else you need help with?
– Take out the trash, son. I forgot to take it with me this morning. And now I’m very tired, I won’t be able to come down from the thirty-seventh floor.
Dima usually snapped after every attempt to force him to do something around the house. But what has changed now?
I packed my backpack in the evening so as not to forget a single textbook. I laid out screwdrivers and other items unnecessary in the educational process. At exactly nine-thirty the young man went to bed. At his age, he needs at least nine hours of sleep to stay healthy. And no games at night – they are harmful to the development of the psyche.
At the entrance to the school, Mitya grabbed Dima’s hand.
– Excuse me if you can. Dim, I don’t know what came over me yesterday. I didn’t do it on purpose. I… – Mitya burst into tears.
– Everything is fine. You did the logical thing. You still couldn’t save me. But he saved himself.
Mitya didn’t think so. The boy must fight to the last drop of blood for his brother.
– What happened to you yesterday? What did he do to you?
– He re-educated me.
– So are you really okay?
«Everything is perfect,» Dima said, and entered the school.
– Maybe it’s… let’s have a smoke before Isolda Viktorovna comes? Around the corner,» Mitya suggested.
– I stopped. Smoking is harmful to health. And I don’t recommend it to you.
Inside, as always, it smelled of cutlets and sweat. Dima greeted the cloakroom attendant warmly and changed his second shoes. Today he did not argue with the duty officers from the ninth «b».
Dima also greeted Marina. I said hello. And he moved on. And not a single word more. Marina almost choked: won’t she get some attention today? She took out her compact to look in the mirror: was there something wrong with her today? Is she not so beautiful now? Or did Dima notice this pimple on his face?
By the way, Marina only now noticed that there was no trace left of Dima’s acne.
– Listen, Dim, I was thinking: let’s meet? – Marina smiled radiantly. It didn’t work out with Vasya, so she looked for alternate ways. How will she look her friends in the face if she is alone, without a boyfriend?
– No, Marina, you don’t suit my genotype. We will not have perfectly healthy offspring. Sorry.
Marina turned green with anger, then burst into tears loudly. But the young man did not turn around at her trick. He had no emotions left.
Dima entered the office five minutes before the bell rang and went to the first desk. There was another Ideal sitting there.
Since today, Dima has not entered Technopolis. More precisely, now he was always in virtuality and never left it. The blond sitting next to him shone with white light in the expanded reality that Dima had always seen.
Dima forgave Mitya, and for some time they communicated with an old friend. But Mitya could not stand Ideal’s company for long.
– You’ve become boring. It’s not interesting with you,» Mitka once said.
Dima graduated from school with a gold medal. Graduated from the university with honors. And he lived an ordinary, ideal life. There is only one «gray» spot in his biography. When his child was born and he was offered a vaccine, Dima shook his head.
– But why? Dim, we are perfect, why don’t you want our son to grow up the same? – Dima’s wife asked.
– Yes, we live ideally. But let our son grow up happy. At least until the first mistake, let’s allow him this.
The years passed, and there were more and more Ideal ones. But among the skyscrapers stood the same school, built in the mid-sixties of the last century, in the corridors of which there was still the same smell of cutlets. And in this school, different people were welcome, even if they were not adults yet, even if they were not ideal.
Soul limit
Every year there are more and more people, but there is less and less humanity in them.
I’m sitting in a stuffy classroom. Humidity – 61% It would be nice to open the window, but Marina Velichko is allergic to the pollen of one of the plants. It seems irrational to me when 25 people suffer because of one. Moreover, one cannot call life full of life with such functional damage. Violetta Semyonovna in a dress that reflects light with a frequency of about 450 THz. People would call it red. The timbre of her voice constantly changes, and her pupils dilate slightly when she looks at the projection of world-famous paintings.
– And this is a landscape by the Russian artist Alexei Savrasov…
And then there are many epithets. No matter how hard I tried, I could not understand what the words «beautiful», «extraordinary skill», «winter splendor», «defenseless branches in their nakedness», «freshness» mean. Of course, I already remembered in what situation it is necessary open your mouth and show your teeth (they call it a smile), and when to lower your eyes to the floor (shame), but I don’t fully understand why they need this.
A signal with a frequency of about 1000 Hz, which means that you can get up from your seat and go to the next lesson. I love mathematics more than cultural studies. Mathematics is useful, but what is the use of looking at pictures drawn a hundred years ago? You won’t live in a painting, a painting won’t feed you. And it takes up a lot of information on the medium, not just numbers.
Vika Aksyonova and Yura Stepunov hold hands and look into each other’s eyes, and so on at every break. I don’t understand their logic: do you really want to touch someone when the room temperature is almost 27 degrees?
– Hey, voidman! What are you staring at? – Yura knitted his eyebrows and stared at me. – Do you have any problems? If you don’t get out of here, you’ll find them.
– Yuri, let him go his own way, where he was going. No need to touch it! – Vika whispers.
– I hate void people. Moral monsters. They have no place in our country. And let them get off the planet. There is a state program for space exploration. Let him fly to Mars. Or to Jupiter. The main thing is further from our school.
Yura thinks that his words should make me angry. Or maybe these people are jealous? We are better than them in many ways. We feel temperature and humidity better, and we can name the frequency of light and sound waves with great accuracy. And we also have no feelings. Although, sometimes I… I guess that’s what people call envy. People most often go in pairs, or find friends, and gather in huge groups. And void people are always alone. We communicate with someone when the interlocutor is useful to us. My mother was a human, and my hollow father communicated with her in order not to pay the tax for childlessness. It was more profitable for him to be with us than for himself.
Yes, I sometimes envy people. But we are a perfect race, and the future belongs to us. People’s ambitions have brought the planet to the brink of an apocalypse. If we had not appeared as a new target for persecution, then they would have continued to destroy their own kind, who simply live behind the fences of borders that the people themselves invented, for the pleasure of those in power.
The Creator gave people a piece of himself, which became their soul. When a person died, this piece passed to the new owner. But murderers, drug addicts and other criminals left behind a rotten substance when they died, which crumbled to dust after their death. One day there were so many people that the limit of souls was reached. This is how the first voidman appeared. At first, people tried to beg their child’s soul so that he would become «just like everyone else.» Ironically, voidites, people without a soul, have become the best proof of the existence of this very soul! Soon a black market for