Gilbert learned to notice this in advance. It was like an influx, like a process of collapse of the wave function, random, unpredictable and inevitable.

Their group did not just work on the secrets of the possibilities of heterosteel, Professor Tuganov somehow let it slip. Entering his office at the far end of the corridor on occasion, Gilbert once overheard how he and Riyad were discussing some very specific figures with thousands of atmospheres, hundreds of gauss and hundreds of running meters. At that time, he did not attach any importance to what he heard, but now the thought once planted in his plagued mind has matured and materialized.

If they planned to bring mono-thread materials into practice, their plans were not based on the market for the banal development of ultra-light building materials as a substitute for expensive titanium alloys, no, they looked much further. Even the programs of the European Space Agency did not need such scales.

Before Gilbert's glazed eyes flashed the gigantic bells of fusion engines, which were useless even on interplanetary flights. Too powerful, too bulky, insanely expensive. But space fusion was the only possible use for their heterosteel, if it could hold the numbers they were talking about at the time.

But why then such secrets? Where are the publications in Nature? ?

Gilbert shook his head helplessly.

Is it because Science Po does not have a doctorate in physical disciplines at all. Their lab itself was not even planned. And no Russian professor with the surname Tuganov received the Nobel. And the Emtijistil itself, whose quantum assembly they were all involved in, not only had not been discovered until now, but also did not exist in nature.

Shaking fingers blurred before his eyes full of desperate tears. They were no longer wearing sterile gloves, just as the laboratory overalls were already dissolving in the air.

Gilbert threw a desperate look at Riyad, as if trying to grab hold of that, like a lifeline in the middle of reality disintegrating before our eyes, but no, he was gone too, some important gentleman in a trouser suit was sitting in his place and busily shifting from place to place. place of an important type of paper.

It was as if someone at once pulled the universe familiar to him from under Gilbert, slipping something else in its place, grotesquely similar, but completely unrecognizable. It was as if someone, before his eyes, maliciously modified existence itself, reshaping it in its own way.

No, Gilbert remembered.

It wasn't the first time he'd come up with that idea.

What if it’s not someone, but they themselves, in this and other laboratories around the world, they quietly changed reality, not even the future, but the present , creating it differently, not the way it should have developed naturally.

He even saw this path. He always appeared before his eyes at such moments.

A black gap into infinite non-existence, gaping with the approaching emptiness. A black hole rapidly forming into the profile of a human figure. What Gilbert feared more than anything.

Yes, we need to get together. This obsession will go away, it is worth throwing the thought that gave birth to it out of your head.

Scraping the pass card from the table by touch, Gilbert rushed out.

To hell with decency, when it gets dark in your eyes, and feverish sweat flows in streams down your collar, you don’t have time to think about what your colleagues will think of you. And even then, a person looks at one point for himself, thinking about something, after which, recollecting himself, he runs about his business. It's time for lunch, by the way.

Thoughts are chaotically rushing about in my head, and that's good. The less order, the better, let them run, the main thing is not to return to the origins of the logical trap that led him to a new attack.

Gilbert barely had the patience to wait until the adapter finally equalized the increased pressure inside the lab. To the squeak of strained eardrums, he fell out into the vestibule, mechanically tearing off the cobweb of his overalls.

Ugh, the gloves with ballet flats that remained in place turned long pieces of fabric torn with crooked fingers into an ingenious trap that bound Gilbert hand and foot. The straitjacket tightened with every tug.

Falling on his side, with a strained growl, he nevertheless managed to tear off everything superfluous from himself, finally freeing himself.

Here he is standing in front of the locker room mirror - barefoot, red-faced, T-shirt somehow tucked into loose shorts, red hair tousled, eyes darting.

We don't stop, we move.

Somehow putting on his sneakers, Gilbert hurried to the exit.

It was already getting hot on the boulevards in the middle of the day, but the hot sunny palms on his steamed face always made him feel better. Quickly plunge into the usual dining crowds, sneak sideways closer to the distribution, order a traditional box of wok with seafood with teriyaki sauce from a dense Asian in a dark blue apron, sit down in the shade, it usually helped him.

Only for the third time, incomprehensibly jerking the locked door, did Gilbert make an effort to raise his head above himself.

C'e the farmer is jordan.

Gilbert grimaced at the two misprints on the tablet. It could have been smarter.

Wait.

He turned around, thinking. Where is all the people?

The buzz of voices was much louder than usual, but there was no one around at all.

From a neighboring doorway, trying to portray independence, some businesslike gentleman with a briefcase darted, darted and disappeared from sight.

And only then the first wave of amber reached Gilbert.

The viscous stink of burnt rubber hit his nostrils so that tears again splashed from his eyes.

So what is it, again?