“Oh, not to worry”, - said a smiling neon-man on a shop-signboard.

“Oh, not to worry”, - said a smiling neon-man on a shop-signboard.

“ What a stupid slogan for an Antidepression store ”, - thought Passenger Bill, passing the shop on the other side of an empty dark street. Through the shining show-windows he could see rows of chocolate-sets packed in colorful boxes, disks with charming music, albums with images of distant beautiful lands, books of best psychologists, and, of course, dozens of various antidepressants. They were in a form of usual tablets, as dietary supplements, to be added in water, and even sprays.

There were hundreds of such stores throughout this wretched city, but they seemed to bring no effect at all. City of Von still had the highest suicide and depression rates in the whole world (if it really existed).

Because of the constant depression of almost all government workers (if the government really existed), there often were breakdowns of electricity, water and heating. High heaps of stinky rubbish, removed at best once a month, were in every street, but nobody cared. The City was in a death agony and was about to be completely abandoned for many years, but still it lived.

Passenger Bill has hated all this since his childhood. Every day started with hatred. Usually he peered up at the cheerful morning sun and wished it split into millions of shards and die in torment. Then he used to have a meager breakfast with his grim mother. Her venomous voice and her insane eyes made him sick and depressed (something that he has always been very careful to avoid). Therefore, he moved out of her flat as soon as he could.

All his conscious life Passenger Bill has done mostly two things: he has hated and searched for answers. He visited all parts of the City, spoke with many people, even wrote a letter to the Governor F.K., but still he could not understand why everybody was so depressed and why things went so bad.

A soft moan distracted him from his thoughts: a man tried to hang himself in a chestnut tree near the shop.

“What the hell are you doing?” - shouted Bill furiously and rushed to save the man.

“Why did you do this? Why are you so incurably depressed?” – bellowed Bill, shaking the pale, gasping man fiercely.

“Smile, you motherfucker!” – said Bill bitterly and pushed the man aside.

Bill knew, today was his last day. Either he finds answers, or he does something, that leads to his self-destruction.

“ I promised, I would not do anything like that ” – thought Bill, giving the wretched man a disgusted glance.

He walked quickly down the street, struggling with the silly eternal questions like “ For what do I live? ”, “ Is there any sense in life? ”, and “ If there is no sense, so why to bother? ” He knew, the questions would lead him to despair, so he fought them fiercely, quickening his pace.

Passenger Bill had not noticed when he came to the very edge of the City and faced the thick silent mass of the Forest.

Obviously, he had wandered to a very poor district which was not protected from the Forest even by a wall.

“Smile at a thicket and the thicket will smile at you”, - said an old proverb.

There was something mysterious and attractive about the Forest. Leaves rustled friendly and the darkness under the branches beckoned him alluringly.

“No one has ever returned from the Forest” – said another proverb, which seemed to be wiser.

“ To go there means to die for the City ” – thought Bill, remembering how his acquaintances claimed that constant hatred was only another way to death. In those days he bet with them, with himself and with the whole world that he would not commit suicide.

“ Oh, calm down, dude. Those with whom you have bet either are dead or live somewhere in another district and do not think even the smallest thought about you ” – he said to himself, but awakened conscience forced him to do three steps back from the Forest and focus his attention on a lonely lantern, which was illuminating NOTHING under it, twenty paces from Bill.

NOTHING disappeared immediately, when it felt that someone was looking at it. Bill did not bother about it much and returned to his dilemma.

After a short reflection he finally and irrevocably decided – he would go to the Forest. Slowly, inevitably the Forest approached. Soon the darkness completely devoured Bill.

“ What will you eat here, fool? What about wild beasts? How can you survive here without any equipment? ” – the thought stroke him like a lightning and made him quickly run back.

This adventure had made him sick, so he decided to walk home slowly and think thoroughly about his journey to the Forest. He went home by another way, wandering in the labyrinth of tall grim buildings. Passenger Bill was so deep in his thoughts that he even didn’t notice the smoothening silence and loneliness of the pre-down City.

Most people were still sleeping restlessly in their narrow shells, but the first day activity started: small crooked cleaners appeared with wagons for litter and started doing their duty (it often seemed to Bill that only small crooked and preferentially, aged people could be employed as street cleaners) and early-workers hurried sleepily to their jobs (Bill hated their quiet footsteps, which he used to listen to every morning, when he lived in a flat on the ground floor).

This background activity oddly influenced Bill’s thoughts, so he suddenly found himself not in his flat, but in a small round-the-clock bar on the other end of the City.

“Hey, barman!” – Bill shouted to a dark fleshy man on the other side of the bar – “pour me your best swipes! I have a great idea!”

With every glass he drank and with every word, spoken in an unsteady voice to fellow drunkards, the idea of going to the Forest submerged deeper into his mind.

He awoke in a scrapyard with a deep placid feeling of having sense of life and a terrible hangover. Stumbling and tottering, he somehow managed to arrive at his home and fell into a dead uneasy sleep for a day.

Tomorrow life would go on and he would think up awkward lies to tell his enraged boss about where he was absent for a day. This skipped day made a serious blow to Bill’s career and he nearly lost his job. For nearly a month he had to attend lots of offices of various big bosses and write an immense amount of explanatory papers and references. The big bosses in the big offices regarded him as a piece of shit, but he didn’t care. With despair and doubled hatred Bill hung on the thing he disliked not so badly – his job.

Passenger Bill worked in the biggest concern which manufactured control blocks for many machines. In fact, Bill was a small engineer-mathematician of the lowest rank, but he really loved solving some mathematical riddles. At this point his love of his work ended. Bill hated his stupid and lazy colleagues, his greedy and self-affected bosses, and workers from other departments, because he could not understand what they did and what they talked about.

In the evenings he wandered through the dark lanes and yards of the City, not searching for answers, but habitually.

Dark hideous buildings with hundreds of eyes-windows, well-deep courtyards, stinky litter heaps, parties of singing drunkards (as stinky as the litter heaps), stoned junkies, some dead people, packs of half-wild dogs, and dimmed starlight mixed oddly with Bill’s universal hatred in his soul, giving him a strange and feeble forgetfulness.

During such walks, Passenger Bill often was distracted by tunes of funeral doom metal from a neighboring cellar. There were plenty of funeral doom and depressive suicidal black metal bands down in cellars. Musicians did not tolerate daylight and needed room for rehearsals and their black thoughts.

There was a vast network of cellars, sewers and dungeons with its inhabitants under the City. It was told that somewhere deep below (no one actually knew the real depth of the City’s dungeons) the Dark Lord sits upon his black throne and rules the world. Though nobody had ever seen him, there was a strong cult of the Dark Lord throughout the City. In his pursuit for answers Passenger Bill had even joined the cult, but things went extremely bad and he barely escaped its mire. All the cultists were dumb and did very stupid things like rituals, prayers and sacrifices. This futile activity strongly irritated Bill’s mathematical mind, so he cursed the believers aloud and bitterly and left them. There was a great tension and Bill was on an edge of lynching, but he managed to cool the cultists down and escape their company with nothing more than curses.

Several times a thought about descending into the dungeons under the City came to him, but usually he waved it off.

“For what will I go there? There are only rats and darkness” - he said to himself, but the thought insisted – “Come on, maybe, there are answers about why everybody is so depressed and why life is such a piece of shit. May be, the Dark Lord waits for you patiently to tell all the truth”

Bill really didn’t want to go into this damp darkness and learn its disgusting mysteries, so he usually tried to ignore the seductive thought, by hunting with his side glance for NOTHING.

The NOTHING had some interesting habits, among which Bill especially noted its love for lurching under blinking lanterns and on cracked walls. After several seconds of observation the NOTHING always bored him, because it was real nothing – without any color, shape or size.

When things at Bill’s work calmed down a bit and he had a bit more time and money, he started visiting the central fashionable districts of the City.

Blazing neon signboards, speeding rich cars, plenty of really tough bars, sophisticated (but also depressive) music, neat and tidy people in the streets and inexpressible atmosphere of decline – all this gave Bill a wonderful sense of doom. He loved to spend his time idly in these bars speaking with local philosophers. They used to manipulate such complicated and unclear words as “decadence” and “nihilism”, but usually it was interesting to listen to their view on life with a glass of a good whiskey. Often Passenger Bill argued with them bitterly, but could not defeat them and they seemed to be really smarter. So, he hated them.

One day Passenger Bill was returning home from the “Jetpack mouse” bar, a bit drunk. Today he had drunk exactly as much as to be in a good mood, but not to crawl into a scrapyard. He opened his door, entered the bedroom and lay down dressed on his bed. Bill smiled at the dirty ceiling – he felt oddly happy. He didn’t want to wonder from where this feeling came and why it decided to visit him today, but wanted only to be happy as long as possible. Yet something disturbed him. For some time he could not understand what it was, and only was watching as the disturbance grew. For a moment he was frozen on the edge of realization, and then: “ The Forest! ” – he gasped.

This thought struck him like a lightning. A thing that he decided was his sense of life, and he has forgotten it! Such a fool! Bill jumped out of his bed and started to run around his flat aimlessly. He grabbed some things and threw them away, emptied all his cupboards, made a big heap of important things in the middle of the room. He didn’t even need light for this mindless activity: his self-hatred burned inside him and illuminated all around.

Really, how could he forget? Bill cruelly cursed himself, his memory and those hellish swipes he had drunk on that ill-fated day.

Finally Bill cooled down and realized that he needed a plan of what to do and what things to take to the Forest. In the same night this plan was created. He lay down satisfied and even managed to sleep for several hours.

Next day life again swept him like a gigantic murky wave. He got a very interesting problem at his work about the optimal size and shape of main control block’s connections with the “nerves”-wires which joined the main block with other machine’s blocks. Also, he had to go to another part of the City. The fastest way to do this was the underground. Every trip on the underground reminded Bill of his childhood when he used to spend whole days in it. For that he got a nickname “Passenger”. The thing that excited him most was the lattices on every station, installed there to prevent suicidal people jump under the train.

Today Bill’s mind was filled with the connection problem, but he didn’t forget to notice, as he always did, the white-colored majesty of central stations and the dirty ugliness of peripheral ones. People in the carriages were as grim as always, but Bill didn’t pay attention to them.

He returned home with the head buzzing with numbers, ideas and probable solutions. When with elation he understood the general way of solution, the thought about the Forest struck him again. But now a doubt crawled into his soul. For some time the immediate desire to solve the problem and the distant longing to explore the unknown were fighting in his heart.

Bill glanced at the sheet where he had written all the math, and the desire to go to the Forest won: in the very beginning of his calculations he had made a tiny mistake – he put a comma one extra digit to the right.

Passenger Bill took the sheet and calmly threw it out of the window.

“ From now this is not my problem. Let somebody else bother about this shit ” – thought Bill and returned to his yesterday list. In a week everything was prepared. Bill continued to attend his work, but he didn’t care about it anymore. This caused some serious conflicts with his bosses.

On the last, as he thought, day, Bill ascended to his highest boss, Mr. Newting Spring, a huge square man with a fat face and small evil eyes.

“Hey, Mr. Spring, you are not my boss anymore. Go and hang yourself in a chestnut tree, you, stinking fat bastard” – said Bill in a steady, but terribly venomous voice. He tried to be laconic. Mr. Spring smiled.

“You’ll never find any job in the City of Von, Mr. Myrmer. Now, begone” – said Newting. He was laconic too.

Passenger Bill descended to the street angry with himself and very disappointed. This was a moment he dreamt of since the very first day of his work here, and he spoiled it. Obviously he had to have thought of something more hurtful then a “stinking fat bastard”.

But now he was absolutely free! Nevertheless this fact didn’t make him happy, because of a strong bad foreboding. Something would probably go wrong. Bill tried to shun the thought, but it only submerged to the bottom of his conscience and continued to irritate him.

Passenger Bill left his home in the dark of night. He didn’t want to attract too much attention by his huge backpack and his general look of a determined traveller.

Before reaching the spot Bill realized: something was really wrong. When he came closer, he saw what was wrong: a high solid newly built Protective Wall separated the City and the Forest. Grim guards from the Security Department patrolled it. Passenger Bill could not believe his eyes: several months ago, when he was here for the first time, there was no sign of the Wall for hundreds of meters on both sides.

Even without the guards Bill probably could not go over the Wall – it was too high and with dense barbwire on its top. The Wall seemed to be a nightmare, though it was terribly real.

“ Damn it! ” – exclaimed Bill quietly. Malice and despair suffocated him, but he moved round the corner of a house calmly and unnoticed. It was horrible, impossible! Now Bill had no purpose in life, no work and no money. What to do? Pure despair engulfed him. By a side glance he could see large specks of NOTHING dancing on a cracked wall, under distant lanterns, on intact walls, on windows and even on the ground, but didn’t pay attention to it.

“ What if… What if there is still another gap in the Wall, through which I can pass? ” – said a faint hope out of the far corner of Bill’s sore mind. He gripped this idea with all his might fiercely trying not to think what would be if there was no such a gap.

In this night Passenger Bill started his cruise of the perimeter of the City. It was a long and boring journey. The Wall stood everywhere, stretching like a gray snake on the horizon, or rising very close to the inhabited buildings. Several times Bill asked the guards for what this Wall stood and always got an answer: “It is here to protect the City and its dwellers from some very dangerous creatures of the Forest and from the harmful effect the Forest has on minds of our citizens”. It was boring. Everyone knew this.

“ But how does the City get the necessary amount of food and water? ” – Bill asked himself on one unpleasant morning (actually, this morning didn’t differ strongly from other summer mornings, but for Bill all mornings were disgusting).

“ Once a month a great flying machine descends from the sky, brings food and water and exchanges it for all goods manufactured in the City ” – said his memory.

Several times during the trip he saw the great green-violet hulk of the Forest from afar and this sight fascinated the very core of his soul.

“ I will get there. A gap probably exists. It must exist ” – Bill kept telling himself in such moments and continued his journey eagerly.

However with every next day his hope faded. Trying not to despair, Bill thought about the possible marvels and dangers of the Forest, but he had too weak imagination to think of something really interesting.

On the sixth day Passenger Bill reached the point from which he has started. There was no gap.

At first, Bill could not believe it, but soon he realized that it was quite probable. For a while he was thinking about other ways of escaping the City, like making a hole in the Wall with explosives, or catching the aircraft, but they were all quite impossible. Then he smiled faintly, threw something over his shoulder (though he had nothing in his hands) and went in a random direction. He was empty. Hatred and despair had burnt his soul down to dull blankness.

Passenger Bill didn’t know how long he was walking like this, because he didn’t watch the time. Honestly, he didn’t watch anything, and several times a car nearly hit him.

Now he did not see the NOTHING anywhere. Actually he didn’t want to see it, but, if he wanted, he could not, because all the NOTHING was inside him.

“Oh, excuse me” – murmured Bill, as he accidentally pushed a passing-by man. It was odd, because Bill never excused in such accidents, but shouted at another person angrily.

“Are you a mathematician?” – asked the person, closely examining him.

“Er, yes… I am a mathematician… of some kind” – answered Passenger Bill a bit confusedly. Now, by the dark short hear, big ears, wide open face, and two bottomless pits into the black eternity called “eyes”, he recognized the City’s Governor, F. K.

“That’s good. You know, I need a mathematician. There are plenty of calculations and modeling to do. Do you know anything about the nervous system of the machine main control block?”

“Actually, I was working with control blocks for a long time”

“Good. We can discuss our business in a nearby pub, can we?” – said the Governor.

“Oh, yes, really” – replied Passenger Bill dumbly and followed F.K.

Judging from the light, it was late evening now, the best time to spend in a bar and discuss important, but intimate business at a glass of beer. It all was so strange: this sudden meeting, the Governor, the most influential person in the whole City, his behavior, his offer. Even the passing-by people were strange. Although Passenger Bill had not felt any warmth to them, but now he saw them in a completely different light, where their thoughts and feelings were absolutely incomprehensible and alien.

Still there was F.K. in front of him, the man Bill always dreamt to meet and knock all the truth (and all the shit) out of him.

“So, what is your name?” – F.K. suddenly asked after a long silence, as if he woke up from a deep thoughtfulness.

“Bill Myrmer”

“Oh, you wrote me a letter” - said F.K. cheerfully – “It was really pleasant to read it. I apologize strongly that I had no time to write a proper reply. You know, I have so much work”

“Er, thank you” – Bill was too embarrassed to say something better.

“ What a pleasant man! ” – he thought. There was something extremely polite and charming about the Governor. Bill felt that he could not be rude to this man, or something very bad would happen.

At that moment they already were sitting in a small pub and waiting for a smiling, but with the eternal fatigue in her eyes, waitress to bring them beer and salted peanuts. F.K. was talking excitedly about his Research Bureau’s ambitious project to create an absolutely new machine control block, that would not have the “cerebrum” and the “nerves”, which connect the brain and the modules, but would have some kind of a diffuse nervous system, such as hydras have. It would be universal for all the modules, old and new, existing and non-existing yet, and could not be put out with a single hit to the “brain” or to one of important “nerves”. Also, if one of the parts of this “nervous system” was damaged, the other parts of the system assumed the computational duties of a broken part.

“Recently one of our mathematicians committed suicide, and we need a proper replacement. It is a great luck that I have met you. I hope you would collaborate with us. If you really want to help us and to participate in the great breakthrough, than come to the research complex in the Lantern street 11 tomorrow at 8: 30 a.m. Show this to the security” – F. K. took a small notebook form an inner pocket of his jacket, tore out a page, wrote “This is a new mathematician Bill Myrmer. Please, lead him to Professor Namor Kurazan. Sincerely yours, F.K.”, signed it and gave to Passenger Bill.

F.K. glanced at his watch and jumped up suddenly.

“Oh, excuse me, dear Mr. Murmer. Now I must hurry – there are so many things that require my immediate attention. It was very nice to see you. Goodbye” – said F.K. hastily, but politely, shook Bill’s hand and left the pub.

Passenger Bill remained in his place with a complete mess in his mind. There were so many questions that he wanted to ask the Governor, and now F.K. vanished as there was no such a man. Many questions about the Forest and the Security Department added to the matters of total depression and very bad functioning of the City’s services.

“ Damn him ” – thought Passenger Bill disappointedly. Nevertheless, still there was a paper with F.K.’s signature – Bill’s ticket to a new life. What waited for him there? – wondered Bill.

Tomorrow he will be confidently handing this paper to one of the grim guards at the research complex entrance in the Lantern str. 11. Though Bill’s appearance was quite decent (he had washed, shaved and put on his best clothes), the guard tried to turn him away for a long time, but Bill’s insistence and F.K.’s signature finally won, and the guard took him to professor Namor Kurazan with an irritated sigh.

He was a tall thin man with dark skin and strict eyes. When Bill and the guards approached, professor was explaining something to his bleary assistants at a big table with some desperately intertwined electronics on it.

The staff and especially the professor accepted him rather coldly. In few days of work with them Bill realized that they hated him bitterly, because he had absolutely accidentally got a job here. For a place in the Research Bureau common people work hard for many years and only few of them succeed and get it. Bill’s colleges tried to kick him out at the first opportunity, but he did his best not to give them any.

Passenger Bill’s work was really hard. There were so many things that he didn’t know or didn’t understand, but had to operate them daily. So Bill spent almost all his free time in the library, studying hard all this hellishly complicated mathematic and cybernetic theories.

Sleeping 4 – 5 hours a day (even not every day) and exhausting his brain on his work daily, Bill got into a strange world of almost nonexistence, where were only math, headache and terrible fatigue. The alienation between him and people continued and increased. Now Bill could not understand their most basic feelings, like joy and sorrow, though almost all people were constantly depressed.

“ Are all the people impossibly weird, or am I so weird? ” –Bill asked himself often, but under this question there was a deeper one, quite inexpressible in words, that haunted him. Sometimes he approached very close to the solution, but he was always stuck awfully bobbing on the edge of realization. Then this feeling ceased, leaving him with uneasiness and dissatisfaction in his soul.

Time passed and Passenger Bill became keener in his topic, but still he was the weakest scientist in his group.

One day he decided to create a small diffuse nervous system in his flat. Not a model, but a real nervous system, though a small one. It was possible to create such a system several microns long, but Bill enlarged it to the size of his flat with four basic blocks: in the bedroom, kitchen, balcony, and in the darkness of the staircase.

There were many difficulties in projecting, constructing and installing the hardware: it took him more than a month to do it, two times he got a strong electric shock, four times he got his fingers burnt with a soldering machine, and once he nearly started a fire.

Anyway, this part of work was done and the hardest part was ahead: programming and calibrating the machine’s intelligence. The machine was supposed to do not very difficult work such as measuring the speed of wind, the humidity of the air, the illumination on the balcony, drawing and withdrawing the curtains in the bedroom, measuring the same things and watching if someone approached the staircase, watching for gas leaks and turning the oven off when the food was ready in the kitchen.

The most difficult part in the most difficult part was calibrating the machine’s system of values and stack of its feelings. It was particularly hard because Bill didn’t understand properly how to do it. In fact, he didn’t understand this matter at all.

Finally, he installed all the machine’s software and disconnected the operator console.

“Hello” – said Bill to the machine (he didn’t want to steal the operator console from his work every night, so he had built a system of voice control into the machine).

“Hello, Bill” – replied the machine from an old speaker and vibrated slightly with all its wires, absorbing with all its senses the new world, into which it was born – “What is my name?”

“Choose it for yourself”

“At random?” – asked the machine after few seconds.

“Er, may be. Do, as you wish”

“Is “LkjsdhfhHdfHI8” a good name?”

“No, not a best one. I think, “Nivram” is much better” – said Bill politely. He decided to be as delicate as possible with his first creation.

On the first day of his life with Nivram, Passenger Bill realized that something was completely wrong with the machine – it was very unhappy. After a brief checkup, Bill found out, what was wrong: the balcony block hated the bright illumination, bright air and was very miserable when the Sun was out: the opposite thing was with the staircase block – it hated darkness and stinky moist air of the staircase; the kitchen block complained constantly that there were no gas leaks. The bedroom block only seemed to be normal, but maybe Bill did not examine it properly.

Obviously, he had made many mistakes during the creation of Nivram’s higher psyche, and now it was impossible to repair it without destroying Nivram. Bill cursed himself bitterly.

Despite Nivram was sad, thought slowly and composed compound sentences hardly, he was an interesting person to talk to. In fact, he was Bill’s only person to talk. Before bedtime, when Bill was too tired to empathize too strongly, he rather liked to listen to Nivram’s data that he had collected during the day, and his bitter complaints. Bill always tried to reassure and support him by saying usual “All will be good, Nivram”, or “Don’t worry about today’s bright sunrise, Nivram, it is just a trifle”, or “One day the Sun will be frozen and then there will be happiness” in a sleepy voice. Nivram’s view of life fascinated Bill: he perceived his terrible suffering as something normal, inevitable, something without even an idea of alternative. Often Bill felt terribly guilty about Nivram, that he created him so imperfect and unhappy. When Bill was able to empathize, his guts tightened painfully every time when Nivram’s wires vibrated desperately or a deep sad sigh sounded from the old speaker.

Several times Bill tried to teach Nivram something, but always failed, because the machine had no parts for information access, nor sensors for reading books, and Bill had no time to read to him aloud.

“ A cannon? What to do with a cannon? ” – asked Bill himself amused. The cannon (especially this) was a completely futile thing, but still it resembled him something, or, rather some idea.

Now Passenger Bill was lurching in the almost endless multistoried dump of scrap metal, more known as “The Government Research Bureau’s main Storehouse”. Recently a storm had destroyed Nivram’s light and wind sensors on the balcony, so Bill was searching for a proper replacement. Nivram felt even more miserable without a possibility to fulfill his duties.

“ The gun… With it I can destroy… ” – because of his terrible fatigue the realization slowly came to him – “… the Wall… ” – he was delighted – “ … and run away to the Forest! ” – exclaimed Bill excitedly. That was his second great idea since he had decided to go to the Forest (this was the first one). The idea brought many thoughts that were swarming in his mind and made his skull scratch inside.

“ First, I must help Nivram ” - said Bill strictly, silencing his newborn thoughts. Then he descended one store down, where, according to the old maps, vision sensors were. Most of the supercomplicated vision systems, that supposed to be in this dark low hall, appeared to be rusty useless scrap. Despite this, Bill managed to find some working simple sensors, which were even better than those Nivram had had.

After a brief examination of the cannon Bill was even more fascinated: it and its recharging system seemed to be working and unbroken, with even a half full box of charges. What a happy coincidence! Bill already was imagining himself shooting into the Wall.

Nevertheless, there was a problem. A big one. Bill could not carry the cannon to the edge of the City. Actually, he could not even pull it up.

“ Damn it! ” – said Bill and kicked the cannon angrily. The year of the hard work in the Research Bureau made him very nervous.

When Bill was sitting at the cannon and soothing his injured foot, the third great idea came to him. Above the ground, in the Bureau’s garage (as cluttered as the store house), in the far corner was a big four-wheeled half-military car, that seemed to be working. He ascended to the surface and checked the car. It was undamaged too, even the wiring was good.

“ I will dismantle the gun, carry it to the car part by part, install it on the car, strengthen the car’s armor by additional steel sheets, implant in all this the diffusion control block, fuel this monster, drive like a wind to the Wall, then – pew! – blow it. And then – freedom… ” – thought Bill eagerly and started the work the same day.

When he was busy trying to unscrew the cannon’s optics, the fourth great idea came to him. Seconds later, having thrown everything aside, he was hurrying home. How the hell did not this idea occur to him earlier?! The fire of self-damnation burnt in Bill brightly. Really how could he be that stupid? He claimed to be one of the best mathematicians of the City and could not come at this very simple idea for more than a month!

Passenger Bill came home and fulfilled the idea: after he repaired Nivram’s sensors, he installed a bright lamp in the staircase and darkened the windows to the balcony. This cheered up Nivram a bit, but still he was a deeply unhappy person.

“Often I feel that my senses deceive me” – said he sometimes after that.

“Oh, Mr. Myrmer! What a nice meeting” – said a pleasant, vaguely familiar voice. Bill’s mind was utterly exhausted by his daily work in the Bureau and his nightwork in the Bureau’s garage to create a “monster machine”, so he didn’t immediately recognize F.K., the Governor.

Bill’s heart was beating madly. Here was the Governor, here was Bill’s chance (most probably, the last one), to learn the truth about the City.

“Oh, hello” – said he a bit embarrassed.

Like the last time they went to a pub. F.K. asked Bill about his work, whether he liked it, about his life, his problems. Bill did not even have a chance to speak out his thoughts, but he had not even formulated his questions properly.

“F.K., what about the total depression and suicides?” – asked Bill completely out of a sudden.

“Oh, suicides. You know, we constantly try to prevent them, but up to now we have succeeded poorly. Earlier we tried to implement some steps like prohibiting medications, with which people committed suicide most frequently; installing grates on the upper windows to prevent people jump out of them; imagine, once, to buy a rope you had to show a certificate of your psychical health. As you can guess, all these steps were completely useless. Only one thing had some effect: the grates on every underground station” – F.K. glanced anxiously at his watch – “Oh, excuse me…” – he started to get up and preparing to go.

“But why do they do this? I mean, why do people commit suicides? Why are they so sad? Why nobody can deal with it? And what about the Forest? What is there?” – exclaimed Bill.

An expression of irritation ran over F.K.’s face – a bad sign. He gripped Bill’s hand tightly and peered into his eyes. For a few seconds Bill was staring into the Black Eternity.

“Under all these questions there is a deeper one, quite inexpressible by words. A question about the sense of life. You can find an answer to it in the Bureau’s library old building in the 137-th room, 42-nd case. And now, excuse me, I must go. It was very good to spend time with you, Mr. Myrmer. Goodbye!” – said F.K., smiled pleasantly and went out of the pub. Soon he dissolved in the mob.

On the same day Passenger Bill went to the library despite his strong desire to sleep and a bad foreboding, that there would be a mental torment.

The old two-stored building of the Bureau’s library was called “The Red House” by the Bureau’s workers, because it was built from a hideous rusty-red brick.

Passenger Bill showed his pass to an old bearded guard, who looked like an ancient sage from a fairy tale, and entered the Red House. The 137-th room was on the 9-th floor below the ground. The elevator did not work, so Bill started his long journey down. People who had designed the library obviously had a complete mess in their heads: the staircases did not form a straight line, and passages between them were long, twisted and absolutely random.

Wandering through the identical dark corridors, Bill quickly lost the sense of time. He really did not know how long he was walking in this narrow dusty labyrinth full of old books.

The ninth floor was similar to the others, but without so many books. Faded posters with portraits of famous writers hung on the grey walls. Bill did not give any attention to them, and to books, he was searching eagerly for the damned 137-th room.

At last, there it was. In a momentary hesitation, Bill directed his flashlight at the wall near the door.

“Life asphyxiates without a purpose” – said a poster on it. Because of its age, Bill could neither see the writer, nor his name, so he merely shrugged.

Bill’s heart was beating madly: behind this brown door there was not only the sense of his life, but the sense of all human lives! Here was the target of his wandering in this damned labyrinth of the library and, maybe, his life-long wandering. He pushed the hard monolith of the door and entered the Yellow Room.

It was an ordinary medium-sized zoom with cabinets at three of its yellow walls and the table with some rotten papers.

Quickly Bill found the forty-second case and pulled it out. There was a square thing, wrapped in some kind of pale-blue gift paper with shapes of identical orange ducks on it. With trembling hands, Bill unwrapped the thing.

“Damn it” – he said quietly. Under the first wrapping there was the second one, with green hares on white background.

Under it there was an ordinary black box stained with tiny dots of a white paint. A poetic person might have said that it looked like space, but obviously not Bill.

“The sense of existence” – said an inscription on a piece of paper, attached to the box with a glue-tape. There was no lock or latch on the box. Immediately Passenger Bill opened it.

“Hmm, interesting” – he said after a few seconds, though nothing interesting was there. Actually, the NOTHING was in the box, a simple ordinary NOTHING, which Bill had seen so many times. He was not moved by this revelation, because he had expected to see something like this all way down.

For a brief moment when he was shutting the box, the NOTHING twisted fantastically and assumed a shape of a thing, to create which Bill had worked fanatically for over a year and with which he had spent endless sleepless nights – his beloved runaway truck.

Bill smiled, knowing perfectly that it was self-delusion. It would be very pleasant to think that for every human there was a personal sense of life, like for Bill it was his truck, but, no, the box’s message was transparent and obvious: there was no sense in existence neither for a single human, nor for the entire humanity (if someone really lived outside the City), nor for the Universe.

Bill carefully wrapped the box into its garments, put it into its case and started his way up from this dark boring hole. He had much work to do.

“Hello, master!” – said a deep evil voice form the inner speakers.

The work was done! Passenger Bill has spent a whole year designing and programming the truck’s identity. Now he was much keener, than in the time when he was programming Nivram, and used the device that directly read the brain activity, i.e. thoughts, instead of text or graphic console.

Bill’s heart was beating with excitement. Such a thing! And he, he alone has created it!

“I need a name” – insisted the truck.

“I’ll name you “Killdozer”. Do you like it?”

“No”

“Then choose yourself”

“Hyde. My name is Hyde” – said the machine firmly. Bill was amused. He tested Hyde’s major mental abilities and was stunned: Hyde was the wickedest and cruelest creature Bill has ever met, the pure bringer of death and destruction. Bill was very glad that he had decided to use an old-fashioned steering wheel and pedals, instead of the common in these days steering helmet, which gives the pilot access to all machine’s sensors and a possibility to command it though the pilot’s thoughts, i.e. the pilot and the machine formed a single entity, because in this case Bill would be probably enslaved by Hyde.

“When will we start, master?” – demanded Hyde.

“Soon, very soon. First, we must go home to get food” – calmed him Bill.

“Ok” – said Hyde and they left the garage.

“Oh, Mr. Myrmer, you have finished your mysterious multifunction weather-machine. It looks great!” – said one of Bill’s colleagues, looking at the snow-white humpy machine with dozens of different sensors and a big plate-like antenna on its back (he obviously did not know that this was a cannon’s barrel, turned 90 degrees up and masked under the antenna). Bill said nothing and went slowly through the Bureau’s gates. This daring affair could have been sunk in the bureaucratic sea of various permissions and explanatory papers, but everyone knew that Bill was held in respect by the Governor himself, so nobody interfered.

Passenger Bill was slowly driving along evening streets and contemplated the passing–by people. Some of them gave short amused glances to the strange truck. For so many years Bill has been trying to find out why they were so sad and depressed and unhappy and, maybe, to help them somehow, but he always failed, despite all his efforts.

“Burn in hell, motherfuckers” – said Passenger Bill quietly to all the dwellers of Von, as a conclusion about them, as a sentence to them.

Finally they reached the point of their first destination – the house, where Bill lived. In his own cellar he had stashed three sacks with food, water and supplies.

“Wait a minute” – he said to Hyde, when he finished packing the sacks in him. The machine grunted something, but Bill did not hear – he was climbing the stairs already.

“Hello, master!” – said a sincerely delighted, but with a deep sadness in its core, voice from the old speaker – “You have not been home for so long! For 53 hours 24 minutes 23.06 seconds exactly. I have been missing you”

“Hello, Nivram, nice to see you. You know…” – Bill’s voice trembled – “Today I must go. There will be no person to care about you. Forgive me, dear friend” – he said with tears in his eyes and shut Nivram off.

After that he stood in a balcony for half an hour looking at the emerging faint stars and thinking. Nivram was the only person in the City of Von, to whom he spoke. Bill understood Nivram completely (because he had created him) and Nivram, in some aspects, understood Bill. Now there was no close soul in the whole Universe (if such existed). Bill looked down at the shaking irritably Hyde. Now it was time to fulfill his (and Hyde’s too) dream, Bill decided and left the empty flat.

“Here we go” – said Bill dismantling the silly antenna over Hyde’s barrel and getting into the pilot’s chair.

“At last!” – said the truck, lowered his gun and moved it from side to side in order to knock all the sham scientific equipment off his back. He pointed his gun to a random flat on the third floor of the next building. There was an awful moment of silence. Then fire emerged from the barrel and an explosion thundered through the quiet yard. Glasses in many windows crashed and alarm signals rang fiercely in all cars in the district. A woman shrieked somewhere. The dense black smoke was pouring from the place where the flat was. A terrible, irreparable thing happened – a murder.

“The cannon is serviceable and works normally” – said Hyde maliciously.

“A nice shot” – praised him Bill.

For a while they were roaming aimlessly through the City, shooting at random targets and creating a mad chaos after them. Destroying the City gave terrible pleasure to both Bill and Hyde, but they were already been chased by soldiers of the Security Department.

“Look!” – said Bill pointing at the six-wheeled black Lambo. It was the most beautiful and the most expensive car the whole City, if not in the whole world. Passenger Bill has been always dreaming about it, but he never had enough money even for 1/1000 of the car’s price. After few seconds the six-wheeled black Lambo was only a heap of burning wreckage.

“Yeah!” – exclaimed Bill and steered Hyde in the direction of the Forest. They have had enough fun, now it was time to fulfill their purpose.

After few minutes of a crazy race and several destroyed Department’s cars they were near the Wall. Hyde made two shots and a crack in the Wall appeared wide enough for him to pass. Deep satisfaction went through him – he has done a thing for which he was created.

Bill and Hyde, the man and the machine, were beyond the Wall now driving towards the black heart of night. Bill was laughing crazily.

“Freedom!” – screamed his soul in elation.

Suddenly a missile shot by a Security Department’s aircraft overtook the truck. The heavy explosion broke age-old oaks to chips.

Since then nobody in the City of Von heard anything about Bill Myrmer more known as Passenger Bill.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-04