This piece focuses on two of the main characters, Innokentiy Zvezdochkov and Aleksei Kholodov. They are in an old apartment block having a nice conversation as the world is burning around them.
Innokentiy Zvezdochkov is a leader figure—the one in charge of where he and Aleksei Kholodov go—but he is often not accurate. You could call him…a false genius. That’ll work.
Aleksei Kholodov is a follower figure. He is trying to sort through his own head to figure out what is real and what is not. He is not having a good time with it.
Otchayaniye is the setting. It is a bleak factory nation with bare housing.
Chapter Thirteen
“This message will continue until nothing is left to hear it.” SCP-3426 (SCP Foundation)
“What if empathy existed?” Zvezdochkov asks me as we stand in front of the door.
I look at the back of his head inquisitively.
I raise my eyebrows. “It does exist,” I say as Zvezdochkov coughs into his sleeve.
“Explain why Nusquam’s looking for us,” he says. “If this strange empathy thing existed, then we’d be just fine.”
“That’s it, we’re not. You are saying is that empathy is propaganda. As we all know, propaganda is truth, as can be seen from our beloved government’s speech,” I reply.
Zvezdochkov opens the door, walks up to the watchman, and whispers, “Quoth the Raven, nevermore*.”
The watchman, an Otchayaniyan who has defected, jumps and yelps. He is wearing an Otchayaniyan uniform—a trench coat and a beaten up civilian cap—with Nusquam’s badges sloppily painted on. Poor soul, his uniform is dirty and he has lost everyone he once loved—once cherished more than himself. Pity that he is now considered a traitor and, if Otchayaniye grows to what it once was again, he will be executed for his crimes if he stays. Zvezdochkov acknowledges this.
“I’ll pay you for your silence, my former comrade,” he says—however, he is too late. The defected one has shouted to his fellow soldiers already, and Zvezdochkov is pulling me along as we run. He is muttering many words under his breath. Must I describe what these words are, and must I translate them? I must—the reader probably doesn’t understand the fictional language we all know.
“Leonid—you have let him down yet again. You have tried this route a thousand times, over a thousand years within one day. You will never succeed, will you? You tried your best, you tried your best to lie to him to make him care about himself,” he says. “Do you have to go back…again? Do you have to live in this endless hell again?” He speaks to himself in the voice of someone who has lived a hundred lifetimes but never progressed.
I interrupt him.
“Who are you talking to?”
We run down the stairs and out the door into an alley. As Zvezdochkov catches his breath, he glares at me.
“I’m not Leonid. I’m Innokentiy Mikhailovich Zvezdochkov,” he snaps at me.
I raise my eyebrows as I try to inhale. “Who are you?” I ask. “You’re Zvezdochkov, but you spoke to Leonid like you were speaking to yourself.”
Zvezdochkov raises his eyebrows after he catches his breath.
“Leonid…Leonid does not matter. I am not a self-insert,” he says. “We are living in reality. Reality is where we live. We do not live in a fictional world.” Zvezdochkov puts his hands on my shoulders. “See? I exist. I am here. I exist. I am right here, sitting in front of you, on the pavement.”
When Zvezdochkov comes to his senses again, we continue running. We end up in Boris Yevegenievich’s scrapyard. I see the old tank that Zvezdochkov blew up—so long ago? It was only a few days!—and wonder how he found me there. It is like he has lived through these last few days many times, so I ask him.
“Shut up,” he tells me. “Do not ask questions, and do not resist. This is for both of our good.”
“At what exact point, then, should one resist? When one’s belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one’s home?” The Gulag Archipelago Vol. 1, Solzhenitsyn, 13
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll let you control everything.”
We sit in the darkness and stare at each other. After a while, I ask him a question.
“What is real?”
*”The Raven,” Edgar Allan Poe