Echoes of Oblivion

Some began to scream. Incoherent, animalistic cries of despair. Others just sat on the cold pavement, arms around their heads, rocking back and forth. Their inner world, their identity built on a foundation of digital connections, photos in the cloud, search history and saved playlists, collapsed. They woke up in their own bodies, like in an unfamiliar house where all the furniture was gone. They were ghosts in their own lives.

Thirty kilometers from the center of London, in a quiet suburb, Matvey Kamen put down his hammer. He stood in his shed, smelling of fresh shavings, tar and machine oil, and looked at the frame of the wooden boat he was building for his grandson Leo. “A house should stand on the ground, not on a cloud,” he liked to say, which only elicited condescending smiles from his children who lived in “smart” apartments. His house stood on the ground. And now, when the world was collapsing, his house was still home.

He distrusted this new world from the beginning. Not because of retrograde, but because of instinct. He’d seen people become fragile, dependent. How their hands lose their grip and their eyes lose their ability to see beyond the screen. He had seen his own son, David, a brilliant programmer, unable to start a fire without an ultrasonic lighter. Matvey wasn’t angry, he was sad. He felt that humanity had traded its power for convenience. And now the convenience was over.

But his sadness was colored by bitterness of guilt. He, a builder who made houses of stone, had failed to build a bridge to his own son. All his attempts to teach David to work with his hands had run into a polite but impenetrable wall of digital superiority. “Dad, why chop wood when you can optimize the heat supply by 12% and save energy?” – David used to say. In their last argument, just a week ago, Matvey had shouted in his hearts: “When your numbers turn to dust, you’ll come crawling to my stone!”. He didn’t want those words to prove prophetic. He wanted his son to prove him wrong. And now, as the world crumbled, Matvey felt not triumph, but only the emptiness of an unspoken apology. His strength was his curse; he was right, but at what cost?

The silence caught up with him here. He hadn’t paid much attention to it at first. The old radio, always blaring jazz, just went dead. Then the lights went out. The automatic gate wouldn’t open. “Another substation malfunction,” he thought angrily.

But then he tried to remember. He wanted to carve the Odal rune on the bow of the boat, the symbol of heritage and home that his father had taught him. He saw it clearly in his mind-a diamond with two tails at the bottom. But when he picked up the chisel, the image blurred. Fingers that remembered hundreds of movements didn’t know which one to make first. It was a knowledge that lived not in his logical memory, but in his muscle memory. And it was gone, as if amnesia had struck the muscles.

It wasn’t just the rune. He tried to remember his father teaching him how to lay a brick wall. He remembered the movements, but not his father’s words, not his hoarse laughter when young Matvey dropped the trowel. He remembered the fact itself, but he had lost the warmth of that memory. And it was as if all the furniture had been taken out of his house, leaving bare walls. He had built houses, but his own inner home had been looted. That was why his decision had become so firm: he would build with what he could touch. Out of stone. Of wood. Of something that would not betray.

He looked at his hands in bewilderment. The strong, calloused hands of a builder. They always knew what to do. Now they seemed foreign. He tried to remember the face of his father, who had taught him this rune. The face was there, but the name… his father’s name flickered at the edge of his consciousness and slipped away like a frightened bird. The fear he felt was cold and ancient. It was the fear of losing his roots.

He stepped out of the barn in confusion. His wife, Anna, stood in the middle of their perfect lawn, which was being mowed by a robotic lawnmower, now frozen in the middle of the lawn like a prehistoric green insect.

– Matvey…” she whispered. There was the same fear in her eyes that he had seen in the eyes of a frightened doe in the woods years ago. – I can’t call the children. I… Matvey, I can’t remember their number. I don’t remember their names.

Matvey squeezed her hand. Her knuckles were ice cold. His own memory worked the same way. He remembered having a son and a daughter. He remembered their faces, their laughter, the warmth of their childhood embrace. But their names…they were on the tip of his tongue, prickly and elusive. He knew he loved them more than life, but he couldn’t name them. This emptiness was more frightening than any silence.

At that moment, he saw their faces in his memory with crystal clarity: here was the son, frowning his eyebrows in concentration over some digital puzzle of his. Here was the daughter, laughing, with eyes full of light. Loving them was a physical ache in his chest. He couldn’t name them, but he knew he would die for them. And that knowledge, that feeling, was the one thing that the wave of oblivion could not wash away. It didn’t live in memory. It lived in the blood.

– Nothing,” he said, and his voice sounded surprisingly solid, like the rock their family was named after. – We’re here. We’re together. Go inside. Lock the doors. I’ll check the supplies. The age of the smart man is over. The age of the strong has begun.

In his world, the world of physical objects, things were simpler. There’s water in the well. There’s canned goods in the cellar. There’s an axe and a stack of firewood. There’s his grandfather’s double-barrelled shotgun in the safe. His memory of survival, the one passed down from generation to generation not through the Net but through blood and experience, was there. And he realized: their family was no longer a project. It had become a clan again.

In Trafalgar Square, at the foot of Nelson’s Column, stood a man named Jonah. Until 5:34 p.m., he was a nobody – a street preacher, an urban lunatic whom everyone ignored by turning off the sound of his voice in their audio filters. He shouted sermons about the sins of the digital world, about the Tower of Babel of information, about humanity drowning in data and losing its soul. He was white noise to them.

Now the white noise was gone. Only his voice remained.

Jonah looked at the confused, devastated faces around him. He saw their fear, their pain. But he felt no fear, no pity. He felt triumph. Ecstasy. This was what he had prayed for. The Great Purification. The divine pressing of the Delete button.

He saw the young woman shaking her dead communicator in panic, crying and repeating the same word: “Pictures… my pictures… my son… I don’t remember his face…”

Jonah walked over to her. He put his hand on her shoulder, and she flinched, feeling the touch of a stranger unmediated by technology for the first time in years.

– “My child,” he said, and his voice, amplified by the general silence, echoed across the square. – Why do you want the pictures? The man you saw in them is dead. That life was a lie. An illusion. God took pity on us and erased our shame. He gave us the greatest gift of all… the gift of Oblivion.

Jonah looked at her, and there was no sympathy in his soul. He remembered his past life. He remembered standing in the gleaming lobby of Chrono-Synaptic, presenting his energy grid optimization project. And how Kevin Tsang himself, walking by with investors, had cast a quick glance at his tablet and told his assistant loud enough for Jonah to hear: “Another dreamer. Make sure his social rating won’t even allow him to take out a loan for a coffee maker.” That phrase, forever written in his digital file, closed all doors in front of him.

But that wasn’t the worst part. Worse was that the Network wouldn’t let him forget. Every morning, his personal assistant offered him “refresher courses” based on his “low performance rating.” Every time he logged on to a social network, an algorithm would slip him success stories of people who had worked on projects similar to his own. And once, as an elaborate torture, the system suggested he buy a 3D model of Tsang’s office as a “career motivating souvenir.” The Web didn’t just remember his humiliation. It poked his nose into that wound daily, methodically, with the soulless smile of an algorithm. She wasn’t just an archive. It was a personal, eternal, digital hell.

She haunted him in his sleep. The net made it impossible to forget anything. She was an eternal accuser, an eternal reminder of his humiliation. And now she was silent. He felt as if the red-hot shackles had been removed. He wasn’t just free. He was avenged.

Several men turned at his voice. A light flickered in their empty eyes. Not hope. A new, eerie sense of purpose. Their agonizing minds clung to any idea, even the craziest, that could explain what was happening.

– Rejoice! – Jonah raised his voice, spreading his arms as if embracing this whole broken world. – For we are free! Free from the weight of the past! Free from likes and dislikes, from digital debt and fake friends! We are a clean slate! We are the first people of a new world! Memory is a disease! Forgetting is healing!

And people listened. They listened because his words, as wild as they were, offered a way out. They turned their loss into gain, their weakness into strength, their terror into holy awe.

In his apartment on the 73rd floor, Elias Vance pushed aside a heavy oak desk and barricaded the front door with it. He realized it wouldn’t hold for long, but he needed time.

He walked along his bookshelves, running his fingers along the leather and cardboard spines. Shakespeare. Dante. Homer. Plato. The Bible. The Koran. Dostoevsky. That was all that was left. Not just stories. They were blueprints of the soul. Instructions on how to assemble a human being.

His own memory, the memory of a scientist, had been destroyed. He could no longer trust what he knew. But the letters on the paper didn’t lie. They were here. Physical proof that humanity knew how to think, love, suffer, and hope long before they invented the silicon chip.

His mission had become terribly clear. He was no longer the Archivist of the past. He was to be the seed of the future.

He picked up a blank sheet of paper and a real fountain pen from his desk, another of his atavisms. His hand trembled, but he forced it to obey. He had to start writing things down. Everything he could still remember. The names of his children. The face of his grandson. The first lines of poetry that still lingered in his head. He wasn’t writing for himself. He was writing for someone who might find these sheets a hundred years from now.

Because in that deafening Silence of the Net, he realized one terrible thing. Oblivion is not just the absence of memory. It is a vacuum. And nature, as he vaguely remembered from some book he had read long ago, does not tolerate emptiness. And if he and others like him didn’t fill that void with bits of old wisdom, something else would.

Something new.

Or something very, very old and dark that had been waiting patiently in the very depths of the human soul all this time while the hum of the Net drowned out his whisper. A voice like Jonah’s.

As Elias wrote, the lights of London slowly dimmed outside the window, and the first real night in a hundred and fifty years descended upon the city. A night full of stars and fear.

And on this night, on the other side of town, in a small apartment piled high with medical reference books, another woman was awake. Her name was Lena. She was a doctor. And she was Elias Vance’s daughter.

She had just experienced hell in her clinic. She had seen patients hooked up to life support systems die when they were disconnected. She had seen her colleague, a brilliant surgeon, suddenly forget how to hold a scalpel and start reciting poetry in ancient Greek out loud. She saw a nurse go into convulsions, screaming out someone else’s name and address in another city.

She didn’t know what had happened to the world. But she did know one thing: her father, Elias, the reclusive historian who always talked about the fragility of digital civilization, was in his tower. And her brother, David, a brilliant programmer who lived outside the city with his retrograde father, was trapped, too. In her mind, like three lights in a raging ocean, there were three dots: her father, her brother, and her son Leo, who was now with David. Her family.

She looked at her dead communicator. There was no connection. But she was a doctor. She knew how to heal, but also how to think. And she knew that in the first hours of chaos, it was not the strongest who survived, but whoever got to their own first.

After packing all the medications she could carry into her backpack, she left the clinic. She didn’t know if she would reach her father downtown. But she knew she could try to make her way south, to her brother’s house. To the home of Matvey Stone, who, she vaguely remembered from conversations, had built himself a “fortress for the end of the world.”

So, on the first night of the new world, the three threads of history began their movement. The librarian, locked in his tower of knowledge. The Builder, fortifying his home with his family. And the Physician, a woman who at that moment made the decision to become the link between them. Their paths had not yet crossed, but they were already inextricably linked.

Chapter 3: The First Days of Chaos

Fragment of lost information: excerpt from high school social studies textbook, Foundations of Civilization 2.0, 2044.

“The social contract of modern society is unique. It is no longer based on physical strength or birthright. Its foundation is an interconnected information infrastructure. Trust, reputation, access to resources are all functions of your digital footprint. The loss of access to the Web is tantamount to social death. Theoretically, the collapse of this system would lead to a regression to the most primitive forms of organization based on tribalism and violence. Fortunately, this is only a hypothetical scenario…”

On the third day after the Shutdown, the city began to make new sounds. The silence, deafening at first, was replaced by a cacophony of regression. Instead of the steady hum of electric highways and the rustle of drones, there was the crunch of broken glass underfoot. Instead of music from flying pods – rare, desperate screams, quickly turning into gurgling silence. And at night, as the primal darkness unfamiliar to the townspeople descended, there were dry, jagged pops. A sound Elias Vance’s ancestors knew all too well. The sound of gunpowder.

Hunger proved to be the quickest and most effective teacher. He taught his first lesson at the windows of the automated supermarkets “Kwiki-Mart”. Behind the impenetrable polycarbonate, in the steady light of emergency diodes, lay mountains of food. Pyramids of canned food, vacuum-packed synthetic meats, rows of clean water bottles. They were there, two centimeters away. But the door, controlled by a dead central server, wouldn’t open. And then people, who yesterday had been law-abiding citizens, picked up stones, pieces of rebar, torn-off road signs, and beat on the transparent barrier like moths against the glass of a lamp. To no avail. Civilization locked its storerooms and died, leaving the keys in a nonexistent cloud.

Elias Vance watched it from his tower window. His 73rd floor had gone from status symbol to curse. He was trapped, on an island in the middle of a stone sky, and hell was unfolding below. He stopped looking at people. He looked at the city like a map. Here were the small stores, the family stores, the ones run by old retrogrades who didn’t trust full automation. There were already flocks clustered around them. They weren’t like gangs. They were just neighbors, who two days ago had said hello in the elevator and now fought with primal fury over a can of stew.

The physical hunger was nothing compared to the informational hunger that was devouring Elias. His own memory, his internal archive, was stricken with “digital leprosy.” Facts were scattered, names turned into sounds. He sat down at his oak desk, picked up a real pen, and began to write. It was a race. A race against time, against the chaos outside and the entropy inside his skull.

“How to purify water. 1. Boiling. Kills almost everything. Must wait for the ‘white key’. 2. Steeping. Long. Unreliable. 3. Chemistry? Iodine? Chlorine? I don’t remember the dosage. Dangerous.”

He wasn’t writing history. He was writing a survival manual for a humanity that had lost the ability to live.

“The simplest knots. Straight. Eight. Bayonet. What was a bowline for? To… to get people out. Yeah. A noose that doesn’t tighten.”

On the fourth day, they came for him. The heavy, methodical blows on the armored door of his apartment sounded like a sentence. The voices were rough, devoid of the overtones of civilization.

– Hey, up there! We know you’re up there! Get rich from the tower! Open it or we’ll break it down! You sure have food! And water!

Elias froze. His barricade of desk and bookcases seemed like a child’s toy. He looked around his library. His treasure. Plato. Herodotus. Shakespeare. Dante. All the wisdom of the world. And what of this could he counteract with scrap and hunger rage?

The blows came harder. The door rattled, the metal squealing protestingly. He had minutes. He couldn’t save everything. Choices had to be made. What was the most important thing? What to pass on next if he didn’t survive? His gaze darted from the heavy volume of History to the elegant binding of the sonnets. Useless. Beautiful, but useless.

And then he saw it. A small, unassuming book in a tattered paperback he’d bought at a flea market out of nostalgic whimsy. “Boy Scout Survival Guide.” 1985 edition. Starting a fire by friction. Building a shelter. Water purification. First aid for fractures. How to distinguish edible berries from poisonous ones.

Practical Knowledge. Survival Concentrate.

With a feverish haste that made his fingers cramp, he grabbed the book, his scribbled sheets, and a small but razor-sharp paper knife. His apartment had an old, bricked-up ventilation duct, an atavism left over from the builders of the last century. He’d discovered it during renovations and wanted to fix it, but kept putting it off. Now it was his only way to escape.

The door flew inward with a deafening crack. Without looking back, Elias ripped open the ventilation grate and ducked into the dark, dusty, oblivion-smelling womb of the wall. The last thing he heard was the roaring and stomping of his apartment, the sound of tearing books and shattering glass. A new world was breaking into his home.

He crawled through the narrow, dusty crawlway, and every crack of tearing paper echoed in his heart with physical pain. They weren’t just books. They were voices. The voice of Plato arguing about the ideal state. The voice of Shakespeare mourning his heroes. The voice of Dante leading him through the circles of hell. And now these voices were silenced one by one under the boots of barbarians fighting over a can of synthetic beans. In that moment, Elias Vance, the Archivist, hated humanity. Not the ones who were busting down his door, but everyone. All those who had traded the eternity contained within these pages for a momentary comfort that vanished like morning fog. And he vowed that if he survived, he wouldn’t be saving people. He would save the things that made them human, even if they didn’t deserve it themselves.

Dozens of kilometers to the south, in his house, which he had built with his own hands, Matvey Kamen loaded his grandfather’s double-barrelled shotgun. The cartridges were old, but he cared for them like a family heirloom. He, too, heard voices and saw packs prowling their suburb. But his house wasn’t an ivory tower. It stood on the ground. Firmly.

His family was packed. Son David and daughter Lena and their spouses and children had managed to reach their parents’ home in the first few hours before the roads turned into death traps. Ten people. Ten lives.

David, pale, clutched the heavy axe in his hands. His fingers, accustomed to smooth keys, did not know how to grip the rough axe-head properly.

– Daddy, maybe we can talk to them? Give up some of the food?” his voice, the voice of a programmer and negotiator, trembled.

– “You don’t talk to wolves, son,” Matvey replied, keeping his eyes on the street. His gaze was as heavy as the stones in the foundation of his house. – You show your teeth with them. Or they’ll eat you, David backed away, feeling helpless. In his world, any problem was solved by negotiation, by compromise, by finding the optimal algorithm. He instinctively tried to “scan” the faces of his attackers, to assess their threat level, to make a psychological profile… and realized that his brain, honed for solving the most complex problems, was failing in the face of simple primal rage. His skills weren’t just useless, they were harmful. They forced him to analyze when he should have acted. He looked at his father, who didn’t think but just knew what to do, and for the first time in his life felt not condescension for a “retrograde” but burning shame for his own fragility.and then your family.

When the first group of five approached their wrought iron gate, Matvey didn’t wait. He raised his rifle and fired into the air. The rumble in the dead silence sounded like the voice of God. The attackers, ready to break through the fence, froze. On their faces hungry rage was replaced for a moment by a primal fear of the loud sound and the promise of death.

– The next charge will not fly into the sky! – roared Matvey, and his voice seemed to vibrate with the earth. – This is my land. My home. Let’s go away!

They wrinkled their brows, looked at each other. There was no easy prey. They retreated, disappearing into the twilight.

That evening, as they sat around the fireplace, the only source of light and warmth, Matvey gathered the whole family together. The wood crackled, casting fluttering shadows on their faces.

– Listen to me,” he said, and his voice was quiet, but everyone caught his words. – The world you knew is dead. Bury it. Different rules now.

He paused, looking around at everyone.

– Rule one: we are not a family. We are a clan. Stone. We breathe together, we die together. No one survives alone.

– Rule two: Every hand has a job to do. David,” he said to his son. – Your computer is dead. Your axe is alive. From tomorrow you’re in charge of the firewood. Lena, – he looked at the doctor’s daughter. – Your clinic is now in this room. You are responsible for everyone’s health. One scratch can kill. Anna,” he nodded to his wife, “you are the keeper of the hearth and supplies. Not one crumb, not one drop must go to waste.

He looked at his frightened but attentive grandchildren.

– And your job is to learn. But not what you’ve been taught. To learn to watch, listen and memorize everything we do.

He rose to his mighty height.

– And rule three. The most important. We don’t just survive. We live. We will gather here tonight. And we will tell stories. We’ll sing the songs we still remember. We will not let the chaos eat our souls. This is the Code of the Stone. And from now on, it is our only law.

He wasn’t just protecting his home. He was founding a civilization. Tiny, harsh, but his own.

Far away from them, in the ruins of an industrial city, in a square littered with garbage, the Prophet of Oblivion Jonah found his flock. They were the most lost, those who had nothing but debt and digital shame in their past lives. They gladly accepted the nullification. They looked at him, and there was empty hope in their eyes.

– They cling to their past! – he shouted, pointing to the hulk of a burning luxury electric car. – They weep for the pictures in dead cell phones! They mourn over names they can’t remember! Fools! They don’t realize what a gift they’ve been given!

He jumped up on a concrete block, spreading his arms like a crucifix.

– God took pity on us and pressed “Delete”! He erased our shame, our pain, our rotten history! He gave us the greatest gift of all – the gift of Oblivion! We are a blank slate! We are the Adam and Eve of the new world!