Читать книгу Unreversible - Emil Akhundov - Страница 7

June 18, 2038

My morning, like any morning in the last ten years, was beautiful. I didn’t have to rush anywhere, the sun was gently warming the ground, and the aroma of my wife’s cinnamon tea spread throughout the house.

For almost 50 years now, she’s been getting up before me, and every morning she makes a new and delicious tea – she just has this hobby of making the magical drink in different flavors. I was always amazed at how many recipes there are for making tea. I do not remember my wife repeating herself, though she had a cherished notebook somewhere, where she recorded the recipes she made and how good the resulting tea was. Marina, was a wonderful wife and a wonderful woman in every way.

To our daughters, Diana and Milana, she instilled a love of home, comfort, beauty – everything that would make them even more beautiful wives than Marina, and I myself envied their future suitors. I must say that they were clever, and like all the young people of Eden, they never worked, and they didn’t need to. When they were young, I couldn’t provide for them, so they had to make do with what they had. But when they were adults, I was able to buy them everything and more. That’s the way it worked for us. And that was the worst horror of my life. If anything happened to me, they would literally be thrown against the world, and the laws were getting stricter by the day, so I had to devote my life to providing for them today and making their future as serene as it is now. I have been lucky enough to have succeeded in many things.

We had everything: a four-bedroom house in St. Petersburg Eden, fully paid social security dues for a hundred years ahead, and a bank account for more than eleven million, which received forty-seven thousand koins in interest each month. At five thousand per person, we were living on our own, and I spent the rest of the money buying new stocks, gradually increasing our passive income. I would like to say that our life was boring, and I enjoyed boring myself for more money.

I lazily got out of bed and went to take a shower. I liked living here, but I realized with dread that I was getting more and more bored with it. That fact alone didn’t scare me, it was the consequences of my actions that scared me. I knew I could move to another Eden-type city, but my family and I had been to all of them, and we didn’t like any of them, and there was nowhere else to live with the same level of comfort-there were no other settlements of this type, and there were not even plans to build them. And living outside of Eden was suicidal-the average life expectancy there had already fallen to less than forty years because of the terrible environment and the level of criminal activity.

I spent all the time in the shower in nostalgic memories of the life that was in the Soviet Union, where everyone knew exactly what he had to do, what he was needed for, and how good it was when everyone in the country had roughly the same ideology. I got out of the automatic shower and wiped myself with an old terry towel, which I kept just out of habit. I had always been a junk man and never threw away junk; it was easier for me to think of new uses for it or leave it until better times than to take it to the trash.

I glanced at my watch and realized that I was finally relaxed-this was the third year in a row that I had gotten up a few minutes late, and now at eleven o’clock in the morning I was just on my way to breakfast. The whole family was already waiting for me at the dinner table, with a whole stack of thin pancakes and a dozen syrups of all kinds, and a big glass kettle on an automatic heated coaster in the middle of the table.

We sat and laughed and tried to think of something to do for the day, which was our tradition. We could talk like that in the morning and then, a few hours later, sit in a rented plane and fly to the other side of the world. And every day it was more and more difficult to come up with a new activity. Once we realized there were no good ideas, we decided to turn on the news – just in case we missed something.

It should be noted that all digital broadcasting now belonged to one social network, and the TV channel “News” showed the most interesting videos for our family from various bloggers. My attention was completely absorbed by the video where a poor boy somewhere in the Amazon jungle saw and filmed a wild jaguar. It was now akin to a miracle. How could one encounter a wild animal in this day and age! I even made a generous donation to this boy and began to speculate that this world was about to kill itself:

– Interesting! There are still places where there are wild animals after all. I would even pay the person who shows me a stray dog in Kupchino! – I philosophically exclaimed.

– You’re afraid of dogs! – My wife never missed a chance to tease me.

– Yes, but now I’m more afraid of robots. Honestly, I miss the days when you could buy bread at the store and give it to a mutt. – I was beginning to complain about life.

– So let’s get a puppy! – Diane loudly blurted out.

– Or better yet, two! – Milana instantly picked up on it.

– And a cat, too! – I started sneering, though I liked the idea. – And who will walk with them?

– Yes, we all have so much to do… – Marina said meaningfully and smiled widely.

We all laughed and went to pack – we could only buy a puppy in one place – the zoo. In general, the Edens were unbearably logically designed; there was practically nothing duplicative, moreover, everything was always in one place. There was a veterinary clinic next to the zoo, an animal owner certification office, a shelter, and an animal observation center.

When everyone was ready, we called a cab to go to the pet store. I’ve never had a car – I’ve always wanted one, but was afraid to drive, and now there are almost no private cars – it’s the lot of the richest people in the world. Everyone else was left with robot cabs, which always came quickly, were always clean, and, of course, there was only one operator for the whole world.

Fifteen minutes later we were already there. I sent my family off to look at the flora and fauna, and I went to get my pet license myself. I had to listen to a few hours of a stupid lecture and pass a test to get a permit, with which I could then buy a dog. As usual, a robot accepted the course fee, another robot took me to the auditorium, where a third robot showed me a long movie about how pets should be loved, as if someone had gotten dogs without feeling affectionate about them.

Anyway, I was able to pass the test the second time because I couldn’t tell several different pinschers from each other, and as a result, I was banned from buying dogs of those two breeds. I actually wasn’t going to choose these breeds, my dogs are supposed to be big and drooling, but it was still very frustrating, although I had accomplished the main task, it was only a matter of time.

I found my girls in the cafe that was in the zoo. They were eating ice cream, of course. There was a lot of noise, apparently they had brought children from behind the “fence” and showed them both the zoo and Eden itself, so they knew what they had to strive for. I always thought it was a kind of mockery of children: first bringing them from hell to heaven and then taking them back to blackness with the full knowledge that they are still no good, since they don’t live here. And the most cynical thing about this world was that all of these excursions were paid for and quite expensive for the parents of these children. But it was in such twists and turns that Toleko’s main policy lay.

We went looking for a pet store to buy the puppies that were to become the new members of our family, but unfortunately it was closed for quarantine. For some reason we couldn’t carry out our plan today, so we had to resort to the backup plan of buying a few bottles of wine and half a pound of mold cheese.