Wong made a gesture—careless, almost bored. The world around us did not vanish. It simply became smaller. The garden of Ivy House remained—the grass, the mist, the frozen figures. But over it, something else began to bleed through.
First—shadows. Then the shadows gained depth.
I saw a layered reality—corridors stretching up and down through the earth and sky—wide, with high vaults and a soft light that cast no shadows. Halls the size of cathedrals. Passageways kilometers long. And everywhere—people. Not a crowd. Staff. Working with monitors, with technology. There were so many they couldn't be counted.
Then, a wall became transparent. Behind it—space. Not the beautiful space from textbooks—endless, indifferent, black. And in that blackness—lights. Thousands of lights. Then I realized they weren't stars. It was a city, hanging in the nothingness between times and worlds.
"The Predictoria of the Multiverse," Wong said. Without grandiosity. As one speaks of something mundane. "Agents work from here. Architects construct reality here. Predictors plan here."
He swept his hand, and an image unfolded in the air—a patch of atmosphere simply became a display. Maps. Timelines diverging like cracks in glass. Colored markers—red, yellow, green. Thousands of dots, each one a life, a decision, a war.
One dot pulsed brighter than the rest. I didn't immediately realize it was my reality. Then I saw the familiar contours. Wong touched the screen. The image zoomed in. Europe. Then—Ukraine. Then—two lines diverging from a single point in 2022.
"You want to know why," he said. I remained silent. "You came for revenge," he continued evenly. "For six years of your life. For the restrictions. For the war with Russia that destroyed what you called home. But you are looking at a single point. I—I look at them all."
He traced his finger along the lines. "Eighteen out-of-time years of modeling." His voice sounded as if it were weary of its own truth. "Hundreds of variations. And in every variation where this war did not exist—humanity perishes."
On the screen, a red line spilled out—wide, covering the entire map. "Different pretexts, the same result." He looked at the map without expression. "We chose between a nuclear apocalypse and a slow-burning war of attrition. We calculated that the latter gives at least a chance for your survival."
I stared at the red lines. "A chance," I repeated. "A chance. Not a guarantee." He cleared the red lines. A yellow one remained—the one that existed now. "In this variation, humanity loses much. People, time, trust. But it continues to exist. It isn't beautiful. It isn't just." A short pause. "It is mathematics."
"Mathematics," I said. "Destroying our lives." "That is exactly what mathematics is," he continued. "Not an abstraction. Every dot on this screen is a person. We know this. And we still choose the smaller number of extinguished dots. Because the alternative is all the dots at once."
I said nothing. The city behind the transparent wall glowed with thousands of portholes. People I didn't know were working there with maps of other people's lives—calmly, methodically, as one works at a task one has performed for a very long time.
"Are you waiting for me to say you had no right?" I finally uttered. "I want you to understand that 'right' does not apply here, nor does justice," Wong replied. "A right is a contract between equals. The House is not equal. It is superior. But that is not a privilege. It is a responsibility."
With a wave of his hand, he dismissed the screen of graphs. But the city behind the wall remained. "You came for revenge, Vei Lin." He looked at me directly. "But you are looking in the wrong place. Your war is not here. Your war is within yourself. And you know it."
I didn't answer. Because he was right. And because it changed nothing. Wong turned away from the city. He looked at the frozen Anna—at her hand still holding the cartridges, at Charlie beside her. "Now, about them."
He touched the air again. The screen unfolded differently—not maps, not lines. Something resembling a tree. Roots reaching into the past, branches into the future. On the branches—names, dates, events.
"Usually, 'jumpers' try to eliminate dictators. We nullify them easily. Но твоя идея гениальна в простоте, которую не просчитал никто из моих аналитиков," he said without condemnation. "Two people. A ballerina and a comedian. She carries the language of movement in her body; he carries the language of laughter. Together, they create a third thing. You call it a cultural revolution." He tilted his head slightly. "You are right."
I hadn't expected this. But he continued to stamp his words into the fabric of reality, delivering his verdict. And my dog tag, the weight of which I felt on my neck, became a senseless scrap of metal.
"Their union would have triggered a wave. Not immediately—decades later. It wouldn't have prevented World War II—but it would have made its outcome a negotiated one. The war between Russia and Ukraine wouldn't have happened at all, because people with a different mindset would have been in power." He ran a finger along the branches of the tree. "The mindset would have changed slowly. But irreversibly."
"Is that a bad thing?" "It is a catastrophe," he said simply.
The tree on the screen began to change. The branches shifted—becoming thicker, darker, then blurring and crumbling into dust.
"The current type of human cognition took hundreds of thousands of years to form. Through suffering. Through scarcity. Through instincts and the struggle for resources. It isn't beautiful—but it works. A human with this mindset is understandable. He acts predictably. He can be modeled. He can be managed—because that is the only way to keep the system from self-destructing."
He stopped.
"Now, imagine a mindset born of abundance. A person who does something not because they will die otherwise—but because they are interested. Who joins with others not out of fear or need—but by choice. By a coincidence of values."
"That sounds like progress," I said.
"Until the first external strike," he cut me off.
The tree on the screen split. One branch continued to grow—bright, dense. The other broke off.
"Mindset born of interest allows for the formation of small groups," Wong said. "Very high-quality groups. Living. Human. Incredibly creative. But—small. Because large structures require coercion—and coercion is incompatible with this type of mindset. And quantity, as you know, is its own quality."
He turned to me.
"Small groups lose to any invading dictatorship. Always. Without exception. A dictatorship utilizes the old mindset—fear, scarcity, instincts. And it grinds the new one down. Like millstones grind grain."
The screen went dark.
"You wanted to give people another way to live," he said. "Noble. But you forgot to ask—will they survive with that way of life? Your sister—did not survive."
I lifted my head.
"What did you do to Issa?"
Wong did not look away.
"The Volarians arrived half a century after you left. The unified world of humans could not offer resistance to what came from without. Because they had forgotten how to fight each other—and hadn't had time to learn how to fight others."
"How long did she hold?"
Familiar images of that world appeared on the screen.
"Five days." He spoke evenly. "Alone. The last forty-eight hours—without communication, without reinforcements, without a chance to retreat. She killed thousands of enemies. But tens of thousands came to take their place. Quantity always beats quality, Vei Lin. And order always beats class."
Something in my chest tightened—not pain. Something heavier than pain.
"You could have stopped it."
"Yes."
"But you didn't."
"No."
"Why?"
He fell silent. For the first time in the entire conversation—a genuine pause.
"Because if I had stopped the Volarians—someone else would have come. Humans are lonely in their universe. In ten years, in twenty. Or five hundred. A unified world without internal conflict is a world without muscle. Beautiful. But defenseless."
He looked at me.
"I didn't do this to Issa, Vei Lin. I did this to an equation. She was simply a variable in it."
"She was my sister!"
"I didn't expect her to fight with such resolve, considering her teacher was a weakling and a non-entity, as he considered himself. Though she understood that all was over."
The city behind the transparent wall glowed as before—thousands of windows, thousands of people simply sitting at desks, files, monitors. Working with equations. Methodically. Without pause.
"Inevitability," I said finally.
"Not I, Vei Lin," he replied softly. "Inevitability. You wanted to be a black swan. But for every black swan—there is a larger one."
In these words sounded the verdict on everything I had tried to believe with the remnants of my soul. But he relentlessly continued to grind down the remains of my hope.
"Intervention is a high risk for the system. One correction pulls hundreds of unpredictable consequences behind it. Sometimes we do not intervene precisely because we cannot afford to."
I stared at the city behind the wall. Thousands of windows. Thousands of people with equations. "Why am I still alive?"
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Wong looked at me—and for the first time in the entire conversation, something resembling genuine curiosity appeared in his gaze. "You haven't endured all that much for a human. But your psyche—it shouldn't have held. Everyone has a limit. Yours is significantly below average." He spoke of me as if I were a clinical case.
"You've been belittled since kindergarten. Not brutally—but systematically. As they say in your world: water wears away the stone. In any collective, you were the scapegoat. Such people either eventually believe in themselves, becoming heroes for a single moment to prove to the world they aren't nobodies—and perish in an unequal fight. Or—they break quietly and unnoticed. You—you chose a third path. You denied yourself the right to be a hero, used that as fuel, and set your mind to changing the very foundations of existence."
He tilted his head slightly in a silent question. "Who helped you?" "Don't you know?" "The blind spots of the timeline," he stated with indifference.
He didn't look away—and there was no game in that phrase. It was an admission. Even the House was not omnipotent.
"Am I supposed to just believe you?" "Do you have a choice? After everything you've seen—we cannot let you go. Therefore, there is no reason for me to lie." He stepped aside, opening a full view of the city.
"We will roll back your changes. We won't kill you; we’ll send you home. But upon returning to your world, you’ll fall into the clutches of a system that will do our work for us. You know how much you are 'loved' in any collective. And a smart man at the front is the first candidate for 'Task 200' (KIA)." He chuckled.
"But I’m offering you a job. And immortality—through nanoreconstruction. A few hundred years as an agent—until you understand the system. Then—a position as an analyst. And perhaps, after thousands of out-of-time years, you and I will search for other paths together."
"You and I? And who is that exactly?" "I haven't stated my title; it’s all my modesty. Multiverse Predictor." "Should I wet myself or get excited?"
He seared me with a gaze like a laser, ignoring the sarcasm. "But most importantly—you will help us calculate the blind spots." He paused. "Who is the Man in White, Vei Lin?"
There it was! They didn't know about Freeman! Or they didn't know everything. "You've seen him on your monitors," I said cautiously. "You should know for yourselves."
"We saw only a white blind spot. And afterwards, the person he contacted becomes a thorn. He is called by different names. In every reality—his own. In every era—a different face. And everyone who carries real memory of him—becomes a variable. Like you."
"And they end up here?" "Not all." He gestured toward the infinite hall, the thousands of working people. "Only those who accepted our path. But every one of them heard him speak of free will. Which, in reality, does not exist."
I looked at the people behind the glass. "And have you seen him yourself?" Wong stopped. "Yes," he said finally. "And just like you, he led me between worlds. Gave me opportunities. Dragged all my demons out. But he left me alone with them. And one day—he simply left me. And I learned to walk on my own."
He looked at the city. "Everything you see—I created." There was no pride in his voice. Just a fact. "And you know, it was foolish of you to leave Issa. Because she would have created a platform of nanomachines for you. Like mine."
He disintegrated. Literally. The suit, the face, the hands—everything collapsed into a cloud of tiny particles that hovered in the air for a second. His eyes—the last thing to vanish—flashed red for an instant. Then, everything reassembled. The suit. The face. The hands. The man in the impeccable jacket stood before me as if nothing had happened.
"You simply built a displacement machine inside yourself?" "Exactly," he replied. "And that is even more surprising. Because you—you didn't receive such a body. How do you walk? You have nothing that can attract a portal. We detect such devices immediately."
I had long realized that strength—the strength of a nanomachine cyborg who can stop time with a snap—could not win. You couldn't win against him at all! But the fact that he didn't realize the compass in my pocket searches for portals rather than attracting them, and knew nothing of the Token—that could be used.
"Did he give you tasks?" I asked. "No." Wong adjusted his cuff. "He simply dropped me in the next world. And he never said anything about himself." A pause. Short, but real. "I must find him. To settle the score. And you will help me."
There it was. Not only did I have a score to settle with the House. The House had a score to settle with Freeman! "Is his influence really that great?" I asked. "Do you know why our symbol is the Ouroboros? The Man in White interferes with us with his unpredictability. Но и уничтожение его, если бы даже и было возможным, лишит нас свежей крови. We would have no one to recruit."
"So, you can neither detect him nor kill him? Who is he then?" Wong gestured toward the holograms. "If all of this—was created by me, then he—he created everything."
I had long suspected his superpowers; there were too many coincidences working in my favor. "Did he tell you that himself?" I wanted to draw out as much as possible. "I arrived at that through calculations," he replied coldly. "The Ouroboros—it’s not just you, but him too?" "It is an infinite cycle."
Wong looked through me. "He introduces a virus into consciousness—and leaves, abandoning everything to itself." His voice grew drier. "Because of this 'free will'—there is nothing but chaos. All the wars between Houses. All the parallel realities that destroyed each other for thousands of years until we intervened. All this endless, meaningless chaos that we are now sorting out."
He finally looked at me. "With your help. Or without it."
I said nothing. Behind the wall—thousands of people who had seen the Man in White and ended up here. In the system. "He didn't tell you," I finally said, "why he did it?" "No." "And you didn't ask?" "I asked. Once. At the very beginning. He just smiled and walked into the sunset. Then I decided the answer lay in building a system where the question itself would cease to matter."
A pause. "And does it still matter?"
Wong didn't answer. But I saw it—it stung him. Despite the machine body, a man stood before me. And his silence was more eloquent than any answer.
Wong turned to me. "You consider me a villain," he said. "I—" "Don't deny it. I see it in the way you look at me." He took a step. "But do you think you were doing good? Let’s check."
The screen expanded into something resembling a web—nodes, threads, connections branching in all directions. "Worlds are linked by an information field," he said. "And you and Issa almost fully grasped the interdimensional model. Every event in one is a ripple in others. But did you think about the consequences?"
He traced a finger over one node. "Paradise." The screen showed the familiar seaside town that exists on no map of my world. "You gave those people a finale. You closed the story. You put a period on it." His voice was level—neither judgmental nor ironic. "They simply continued living their lives after you left."
"Which means no one died," I interrupted. "In their world. Но знаешь, сколько людей потеряли работу из-за этого в твоём? Authors. Critics. Platforms that monetized the debates around unresolved questions. For some, it was their only source of existence." A pause. "Simply because you decided to philosophize about your fetish with that characteristic 'truth' of yours."
I said nothing. "We have been shaping morality for thousands of years," he continued. "Not so that humans would hide their genitals, but so they wouldn't ask unnecessary questions! Morality is a perimeter. Inside is predictability. Outside is chaos. You stepped outside the perimeter, and you're surprised that everything fell apart?"
I had no rebuttal. The next node. I saw a familiar face—Max. "We sent Max to you," Wong said. "It didn't take much convincing. He sincerely believed in what he said—his sincerity was more convincing than arguments, though an entire department worked on those arguments too. Any normal person would have accepted his truth. Or broken." He looked at me. "But not you."
"Everyone stuck to their own. What's the harm in that?" I was beginning to grasp the scale of what Freeman had dragged me into. "The harm is that you didn't succumb to a manipulation that cost us many resources. And Max—he died in the war. Cursing draft dodgers like you. And especially—you."
He looked like a prosecutor after the guilt has been proven. "He didn't love Bandera—he loved the side he took. The pack. And it didn't matter if it won or lost. You could have fought together. Brotherhood—" he nodded toward the frozen Anna, "—is more important than 'against whom.' You just proved that yourself, here in this garden."
"We would have just died together, Wong. With my body in that world, I’m about as much use as a soldier as a chocolate teapot." "There is no doubt of that, but you would have died predictably and according to the rules," Wong snapped. "And as brothers-in-arms. Which is convenient for us and accepted by you."
He looked like a professor explaining material to a failing student. "We are not enemies of humanity, Vei Lin. We are the managers of its survival. Both sides found themselves trapped in history and must—simply must—pay the price in lives! Your crime is that you refused to serve history."
The next node appeared. The Terminators. Issa. "The union of man and machine," Wong said. "In the short term—a breakthrough. In the long term—the weakening of both sides. Without conflict, there is no pressure. Without pressure, there is no development. You had that thought yourself; why didn't you pursue it?" He shook his head with something like tired admiration. "You think you saved the world? You ruined a perfectly good franchise! I liked those movies myself."
"Humans and machines could have found another path," I exhaled. "They could have. Но не успели. Because you removed the pressure before they developed an immunity."
The final node: Wick and Eve. "You gave them a goal," Wong said. "And a chance to be together, though they realized it too late." He paused. "They destroyed every agent—the House's people in their reality!" A short pause. "What a pity."
"Sounds like praise." "It's a fact, Vei Lin." He looked at the node. "But the House never loses. Every one of our agents is a nanoplatform. Wick and Eve died because they wouldn't accept our terms. And what did you give them? Death in each other's arms? But how many more stories could have been written about them?"
"To inspire people to a struggle they can't win?" I asked. "To eliminate variables," he replied flatly.
The screen went dark. "Issa. Eve. Wick. Did they die free, or as slaves?" Wong didn't look away. "What does it matter if they are gone? Survival is everything. Only while you are alive is development possible." "But does it have meaning," I said slowly, "if there is no free will?"
He was silent. Longer than usual. "It exists. It’s just that the Man in White left no instructions!" he finally replied. "But people are not ready for true freedom now. And in thousands of years, they still won't be." "And do you yourself know the criteria for readiness?"
Wong looked at his hands—like one who wore a human form as a well-tailored suit. "That is why our symbol, the Ouroboros," he said quietly, "is broken."
I didn't look at the Predictor. Nor at the head of the House. I looked at a man who had received the same opportunities from Freeman as I had—and from them, built a prison for the entire multiverse. Sincerely believing it was the only way to save it. A man who still did not know the answer to the ultimate question.
"You are almost a god, Wong. But do you know the problem with being a god? He has no one to pray to. That is why you are alone," I said into the void with the detachment of a Stalker. Because I had long since understood: a man is born and dies alone.
The silence following my words was brief. Something shifted in the air. Something subtle, like the moment before a thunderstorm when the birds fall silent.
He raised his hand and twisted his fingers in the air, as if screwing into the fabric of existence. The frozen people in the garden moved. They simply shifted, like chess pieces moved by an invisible hand.
Booker—with his fist raised—now stood with a blade at his throat. Nicolo—now frozen with a foreign edge at his temple. Joe—motionless as a rock—was now bound by two fighters. Andy—her labrys at the final point of the strike—now stood with the Demon’s yataghan across her throat. Anna and Charlie—holding hands by the wall—were now gripped from both sides by masked men.
"When I snap my fingers," Wong said quietly, "time will resume. And my people will simply kill them. All of them. You will save no one."
His voice was steady. Almost as it was before. "The Immortals have been a nuisance for a long time. You gathered them in one place—thank you. Dandre will get his role back. Anna and Charlie—we will erase their memories." He looked at me without expression. "No one will know. No one."
I looked at Anna. At how they stood: just two people who had finally allowed themselves to be together.
"What will your 'yes' be?" Wong asked.
Everything compressed into a single point. Every action had led to a scenario so dire that my "worst-case scenario" thinking had become a joke. But Freeman—he was an adept of free will. Would he have put me in a situation of choice without choice? Join the House or die in a ditch? No. I had always known how to find the third path. For that, I truly respected myself. I understood that I had lost. That I could change nothing more, and everything I had done, Wong would turn into phantom pains for the few who would remember.
Slowly, by feel, I found a crumpled piece of paper and a pencil in my pocket. I unfolded it—with one hand, because the other wouldn't obey. And while he spoke, I wrote a few words. A line from that very novel—about a porcupine, about a ballerina, about a dream that was fuel as long as it was unattainable.
"Forgive me, Anna," I whispered.
I tucked the paper into my pocket. But in reality—into the Compass.
Wong stepped forward—he felt something—but he was too late. The portal opened without a storm. Without a flash. Just a hole in the air, quiet and absolute, smelling of time that had not yet happened.
The last thing I saw was his face. Not anger. Surprise. The look of a man shown something he did not foresee.
I vanished into the vortex, seeing the reality begin to blur. I knew exactly what I was going to do. No one else would die because of me.