It's a Miracle

But knowledge is not a shield. No formulas could prepare them for the day when a worn-out "gazik" pulled up to the doorstep of their institution, and a frightened, pale officer jumped out. His orders were abrupt and insane: disperse, destroy everything possible, and the uniforms… "Hide the uniforms, cut them up, burn them," he whispered, glancing around. "They anger people. The new people." People intoxicated by a strange, furious freedom that smelled of smoke and broken glass.

For the first year, she couldn't sleep without vodka. Two glasses in the evening—a ritual to numb her mind. But every night she woke at three o'clock: drenched in a cold sweat, sober to the point of horror, and gripped by an animal, silent fear. And the torment would begin again: running through alternatives, the endless "what if?" What had she missed? Which variable had she failed to account for? What magical coefficient could have propped up the collapsed reality? It was a theoretician's nightmare, trapped in the ruins of her own prophecy.

After a year, the money ran out. And paradoxically, it became easier. The acute, physical task of "survive today, find food tomorrow" burned away the agonizing introspection. Hunger is an excellent cure for existential dread.

And so she devised a masquerade. A fortune-teller. A prostitute of statistics. Her thin lips twisted in disgust at the thought. But the new world, the world of young "businessmen" (if we're honest—just frightened, brutal boys with money and guns), turned out to be superstitious to the point of trembling. They, who played with death every minute, desperately wanted even a glimpse of its blueprint. The rumor of the "old woman who finds things with pinpoint accuracy" spread quickly. And they began to pay.

She looked at these guys, at their brazen but empty eyes, and soon stopped peering into their probability fields further than a month ahead. The picture was monotonous and horrifying: a bloody fog, a short flash of pain, and—a cut-off. Death, death, death… She learned to give them what they wanted: coordinates, names, enemies' weak points. And she tried not to see the ones whose threads she effectively severed with her calculations.

And only in rare, cursed moments of idleness, when a thick, dusty silence hung in the apartment, would the true horror wash over her. What kind of "peacetime" was this that they had all been so eager to enter? A time where boys die not on battlefields, but in back alleys over a wad of cash? Who would grow out of this bloody mess? And would anyone grow up at all?

And here he stood, huge and clumsy, in the middle of this labyrinth of strange clutter. It smelled of dust, old paper, and something bitter, like wormwood. His leather jacket creaked in the silence, the briefcase with its meaningless papers hung like a dead weight, and on his shaved head he felt the chill of a draft. He was a stranger here, superfluous, a bulldozer that had crashed into an antiquity shop.

"Did you bring it?" The voice from the semi-darkness wasn't raspy or old, but low, thick.

"Ah, yeah..." he fumbled nervously in his briefcase and held out the color-printed photographs. "I think it's this asshole who stole it," Artem blurted out and immediately fell silent, as if he'd bitten his tongue. Her gaze, which he finally saw in the light of the candle she was lighting, wasn't just severe. It was all-seeing.

"'He thinks,'" the voice chuckled. The shadow from the dancing flame twitched on the wall. "Well, see, you know it all yourself. Why come to me, then?"

And then Artem looked closer. And was stunned. Why had he thought she was an "old woman"? Her face in the flickering light—not wrinkled, but etched with soft shadows. Her eyes—not cloudy, senile ponds, but black as coal, sharp and penetrating. The hand that took the paper—with smooth, even skin. She... she wasn't much older than him.

"This one," the witch-woman set aside a scrap of paper scrawled with numbers and unfamiliar symbols. "With a probability of... ah, never mind. He took what's yours. And most likely..." With a deft movement, she pulled from the pile of folios a worn, ordinary, cheap-looking map of Moscow from Soviet times, on thin, tissue-like paper. Her fingers, long and confident, picked up an old wooden ruler. "Here, they're somewhere around here." The tip of the ruler rested on a tangle of streets in the center. She measured distances not from the edge of the map, but from some invisible points marked in the margins. The silence in the room grew thick as honey, and Artyom held his breath, feeling goosebumps run down his spine.

---

When the latest "bull," reeking of hangover and fear, had clattered down the creaky staircase, Yekaterina Petrovna exhaled sharply. The sound was dry and weary, like the rustle of old parchment. With annoyance, almost with vehemence, she swept a pile of heavy folios off the table. They thudded dully onto the carpet, raising a cloud of dust that glinted gold in the slanting beam of the streetlamp. Those books were useless for today's work, but they were a crucial part of the set dressing, playing their role in the performance she was forced to put on every evening.

That's how it goes. First—you're a respected scholar, a brilliant theorist, one of the strongest probability-witches of your generation. You make the most delicate calculations, where the slightest percentage probability decides the fates of divisions and political currents. You work for the good of the country, charting its future like a complex graph on the coordinates of historical probabilities. And then... Then there's no job, nor that very homeland in whose name you broke your head over matrices of possibility. Now your lot is to help young blockheads and panic-mongers. Either to find who stole from them, or—more shamefully—to figure out how they can steal. Or "artistically improve" the situation of their offender. It's the same work with probabilities, only the scale, damn it all, has shrunk to the size of someone else's wallet or personal vengeance.

Ada giving a ride to her boy.