Maria hated mathematics even more than her retrograde father's lectures, and more than her stepfather Muharramka's visits. Because her father called from distant Russia not more than once a week, and the stepfather came even less often - when he did not have enough money not only for dope, but even for food. My mother traditionally took him in, but what if a miracle happened and he got rich? A stormy night ensued, and on the second, or at most the third day, she banished her ex-husband and the father of the twins. Sometimes the exorcism was accompanied by ritual yelling, breaking appliances and dishes, and sometimes even the police were called in to help.
Even God could not banish the mathematician. Worse, the devil himself, or one of his cronies, said that it should be studied, it helped to understand the universe, and Daddy agreed with him, and Mary became more and more convinced that her father was an accomplice of Satan, and if not his right or left hand, then certainly his finger...
Professor Kian, a youthful, ever-smiling Irishman with bleached hair and augmented reality glasses with fierce green frames, enthusiastically looked at the monitor, dictated a formula, and, obeying his voice, numbers and letters flashed on the monitor of the classroom board, whose meaning escaped no matter how Maria tried to strain her brain, raped by Xs and Ys.
What did the teacher see instead of a dull screen of letters and numbers against a background of flashing green sparks? All the classmates, except the epileptic Isaac, had either augmented reality lenses or glasses. Both, as the Manga developers assure us, contain scripts... Or whatever... In general, they affect the brain through the senses, and it works more efficiently, so the information is better absorbed.
The old fool, I mean daddy, is sure that the lenses affect something important in the brain, and the person loses adequacy, and it's dangerous: schizophrenia, retrogrades, cyber-terrorists, blah-blah-blah, ko-ko-ko. Yeah, Kian, over there, has already lost all adequacy. And classmates, and the whole advanced world.
Maria propped her head up with her hand, mindlessly watching the flashing numbers. The students came alive, prompting Kean, arguing with each other, and each correct answer sent him into near-orgasmic ecstasy. There was a buzz in the classroom. Once again Maria tried to understand, but there was no way! - and her thoughts returned to her father.
You can understand what was in his head when he set a condition: either a "smart" bracelet that wouldn't let in the Dream universe, and maintenance until she graduated from any higher education institution in the UK, or the Dream and... and nothing, no money. But why did he make her choose mathematics when Maria was going to study psychology at Portsmouth! She didn't want to go there! She would have chosen some geography, she would have studied with interest. Or business would have come in handy. Why torture her with math?
No personal life because of it, all my free time is spent on cramming, but if you only cram, you won't get a high score! And he didn't need it, at least he'd pass somehow, then my dad would throw in some crypto, most likely a thousand Ixcoins, which is the equivalent of twelve thousand pounds! And if they ban ikskoin, Daddy will get out of it, reward his daughter in some other way.
I wanted to yawn, juicy, but Maria caught Kian's gaze and restrained herself. The only good thing about this class was that it was mostly boys... She glanced over at the third row by the door. Her interest was in Ron. Tall, black hair in a wavy mess, his eyes teal green and speckled. He didn't wear contacts, so she could tell right away what kind of eyes he had. And, unlike his peers, Ron already shaves. He is also an athlete; he has boxed and has even been to competitions.
Just looking at him makes your heart race. And... they say girls don't get a rise out of guys. Sure they do - the blood pressure! Sensing her scrutiny, Ron turned his head and Maria hastily shrank back. She hadn't... I mean, yes, she had, but not right now.
She'd imagined a hundred times, walking up to him and starting a conversation... "You're so smart, explain the problem. And then, "Let's do homework together..." So? He has other disciplines, only in math he and Maria crossed paths. And it's not a good idea to ask him out. Most likely, there will be nothing to talk about, just like there is nothing to talk about with all the other peers. Maria is a laughing stock, a retrograde, without lenses or even glasses, as if she were as sick as Isaac, who cannot go to Dream because of epilepsy.
If the father had only a little understanding of what he had deprived his only daughter of! What a miserable existence he had condemned her to!
The
lesson was over, the chairs rattled, Maria turned off the laptop and
stared at her reflection in the black screen: huge dark green eyes,
black eyebrows, black eyebrows, button nose, cheekbones are also
nice, but her lips are not. If she'd had access to the Dream, she
would have adjusted the visualization so that everyone connected to
the Dream universe through glasses or lenses would have seen not
these threads, but plump, pink, inviting lips. And Mariah
would have had her breasts enlarged.
Maybe
it's because she sees people as real, with all their flaws, that
she's not loved. Of course, Ron didn't need lenses so much-he was
perfect.
Watching him sideways, Maria slammed the notebook shut, and reached for her bag, when someone carelessly dropped her folder from the table, and it fell to the floor, spreading its pages like a butterfly's wings. Maria raised her head and shouted to the hovering, lanky Lily, who looked like a Russian tsar, Peter the Great:
- Careful! - Maria returned the folder to the table, but it flew to the floor again.
- Fascist. - Lily smiled smugly, behind her two girlfriends, a fat girl and a redhead who looked like a rabbit, both with lenses.
In September, Maria had moved up to Sixth Form, grade twelve, and now her chosen classes were attended by students from different classes and even other schools, math the most, as many as twenty-five people.
- Why would that be? - Mariah stood up, a chill in her stomach, her heart racing.
Lily grimaced, mimicking her accent, her friends laughed.
- Go back to your place, you dormouse! You're not welcome here.
Maria stood with her arms crossed across her chest and her head thrown back. Lily's bright blue eyes, with their violet pupils, seemed to glow from within. She wanted to say something about Peter the Great and the mustache above his lip, about the shark and the clinging fish, about the inferiority complex that plagued the wrong people, but all her gruff words would be laughed at, so she chose a different tactic:
- Look, why are you picking on me? I hate Russia in general! If only...
Her words were drowned in laughter.
- Hilarious! Say something, huh? - Lily turned to her friends. "She talks like a crow, doesn't she?
- She pretended she didn't know it," the redhead, who looked like her mother when she was young, cut in.
- The wild Russians have no place among normal people," Lily delivered her verdict.
Maria lowered her head, sat down, tried to put her laptop in her bag as a weight, so it wouldn't get thrown on the floor and smashed. Kian pretended not to notice the conflict and hurried away. Now all she could see were the girls' feet. Sneakers, orange sneakers, and athletic red shoes kicking the folder were joined by black men's shoes. They froze, pointing their toes toward Maria.
- What's going on here? - spoke in a velvet baritone, and Maria was stunned. - Lily, what kind of Nazism is this?
- Let her go back to her bears! - Lily snarled, but retreated anyway, and Maria pretended to fumble with her bag. She wasn't ready to look at her savior.
- Thank you," she finally said, tucking her bangs behind her ear and straightening up in her chair.
Standing in front of her was... him. Ron. He was standing there, looking at her questioningly. She fell into that awkward silence, the kind of silence that made her want to crawl under the ground. Her cheeks flushed, her thoughts ran wild.
- Are you all right? - Ron asked, adjusting the laptop bag slung over his shoulder.
Maria shook her head.
- Yeah, I..." She jumped up, almost knocking her chair over and leaning against the table. - Do I really have such a terrible accent? Like a talking crow?
Ron smiled in a way that made butterflies flutter in Maria's stomach.
- Let's go. - Without turning around, he said, "You've been in London since when? Not since I was born.
- Since eight," said Maria, following him.
- I can't imagine what I would have done. I can't imagine what I would do if I went to school in France, for instance. It's crazy hard! A foreign language, and no matter how you learn, it will still have an accent. So you're doing great. - He went outside, squinted at the bright sun, waited for Maria and asked with mild surprise: "You seriously do not understand why they are bothering you?
Maria shook her head, smoothing her hairline with her fingertips.
- Your country shot peaceful demonstrators protesting...
- It's not my country! - Maria exclaimed indignantly. - I hate it. My father stayed there, but my country is here! Don't you understand? Why should I care?
Ron shrugged and nodded as the cars moved.
- That way to the parking lot, isn't it? It's the other way," he said. - His hand gripped her shoulder lightly. - See you tomorrow, Mary.
- See you tomorrow," she dropped it and stared at his retreating back.
Joy was replaced by anger at herself and desolation. Go ahead, do it! Ask him to explain the task, offer... even in the canteen for lunch! No, she just stood there dumbfounded and froze like a sheep! And now what? Should I call her? Stupid. Run after him? Even stupider.
In the parking lot Maria sat behind the wheel of her old Toyota, but did not hurry to leave. She felt sick to her stomach. Very ugly. As if a cuttlefish released an ink cloud, and the whole world was plunged into darkness.
It
rang in my head: "Wild Russians have no place among normal
people. The future stretched her lips in a fake smile of a Russian
dictator, whose greed and stupidity now got her in trouble. Maria was
not interested in politics and did not want to know what he had done
this time. The bastard was always at war, now with strangers, now
with his own.
She started the engine, pulled out of the
parking lot, and instead of driving home, went for a wander in the
park, to feed the ducks. There was no way she could settle down at
home.
The parking lot at the park predictably had no room, but there was a nook for her tiny Toyota at the very end of the parking lot pocket, near the curb, where they also parked.
The day was clear and clear, too warm for October. The park was more crowded than I would have liked.
As they passed by the schoolchildren - loud-mouthed, active, colorful - Maria noticed that they were clustered by nationality: the English and Arabs, who had been here a long time, the Asians separately, the recently arrived Arabs separately.
A Chinese girl of about ten was walking alone and talking to the air in her own language, splashing her arms, laughing, her shining emerald eyes, altered by the lenses of augmented reality, hinted that she was talking to a holographic friend or girlfriend. Maria wouldn't refuse such a friend right now, either.
She had felt out of place before, but there had been other "Russians" in her class before - Amina from Kazakhstan and Pasha from Ukraine, who smoothed the loneliness. But they went to another school, and Maria was left alone.
No matter where she lived, no matter who she worked, she would still be a "wild Russian. But she didn't want to go back to Russia either: there was constant fighting, it was cold. And no freedom. Russia was like a cursed bracelet that cut her off from her dream world.
And here?
Her father's huge house with its marble staircases came to mind. Maria had two rooms: a bedroom and a playroom with a mysterious forest, a railroad and a slide. There was a pond in the garden, where goldfish were released in the summer. My friends Yulia, Alina and Nika came to visit. And Iegorka, who wrote a love confession.
And also an apartment in Yalta, on the top floor of a skyscraper, with a view of the whole town and the sea. From this apartment began her memories. She was a little over five, and in the daytime she was afraid to go near the window, as it seemed that the house would sway and fall. She was also afraid of doctors and people in white who looked like them. Her mother said that she had been seriously ill with meningitis and had suffered in the hospital, hence the fear. But Maria didn't remember that, or anything before the illness.
But she remembered perfectly the tender sea in Yalta, smelling of sunscreen, watermelon peels, and something else beautiful, forever lost.
My mother now rented an apartment on Liam Way, on the western edge near the marsh, a twenty-minute drive from the Raislip subway station. It had once been an industrial neighborhood, then rebuilt, the factories stylized as shopping centers, but the two-story brick houses still reminded me of barracks from Russian cartoons. I saw them, and I thought, "You're not doing so well, my friend.
Yes, there were prospects in London, but... But for the talented, out-of-the-box thinkers. Maria had no illusions about herself: she was an average student, a mediocre student. In addition - the "wild Russian" and for the locals will remain as such forever. Her father's power did not extend here.
Prospects were not good, and Maria did not consider returning to Russia, it was like voluntarily putting herself on a chain. Every compatriot dreams of being here, not everyone is lucky, so it's a sin to complain. Probably.
Five years of patience and she'd graduate, do what she wanted...
So far five years seemed like an unrealistic time frame, the best years ripped out of her life by the old samodurai.
Her stomach rumbled unhappily, hinting that it was time for a snack, and Maria decided to ignore the diet and sweeten her lousy life with cheesecake, there was a cafe with divine sweets in the entertainment center.
As she walked, she dreamed of lenses and a program that only costs a hundred pounds. You put the lenses on, you buy food and whatever you eat, instead of the real thing you get a taste of what you like. For example, you chew kale and it's like you're enjoying a brownie. And no dieting, no risk of getting fat. Maria considered her slender long legs her greatest asset, and was afraid that her object of pride would fall into disrepair, so she had to deny herself a lot of things. Unlike most of the scarecrow-like women around here, she liked to look good.
But guys didn't like her for some reason. I mean, at first they'd fallen for her, like that blond guy over there, looking on admiringly, and then... I guess the accent really did scare them off. At eighteen, she hadn't even been kissed; if she told anyone, they'd laugh.
She was so thoughtful that she did not notice how she almost bumped into an orange clown with orange eyes with vertical pupils. She shrieked, running nose-to-nose into his ugly face. The clown smiled, pressed the red ball of his nose - he grunted. Maria instinctively took a step back, but the clown, meant to entertain children, kept up, lurched to the side, pointed to his eyes, and mumbled with a slight accent:
- "You're too much of a show-off, sister. The cameras, the voice. Surveillance everywhere.
Maria dazed and instinctively grabbed her laptop.
-
What do you want?
The clown shook his head and grinned, showing
his white teeth. The two upper two incisors must have been tight in
the gum, and they protruded forward when they collided.
- You'll need this. I will. Soon. The time will come.
The clown recoiled and spun toward the mother and child, who excitedly began to press his quacking nose.
- Come to our amusement park! The dinosaurs are almost like the real thing! Carousels-" He handed the boy an orange flag with a picture of a caterpillar on it.
Crazy? Or a retrograde terrorist who confused it with someone else? The latter is unlikely: the man has lenses. But for sure he was insane and could be dangerous, she needed to tell the cops. Maria took out her phone, frowned, deciding whether or not to call. Any Englishman would have called, of course, just to be on the safe side. Maria couldn't get over the fear instilled in Russia, when her mother frightened her with an angry policeman who would take unhealthy Masha away and put her in jail.
The cake did not fix the mood, just added to the emptiness anger at herself for not resisting temptation, and Maria went to wander through the mall, flooded mostly with schoolchildren, because not far from the park was a huge school and a newly opened college.
There were two floors, one above the other, with a decorative pond with lilies and turtles in the middle, surrounded by benches and potted palms, and a glass domed roof on top. On the second-floor level spun three-dimensional hologram letters: M.A.N.G.A., surrounded by a running line: "The future is near. Touch the man-made universe!" Holographic arrows, moving from the air to the second-floor floor, pointed to the door where the immersion pods were located in the simulated universe. That's what the developers called the world of Manga, where everything is real.
And above the volumetric letters the developer's abbreviation was deciphered, which was known to every retrograde and bum in every corner of the world: the blue letter M was Meta, the yellow A was Amazon, the red N wasNetflix, G was Google, and the black A was Apple.
The smartest and boldest at the initiative of the late Sergey Brin, the developer of Google, forgetting about the differences, got together in October 2008 and created a mega-corporation, in order to stand against the global crisis. In January 2009, Steve Jobs swooped in like a shark on blood for big money - thus the black letter "A" appeared, and essentially the Disney studio he owned stopped competing with Netflix.
The legs brought us to the door, which had been turned into a billboard, where holograms were replaced by pictures. First, Manga's motto: "Creativity. Stability. Affluence. Then the appeal: "Be your true self! Reject Fear. Get what you want. After that came the three-dimensional figures of a busty pixie, a mighty warrior in a horny helmet, and a wizard with a branching ball lightning in his palm. Pay, and you're not a fat girl with pimples, but a real beauty. Not a manager whose fake smile makes his jaw drop, but a great and ruthless magician.
Maria, not spoiled by the virtual, stared mesmerized at this trio, through which, as through the wall, passed two shabby men with pious faces.
How I wanted to go there! But this salon was 21+, which meant you could rob, kill, rape in the virtual. They say there's a red-light district with a home for all sorts of sadists and other perverts, and you can also play war, and the nopis behave like real people. You can choose your own mini-reality, and if you don't have enough money, you can frolic in the general one.
With a sigh, Maria headed further, toward the hologram, "Be real." An arrow pointed to a glass wall, behind which was a souvenir shop with trinkets for women, because many, especially immigrant women, still preferred to adorn themselves with silver, gold, and bijouterie.
The wall was also adorned with translucent holograms: a golden owl with ruby eyes, a pearl necklace, a fiery Chinese dragon, curved like an s, with little legs and a tail so long that it outlined its body in a circle, a ring in the shape of a uroboros, a grinning wolf snout...
The picture before my eyes blurred. I felt nauseous. My head-not sick, no. I felt as if my brain had become a roaming dough that wanted very much to come out of my skull. Good thing there was a couch in front of the store, where Maria sat down, scaring someone away. The monotonous hum of the customers merged into the buzzing of stinging insects.
Maria
groaned, clutching her temples. A laptop clacked in her bag, which
had fallen to the floor. What kind of day was it today? Suddenly she
thought of her epileptic Isaac, and thought she was about to be
convulsed... But little by little the pain subsided, and the lump in
her throat dissolved, as did all the unpleasant feelings, including
moping.
There was a kind of... clarity, or something. It
was as if there was a frosty day in my head, crisp and clear. Her
thoughts became clear. Thousands of details came through that she
would not have noticed before.
By the carved railing, ten feet away from Maria, stood two girls about her age, about eighteen, give or take. The blond one had a ketchup stain on her sweater, and the fat one, shaved clean, had dirty pants that bubbled up to her knees. So they'd been sucked into the Dream so much that they'd stopped taking care of themselves.
The fat one pursed her lips. There was no way to hear what she was whispering from this distance, but somehow Maria miraculously knew it! It was as if someone was dictating, "...awesome turkey chops and unfiltered beer nal..." The fat lady turned away, showing a crease of fat on the back of her head, and the voice in her head died down.
"Is it that I can read lips? - Maria wondered to herself. - Interesting. And the state is interesting, as if someone opened a flap in my brain, and they worked at full force. I wish it would never end!"
Marveling to herself, Maria began to observe people, and the previously unknown was revealed to her. By some miracle, just by looking at some of the visitors at the mall, she knew how they were: brave or cowardly, confident or timid. She knew if that man over there had a bad back, or if that Asian woman over there had a bad leg, or if that smiling guy stomping after three other people wanted to punch someone. Maria wasn't worried about the fallen laptop, either, because she knew that if it had crashed, it would have made a different sound, but the fall was cushioned by the folder lying inside.
Was this what is called clairvoyance?
The answer, too, came on its own as a succession of momentarily flashed still frames. No. Analysis of gestures, gait, facial expressions. And the reading goes without the will, mechanically, as soon as you focus your gaze on someone and want to know. Some people keep a face, behave neutrally, and it is difficult to read them.
What happened to my head, and why now? Why not before? The answer came, too, in a series of frozen memories, from which Maria realized only that she had been young and foolish, and now it was time. The clown's voice rattled, "You need this. It will be. Soon. The time will come."
He knew! Grabbing her bag, Maria rushed into the park, because the clown certainly had the answers to her questions.
Outside, Maria squinted at the sun, ran out onto the path, where the clown-visitor worked... No one. Well, there are people: the bench was occupied by teenagers in school uniform, near the stream settled homeless people, passing each other a bottle and a pack of chips. But there was no sign of the clown.
As she walked around the other walkways, Maria was sure she wouldn't find the clown, because that's how it was in all the spy movies. An unsettling thought crept in that she was going crazy, hence the altered consciousness: she thought she was reading lips, but really it was nothing more than a fantasy. The grown hairs on the back of her neck, shaved a week ago, stirred and stood up on end. Maria squeezed her eyes shut, dazed, and ducked out of the bike lane at the sound of the klaxon.
Her brain, still working as clearly as ever, analyzed her behavior, compared it to the symptoms of the approaching madness, and reassured her that everything was fine, except for the mild anxiety disorder that had been there before.
What was also funny was that all the people she watched at the mall, she remembered in detail! It was like pulling vivid pictures out of an archive. Though before, details had always eluded her. The limp Asian woman had a silver butterfly brooch on her white blouse and a constellation of moles on her right cheek. Her left eyelid is more drooping than her right, her mouth is slightly slanted...
It's unrealistic to remember such little things without concentrating on them beforehand. What on earth is going on? The clown, where are you?
But the clown never showed up.
I didn't feel like going for a walk. In addition, a gray pall began to cover the sky, which threatened to descend into fog. Maria told herself to calm down and not to get depressed. Surprisingly, it worked! A rumbling emptiness reigned in her head, leaving only mechanical thoughts that were not "want" but "need". I have to do an assignment in genetics, an interesting one, by the way. Choose three traits of parents, figure out the nature of inheritance in the family, and guess what genotype: homozygous or heterozygous, the parents have for these traits.
It is true that there is no family as such, but at least the father is known.
In addition to genetics, there were a lot of math problems to solve. The thought of it, though, awakened my heartache. Two years to study something Maria hated. Every day! And it's not even physics, where you can clearly see what's going on, but fucking abstract nonsense that doesn't even exist in nature!
Seeing
her car in the parking lot, Maria groaned. An SUV was parked on the
curb, partially blocking the exit from the parking lot with its thick
metal backside. A minivan pulled up beside it. Although the Toyota
was tiny, maneuvering it risked snagging one of the cars, she was not
a confident driver and was still afraid to go downtown. Theoretically
it was possible to get out, but make a mistake of a couple of
centimeters and hello, the first accident in my life!
No
sooner had Maria become frustrated than an algorithm of actions
flashed in her head, a certainty emerged that if she did this,
everything would work out.
She squeezed into her small car, sat in the seat, took the wheel, looked in one mirror, in the other... And it was as if she had a picture in her head of how many degrees to turn the steering wheel to get out, not only that, she felt the dimensions of the car for the first time! And she was sure she could do it.
A group of guys appeared in the rearview mirror, gesticulating and looking at Maria's car. Maybe they were even taking bets. Smiling, she started the engine. And that's a dick instead of a show!
Okay... Concentrate. Turn the wheel a little to the right. Drive a little bit. A bit more. Stop! Now turn a little to the left and - slowly, slowly pull out. A little bit more steering... Slow down. Fold left mirror, accelerate again... Yes!
She pulled out, smiled to herself and the guys. Two applauded, three, who apparently bet that she can not cope, shrugged, but still showed "class. After waving to the guys, Maria rolled home, pleased with herself.
They lived in the fourth and final entryway of a brick two-story house with a facade decorated with brown wainscoting that was changed every year. Her mother's blue Honda was parked in its spot, and Maria parked in the cul-de-sac, next to the SUV of Johnny's elderly neighbor, who had dragged after his mother, for which he occasionally got it from his wife, Peggy, who looked like an old, stunted donkey - you could hear it from the wall.
Maria opened the door to the house.
There were toys and screaming in the living room - frolicking seven-year-old twins, the chocolate descendants of Muharram the Moroccan. Steve, called by his father, was throwing stuffed toys at Julie from the stairs.
On seeing Maria, Julie, whom her mother called Julie, rushed toward her sister, nearly knocking her down to hide behind her back. Steve, aka Stepa, tossed a seal at her, which Maria instinctively intercepted and immediately threw at the argessor. The black plastic nose of the toy struck Stepan in the forehead, and he, being a whiner and simulacrum at seven, cried out loudly.
Julenka became subdued and came out from behind her half-sister, not yet deciding whose side she was on. Out of the kitchen popped his mother and exclaimed:
- What now?
- She hit me! - Stepa cried out, pointing at Maria. - Right in the eye!
The mother, who took the side of the younger children no matter what they did, looked at Stepa, who was sitting on the stairs, at Maria, who had not yet taken off her sneakers, and for the first time did not make her feel guilty:
- Stop lying! How did she get to you?
Julenka rushed to her - to tell her how it was. Before her mother changed her mind and started yelling at her, Maria threw off her sneakers and rushed up the stairs to her room. She shut the latch and exhaled a sigh of relief. That was it, she was safe.
Half an hour to rest, and then back to work. Difficult assignments in biology and math, the rest was just nonsense. Maria sat down at her home computer, turned it on, so she could log on to the dying Insta. At least there was some joy, even if it was mostly seniors.
The youngsters are all in the Dream Rooms, talking about themselves. Some Dream Dreamers are so popular that their rooms are more like stadiums. You can have a party or just dinner there. A dance, a discussion, or a fight. You see the person you're talking to instead of looking at pictures. A whole industry, the illusion trade. Maria would open an immigrant adaptation room so no one would feel alone. And as a study such a thing would go down a treat.
There was a knock on the door. The children usually started banging on the door first, not knocking, but knocking.
- Masha, are you sleeping there, or what?
Mother never came for no reason, she always needed something. More often than not, she ran out of money, and asked her to contact her father and beg for at least a hundred Ixcoins. Maria hated asking her father for anything, humiliating herself, lying. Especially since she had already asked six days ago.
- What now? - Maria shouted irritably, opening the door and letting her mother pass.
She came in, glanced around the room, pursed her lips, crossed her arms across her chest, and asked ingratiatingly:
- How was school? - Every word oozed falsehood.
Maria rolled her eyes and sat down in the computer chair, throwing her legs up on the table and using her newfound instinct to assume that this time it was definitely something important.
- What do you want, Mother? - Maria asked bluntly.
Her mother looked perplexed, her eyes slammed shut.
- What's the tone, Masha? I can not ask how you do?
- There is a pattern," said Maria quietly, staring at her mother, "you are interested in my progress only when you need something from me. Sit with the little ones? - She asked, analyzed her mother's facial expressions and answered herself, "No. Do you need me to fetch something? No. Money? - Her mother's eyebrows flinched a little, her nostrils flared, her lips curled up, and she snapped her fingers. - Of course it is! But I asked for it for you, didn't I, only a week ago. Have you spent it all?
Her
mother's face grew red, and she put her hands to her sides and tears
welled up in her eyes.
- So that's it? Okay. My car broke
down, I can't afford to fix it. So I'll take yours. - She held out
her hand. - Give me the keys.
Maria's anger swept over her and she was carried away:
- I won't. Get a job. You don't want to, you're using me as a... as a bank card! You don't care how I feel, what my grades are. You don't care about me! All you care about is money! And the fact that I'm sick of asking him - how does that count?
- You ungrateful bitch," her mother whispered, gasping with indignation, and Maria could not stand it, jumped up and shouted:
- "Am I ungrateful? You live on my money, you rent an apartment, you feed your children! And I'm the ungrateful one?
Her mother stepped toward her and slapped her cheek - her cheek burned with fire - grabbed the keys from the table, and rushed out. She slammed the door.
She whispered a curse through her teeth and dropped her head onto her folded hands on the table, panting with helplessness. Gimme, gimme, gimme. Go to fucking work, learn the language! But her mother never bothered to learn English, she understands, but she can barely speak it.
She is not accustomed to work. Twenty years ago she made it to the finals of a beauty contest in Irkutsk: a long-legged, fiery-red, slender girl with clear cornflower eyes, which baited Yegor Tochinov, a local forty-year-old czar. They married a year later. Two years later, on July twenty-fifth of the year two thousand and four, Maria was born. After eleven years of married life the couple divorced on her father's initiative. Maria did not understand what had happened, she had just turned seven. They did not fight, they talked politely. And then she and her mother left for a small apartment and very quickly to the UK.
Before the twins were born, Mom looked like a Barbie doll, the first pregnancy didn't affect her at all. And then a Moroccan man came along, he said that he had shares worth two hundred thousand euros, he was in chocolate, come with me, baby. And my mother went, got pregnant, almost doubled in size, and never went back to normal, and when the twins were born, she turned into a mother-jerk, forcing the eldest daughter to babysit after school. Fortunately, she managed to get her father to give her full board at school.
Now, having studied psychology, Maria knows that most often at the birth of a younger child older than five years automatically passes into the category of adults, and he is allocated a meager limit of love. But it doesn't get any easier by the hour. The fact is, she was thrown overboard and milked like that cow.
Never mind, let her choke on the car! It should stutter - and his father will stop sponsoring his mother, and Maria will settle somewhere in a dormitory at the university, and it would be quieter.
Yes, that's what she would do. Now we must calm down and get on with our assignments.
- Thank you, dear Mommy, for a happy childhood. - She did not notice that she spoke her mind. - And thank you for the half-hour rest, damn you!
So, first things first: genetics. Three traits of the parents: hair color, eye color, height. We know that the gene for dark hair color, like eye color, is dominant. So with a probability... Maria took a pen to write a problem and calculate the probabilities, but her brain had already analyzed all the information and concluded that the parents had a 100% probability of having a blond-haired, blue-eyed child. The mother was a redhead with blue eyes, the father was a true Aryan, a blue-eyed blond, and both signs were recessive, that is, suppressed. Maria, on the other hand, is a green-eyed brown-haired girl. She had a dominant gene that her parents had nowhere to get.
I got a fever. So the father wasn't hers? That was all she needed.
She swallowed noisily and twisted in her chair. Hadn't he checked paternity? It would appear that he hadn't. It didn't fit the image of a pocket dictator. More likely he knew, but he wouldn't give up the child he'd been forced to have. Theoretically, Maria could go back to Russia, wear furs, drive a Rover and live in his father's palace, which is now near Novosibirsk. But he would drive an impostor! And the country ... dubious, torn by civil war. Everything there is miserable, clumsy, some primitive-rustic.
Maria thought she knew nothing about what was going on in Russia. And she didn't want to know.
It wasn't pretty with her father, but it was unclear whether or not Maria was upset that he was not her own son: they had never been close, she had used him as a cash cow, and all her "thanks" were fake. And no one had ever done more for her than he had and never would. And how was she better than her mother? Not once has she ever made a phone call for nothing. She doesn't even know what kind of business he has. She knows about the small winery in Kuban, about the plant in Perm, where they made licensed car parts. What became of it after the sanctions were imposed? And that's not all of his steam-powered factories!
It's five o'clock in the evening. Her father was probably at work, but Maria couldn't resist, she dialed him on Skype - he answered immediately, his weary face appeared on the screen. Sagging cheeks, bags under his eyes, grayish skin, but still feel the inner strength.
-
Hello, Masha. Something urgent? I have a meeting.
Maria was
dazed and numb for a few seconds, but quickly pulled herself
together. He interrupted the meeting to answer her! So he really did
care for her!
- Daddy... I've been thinking... You've done so much for me, and I... Well, thank you. Just thank you, Dad.
My father's eyes widened in surprise.
- Is there anything you want?
- No, Dad. I really don't. Just thank you. You call... just like that, when you're free.
She passed out, wiped away a tear. And she stared at the piece of paper where she'd described her parents. Tearing it up, she took a clean one, made her father a green-eyed brunette-no one had ever seen him anyway, and she couldn't have been born blond and redhead. Or could she? She'd have to ask her teacher, but in private; she didn't want her classmates to hear that her father wasn't her own.
It took fifteen minutes to describe the solution - her brain analyzed the information instantly. But Maria was in no hurry to start math, she had a premonition of three hours of torture, reading forums and YouTube, so she just stared blankly at the monitor. Finally I pulled out the printout with the task, sighed, staring at the formulas...
Solving systems of linear equations by the substitution method. Damn, it's elementary! Kindergarten! One by one the solutions flashed in her brain. All she had to do was express other variables through one variable!
But her brain did not rest, and offered a more interesting solution. Maria finished counting, scratched her pen behind her ear, and went on the Internet to find out what this method of calculation was called. Yep, it's solving equations using the determinant.
While the solutions were still in her head, Maria wrote them down, afraid she would forget, stop thinking, but she didn't! Not only that, she felt satisfaction, as from a job well done. Zadachas began to resemble a crossword puzzle: to guess a word is joy, to find a clue and use it - joy doubled.
It took an hour to solve the problems. Fascinated, Maria went over the topic of the next lesson, then - the one that will be the day after tomorrow. She went on the Internet for more information and sat up all night, even forgetting about dinner.
Reluctantly, she broke away from mathematics and delved into genetics. The school information seemed to her superficial, and she began reading serious research on inheritance - she wondered whether blondes could be born with brown hair. It turned out that hair and eye color are complexly inherited polygenic traits. So more than a dozen genes affect iris pigmentation, and even blue-eyed blondes can be born brown-eyed, but the odds of that happening are vanishingly small.
It was twelve o'clock. Tomorrow she'd have to get up at six to get the car before her mother did, and there were spare keys. Maria yawned, glanced at the computer monitor. She felt a hunger for information that drowned out her physical hunger. It took a great effort to force herself into the shower and into bed, but even there she could not help herself, turned on her smartphone, and began to read material on genetics. How little they taught her at school! And before, it seemed that they were loaded up to the ears. Maria was afraid to go to sleep, afraid that tomorrow morning this magical state would be gone, and she would be a perpetually dull, passive maiden again, but at three in the morning tiredness took its toll, and she sank into the realm of Morpheus.
Surprisingly, she woke up awake awake. With a sinking heart she tried to multiply 28 by 43, the result was 1204. She checked the result with a calculator: it worked. It worked! 504 times 612 - 308,448. Divide the result by 20 = 15422.2! Fantastic!
While making herself cheese and tomato toast, she kept using her brain as a calculator. Now that's super! That's a superpower! You could go straight to Cambridge! Just do the math, and then go.
There were only fifteen people in biology. Everyone who didn't want to study didn't go to twelfth grade; only the interested and talented kids stayed. And while math was mostly attended by guys, biology was fifty-fifty: seven boys and seven girls.
This was probably the first time Maria was looking forward to the start of class. She rewrote the genetics assignment again, brought her blond father back in introduction, now determined to prove the solution based on her new knowledge. She wanted to build her report on the indignation of her classmates, who had become agitated that her solution was wrong, and everything went according to plan: the class turned on her, trying to prove that blondes would never have a brown hair, much less a brunette. The teacher listened to them seriously, looking suspiciously at Maria, who could hardly contain her triumph, but did not interfere in the squabble.
When
the commotion in the classroom subsided, Maria, continuing to provoke
her classmates, retold the well-known information, took a pause,
reading the anger of her classmates. And then moved on to what she
learned later, about complexly inherited polygenic traits. She went
to the holographic board and started to solve the problem in a
different way, based on many inputs. She finished it with words:
-
As we can see, with such a combination, the probability of which,
though negligible, is still present, and the appearance of a
dark-haired child of blond parents is possible.
The teacher looked at Maria as a higher form of mind and could not find the words. She shook her head and applauded. Taught Joe stood up and clapped, too.
- Maria, you had a few days to do your assignment. How did you make it?
- I got a little carried away tonight.
- Definitely, it's the highest grade!
For the first time in her life Maria returned with a feeling of deep satisfaction and understanding that success in school, like any other success, is topped off with a good portion of dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins (the names of these substances flashed in memory), and in simple words - is encouraged by a feeling of happiness.
Maria listened to the other speakers half-heartedly, connected to the Internet and browsed through the news headlines. Her head was spinning from the abundance of information. Her brain greedily absorbed knowledge, hashing it into chains of probabilities, running out by threads of web from the center, where Maria, like a spider, was trying to analyze them, connect them by circular threads, cut off the secondary, concentrated on the main.
The whole world is permeated with algorithms and probabilities, some easily calculated, others cut off, others ending in nothing. My father was right about math! Maria imagined her brain as a blockchain, only biological, and located in one head.
Crypt! A few days and she would learn to analyze probabilities and be able to play the stock market! She will be able to speculate with shady bits! She'll be able to make a fortune! And this must be done today, and at the same time to read up on how to ensure anonymity on the Net. The end of a miserable existence!
Her imagination pictured an ivy-covered castle, a Bentley, a doorman in a tuxedo and a beach that smelled of suntan lotion and watermelon crusts... And suddenly a wealth of information surfaced knowledge that she did not like: a surge of brain activity could provoke a brain tumor, either benign or malignant, which is very likely to be localized in the pituitary gland.
The bell rang, and Maria did not get up, trying to calm her racing heart, and reassured herself that tumor processes could not be asymptomatic, but her waking brain was telling her the opposite: yes, they could, and it was better to get checked!
In math class, fifty-year-old Kian, who acted like a testosterone kid, found that half the class had cheated off two problems without much effort. More precisely, he discovered that someone had leaked the solution yesterday, so he put it to the test: he wrote a similar problem on the holographic board and, looking at the hushed students and still smiling, asked them to solve it. He called out a name - the student solved it. The next one continues.
Smiling, Maria raised her hand. Kian looked at her irritably, and when he looked at Ron, who had also volunteered, his gaze softened. Maria had always guessed that Kian didn't like her, but now she was completely convinced. She'd watched him and concluded that he was gay, and liked Ron and the quiet, reverent Mick. I can't believe I didn't know that before.
Apparently, Kian had decided that the first part of the solution was the easiest, so Mariah asked him to finish the solution after Ron had dictated the formula to the middle. She smirked maliciously at this selectivity and began to dictate the solution using higher mathematics, which they don't teach at school. She could see from Kian's graying face that he had no recollection of the subject himself. She paused, smiled and wanted to ask Kian to continue, but decided not to make him angry and finished:
- This is the solution of systems of linear equations using the determinant. You find the determinant for the entire matrix of the system, then you find the minors and the smaller determinants one by one. We divide the minor by the principal and get the roots.
Maria looked at the elongated faces of students, read the look of surprise in Ron's eyes, looked at Kian, and she was seized by irrational fear, the reason for which she did not immediately realize.
The mathematician had aged twenty years and looked his age: his cheeks were flattened, his nose was pointed, and his friendliness was gone from his face, though he was neither angry nor irritable. Behind the glasses of his augmented reality glasses, his pupils were dilated, like those of a drug addict.
...on a corpse. Such a face - a corpse! Maria thought for a moment that Kian was about to have a stroke, but no. He threw up his head and spoke, and his voice, previously rich in overtones, became monotonous:
- Mary, are you telling me that you solved the problem yourself in this way? Not by tapping into the Net? Without any hints?
- You can check me again," she said without enthusiasm, already regretting the game.
- Great, no hints," he said in an icy tone and dictated the formula.
Maria looked at her. Ten seconds was enough time to realize that Kian was trying to confuse her.
- There's a mistake in the condition. Right there. - She went over to the board and jabbed her finger at the hologram. - Prove it?
-
Prove it.
And another five minutes to decide. Then Maria
shrugged her shoulders and said:
- That's what I had to prove.
- This is unbelievable! - Kian walked up to her and stared without blinking, as if he were trying to scan her with his gaze, to find any devices that might tell her. - One last assignment for you personally.
Now, eight minutes to decide, because it takes too long to dictate the signs. When she had finished, she turned to the class, and when she turned her gaze to Kian, he pulled himself together and became the same youthful, positive gay man he'd always been.
- Wow! Fantastic! Yes, Mary, you had talent in you! I'm so glad it was awakened! Top marks! I'm blown away! - He fluttered his arms, shot his eyes, and smiled incessantly.
Maria looked at him perplexed, tried to analyze his behavior, but none of the conclusions were accurate.
At recess, Ron came up to Maria and held out his hand. Maria didn't know what to do with it, so she shook it with two fingers. Damn! As soon as he got any closer, she was dumb again! All the new settings went off.
- That was cool! - he said.
- Did you know Kian was gay and that he liked you? - She asked innocently, seeing Ron's incredulous expression twist, and smiled. See you Monday!
She staggered toward the exit and heard behind her:
- If you wore lenses, I'd think you hacked into the school system and found a way to connect to the global Drim... Mary! - She turned around, playfully tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. - The day after tomorrow, Sunday at nineteen zero zero, user meeting at Dream Real, I'm going there. Will you come with me?
Maria grew sad. Oh, she really wanted to touch her dream. Except what would she do there when she didn't know what was trending with the Dreamers? Smile and nod like a Chinese dummy, feeling out of place?
- Alas. I'll feel uncomfortable, I can't go to the Dream.
- Why not? - Ron wondered.
Maria showed him the bracelet and muttered venomously:
- "My father forbade it, and he put this on and said: "It's Dream or money." Anyway, he won't pay me if I break the ban.
- Oh," Ron said sympathetically.
- Let's... let's go to a cafe sometime, okay?
- Call me if you want to," he said, as if he hadn't heard the answer, and Maria walked frustratedly toward the exit. He would, wouldn't he? Or did he like her, or was he just confused? Probably, yes.
When it came to Ron, Maria wasn't sure of anything.
As soon as she arrived home, her mother immediately walked out to the car with the keys, followed by the twins. As they approached Maria, Step-Steve stuck his tongue out and mouthed. "Education's a bitch," she thought, and hurried to her computer so she could settle down in her chair and study the stock markets, crypto, and the conditions that affect its value, swaying.
After about an hour, maybe more - immersed in streams of information, Maria lost touch with time - her father called her on Skype. Maria would have liked to see his hologram, but the civilized world, or rather MANGA, had disconnected Russia from this system, so she had to be content with the image on the monitor.
My father looked more awake than yesterday: his skin seemed to have tightened and the circles under his eyes had disappeared.
- Hello, daughter," he smiled quite humanly, and Maria caught herself thinking that she did not remember his smile. - How have you been? What are you doing?
The questions were just an act of politeness, but Maria decided to answer them, showed her smartphone screen:
- Studying the fluctuations in the value of bonds. More specifically, the effects of local military conflicts on them. At the same time I'm dealing with crypto.
My father raised an eyebrow in surprise.
- You don't study economics in school.
- I don't. It's just for me. In two years the government will give me an investment package, I need to know where to invest to get a profit.
- The desire for knowledge is very commendable. In two years you'll figure it out. You're better off investing in something stable. For example, in bitcoin.
Maria grinned and shook her head.
- No. I want to make a profit, she repeated the last part with a certain amount of pressure. - That's why it's better to invest in assets of developing countries, where the situation is unstable, or in semi-legal no-name crypto.
My father once again raised his eyebrow, rounded his eyes, rubbed the bridge of his nose.
- And what's the prognosis for crypto-no-name?
- Noah and Roo. Half a year's growth. Noah will peak in early 2023, and then... Then either a syndicate takeover, which will stabilize it, or it will be ousted from the market. Ru, most likely, will go into the shadows, it is savings of illegally earned money, rather than multiplying them. But there will be growth, too. I think for another three or four months.
- Hm ... - That's all my father said, Maria continued:
- To make more accurate predictions, you need to thoroughly examine the interests of the big players, who tend to interfere in natural processes in the most unpredictable way. The joker factor, so to speak. For example, MANGA and...
Her
father pressed his finger to his lips, and Maria immediately realized
that this should be discussed in an encrypted channel, she had
already said too much. What had she said, though? It's all in the
public domain, noah.
- Did you come up with this on your own, or
did someone tell you? - Apparently, my father couldn't believe his
ears.
- Of course someone told me, how could I? - She said it with such sarcasm that my father understood correctly and nodded.
- I'm glad you began to take an interest in important things. So, there will be someone to inherit the business.
It was Maria's turn to round her eyes. Her father had never talked about inheritance - her mother had assured her that her father considered both her and Maria to be stupid philistines who would ruin everything. In his opinion, it was better to pass the millions into the hands of a talented successor, so that his business would live on.
- I'll study the main players a little more," Maria broke the silence.
- I'm ready to invest in your projects," his father said, and for the first time in his life Maria understood him, as well as what he had been trying to get from her all this time. - And I'm ready to tell more about the players next time, now I have to go, in a couple of minutes, - he glanced at his watch, - he had a meeting with the journalists.
- Bye, Daddy! Glad you called!
Father smiled at me:
- You can not imagine, Masha, how glad I am!
He passed out. And Maria realized that suddenly her father, whom she disliked and feared, was not scary at all, but very interesting. The ivy-covered palace, the Bentley, and the doorman in the tuxedo came into view more and more clearly. Maria smiled dreamily, looking at the monitor. She didn't want to analyze why what had happened to her had happened.
But suddenly the screen darkened, and white letters appeared on a black background:
Secrets of the World, as I wrote them down in a notebook,
"I've written them down in a notebook.
I see no noble men among scholars,
I have put the seal of silence upon my lips.
Before Mary could think where the text came from, the letters melted away, and the symbols of the desktop came through. Her heart began to pound, and anxiety arose, and the question of "why" arose with unexpected urgency. What was it? A trick? Was her father warning her to keep quiet?
Or had some anonymous person warned her that it was her father who posed the danger?