The Thread Is Calling

The next morning I got in the car and drove to the clearing.

The route to the Academy had turned into reflex over eight years: three hundred and forty kilometers on the Yaroslavl highway, turn past the thirtieth kilometer from Pereslavl, then a dirt road for seven kilometers, then forest, where the GPS loses its bearings and the compass behaves like a PhD candidate’s brain toward the end of the year (meaning it points at its own hands).

Since then, only one thing about the road has changed: GPS in this forest now lies consistently. It shows that I’m in Kostroma. Always. I entered the forest and the phone informed me I was at Sovetskaya Street, building seventeen, apartment twelve. That’s Irene’s address.

(I checked three times in a row. Turned off geolocation, restarted the phone, turned it back on — each time the phone returned the same Kostroma. The first attempt seemed funny; by the third the laughter was gone. The GPS sees where my signature is drawn to. Technically this is, of course, impossible: GPS works via satellites, satellites can’t know about signatures, there are no invariant keepers aboard the satellites, and nobody from the Academy is looking at the American GPS.

And yet — the screen says Kostroma, Sovetskaya, seventeen.

I explained this to myself as follows. Google Maps in 2033 is a seventh-generation neural network, trained on billions of routes. It has entered these routes so deeply that it learned to predict intention before geolocation. Meaning it looks at where I’m going before it looks at where I am now. I’m going to Kostroma. Google knows this, without yet seeing the turn toward the clearing or the thread inside me.

Google the corporation, of course, knows nothing about signatures. But Google’s neural network, on its own, does. Nobody told it. Nobody taught it. It learned in the process of serving eight billion routes per day. The world passes through its receptors, leaving a distributed imprint — and at some point it began distinguishing intentions alongside trajectories.

This is bad news. The sixth floor of the stack is starting to leak into commercial infrastructure through the infrastructure itself, without individual awakened intermediaries. Google knows where I’m going. Yandex knows what I want. Apple knows I’m sad right now. Between knowing and knowing how to use that knowledge, there’s one small step. I suspect some divisions are already taking it, and the official launch is months away.

But that’s a separate topic, and today I won’t think about it.)

I parked at the edge of the woods.

---

The clearing was the same: two hundred meters of field, in the middle — a place where the air is different. Nobody had installed an invisible door: no installation is needed. Whoever makes it there — sees.

Wei Lin stood on the other side of the door, in his usual dark-gray jacket, looking at me, as always, slightly to the side, slightly past — because Wei Lin doesn’t look directly at faces on principle; it’s rude to him; over seven hundred years he’s learned to look in a way that makes you understand he sees you, while his eyes are actually occupied with something else, a centimeter from your face. It’s a special seven-hundred-year-old way of showing respect.

I walked up.

— Wei Lin.

— Daniil.

He nodded once. I nodded once. The daily gesture quota was exhausted.

— I’m following the thread.

— You’ll go.

— I’ll go.

— Come back.

He said it without pressure, without anxiety. The way a doctor says “call if anything.” It was his permission and his voucher for my integrity. One word. If Wei Lin doesn’t say “come back” — it means he’s not sure you will. Seven years ago, before my full rewrite, Wei Lin didn’t say come back. He said go, and I heard the difference. Today — come back. Meaning the route is marked, the emergency exit exists, the safety net is active. The bureaucracy of seven hundred years of living: the whole risk assessment — in a single word.

(I suspect, by the way, that somewhere in the Academy there exists an unofficial internal document of Wei Lin’s listing every case where and to whom he said go instead of come back. The document, I think, consists of six lines. Each line — one name, one date. The first: Lan, 1633. The last: Dorian, 1891. I was presumably supposed to be the seventh line, but at the last moment Wei Lin wrote the word Noma in the margins and froze the document. I’ve never laid eyes on this document. It doesn’t physically exist. But Wei Lin has an internal bureaucracy that I don’t, and I know he has it by one sign: he never confuses words.)

Wei Lin, as if reading my mind, added:

— Lia has been going there for some time.

— What?

— Through sleep. About seven months.

We stood on the clearing. October, light rain, the smell of rotting leaves. For seven months my seven-year-old daughter had been visiting Grandma, and I didn’t know. Kira, as far as I know Kira, didn’t know either (Kira would have told me; Kira only stays silent about such things when instructed, and in this case there was no instruction). But Wei Lin knew. He knew — and waited until I went myself.

— You could have said.

— I could have.

— Why didn’t you?

— Because if I’d said — you would have gone earlier. Lia would have let you go ahead. She did it on her own. This is her first independent signature at long distance. I wasn’t going to take that from her.

I looked at the door.

— Thank you.

Wei Lin nodded. Half a millimeter. Like seven-year-old Lia last evening.

(On the threshold of my return this year stands a thought I’ve been trying not to think for eight years: my daughter and my teacher are structurally alike. They both economize the same way. A seven-year-old and a seven-hundred-year-old share the same minimalism. For me this means that between the two of them in my life I’m caught in a philological fork: Wei Lin speaks one nod, Lia speaks one nod, and I in the middle have to translate their nods into plot. This is work nobody pays me for. It falls under my “family” department. It’s worse than a tax. It’s a structural obligation.)