Читать книгу Unreversible - Emil Akhundov - Страница 4

May 29, 2039

I am sitting under a young apple tree in Obukhovo, which for some reason has already decided to bloom, and I breathe in the sweet smell of its flowers. I enjoy the aroma, because all around me there is clean air, which we haven’t had for maybe fifteen years, and the green lawn on which I am sitting was something mythical and unattainable, and a year ago I could not have imagined it. The behavior of the kids around me was amazing: the kids weren’t running around squealing with delight, no, they were walking barefoot on the grass, and the expressions on their faces were as if they were waiting for the green luxury under their feet to disappear into a cloud, and they would have to try to catch that cloud with their hands. It was a fairy tale, and I was sitting right in it.

It’s very funny how ordinary things that we’re used to can one day become real happiness or even a miracle that absolutely everyone will marvel at. After all, if you think a little bit, everything that we have, have been and will be, has some share of this very miracle, but we just do not see this miracle in our hands, and treat it as if it is just an ordinary thing, a thing that is owed to us by right. And as a marketer with more than fifty years of experience, I can safely say that the real value and usefulness of a certain product can only be known one way – by losing it. And I must say that in the same way we almost lost the whole world. For me, as for any old man, the common lawn is not just a delight for the nostalgic soul, it is a living example that everything can be fixed, even the most terrible and profound mistakes. And now, on this very day, I can say that we’ve managed to get it right. Although no, not “we,” but one person with whom I had the good fortune to work side by side long ago.

And the whole paradox of my story is that the man who, incidentally, planted this apple tree with his own hands first took everything from the world: the air, nature, work, and almost life itself. We were too carried away by technical progress, and he was the one who successfully refined this idea and promoted it to the masses, but no one thought of the consequences.

I have known this man for more than twenty years, and even at my advanced age I cannot fully understand him or give even the slightest objective assessment of his actions. I can only hope that I can fully convey to you the true story, which you will not find in textbooks or documentaries. A story where the main hero and the main villain are one and the same person who, in fact, never aspired to these roles.

This phenomenon of the human race is called Boris Voropaev. The story of him is worth beginning with the fact that this guy never gave a damn about his position in society or the opinion of others, he just did what he thought was right. He always worked for his personal comfort and free-wheeling pleasure of the projects he implemented. It is worth saying that he celebrated the completion of any, even global, projects in a very peculiar way – he would recline in his chair, throw his legs over the computer system unit that was on the floor, and lay there for a few minutes, then immediately start a new project. Before I met him, I never would have thought that there was a man who did not know how to express joy at all. But as for Boris, he always tried to show his superiority over others at every opportunity, and I must say, on every occasion he could afford it.

Somehow magically he was able to do absolutely everything he wanted to do, from writing magazine articles to all kinds of business analytics. And if he started drawing something like a logo, his work was always recognized as one of the best in some international contest. Don’t ask me how he did it – I can’t explain. At first I thought that it was just my luck and I was looking forward to his mistake, but after a few years I gave up hope, because his work was perfect, in fact he was so efficient that he pulled the whole company together, which became a real monster of the world market. It would have been a talent if Boris himself had acknowledged the existence of talent-he always said it was just a trained skill, that’s all. But the amazing thing is that he did not work for the money.

Even before I met him, he had already managed to make a fortune! His attitude toward money was also striking. For me money is a direct means of existence, but for him it is just an opportunity. Let me try to explain. Let’s take a sports car… He didn’t need it, but he must have understood that he could buy it at any time if he wanted to. And on top of that he had an excellent education, a brilliant lively mind, and the broadest thinking I’ve seen in more than seventy years of my life. He had plenty of ideas and energy to bring them to life. And his most important characteristic was his incredibly explosive nature. Though not without difficulty, he knew how to manage it. Sometimes it seemed that he was about to explode and something terrible would happen, but Boris always stopped in time, as if he himself was afraid of the consequences of what might happen when he lost his temper. I always thought that Boris was a kind of walking paradox that contained all the possible opposites in the world, but I guess people are telling the truth: “Great men are not of this world, indeed.

However, I must admit: all the good that exists in our world is the merit of people of the same kind as Boris Voropayev. Only such vitality and such genius mental abilities could have given us, mere philistines, all the joys of technological progress that we enjoy. All this is presented to us as something ordinary, although in its essence it is a miracle, a miracle that he or people like him did, not you and me. We simply benefit from other people’s achievements, and only because those people have shared them with us. In other words, your coffee machine in the office is a gift to you from someone who doesn’t even know you exist, it’s not something you rightfully deserve. The sooner you grasp this wisdom, the sooner you can create something like this.

However, it would be wrong not to mention the duality of this world, which means that everything has a downside, and usually it is directly proportional to merit. Everything bad that has ever happened to the world is the fault of those same people. It’s not the fact that they planned it or didn’t know there were risks, it just happened. We can’t change the past, we can only write it down in a history book, hoping it will stick in people’s minds. But the great misfortune of it all is that these textbooks are written by people who cannot always correctly assess all the circumstances. They unwittingly distort the facts with their thoughts and comments, and this distorts history as a science, turning it into a certain set of dates and facts that are simply repeated from age to age, without showing the whole picture and the original essence.

This has happened a thousand times, and nothing has changed. People are still the same selfish people who think that everything is within their power, and even knowing the bitter experience of the past, they repeat old mistakes, with only one difference – each time the consequences are more tragic and large-scale.

I don’t know whether I was lucky enough to experience the apogee of humanity’s tragic experience or whether I was just lucky enough to have the most serious one ahead, but I hope that the true story will make you think about the consequences of the actions of most people in general and yours in particular.