Kitobni o'qish: «DOPAMINE»

PROLOGUE — AIM

Autumn came early to the steppe in 1942. At night, a thin skin of ice already seized the ground, and by day the wind drove gray clouds low across the sky, like ash from some distant fire.

Five men walked from the village toward the radio tower.

Three were soldiers carrying rifles. The fourth was a lieutenant. The fifth wore no hat, his hands tied behind his back with telephone wire. The wire was new and black, smelling of rubber and machine oil. The condemned man kept brushing his boots through the dry feather grass, as if trying to memorize the sound.

“Stop,” the lieutenant said.

They halted at the tower’s concrete base. It looked too tall for this empty land. Steel latticework vanished into the clouds, and a loudspeaker swayed at the top. Radio bulletins sometimes came from here, and when they did, the whole village gathered around its only receiver: women clutched their headscarves, old men stared at the floor, and children learned not to ask questions.

Today, there was no one at the tower.

The lieutenant took out a cigarette, lit one for himself, then put another between the prisoner’s lips. The man didn’t thank him. His name was Tulegen, but it had been misspelled on the charge sheet. He was going to die with that mistake beside his name.

“Last words?” the lieutenant asked.

“To whom?”

One of the soldiers gave a nervous half-laugh. Another turned toward the steppe.

The lieutenant yanked the cigarette from Tulegen’s mouth and tossed it at his feet.

“Five steps forward.”

Tulegen took five. On the sixth, he stopped on his own. Closed his eyes. The wind shoved him in the back, and for a second he thought it was already the bullet.

The lieutenant unfolded the paper.

The words about treason, sabotage, and ties to the enemy sounded hollow. The wind carried them off at once. Tulegen wasn’t listening to the charges. He was listening to the loudspeaker above. For the past three nights, he had heard whispers coming from it even though the tower had no power. The whispers repeated the voices of people from the village—their pleas, fears, prayers. Sometimes the loudspeaker spoke in the voice of his dead brother.

“Squad, ready!” the lieutenant ordered.

The rifle bolts clicked almost at the same time.

Tulegen breathed in the smell of cold earth.

“Aim!”

The rifles came up. Three barrels froze behind his back.

Tulegen closed his eyes.

The lieutenant drew breath.

But he never got the chance to give the order to fire.

The loudspeaker at the top of the tower came alive.

First came static. Then a firm voice, familiar to everyone, said:

“From the Soviet Information Bureau...”

The soldiers froze. The lieutenant looked up.

The voice cut out. A thin, piercing tone stretched from the loudspeaker. Higher than a human scream, deeper than the drone of an aircraft. It slipped under Tulegen’s skin, ran up his spine, and settled deep inside his head, as if it had found the place where his thoughts were born.

Inside that single note he heard everything he had waited for all his life: his mother’s voice, a verdict clearing his name, the laughter of children not yet born, the promise that the war would end tomorrow.

Then came silence.

The order to fire never came.

Tulegen waited. One second. Two. Ten.

He opened his eyes and slowly turned around.

There was no one behind him.

Three rifles lay on the ground. Neatly, as if the soldiers had carefully set them down before disappearing. Nearby, the lieutenant’s cigarette still smoldered. The wind worried at the charge sheet but couldn’t turn it over.

Tulegen backed away. He wanted to run, but he couldn’t tear his eyes from the loudspeaker.

The lieutenant’s voice came from it—quiet, almost childlike:

“Fire?... Why didn’t you say ‘fire’?”

Tulegen broke into a run and fled across the steppe.

Behind him, the tower sent an invisible signal into the sky, and the farther he ran, the more clearly he heard a sound that did not yet exist: the short, cheerful chime of a new message notification.

When a person hands their sense of meaning over to a machine, they shut down when the signal does.

PART ONE — NO NETWORK

Chapter 1. Glitch

Almaty, 2036.

The city ran on algorithmic schedules. Office towers changed their ads to match pedestrians’ expressions; driverless buses slid through streams of people; delivery drones buzzed overhead inside strict flight corridors. The mountains reflected in the glass front of the Nomad-Link high-rise—the one thing nobody had figured out how to personalize yet.

Thirty-five-year-old Yernar sat on the forty-second floor surrounded by transparent screens. One showed a map of the country pulsing with green dots of network coverage. Another displayed security alerts and anomalous requests. On a third, the corporate assistant ZHYLTYR was confidently explaining that there was no threat.

“You don’t know whether there’s a threat,” Yernar muttered. “You know which sentence I want to read.”

ZHYLTYR answered at once in a soft voice:

“Your skepticism improves decision quality.”

“Exactly.”

A coworker in the next cubicle raised an eyebrow.

“Talking to a machine you don’t trust again?”

“Making sure it remembers its place.”

“Does it know yours?”

Yernar didn’t answer. A name flashed on his personal display: GRANDMA.

He smiled before he even realized it and accepted the video call.

The camera showed a low room with whitewashed walls. A lace curtain hung over the window, evening light trembling behind it. Grandma Kulzhan sat at the table, holding the phone too close to her face.

“Son, you’re skinny again,” she said instead of hello.

“It’s the wide-angle lens.”

“A lens doesn’t feed you.”

“We get free food at the office.”

“Free things never have a soul.”

She laughed. Yernar did too. Around his grandmother, laughing still came easily.

“When are you and Aigerim finally coming?” Grandma asked. “Will I get to see you before the wedding without a screen between us? Or has she finally realized how stubborn you are and run away?”

“The wedding’s in a month.”

“A month is enough time to change your mind thirty times.”

The connection stuttered. Grandma Kulzhan’s face broke into squares, then came back together.

“See?” she said. “That tower’s acting up again. Network, no network, network, no network. Yesterday the shop wouldn’t sell me bread because the system was down. Says the register doesn’t know the price. I say, I know the price. He says, the system doesn’t. So now the system matters more than a grandmother.”

“I’ll check it remotely.”

“You can get married remotely too.”

Something moved behind her.

Yernar stopped smiling.

At first he thought it was a compression artifact: a dark vertical smear by the door. Then the smear stepped into the room.

The lieutenant. Three soldiers behind him. Gray greatcoats, side caps, rifles. The image was black-and-white, yet it sat over the full-color room with no transparency at all.

“Grandma,” Yernar said quietly. “Who’s there with you?”

Grandma Kulzhan smiled as if she hadn’t heard.

The lieutenant stopped behind her chair and unfolded a yellowed sheet of paper.

“Grandma, turn around.”

“What is it, son?”

The three soldiers raised their rifles.

Yernar shot to his feet. His chair slammed into the partition.

“GRANDMA!”

The lieutenant looked straight into the camera. His face was young and deathly tired.

“Fire,” he said.

Grandma Kulzhan jerked. Her forehead hit the table. The phone toppled onto its side. Her motionless hand remained on-screen.

The call dropped.

Yernar stood among his frozen coworkers, pressing a hand toward the empty air where his grandmother’s face had been a second ago.

Then the phone rang again.

The screen read: GRANDMA.

Chapter 2. The Second Call

Yernar couldn’t make himself touch the button at first. His finger shook and missed twice.

“Son?” Grandma Kulzhan appeared on-screen alive, annoyed, and completely calm. “Why are you yelling?”

Yernar sat down right on the floor.

“You... you fell.”

“I’m sitting.”

“There were people there.”

“What people?”

“Soldiers. Behind you.”

Grandma looked around. The room was empty.

“It’s just me and the kettle. And the kettle isn’t in uniform.”

Someone in the office gave an awkward laugh. His department head came closer, but Yernar raised a hand: not now.

“Show me the table.”

“Why?”

“Just show me.”

Grandma Kulzhan moved the camera. On the vinyl tablecloth sat a cup, a saucer of sweets, and an old radio. No blood. No bullet hole in the wall. The phone was still in her hand.

“The connection dropped,” she said. “I called back. You’re looking at me like you already buried me.”

Yernar zoomed in on the call recording. The system had cached the last twenty seconds locally. He saw his grandmother smiling, the soldiers raising their rifles, the fall. It was all there.

“Grandma, don’t leave the house. I’m coming.”

“Today?”

“Now.”

“It’ll be dark soon.”

“Now.”

He ended the call and stood. Half the office had already gathered around him. Someone was recording through a contact lens. Yernar snapped a hand in front of the person’s face.

“Delete it.”

“I’m not—”

“Your indicator’s blinking.”

His boss, Temirlan, took him into a meeting room. The glass walls turned opaque.

“Show me the recording.”

Yernar sent the file to an isolated screen. The video played without sound. Temirlan watched closely, but by the end his expression had changed to careful concern—the look people gave a coworker who might be having a breakdown.

“Deepfake,” he said.

“In real time?”

“Malicious filter. Video-stream substitution. You’re the one who taught us anything can be faked.”

“Not anything.”

“Then maybe your implant’s been compromised.”

Yernar automatically touched the small scar behind his ear. A neural port sat under the skin, with a detachable module clipped behind the ear. Through it he logged into work systems, heard secure communications, and controlled displays. Yernar hated having hardware that close to his brain, but without the port he wouldn’t have been cleared for the job.

“I’ll check the logs,” he said.

“You’re taking the day off.”

“The village base station is going down.”

“Technicians can go in the morning.”

“I’m going now.”

Temirlan sighed heavily.

“You can’t take the company terminal.”

“I don’t need the terminal.”

“You need a doctor.”

Yernar stood up.

“Put me on unpaid leave.”

“Yernar...”

“Or fire me. Pick whichever loads faster.”

Aigerim called him in the elevator. Her face appeared on the inside of his lens: short dark hair, tired eyes, white coat. Behind her, robotic gurneys moved through the city clinic.

“I heard you caused a scene,” she said.

“Gossip travels faster than light.”

“What happened?”

He wanted to tell her. Instead, he said:

“Grandma’s having network trouble. I’m heading to the village.”

Aigerim was quiet longer than usual.

“We’re meeting the wedding coordinator today.”

“Reschedule it.”

“You picked the date.”

“This is urgent.”

“Everything is urgent to you except the people standing right next to you.”

The elevator doors opened. In the lobby, people walked through advertising holograms without looking up from their personalized feeds.

“I’ll call you from the road,” Yernar said.

“You’re always calling from the road. You never actually show up.”

The connection cut out.

In the parking garage, the autonomous car asked for a destination. Yernar named the village. The system warned him that the last forty kilometers of the route were not verified on the digital map.

“Continue?” the car asked.

“Yes.”

“Network coverage is unstable at your destination. Some functions will be unavailable.”

“I know how to drive.”

“According to your profile, you last drove manually eleven years ago.”

“I’ll remember today.”

Once the car was out of the city, Yernar opened the call recording again.

This time, after the lieutenant gave the order, his grandmother didn’t fall.

She slowly lifted her head and looked into the camera.

Her lips formed silent words:

Don’t bring them the signal.

Chapter 3. The Road Without a Map

Until dawn, the car behaved perfectly. Then the navigation system began inventing junctions that didn’t exist in the steppe.

Translucent arrows appeared on the windshield: turn right in one hundred meters, take the side road, keep left. To the right was nothing but a dry ravine. To the left, a field overgrown with wormwood.

Yernar switched off augmented reality and took manual control.

For the first few minutes, his grip on the wheel was too tight. Ten minutes later, his body remembered what his father had once taught him: don’t stare at the road right in front of the hood, feel where the rear wheels are, don’t fight the road.

His father had disappeared when Yernar was seven. Grandma said Serik had gone away for work and never come back. After that, Yernar’s mother moved to the city, while Yernar stayed with Grandma Kulzhan until he finished school. Years later, his mother died after a short illness, when he was already at university. Yernar had stopped asking where his father went a long time ago. When people asked, he gave the shortest answer possible: disappeared.

The phone on the passenger seat flashed.

New message from: DAD.

Yernar slammed on the brakes.

The car skidded on gravel and stopped sideways across the road.

The notification vanished.

He checked the log. Nothing. Cloud history—nothing. Local cache—nothing.

“Phantom notification,” Yernar said aloud.

The words sounded convincing until a man’s voice came from the powered-down audio system:

“Easy on the turns, son.”

Yernar ripped out the power module. The screen went black. The voice stopped.

He drove the rest of the way in silence.

By noon, the first houses appeared. The village of Karasu sat between low hills as if sheltering from the wind. Above the roofs rose the tower—not the thin wartime structure Yernar knew from archive photos. Its old metal skeleton had grown layers of panels, antennas, and amplifier rings. A laser relay spun at the top. White base-station capsules hung below. In the sun, the whole thing gleamed like an artificial bone pushing through the earth.

A line of cars stood at the entrance to the village.

People were arguing at the automatic barrier. It wouldn’t open without network authorization, and the guard refused to raise it manually because the rules said he wasn’t allowed to.

“My medicine is stuck in a delivery!” a woman shouted.

“My pass is valid!”

“The register took my money, but it won’t show the transaction!”

“Come on, Grandpa, open the damn thing!”

The guard, a wiry old man in a faded quilted jacket, calmly drank tea from a metal mug.

Yernar got out, found the mechanical lock beneath the panel, and broke the plastic seal.

“You’ll get fined,” the guard warned.

“They can send me a notification.”

The old man smirked.

“Then I guess you won’t.”

The barrier lifted. People surged forward without even looking at Yernar. Every one of them was staring at a screen, checking to see if the network had come back.

Only the guard asked:

“You Kulzhan’s boy?”

“Her grandson.”

“You look like your father.”

Yernar tensed.

“You knew him?”

“Everyone here used to know everyone. Before phones taught us how to forget.”

“What’s wrong with the tower?”

The old man looked toward the metal cutting into the sky.

“It isn’t breaking down. It’s waking up.”

Yernar was about to ask what he meant when cheers erupted behind him. Someone had one bar of signal. People raised their phones over their heads and started running toward the rise.

The guard set his mug on the ground.

“People used to run like that to the radio when they were waiting for news from the front,” he said. “Back then, they were afraid of hearing something bad. Now they’re afraid of hearing nothing at all.”

Yernar’s phone vibrated.

A message from his grandmother was on the screen:

Don’t come into the house. I’m not alone.

Chapter 4. The Village That Watches

Grandma Kulzhan’s street began behind the school. Yernar drove slowly, weaving around people standing in the middle of the road with their phones held up. Some were trying to catch a signal from the roofs of their cars. Two teenagers had climbed the water tower. A girl in school uniform held a tablet over her head and cried as she repeated:

“Just a little more. One more bar.”

Karasu had changed. The houses were still low and the yards still dusty, but facial-recognition cameras hung above the gates, solar panels gleamed on the roofs, and an automated parcel locker stood outside the shop. Now the cameras at the gates didn’t recognize the homeowners, and the parcel locker was just a dead metal box.

The gate at his grandmother’s house stood open.

Yernar stopped the car and reread the message. It was marked as delivered two minutes ago even though the signal indicator showed zero.

He went into the yard.

Herbs were drying beneath the awning. Apples lay in a basin. From the summer kitchen came the clink of a spoon against a cup.

“Grandma?”

“In here, son.”

Grandma Kulzhan sat at the table just as she had during the call. An old radio stood in front of her. There was no one in the corner.

Yernar hugged her too hard. She patted his back.

“You’ll break my bones. Then you can look after me yourself.”

He pulled back and checked her face, hands, neck.

“You messaged me that you weren’t alone.”

“I didn’t.”

He showed her the screen.

Grandma read the message and frowned.

“The phone was lying right here.”

“Who could’ve taken it?”

“No one. I don’t lock my door. Not against people.”

“What do you lock it against?”

She looked up. Fear flashed in her eyes for a second, then vanished behind her usual sternness.

“Eat first.”

“Grandma.”

“Even the truth sounds stupid on an empty stomach.”

Yernar sat down. While she ladled out broth, he connected a diagnostic module to her phone. The device found no malicious apps. But the network log showed repeated requests from an unknown base station: its identifier was all zeroes, and its frequency lay outside the civilian band.

The maintenance log held another oddity. Three days earlier, at 02:17, Nomad-Link had automatically added Karasu to a pilot group for unstable connectivity and pushed a ZHYLTYR package to the tower—a module called “retention during unstable connectivity.” The local technician had requested nothing; the module was supposed to run in the cloud, not on the station itself. Thirty-seven seconds later, a device with a zero identifier answered in the logs for the first time. Before that night, it had not existed.

“When did the glitches start?”

“Three days ago. At night first. Then during the day. Yesterday the tower started talking.”

Yernar stopped eating.

“What did it say?”

“Not words. More like someone tuning an old radio, looking for a station.”

She turned the radio dial. White noise spilled from the speaker.

“That radio hasn’t worked in twenty years.”

“Then it’s had a nice long rest.”

A rhythm formed inside the static: three short pulses, a pause, then three more. Yernar recorded it.

“Where’s your father?” Grandma asked suddenly.

“You tell me.”

Grandma Kulzhan flinched as if the question had come from someone else.

“He left.”

“Where?”

“Far away.”

“Grandma, you’ve been saying that for twenty-eight years.”

“Then the answer hasn’t changed.”

A rumble of voices came from the street. People were running toward the house.

Malika burst in first—a local blogger Yernar remembered as a girl with braids. Now even in real life, lenses retouched her face; a streamer implant glimmered at her temple. A faded hospital wristband, far too small for an adult, hung from her key ring. When she noticed Yernar looking at it, Malika closed her hand around it.

“Yernar!” She pointed her camera at him. “Guys, meet our big-city cyber expert. Tell my followers when the internet’s coming back.”

“You don’t have a connection.”

“I’m recording offline. I’ll upload it later.”

Neighbors crowded in behind her.

“The shop’s down.”

“Electronic prescriptions won’t open.”

“The kids are losing it.”

“You’ve got company access, right?”

Dozens of eyes shifted toward his phone at once.

He shoved it into his pocket.

“I’m checking the tower first.”

“Check it now,” said a tall young man in a gaming jacket. “I’ve got a tournament. Miss one day and my team drops me. My channel’s small, but if we make the final, people will watch.”

“Your name’s Daniyar?”

“Dan. Online, KhanZero. Same handle on stream.”

“And offline?”

The guy didn’t understand the question.

A voice came from the old radio on the table.

Quiet, distorted, but unmistakable.

“Yernar... don’t show them your phone.”

Everyone went silent.

It was his father’s voice.