LITMIR.BIZ

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the rebel attack, she left the base and flew to the central worlds.”

      “Do you confirm the choice?”

      I shuddered. The last question came in the voice of my ex-girlfriend. All the intonations were imitated so precisely that it seemed to me as if Letra were beside me, and if I only looked around, I would see a woman whose fate I had not known for almost a year.

      “Yes,” I affirmed the choice and could not refrain from asking a question that plagued me in the first months after landing on Earth, “Is anything known about her fate after the beginning of the mutiny?”

      “Research Engineer Letra has been recalled from the Moonbase to the Central Republic Academy for a new assignment. The database has confirmation of her departure for Metropolis. The transport ship Bark-86 was supposed to send a report to the base's navigation system on the successful completion of the first hyperjump, but it never made contact.”

      I stared out the window in silence for a while. I was in pain. I hadn't even expected such a reaction from myself, thinking that all my feelings for Letra had long since burned out, especially if I recall the circumstances of our parting. Still, I was very attached to that girl at the time, and her disappearance from my life was a great loss to me. We were too different in both education and social status. I could see that she felt good with me, and I felt easy and comfortable in her company, but our relationship had no prospects, which was confirmed when a request came to Letra's name from the Academy. She didn't want to sacrifice her scientific career for a simple lieutenant, and we never once discussed such a possibility – everything was clear as it was.

      Of course, these experiences were now perceived as something long gone, but they linked me to my past life, which I could not and did not want to give up completely.

      “Your name is Letra now,” I said, suppressing a sigh.

      “Accepted.”

      “I want a summary of events in Metropolis and the Sixth Republic colonies in the last month leading up to the attack by a rebel cruiser on the Moonbase.”

      “What kind of events are you interested in?”

      “Anything that has to do with the mutiny and the attack on the base. I am interested in the reasons for this madness and its scope.”

      “The data on the causes is incomplete. Long-distance communications reported outbreaks of rebellion in all the major colonies. Pockets of uncontrolled and unmotivated aggression began to emerge all over the place almost simultaneously. They were accompanied by inadequate behavior of citizens, which bore the signs of virtual psychosis in an extremely severe form.”

      “How did it manifest itself?”

      “Individuals and organized groups of citizens, including military, government officials and law enforcement officers, acted aggressively and deliberately, in the full belief that they were in virtual simulators and practicing training tasks, set by their commander's office. Many citizens thought they were in the game and doing game tasks. Initially, the behavior and motivation of different groups differed greatly, but regardless of the initial drive forward, all those affected by psychosis quickly found common ground with each other, accepting the same concept of what was going on, and did not perceive the arguments of people not affected by psychosis at all, considering them as bots or extraneous characters.”

      “That is, a fleet officer, confident that he leads his ship in a training battle on a virtual simulator, and a gamer he encounters, hunting digital monsters with a club, understood each other perfectly?”

      “Yes, they did. And gamers were quick to abandon their game scenarios and adopt the legends of those ill persons whose virtual worlds were closest to reality, i.e., police officers and military personnel.”

      “So the entire crew of the cruiser that attacked the Moonbase went crazy?”

      “This is not a completely accurate term. In their own way, all these people were perfectly normal. They just stopped distinguishing between the real world and the virtual world. Or rather, the virtual world became more real to them than the real one.”

      “But who made them attack ordinary people? They must have received someone's orders! How could an officer of the Sixth Republic in his right mind normally accept the training task of storming his own metropolitan system? And our base?! All senior officers in the Fleet know why we study underdeveloped civilizations. How can one explain such a learning task, as the destruction of one's own research station? Who needs to practice such skills, and why?!”

      “They consider ordinary people to be infected, and dangerously so, with the possibility of transmitting their mental illness to others. It was as if their consciousness was turned inside out, transferring everything that had happened to themselves to citizens who had not fallen under the influence of virtual psychosis.”

      “But who set their tasks, coordinated their actions, led their fleets and armies? Wait a minute, though… I think I understand. They united, using regular fleet, police and army communications systems and built their own vertical chain of command, as if there was no virtual psychosis. Reality was different for them.”

      “That's about the way it happened. At first there was chaos, but then those who fell ill organized themselves very quickly, outstripping ordinary citizens, even the military and law enforcement officers. True, not everywhere. In some colonies sick people were quickly isolated, and then the army and fleet put up serious resistance to the rebel forces.”

      “Where did this disease come from?”

      “It is believed that this is an undocumented and unaccounted for negative effect of the "VIRT-N" technology with a pseudo-infinite number of virtual degrees of freedom. The manufacturer promised complete indistinguishability from reality, but the new virtuality proved to be stronger for human consciousness than the real world. This effect was not immediately apparent. They were in such a hurry to bring this technology to market that they limited the trials to three months, while more time was needed for the accumulation of critical changes in the user's neural connectivity system. And it also needed a jolt – some kind of peak load on the brain, which would switch the perception of the world from real to virtual, that is, replace one world with another.”

      “And what was the trigger?”

      “The launch of the galactic hypernet. After it went live, the time spent by an average user in virtuality increased by a third. The release of a number of new-generation games specifically tailored to the VIRT-N technology was timed to coincide with the launch of the unified network. This proved to be sufficient.”

      “What happened next?”

      “Mankind split in two. There were fewer rebels, or rather sick people, but they were much more motivated and had absolutely no fear of death, although they did not seek it – quite expected behavior for someone who thinks he is in a game or a training battle where it is a shame to die, but death is not real.”

      “Who was winning the war when the rebel cruiser attacked the Moonbase?”

      “There is no information. The colonies stopped communicating and disappeared from the hypernet one by one. A wave of rebellion swept even the outlying independent planets. Metropolis went silent a week before the Moonbase was hit. I have no more recent data.”

      “After all, we killed ourselves… There was no outside factor. It was the same as with everyone else before us, only we lasted a little longer.”

      “It is premature to speak of the complete death of civilization. Some part of the population may have survived, but my prediction algorithms allow me to say that with a 98 percent probability the Sixth Republic has ceased to exist as a single interstellar state. The war led to the mass death of qualified specialists and the destruction of the most important scientific, technological and educational centers. In the coming decades, those who have survived will be in for a technological setback of two or three hundred years, with possible further regression.”

* * *

      Henning von Tresckow hated the Nazis in general and Hitler in particular, but this did not prevent him from serving honestly in the Wehrmacht. At the age of sixteen, Henning volunteered for the army and fought

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