Chapter 1: The bay and the voice
By the time the wind turned razor‑thin, the cranes had already frozen into silhouettes—long‑necked birds hunched against the rim of Golden Horn Bay. Vladivostok breathed in diesel and salt and the old iron smell of promises that never kept. Mitya stood at the water's edge and counted the buoys as if numbers could anchor him. Behind him, the city pushed its lights into the dark like a quiet defiance.
The voice arrived without fanfare.
Operator detected. Alignment incomplete. Do you accept initialization?
He didn't startle. The strange thing about hearing a voice in your head is how familiar it can feel, like a name you once had and forgot to answer to. His breath left a pale ribbon. "Who are you?"
System. Designation pending. Purpose: provision, instruction, execution. Confirm.
He laughed once, short and dry. It sounded like frost cracking. "I'm seventeen," he said to the black water. "What would I even confirm?"
Resolve equals access.
The screen wasn't a screen, yet he could see it—a flat, austere panel against his mind's eye, a sterile room with a single door labeled TRAINING SIM. Another door waited, unmarked, with the kind of presence that warned more than it invited.
He could walk away. Go back up the hill where the buses coughed exhaust and the shops sold tea and cheap cigarettes and the winter turned boys into hard men with soft, breakable things inside them. He could forget the déjà vu that trailed him like a stray dog: that he had stood at a water's edge once before and lacked the thing he most needed. He didn't remember the details. Only the vow: No more helplessness.
"Fine," he said. "Initialize."
Acknowledged. Operator: Dmitry Rybakov. Epoch anchor: 2000. Locale: Vladivostok, Russian Federation. Module access: Training Sim (basic), Ledger (view), Cleanroom (trial). Cautions: None recorded.
The bay lapped at the rusted pylons. Somewhere, a ship's horn grieved across the water. Mitya closed his eyes and stepped into a room that wasn't there.
Training Sim was white and horizonless, and yet the air had the green tang of antiseptic, like a hospital that forgot to be loud. A table rose from nothing. On it lay an object that could have been a gun if this world permitted such words. Here, it was geometry and intention, dangerous because he was.
Scenario 1: Proximity threat. Objective: survival with minimal collateral. Instruction: observe, decide, act. Moral load: tracked.
"What's moral load?"
Silence. He didn't mind. He had grown used to asking and receiving silence in return. He'd learned the trick of speaking anyway, so he'd hear where his own voice was weakest.
A door unfolded ahead. A man entered—more posture than person, a simulation of momentum and bad decisions. In the real world, Mitya might have cataloged the calluses on his hands, the way the eyes didn't match the mouth's smile. Here, the Sim gave him parameters: distance, angle, vectors of intent.
Resolve equals access.
"Not just resolve," Mitya said. "Judgment."
He didn't reach for the object on the table. He stepped left, let the man's momentum carry him two degrees too far, then placed his palm—open, deliberate—against the elbow that wanted to be a hinge for harm. The body's mechanics did the rest. The man crumpled without romance. No shots. No noise except the thud of consequence.
Outcome: success. Collateral: none. Moral load increment: negligible. Award: access expansion pending.
He exhaled. The room didn't change, but it felt different—the way a street feels after a storm passes, slick and fresh and slightly dangerous because of the shine.
"Again," he said.
The Sim obliged. Each time, it fed him variables: time pressure, bystanders, bad angles, the kind of uncertainty that hides in sleeves. He learned to move like he'd always intended to be there. He learned how to do less, and how less could be enough.
Hours later—or minutes, or lifetimes—the room folded back into the bay. Vladivostok had grown colder, or he had. He checked his hands. They trembled only the way hands do after holding on too tight to something that wanted to fall.
Module unlocked: Warehouse (placeholder inventory). Cleanroom (trial extended). Ledger (active). Note: resolve registered.
"Warehouse," he said.
A catalog slid into view, but it wasn't a catalog so much as a promise. Slots that read PENDING. Items represented as sanitized silhouettes, devoid of names that would moor them to law or history. It felt like standing before a library with all the titles scraped off. He could feel the weight of what was possible pressing through the glass.
"Is this a test?"
All modules are tests.
He turned from the water and climbed the hill. The city clicked and hummed with its own private pains. At the bus stop, a man argued with his reflection in the kiosk. Two sailors laughed too loudly at something that wasn't funny. Mitya walked, counting breaths, cataloging exits and alleys and the way light pooled at corners and left edges for the brave and the stupid.
His phone chimed—only it wasn't his phone. Ledger: zeroed at dawn, incremented at dusk. Balance: 0.00. A small note appended itself in neat font: Wealth is a measure of time, not metal.
"Then give me time."
Offer detected: Low‑risk deniable service. Compensation: modest. Collateral risk: minimal. Moral load: low. Accept?
He stopped under a flickering streetlamp. He had the sensation of standing on ice that might hold if he didn't jump. "Define service."
Information relay. Non‑violent. Objective: verification of transit schedule metadata. Complication: potential contact with unsanctioned third party. Instruction: avoid escalation.
Transit schedule metadata. Vladivostok lived on transit—ships and trains, trucks shuttling crates heavy with the world. He felt the door in front of him again: unmarked, waiting. In another life, maybe he would have studied medicine, like Anya, whom he knew as the girl with the braid who cut through the hospital's haunted corridors as if she owned their ghosts. In this life, the door was open, and he was someone who had already walked through.
"Accept," he said.
Acknowledged. Cleanroom engaging.
A second reality layered over his night—voices filtered through an interface that braided anonymity with command. It felt like a choir humming on a frequency his marrow could hear. Coordinates, times, a courier whose name would never become a story. He learned quickly. He asked the right questions and, more importantly, the ones that couldn't be answered out loud.
An hour later, he had verified what needed verifying. He never touched a crate. He never crossed a line except the one that exists inside a person, where you decide that knowing and not intervening is an action in itself.
Ledger updated. Balance: 200.00. Note: First increments are ceremonial.
"Ceremonial," he murmured. "Like a knife."
He cut across to the hospital as if drawn. He told himself he was just walking. He found himself watching windows instead—rectangles of bright where lives were being stitched back together by hands that smelled like soap and resolve.
Anya came out into the cold for a breath that wasn't filtered. She recognized him, or maybe recognized the posture boys take when they pretend to be older than they are. "You again," she said, not unkindly. "Do you sleep?"
"Sometimes," he said. "Do you?"
She smiled, the kind you give a stranger to remind yourself you're human. "On Thursdays."
"It's Friday," he said.
"Then I'm late." Her gaze slid past him to the bay. "Storm coming."
"In the water or the city?"
"Both." She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. "You look like someone with a decision in your pocket."
He didn't ask how she could tell. He was tired of questions that told on him. "What do you do," he asked instead, "when choosing feels like stepping off a roof?"
"Check the ground," she said. "Make sure there's snow."
He laughed, softer this time. "I'll try to schedule my falls."
"You look like the kind of person who'll be busy," she said, not as a compliment. "Get some sleep, Dmitry."
He watched her go back inside, and the door swallowed her like a sea takes back a wave. He stood a while longer in the cold.
System whispered, gentler than before: Operator, further access is possible.
"What's the price?"
It didn't answer. It didn't need to. He could feel the weight of what would come—the way the city's arteries would open to him if he pressed in the right places, how the world would translate into vectors and margins and a kind of power that substituted for safety when you didn't know what safety felt like. He was seventeen and already older than the winter.
When he reached home, the room was the same familiarity of thin walls and thicker silence. He lay down and let the ceiling spin into the white horizon of the Sim. The object on the table waited. The door to the unmarked room breathed steadily.
Resolve equals access, the System had said.
"Then teach me," he said, eyes open to the dark. "And let me keep what it takes."
Acknowledged, the voice said, nearly warm. Module progression queued. Operator directives: pending.
Outside, Vladivostok turned in its sleep, and the storm kept its appointment.