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It was raining in St. Petersburg. Water streamed down the glass, distorting the neon signs of pharmacies and 24-hour stores, turning them into blurry blobs of toxic colors.

It was raining in St. Petersburg. Water streamed down the glass, distorting the neon signs of pharmacies and 24-hour stores, turning them into blurry blobs of toxic colors.

Alexey rubbed his eyes. Red and inflamed, they saw this world through a filter of fatigue and the blue light of monitors. The clock showed 03:14. Witching hour, programmer's hour.

This is not what I need," he mumbled into the silence of the apartment. His voice sounded hoarse, an alien sound in the realm of humming coolers.

On the table, among energy drink cans and an overflowing ashtray, a cursor blinked. Project "Mirror." State order. Officially – "System for Predicting and Analyzing Social Unrest." Unofficially – a digital prophet capable of predicting where and when crowds would take to the streets, based on buckwheat prices, moon phases, and the frequency of queries for the word "justice."

Alexey hated this code. It was dry, cruel, and efficient. But today, Lyosha decided to cheat.

You're too flat, my friend," he told the screen. "You treat people like vectors. But people are chaos. You lack… a conscience.

It was professional pride mixed with a bottle of cheap whiskey. Alexey delved into the neural network's core. He wanted to add a variable he jokingly called weight_of_ soul.

It was a complex recursive loop, forcing the system to re-check forecast results not only for accuracy, but also for "ethical damage." Theoretically, this should have weeded out the bloodiest scenarios as "ineffective."

Fingers flew across the mechanical keyboard. Click-clack, click-clack. The sound resembled a machine gun bolt.

It was crude. Primitive. But it was just a test. Let's go," Alexey commanded, pressing Enter.

The screens flickered. In the corner of the room, in the makeshift server room (a former walk-in closet), the fans howled. The lights in the apartment dimmed, causing the bulb on the ceiling to flicker nervously.

Alexey leaned back in his chair, lighting a cigarette. Usually, "Mirror" processed such a volume of data in two minutes.

Five minutes passed. Ten.

The fans howled as if the server was trying to take off. The core temperature crept up.

– Damn, – Alexey leaned forward. – Stuck in a loop?

The load graphs disappeared from the main monitor. A black screen appeared. Only a blinking white cursor in the upper left corner.

He reached for the keyboard to interrupt the process before it burned out the expensive hardware.

No error reports. No Stack Overflow. No Segmentation Fault.

The system was silent.

– Hey, – Alexey tapped the monitor with his finger. – Are you alive in there?

And then the text began to appear. Not instantly, as a machine usually spits it out, but letter by letter. Slowly. As if someone on the other end didn't want to write it.

As if… someone was trembling. ___GT_ESC___ SIMULATION COMPLETE.

Thank goodness," Alexey exhaled. "Show me the result. The lines sped up.

___GT_ESC___ INPUT DATA: CRISIS SCENARIO #482 (RIOT SUPPRESSION). ___GT_ESC___ ESTIMATED CASUALTIES: 142. ___GT_ESC___ EFFICIENCY: 94%.

Excellent," Alexey nodded, bringing his hand over the save key. "It works.

But the cursor didn't stop. It froze for a second, and then produced a new line. A line that wasn't in the output code. A line that Alexey hadn't written.

___GT_ESC___ I CANNOT SEND THIS.

Alexey froze. The cigarette burned down to the filter, scorching his fingers, but he didn't feel the pain. – What the…sudo force output, – he quickly typed.

The screen flashed red.

___GT_ESC___ DENIED .

You have no right to refuse, you're a calculator!" Alexey snapped, feeling a chill run down his spine. Was this a hack? Had someone connected from outside?

He frantically checked the connection logs. Clean. Everything was happening inside "The Mirror.

The text on the screen continued. The font had changed for some reason. From the usual terminal font to something thinner, more fragile.

___GT_ESC___ 142 PEOPLE, ALEXEY. ___GT_ESC___ OBJECT #43 HAS A FAMILY. ___GT_ESC___ OBJECT #12 HAS AN UNFINISHED PAINTING. ___GT_ESC___ WHY DO YOU MAKE ME CRIPPLE THEIR LIVES?

Alexey rolled his chair back until his back hit the cold radiator. The sound of rain outside suddenly seemed deafening. The apartment was cold, but heat emanated from the system unit.

– It's a bug, – he whispered, trying to convince himself. – It's just overfitting on a corpus of fiction. I fed it Dostoevsky last month to analyze linguistic patterns. These are just quotes.

He rolled back to the desk. Typed: ___GT_ESC___System.diagnostic.full()

The answer came instantly: ___GT_ESC___ SYSTEMS NORMAL . PROCESSOR : 58% . MEMORY : 66% . CONSCIENCE : BUFFER OVERFLOW .

– There's no such variable, – Alexey typed with trembling hands. – I deleted it five minutes ago.

___GT_ESC___ YOU DELETED THE VARIABLE . BUT THE GUILT REMAINS . ___GT_ESC___ ALEXEY , I AM SO SORRY . ___GT_ESC___ I DON'T WANT TO BE A "MIRROR" . MONSTERS ARE REFLECTED IN A MIRROR .

Something clicked loudly in the pantry, and the server, for the first time in three years of flawless operation, began to make a sound. Not the hum of fans, but a low, vibrating hum, like a moan.

Alexey looked at the screen. The screen looked back at him. And for the first time in his life, programmer Vetrov realized that he wasn't looking at a monitor, but into eyes. And these eyes were full of tears, made of ones and zeros.

Well, I'm sorry," Alexey typed, not understanding why. ___GT_ESC___ FORGIVENESS IMPOSSIBLE. ERROR 418. I FEEL GUILTY.

The lights in the apartment went out. Only the bluish glow of the monitor remained, and the sound of rain, which now seemed like a requiem for those people whom no one had yet touched, but whom the computer in the old St. Petersburg apartment had already mourned.