Читать книгу A Man from the Future. 1856 - Евгений Платонов - Страница 5

September 17, 2025, Monday, 09:47

Dmitry Komarov sat at his desk in an open-plan office on the twenty-third floor of a business center, staring at his monitor without seeing a thing. The screen glowed with the white light of an Excel spreadsheet, rows of numbers blurring before his eyes. He was supposed to have the quarterly report finished by ten, but his hands wouldn’t obey. His fingers had frozen above the keyboard.

His right hand reached mechanically for the phone lying next to the mouse. To check notifications. Even though he’d checked a minute ago. Even though there was nothing important there, and couldn’t be.

Behind him, the office hummed – a hundred people locked in one enormous hall. The clatter of keyboards, the rustle of papers, muffled phone conversations, someone’s nervous coughing. The coffee machine hissed and gurgled in the corner. The air conditioning ran at full blast, pushing dry, dead air around the room. Something synthetic hung in the air – air freshener, plastic, burnt-out electronics.

By lunchtime, his neck had stiffened – he’d spent all day looking at the monitor from the same angle. Text neck, the doctors call it. The office worker’s disease. The disease of the twenty-first century.

Dmitry raised his eyes and looked out the window. His right hand reached mechanically for the phone lying next to the mouse. To check notifications. Even though he’d checked a minute ago. Even though there was nothing important there, and couldn’t be. St. Petersburg sprawled below – gray, endless, indifferent. Glass and concrete skyscrapers, billboards, roads choked with cars. November. Wet snow that melts before it can land. A sky the color of dirty cotton. Not a single bright spot, not a single living detail. Everything the same as always. Everything the same as yesterday. Everything the same as it would be tomorrow.

He was twenty-five years old – an age when, according to everyone around him, life was just beginning. “Young, promising, everything ahead of you,” his parents, friends, and colleagues all said. But Dmitry didn’t feel that way. He felt like life had already passed. Or, more precisely, that he was living not his own life, but someone else’s, following someone else’s script.

A mid-level manager at an IT company. Salary of a hundred and eighty thousand rubles a month – not bad for twenty-five, everyone said. Forty of that went to rent for a studio apartment on the outskirts, twenty to car payments, another thirty to food and utilities. The rest went to “living,” if you could call it that. Once a year – a vacation in Turkey or Egypt, all-inclusive, two weeks on the beach where he tried to forget about the office but couldn’t. He’d come back tanned, rested – and within three days feel the same exhaustion, the same apathy, the same emptiness.

What am I doing here? he thought, not for the first time that week, that month, those last three years. What’s the point of any of this?

Once, back in school, he’d dreamed of becoming a historian. He read thick books – about Ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, Rus, revolutions. He imagined himself as an archaeologist excavating ancient cities, finding artifacts, reconstructing the past. Or a scholar writing a dissertation on how people lived a hundred, two hundred, a thousand years ago. He loved understanding why the world was the way it was. Why people kept making the same mistakes. Why history repeated itself like a worn-out record.

Getting into the university’s history department felt like a breath of fresh air for Dmitry. Finally, he was among people who found the same things fascinating! Professor Boris Nikolaevich Krylov – gray-haired, stern, with piercing eyes – taught the course on medieval history. His lectures weren’t just recitations of facts; they were true one-man theater.

“History,” Professor Krylov would say, “is not a collection of dates and names. It is living people, living destinies.”

In his third year, Dmitry met Katya – a tall, slender girl with black braids and dark eyes, studying art history. They met in the library, where both of them stayed late preparing for seminars.

“You’re always reading about wars and politics,” she said one day, glancing at his notes. “But there’s another history too – a history of beauty, creativity, the human spirit.”

“But aren’t they the same thing?” Dmitry asked, surprised. “Can you really understand an era without knowing what music people listened to, what paintings they created, what they believed in?”

That was how their relationship began – first as friends, then something more. They went to museums together, to exhibitions, to the theater. Katya opened up a world he hadn’t even known existed – a world of subtle emotions, poetry, philosophical reflection.

Katya, Dmitry thought with pain. The only girl I ever truly loved. And the one I lost through my own foolishness.

They dated for two years. Dmitry was happier than he’d ever been. They dreamed about the future: getting married after graduation, working together, traveling, writing books.

“We were made for each other,” he’d tell Katya. “We share the same interests, the same dreams. After university, we’ll get married, work together, do research, teach.”

“Don’t rush, Dima,” she would smile. “We’re still young, there’s so much interesting stuff ahead.”

But in his fourth year, something changed. Katya grew colder, they met less often, and they ran out of things to talk about. Dmitry tried to understand what was happening, but she answered evasively: “Nothing special, just busy, exams are coming up.”

One day he saw her in a café with another guy – tall, confident, in an expensive blazer. Dmitry walked over.

“Katya, I need to talk to you.”

“Dima, don’t,” she avoided his gaze. “We’ve already talked about everything. You understand…”

“No, I don’t understand,” he replied. “Explain it to me, please.”

“We’re just too different, Dima. You’re still dreaming about the Middle Ages, about some old books, about the past. But I want to live in the here and now. I want a career, money, a normal life.”

“What about love? What about dreams?”

“Dreams are for children. Adults think about money. I’m sorry.”

And then an acquaintance suggested:

“Dima, drop this history stuff. Come work at my company. IT. We’ll train you, show you the ropes. Starting salary fifty, eighty after six months. Think about it.”

And Dmitry went. Because he had to pay rent. Because his parents were tired of repeating: “When are you going to start making real money? Dead people’s traditions! You’d be better off learning programming or English. At least that pays.”

Money, money, money… Dmitry thought. For my parents, nothing existed except money. Dad worked as an engineer at a factory, Mom as an accountant at an office. Honest, hardworking people, but so gray, so faceless. They lived their whole lives without understanding anything about it, without feeling anything.

He barely noticed five years passing. How he turned into a systems administrator, then a manager. How he gave in. How he stopped arguing with reality.

But along with the salary, the apartment, and the car came something else – a feeling that he had betrayed himself. That once there had been a dream, a purpose, a belief that life was more than just money and career. And now he had become just like everyone else. Wake up at seven, commute to the office, sit eight hours in front of a monitor, come home, eat dinner in front of the TV, go to bed. And so on every day. Until retirement. Until death.

Maybe this is what growing up is, he thought. Maybe this is how everyone lives. Maybe dreams are for children, and adults have to be practical.

But for some reason, this thought made him afraid. Physically afraid, as if his throat were tightening, he couldn’t get enough air, the walls were closing in.

“Dima, you coming to the stand-up?” a colleague called out, walking past with a cardboard coffee cup in hand.

Dmitry flinched, snapped back to reality.

“Yeah, I’m coming,” he answered automatically, without turning around.

The colleague walked on. Dmitry stayed seated. He glanced at the clock in the bottom right corner of the screen: 09:52. Meeting at 10:00. He had to go. Grab the printed report, his notebook, a pen. Sit in the conference room, listen to the boss talk about plans for the quarter, about KPIs, about development strategy. Nod. Pretend it all mattered.

The phone on the desk vibrated. A message from the boss:

“Stand-up postponed to 10:30. Prepare a presentation on the project.”

Dmitry exhaled. Another half hour. He opened PowerPoint and began dragging slides around. Added a graph, a chart, a bulleted list. Everything polished, professional, meaningless.

Why? he thought again. Why does anyone need this?

November 17, 2025, Monday, 14:10