When the boys woke up, they were very tired, even though they had slept well. Something in them seemed to have changed, but what? They couldn't understand it at all. Kirill and Maksim didn't even want to understand why they were comfortable lying in bed and sleeping until they were fully rested. But Vlad was the most nervous of all — he wasn't himself, constantly walking in circles around the room and speaking either out loud or in his own mind:
— If I sleep a little more, it will be disrespectful to the counselors. On the other hand, if I sleep well, I'll be more useful.
Vlad stopped and, like a professor at a university preparing to lecture students about the Trojan Horse, raised a finger and said:
— Decided, I'll sleep. Then I'll be more useful.
He lay down as if someone had injected something into his arm, and fell asleep. Or as if someone had pressed on his carotid artery.
Mildred entered the room. When she saw Vlad sleeping, she placed juice beside him and quietly whispered into his ear:
— Drink the juice at 10:21.
She left the room, closing the door behind her.
At that time, Alex and Denis went out for a walk around the camp. No one understood how these two boys, who had been fighting back on the bus, were now walking together. They talked about different things: their hobbies, parents, who they wanted to become in the future, and so on. At one point, they saw the tree where Vlad and Elizabeth had once written something. They looked at each other, smiled slightly, ran to the counselors, and said:
— Do you have something sharp?
Meanwhile, Vlad did not hear Mildred, but somehow seemed to know that he had to drink the juice at 10:21. He slightly sat up and took a sip. The juice was, as always, wonderful — overall the same as usual, but with one addition: it felt as though it was whispering something to him. Like in his story "The Foggy School," where Simon and Nolan had a dark side controlling them. As though the juice was the same, as though it was telling him to obey the counselors, to be obedient.
The counselor looked surprised, and Vladimir said:
— Why do you need something sharp?
Alex replied:
— We want to do something.
The counselors stepped aside, talked among themselves, and when they returned, they gave them a knife — not very sharp, but not very dull either.
Alex and Denis ran to the tree, and Alex carved the letter "D," while Denis carved the letter "A," placing everything inside a heart. They smiled and sat beneath the tree. Denis rested his head on Alex's knees and asked him to massage his head. Alex didn't mind — rather the opposite.
Time passed unnoticed, and they decided to go to the cafeteria to finally eat.
Kirill and Maksim had also been sleeping, just like Vlad. They were huge sleepyheads — always sleeping during classes, except for chemistry and biology, because they liked those subjects. They finally decided to get up, quickly got dressed, and went to the cafeteria to get food. But Vlad was still asleep. The boys started getting nervous. Not to mention Elizabeth — she couldn't stay still, pacing back and forth anxiously.
Sasha jokingly said:
— Did you fall in love with Vlad or something?
Elizabeth merely crossed her arms over her chest and waved her hand, silently meaning: "Get lost, none of your business."
When Vlad arrived, she quickly hugged him, but then sat back down in her place and began eating quickly. Vlad sat down as Elizabeth used sign language to tell him:
— Let's go meet the kids from the "Beautiful Violets"? And then to the library.
Vlad understood sign language, but didn't answer, only nodded and smiled. Elizabeth was so happy, as though someone had told her she had received every book in the world for free.
The spoiled children decided to go with Elizabeth and Vlad to meet the children from "Beautiful Violet." All the other children followed them too. To put it shortly and clearly — all the children from "The Awakening Rose" went.
The children from "Beautiful Violets" were older, around sixteen or seventeen years old. By the end of the camp session, they would become counselors themselves.
Rio was the first to start the conversation:
— Hi, what are your names? Can you tell us more about the camp?
A girl about sixteen years old looked at them. She had a beautiful figure, lovely skin pale as a porcelain doll's. She smiled and said:
— Hello, my name is Eli. I'm sixteen years old, and if you want to know more about the camp, it's better to ask the counselors. We might be mistaken.
Her voice sounded thick and dragging, like the counselors', but not quite as strong.
A boy almost identical to her continued for her and said:
— Like Eli said, it's best if you ask the counselors. We might tell you something wrong, and you want accurate information, right?
The children nodded and decided to go to the counselors, but Elizabeth and Vlad went, just as Elizabeth had said earlier, to the library. In the library, they took books that were suspiciously proper even for themselves. They read in silence — they liked it. When they finished reading, they went beneath that same tree. When they saw the inscription "D+A" inside the heart, they chuckled quietly.
They sat beneath the tree and started talking again. Vlad was braiding Elizabeth's hair when Yulia, one of the counselors, called them and said:
— Come on, let's go to the assembly hall, we have to perform something there, okay?
Vlad and Elizabeth nodded. Yulia walked ahead; Vlad's legs had gone numb, he groaned softly and walked with Elizabeth.
The assembly hall was already full of children. Alex and Denis sat together, Denis holding Alex's hand. In the assembly hall, they decided to stage "Romeo and Juliet." The children sat and watched, but Vlad and Elizabeth were bored — they knew it by heart. When it ended, Vlad and Elizabeth went back to the library with Vlad's notebook, and Vlad began writing:
"Performance of the Two-Faced."
They called it the "Performance of the Two-Faced," but inside the enormous hall there were no spectators — only the same faceless puppets whose will had been erased down to its very foundation. Every morning here began with a monotonous, low hum. It continuously vibrated at a frequency of 430 Hertz — an oily, viscous sound that seeped through the skull and flooded the mind with sticky fog. The puppet masters called this hypnotic whisper "Direction." The soundwave paralyzed the neocortex, forcibly shifting the brain's electrical activity to the theta level — a state of deep, irreversible waking sleep. Logic, memory, and one's own "self" dissolved within that sound. All that remained was pure, absolute hypnosis controlling every breath. Over thirty years of the Performance, no one had ever seen those sitting in the theater boxes above the stage; only fragments of their orders drifted through rusty loudspeakers, which the sleeping mind perceived as its own, only correct thoughts.
The Conveyor Belt for Burning Away the Mind
No one was born an actor in this theater. Every person was brought here through a merciless conveyor belt of mental violence consisting of three stages.
Everything began in completely black, soundproof rooms — conditions of total sensory deprivation. The prisoner was stripped of all external stimuli: no light, not a single rustle, no tactile sensations. In such emptiness, the human brain lost its connection to reality within 48 hours. It was then that three layers of sound were played through hidden headphones: low-frequency infrasound inducing causeless, primal terror, binaural beats, and the monotonous, dry ticking of a whispering metronome that gradually replaced the rhythm of the person's own heartbeat.
When the brain sank into a pliable trance, the "Breaking of Anchors" began — the methodical destruction of the past. Special linguistic codes were broadcast through loudspeakers, layered over personal memories. If a person tried to remember their name, a voice in the darkness gently whispered: "That name belongs to a dead man. Your name is silence." If the face of a loved one appeared in memory, the hypnotic command instantly linked that image with suffocating, unbearable pain. The brain, protecting itself from suffering, blocked and burned away those neural connections on its own. After several weeks of continuous suggestion, the personality turned into a clean, empty sheet.
At the final stage came the fixation of the "Mental Lock." The emptied prisoner was led before a mirror. At that moment, their mind resembled liquid cement — ready to take any shape imposed upon it. For the first time, the puppet master placed a heavy mask into the prisoner's numb hand and pronounced the key audio anchor — a short metallic click from the loudspeaker. At the very same instant, a trigger program was permanently hammered into the mind: "The mask is your face. The spike is an extension of your bone. To loosen your grip means death."
The Anatomy of Masks and Trance Triggers
This post-hypnotic command became stronger than unconditional reflexes. The hypnosis penetrated so deeply that the autonomic nervous system restructured itself: the actors' heartbeat and breathing synchronized completely with the frequency of the hum in the hall. The muscles of the hands obeyed the mental command so rigidly that over time the tendons became permanently twisted by spasms; the fingers transformed into grotesque bony locks forever fused with the wooden rod of the mask. Beneath the masks, people's faces had long become pale, hairless blanks. Their skin had thinned and yellowed from the absence of sunlight, and their lips had atrophied — the hypnotic block imposed a physical prohibition on any sounds except the moaning regulated by the script.
The mask itself, made from a mixture of plaster, compressed ash, and chemical hardeners, controlled emotions through trance triggers:
White Side (Ecstasy): a matte-white half with empty eye slits and a frozen, unnaturally wide smile. By touching this side to the face, the person under suggestion experienced a burst of artificial, chemical happiness so intense their knees weakened. The brain completely believed in this illusion of joy.
Black Side (Repentance): a charred, rough surface repeating the contours of a face distorted by pain. The moment the mask was turned with this side outward, the mental program instantly activated the panic centers: the actor felt as though they were being burned alive or drowned in icy water. There was no physical pain, but the hypnotized mind suffered for real.
The Synchronization Ritual
Every four hours came the moment of "Synchronization" — the phase when hypnosis deepened to a critical, absolute level. Two figures frozen upon the stage moved closer together at the center of the circle. They no longer remembered who they had been to each other in their former lives — husband and wife, brother and sister, or mortal enemies. The mental code had completely erased their past, replacing it with emptiness.
Their movements were measured down to the millimeter, obeying invisible strings of trance. At the signal from the loudspeaker, they raised the masks to their faces. The left hand of each figure convulsively gripped its own shoulder; it was the final unconscious defensive reflex of the body desperately trying to break through the mental block and hold onto the vanishing "self." But the moment the mask touched the skin, a new wave of suggestion flooded the brain completely. The remnants of will shut down. The line of the mask divided the shared hallucination in half: one of them turned the black side outward, accepting within their mind the suffering of invisible spectators, while the other turned the white side outward, transmitting false peace.
An Abyss Without Escape
Sometimes, deep within the exhausted psyche, a "Necrosis of Will" occurred — an extremely rare malfunction when the overstrained brain briefly cast off the chains of suggestion for a fraction of a second. In one such moment, the actor holding the mask looked into the empty eyeholes of his partner. In the depths of his pupils he saw not a human being, but another mirror reflecting an endless corridor of masks disappearing into darkness. For a fraction of a second, awareness returned to him: he understood that his entire life, his feelings, and his movements were nothing more than someone else's mental installation.
He tried to unclench his fingers to release the spike, smash the heavy plaster against the stone floor, and break free from the trance. He desperately wanted to scream, to shatter the illusion and awaken the others.
But the hypnosis was absolute. The defensive mechanisms of suggestion instantly blocked the motor neurons. The mind became trapped inside its own motionless body. The hand, obeying the implanted pattern, merely tightened its grip on the wooden rod and pressed the mask harder against the face, sinking fingers into the dead plaster. The soundwave from the speakers grew louder, transmitting the final command: "Forget." And the consciousness obediently complied, instantly erasing that second-long flash of rebellion.
The darkness of suggestion merged with the darkness outside. In that enormous room without windows or doors, salvation did not exist, because the most terrible, vigilant, and reliable jailer had become their own forever-sleeping mind. Humanity no longer needed overseers — the brain itself punished any attempt at awakening with paralysis. In complete, silent emptiness, the Performance continued, and the hypnotic sleep deepened endlessly.
When they looked at their work of art, they smiled and went walking again.