Читать книгу The Vault of Finished Goods - Назар Валерьевич Валеев - Страница 3

Before the Genomode annihilated the world of the Smorgs, their planet had known no war, no oppression, and no fear of the days to come. It grew, it unfolded, and it breathed as a living organism breathes, moved by clarity of thought and a faith in creation.

The Smorgs were a people unhurried and deliberate. They did not strive to seize the cosmic reaches, yet they knew how to comprehend them. Their civilization stretched not upward, but outward, and they sought not expansion, but a deep, almost philosophical mastery of what was already theirs by the right of reason.

The cities of the Smorgs were broad and rounded, as though their architects had drawn inspiration from wildflowers and the natural symmetries of living forms. Their buildings followed a principle of centripetal harmony, each district a complete little world of its own, in which they lived, worked, learned, and rested together without breaking the bonds between them. They avoided tall structures. The ground floor was always raised upon massive supports, so the earth could breathe, with paths laid between curved columns, streams flowing through them, gardens and fountains stretching in the shade beneath the overhanging levels.

The Smorgs never separated nature from technology. Their energy systems were powered by the cyclotronic reaction of moving water, and their food was created in specialized biocentres, where perfectly balanced components were synthesized without destroying living natural resources. And all this powerful infrastructure was woven into the texture of nature – not suppressing it, but emphasizing it.

The majestic spaceports were built as floating platforms. When necessary, they could be moved beyond the borders of the metropolis or sealed beneath a protective dome. In earlier centuries, Trianna had often suffered from meteor showers and fragments of asteroid streams, and such measures helped safeguard ships and starcraft. No such threats had been observed over the last two hundred years, yet the Smorgs continued to design their spaceports according to the same principles – not out of superstition, but as a tribute to an engineering tradition in which the past became not a burden, but experience worthy of respect.

The platforms were equipped with independent swarctronic stabilizers which, in the event of an alert, could be shut down automatically, allowing the structure to be sheltered beneath the dome or carried away along a safe atmospheric trajectory.

Every joint, every engineering node was like a line written in an elegant yet logical language. The world of the Smorgs was an aesthetic expression of balance between knowledge and the reverence owed to the unknown. Yet greatness, in their understanding, did not lie in technology or scientific achievement. Their true pride was their society.

The Smorgs rejected hierarchy. Their system of governance was founded on Circles of Clear Councils, large and small, where each took part according to their field, their way of seeing the world, or their inner vision: engineer, researcher, philosopher, observer. Elders did not command – they interpreted. The younger did not obey – they reflected. The ideal was not the hero, but the master jeweler, the master gardener, or the master navigator… Mastery was not so much a profession as a state of spirit.

In school halls, learning was pursued not for the sake of a career, but for the sake of understanding. Lessons and early knowledge were not reduced to memorization, but rather to a dialogue with the world. A pupil who discovered a new way to describe water became as much a hero as a geological scout who found a new mineral or a rich rare-earth vein on a neighboring planet.

Yet no philosophy, no refinement of engineering thought, and no reverence for nature could save them from the horrific Genomode – a deadly virus that emerged suddenly, like a black shadow, like a misplaced variable in the familiar equation of the world. Its effect was subtle, gradual, and utterly fatal. Not one of the initially surviving Smorgs left the planet – all understood there would not be enough ships for everyone, and so, without arrangement or command, they chose to stay.

Trianna, once the shining heart of Smorg civilization, sank into silence with terrifying speed: the Genomode worked soundlessly and mercilessly. No bells of alarm, no sirens – only sudden breaks in communication, the silence of laboratories, and the fading lights of festive domes. At first, the count was in weeks, and then, in days.

Only a small handful of Smorgs survived, those who happened to be on orbital stations: communications engineers, operators of navigation complexes, a few star patrol units with scientific observers, as well as groups of researchers stationed on the three conditionally habitable planets of the system: Veltora, covered entirely in salt deserts and hollow ridges; treacherous, humid Veilid, known for its unstable biosphere and low gravity threshold; and Unra – lifeless, barren, the farthest planet from the star, rich in diverse resources.

In time, some of the Smorgs left their system. Some – aboard the remaining ships of scientific missions, others – in the escape shuttles of the orbital stations. They felt like exiles, abandoning the ruins of their homeland. But the world beyond did not greet them as the saved, but as the damned.

No one listened to the Smorgs anymore, no one asked them questions or tried to understand their explanations. They were simply accused, and the accusations were furious and many. They were seen as those who had erased their own civilization from the face of the world, destroyers who had created the deadly genome-virus. Their restrained, careful and honest attempts to explain the tragedy were regarded as pitiful excuses. And restraint, as is well known, always loses to rage.

The Smorgs were strong in the sciences, especially in substance synthesis, the creation of molecular templates, genetic engineering, and biosymbiotic cloning. And, as so often happens, their abilities attracted those who sought profit and gain, not meaning. Criminal cartels, shadow corporations, arms dealers – all quickly understood how much could be extracted from the Smorgs. It was enough to offer them the illusion of understanding, or a meagre imitation of a homeland, and the Smorgs agreed. In truth, they had no real choice in this difficult struggle for survival. And there was also the naïve belief that one day they would once again be accepted as equals. And when their developments and discoveries led to tragedies, no one cared who had truly been behind those projects – the blame, unquestionably, fell upon them, the Smorgs.

Thus, all too quickly, the reputation of a great people, once honored for clarity of thought, humility, and remarkable scientific achievement, turned into an indelible mark. The Smorgs became a symbol of ruin, an example of failure, and a warning. In some archives – a case of galactic tragedy, in the mentions of others – proof that the Smorgs were dangerous.

Yet those who survived the catastrophe preserved something timidly within their minds – not so much the memory of former greatness, as the feeling of a truth which, though lost, had not vanished. It was merely waiting for the moment when someone would find it again.