Chronicles

Zoya Mirai in 2026 did not register in the perception of ordinary people as a figure. People did not see her by sight. If someone passed her in a corridor, their gaze would slide, the way a gaze slides off a glass that has water poured onto it. It was her biological peculiarity: diagnosed, initially, as a rare variety of paramnestic dissociation with disruption of figural organization of perception in observers (fourteen years at Kashchenko, three courses of neuroleptics, Zoya in the end simply stopped taking them, because they dulled her own self — the fantasy from them remained untouched). Later, at the Academy, it turned out there is no pathology here at all; it is — a property of signature. Zoya carries in her signature fragments of other lives (seventeen earthly languages and six not in the world’s phonological atlas); her signature is structurally larger than one observer, and ordinary people do not see her for a simple reason: they have no slot in their heads for such an observer (their perceptual resolving capacity supports one or two subjects per object, and if there are many more subjects, the object falls out of the category of “figure”).

Until 2031 this peculiarity worked stably. Zoya lived at the Academy openly; she was seen only by curators and students who had passed a certain stage. In town she walked like a ghost in a coat, without attention, and this suited her.

Then the world grew thinner.

In 2031 Olya — Olga’s fourteen-year-old granddaughter, who has seen the stack since childhood — brought to the Academy her classmate, an ordinary girl named Vika, from an ordinary school in Khamovniki, without any markers of extended perception on her form. Olya wanted to show Vika the Academy (“just a place where we sometimes are”). Vika came onto the grounds, had tea, met Olga. Then, in the yard, Zoya walked past them with an armload of books to the corridor.

Vika saw her.

Zoya wasn’t trying to manifest; Zoya was walking on her own business. But Vika saw her, visually, the way an ordinary person sees an ordinary other person. Raised her eyes, gave a slight nod, returned to the conversation with Olya.

Zoya, having passed the corridor, leaned against the wall and was silent for a minute. Then said to Olga: “I was just seen. Without my permission.” It was the first case in twenty-two years of her life after accepting her own peculiarity.

That same evening one line appeared in Zoya’s notebook: “The filter is thinning faster than I’m losing transparency. Calculating the difference.”

Since then Zoya understands that her period of transparency will soon end, and that she is to become visible to the same world that for twenty-two years did not see her. This does not gladden her and does not frighten her. It is — a fact, to which she adapts with the same methodicalness with which she adapts to everything else in her life: she records, observes, notes.

By 2033 her incidental visibility had risen to about one in ten.

Today Lia is the eleventh.

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Arrival at the Academy was on Saturday, the second week of November. The snow had already settled firmly, white, heavy, with a thin ice crust on top (Olga mentioned the crust the day before in the folder: “early — unpleasant — watch the kids outside”). Kira stayed in Moscow with syrniki and Schrödinger Junior, because she had an article she was writing and which she was not showing to anyone, because she was writing an article for the first time in her life not for Physical Review, and she was scared.

(The article was called — working title — “Subjective Signature in the Upbringing of a Child with Extended Perception: A Mother’s Notes.” Twenty-one pages in Word. The tone — strict, medical, with inclusions of what in Kira is called “mama’s remarks.” She intended to publish it on the website of a Moscow psychological association whose editor-in-chief is certainly not from Ordo (from whom — Kira didn’t yet know; the editor was a friend of a friend, and Kira trusted that friend). The article, in my estimation, was to, two weeks after publication, land on Elsa Brenn’s desk, who’d read it over an evening and keep one remark in the notebook of her second dissertation. But this is my forecast; I didn’t voice it to Kira, to avoid jinxing.)

(In Kira’s required reading list for the second-year graduate course on morphogenesis sits one sideways book: Jane Bennett, an American political theorist, in 2010 wrote Vibrant Matter — about how things have an agency of their own, and ignoring it is an error of scale. Biologists usually find this awkward: their notion of agency is reserved for the living. Kira assigns it anyway. She tells students: “Bennett is wrong on every other page, but she got one thing right — she forbade us from calling the material world a passive substrate.” After that book, Kira’s students stop talking about passive substrate. She’d been working at that for five years.)

Lia on that visit went with a notebook and with a specific task. She was seven and a half, four months had passed since the birthday, and she, having learned a month ago of the existence of the Stack Chronicles, had asked to see them. Asked Wei Lin directly, bypassing Kira and me. Wei Lin, to my astonishment, replied with a single nod: yes. A week of arrangements. Zoya agreed to lead. Noma — to back up. Wei Lin — to observe.

I traveled in the state of a parent who isn’t sure whether it’s right to give a child a lever that the child unconditionally deserves. This is the ordinary state of the parent of a seven-year-old with an IQ of one hundred sixty and a signature of 0.94 by Architect-1, and I had gotten used to it on weekdays; but on weekends, when the lever is called the distributed memory of the planet, the habituation didn’t carry.

Lia slept in the car. In her hand — her notebook, in which she had been preparing for the last three days: lists of questions, sketches of figures, certain points. I didn’t read the notebook. That’s our rule with her: the notebook is hers.