The Oracle of Pain

It began with silence. Thick, clinging. Alexei stopped asking about her day. Stopped sharing news from his world of architecture – a world untouched by «Huntington-Plus» or the «Oracle Effect.» He watched her from afar, as if she were a fragile vase covered in cracks, about to shatter. Or contagious.

He tried. At first. Suggested going to the sea, «taking a break from all this.» Said, «Lena, you’re fixating. It’s killing you faster than any disease.» His words were like an attempt to grab her hand as she fell into an abyss. But she couldn’t stop. Viktor Semenov, Anna in her wheelchair, her own twitching fingers – it all screamed too loudly. The research, the data, the meetings with Andrei and Dina – it had become her oxygen, her only way to stay afloat in the sea of doom.

Her obsession was a wall. And Alexei, with his normal life, his «Unknowing,» his desire to simply live while they still could, kept hitting that wall. The atmosphere in the apartment thickened, saturated with the smell of coffee, paper dust, and silent despair. He came home – she sat at the screen, pale, eyes sunken. He went to bed – she tossed and turned, muttering in her sleep about algorithms and symptoms. He woke up – she was already checking her facial symmetry in the mirror.

The final straw was the night she was analyzing data on suicides among the «Knowing» after job losses and broke down sobbing, shaking uncontrollably. Alexei approached, tried to hold her. She flinched away as if burned.

«Don’t!» she snapped, harsh, almost rude. «I… I can’t now. The data… See, the correlation between job loss and…»

He stepped back. His face in the dim bedroom light turned to stone.

«Data,» he repeated quietly. «Always data. Patients. Symptoms. Verdict. Where are we, Lena? Where are you? Where am I?»

She couldn’t find an answer. A lump of hot shame and helplessness stuck in her throat. He was right. And he was a stranger in this war she was waging alone.

«I’m suffocating here,» he said, his voice breaking. «I watch you die every day. In advance. And not from the disease, but from… from this!» He gestured wildly towards her desk, buried under proof of the end. «I can’t be your witness anymore. Or your nurse. Or… or your next statistic in this goddamn research of yours.»

She stayed silent. What could she say? Ask him to stay? Why? So he could watch her fall apart? Witness her shame, her helplessness, her final descent? She loved him. That’s precisely why she couldn’t ask.

He left the next morning. Without drama. Quietly. Packed a single suitcase – neatly, as if going on a business trip. She stood in the kitchen doorway, clutching a hot mug, feeling a fine tremor run down her forearms. Not from the disease. From the icy terror of loneliness.

«I… I’ll leave the keys under the mat when I find a rental,» he said, not meeting her eyes. His voice was flat, empty. «Call me if… if something serious happens.»

He opened the door. The smell of damp city air rushed in. He didn’t look back. The door closed with a soft click. The hollow sound of emptiness struck her ears. She sank onto a chair, the mug slipped from her trembling fingers and shattered on the floor. Dark splashes of coffee spread across the light laminate like cracks on fragile ice. She didn’t clean it up. Just sat and stared at the puddle, the shards. Her reflection in them was distorted, broken. Like herself.

Loneliness tightened around her throat like a cold band. The apartment, once a refuge, now gaped with emptiness. Every sound – the creak of the floorboards, the hum of the fridge – echoed in that void, reminding her she was utterly alone. Facing her sentence, facing Verdict, facing the inexorable future she herself was dissecting like a pathologist.

The social death of the «Knowing» was no longer abstract statistics. She saw it daily at the clinic. Colleagues who averted their eyes. Patients she once helped now looked at her with pity and fear – not as a doctor, but as a plague carrier. But the final blow, shattering the illusion that one could «live before» or «prepare,» came later, at the subway exit.

A fine, persistent rain was falling. By the exit, under a pathetic plastic canopy, sat a figure. Wrapped in a dirty, soaked raincoat, legs drawn up. Beside him – a battered cardboard box with meager belongings and an empty begging cup. His face was hidden by a hood, but the hands… Thin, trembling, with bluish nails, lay on his knees. And those hands were making small, involuntary, worm-like movements. Chaotic. Familiar.

Elena froze. An icy trickle ran down her spine. Chorea.

She stepped closer instinctively, the doctor in her overriding despair. Then she saw his face. Dirt, beard, deep wrinkles, but… the features. An intelligent forehead, a gaze once clear, now clouded. She knew that face. Dr. Pyotr Ilyich Levin. A brilliant neurophysiologist. Her former patient. Three years ago, Prognosis had delivered his sentence: Huntington’s chorea (classic, before «Plus»). Symptom onset in 4—5 years. He’d been full of plans – finish his monograph, pass the lab to his students, take his wife to Italy.

And now… He sat by the subway entrance. Shaking, filthy, empty-eyed. Social death had arrived before biological death. Much sooner.

«Pyotr Ilyich?» Elena’s voice rasped, rough with shock and horror.

He slowly raised his eyes to her. No recognition. Only dull apathy and animal fear. His hand jerked sharply, knocking against the cup. An empty sound.

«Go away,» he hissed hoarsely. «I… I’m contagious. Everyone says…»

«Pyotr Ilyich, it’s me, Dr. Sokolova. Remember?»

He stared past her. «Sokolova… Knowing. Like me. Doomed.» He gave a bitter smirk, revealing bad teeth. «Wife left. Lab… fired. «Ninety-Day Rule’… ha! They gave me a hundred twenty. Merciful.» His gaze fell on his twitching hands. «It… it started. Sooner. Knowledge… knowledge pushes it.» He fell silent, chin dropping to his knees, curling in on himself. Near his feet, in a puddle, lay a crumpled sheet of paper. Elena’s gaze lifted automatically. It wasn’t trash. It was a fragment of some complex neural diagram. Pyotr Ilyich’s recognizable handwriting.

Elena stood, unable to move. Rain soaked her hair, trickled down her collar. She looked at this man – yesterday’s genius, today’s outcast, a living illustration of what awaited the «Knowing.» Social death. Loss of everything: job, family, status, human dignity. All before the disease itself rendered him helpless. Verdict had predicted the disease of the body. But it hadn’t predicted that its prognosis would become the tool for murdering the soul and one’s place in society. It had provoked that murder.

Pyotr Ilyich was a mirror. A mirror of her immediate future. Alexei was gone. Her job hung by a thread. Who would beg for alms at the subway entrance in a year? Two? When she couldn’t hide the tremor, when her unsteady gait became obvious to all?

She shoved her hand into her pocket, pulled out all the bills she had, and silently pressed them into Pyotr Ilyich’s trembling, stiff-fingered hand. He didn’t even glance at them. She turned and walked away, blind to the path beneath her feet. Loneliness closed around her in a dense, impenetrable ring. She had lost Alexei. She was losing her profession. She was losing her place in society. All anchors had given way. All that remained was the shadow of the future, thickening with each day, the fragile alliance with fellow outcasts – Andrei and Dina – and the quiet, insistent whisper of her own body, reminding her: «You are Knowing. You are next.» She walked under the same rain as Pyotr Ilyich, and the difference between them now seemed only a matter of time.

Chapter 15: The Decision to Fight