Mircea Băduţ

Let's not waste our time

(dystopia)

Time trip-or temporal translation-proves to inspire brave ideas perhaps because the writer is often asked for additional fantasy in describing the translation itself. However-to imagine the equipment and operating principle related to the time machine and to obtain an effect of "transcendental possibility"-the creator must show a very lenient, and at the same time elastic, common scientific. However, it is sometimes happening that readers will remain unsatisfied from this point of view, and this is due to the difficulty of diverting the common sense; that is, the insufficiency in creating the illusion of the possibility of shaking or even the crack of the existing scientific beliefs.

Without proposing a critical study of synthesis of temporal travel, I will try a logical analysis of the temporal jump itself.

*

In order to make it possible to understand those I want to show, I will have to start from a certain initial data fund. Thus: it is considered that temporal translation is possible both forward and back in time; It defines the time from which it is departing as the original time, and the target, the destination, as a second (or secondary) time.

The name of the subject is all. It has parents, friends and acquaintances - that is, normal relationships with the present. It also has the secret of travel over time. But this is not interested now. We want to follow only what implications the jump can have.

All starts back a few millennia. Arrived during the target time, he - let's say involuntarily - conflicts with the environment. Conflict can be of any kind and is inevitable. That is, from the simple presence during the second, to the intense and conscious involvement in a process that obviously changes the world (from moving a grass that would otherwise have consumed an insect with its importance in a trophic chain, to destroying a civilization), the conflict exists and has the effect of discrete or accentuated. And all, aware of this involvement, returns during the original time being curious to see what changes the incursion produced in the past.

Fortunately, he finds no change. An entire universe-with its own energy balance-cannot change suddenly (because for those remaining during the original time the change would be terribly abrupt) due to a simple atom that has coated history. However, the second time has existed, and there is also impossible its disappearance.

The only explanation would be the creation of a new, variant world, existing in another time (say so), whose training was based on the original world, the evolution towards variant being univocally determined by All of All.

In other words, from the moment of jump the history has been bifurded in the original and in variant.

All starts in the future for a few years. Very few in number. Arrived here, the implication in the new environment is equally safe and logical. For the sake of the All experiment, it meets the future all, all second (all "). He explains the situation and returns during the original time.

Wait for a few years. And on the date targeted in his last jump he has the surprise not to meet any all. Safe thing, because otherwise they would be both originally. Or, more than everyone, all, "did not anticipate All's visit, while all is waiting for it.

Both times existing, it turns out that in the case of translation to the future a temporal variant is formed.

The first axiom can now be defined: if someone (something?!) Visits a past or future time, instantly born a historical variant that evolves - from the moment of jump - independent of the evolution of the original history.

The fact that the temporal referent is taken as the original history or time is justified by the legal and logical existence of the world from which the female starts, as well as the fact that the variant is a derivative of the original time.

*

Consequence: the smear can move only to the past and future of the original time.

Let's follow the wire carefully!

All makes a leap in the past. Well, once in the secondary time, in the variant, this time becomes an original time, being even the subjective time of All. And, if he wanted to return-thus imposing a leap in the future-he will reach the future of the variant, thus creating a new variant. Variant of the variant. All this because the jumps (in the past or in the future) have as a referent the subjective time of the temporal intruder.

Suppose all would leave in the future. As well as here the secondary time would become an original time for him and thus the return would be made in the past of the variant.

So what is more important for all, he will never be able to return during the time he left. And for those left in the original time the only thing that could confirm the leap of the Temponaut would be its disappearance forever.

The second axiom: the temporal variants are independent from the moment of their creation.

Consequence: The smear cannot return to history and during which he left.

*

That would be.

And I believe that anyone will filter all these immense implications related to the creation of variants by their own common sense of honorable citizen will agree-for now-with:

Time axiom: time travel are impossible, and time is unique and non -recoverable.

June 20, 1987, Rm.Vîlcea

Mircea Băduţ

ONE WAY

I told myself that I have an almost perfect suit. For a week I was advancing through a desert of mud of a frightening stretch and monotony and I did not feel a little dirty.

At first I told myself to count the steps, maybe this time would run easier. But I gave up after several attempts in which I inevitably exhausted the memorable numbers register. In front of us, an infinity of steps await us, and - if there will be chances - we will finally reach the oasis of life in the opposite hemisphere of the planet.

The primordial care was that Iria would not stay too long, and from eight to eight hours I would inject the narcotic-nutrients and the stimulating-nutrient. I was thinking - especially at the beginning, when I could do it lucid - that it is the only solution to overcome Desnadejdea.

If the distance between us became greater than five steps I would stop, shouted it slowly and extended its hand. Each time the irria was gently squeezing my fingers. But when I was detached, he had no reaction.

In those moments-and not only then, because time, leaking indifferent and monotonous, we were no longer declared opponent-I was trying to imagine how a consciousness reacts under the effect of the narcotic ...

The stops, from eight to eight hours (I had probably exceeded thirty), had some kind of ritual. The eyes of Iriei had a brilliance of intelligence, the clock bracelet signaled my moment and optically, and so I stopped. I removed a regenerating towel from the backpack and wiped my hands energetically. Then, once the medical kit was removed, I was fixing the tank with a narcotic in the syringe, I was giving her to hold it and, looking into her indifferent eyes, I was injection. It was my turn, I was packing everything, I was watching the beautiful irria to see if the eyes were regaining their molatec heat and then, taking my hand in mine, I was invariant on the road.

*

Four centuries ago, due to the overcrowding of the Earth, the colonization project of the cosmic space had been initiated. Humanity was a few millennia and she was forced to send her ships to find new living spaces. Thus, an avant -garde expedition had also reached Vanelia. This planet was slightly larger than the Earth, but it had the totally different relief: on 99% of the surface there were continuous deserts, and the small rest consisted of two vegetable oases. It was said "desert" not because there was a full correspondence with the classical definition, but because-not having a generic term-the analogy was made based on the traits and deserts, otherwise the main definers.

The atmosphere found stagna in an unnatural balance of stable, and the air was sufficiently similar to that of our world of origin for the planet to present interest. Especially the oasis area. Oases - even if they were not at perfectly opposite points of the planetoid - formed two biological poles, and surrounded the only water sources.

Noting the existence of a biological "magnetism" with uncontrollable manifestations, the pilot colony would be designed only for one hundred and two earthly, however, entering the wide category of independent colonies.

About four years after installation, a group of researchers has established that biological polarity changes - somewhat similar to the terrestrial magnetic one - but at short and, at least apparently, irregular intervals. The legend of the change of polarity was also discovered, the equation whose only shortcoming was that demanding the knowledge of a change in relation to the local astonomic time. When the hypothesis appeared that this change could also have harmful effects, a rescue system was developed, but that any solving of a problem without known parameters and with a low probability, it was quite thin-in particular, measures to rescue the possible survivors were proposed.

The construction of the habitat had ended almost a decade ago and I was 16 years old. Our dwellings-aesthetic-durable peaks of colonial architecture-had naturally filled and society had begun to pulsate. After a few years, when graduating from the training course, when I was elected auxiliary member of the Board of Directors, I also learned about the problem of polarity. But during the peaceful period of life that has been elapsed since then I have forgotten about that threat.

*

I had noticed Iria from the beginning - a nice little girl, a little full, having a charm that I had been conquered.

*

Because sometimes I felt the need for a change in the decoration, I went out with Iria to an end of the oasis crossing seven to eight kilometers, to look for hours over the deserted stretches. It was often the case to take us at night about simple things or not, but the bright nights on Vanelia are very beautiful.

In such a evening-nine years had passed since the colonization of the planet-the disaster occurred. The air was hot and began to vibrate strangely, a distant smell came to us and Iria proposed to return immediately. I had to be a little brutal to be able to hold it. Then I tried to explain to him that the phenomenon could signal a change of biological polarity and that it may be dangerous. Probably if I had been silent it would have been easier.

In the meantime, the smell has intensified unbearable by forcing us to move another kilometer. Looking empty-in those diffuse waiting moments-I started to imagine my possible disaster: known faces came to my mind, and pessimistic thoughts were terrifying me. In order not to panic, I forced myself to recap the instructions received in the Council. Some seemed meaningless to me and I could hardly wait to consult the central computer.

The impatience took unbearable proportions and, shortly before the morning, taking any risk, we set off for the colony.

After almost two hours I arrived and I had to see that a disaster had been produced. The streets were deserted, the warehouses were also agitated and, very rarely, an inanimate body. That was all I saw on the desperate escape to the central building. I entered the computer and read the computer display, which had already been questioned by the service person. The yellow letters blinked:

3.1 MRI biological emanation.

Indefinite nature.

Effect of changing biological polarity.

The mortal dose on a quasi -circular surface with a radius of 5 km around the pole.

Additional information: C 2156.

After drawing his breath, Iria also read. He looked at me terribly and went out. I wanted to follow her but I remembered instructions. So I returned to the computer console and formed the figure 2156. I completed the data required by the initialization of the program and so I found out everything.

For almost twelve years, this oasis will be uninhabitable due to continuous poisonous gas emanations, then the other pole will be uninhabible for almost fifteen years. In the next four hours, I had to leave the colony together with the possible survivors, and - to save it - to reach the other habitable oasis.

Because the connection with the earth needed a waiting time for several weeks, I had to go to action: I switched all the intercoms and launched a repeated call.

I had scheduled the computer to communicate on Earth the ones that happened and I had finished the Planglob's map, when - almost unheard of - it entered the irria. He calmed down as soon as he felt me next to me and informed me that they had died; that they all died. And I had to believe it because the intercoms, amplified to the maximum, issued only a slight background noise, and the signals confirmed everything. We were the only survivors.

After a while I managed to chase my images and gather my thoughts. I tried to explain the instructions. The logic understood it perfectly, but it did not understand what it is to try. I couldn't explain the point either; If it was the conservation instinct or the instructions received in the council and assimilated as primary needs, but I knew we had to live and I was surprised then that I did not even struggle to find motivation. Iriei the preservation instinct had been annihilated in pain and told me that he did not want to hear about departure, and I-if I am so cowardly-I have only to leave. Single!

He went out, leaving me perplexed, but I returned to how he slammed the door and rushed to act the system of locking the exterior doors.

After a few preparations I called it and said:

- I hold you too much to leave you alone. But something I still want to try - we will make a vaccine and I hope it has an effect!

Unable to read nothing in my concerned gaze let me approach and fix his syringe on the forearm. I was a little wrong when, for more safety, I firmly shaken her hand, and she started to suspect something.

- All, you do not ... you want to ... you take me ...

Then the rumor was faded by narcotic.

"From now on my good Iria will follow me anywhere!" I communicated this century, refusing any other implications for the moment.

I memorized the instructions given by the computer, I took the medical kit with nutritional reserves, the computer station, a mini-technical and a miniature tent, and I left for a while without analyzing my feelings. Everything in desperate and yet logical frenzy. And the fact that Iria was holding confidently by my hand gave me the decision I needed in trying to cross the planet in search of the only place where you could live.

I had come out of the oasis and looking behind that I told myself that in an hour a new emanation will occur. I turned my eyes forward and started immediately thinking that we had over twenty thousand kilometers and there was no point in mounting the radio to find out what the computer looks about the new wave of emanations. Or about anything else.

*

After another week the aqueous mud had turned into a thicker one, which made the shoes pant, then thicker, so that the traces left had a depth of only three to four centimeters. He had never rained, nor do I remember seeing the trace of the cloud. The nocturnal drop in the temperature was insignificant and we were walking under the strong satellite light.

*

The injections had proved to be quite formidable: we were going through almost a hundred kilometers on a continuous day. Vaanelian time being almost identical to the terrestrial one I did not feel the need to have accuracy calculations.

Anyway, apart from walking, I couldn't do anything else. Only in the stops I was thinking with love about Iria, the way they endure, its reactions, sometimes trying to imagine their mechanism. In the meantime, something happened that I almost knew would happen: I was gradually losing lucidity. I diluted myself in the middle of this exceptional situation, letting the instincts govern me. It was a strange state; New sensations replaced my logic and lucidity securely. The crossing of the road was printed somewhere in the subconscious, becoming a complete reflex, a fundamental law of survival; And so the goal seems to free my mind, leaving my thoughts to rub in an organic disorder around the most beautiful subject-Iria.

*

Gradually and yet unobserved the mud had dried, cracking in irregular forms that gained an incredible symmetry through infinite repeat. I had even begun to believe that the surface of the planet is flat, the horizon not to end due to the curvature. It was of course an aberration, but he often haunts my thoughts.

I was walking continuously, at an eternal pace, and I had come to fear a reaction of organisms to the substances we inject.

*

The soil had become sprinkled with huge cracks. In these areas, where the water was drawing for centuries, we managed to cross over one hundred kilometers a day. I was telling myself that we still have a lot to learn about this planet, nothing I knew about the earthly climate or other worlds without the fact of the fact here. But I knew that it also depends on our effort now if there was a future for it.

*

In one of the rare lucidity moments I realized that I no longer follow the time. I lost the count and I should have been upset and mobilized to restore the loss. But I smiled, telling myself that this movement of interest protects us. In the sense that we are too small, vulnerable and mortal to continue to go against time.

And I also told myself that I am starting to waste the notion of time because in fact the space is the one who interposes between us and the oasis of life.

*

I was watching as much as possible to notice the appearance of dust in the air to know how to take additional measures to isolate the equipment; But the soil was terribly compact - no dust particle was detached in any way. From this perspective everything was in order.

Something curious seemed to me to happen to Iria. Against the background of the same need for protection, in the moments before the stops, when the narcotic was beginning to lose his effect, he was crying lightly, he reached me from my three steps, he grabbed my hand and pulled me forward. My wonderful gaze answered them with a beautiful smile. He had even begun to help me in injection of the evenings, and the eyes we changed had multiplied.

Then I had moments of insecurity of thoughts. Thoughts that, on the one hand, accused me of proceeding with the irria to such treatment, on the other hand they made sure that I was avoiding depressions and fatigue I had more chances.

*

I remember a glitter of lucidity when a bud of idea tried to reach the light; But from that inappropriate effort only a sensation has fought me to the level of the conscious-a insufficient question regarding the thermodynamic balance and its principles. Probably the amplitude of that idea was initially more substantial, but I had managed to impose my memory.

Then this simple reference would frequently fight until controllable thinking without being able to build more.

*

The dust also appeared, but it remained unwavering on the strong soil. After another twenty stops, we were-progressively-in the eternal sands. The soil was flat from the horizon to the horizon. It doesn't even blow the wind, so it seems like a more earthly image. In that discouraging mostruity of the building, we only move, advancing alienating through the desert.

*

I do not know how and why, but I had come to hold Iria continuously. And this would save us from a tragedy. One day, at a stop, I injected both nutrients-narcotic.

I felt the effect of annihilating the conscious immediately after I had packaged everything. With the last coherent thought I communicated that I will now find out through my own senses how the narcotic acts. I remember seeing pictures (or imagining them), I heard noise (or seemed to me), and that I was a total and timeless spectator at everything that surrounded me and what was happening to me. When I came back from the nightmare of powerlessness, I noticed that we stopped and the Iria was already cleaning on the hands and face. I was too dizzy to amaze me then by her lucidity. I had the power to restore the injections and everything returned to normal, except that I had to correct the route - the last eight hours I had been perpendicular to the proposed route. An unexpected compensation: I had the feeling of a relaxing vacation.

I could not stop thinking about what would have happened if I had lost Iria, but every time I was afraid to take my thought too far ...

The desert had become exasperating. The amazing fine sand - probably created centuries through who knows what miracles, because the temperature differences were insignificant - rising as a result of our steps like an endless dust.

The temperature had grown a lot and I felt the hand of the irony sweating. I was afraid of the evolution of the temperature and the reaction of our organisms. When I had reached annoying crises caused by the sting of the sweat that entered my eyes, I had the joy of finding-at one of the stops-that the temperature dropped by half a rank. I had once learned about the symmetry and uniformity of the Vanelian climate and the fact told me that we were halfway. At this memorable stop, as if in a fever, I talked to Irie for a long time about the chance to reach the oasis. Despite the fact that she did not understand anything. But he was smiling and it was enough.

*

I do not remember when the dessert was over; For a few weeks I had been lucid only at the stops, and only as much as I could be surprised where I have the power to respect the ceremony.

I felt the continuous loss of lucidity and I could barely make the effort to track the route on the map. The air was no longer so hot, but the sands reminded me that I still had a lot of walking. And I thought that from the departure I was only sitting on the soles.

*

The stops were normally running and Iriei seemed to be undergoing injection - he had begun to help me and watch me smiling.

Otherwise, I was looking at my feet, as one before the other and then the second in front of the first, and again ... And when I wanted to chase the state slowly, I was slowly shaking the hand of Irie, and it was easy to remember that I had to do everything for success.

*

I do not know how long it had been and since, but something special happened at a stop. After I wiped my hands, I opened the kit and spread the serum tank. When I load the syringe, Iria threw the dose on the floor. A fact that instantly brought me the lucidity. I looked at her in my eyes hiding my surprise. He breathed broadly a few times, and then he told me looking at me:

- You trust, all! I will be next to you.

Probably what I felt then is true happiness.

Under these conditions I had to do it was nothing, the fact that we would be alone not having importance-we were determined to take life from the beginning.

Iria looked splendid and since then we would use the same serum.

Two weeks after the unforgettable event the soil had become covered with a very sticky mud. But the new unit helps us to cross in these conditions over thirty kilometers in a cycle. And the stops were now unforgettable - after we changed some technical impressions on the route and we were making plans for the future, we were deepening in tender eyes that told about a unique love. At least on this planet.

*

* *

From the distance we saw the oasis and even tried to hurry. Unexpected reserves of reason brought me some ideas with survival valences. I then realized that besides fatigue I had also accumulated a lot of information about this living planet. Information that - added to the data in the computer we were related to - will help us explain and control even what it seemed to not respect the principles of thermodynamics.

After a few good hours we stopped near a spring. I installed the tent and installed the radio connection with the computer.

I had gone seven months and eleven days and knew that stopping the treatment would follow terrible fatigue. We took a dose of homogenizing sleeping pills and we slept in a hurry because, after a few days of sleep, the beginning of a new life was waiting for us.

May 17-18, 1986, Rm.Vâlcea

Mircea Băduţ

ONE WAY

I told myself that I have an almost perfect suit. For a week I was advancing through a desert of mud of a frightening stretch and monotony and I did not feel a little dirty.

At first I told myself to count the steps, maybe this time would run easier. But I gave up after several attempts in which I inevitably exhausted the memorable numbers register. In front of us, an infinity of steps await us, and - if there will be chances - we will finally reach the oasis of life in the opposite hemisphere of the planet.

The primordial care was that Iria would not stay too long, and from eight to eight hours I would inject the narcotic-nutrients and the stimulating-nutrient. I was thinking - especially at the beginning, when I could do it lucid - that it is the only solution to overcome Desnadejdea.

If the distance between us became greater than five steps I would stop, shouted it slowly and extended its hand. Each time the irria was gently squeezing my fingers. But when I was detached, he had no reaction.

In those moments-and not only then, because time, leaking indifferent and monotonous, we were no longer declared opponent-I was trying to imagine how a consciousness reacts under the effect of the narcotic ...

The stops, from eight to eight hours (I had probably exceeded thirty), had some kind of ritual. The eyes of Iriei had a brilliance of intelligence, the clock bracelet signaled my moment and optically, and so I stopped. I removed a regenerating towel from the backpack and wiped my hands energetically. Then, once the medical kit was removed, I was fixing the tank with a narcotic in the syringe, I was giving her to hold it and, looking into her indifferent eyes, I was injection. It was my turn, I was packing everything, I was watching the beautiful irria to see if the eyes were regaining their molatec heat and then, taking my hand in mine, I was invariant on the road.

*

Four centuries ago, due to the overcrowding of the Earth, the colonization project of the cosmic space had been initiated. Humanity was a few millennia and she was forced to send her ships to find new living spaces. Thus, an avant -garde expedition had also reached Vanelia. This planet was slightly larger than the Earth, but it had the totally different relief: on 99% of the surface there were continuous deserts, and the small rest consisted of two vegetable oases. It was said "desert" not because there was a full correspondence with the classical definition, but because-not having a generic term-the analogy was made based on the traits and deserts, otherwise the main definers.

The atmosphere found stagna in an unnatural balance of stable, and the air was sufficiently similar to that of our world of origin for the planet to present interest. Especially the oasis area. Oases - even if they were not at perfectly opposite points of the planetoid - formed two biological poles, and surrounded the only water sources.

Noting the existence of a biological "magnetism" with uncontrollable manifestations, the pilot colony would be designed only for one hundred and two earthly, however, entering the wide category of independent colonies.

About four years after installation, a group of researchers has established that biological polarity changes - somewhat similar to the terrestrial magnetic one - but at short and, at least apparently, irregular intervals. The legend of the change of polarity was also discovered, the equation whose only shortcoming was that demanding the knowledge of a change in relation to the local astonomic time. When the hypothesis appeared that this change could also have harmful effects, a rescue system was developed, but that any solving of a problem without known parameters and with a low probability, it was quite thin-in particular, measures to rescue the possible survivors were proposed.

The construction of the habitat had ended almost a decade ago and I was 16 years old. Our dwellings-aesthetic-durable peaks of colonial architecture-had naturally filled and society had begun to pulsate. After a few years, when graduating from the training course, when I was elected auxiliary member of the Board of Directors, I also learned about the problem of polarity. But during the peaceful period of life that has been elapsed since then I have forgotten about that threat.

*

I had noticed Iria from the beginning - a nice little girl, a little full, having a charm that I had been conquered.

*

Because sometimes I felt the need for a change in the decoration, I went out with Iria to an end of the oasis crossing seven to eight kilometers, to look for hours over the deserted stretches. It was often the case to take us at night about simple things or not, but the bright nights on Vanelia are very beautiful.

In such a evening-nine years had passed since the colonization of the planet-the disaster occurred. The air was hot and began to vibrate strangely, a distant smell came to us and Iria proposed to return immediately. I had to be a little brutal to be able to hold it. Then I tried to explain to him that the phenomenon could signal a change of biological polarity and that it may be dangerous. Probably if I had been silent it would have been easier.

In the meantime, the smell has intensified unbearable by forcing us to move another kilometer. Looking empty-in those diffuse waiting moments-I started to imagine my possible disaster: known faces came to my mind, and pessimistic thoughts were terrifying me. In order not to panic, I forced myself to recap the instructions received in the Council. Some seemed meaningless to me and I could hardly wait to consult the central computer.

The impatience took unbearable proportions and, shortly before the morning, taking any risk, we set off for the colony.

After almost two hours I arrived and I had to see that a disaster had been produced. The streets were deserted, the warehouses were also agitated and, very rarely, an inanimate body. That was all I saw on the desperate escape to the central building. I entered the computer and read the computer display, which had already been questioned by the service person. The yellow letters blinked:

3.1 MRI biological emanation.

Indefinite nature.

Effect of changing biological polarity.

The mortal dose on a quasi -circular surface with a radius of 5 km around the pole.

Additional information: C 2156.

After drawing his breath, Iria also read. He looked at me terribly and went out. I wanted to follow her but I remembered instructions. So I returned to the computer console and formed the figure 2156. I completed the data required by the initialization of the program and so I found out everything.

For almost twelve years, this oasis will be uninhabitable due to continuous poisonous gas emanations, then the other pole will be uninhabible for almost fifteen years. In the next four hours, I had to leave the colony together with the possible survivors, and - to save it - to reach the other habitable oasis.

Because the connection with the earth needed a waiting time for several weeks, I had to go to action: I switched all the intercoms and launched a repeated call.

I had scheduled the computer to communicate on Earth the ones that happened and I had finished the Planglob's map, when - almost unheard of - it entered the irria. He calmed down as soon as he felt me next to me and informed me that they had died; that they all died. And I had to believe it because the intercoms, amplified to the maximum, issued only a slight background noise, and the signals confirmed everything. We were the only survivors.

After a while I managed to chase my images and gather my thoughts. I tried to explain the instructions. The logic understood it perfectly, but it did not understand what it is to try. I couldn't explain the point either; If it was the conservation instinct or the instructions received in the council and assimilated as primary needs, but I knew we had to live and I was surprised then that I did not even struggle to find motivation. Iriei the preservation instinct had been annihilated in pain and told me that he did not want to hear about departure, and I-if I am so cowardly-I have only to leave. Single!

He went out, leaving me perplexed, but I returned to how he slammed the door and rushed to act the system of locking the exterior doors.

After a few preparations I called it and said:

- I hold you too much to leave you alone. But something I still want to try - we will make a vaccine and I hope it has an effect!

Unable to read nothing in my concerned gaze let me approach and fix his syringe on the forearm. I was a little wrong when, for more safety, I firmly shaken her hand, and she started to suspect something.

- All, you do not ... you want to ... you take me ...

Then the rumor was faded by narcotic.

"From now on my good Iria will follow me anywhere!" I communicated this century, refusing any other implications for the moment.

I memorized the instructions given by the computer, I took the medical kit with nutritional reserves, the computer station, a mini-technical and a miniature tent, and I left for a while without analyzing my feelings. Everything in desperate and yet logical frenzy. And the fact that Iria was holding confidently by my hand gave me the decision I needed in trying to cross the planet in search of the only place where you could live.

I had come out of the oasis and looking behind that I told myself that in an hour a new emanation will occur. I turned my eyes forward and started immediately thinking that we had over twenty thousand kilometers and there was no point in mounting the radio to find out what the computer looks about the new wave of emanations. Or about anything else.

*

After another week the aqueous mud had turned into a thicker one, which made the shoes pant, then thicker, so that the traces left had a depth of only three to four centimeters. He had never rained, nor do I remember seeing the trace of the cloud. The nocturnal drop in the temperature was insignificant and we were walking under the strong satellite light.

*

The injections had proved to be quite formidable: we were going through almost a hundred kilometers on a continuous day. Vaanelian time being almost identical to the terrestrial one I did not feel the need to have accuracy calculations.

Anyway, apart from walking, I couldn't do anything else. Only in the stops I was thinking with love about Iria, the way they endure, its reactions, sometimes trying to imagine their mechanism. In the meantime, something happened that I almost knew would happen: I was gradually losing lucidity. I diluted myself in the middle of this exceptional situation, letting the instincts govern me. It was a strange state; New sensations replaced my logic and lucidity securely. The crossing of the road was printed somewhere in the subconscious, becoming a complete reflex, a fundamental law of survival; And so the goal seems to free my mind, leaving my thoughts to rub in an organic disorder around the most beautiful subject-Iria.

*

Gradually and yet unobserved the mud had dried, cracking in irregular forms that gained an incredible symmetry through infinite repeat. I had even begun to believe that the surface of the planet is flat, the horizon not to end due to the curvature. It was of course an aberration, but he often haunts my thoughts.

I was walking continuously, at an eternal pace, and I had come to fear a reaction of organisms to the substances we inject.

*

The soil had become sprinkled with huge cracks. In these areas, where the water was drawing for centuries, we managed to cross over one hundred kilometers a day. I was telling myself that we still have a lot to learn about this planet, nothing I knew about the earthly climate or other worlds without the fact of the fact here. But I knew that it also depends on our effort now if there was a future for it.

*

In one of the rare lucidity moments I realized that I no longer follow the time. I lost the count and I should have been upset and mobilized to restore the loss. But I smiled, telling myself that this movement of interest protects us. In the sense that we are too small, vulnerable and mortal to continue to go against time.

And I also told myself that I am starting to waste the notion of time because in fact the space is the one who interposes between us and the oasis of life.

*

I was watching as much as possible to notice the appearance of dust in the air to know how to take additional measures to isolate the equipment; But the soil was terribly compact - no dust particle was detached in any way. From this perspective everything was in order.

Something curious seemed to me to happen to Iria. Against the background of the same need for protection, in the moments before the stops, when the narcotic was beginning to lose his effect, he was crying lightly, he reached me from my three steps, he grabbed my hand and pulled me forward. My wonderful gaze answered them with a beautiful smile. He had even begun to help me in injection of the evenings, and the eyes we changed had multiplied.

Then I had moments of insecurity of thoughts. Thoughts that, on the one hand, accused me of proceeding with the irria to such treatment, on the other hand they made sure that I was avoiding depressions and fatigue I had more chances.

*

I remember a glitter of lucidity when a bud of idea tried to reach the light; But from that inappropriate effort only a sensation has fought me to the level of the conscious-a insufficient question regarding the thermodynamic balance and its principles. Probably the amplitude of that idea was initially more substantial, but I had managed to impose my memory.

Then this simple reference would frequently fight until controllable thinking without being able to build more.

*

The dust also appeared, but it remained unwavering on the strong soil. After another twenty stops, we were-progressively-in the eternal sands. The soil was flat from the horizon to the horizon. It doesn't even blow the wind, so it seems like a more earthly image. In that discouraging mostruity of the building, we only move, advancing alienating through the desert.

*

I do not know how and why, but I had come to hold Iria continuously. And this would save us from a tragedy. One day, at a stop, I injected both nutrients-narcotic.

I felt the effect of annihilating the conscious immediately after I had packaged everything. With the last coherent thought I communicated that I will now find out through my own senses how the narcotic acts. I remember seeing pictures (or imagining them), I heard noise (or seemed to me), and that I was a total and timeless spectator at everything that surrounded me and what was happening to me. When I came back from the nightmare of powerlessness, I noticed that we stopped and the Iria was already cleaning on the hands and face. I was too dizzy to amaze me then by her lucidity. I had the power to restore the injections and everything returned to normal, except that I had to correct the route - the last eight hours I had been perpendicular to the proposed route. An unexpected compensation: I had the feeling of a relaxing vacation.

I could not stop thinking about what would have happened if I had lost Iria, but every time I was afraid to take my thought too far ...

The desert had become exasperating. The amazing fine sand - probably created centuries through who knows what miracles, because the temperature differences were insignificant - rising as a result of our steps like an endless dust.

The temperature had grown a lot and I felt the hand of the irony sweating. I was afraid of the evolution of the temperature and the reaction of our organisms. When I had reached annoying crises caused by the sting of the sweat that entered my eyes, I had the joy of finding-at one of the stops-that the temperature dropped by half a rank. I had once learned about the symmetry and uniformity of the Vanelian climate and the fact told me that we were halfway. At this memorable stop, as if in a fever, I talked to Irie for a long time about the chance to reach the oasis. Despite the fact that she did not understand anything. But he was smiling and it was enough.

*

I do not remember when the dessert was over; For a few weeks I had been lucid only at the stops, and only as much as I could be surprised where I have the power to respect the ceremony.

I felt the continuous loss of lucidity and I could barely make the effort to track the route on the map. The air was no longer so hot, but the sands reminded me that I still had a lot of walking. And I thought that from the departure I was only sitting on the soles.

*

The stops were normally running and Iriei seemed to be undergoing injection - he had begun to help me and watch me smiling.

Otherwise, I was looking at my feet, as one before the other and then the second in front of the first, and again ... And when I wanted to chase the state slowly, I was slowly shaking the hand of Irie, and it was easy to remember that I had to do everything for success.

*

I do not know how long it had been and since, but something special happened at a stop. After I wiped my hands, I opened the kit and spread the serum tank. When I load the syringe, Iria threw the dose on the floor. A fact that instantly brought me the lucidity. I looked at her in my eyes hiding my surprise. He breathed broadly a few times, and then he told me looking at me:

- You trust, all! I will be next to you.

Probably what I felt then is true happiness.

Under these conditions I had to do it was nothing, the fact that we would be alone not having importance-we were determined to take life from the beginning.

Iria looked splendid and since then we would use the same serum.

Two weeks after the unforgettable event the soil had become covered with a very sticky mud. But the new unit helps us to cross in these conditions over thirty kilometers in a cycle. And the stops were now unforgettable - after we changed some technical impressions on the route and we were making plans for the future, we were deepening in tender eyes that told about a unique love. At least on this planet.

*

* *

From the distance we saw the oasis and even tried to hurry. Unexpected reserves of reason brought me some ideas with survival valences. I then realized that besides fatigue I had also accumulated a lot of information about this living planet. Information that - added to the data in the computer we were related to - will help us explain and control even what it seemed to not respect the principles of thermodynamics.

After a few good hours we stopped near a spring. I installed the tent and installed the radio connection with the computer.

I had gone seven months and eleven days and knew that stopping the treatment would follow terrible fatigue. We took a dose of homogenizing sleeping pills and we slept in a hurry because, after a few days of sleep, the beginning of a new life was waiting for us.

May 17-18, 1986, Rm.Vâlcea

Mircea Băduţ

One last chance

A new crisis. He closed his eyes. He wanted to smile and even smiled a little, glad that the intensity and frequency of these crises had decreased. A little then looked around and analysis.

The lead sky had descended very close to the world.

Think: "It should be spring ... Maybe it is. But no one can say it. Noticing for anyone."

Everything seemed sad and terribly immobile. At the station they were stationed, who knows since, two freight gaskets whose wagons looked sad. The invasion of the rust would have said that here is an abandoned territory, but a small detail denied the hypothesis: the main line rails were polished.

He then looked at the platform. Framing with a ironic perfection in the grim landscape, a few people were waiting almost still. Despite the reason of disgust reason, as an excuse for their own species, that they seem normal to this bleak state.

He remembered waiting for almost four hours; No train had arrived and the belt of the bag seemed to have passed through the clavicle. As he passed the other shoulder, he saw a woman approaching him. He reproaches herself that she had not noticed her waiting on the platform.

She was young, even younger than him, and she looked relatively good. In addition-which seemed special to him-he had that look, so rarely encountered in those around him, which preceded the so-called "practical alienation".

He tightened slightly from the jaws, realizing he liked it. Then he looked at her deep and somewhat lost. The game also pleased them, even if he did not understand anything. Asked him:

- Are you an alien?

He kept looking at her in the eye without being able to answer her.

- Your costume so strange ... and then this tired look of the master's meanings ...

He had decided to speak to them:

- Black leather jacket, with double shoulders, blue cotton pants, wool gray blouse, white sports shoes. Something in the fashion of the 20th century.

-What is that fashion? But the century?

- Hm. The century is a kind of unity of time measure.

- And the 20th century means in our past, right?!

He confirms them by shaking his head and still looking at her with the hope that she will still understand something.

- So you're not an alien! ... But you look different from the others ... where are you going?

- Home.

-Where's home?

- Where it should have been childhood. And the silence ...

Realizing that she could not be understood, she stopped and researched her reaction.

-Why are you talking about it? he asked. I go without knowing where, and you don't really know!

He looked at her with love. As he had never done it before. And with great hope. Suddenly, and without the need for any rational motivation, he was surprised that he no longer wanted to accept the fact that she could not understand and feel nothing, that he could not resonate anything.

She was glad when she caught a little change in her gaze: it was not an opinion. It was not an opinion at all!

The young woman pressed her fingers with her fingers and the gesture was worth a lot for him. He saw her more confused, less apathetic than any other man.

- Do you want me to go with you?

He knew, he had learned to keep his knees straight. So her proposal answered her by a speechless lock.

*

A train of people arrived in the station. "It does not show anything above the goods gasket," he thought and once looked at the gray and sad railway covered by the dirty afternoon.

He took her hand and climbed. The train was free, completely empty. After occupying a compartment, he realized that he did not know in which direction he was going to leave. He was no longer tired of orienting himself - it didn't matter.

Almost immediately the train was set in motion with the entire range of shortcomings characteristic of the technical-social level at which the world was maintained since the beginning of the ongoing millennium.

For a long time they looked into each other's eyes, he thought, waiting for a true beginning. He was afraid to do it, and she couldn't do it.

He was hungry. He also asked her if she wanted to eat something and then searched the nutritional tablets in her bag. After swallowing one and one was surprised:

- What guy is this? I have never seen!

- Complex D 23. I have a reserve here for a few months.

- Where?

-Hm ... from an abandoned warehouse.

He rises intrigued to control his bags. A pair of handcuffs was most attracted.

- Have you been in war?

He nods by a very economical sign.

-Put me too!

- No! I am the only one who wore them.

- Please!

The begging in her voice seemed to be a shocking success. No, he couldn't believe it. He wondered in the thought, rhetoric, tired and almost defeat: "Can any man be implore?!"

For a while she was lost in her eyes now warm and candid. When he returned his handcuffs and put them tightly on the wrists.

The relieved breath looked at him with childish gratitude. And he felt lost, slipping from lucidity. She approached her to kiss her happy gestures: she tried to hug it, then-realizing that she has tied hands-abandoned the kiss.

He withdrew in a moment of silence, moving away and holding his eyes closed, as he looked at her not to believe the lived.

But he was surprised when she opened her eyes and saw her inexpressive look, and the surprise became shock when she heard her tired voice:

-Remove me these things!

He should feel offended, but he had lived too much among people. He knew their possibilities.

He took his "bracelets" and continued to follow her. He had closed his eyes again and breathed forcedly, as if he were to recover from a crisis. When he calmed his eyes, his eyes were open and asked him somewhat alarmed:

-What happened to me? What did you do to me?

He looked at her tangled, without being able to answer.

-I know you did something harm to me, but why didn't I feel it, why didn't I react normal?!

She attended even more confused to her despair being afraid to help the fight in any sense.

He then saw her wiping her tears and smiling.

- You have supernatural powers. And, what's much worse, now I want to continue your spells. I know it is not good, but it was a little more beautiful than the effect of a narcotic, it was like a descent into my intimacy, as a living through a primitive self ... or I do not know how! But dangerous ...

Can you do that with me?

He finally replied and the answer rejoiced him more, reviving his hopes. Hopes buried with much sense of responsibility by the state of affairs.

- Yes. And even more beautiful. More real.

However, because you need your conscious understanding and participation, I will start telling your story.

*

"A few hours after the conflagration had generalized itself, that is, after the war had suddenly entered the world, I - as well as all over 80% of the planet's implicit inhabitants - started to do exactly what I need.

Alarmed by this nonsense, because in essence the whole world had declared war, the organization for the conservation of humanity-or the fanatics, as they were told-began to do their duty of consciousness. Thus the conflagration would go to her, thus being natural to fight the only organization that did not let them fight. It was the so -called vector reorientation of the war. And the arguments seemed to spring from ourselves.

Seeing themselves defeated, isolated in a few points of the globe, the remaining fanatics made one thing whose sense then I could not find it questionable: using a few tens of records, they started to record, to say, history.

You will understand later what I mean by that.

Frightened by this secret project, the belligerent parts sent important forces for the destruction of registration centers and, later, orders specially prepared for the location and destruction of the ordinplexes.

Ordinaplex is a memory of information, as small as it is so difficult to destroy with ordinary means.

From such an commando I did. I received the coordinates of six ordinaplexes and we started to annihilate them. But our rapity was opposed to the fanatics, so-after destroying four ordinaplexes-from thirty-sip, the team had become composed only of three fighters. And my last comrades were almost stupid as I destroyed the penultimate device.

I started alone for the last. I found him totally, abandoned as a nullity, and something happened in my mind-I refused to destroy it, seeming to get such a victory. I carried it with me and hid it, not knowing what I do.

Then-when it was found out that a Nedistrys device remained-I was arrested. The occasion with which I was honored to unravel the first box of handcuffs to put them on.

I wore them for a few good days, during which time they were terribly unnaturally treated. Their losses in this conflagration had not been too significant and now the treaties were trying to cover the stupidity of those. And about the losses of the Pacifist organization was not spoken at all.

Of course, then I didn't think so. It all seemed natural to me like any other man-a simple mortal of events-, so I didn't wonder the morning they released me. "

He paused the thought of losing him in the past.

-And with the ordinaplex what did you do?

-I recovered it and read it.

- Can you read?!

-It's a way of saying. I submitted to the transfer of information. Since then I always after me.

She looked questionable to his shoulder bag. It really contained a device of appreciable size.

- Yes, that is. And there was the supernatural you were talking about.

I submitted to the transfer and found out everything that has been until now, everything people have done throughout the evolution; I found out how they lived and felt. And I also learned about the evolution of nihilism.

The last sentence had spoken her as a comment for himself.

- Why did you underline "they lived and felt"? What could they have had other than we regarding the living and exchange of information with the environment?

- Hm. To them the relationship with the environment was not as extrinsic as in us; and there was respect for the interior.

- Somehow ... similar to what I lived in?!

He saw her in an enigmatic smiling and, interpreting her thought, said to her:

-By submitting to the transfer you risk becoming another!

- If you assure me that the experiences can rise to that, I accept the risk!

He nodded and gave them to swallow eight nutritional tablets. He fixed them on the forehead and on the temples a few independent electrodes, then the ordinaplex coupled without removing it from the bag.

After ensuring that she entered the total-passive state drawn to the window of the compartment to look at the forms that could be distinguished, taking place in the late insertion.

Indifferent to fatigue and circles, on the face was a very complete expression of hope. His gaze was lost in the distance and he rarely blinked, in harmony with the peace of mind.

*

He woke up on a meadow behind a station with nothing more than the one they had left, and he was sleeping next to it. He smiled when he felt the wrist of the left hand handcuffed by his right hand.

He looked at him and said he didn't look bad at all, and that he didn't seem to be too twenty. He slept with his head on his bag and had an expression of happiness.

He stumbled, remembered everything and remained still wanting to analyze. To analyze.

Very soon he woke up and looked at her curiously, then the joy to illuminate his whole face. I know the experience had succeeded.

She asked him thoughtful by pointing to the electrodes:

- How much did he hold?

- Almost two weeks.

A feeling that had not lived him was crossing his viscera and realized that in other conditions he would not give any significance to the fact that he had watched it for so long.

Then he thought of something else, saying that he would always have to think of something special. As an restless hope.

And he did it aloud, making frequent efforts:

-... Nihilism stated in the 21st century, imposing itself quite quickly.

Why did people accept it? ... Ah, yes! I remembered: the subconscious exploitation of comfort and pride ... and this would actually mean the blocking of the whole humanity at a certain level ... and the ceiling naturally involved the denial of certain values ... and the circuit was closed to continuously accentuate the reaction.

I can't believe it! I can't accept it! Understand me! ...

He mastered his tears and continues:

- It is true. Proof is the registration, whose authenticity I cannot doubt.

Then, much more convincing, is the fact that I found hidden somewhere, very deep in my being, the potential resources and the calls that made me resonate to all these human values.

For a while he said nothing and even thought nothing. Then he looked at his left hand. He raised it and looked into significance as with her, his hand, totally relaxed, abandoned with confidence.

He supported them so until he could not bear the handcuff. He looked at the metal with affection, thinking that this toy had linked them, and they owed this rediscovery of the soul ...

The soul he suddenly felt so full. And so along with the other.

I know he looks at her. I know he had looked at her all the time. He turned almost suddenly to him and said:

- I want to make love!

*

They had climbed another train, but much more determined.

He no longer had the handcuffs on the wrist, but he felt it there and he knew he felt the same - they both believed in this connection.

And they felt as if they had started to regain the world.

Craiova, April 24-25, 1988

Mircea Băduţ

One last chance

A new crisis. He closed his eyes. He wanted to smile and even smiled a little, glad that the intensity and frequency of these crises had decreased. A little then looked around and analysis.

The lead sky had descended very close to the world.

Think: "It should be spring ... Maybe it is. But no one can say it. Noticing for anyone."

Everything seemed sad and terribly immobile. At the station they were stationed, who knows since, two freight gaskets whose wagons looked sad. The invasion of the rust would have said that here is an abandoned territory, but a small detail denied the hypothesis: the main line rails were polished.

He then looked at the platform. Framing with a ironic perfection in the grim landscape, a few people were waiting almost still. Despite the reason of disgust reason, as an excuse for their own species, that they seem normal to this bleak state.

He remembered waiting for almost four hours; No train had arrived and the belt of the bag seemed to have passed through the clavicle. As he passed the other shoulder, he saw a woman approaching him. He reproaches herself that she had not noticed her waiting on the platform.

She was young, even younger than him, and she looked relatively good. In addition-which seemed special to him-he had that look, so rarely encountered in those around him, which preceded the so-called "practical alienation".

He tightened slightly from the jaws, realizing he liked it. Then he looked at her deep and somewhat lost. The game also pleased them, even if he did not understand anything. Asked him:

- Are you an alien?

He kept looking at her in the eye without being able to answer her.

- Your costume so strange ... and then this tired look of the master's meanings ...

He had decided to speak to them:

- Black leather jacket, with double shoulders, blue cotton pants, wool gray blouse, white sports shoes. Something in the fashion of the 20th century.

-What is that fashion? But the century?

- Hm. The century is a kind of unity of time measure.

- And the 20th century means in our past, right?!

He confirms them by shaking his head and still looking at her with the hope that she will still understand something.

- So you're not an alien! ... But you look different from the others ... where are you going?

- Home.

-Where's home?

- Where it should have been childhood. And the silence ...

Realizing that she could not be understood, she stopped and researched her reaction.

-Why are you talking about it? he asked. I go without knowing where, and you don't really know!

He looked at her with love. As he had never done it before. And with great hope. Suddenly, and without the need for any rational motivation, he was surprised that he no longer wanted to accept the fact that she could not understand and feel nothing, that he could not resonate anything.

She was glad when she caught a little change in her gaze: it was not an opinion. It was not an opinion at all!

The young woman pressed her fingers with her fingers and the gesture was worth a lot for him. He saw her more confused, less apathetic than any other man.

- Do you want me to go with you?

He knew, he had learned to keep his knees straight. So her proposal answered her by a speechless lock.

*

A train of people arrived in the station. "It does not show anything above the goods gasket," he thought and once looked at the gray and sad railway covered by the dirty afternoon.

He took her hand and climbed. The train was free, completely empty. After occupying a compartment, he realized that he did not know in which direction he was going to leave. He was no longer tired of orienting himself - it didn't matter.

Almost immediately the train was set in motion with the entire range of shortcomings characteristic of the technical-social level at which the world was maintained since the beginning of the ongoing millennium.

For a long time they looked into each other's eyes, he thought, waiting for a true beginning. He was afraid to do it, and she couldn't do it.

He was hungry. He also asked her if she wanted to eat something and then searched the nutritional tablets in her bag. After swallowing one and one was surprised:

- What guy is this? I have never seen!

- Complex D 23. I have a reserve here for a few months.

- Where?

-Hm ... from an abandoned warehouse.

He rises intrigued to control his bags. A pair of handcuffs was most attracted.

- Have you been in war?

He nods by a very economical sign.

-Put me too!

- No! I am the only one who wore them.

- Please!

The begging in her voice seemed to be a shocking success. No, he couldn't believe it. He wondered in the thought, rhetoric, tired and almost defeat: "Can any man be implore?!"

For a while she was lost in her eyes now warm and candid. When he returned his handcuffs and put them tightly on the wrists.

The relieved breath looked at him with childish gratitude. And he felt lost, slipping from lucidity. She approached her to kiss her happy gestures: she tried to hug it, then-realizing that she has tied hands-abandoned the kiss.

He withdrew in a moment of silence, moving away and holding his eyes closed, as he looked at her not to believe the lived.

But he was surprised when she opened her eyes and saw her inexpressive look, and the surprise became shock when she heard her tired voice:

-Remove me these things!

He should feel offended, but he had lived too much among people. He knew their possibilities.

He took his "bracelets" and continued to follow her. He had closed his eyes again and breathed forcedly, as if he were to recover from a crisis. When he calmed his eyes, his eyes were open and asked him somewhat alarmed:

-What happened to me? What did you do to me?

He looked at her tangled, without being able to answer.

-I know you did something harm to me, but why didn't I feel it, why didn't I react normal?!

She attended even more confused to her despair being afraid to help the fight in any sense.

He then saw her wiping her tears and smiling.

- You have supernatural powers. And, what's much worse, now I want to continue your spells. I know it is not good, but it was a little more beautiful than the effect of a narcotic, it was like a descent into my intimacy, as a living through a primitive self ... or I do not know how! But dangerous ...

Can you do that with me?

He finally replied and the answer rejoiced him more, reviving his hopes. Hopes buried with much sense of responsibility by the state of affairs.

- Yes. And even more beautiful. More real.

However, because you need your conscious understanding and participation, I will start telling your story.

*

"A few hours after the conflagration had generalized itself, that is, after the war had suddenly entered the world, I - as well as all over 80% of the planet's implicit inhabitants - started to do exactly what I need.

Alarmed by this nonsense, because in essence the whole world had declared war, the organization for the conservation of humanity-or the fanatics, as they were told-began to do their duty of consciousness. Thus the conflagration would go to her, thus being natural to fight the only organization that did not let them fight. It was the so -called vector reorientation of the war. And the arguments seemed to spring from ourselves.

Seeing themselves defeated, isolated in a few points of the globe, the remaining fanatics made one thing whose sense then I could not find it questionable: using a few tens of records, they started to record, to say, history.

You will understand later what I mean by that.

Frightened by this secret project, the belligerent parts sent important forces for the destruction of registration centers and, later, orders specially prepared for the location and destruction of the ordinplexes.

Ordinaplex is a memory of information, as small as it is so difficult to destroy with ordinary means.

From such an commando I did. I received the coordinates of six ordinaplexes and we started to annihilate them. But our rapity was opposed to the fanatics, so-after destroying four ordinaplexes-from thirty-sip, the team had become composed only of three fighters. And my last comrades were almost stupid as I destroyed the penultimate device.

I started alone for the last. I found him totally, abandoned as a nullity, and something happened in my mind-I refused to destroy it, seeming to get such a victory. I carried it with me and hid it, not knowing what I do.

Then-when it was found out that a Nedistrys device remained-I was arrested. The occasion with which I was honored to unravel the first box of handcuffs to put them on.

I wore them for a few good days, during which time they were terribly unnaturally treated. Their losses in this conflagration had not been too significant and now the treaties were trying to cover the stupidity of those. And about the losses of the Pacifist organization was not spoken at all.

Of course, then I didn't think so. It all seemed natural to me like any other man-a simple mortal of events-, so I didn't wonder the morning they released me. "

He paused the thought of losing him in the past.

-And with the ordinaplex what did you do?

-I recovered it and read it.

- Can you read?!

-It's a way of saying. I submitted to the transfer of information. Since then I always after me.

She looked questionable to his shoulder bag. It really contained a device of appreciable size.

- Yes, that is. And there was the supernatural you were talking about.

I submitted to the transfer and found out everything that has been until now, everything people have done throughout the evolution; I found out how they lived and felt. And I also learned about the evolution of nihilism.

The last sentence had spoken her as a comment for himself.

- Why did you underline "they lived and felt"? What could they have had other than we regarding the living and exchange of information with the environment?

- Hm. To them the relationship with the environment was not as extrinsic as in us; and there was respect for the interior.

- Somehow ... similar to what I lived in?!

He saw her in an enigmatic smiling and, interpreting her thought, said to her:

-By submitting to the transfer you risk becoming another!

- If you assure me that the experiences can rise to that, I accept the risk!

He nodded and gave them to swallow eight nutritional tablets. He fixed them on the forehead and on the temples a few independent electrodes, then the ordinaplex coupled without removing it from the bag.

After ensuring that she entered the total-passive state drawn to the window of the compartment to look at the forms that could be distinguished, taking place in the late insertion.

Indifferent to fatigue and circles, on the face was a very complete expression of hope. His gaze was lost in the distance and he rarely blinked, in harmony with the peace of mind.

*

He woke up on a meadow behind a station with nothing more than the one they had left, and he was sleeping next to it. He smiled when he felt the wrist of the left hand handcuffed by his right hand.

He looked at him and said he didn't look bad at all, and that he didn't seem to be too twenty. He slept with his head on his bag and had an expression of happiness.

He stumbled, remembered everything and remained still wanting to analyze. To analyze.

Very soon he woke up and looked at her curiously, then the joy to illuminate his whole face. I know the experience had succeeded.

She asked him thoughtful by pointing to the electrodes:

- How much did he hold?

- Almost two weeks.

A feeling that had not lived him was crossing his viscera and realized that in other conditions he would not give any significance to the fact that he had watched it for so long.

Then he thought of something else, saying that he would always have to think of something special. As an restless hope.

And he did it aloud, making frequent efforts:

-... Nihilism stated in the 21st century, imposing itself quite quickly.

Why did people accept it? ... Ah, yes! I remembered: the subconscious exploitation of comfort and pride ... and this would actually mean the blocking of the whole humanity at a certain level ... and the ceiling naturally involved the denial of certain values ... and the circuit was closed to continuously accentuate the reaction.

I can't believe it! I can't accept it! Understand me! ...

He mastered his tears and continues:

- It is true. Proof is the registration, whose authenticity I cannot doubt.

Then, much more convincing, is the fact that I found hidden somewhere, very deep in my being, the potential resources and the calls that made me resonate to all these human values.

For a while he said nothing and even thought nothing. Then he looked at his left hand. He raised it and looked into significance as with her, his hand, totally relaxed, abandoned with confidence.

He supported them so until he could not bear the handcuff. He looked at the metal with affection, thinking that this toy had linked them, and they owed this rediscovery of the soul ...

The soul he suddenly felt so full. And so along with the other.

I know he looks at her. I know he had looked at her all the time. He turned almost suddenly to him and said:

- I want to make love!

*

They had climbed another train, but much more determined.

He no longer had the handcuffs on the wrist, but he felt it there and he knew he felt the same - they both believed in this connection.

And they felt as if they had started to regain the world.

Craiova, April 24-25, 1988

Time and angel(Fragments)

In my mother's memory.

GURGE COSTS

I remember it was the spring of a year. I do not know which exactly because everyone seems to me and have complicated names to keep them. It was spring as she is in Bucharest. Warm, wet, with fresh smells of green trees and Turkish bread, with a dazzling sun, foreseeing the twig in summer. The children were beginning to walk their shorts, businessmen to display their silk ties and thin leather soles, teenagers returned to the streets with the latest Levi's, Benetton and Naf-Naf, the Bişnitari were competing in trainers and sports shoes, and the Aurola, which became a goose. channels and smell the hot air, with smell of pollution.

The event happened suddenly, as the catastrophes are usually happening. It was past midnight. The sky hangs hard on the stars above the capital. The area was the North Railway Station with the intense nightlife around the non-stop games and boutiques, with the shouts of help in the station park and the tens of dogs behind the blocks.

A liquid eye opened in the sky, lightening strongly above the palace, and a lightning bolt broke out of it, firing the building silent. A wave of white, foamy lava sprinkled on all the windows of the palace and rapidly leaked on the walls. An explosion of foam. The neighborhood was shaking briefly, but violently. In a few minutes, the white matter covered the Ministry of Railways and had spread within a radius of several meters around, then coagulated and strengthened. The whole palace looked like a candle melted overnight.

General alert, panic, evacuation of the station area, the army raising the first barriers and trying to isolate the affected area, scientists mobilized from all over the country to investigate the nature and origin of the phenomenon, of the celestial injection, as it was called by the press later. In 12 hours Bucharest had become a war area. In a short time, however, it was clear that there was no power on the globe that had launched any attack. The origins of the phenomenon remained unknown.

After a week the white matter had lost its matte, milky, from the beginning and had a translucent gloss. Underneath the outer layer had begun to pulse another gray liquid. A threatening bubble to which no attempt by the scientists or the army could reach. The whitish-crystalline substance has proven indestructible. Over time, fast and wavy movements began to discern through the interior gray liquid. It was obvious that under the protective pink was born life. A form of foreign life. The glass plague was baptized.

The Romanian government has been forced by the United Nations to receive international researchers' official observers and teams. In a few months Bucharest had fulfilled its dream of being one of the most important capitals in the world. The expansion of the phenomenon was relatively slow so that the big television networks and press groups had occupied huge buildings and had brought their best equipment to observe the phenomenon and transmit it live.

The coffin plague inexorably earn a few meters a day. Slow, sometimes unobserved. At first there were a few lightning advancements that had surprised various people, thus defending the first victims. In time, however, the attacks have been raised, then completely disappeared. The first affected had hardened, covered by white matter. They could be seen in a few places, plaster statues, whose surface discolored over time, becoming like glass, hosting the movements of the new life inside them. Others had managed to escape the coagulation of the glass plague on their skin, being transported in time to quarantine centers. It was rumored that they were fine, but alterations occurred psychically. After a few weeks the official reports had stated that some of them had suddenly aged and died, and others remained psychically traumatized, caught subjectively in the same days or hours. No one has ever seen some, nor the others.

One of the famous cases and which they could not hide for a long time was that of the old man with the newspaper. This time the attack had another nature. The individual was discovered in a glassy, transparent drop, such as the insects of prehistory in amber. But the old man was still alive. His eyelids had been immobilized, like the rest of his body, in the solidified air. Only the eyeballs remained mobile, forced to an eternal state of observation. After years, he was in the same place, unchanged, in the same position, in an eternal moment, moving his eyeballs after the outdoor movements. The dropless air drop was the name used on television.

Although the scientists were thickened every month, although everything was cataloged, called, tested, the glass plague advanced with the few meters a day. Surprise expansions had long ceased, the advance being already predictable. It was officially found that there was no danger of any epidemic and that the plague had no other risk other than the obvious, invasion. So Bucharest was leaving scientists and researchers from the farthest corners of the world, the national army and the blue headphones, tourists and businessmen born after the plague event. After a year, the dam had become practically pointless, the affected area being too high, and the pressure of the population was too strong.

It was rumored that Bucharest would eventually be evacuated for political reasons. It was rumored that in fact everything was just an experiment with biological weapons. It was rumored that in a few decades the glass plague would cover the whole globe. But interesting things were to come.

Secret meetings

The sky was clear, without the slightest trace of clouds. A cool wind was blowing. The streets were deserted. It was that tired summer passage in the fall. They entered the park, full of eternity leaves and empty banks. Sax remembered the park in the spring - raw and flowering green. In the summer he had passed into a bushy-mature appearance, and now he had begun to key. In the winter he was going to die and leave behind only the blackish skeleton. Then again, the skeleton will be filled with meat and everything will be resumed.

The three friends stopped on an alley. Kiss and the horn took their headphones out of their right ear and looked at each other. A sadistic smile was left on Kiss's face. He nodded in the rhythm of the music. Tami completes him with one of his specific philosophers and he raised his sleeves to the elbow. Saxon sax The volume of the minidisk. Listen to Judas Priest with "heavy load", remixed on the techno-punk line used to listen and sometimes to remix the hits of rock monsters in a modern acoustics. But they had never touched the sacred pieces, the border stones. The drums were rhythmically roasted in his blood. Finally, he took his helmet from his right ear. The bass and the drums were leaning on the pulse and gave weight to the steps. Yes, Conu 'Priest turns him into a warrior in armor.

The toilet in the Icon Park were hated smelling and isolated. Favorite meeting place for homosexuals. The law no longer prohibited relationships between people of the same sex, but prohibited the practice of any form of love in public places. So when the three attacked the lovers in the toilets of the icon, the law was in a way. Only in a way, but they didn't care.

The steps went down and slammed the door to the wall entrance. The drums were pushing them in the left eardrum. It was only one, one of their ordinary customers. He stopped at all surprised, from a vigorous penis friction movement over a sink.

"What are you doing, you started to paint?" Kiss said after the first steps.

The doors of the cabins were all closed. No noise was heard outside the water from the pounds. Tamps began to check each cabin, one by one, while Sax and Kiss approached the individual. He, small and weak, with a nervous sneeze, introduced his equipment back into his pants, closed his zipper and looked at them, smiling broadly and happy with his mouth. On the missing side of the tooth they had taken care in previous sessions.

"Why do you think Bulaanu smiles?" Sax asked.

"She believes that she stole it so many times, because we got bored and left him alone," Kiss said with a hint of humor that was not characteristic.

Sax's fist flies to the happy client and the last front tooth. The individual fell near the wall like a cloth. He raised his bloody face to them - he was still smiling satisfied. A moment later, the sirens were heard, away.

"Now I know why he is happy, you are the dead of the bubble!" Kiss sliced a shot in her stomach and ran down the stairs after the other two.

The police cars were heading for the park. The three of them were in a hurry the first street. At her corner, Sax looks back. Two cars stopped in Icoanei Square. Some policemen had descended and began to run after them, while the vehicles were turning and heading for the boulevard, hoping to cut their face before the Roman Square.

In a few minutes the three arrived in the Cosmonauts Square. He would have had no chance until Roman. Some buses were at the end of the line. The last already signaling. They continued their flight to him, making desperate signs with his hands. The car was waiting for them and closed the doors immediately behind them. The police had just entered the market, but the traffic light was green and the bus left. In a minute they were already in Roman. No one went down, only two young people climbed very fast and the car was moving again. The police had given up the run, waiting for their cars.

But the stations were short to Victoriei Square and there he could wait for another radio alerted police crew. They went down to the first and ran away from Nan Jing and George Enescu High School to the affected area. They shortened through the back of the Church of the Holy Voivodes and cut Griviţa to the market. The sirens were already heard.

"How did Rahat know these?" the Sax Pales.

"What do we do, we cut it to Titulescu?"

"No, we hide somewhere. We do not resist another tour with the cars," stopped her tube. He leaned with his palms on his knees and looked at them, where?

"In the area", proposed Sax.

"You think ..."

"In the area", Sax cut and he ran away. The cars stopped a few hundred meters from them, on the border.

At the end of the street the sidewalk was cracked and traversed by thick and white. The remnants of the last isolation fence of the affected area could still be seen on the edge of the Matache market, abandoned and stuck in a white-loud leak. The area of the plague resembled a sun whose center was the CFR Palace and Gara de Nord, from which the radial strips had spread, now long miles and thickening daily in diameter.

They looked back and saw the police still following them, but this time with caution. They were afraid of the area. Recently, the crystalline walls of the affected buildings had begun to soften. Large grains as the fist were growing in huge bunches. They were soft and deciduous, protecting their core from the size of a nut. Gumos, of a dirty yellow, when it reached maturity, the core slipped from the bud and remained suspended by a rosy navel. The aurolas had been the first to try their taste. Then, in a short time, they had become the main merchandise for drug traffickers. Strong cards had formed around the area, and the area had been divided into sectors conquered after fierce struggles and political pacts. The Gypsies had the largest area, snatched into a sea of blood from the Turks and the Chinese. The police usually avoid interfering in their activity. Only the army was moving unstoppably in tanks and armored cars, driving and protecting the researchers, and sometimes pretending to impose the new regulations of the United Nations, to prove the plague drug. Officially, however, the offer had been rejected to use the blue headphones to release the area under the control of the cards.

"We go to the blocks at the station," Sax said. He had lived in one of them before the event. He had been forced to abandon his apartment with the others, right from the first week, when the white lava had begun to solidify on the first steps.

"The third staircase has the entrance to the basements of the blocks. If we hide there it could lose us."

"What do we do with the Gypsies?"

"I come only at night and I do not think to enter through blocks."

They ran over the old man in charge outside of time. His eyeballs followed them curiously. At no one minute, they were fixed with the gaze on the scared group. One of them was trying to ask him something, but his gaze remained unchanged. The sounds did not go through the solidified air. Finally, the followers gave up and started it back in relief.

The door to the basement opened with a sigh. The white stairs seemed limestone deposits. It was a dark diluted by the phosphorescence of the translucent walls. The three looked at each other with confused smiles.

"Do you think they are following us?" he asked, trying to try a joking tone.

"What, have your feet soaked? What can you get down there? Have you ever entered, Sax?"

"A few times before the plague. There was the boiler and a gym for the blocks in the blocks-ping-pong and a few mattresses.

"What about a visit? What does the guts come with me?" Plete Kiss.

"I do not think it is a smart idea, yes, this is what it characterizes. Why not!"

"Well, baths. Baths, boys," the horn is sprouted, "You got on your head? What my skin is with you? What do you think you will find there, down? It is dark, the current does not work, in a few hours the Gypsies appear ..."

"In a way you are right," Sax interrupted. "Wait here and if we don't go back in an hour, go to the hospital and tell my sister to stay overnight."

"Well, don't be stupid!" Tamps grabbed Sax by the arm and detained him. "Your mother needs you, Cris does not do it alone ..."

"Don't put my mother in this and don't tell me who needs me!" He pushed him brutally.

He placed his headphones on his ears and changes the minidis. Iron Maiden put on "666". The guitar kneaded his nerves like a cake. Some said that music is an incentive, others that he was an anesthetic, but they all liked the addiction. Sax felt his nerves tinging, in his arms and his chest. He enlarged the volume and turned his back.

Contrary to the first impression, the steps were not slippery. They had a spongy consistency, almost even adherent to the soles of the boots. The walls shone weakly in a silver fluctuation. Dark snakes under the translucent skin of the walls and sudden flushes made them shudder.

The basement floor was made of the same limestone white. A gray light fell from above, near the ceiling, through the long, lattice windows at the street level. All the space under the blocks was a string of huge rooms, which gave from one to the other. The ceiling was covered on large portions with pipes of all dimensions that probably crossed the entire length of the basement.

The walls were different from those on the outside. The translucent pole had been covered on several areas with high-mate surfaces. Square meters of wall highlighted in swelling of the size of melons. Most buildings, but some flourish in violent seizures. Sax felt his hair on his arms. He officially finds that he had an inner chills from the head of the chest to the navel. "666, the number of beast" screams in the left ear Iron Maiden. He approached a wall and noticed that on some swelling the white-matte layer had excited pores like human skin. At a closer look, or imaginative, they brought with some breasts. Whole walls decorated with breasts, some hanging inert, others excited and rushing nervously.

He retreated his back and fired the other two friends. They stopped in the middle of the room and looked around. Hundreds of pink-murdar, long and nodular umbilists hung from the ceiling. Some of them had been on the pipes that crossed the room space. Whitish turtles hung from the contact places.

Tompi of violently. One of the hangers hanging above them had sprinkled on the jeans jacket with a sticky liquid, of an uncertain color.

"This has let go of you!" Kiss did not abstain.

They helped him undress his jacket and threw it on the floor. The liquid was soaked quickly, leaving behind a gray foam. It looked as if the jeans had begun to ferment.

Tami swears with a nap. Had sweetened instantly. His hands were shaking. It would normally have returned to the spot and left the basements. But he knew he would have done it alone and that would have been even more unpleasant. Normally the other two friends would have given up and would have returned to light. But these were not normal times. And they had long lost the values received through education. Maybe since Kiss's parents, who went to France for the holiday, had postponed their return home to the event in Bucharest and kept in touch with their only child by phone; Or maybe since Sax's mother had fallen in a seriously ill bed, and his father could not adapt to the idea that her disease had no remedy and had decided that the only viable solution was divorce. Who knows when they had taken the first side step-maybe when they had given up their name and adopted their nicknames. Tilă had a T-shirt with the Saxon band, which she had not listened to too much and did not like it, but the shirt was 'craftsman' and was a gift from her parents before divorce, disease, quarrels, from the times when everything was chirping and music. He didn't know why, but it seemed normal to tell Sax. And Boga had decided after a thorough measurement on an evening of drunkenness, that his language was as long as the vampire in the band Kiss, and that he was so entitled to bear their name. The 'dangerous band', which inspired him how to impress the kids and turned him against the biscuits, that is, homosexuals, without being able to explain why.

Or maybe the lateral step had happened before that, when the two had divided the same friend in secret and then, at the discovery they had decided that their relationship was more important, but they could not stop to tease and insult each other. Or when they had adopted the tube, against the contrary reaction they had tried. Tami was the Lord intelligence, or at least for his age it sounds smarter than he should have. He was fascinated by the gross strength and the animal attraction that he exerted Kiss on sex sometimes beautiful, but also on all the rifles who were his mouth to his heroism stories. Kiss was a source of the history of the neighborhood - the battle of the Basarab Bridge, the ambush from the beer factory, the rocker guerrilla against the Gypsies of Matache….

Kiss always appreciated Tompi's opinion to himself, but in their relationship he liked to brave and plus the stake. It was the only way he could cope with the personality of the other, even humming him in most cases. Sax was the catalyst, the environment by which the two forces - psychic and physical, merged, the oil that greased the wheels of the three, the one who suggested, then imposed the action projects, using his brain and Kiss's adventure desire.

"Who's there?"

The three trembled at the hearing of the thin, trembling voice. The question had come from the second room. They advanced cautiously keeping silence.

"I asked who's there!" This time something more authoritarian.

They entered the second room. It was as gray light and had somewhat the same interior decoration that flowed on the walls. It had been the room of the thermal power plant, which had turned into something similar to massive limestone deposit. A spill of whitish-translucent matter, perforated in countless places. On the bottom of the numerous holes, the liquid under the protective layer stubbornly, in slow expirations and inspirations. In contact with the air he had acquired an elastic consistency. The pipes that crossed the ceiling starting from the boiler in all directions were completely wrapped in the pink umbilicia. The sensation was that they had been wrapped in a dirty, bubble skin, twitching under strong muscle spasms.

"I come to pour," the tube began.

"We put a key and pour on common."

"Shut", Kiss interrupted, "you see something in the shadow, next to the former central? She moves quickly and it's too dark."

They all stared in the indicated direction. An unclear form withdrew further in the shade, then for a few seconds saw nothing. Again next to the opposite wall, a barely insinuated soss, the shape broke off the wall and disappeared again, too quickly because they could follow it.

The three were stuck in the middle of the room, with their breaths stopped, waiting for something to appear again. However, nothing seemed willing to move for them, Sax looked at Kiss and fixed the direction of his eyes, then Kiss grabbed the wrist tiles and pulled him after him.

"I know you!" The thin voice sounded in their immediate vicinity.

They were shaking in unison and turned in the direction of the voice. A girl who seemed naked, less than a meter. They had not heard her approaching. His skin was translucent. A white-mourn fluid bolted under the epidermis, leaving small snaking shapes to distinguish. His hair was dark, long to the shoulder blades, waving nervously. His eyes looked strange, though he could not say in what sense, being too dark to distinguish such details, and at the temples and down the ears and on the neck, the whitish deposits, in thin and superimposed layers, were highlighted. The bodily proportions seemed correct. His legs were buried above the ankles in the crystalline matter that covered the floor and walls. When he moved, the solidified layer unfolded in front of her like the water, and the advance was taking place without her moving her feet. As on a treadmill. As if the glass plague was walking from one place to another.

"Bagami would ...", Kiss began with his mouth.

"I don't remember exactly, but I saw you before," she said looking at Sax. He had a known stamp.

"And you tell me something, though you are ..."

"A little changed?" It helps it, looking at it significantly.

"Hm", she did to the light. "Probably my mother would not recognize me now."

Sax stopped the minidis and the silence of the place for the first time. Without music it was vulnerable. But he had felt the need to stop it.

"My name is Iulia. It tells you something? I lived right in the block above…."

"Yes, yes, yes. Now I located you. Iulia. You were a friend of one Gabi, three years older than you."

"Yes, Gabi," she said, leaving her head. "Gabi died at the impact. We couldn't save him again. And are you?"

"Til, ie, sax. You can tell me Sax. They are Kiss and Tami."

Iulia didn't laugh. He looked at her serious and tilted her head to each name. There was a moment of embarrassing silence, after which she resumes:

"You are the first to enter here. I really wonder what you have made you try."

"Yes, good tip," said the horn. "I asked him the same thing before entering."

"Hardly stretched ..."

"Ciuma" helps Kiss.

"The plague?! Who had the mind to call it so?"

"You mean you didn't know!"

Nodded.

"I am here from the first moment. It had to be my first night with Gabi, so I tried to make the place as romantic as possible. In the end he resumed: "I do not know how it was outside, but here it was like an earthquake. Then I did not dare to go out as I look, especially since he told me that the world was not yet ready for me."

"Are you talking about Gabi?"

"No, angel."

"I mean, Gabi died and turned into a ...?"

"Not Sax, Gabi died and is dead. The angel is someone else. It's ... even an angel, one who fell here from the accident."

"Or who decayed", Ironic Ironic Tami.

"He says he is not that angel."

"And where is he now?" Kiss Curios asked, looking around.

"Somewhere under the CFR Palace. There it is in connection with his. He has opened roads from these suborders to the underground under the CFR Palace and School 1, and in the other to the subway."

"If I hadn't come from the shit from the outside and I wouldn't see you as you look, I would say I got it crazy," said tube.

"You can come with us. We can take you to a medical campus," he reached for her Kiss, but her violent reaction held him right away. He had retired a few lightning meters and looked scared. He breathed deeply, then answered in a slightly quieter tone:

"My skin is more special now, it is much more sensitive. Any touch gives me ... sensations, most often transformed into pain. Even a stronger air stream makes me tremble with pleasure, and a true wind would make me scream in pain. He is the only one who knows how to protect me and how to touch me."

You mean that any touch is like sexual contact? ” Sax asked in confidence.

"No, not every touch. Only he knows how to touch me in that way."

Sax breathes confused: "This is a delicate problem. Do you think we could see the angel?"

"Aa, no, it doesn't start again," he jumped nervously.

The other three ignored him.

"I would like to talk to him first. But you can go to visit. We will leave the door open for you. We are waiting for you anytime."

The three turned to leave. At the exit of the Iulia central hall he cries after them in a hesitant voice:

"I wanted to ask you if you have something with you, a newspaper, a book, any kind."

"No, we don't have it, but we bring you next time."

"Oh, it would be something yes' I don't know if it's your taste," Kiss stopped. He took proudly grinning, from the inside pocket of the jacket, a sexy magazine: "Rumânca!"

Iulia burst into laughter:

"Does he have articles, or only pictures?"

"Take it and see. I didn't look after the articles."

The girl disappeared with the magazine in the darkness of the other room. The three went out in the first room. A dubious rumor drew their attention somewhere to their left. They approached caution.

"God!" Tamps withdrew a few steps.

His vest, abandoned at coming, was unfolding in wavy forms-small snakes with jeans, slipping to the dark areas of the room. The plague was reproduced. He had done an object, an unashable thing, to multiply. The explanation sounded absurd, but at the moment Sax could not think of another. In the quiet of the basement he managed to hear the leaks of the ceiling breaking the glass floor and being absorbed with noise. A chill passed him. He could not imagine what could happen to a living being sown with plague. Carefully locate those navels in the ceiling that were elongated and swollen, ready to ejaculate and began to make their way back to the exit.

Secret meetings 2

[…] They headed for the North Railway Station. They entered the area. A team of researchers and observers looked after them. The soldiers put their hands on the weapons. The three friends bypassed them from afar and on the same block scale. They are lost in the dark of the hall, then down to the basement.

They stopped at the end of the steps, the first hall, then in the first room and listened for a few minutes. The minidisc was over during the pursuit. It was quiet. They only heard their own snacks. Probably the trace was lost. They had been lucky twice so far, with these basements.

On the way to the room of the thermal power plant they stopped shocked. In the wall, below the protective translucent layer, three seemingly human forms could be distinguished. They had come out of the wall structure in the mocked liquid of the plague, but they had not been completely detached, being half embedded in the concrete. Their skin had a gravel-gray appearance. Snaking shapes had been coupled directly on the skin, especially in the neck and head area. Huge bulbs rolled near the three bodies. Tami approaches the wall, screams frightened and bent vomiting instantly. The other two had noticed the reason. The shapes had about their faces. As if the plague had made love with their minds, then created their bodies to have the entire silence. They pulled the horn after them and entered the second room.

"Iulia," Kiss shouted. "Iuliaaa".

Like an air current, the whistle licks their ears: "wine!" They said frustrated. Sax looks at the narrow window near the ceiling, eager for the little familiar outside, the ordinary light of the day. The sun had already risen and its rays were climbing the metal frame of the window.

"Neaţa", the voice rang right next to them. They turned like electrocuts. They had not felt it in any way approaching. Its appearance, even if I do not, known to be more and more quiet. They breathed in relief.

"You seem a bit tense."

They looked at themselves not knowing what to say. A snake waved next to her ankles. He had ... an exotic look. He was curled on his leg and from a few movements he was on his shoulder.

"To put myself ...!" He escaped Kiss, who drowns with the rest of the idea.

On the skin of the snake, brightly colored, you could read articles and admire pictures of nudes. The creature's head was not a snake, but a woman - blonde, wavy and rich hair, fine features, almost beautiful. Everything in miniature, as for the small and fusiform body.

"Don't be scared," Iulia reassures. "She is Stela. That's how she wrote on her page, so I gave her the same name. She doesn't hurt you. In fact, none of those here is dangerous. You might see the other stars in the magazine, moving in the area. Although now I think she knows what to undo.

"I would ...", the idea of Kiss resumed.

"I hope you did not bring me anything," Iulia cut, "because I am not going to make a zoo here."

Tamps began to gesture, but no word came out of his mouth. All three followed the index finger of Julia. The rays of the sun had reached the lip of the window and as a sign were in a sign inside, snatching the basement in the shadow. On the wall behind them, in full sun, under the translucent pink, there were five women raised from the wall in the plague liquid. They were in a close interweaving with the back wall, through the tentacles. They had been penetrated through all the holes, starting with the nose and mouth, by thin snaking excrescences. The whole scene was in a rhythmic pulse, framed in a painting full of foamy bulbs.

"I think you have seen yourself in the other room," Iulia said, noting that silence is prolonged and the breaths of the three accelerate. "It seems that this being who takes over Bucharest, tries to learn about us and wants to communicate."

"This being?!" He managed to swim tamps.

"But I think it would be better to meet the angel first. Come with me."

They followed it. They put their headphones again in the right ear, changing the minidis - LED Zeppelin: "steps to heaven." It was said that that song was much more than mere music. That he had reached the sublime levels that vibrated cords otherwise untouched in the souls of men. That if there was something above the world, or after death, "steps to heaven" was really a step towards enlightenment, to divine knowledge. It was a blasphemy with a pretension of holiness, or a sanctity with the appearance of blasphemy.

Iulia led them to the underground under the CFR Palace. After only ten minutes, from the darkness broke only by the fluorescence of the walls enclosed in the glass plague, they came out in the light. Artificial, but strong, almost blinding by contrast.

The three stopped. Tami fell to his knees with his body in chills. The spent guitars of the magi in LED Zep were tearing their brains. Underneath the palace, the underground collapsed under the weight of the fallen ceilings from all floors, following the initial impact with the glass plague. Part of the resistance pillars that had supported the central body of the building, hung in empty with the steel roots twisted under the pressure they had been subjected to. The pit below was deep for several tens of meters. On the interior walls of the palace it was still leaking like a thick sap through the trunk of a tree, the white liquid of the plague, in a continuous flow, branching in dozens of springs channeled below the ground in the directions in which the rays of the wound had stretched. From somewhere, from heaven, above the ruin, a stream of silver light with an almost metallic consistency through the air loaded with electricity of the underans. In the pit, in the middle of the light, in the air, a gray body with the muscles tightened under the glossy skin, with the crucified arms stretching two pairs of huge wings of a metallic gray, along a silver skeleton branched into an extremely fine rib. A true Dutch lace through which the fluff of the wings was intertwined. The body was floating immobile, as if suspended by the bright stream.

An angel! He was really an angel. Sax wanted to prostrate himself in front of His Majesty. He wanted to run away from fear, to hide. He wanted, he felt, he was shaking, a nerve ribbon was roaring his head, he would have been screaming if he had power, he would have said a prayer if he had known any. He would have prayed to him if he had known how.

"Isn't that nice?" Iulia asked in a whisper, looking at her victorious.

Only now did they realize that in the pit under the CFR Palace there was a grave silence. From time to time drops of plague, the stream of light and LED ZEP Torpile their brains.

Isn't that nice? ” The voice of Julia rang as a church bells.

***

[ … ]

"Yes, I am an angel," he said, looking at each one in an effect break. They were silent and silent as at school, when the Mate prophet climbed down the chair and the short skirt of jeans had climbed too high on the pulp, as he explained about the integrals. They were too shocked by everything they had seen to think of any 'smart' reply, or to do 'upset'. They had sat on Turkish around the creature called an angel and caressed their minidis now silent, like cats. They were the engines that kept them on the roads, still running, still fighting, still swearing and spitting.

"Maybe I'm not exactly what you believe in the angel, but close enough. And may not come exactly from the place where you imagine, but from a better one."

Kiss had wrinkled his nose in the figure he usually took when he was going to ask, "What does he want to say?", But this time no word flew from his lips. They were also wrinkled in maximum concentration.

"How many times have you not followed your loved ones by aging and then dying? How many times have you not taken another body without life? How many times have you not said-" this summer has passed, again winter, New Year, another year. "Time is your God!"

He looked at them carefully with the wings slightly stuck, then they seemed to relax and continue:

"He created the world in which you live, in which he dies of hunger, disease, war, but of the passage of time in particular. He dies because he has come to an end. You do not open his eyes well and you died," the words with the cold. The three were shaking.

He got up, shook his wings and stretched. It is restored to Iulia, easily encompassing it in its huge arms. She inspired her hairless hair and tightened her chest. Iulia seemed to merge with pleasure in his embrace, and the luminescent activities under his translucent skin were clearly intensified. The trembling of excitement under the direct touch on her sensitive skin, but the angel buried her face in her stretches vibrating with an inner life, kissing her neck, then blows lightly on her small body. Immediately, Iulia relaxes and breathes more regularly. His eyes were shining. There was a sweet smell of marine plants in the room.

The angel watched empty for a few seconds, then focused on them again:

"They come from a place different from your world. Different in an essential way. I come from a world without time. Where there is no time to run with its implacable effects-degradation, aging, seasons, but especially death. Where there is only life. Not without end. Not without dangers, because accidents exist anywhere, but naturally the only reality is life.

Time is a virus that has infested a distant corner of our universe. As an effect, it created a closed eco-system in which the infected matter suffered mutations. It is so strong that he worked on the fabric of the space itself and modified the environment to the deepest and most hidden levels. The closed system is your universe, where God has become time. He created the world in which you live and the life that populates it. A skilful life, with a beginning and an end. What ages and dies. With an unchanged cruelty and yet of understanding at the blind level of a virus. However, we were shocked to discover the effects of time. We had to do something. ”

With a change of registry in the voice, it continues:

"Your God is cruel and that's because he doesn't think of you. Why? Because he can't!" he added, laughing in resounding hiccups.

He leaned with his palms on the floor and leather came out of thin filaments that penetrated the crystalline-loud floor of the floor. Iulia put her palms over his hands. She looked at the three serious, the expression of thanks not for a moment from her face.

"You were created from an unfortunate accident. And time, as God, is a virus not too intelligent, though potent and adaptable."

"I would ...", "Kiss remembered where she had stayed an hour earlier, but she was brutally interrupted:" Shisk. "

"Yes, I am an angel, but not of your God. Because heaven does not exist, nor does hell exist. There is only the time that plays unconsciously. It creates and crumbles as they please. It is played with existence and this is the final offense. Once it is no longer, nothing is. Created the mortal intelligence, and the intelligence recreates the time, to find a finite universe.

He was silent, his palms on the floor and rose, hardly detached from Julia's body, with one last lustful gesture. He relaxed and stirred his wings, stopping the sunlight to enter the room. The rays pole the fine, silver branch, filtering through the glossy, almost compact fluff. His silhouette remained in the dark, gray shadow on the darkness, in an aura of light.

Sax wondered what he could say. He had a lot of problems, puzzles, hypotheses. But all seemed stupid to a second consideration, and the moment was far too important, mystical, difficult for divine essence, to shatter it with some teenage idiocy. He wanted to know so much and yet he didn't have the courage. […]

"Everything you see around you, the glass plague as you called it, is the antidote. It is an intelligent body that eats the virus time. It normally feeds on culture time, specially multiplied for this purpose. Here, the time has developed and evolved in an unexpected direction, and the consistency, and the internal structure, Test to develop a reaction corresponding to the evolutionary direction taken by time.

"In the world where you live there is no death," he managed to articulate Sax, cursing immediately for the escaped stupidity.

"There is, however, in an insignificant percentage. Accidents exist everywhere. Death is a universal constant. But there is no limit in ... let's call it time. Time is not a death moth."

There was a short silence. The angel folds his wings again.

"And if the time had successfully fought, would our world heal? Would they become immortal?" Sax rushed, fearing not to lose the angel before he had all the answers.

"He wants to say that if the plague would give the time ready, the mortal life would become immortal?" Explains the tube by returning from the state of prostation. "I mean ..."

"Yes, yes, I understood. Of course. Yes. I eradicate the adverse effects of time in the structure of your universe and everything would return to normal, what was before and should be - a world without time, that is, endless. I repeat, death would be, but only by accident."

"Or illness?" Sax said slowly.

"No, we have no diseases. Diseases are a creation of time."

"And how long will it take until the complete destruction and to gain immortality?"

"We cannot know yet," said the angel looking at Sax with interest. "In your terms for several decades, maybe more than a century."

Sax's sigh surprised everyone.

"Can't do anything to accelerate the process?" he asked in a slow voice.

"It could be a solution, but it is not verified yet. And it involves high risks for those who are eager to try it."

He looked at the angel with hope, waiting for the continuation.

"You may be the agents of an antidote and stronger and much faster, but for which there is still no other efficient means of spreading. All the people and things you come into contact with would change, they would escape from the claws of time. And may Monday. ”

"An epidemic", mumbles tube.

"I would get it, that doesn't sound very good," Kiss was heard.

"Remember that the epidemic is the time. You would only administer the cure, healing. But everything is a process of will, so you should believe and want."

"I would be interested in participating," Sax was offered by arousing them again and the surprise of the others.

"Tile, did you fool you? Jump Kiss to him.

"Well, tile, think, what do we know exactly about this whole story? How can we check it?" he joins her tube.

"Have you ever seen an angel before? I don't. And he is here and the plague, and Iulia, and everything around us. I don't need more evidence. I believe. I have faith."

Silence. The angel smells the air. Iulia was watching him carefully.

"What is it?" Kiss interested.

Silence. The angel took Julia's hands and some with his own in a short clash. Then they disappeared to the entrance to the basements they usually used.

"Quick, come here," Iulia urges.

"What happens?"

"Someone forces the entrance to the basement. I think it is the police. I have to get you out of here, while he will hold them in place."

"How did you know?"

"Me and him, we speak otherwise."

Petal me

"What I do not understand is, why do you need an antidote bearer, when up, on the streets, there are hundreds of possible sources of contamination. For example, the sponge traffickers, the drug plague. They sold and sell that thing to thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands.

"The glass plague is not a disease and no bearer of epidemic agents. It is a living being, and the plague is just one of the waste it leaves behind, living."

"A kind of feces?"

"Rather her sweat."

***

They both approached a glassy wall. The luminescence of life inside the wall gave a yellow-green tint to the room.

The angel put his palms on the translucent surface and closed his eyes. All the movements underneath were dispelled, leaving behind a mocked liquid. Solid surface veils slightly under its palms, more as an optical effect. In a short time, however, he lost his hard consistency until then. The angel took his hands and stuck them to the wall: "Enter the wall, don't be afraid."

Sax was afraid and trembled, but the presence of his big angel and palms, guiding him, pushing him before, abducted his power. He felt nothing else besides fear. Neither pride or bravery, nor the noble spirit of sacrifice. Only fear. […]

The surface of the plague was soft, like a paste, even softer and warmer, massaging his hands that sank into it. In a few moments it was sucking in the wall, in the yellowish-gray, warm and protective liquid. A whirlwind stirred his blood, disturbed his lungs, and went through his mouth. He felt easy, floating, with empty veins and plush meat, images flooded him in a colorful stream, had a familiar scent. […]

***

"The glass plague is just the prey animal hunting and feeding on time. What do you do when you have many mice in a house and bring a cat to break them. Unfortunately, our mice has suffered mutations and now it is far too much over the possibilities of the plague."

"And then put poison for mice. I am your poison."

"Something like this. This is why we cannot use the plague and its products. We cannot poison the cat to reach the mice."

***

[ …]

***

He suddenly woke up. He was breathing. It was lying on the former ping-pong table in the thermal power plant room. Iulia was bent over him. The angel was nowhere to be seen.

"Where is he?" he asked hoarsely.

"It's in basements, under the palace," she said and moved away from the table. He smiled: "Last night you dropped in a very deep sleep. You shouldn't have wake up so quickly. Your body was going to re-reserve, easy, anyway, inoculation was successful. If you wait a little longer."

Inoculation?! His head was hard, his mouth dry, but only the thought of them and solved his problems. He felt good, maybe just a little easier than usual. He used to be tall and solid, with some weight, as his father expressed himself. But now, he felt like a flake. He got up and jumped off the table. He looked at his hands and was shocked. Iulia turned to one of the glass walls, which at her touch had become a mirror. A chill chuckles his belly and burned his brain. It looked like a dandelion, more, like a flowered carnival. His skin was all wrinkled in yellow puffs, or blooming in soft and soft petals, his eyes were two miniature sunflower, his whole body was shaking in the wind, it was empty, the pungent clothes near the ping-pong table. He was somehow erotic, completely foreign, non -earthly, frightening and yet attractive. And his sex, a Lord, was embarrassed to look at him, but he could not stop his fascination. Which he also surprised in the eyes of Julia.

"Every fluff is an antidote-bearer," she whispered, crossing her fingers over the softness of her shoulders, "every touch, a deadly touch for time," she said gently in the neck, while the tips of her fingers were walking over the shoulder blades, down, "

He turned it to her and kissed him voluptuously. Her tongue slipped a long snake through his lips down the neck, his hands were knotful stems, caressing his translucent abdomen, shaking his luminous life under the skin, extending to her vagina. His sex was a lujer with yellow petals, believes, penetrating it up, to the abdomen, chest, his groans, heavy breathing, his tongue withdrew from him, he was pleasing and leaned with the back palms, opening his feet even more. The subcatante beings had entered into a troubled agitation, he had reached his chest, his breasts were swollen, he moaned, screaming for pleasure, and his penis unfolded in a flower that spread his pollen.

Iulia fluttered violently, under her skin played fireworks, entered the seizures, with her mouth shut, a yellowish-white liquid leaking over her lower lip. He had glassy eyes, caressing his glossy hair like the silk of corn, his face, breathed deep again and fell inert on the table.

Sax withdrew scared, took two steps back and fell to his knees: "Iulia?!" He trembled with the whole body in the chills. "Iulia?" Fear tugged his intestines. "... We cannot poison the cat to reach the mouse/ So I am your poison ...", he remembered by the angel.

He got up and took her in his arms. He placed it on the table carefully. She was dead. The lights under the skin had been extinguished, the yellow liquid had lost its color, its skin had become like a marble crossed by blue. He had killed her! It was a poison for time and his children. The snakes with a magazine texture and women's heads were scattered panicked, disappearing into the semi -darkness of the basements. He was coming to pour, but the feeling of nausea disappeared immediately. He felt good. The body automatically adjusts to an optimal state.

He moved away with his back to Julia's body. He reached the stairs to the exit of the block and heard the vigorous flutter of the angel's wings. It froze on the first step, undecided, ready to run up, to the street, as always after doing any stupidity. He ran away from the police, ran away from school, ran away from his father, responsible, reason, normal daily that had illuminated his childhood, but had been stolen in recent years.

But he was no longer normal. He was the antidote. He grinned and lowered the step, waiting for the angel. Its silhouette covered the tunnel, friendly and massive. His grin is softened. The angel radiates the delight: "Do you look great, friend! Where is Iulia?" Sax breathes with weight. He put his head in his chest, then raised it again. He looked at him in front, in his big and silver eyes, disoriented now, in the smile that disappeared slowly. He knew, he knew but he had not thought it would happen, he had not thought that Iulia would ... that Sax could have ....

He bypassed him and headed for the chamber of the boiler, the ping-pong table, the rigid body. He looked fixed, frightened. Minutes in a row. For a being in a world without time it probably meant nothing the difference between a second and a few minutes, a few hours. Sax is approaching and waiting in silence. For another ten minutes, twenty, he worried that something happened to him, but his chest was moving rhythmically, his eyes stared at the face of Julia, no other sign of life. He shrugged and the angel collapsed. Suddenly, as a searched sear. He leaned over to support him and gently deposited the floor.

He was crying without noise, with his whole body by shaking it. He retreated to the wall. His wings stretched on the wall like spider webs, he pulled his knees to his mouth and his tears rolling like pebbles on the gray skin.

"I'm sorry," Sax finally managed to speak and was immediately ashamed. What could the bad opinion mean compared to the loss?

"I did not realize what you told me-that I am the poison for time and his children. I do not know how I did.

"An erotic car," he whispered among the sucks.

"We ask?"

"You are like a lamp that will attract all the butterflies. No one will be able to resist you. You are an erotic magnet. You rebellion all instincts in any mortal. No one will oppose you."

"So you knew?" he asked the obvious, amazed.

"Yes, but you didn't have to wake up so early."

Shake. His voice was suffocated.

“I have never been to the surface, but I saw the whole earth through the eyes of his inhabitants. Astonia, greed, envy and weesake were friends of suffering after every climb outside. Only Iulia's unconditional love softened me and made me reconsider every thing ten times. It would not have such a short life.

He spoke and his eyes were glittering about the memory of temporal experiences, and his hands palpated as if he wanted to reach his life, to retain everything he had seen and lived since he was here. Continue taking advantage of Sax's hesitation:

"But more precious is the gift that Iulia has made me. To receive so much from a mere mortal spark, so much energy, so many sensations and something that cannot be explained and enveloped, and taught me, and protected me by immortal temptations in contact with your world, something more than anything else. Love! ”

"But so much misery, poverty, pain, death!" Sax laughed and stands up with indignation.

"All friends, I make the full picture and stronger experiences.

"I have to leave. I have a mission. My mother needs me. All the dying and the sick need me," added emphasis, though a bit false, then shames and resumes: "The mother needs me!"

"Didn't you understand anything?"

The angel caught laughing in tears and Sax felt even worse. He tried to leave, but the tip of one of the wings stopped and caressed him. Sax I don't know how to react.

"Now when I lost everything, I can appreciate the value. Now I can hardly realize what you feel for your mother," said the angel with his cheeks trembling. He reached for the kid and pulled it to him gently, but firmly. Finally, Sax gave and the angel took him in his arms like a child and began to comfort the silk of his hair with his heavy palms. Sax felt his minidisk. His fingers burned the glass of the plague, clutching like claws in the crystalline floor.

"You say forgiveness in such situations. I think it is too late to say forgiveness. I can't save you anymore. But I promise you I'll take care of your mother. Your gesture will not be in vain."

"What do you mean?" Sax Năuc asked, starting to understand the cold thread of truth. Suffocates. The fluff and petals of the body were rubbing violently. He had the impression that the roots were tightening his lungs in the straps.

"Gypsy passes on the road/ Road full of smoke .../ Under a purple sky," he murmured nervously, "in a summer ... I in the country ... I have a house ...", the plain and the flowers of the eyes were crying black seeds.

He left softly under the press of the angel's palm. He was destined and watched empty, as anesthetized. He breathed deeply, whispered.

"The antidote is specially made to kill the time, but it cannot save the temporal life. I needed a volunteer, otherwise your temporal, uncoordinated body would have died in inoculation. That's why I lied to you and manipulated your love ... I'm sorry."

Silence. Heavy and cold. The angel's hand ceases to comfort. Sax was free to leave. But where?

"I will take your poison out of you. But the body can not give you back." Neither life. "

[ … ]

Saxon two days later in a hospital.

[ … ]

EPILOGUE

I remember everything happened in the autumn of a year. I do not know which exactly because everyone seems to me and have complicated names to keep them. But it was all long ago, if for us 'for a long time' it has any meaning.

The angel has respected his promise and after I died he waited for me. But not at the gates of Paradise, as he had promised the mother, but on the terrace of the CFR Palace. With his slender and gray body he had covered the crack in the sky of Bucharest, through which the glass plague had been injected. Like a living cross, organically framed in the texture of the universe, sealing the rupture, stopping the attack on time. He had also communicated with the others beyond, convincing them to give up any action that could endanger us. Or at least he told me later. It is certain that a second anti-time assault did not follow. He remained like a statue suspended above the CFR Palace. People come from all over the world to worship because it saved us. Bucharest has become a place of pilgrimage, the holy capital of the world.

Day after day, month after month, year after year, we are invisible on the palace terrace and look at the world. 'Something' has tied us to this place. But we do not know the impatience or boredom. We are no longer in nature. We watch over the city, the best place that became after the event. We watch over the new world, which we inherited.

What will he follow? We don't know. The angel still claims that nothing can follow. That death means non -being. Who knows? Maybe in the end God exists somewhere outside time. Or maybe time is more than a virus!

GURGE COSTS

Open letter

by Bogdan-Tudor Bucheru

I sit comfortably in the armchair in the corner of the room. It's my favorite armchair. It is soft, just as much as to take the body shape, and high enough to look out the window on the opposite side of the room. It gives me the feeling that I am withdrawn, isolated, intangible in the middle of this world that I can not influence almost at all ... a world with which I have very few things in common, less and less. A world that I can only thank, at most, for this chair so comfortable and ...

I have to relax. To relax a few minutes because next to the table, there is a pile of envelopes waiting to be opened, read, understood ... and all this I have to do! I, who do not want to do anything ... I am tired of everything and everything. I did them all, I know them all. In my memories there are so many things that excite me, charms me and disgusts me, much more than my present can do.

I accidentally take an envelope. I look at him ... and he looks at me. He writes nothing. He doesn't even have a postage brands. I'm happy to do this ... Maybe I'm not addressed to me. I throw it away, then I look at it as it plays a few moments, so that, in the end, it will fall slightly in the middle of the room, where it should have been the Persian carpet, colored in rusty tones, which I do not have much.

The next letter that I raise is as anonymous as the first. Without resentment, I decide the same fate. Then, one after the other, the envelopes catch to fly through the room.

The last one looks at him slightly disappointed. Not even no one was upset about my name, no one had money for a bitter stamp? And then, how did all these letters come to me?!

Still undecided, I undo the envelope. Inside, a single sheet of thin paper, almost transparent and pleasant to pity, covered with a small, stagnant writing, just as I, being hurried, sometimes write. Strange! I could swear it's mine, and yet I didn't write.

“In order to have control over the time axis, you must have access to an additional size. You will be able to walk freely through the quadridimensional space only when a fifth dimension will be available to you.

Of course, you will tell me that the new dimension only takes the place of the old time, decorated in a trivial spatial dimension. And you are perfectly right. These are the rules! Always, from N+1 dimensions, one is independent. Obviously, the thing is valid as long as the principle of causality is standing.

I managed to control, gradually, over two hundred dimensions. That's right, in the end I got bored, precisely because it was always an extra, uncontrollable. The good face of things is that its importance decreases as their number is greater. On the other hand, obviously, you have an indisputable advantage over those who own even a less dimension. But as I said ...“

I close my eyes, trying to take my words out of my head, but the retina retains the distorted letters, which melt in my brain. I cover my eyes with my palms, cover my ears ... too late, it is already in me ...

“As I told you, I got bored, it had become too monotonous.

Now I am in a wonderful place, in an amazing country, a land of chimera. Here, the time is locked at one point ... You can go around if you want ... you can even go through it.

Here, the effect gives birth to the cause ... Please, the expression is not the happiest, but you understand what I mean. "

A moment of silence. I understand what he says ... but I do not want to become a master of time!

“I know you are going through a difficult time, I lived it. I know too well ... That's why I want to motivate you, to support you. I do not have to be in bad name because, from a certain point of view, I do only what has already been done.

It's a fabulous world here, incredible! I learned so many things, I have so many possibilities. What I knew once - what you know - is ... practically, there is nothing! I'm not telling you more, you have to discover alone.

It is worth trying, believe me! I know you will do it! The proof is me ... and this letter that, formally, was not even addressed to you.

Come on! And I knew beforehand ... From here you are no longer alone, we will be together! The irony is that we are one and the same person ... or personality, I think this is the most appropriate term.

So courage! The beginning has already been done, the temptation of the open road will guide you without mistake.

Now ... I leave you. "

I'm waiting yet, unbelieving. It's over ... I open my eyes and close my mind.

If I could forget everything! The message written by that unknown and thrown at me, back in time.

Maybe it was just a hallucination, one of those nightmares that fear and desire, merged, write behind the will ... But no! I have the paper in my hand. A thin, almost transparent, and pleasant paper, covered with a small, pungent writing, as ...

I break it in two pieces, in four, in eight, in sixteen ... I grind it until in my hand remains a pile devoid of any meaning. I look at her for a long time, weighing her.

I draw air into the chest, then blow strong, stirring the remains of the palm, lifting them. It spreads in the air and then it falls slightly, like the snow ... like the snow ...

The snow was falling in that December ... I remember how big flakes and although they were trying to cover the cold ... the cold that we didn't care about ... We had pleasant methods to warm up. We didn't care about the cold, only we cared about us ...

“Do not start again with your insipid memories! ”

What's this?! Who are you?

“Don't do stupid! You know very well who I am! ”

You're the one with the letter ...

“The letter? ... Oh, no! To be healthy, there is much more to him ... I have a three -hour advance. Specifically, three hours and sixteen minutes. ”

I understand ... if you are a ... alter ego ... why don't you like my memories ... ours?

“I turned ... I lived three hours. I have already changed ... it will do it too ... since you allowed the separation, you have to take into account me, so, exempt me! "

He irritates me ... And he knows that. I have to defend myself somehow ... I'm not to blame!

“How's your fault?! To whom is it then? ”

Another is guilty! ... The one five minutes ago started everything ...

“Yes, I started! I like these memory, even a lot. ”

“Those of the past cannot help you, they have not lived the change and will only confuse you! I know what happens, I have transformed myself ... Temporal separation has already begun. We will be more and more ... "

But I don't want to ... I want to be alone, just myself!

“I don't want to either! ”

"Neither do I! We do not want to change ourselves ..."

The warehouse paralyzes my mind, slipping streams throughout my body. What will happen to me? Will I separate myself every moment in an infinity of others, each with his time, each with his truth?

“Slot yourself! When we all gather, absolutely all, occupying the whole time, you will ... we will become a single person, with full powers. We will control the quadridimensional space and have access to the fifth dimension, the new time ... then we will submit it. "

But I don't want that!

“Don't you want to?! Who do you think you can deceive? Look, I lived your struggles, that I know all your arguments and that I have all the answers? "

Why don't you leave me alone if your denouement is known?

“îI only do my duty, understand! I am the tool that helps you to understand, to transform, as I, being in your place, I was convinced of the one over three hours older than me ... and I opposed you ... "

"It's a race, don't give you a beaten! It only gives you the illusion of an illusion, nothing more."

"Mouth! You have no idea what you speak! ... Listen to me, please! You received ... we all received the message ... the letter from the one who ... I, we will write it. We have the certainty of success, a whole world to conquer ... I know, you are afraid that you want exactly that you want!"

I am not afraid, but I do not want, I do not need to extend a meaningless life ... I must end it in a way!

“Have a patience! For now, we are not able to understand ... Eternity is meaningless when time is missing. "

I don't see the point ... I have to put an end to him now!

“You will not succeed! I also wanted to kill myself but I was not able. "

Nothing can I do?! Not even my own end?

“Do it, I support you! You can try ... "

"Do not encourage him, there is no point!"

"And I think you can try, at least!"

Indeed, I can try ... What do I have to lose?

Ana-Veronica Mircea

Oyoja Onuk

1st prize at the prose contest - "Picnic at the edge of galaxy” ‑ 1998

"... The only way to twist an object, so that its right side becomes its left and vice versa, is to pass it through a higher size of the space."

Ip Culianu- Traveling in the world beyond

About Sheagad Hurm always talks, everywhere - but his name is not pronounced. People call her the red witch - if I hate her more than they are afraid of, or the master of time - if fear is stronger than hatred.

Only those like Oyoja Onuk do not call it. Because the statues cannot speak, and they - the exhibits in the valley called the circus of the moments, in which the crowd is scratched with sick fascination - par of well -preserved meat between invisible and impenetrable walls, stiffened bodies, with the forgotten and immovable eyes. However, their minds live in their own bodies embedded in frozen splashes - for example, Oyoja is captive in the fraction of the second in which the guillotine's edge has touched his neck. Sheagad masterfully stopped the time - only his time - just before the blade splitting his skin, when Oyoja was just beginning to feel the cold of death. It had to be the last sensation of his life - and the only awareness at that time. But he is condemned to timeless. He is the eternal prisoner of an infinitely crumbling of the time and has (he almost began to taste the irony!) At his disposal all the time in the world to feel his chest torn by the claw, and the balls trapped on the chin, and the warm water reaching his knees, and the unclean. Handing his mouth to release, vain and irrational, a amputated howling ... For the ruthless touch of Sheagad did not break him from the thread and conscious, but he condemned him to receive the same and the same sensations, because, of all the senses of Oyoja, only the sight and they are not captive.

The ruthless touch of the sheagad ... Touching the woman with Acaju hair, carmine lips and bleeding ... Touching the woman whose irises are two coral -colored rings, two fine rings, as the ancient, around the huge pupils, deep as two holes to the sin ... Human ... the touch that (another irony, not tasted) Oyoja cannot feel ...

The ruthless touch of Sheagad is in some time, outside known and perceived time. Sheagad does not allow what he touches in the living moment, the moment when the powerless mortals call it present and slide between their fingers like the wind caught in fists. Oyoja suspects that Sheagad wandered through the future of the convicted person, chooses a tiny crunch of his time and is waiting for him there, waiting for his life to flow - exactly until then. Then, those around the unfortunate, I wrap Sheagad in a glitter, and see him stinging, the remaining one, at the moment just abandoned by her, as an immortal and powerless prisoner of the time.

Now, Oyoja knows that this happened and when he was captive in the mouth of the guillota and he found himself floating, with her everything above the ovations of the tasty crowd to enjoy his execution. But then he was already believed, already a spirit from the folk of the human ... But he did not see himself as it was due, the stubborn body lying on the scaffold.

So he remembered the sentence pronounced by the great county, more and more relentless than he had believed in that pepper and spelb:

- The guy Oyoja Onuk was aware of him by the time or the -time. Sen -tin will be at the moment of E -Xe -cu -you and will be the time when the time will be conducive to ...

... He also remembered that, from the left of the county, Sheagad had smiled at them, and that he, the fool, had shook from the ground.

... and he was shocked, already seeing himself above the circus of the moments, realizing that he was already going down to one of the spaces still without time - a space he remembered, between a closed couple at the moment of orgasm and a third -rank, accused of corruption, caught when, Hulpav, he drowned with a tasty.

She has been between them for five months. A warm voice - He believes that it is the sheagad - who, at dawn and dusk, announces the time and date before telling their welcome or good visitors, helps him to measure the living time. It is also a torment, without a doubt, also from the sophisticated cruelty of the witch. The witch that descended, a month ago, in the space opposite, precisely on the conjurations she refused to betray. There are twelve rifles - in the flames of their common bush. Exactly the moment they were beginning to burn ...

Oyoja can see them, Oyoja knows they can see him. He would like to be able to read their thoughts, to find out if he was told that he had not sold them - but he would be much more satisfied if he would calm his morbid curiosity, comparing his torment with their torments. He would like to know if the idiots who did not understand from his failure that it is better to lose their trace, giving up the struggle for a lost cause, they are, as he suspects, tortured by more terrible suffering. He would like to know if they envy him, as he envied his neighbor, who would feel that he suffocates, but has his mouth full of flavor - and the nostrils drowned in the aroma of the delicacy that is about to kill him ...

Yes, it is a shame that he does not know the thoughts of the twelve bites - and it would be a shame if they knew him ... because Oyoja was never one of them, he was never a poor naive fanatical, he never thought he could snatch the world and the world. Part, they are the Almighty who effortlessly juggle with that illusion called time ... And Oyoja knows, he always knew that the seniors come, see, and master, and cannot be hung!

But they are the ones, they are somewhere, in insensitive, unimaginable dimensions, inaccessible to a poor three -dimensional brain! In the world of Oyoja, in their behalf the temporary, a man chosen by the guild of judges, advised by the great county and served by the Hurm - the witch, who is now the image of the one who was before the seniors was twisted in the sphere of the three -dimensional, the time of the time, was born. Sai ... Sheagad, the witch who does not love anyone, but to whom the seniors commanded him to receive, subjected, in her bed, temporarily ...

Oyoja dreamed of getting rid of judges, making others of his acolytes, to be the new temporary - to have in his job, at the same time, the powers and body of the witch Sheagad ... Then they would have escaped the acolytes with watered minds, and they would not be surrounded by people, Be loved, unstoppable, on Sheagad ...

But he believed himself to be born to conspire - and it was not so. He believed himself more cunning than the leaders - they caught him, like a jerk, when he did not expect it. They caught him and, in their own way, were marked. They offered him a chance: to betray their accomplices - to be rewarded.

He refused. Not because he would have thought that the others had any luck. He only hoped that the poor kids were to make eyes, to understand that they were fighting with the gods, to understand that their triumph was the most vain utopia ... Of course, they did not care about their skin, but there was no point in sacrificing them. Because the great county rewards what he calls cooperation by giving the traitor to orgasm, along with any woman and chooses. Any woman - apart from the witch Sheagad!

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Michael Hăulică

The Olympic Games of the War

Mention at the prose contest - "picnic on the edge of the galaxy" - 1998

The TV screen, fixed on a transmission without transmission, will have the color of the sky. Guilt. For years it will be that way. And from all those years, how many will be since no one will ask "why"? How many?

A gesture, fingers running on the keys, and the screen will light up.

But on the keys of heaven who walks? Who will walk?

The light arising from the screen will fill the room and the other old people will approach the one who, for years and years, will schedule the same images, the only ones, probably, in memory of the television.

Over the road, moaning, a building will collapse. The four men in front of the screen will not be impressed. A few buildings will be collapsed daily by thickening the layer of rubble which will gradually cover the streets. Scratching them. Hurting them. Sading them. But all this will be an integral part of the life of the four, it will be a habit, a habit ... Man is an adaptable animal, which is valid and later, that is then ...

The oldest of them will rise from the floor, squeezing with a hurried, humble gesture, the rags around the body, caressing the floor, calming it, encouraging it, then stepping through the wall break in the other room. There, he will look for something through the pile of objects of metal, plastic or criorg, draining with the stick, looking for, looking for ... The room will have some convulsions not exactly executed, the scurmination will hurt them, it will be the times when the same gesture was a pleasure. He will find, as in all days, what he will look for, to fix his jack behind his ear, select passwords, barriers, menus and and passwords only known, then return to the others. He will sit in front of the screen, he will pyon his eyes on him, as if. Everything will be like when. For him. For the others ...

VOCE DIN OFF: Welcome to the Olympic War Games!

The distances from the Coordination and Control Center to the most distant corners of the Olympic area, the humidity of the atmosphere, the location of the access roads and the stands for the spectators, their number for each sector, all turned into figures, codes, parameters for the apparatus, so trivial, modulator. And the words of the Crainic rises above the area, like a sound dome, everyone heard.

Arrive early, even too early, to occupy their places, to surprise something from the preparations, from the backstage - everyone knows that the Olympics is one of the most prosperous businesses of these years - the first spectators have already scattered in the Olympic area. They seem like a huge life, with thousands of feet, with thousands of eyes, in a continuous metamorphosis, a fluid, viscous life, which flows on the access roads forming true in front of the gates so that they can burst beyond them, always beyond, to the edges of this territory of the games, which are. Each new arrived hears the desired voice, decoded by the modulator after scrutinizing the subconscious and a smile of gratitude relaxes his face, a sign that everything is ok.

“Welcome to the Olympic War Games!”

I hear some lazy, lined voice, with a strong French accent of any Lo -Lo, Clo -Clo, Fro -Frou, Jou -Jou lost in memory of a Parisian night. Of course, they must be the technicians who, being part of the team of Jorth, provided the Tele and Holo transmissions from the previous edition of the Olympics, in Paris. Their faces, focused on the activities for which they are paid to work and not to sting, however, they are, the nostalgia being something human and common, especially when it comes to Paris.

“Welcome to the Olympic War Games!”

I hear the youngest spectators the gentle voice of your grandmother and as if they see them giving them mango fruits or cryoperes that they then buy from the machines you are hit by all the way.

“Welcome to the Olympic War Games!”

You can also hear the firm, thunderous voice of an ordinary man to give order, full of him and probably full of money.

“Welcome…”

Direct transmission: -Hei, pigeons, welcome to the sixth edition of the Olympic Games of the war! Our comfortable aircraft are waiting for you. The possessors of yellow vouchers are asked to go to the gate one and the lovers of details, the happy owners of the green vouchers, to the gate two where the aircraft equipped and with individual receivers are located.

The reporter returns to the director of the transmission, the device fixed in the ear gave him the signal, professional smile, and:

- Good day or good evening, my dear, your Carmin Philips wishes you a pleasant viewing of our shows from the Olympic Games.

O.K. - The director makes a friendly, encouraging sign. Let them go, old man! Text!

- But until the start time, Jorth presents you the Olympic monument, in which the Olympic flame is burning by the famous athlete Marius Dandy Ho, who, two months ago, simply shattered all the records of the Olympics so far, winning no less than nine samples. The fact made the Planetary Federation of Sports advance the proposal for Marius Dandy Ho to officially be given the title of best PSI athlete of all time. But this must also approve the government, so let's go back. You have on the screens the solemn monument of the ignition of the flame. And now you can carefully notice the shape of the Olympic monument, like a champagne cup. It is said that the first Olympics that took place in antiquity, and even earlier, in early antiquity, were held on land of this form. Interesting, right? Now, to the right, you see the building of the Coordination and Control Center and on the terrace above, the 284 heraldic signs of the participating ethnic groups. Yes. The whole building of the center, the mixing room, the reception salon, one of the rooms where the press conferences take place - distinguish the communication screen in the background ... and now you see me. Hello! Here Carmin Philips, I'm talking to you from the Olympic area.

Voice of Off: Another two billion inhabitants of the planet rushes to the living areas to catch the beginning of the competitions. The most dawn are the ones who escaped the official opening of the games, since today the inaugural discourse will be resumed in which one of the two co -presidents of the Planetary Union has also slipped the usual political allusions, without which the oratorical act would be as a food for diabetics.

DICD | ionar: food for diabetics: archaism. Food for diabetes patients.

Food diabetes - boiled carrot.

The speech ... like a boiled carrot.

Interpretations: communist, soft, long.

Voice of Off: Traffic controllers receive data from observers located on roads, highways, passages, air routes, chew them well in the electronic mixers of their brains, calculating and transmitting back to the observers, trajectories, waiting times, stacks.

Advertisements: Wellit company informs you that the aircraft intended for the viewers of the sixth edition of Jor are waiting for you. Guaranteed comfort. Each place is equipped with personal monitors that can be regulated for details - but only if you count among the happy owners of green vouchers. If not, our agencies are available to you day and night. Access code in the database: Jor - 125320. Don't forget to mention your account number.

After occupying the places, the aircraft will be stabilized above the sectors, at an optimal height for each sample. Perfect visibility! Get tickets in time! Voice of off: The viewing robots are located in all the sectors in which field competitions take place. I am part of the decor or often replace a fallen athlete borrowing his appearance. Although everyone knows about them, no one has to locate, especially the fighters, in order not to falsify the competitions. And so, lately, the hand of the choreographers!

Robots give images to the brave, details, amateurs of strong sensations. But how many are these ...?

Well, there are enough. You can not see how you can see the head because of the hypertressive gases near you all day. Or to see the other curled by a tyrap, transformed into an artesian variety that splashes with blood and pieces of meat and bones. Palpitant, right? Although they can hardly understand those who prefer the images transmitted by the injected equipment directly in the athletes' myocardium.

But each with his pleasures, more or less legal. With the pleasures he can pay.

The cost of the images offered by the robots to be seen or myocamera has increased enormously at this edition due to the numerous accidents suffered by the equipment that is not too cheap. Many robots are destroyed in the middle of the struggles and about myocamers, what to speak, it is clear that with the death of the wearer, they are removed from the circuit.

But this is the risk that Jorth assumes for you.

Advertisements: The Jorth company has placed for you no less than 500 robots in Sector 7 where the field battles are held. For only two hundred dollars you will have at home the most impressive unleashes of contemporary beamy fantasy!

Remember: Jorth company has a motto "Everything for the client"!

Direct transmission: Hello, do you remember me? Carmin Philips, from the Olympic area, on a fourth day of the competitions. We are in sector 7 where the battle of the field began as Olympic discipline. Today you will follow images from the latest meetings during the exercises imposed and tomorrow you will attend the freely chosen exercises that, hopefully, will give the whole poetry of the Olympics.

At this moment, the draw for the first match is proceeded. The representative teams of the French and English ethnicities, eternal rival on all lands, meet in all competitions.

The spectators in the aircraft above Sector 7 have already been announced and do my duty to announce you, detest receivers: Jorth has launched a contest with prizes, objects of victims and autographs of the survivors. The competition test is the theme of the match.

So: What battle in the history of mankind is the theme of this sporting meeting? What were the combatants and the period, if you can even the exact year, in which it took place? The answers are received in the database specially created by the company. Access code: Jorth -10255.

The captains of the two teams are still in the jury, receiving information about the number of fighters, the arsenal, the equipment and the positions from which the fight will begin. Depending on the theme, there are also details about the first troops in which death is only simulated - not the injury, but - specifying the moment from which the team captains will have all the freedom of movement, the moment of relaxation. From here on the theoretical technical -tactical training, but also the knowledge of history can lead each to victory or defeat. That is why, usually, the captains are very good historians, many of them having specialized studies, published works, etc. Captain hunting is still one of the business on all occasions by the Academy of Sciences, the recruitment of historians very much in this chapter. But the managers also have their justice: they are not, whether or not you know the commander of the Iraqi troops in the battle of his bay ... Although there were cases. No further than in the pre -Olympic tour, a captain who had emphasized only the strictly military training, having Octavianus's positions and troops in Egypt behaved as Sinan Pasa in Călugăreni. It is true that he did not lose his teeth but lost the match although he had been favored by the draw.

While I told you these little events that, of course, will remain in the anecdotic of the young Olympic disciplines, the captains of the two representatives entered the field. French athletes are consumed ...

But no, that's what you have to guess, in order to respond to the Jorth Company.

The first actions are carried out according to the historical scenario, the moment has not arrived ... yes, well, thank you. Dear friendly friends, the studio is informed that for now, the comments of the spectators in the ship are more interesting than what is happening on the field, so, for two minutes, you will watch some images from within.

The comments of the spectators: - A, it is clear. Battle of Philippi. Look, there will be the junction with ...

- Fugi d 'that, how will it be ...? He studies, read before you come to the match ... You should give the tickets based on knowledge test, not all idiots come ...

Direct transmission: We are sorry that we abducted the pleasure of these unique and funny dialogues, but the competition has reached the relaxation phase. What do you say a little sound on the right?

"" Do you think this is the only thing I have to do? "To walk all day through these mud and ask where Grouchy, where is Grouchy?

- That's what Napoleon did, captain ...

- Yes. And he lost. Well, I didn't want to. The French could defeat Waterloo and I am determined to get them, their mother to call them by telepath.

- What, are you stupid? Do you want to disqualify us? It is better and waiting for my order. Hear? Don't attack until I tell you. Is it clear? Do not do you like the other idiot to throw your brain prosthesis! It has to be a path ... "

*

On the ground floor of the block will be heard a howl that the four, but also the building, will easily identify, who will not recognize the voice of the free? They will all be rushed to the entrance to the apartment that they will cover with half -burnt mattresses, with pieces that before they made up humanoid devices, with the rubbing, carefully gathered. The wall will also try to gather around the place where, once was the door.

But it will not be enough. All this will be shattered in a moment and the two free will penetrate inside and turning the sticks above the heads. Until they keep an eye on the screen on which the document images of those long times will still be carried out, when human civilization was in full flowering, when ...

A few French athletes, as a cavalry, will approach the chase, shouting and shaking their swords, directly to the robot, to the two free ones who will stare on the screen terrified, terrorized by cries, by the horses and will do what anyone, in their place, would be on their place: crushing him. Crushing him. Then, in the silence that will be left, one of them will grin, and then he will grind from the throat as if he were laughing, and maybe even so, then will articulate:

- Me… Om. Om!

And, proud of him, his power, the breed of which he belongs, he will leave the apartment, slipping through the opening made a little earlier in the pile of objects in front of the entrance. The other will follow him after, with a strong blow, he will break the old man's head ...

The screams of the two will hear for a while inside the building, then in the street, while the men left in the room, live, will approach the low one and will stay there, looking at their chief and the arm finished with the tight fist, raised up, up ...

As a threat? As a cry of powerlessness?

Who can know?

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