Foresight

Chapter One

The most infuriating thing about foresight is the clarity of consciousness and the completeness of sensations.

I was in the room. Small and dark from the thick thick curtains on the window. It smelled of both mold and dust. The outlines of a closet, a wide bed with lumpy blankets, two bedside tables, and a chair littered with crumpled clothes could be discerned.

I breathed heavily, standing at the door, listening to the silence.

And the silence was dead, deathly.

My name is Nikita, I’m twenty-five years old, I deal in securities, I’m absolutely healthy. This is what happened when I went to bed a few hours ago.

Now everything is somewhat different, because I have foresight.

Feeling around the wall, I felt for the switch and clicked the key as softly as possible. The light didn't come on. Despite all the absurdity of the act, it made sense: sometimes the light bulbs begin to glow.

Not this time.

I quietly walked around the bed. My left leg was aching at the ankle as usual; I had once pulled a ligament. He opened the curtains slightly. I looked outside through a cloudy sheet of thin plastic.

The street was empty, except for cars, mostly parked along the curbs, sometimes frozen in the middle of the roadway. Some rusted into trash, two were flattened into colored iron pancakes. Several cars were surprisingly clean and brand new, as if they had just arrived from the showroom.

Only the side mirrors on all of them were smashed to pieces.

People, of course, are not visible.

Gray-purple clouds hung over the city like a heavy dome. The light came from them, the unhealthy gloomy light of the World After.

I let go of the curtain, leaving a gap, and turned towards the bed.

There, as I expected, there were two people lying there. A man and, judging by the long hair, a woman. The bodies had long been mummified, dried out, and turned into dark wax dolls. On the nightstand there was an empty wine bottle with sediment at the bottom, two dirty glasses and a package of some pills, which the couple washed down with wine before hugging and falling asleep forever.

I bent over the chair and began to carefully rummage through my clothes.

Similar foresights had already happened, and I knew that I would not find anything valuable there. I was just gathering my courage. There was one trick that not everyone dares to do, but I have already learned something.

Closet!

It can be dangerous, which is why many people don't even look there. But in vain. Why rummage through the clothes that people took off before committing suicide, then open the bedside tables, where they found only a package of condoms, some dried creams and a detective story from Daria Dontsova, when there is a huge closet in the room?

Let's say I don't need clothes, but clean underwear, socks... who knows what might end up in the closet?

Weapons, there may be weapons.

Or food.

Or a bottle of alcohol.

Some people keep good liquor in their wardrobe. I am absolutely convinced of this. There is a large wooden box there. And in it is some rare old whiskey. And also cognac. And a canister of alcohol. Strong alcohol is not only and not so much for getting drunk. It is suitable for a variety of purposes.

I finished checking the nightstands. I hid a package of condoms in my pocket; this is also a multifunctional thing, almost like alcohol. And he looked at the closet.

Unfortunately, there were serious reasons not to open it...

Well then!

The main thing is the first step.

I tensed up. He took a step, with force, as if in water. After a moment, the resistance was released, the body submitted and began to obey. I went to the closet. He hesitated. And he pulled the door towards himself.

In the semi-darkness a large mirror flashed on the back side of the door. Not just a wardrobe, but a wardrobe; my fears came true! Fortunately, I was ready and immediately looked away, catching a glimpse of my unshaven, emaciated face and gray-green camouflage clothes.

The temptation to take a closer look at yourself was great, but some temptations should not be succumbed to.

I quickly began to open the drawers, throwing clothes out onto the floor. Women's panties and T-shirts, towels, sweaters, a wad of money, a jewelry box - everything was mercilessly thrown away.

And here come the men's boxes.

From one I took out a package of new socks and an opened package of panties. I glanced at the size and also put it aside along with the socks. He quickly sorted through the shirts and took one, slightly worn, but made of good thick cotton.

Then he looked into the bottom of the wardrobe.

There really was a cardboard box with Martel cognac.

Wow!

I took the skinny backpack off my shoulders, put clean underwear, a shirt and a bottle there, taking it out of the box. He threw the backpack over his shoulders again.

And I saw, from the very corner of my eye, something flash in the mirror.

Something big, clumsy, flickering, as if illuminated by a flashlight.

No luck...

I didn't even try to turn around. Instead, he pulled a hefty dark metal knife from its sheath on his belt and broke the mirror with several blind blows, after which he slammed the wardrobe door.

He leaned against the closet, shaking his head. He hit the door with his fist, angry with himself. A shard of mirror stuck in the door crunched.

Of course, during the foresight there was a reason not to look into the wardrobes.

Knife in sheath. To the doors. Through the hallway (the mirror by the door was broken by someone before me). Through the open door, into the entrance, down. The fifth floor - I knew, although I didn’t remember how I went up.

I hate foresights! The third one was the nastiest, but this one was also gaining momentum.

I walked out of the entrance into the red-gray twilight. It was cool, but somehow unexpectedly stuffy, as if the air outside was stagnant. Having quickly looked around, I went to the intersection. There, in the distance, could be seen a large red letter M - not luminous, of course, but unmistakably recognizable.

Are you going to take the subway? Or will I just pass by?

It's not a fact that I recognize this.

But it was worth a try.

I walked along two tall multi-storey buildings (alas, there were no numbers or signs with the name of the street on them). The glass, of course, was broken, and in some places the windows were boarded up with plywood, covered with film, or translucent plastic sheets were inserted. Just under the roof, several windows with corrugated glass gleamed provocatively red. Great value as far as I'm concerned.

At the far entrance I saw a stool, on which sat a teenage girl in a dazzling white knee-length dress and oversized patent leather sandals (I looked away from them just in case). In front of her on the asphalt stood a glass of cloudy glass with a burning candle stub inside. The girl watched me silently and intently. Her face was unnaturally calm, her hair was styled, and it seemed that even her lips and eyes were slightly tinted.

How is she not cold?

I passed by. In the World After, it’s not particularly common to communicate with someone. Now there was a square ahead - trees with bare, dead, as if in winter, branches, rare pavilions.

M was approaching. At least I could see the name of the station or get a better look at the metro pavilion!

Then there was a boom behind.

I turned around, already knowing what I would see.

Halfway between me and the entrance where the girl was sitting, an animal stood in a cloud of dust.

Most of all he looked like a wolf the size of a horse. The fur on the neck and scruff of the neck puffed up into a lush mane - this is how lions were painted in the old days in Europe.

The beast's eyes flickered red. He slowly turned his head, now towards me, now towards the girl on the stool. The dust settled slowly.

Now the animal will make a decision and jump off to the entrance. The girl is more defenseless than me, and should probably taste better. Predators will always prefer to attack weak prey.

And I’ll run forward and try to dive into the subway...

The wolf shook his mane. And he walked towards me. Slowly at first, and then faster and faster, silently and inexorably.

Crap!

Still, there was no need to go into the closet!

I ran, trying not to notice the pain in my leg. Quickly, desperately, realizing that I wouldn’t have time to get to the metro, and even if I did, there would be no shelter there. There was no one on the street except me and the strange girl. I ran along the broken windows of a one-story pavilion covered with gray metal siding, which used to house some kind of shops. In some places the shop windows were boarded up with boards and plywood, in others they gaped empty, but hiding there was suicide. It’s like climbing into a feeder and shouting: It’s time to eat!

The wolf jumped, cutting the distance by half, I realized that he was playing and was able to catch up with me in an instant.

Why did I go into the wardrobe? For laundry and drinks?

Even if he changed his clothes and drank, he would die in clean underpants and drunk!

A human silhouette suddenly appeared in the broken windows. I saw a guy of about twenty, thick-set, tall, wearing round glasses, a bright T-shirt and jeans. In the guy’s hands was a hefty fool, which some misunderstood called a machine gun - a Ferfrans HVLAR machine gun. Such a dark gray crap, all sort of lattice-like, as if assembled from a construction set, and below it sticks out a heavy round magazine.

Seeing the creation of American gunsmiths in my native Moscow landscapes was so unexpected, and the appearance of a young big man with a ten-kilogram machine gun in his hands was so sudden that I stumbled and fell.

At that same moment the young man began to shoot.

Not at me.

I knew that the HVLAR had a clever recoil damping system that made it actually shootable even with one hand. And yet it looked amazing.

Most of the bullets, of course, missed, mostly above my head. But the overgrown wolf got it too. For the first time he made a sound, a mixture of a growl and a squeal, and spun around in place, hitting me on the thigh with his tail. The blow was like a club!

The guy laughed and stopped shooting.

In vain.

The wolf gathered himself, compressed himself like a spring - and jumped, knocking the shooter off his feet. At the last moment, he managed to pull the trigger again, the shots sounded dully from under the carcass that had crushed the guy, the wolf let out a dull roar, twitched, and lay flat on the shooter.

I got up and took out a knife. He stood looking at the motionless body of the young man, crushed by the motionless beast. A gun barrel protruded from under the carcass. Also motionless, of course, only a light smoke came from it. Red flowed abundantly onto the ground, looking black in the crimson twilight.

Badly.

Approaching carefully, I pulled the machine gun, standing so that I would not be hit if the trigger caught and the weapon fired.

Only when the machine gun was in my hands did I feel a little calmer. With difficulty, but still I figured out how to switch the Khvlar to single shooting. He took aim at the animal's head and shot point blank.

It splattered with dark blood, white bone fragments and something shiny, either metal or glass. The wolf didn't move.

I could barely get his head off the guy's face. However, there was no need to rush; the creature tore the neck clean, right down to the spine.

But still, I pulled him out from under the wolf. He was covered in blood, completely and irrevocably dead. The beast not only tore his face and throat, it also bit his right arm up to the elbow, and it remained hanging, either clinging to the fur or getting its fingers entangled in it.

Oddly enough, the shooter’s glasses did not break, they just flew off into the mud. I turned them over with curiosity. Anti-reflective lenses, of course, are suicidal to wear. I got it somewhere... I put the glasses on his chest.

Where did you get such a gun, boy? And what did you want - to save me? Or did you just lose your nerve?

I carefully searched the body, trying not to get too dirty and involuntarily noticing how professionally I checked my pockets.

And, to my surprise, I found a mobile phone with a non-glare protective film on the screen. It even turned out to be loaded. The network indicator, of course, did not show anything, the entrance was password-protected, I was rewarded only with a screensaver with a photo of some middle-aged woman. Mother? I waved the phone in front of the guy’s mangled and bloody face, but the phone refused to recognize its owner in this state. I was about to put the phone on the guy’s chest and leave, but I changed my mind and took it out of the case.

On the back of the case there was an engraving: Return for a reward. And a phone number.

Not God knows what, but I tried to remember.

He stood up and took the machine gun more comfortably. Still, he was heavy as a bastard, even if he has weak recoil, you can’t run much with something like that.

But I wasn’t going to run now. It was necessary to check the pavilion where the guy came from. Perhaps there are cartridges there. Or maybe something else...

And then the foresight ended. Unexpectedly early.

Opening my eyes, I sucked in a breath. It felt like I hadn’t been breathing for a minute. This always happens.

My entire body was covered in sticky cold sweat, my hands were shaking slightly. This is also common. Slowly lowering my feet from the bed, I fumbled for my slippers and took my mobile phone from the nightstand. Six in the morning.

It's probably too late to go to bed.

Having opened the list of numbers, I entered into it the one that I had just seen on the dead guy’s phone. Calling now would be disgusting. However, calling in any case is stupid.

But I still wanted to keep the number. It is not often possible to build a bridge from foresight to reality.

Walking over to the window, I rolled the roller blind up. He opened the window slightly, letting in cold air.

Moscow is like Moscow. Ordinary winter Moscow, an ordinary old residential area of ​​Sokolinaya Gora. The sky is gray, but without a purple glow. Snow falls lightly. The car drove away from the neighboring house, slowly and quietly. The lights were already on in many of the windows.

No apocalypse.

None yet.

I’m sick of it... I said with feeling and went to wash myself.

The tiles above the bathtub were loose in some places, and the cracks greedily absorbed the splashes of water from the shower. Spit. The apartment is rented, few people buy apartments now, and they are in no hurry to do renovations either. The builders, however, are not in poverty; they have a lot of work.

The mirror above the sink was turned toward the wall. I didn’t throw it away; in itself it’s not dangerous.

I stood under the generously twisted stream of water and remembered my reflection in the foresight. My reflection, no doubt about it. Hairy, unshaven, with gray shadows under my eyes, but it was me. You can't understand age. Either twenty-five, as it is now, or forty. There is a period in a man’s life when he hardly changes. Women also have it, but it lasts longer.

The frequency of foresights, as everyone knows, depends on the intensity of events occurring in them. My first foresight was exhausting and long, I couldn’t control events, I wandered through the metro tunnel for five or six hours, but absolutely nothing interesting happened. The foresight was repeated only two months later.

So much happened today that it was time to wait for a new foresight the next night.

Coming out of the shower, I sniffed the towel and decided that I could dry myself with it again. He pulled on his underpants, sprayed some deodorant into his armpits, and walked into the kitchen. It was chilly there, there was siphoning through the window, but I didn’t want to get dressed. I turned on the TV on top of the refrigerator, cracked a couple of eggs into a frying pan, and made tea.

The news was all the same as a year, two or five ago. There were hot, cold, trade, hybrid and psychological wars. The big countries were arguing, reproaching each other for treachery and dishonesty, the small ones were puffing up and puffing out their cheeks, China reported calm and success in the Middle Kingdom. Some things became more expensive, while others became cheaper, a new metro station was inaugurated, a satellite was launched from the Vostochny cosmodrome...

But the announcers’ faces were insincere, as if they were thinking about something of their own.

The All-Russian conference on the problem of foresight has opened in Moscow, the announcer said, perking up a little. – Our special correspondent...

I took the frying pan off the heat, placed it on a wooden cutting board in front of me, and turned up the volume.

The correspondent, very young and lively, was reporting either from the Academy of Sciences or from Moscow State University, I missed it. The bearded, ascetic-looking futurologist, identified as scientific director of the Federal Center for Foresight Studies, looked condescendingly at the journalist, clearly enjoying the interview. Not that old, about forty. Probably with connections, since he landed such a sweet position.

– All our viewers are interested in what foresight is? – asked the correspondent. – Especially those who experience it, of course. Does science have the answers?

Science has a lot of answers, the futurologist said slowly. – But there are facts, and there are guesses. What are the facts?

- Yes, yes, what are they? – the journalist could not resist.

For almost a year now, more precisely, eleven and a half months, about five percent of people on Earth have been periodically experiencing nightmares, the futurologist began. – Dreams vary in content, but have an undoubted common element - a post-apocalyptic future. While in foresight, a person perceives what is happening as a very vivid, extremely realistic dream.

I grinned and took a sip of tea.

Yes, yes, foresight is like a realistic dream. And the flame of a lighter is similar to the flame of a gas burner.

They will recruit idiots through their connections to buy government bread...

- So what is it? After all, foresight comes from the English foresight, foresight? Do people dream of future disasters?

In my profession, it’s customary to talk about the future, the futurologist smiled condescendingly. – But I assure you, there is no talk of foresight here.

- Why?

– People experiencing foresight feel approximately at their real age. This means that if we were talking about a nuclear war or another global catastrophe, the world would not have time to change radically. Clouds, destruction - possible. But monstrous animals?

– Mutation? – the journalist suggested.

- Oh, it doesn't happen that fast. – The futurologist shook his head. – We have a whole group of biologists, they gave an interesting report yesterday...

I wiped the plate with a piece of bread, put it in my mouth and poured more tea. The futurist was clearly ready to talk for at least an hour, but the journalist was pressed for time. With a demanding intonation, he again poked the microphone under the scientist’s nose.

– So what is foresight? Should we be afraid or not?

- There is no need to be afraid! Foresight, according to the most reasonable opinion, is a mental phenomenon caused by growing international tensions and the stress of modern city dwellers.

I laughed out loud. And the futurologist continued:

– Even in the Middle Ages there were mental epidemics that covered the whole of Europe! People began to see witches everywhere and engage in self-flagellation. Let's remember the epidemic of St. Vitus's dance in Germany, tarantism in Spain, hysteria in Russia. And we live in a world of archetypes, in a world of rapid exchange of information, so there is nothing surprising in the alignment of nightmares, their acquisition of certain common features and characteristics...

- There is no need to be afraid! – the journalist said solemnly into the camera. – But it’s worth thinking about whether we are living correctly!

Dumb, I said with feeling.

It became clear to me that neither the futurologist nor the journalist themselves had ever experienced foresight.

But studying this amazing phenomenon is important, the journalist continued. – The conference pays significant sums for a documented story about the foresight experience. You see email and phone numbers on your screens...

I’m already running, I promised, looking away.

Whatever foresight is, most people believe that it is a dream from the future. This means that those who see him exist in the future.

But the rest are not.

Which does not contribute to sympathy for those experiencing foresight.

Turning off the TV, I went to get dressed.

Maybe the cataclysm that five percent of people dream about is going to happen tomorrow. Or maybe in ten years.

This in no way eliminates the need to eat, dress, and pay rent.

I knew many people whose lives changed radically with the advent of Foresight. Some quit their jobs, went into religion, binge drinking, endless sexual adventures, and went to other countries or to the Russian hinterland. Others, on the contrary, began to prepare - they went in for sports, read survival guides, bought weapons and went to shooting ranges, got rid of everything shiny and reflective in their houses.

The strangest thing is that this did not depend in any way on whether a person experiences foresight or not. Some were preparing for the bleak future they had already seen, others hoped that their fate would change. There were some reasons for this; from time to time someone stated that they suddenly began to see foresight after they moved from Moscow to a remote Siberian village, or after they completed a shooting training course. But no one could say whether it was true or not, a pattern or an accident. In my opinion, this was all a lie. Anyone who declared that they began to have foresights after moving to some Community of the Future, buying a legendary knife against monsters or undergoing training for survival After was actually making money from it.

I considered myself to be part of that golden mean, which tried to avoid drastic actions. I broke up with my girlfriend, with whom I lived for two years, but the feelings were already fading, and foresight served as the final impetus. We even thought about having a child - perhaps this would add something new to our relationship. But having children while waiting for the apocalypse? We stopped discussing this topic; it disappeared on its own. And after her, relationships.

Moreover, my friend’s foresights did not start.

I began to practice judo, regularly go to the pool and work out at home, but I had no illusions about my fighting qualities. I studied different types of weapons and survival skills. I received a hunting license and bought a decent double-barreled shotgun, from time to time I went to the shooting range and honestly shot fifty rounds of ammunition. But what I saw during the foresight did not give much hope for firearms.

I didn't quit my job either.

From nine in the morning until half past twelve I sat in front of the computer. Indices, prices, exchange rates. There are, of course, all sorts of neural networks that monitor indicators and make their own forecasts, but everyone has long been convinced that without human participation the result is average. So my work remained in demand. A venture analyst at a strong but not too large venture capital fund is not the best profession if the end of the world is ahead. Right?

However, judging by the financial market, no end of the world was foreseen. Big money ignored dreams, even massive and nightmarish ones.

At half past twelve the computer crashed and went into safe mode. It’s a common thing; updates to the system over the last year have been released in a hurry and crudely. While the computer rebooted, I leaned back in my chair and sat looking at the ceiling. The mirror glass partitions dividing the workroom into cubicles were annoying. I have not yet grown up to have my own office and, quite likely, I will not have time to grow up.

I remembered the World After, where mirrors were deadly.

If everything goes as usual, then