Alpha Partners

Two and a half years passed.

(I won’t recap the interval here; this is a marker that between that December and today’s July lie twenty-nine months of applied life, in which Kira and I did our work, Lia grew, the Institute of Awakening rolled out points one through five according to Artyom’s plan, Iero after two forced broadcasts on regional channels finally retreated to a Telegram with double echo, Gleb Aristov launched the course “Alpha-Partnership 2.0” for three hundred forty-nine thousand rubles and caught his first inspection from Architect-1 for unsanctioned use of fifth-floor terminology. Architect-1 fined him. Gleb paid. A week later he was back on air with the same course in slightly more general formulations, and Wei Lin commented on this to Olga in one breath: “the filter breathes through him.” Olga noted the phrase in her green-cover notebook, in which by this year she had accumulated three hundred twenty-two such utterances of Wei Lin’s over thirty years of work.)

Today is Saturday, July twelfth 2036. Four days ago Lia had her tenth birthday (we celebrated at home on Thursday: candles, the father-in-law arrived from Piter with a Prague cake from “Sever” on Nevsky, Kira cried in the bathroom, I didn’t cry, Lia blew out all the candles on the first try, Schrödinger Junior fell asleep in the cake box; domestic, as is proper). Lia is ten, Karl is twenty, Kira is thirty-five, I am thirty-eight and two months. The three of us are driving to the Academy, plus the cat in a carrier. The cat by his current ten years of life has stopped grumbling on the road; he now travels with us on errands, like a family member taking on his share of responsibility for the route.

We arrived at ten forty. The clearing was green, warm, the fireweed along the edge of the woods had raised its flags. In the car with Lia — a notebook (the sixth, in a red cover; the previous five lie at home in a drawer under the bed, wrapped in parchment paper, numbered), a packet of Koh-I-Noor colored pencils, Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles in the original, bought by Kira on Ozon in March, three hundred seventy rubles with free delivery) and a small jar of honey from Pal Ilyich at the neighboring farm. The honey is linden, from hive number seventy-four. Lia and Pal Ilyich have a stable mutual respect since last summer: he sells honey to her alone at the price “for our own”; she alone doesn’t tell him what kind of signature he has on his hand (Pal Ilyich’s signature is interesting — with two notches in the area of the elbow, a consequence, by his words, of “the chemistry of sixty-four”; Lia asked him about sixty-four exactly once, got the answer “not your business,” and asks no more).

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Karl, by Olga’s morning report, is in the workshop — finishing soldering his latest module.

Karl has been soldering a modular synthesizer for the third year by the Kosmo standard. It’s a British variation on Eurorack, devised by an Englishman from Ramsgate who has in his shed “This Museum Is (Not) Obsolete” and is known for assembling synthesizers out of broken Furby toys and three-cylinder Game Boy boards. In Karl’s module nothing Game Boy-ish is mounted; that’s superfluous to him. He needs the sound of the fourth floor translated into a tonality that can be recorded on tape and listened to on regular speakers. He’s now trying a variant in which the incoming listener’s signature determines which generator turns on next. An instrument that plays the one who listens. Notes here are by-product. In theory — a discovery. In practice — a black box of duralumin, five tubes, three potentiometers without labels, one toggle, resoldered four times in two years of assembly. Olga is afraid of it in a domestic way (in May she asked Karl directly: “can it hiss in the outlet?”; Karl honestly answered “it can,” Olga placed a fire extinguisher in the workshop). Wei Lin — silently approves: in April he walked past the workshop, stood by the door for a minute, didn’t enter; that’s his form of highest praise for unfinished work.

(The idea — an instrument that mirrors its listener — isn’t original to Karl. Keith Fullerton Whitman, an American composer, since the early 2000s has been writing generative compositions on modular synthesizers: he launches a patch and sits for forty minutes without intervening, while the patch plays itself. With Whitman, the listener is Whitman himself. Karl wants to turn this idea a full revolution: the patch should play not itself but whoever is standing across from it. Technically, that means feedback by signature. Whitman knows nothing about signature, and so his generative runs evenly. Karl’s — runs for three minutes and starts overheating: the listener’s signature turned out to be hotter than the modules.)

Karl plans today to try a five-minute regime. Olga, when she informed me of this at the gate, added one phrase: “if it starts to smoke — get the children out.” I noted it.

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Lia took up the porch of the central building. The very one on which Kira and I in 2026 learned that she had seven years to the first layer and nine to awakening, and on which she at eleven months learned to say the word “ohh”, and at one year and two — to point at a violet thread above Olga’s brow and look at us as at the deaf.

Today she had spread out there thoroughly. A blue sundress with a daisy on the shoulder faded by two seasons (Kira doesn’t throw out this sundress, because Lia in it thinks better). Barefoot, with feet on the lower step. Notebook on her knees. Colored pencils in a tin from “Kuskovo” (Olga’s gift in March). Schrödinger Junior on the board next to her, in the position “duty observer with low readiness for displacement”: that’s his summer mode, energy-economical, in which he is in principle present, but on each specific displacement is expertly skeptical.

Kira sat on the upper step, half a meter from Lia. In her hands — a thermos. She unscrewed it, poured into a metal mug, blew on the tea (we always have tea with us; this is in Kira a biological debt to a family tradition in which her mother in Siberia by the lake poured tea from a thermos at any time of year in any point of the world). I went into the house.

In the house Wei Lin awaited me with a brief remark on yet another case which the Institute of Awakening had this week sent to the Academy “for consultation” — through third hands, without official logos, with a note “extremely delicate situation, requires quiet handling.” The case was about an eleven-year-old girl from Krasnoyarsk, with category 4A, unstable signature, mother in panic, father on a year-and-a-half assignment to Sakhalin. The Institute through an intermediary asked of the Academy one single thing: advice on what to tell the mother. This was a new form of Artyom’s pragmatics: order of advice with retention of the parties’ independence. By form the interaction is not yet called cooperation; by content — it is already work. Wei Lin respected this genre, if it had a specific girl in it. About the Krasnoyarsk girl today Wei Lin and I needed in half an hour to work out a reply.

I entered Wei Lin’s study. The kettle stood. Cups — two. Quinta on the shelf — silent, as usual.