Corporation

5

Slowly, unhurriedly, imposingly, as in a rapid speed train, a flaming tire swept past him on a deserted pavement. The black soot rose behind her in a dense, suffocating wave, so that Gilbert automatically reached into his pocket for a life-saving handkerchief. A sweaty rag is not exactly a salvation from subsequent asthma attacks, but it's better than nothing.

The first thought - to quickly return to the sterile recirculating atmosphere of the lab - was immediately discarded. The black failure of the silhouette is just waiting in the wings to return and swallow it headlong.

What jokes, at such a pace he will not work - he will lose his last brains.

The crowd, meanwhile, surrounded Gilbert on all sides.

Motley groups in acid-colored driver's vests over civilian ones ran at him from clouds of smoke lined obliquely by the rays of the sun, ran up, shouting something about fair prices, and immediately rushed away, not paying any attention to the lost Gilbert.

Their sonorous voices, to the rattle of firecrackers scattered along the roadside, tangled in his head into some kind of inseparable sound phantasmagoria, from which it was impossible to isolate a separate cry or a separate chant. It sounded like a wave of restless surf, which, periodically approaching, fell on Gilbert's head, taking away with him the last remnants of thoughts to his relief.

Well, how good!

To be a part of something huge, like a sea of ​​swaying souls, which in a single impulse seeks to unleash its wrath on anyone who dares to resist it.

And it doesn't matter what and for what reason brought all these people here.

We have rights! And we came to demand that the authorities respect them!

Gilbert stood in the middle of the boulevard and kept trying to figure out what makes him tremble so joyfully - well, not the feeling of unity with the protesters? Neither their slogans nor their methods were close to him. And now, quite according to the logic of what is happening, Gilbert distinctly heard through the rumble of voices still distant police sirens.

These guys got into the habit, every day, to burn tires in the middle of the city, and then cars. Everything is good in moderation. The government and so in our time is much to indulge any whims of the crowd, it was worth it to organize at least a little in order to concretize their demands. But so soon it will come to arson of state buildings.

So what attracted him to this crowd?

It was easy to guess. Now, like a breath of fresh air (so-so allegory, Gilbert coughed again) he needed to distract himself from the vision that tormented him. Something that would help not to fall further into the black well of another world, something that would unite his world and the unknown, where he inevitably plunged, as soon as he doubted the reality of existence even for a second.

This crowd was universal . It seemed to serve as some kind of common denominator for all reality at this crossroads of worlds. In any case, it was she who so far did not allow Gilbert to completely lose his mind.

At least for a while.

Time.

The very time that expired from this world, waking up through your fingers to the very bottom of the black well.

Healthy again.

The crowd already sensed the danger. The sirens were approaching from all sides, consolidating and closing the beginning of the column, which had gone west along the boulevard, into a ring of sound. The swearer muttered, and the as yet insufficiently rhythmic blows of the fighters of the republican companies with batons on the shields began to chatter. But soon they will receive their reasonable development - water cannons will hiss, with deaf pops, a teardrop will fall. The locals, accustomed to everything, had been closing all the windows for half an hour, and just in case, they closed the shutters - so that nothing could fly in.

Now it will reach the crowd that it's time to turn in search of detours. The groups closest to Gilbert were already stopping, hesitating. It’s time for him to get out too, before it gets really hot, and at least towards the buildings of the cherished grand ecole.

Turning back to the lane he was looking for, Gilbert involuntarily became worried. The flow of people poured in there already so densely that behind the backs of people, even in the gradually thinning smoke, it was not really possible to see what was there with the entrances to the main building.

Even so, I had to pretty much work with my elbows, and as we approached the main entrance, the crowd became denser. The screams were heard again, and this time they were much more angry. So, apparently, everything is also blocked further down the alley, the Protestants figured it out, but where to...

Logically, they decided it was wise to hide inside the building. Shit. Khrenushki them from there then just smoke it out.

One problem, some fool was smart enough to get in the way of the crowd.

Gilbert felt his legs give way in a panic.

In the way of the "vests" was the same black human silhouette in a bright opening that pursued him in visions.

Only this time it was quite material.

Moreover, he was much more material than the surrounding reality, literally burning through reality with himself. Let angry townspeople rush about between Gilbert and the mystical figure, their bright driver's vests stubbornly dance their mystical dance in front of him, but the black failure of the human figure did not seem to notice them, at once making them infinitely distant and infinitely unnecessary.

Gilbert tried, as before, to retreat, to hide, rushing from side to side, but it was all useless, the ever-densifying crowd did not give him a chance to avoid a meeting, pushing him forward, pinching him in the narrowest place.

And then Gilbert stopped fighting. Let the universe burst at the seams, it was beyond his strength to endlessly keep consciousness from decay. The black silhouette beckoned to itself, riveting the eye, taking away the last remnants of the will.

It is not so simple, this endless failure. This is how the fractal structure of reflections between two mirrors sometimes looks, repeating and repeating the same thing indefinitely, until the loss of any meaning in these layers.

Only here, not a single repetition was actually a repetition, each successive silhouette that led the helpless Gilbert into its own depths, at least a little, but differed from the previous one. A living snake of successively nested anthropomorphic gaps crawled slippery in its own depths, shouting something, waving its arms or, on the contrary, standing firmly and motionless.

This titan of the void, unknown to Gilbert, was not a titan in size at all. An ordinary, unremarkable person. But in an inconceivable way, it was on it that all those invisible axes converged, around which the surrounding world revolved.

It was impossible to resist him, not because he would be so strong. On the contrary, he was almost powerless against the background of those streams that slid around him, but it was he who was the point of application that balanced everything that happened - disappearing with small, but not useless efforts.

This figure, she did not choose her role in the very center of the modern universe. So the gear of a clock mechanism can arbitrarily disagree with its role and place in the general order of things. But one can and should choose between those senseless panic throwings that Gilbert made in his last days, and a clear awareness of his own goal.

Take a closer look.

This trembling multiverse before your eyes - it does not just fluctuate at the behest of cosmic winds, it, like a tightrope walker stretched in the void, every second tries to find a balance that will allow him to take a new step along the arrow of time, so fast, so limitless and so finite.

And this step will be taken.

Almost blindly, after so much incredible effort, it will be done.

Neither circumstances in the form of a raging crowd, nor the impotence of the human community striding into the darkness before the force of the iron laws of the human community will prevent this.

The black silhouette will throw off the chains that bind it with a twist of a snake and lead humanity to a new circle. Whether it wants it or not.

An inhuman, muffled scream whipped through the crowd, throwing it away.

The front rows of protesters were crushed and dragged. People fell, women screamed, the first bloody faces began to flicker in the crowd. Gilbert stared with inexplicable calmness into those bulging eyes and gaping mouths.

Tomorrow they will forget all this, like a bad dream.

The crowd fled, but he continued to stand in front of the endless well. A new, unfamiliar thought disturbed Gilbert, displacing his former fears.

It's not, it's not done that way. The blind tightrope walker has no chance, one day he will definitely stumble, despite all his inner strength. You cannot balance the black well of the multiverse and at the same time look for a path to the future, no matter what it is.

There must be someone who, standing aside, will be able to see the invisible, prompting the titan, trampling the heavens, exactly where they are leaning at the moment.

Gilbert woke up in the middle of an empty alleyway, with obvious displeasure, seeing next to him the sweaty physiognomy of Riyad, who was breathing heavily. Apparently, he also fell into the crowd.

- Crap day.

Have a nice one you too. Gilbert turned to the small staircase that led up to the main entrance. There was no one there. No black silhouette, no one more mundane. But no. He didn't like it.

This could not be imagined even in the depths of the darkest badtrip. Gilbert did not use at all. Is it really all this banal madness, delusional visions of a self-destructive consciousness. Take an urgent academic leave and go to surrender to the Aesculapius? They say that the Faculty of Medicine has the strongest school of psychiatry in the whole country, all the most prominent luminaries teach there. Let some intern write a paper on his, Gilbert's, material.

But no, he doesn't want that for himself. Because like this, to flush the revelation that happened to him down the toilet - there was some distinct weakness in it. A simple path that can always be done, remaining a semi-vegetable under the yoke of new generations of antipsychotics until the end of days. A simple and uncomplicated gear instead of the most precise tool in the service of the universal balance.

Always succeed.

The main thing is to twitch less in the workplace. However, now Gilbert was able to see the black rut passing through himself. And don't be afraid.

Habitually reassuring mechanical sequence of actions when passing through the gateway. Familiar sterile table. Smooth plastic keyboard, barely visible through gloves.

Not given assembly.

If you think about it, he could also move reality. Not on a global scale, but in your own cozy corner. Now he could see, if only barely, on the verge of distinguishing where the general movement should be directed.

And if you look at the conformation formulas from this angle, it becomes much easier to notice your own mistakes. Here is the extra quadrupole moment of the magnetic vortex. Now it is clear why the thread breaks on a different order of magnitude.

Gilbert nodded to himself, immediately noticing two more mistakes.

As their quantum-mechanics teacher, Professor Orsi, said when he was pointed out that he made a mistake in the sign in his formulas at a lecture, “you mean to say that I made a mistake in an odd number of places?”

Nothing. Most mistakes can be corrected. The main thing is that the blind tightrope walker continues to move forward. And Gilbert will help him.

While the conformation calculation was being validated at the entrance to the coherent block, Gilbert continued to think about his own.

A difficult, almost insoluble dilemma. How can a person himself, without outside help, distinguish the fruit of his own sick consciousness from reality, and a psychiatric failure from the truth?

Think, no way.

The grounds for believing in oneself were too shaky.

Reality is reality. It contains material objects. This lab exists. There is a heterostal. There is his tiny apartment on the third floor of a cozy old house a block and a half from campus.

There are "vest" manifestations, global warming, the eternally grumbling Britain and the eternally greedy America, summer and winter, summer with friends on the lake, parents, brothers, for some reason, calling the former every six months.

All this exists.

And how to prove to himself the existence of something that exists somewhere between him and the black well of time?

No matter how much you look there, nothing will change, it will remain the same hopeless emptiness, filled only with endless reflections of this reality, which you can neither reach nor shout at.

But wait.

Then it dawned on Gilbert.

Initially, he did not see himself there, but a titan hidden in the shadows.

Imaginary or real, it doesn't matter.

He didn't see himself there. So, if there are psychos like him in the world ...

Sooner or later he will see something else in the endless series of his own reflections.

Another guardian, frightened by the pernicious variability of his own reality, his mental twin, existing in the same part of the multiverse, who, just like him, here and now looks with hope at the blind tightrope walker, trying to help him.

Perhaps the two of them will do better.

Successful triangulation in 3D requires a minimum of four base stations.

Why did this unknown quote flash through his head?

Four is four. He will seek and find.

And then they will be ready.

Gilbert yanked the satisfied smile off his face. Over the monitors, Riyad watched him attentively from under frowning whitish brows. And what stuck, before from him even the duty “bon nui” at the exit from the clean zone was not expected.

- Check assembly. It looks like you made it.

Ah, that's it. Now let's check.