The Incubator

Day twenty-seven. I’ve stopped counting days, but the notebook counts for me — every entry is dated, and if you add them up (and I’m a physicist, so I added them up), you get twenty-seven. Four weeks minus one day. A month, if you round. (Physicists love rounding. It lets you say “approximately” instead of “I don’t know exactly.” All of cosmology is built on “approximately”: the age of the universe is approximately 13.8 billion years, plus or minus twenty million. Twenty million years — a rounding error. For the report — acceptable.)

In this month, the world has become unrecognizable, and I’ve gotten used to the unrecognizability. Adaptation is a hell of a thing. First you scream. Then you go quiet. Then you write it in a notebook and go make tea. Normalizing the impossible — that’s what the Academy actually teaches. You can learn the stack in a week. But living with what you know — that takes months.

And so — day twenty-seven — Wei Lin said the last thing. Or rather — the one after which the rest folded themselves together; that part of the work Wei Lin refuses, on principle, to do for the student.

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We were alone. No Artyom, no Kira, no Zoya. On the porch (where else). Schrodinger on my lap. Forest all around. Standard configuration.

— Daniil, — Wei Lin said. — Do you remember what I told you on the first day? “You weren’t brought here to learn. You were brought here to be fixed.”

— I remember.

— I lied.

In the long pause only Schrodinger purred.

— You weren’t brought here to be fixed. You were brought here to be tested.

— Tested for what?

— For whether you can take it.

— Take what?

— The knowledge. Everything you’ve learned this month is a stress test, like for a bridge: you pile on heavier and heavier loads and watch for when it cracks. The stack, your mother, demons, immortality, three schools — every new “lesson” is another ton on the bridge, and the question sounds like “are you still standing,” not “what did you learn.”

I looked at him. He was looking at the forest. Not at me. Like a person saying something that makes even him uncomfortable.

— And? — I asked. — Am I standing?

— You’re standing. So far. Not everyone stood: there were those who broke — some on day three, some on day seven, others on day twelve. Marina — your colleague — nearly broke on day eleven, when Hiero told her about the parasites. Her neurosurgical brain started operating on her own consciousness — excising “foreign programs.” We stopped her. Barely.

(So that’s why I hadn’t seen Marina for the past four days. I thought she was sick. Turns out she’d nearly “operated” on herself. A neurosurgeon who decided to remove parasites from her own head with a scalpel. Literally? No, of course not. But on the fourth floor, the line between “literally” and “metaphorically” is thinner than I’d like.)

— The Academy, — Wei Lin continued, — is not a school. It’s a filter. We don’t create those who see the stack. We find those who already see.

— And then what?

— Put the filter back. Return them to normal life. They forget. Not entirely — but enough to function. Like after anesthesia: you remember that something happened, but not what exactly.

— And those who hold up?

— They go further.

— Where?

— To the place you remembered the word “Academy” from.