The Before Short Story Series. Part 1 - Иван Перепелятник

well enough, so that we are ready to convey the essence of new ideas to our main beneficiary—the reader. The reader and only the reader is the chief judge, appraiser and investor into our future. If we choose losing strategies, our investors will bet on Verge, TechWorld, Facebook and similar platforms. You and I would have to talk and write about sausages and beer. I would have thought this is not your goal and not the goal for your department in charge of the technological information unit either.’

Jasha went up to the window in the conference room. The twenty-million city spread out before her like an endless canvas. Glass buildings and office spires were pushing through fluffy clouds, here and there comfortably covering the business centre of Munich, not at all against reaching the Olympus light of European life.

‘Dee, 50% window shading.’ Jasha instructed the digital assistant, squinting her eyes in the sun peeking out from behind a nearby skyscraper.

‘Could we, as a society, hopefully civilized to a certain extent, have achieved such a level of technological development?’ Jasha continued, ‘the level that lifted the human to the sky, and literally speaking, too.’ Waving her hand over the opening perspective of the city, she turned to her colleagues. ‘Whether we, as civilization, could have been able to extend human life up to 200 years, create an artificial PAX intelligence, that in some ways surpasses ours, create a fantastic transport infrastructure that connects the continents together? Could we,’ Jasha held up her index finger, ‘have achieved all this if we didn’t dreamt!’

‘Thomas, get ready with your team, get on a shuttle to Moscow and meet this new Russian miracle!’ Pausing for a while, Jasha summed up.

‘Jasha, your arguments are convincing as always!’ Thomas replied, glancing at his young assistant across the table. ‘We need to prepare, think through all the details, agree the time with Alexandra Tokareva. There is a lot of preparatory work ahead. Do you yet need Peter and me here at the meeting, Jasha?’

‘We have covered all the points with you, my dear. Go and work.’

‘You see, Peter, how useful it is to help your bosses to navigate around,’ Thomas turned to the assistant with a smile of self-satisfaction, while heading between the rows of desks of the editorial staff in the direction of his department, located at the opposite end on the same floor. ‘The plan worked smoothly like on wheels! It was only necessary to push her a little in the right direction and, voilà, everything is ready! And they are saying that women control and manipulate men due to their insight! Ha-ha!’

‘Thith trick won’t work with you now, Thomath.’ Peter objected lisping, ‘you know thith thecret well.’

‘But not in your case, my dear.’ Thomas looked warmly at Peter, ‘OK, you, first of all, contact Alexandra, agree with her the interview time from 12:00 to 14:00. Next, book tickets for the whole team for the morning shuttle to Moscow. We’ll leave Munich at 7:00. At 10:30 we’ll be there, in her laboratory. It will take an hour and a half to prepare for the interview. More than enough. We’ll start at 12. D’you understand everything, Peter? Will you repeat.’

‘Interview with Alexandra from 12 to 14, tickets to Mothcow, collect equipment and the team. Should I look for material about her in our archive, Thomath?’

‘My main task tomorrow is to expose this so-called genius. Although Jasha swallowed the bait about charlatans from science, I am almost sure that this Tokareva is a vivid example of a crook, of which we have already seen a lot. The only difference may be that her artifice is not so easy to be brought to light, given the specifics of its capabilities. So, Peter, my dear, of course, look for and collect all the possible information on this lady in our archives and any other sources. Anything worth my attention, please forward today no later than dinner time. Go, go, go! We’ve got work to do!’

Thomas entered his small office that looked more like an aquarium. 2 by 3 metres, all made of glass, located in a corner of the floor. He was proud of his office and would constantly boast it to all his colleagues and friends.

Corner offices were reserved only for the most important and valuable publishing house employees who had been working with Bild for decades. Of course, there were exceptions to this: petty romantic and love affairs, a couple of bosses’ relatives, proteges of significant sponsors and other eternal signs of social injustice. But that was not Thomas’s case. He had achieved everything by his own merit, graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University in Russia—one of the most prestigious educational institutions in Europe. And he did graduate with a distinctive result. During his presentation of the graduation paper, the commission noted especially the exceptional approach of the German student to studies—a bright and creative, simple and thoughtful, socially significant subject of research... Thomas was offered to start a career in the largest news agency in Russia, but he decided to return home to Germany, where he originally planned to build a career of a techno-journalist, given his interest and passion for everything new, scientific and innovative. He could not but miss a single engineering, technological novelty, gadgets and all kinds of devices, especially when it came to the digital and virtual world—a classic technomaniac. When the operation of the quantum artificial intelligence PAX was launched in the middle of the twenty first century, Thomas had just finished his studies and was starting his first steps in the profession. PAX revolutionized not only the entire planet, it turned Thomas’ mind upside down. His wildest dreams about what a person could achieve, relying on the capabilities of AI, started to come true. Literally every day news about a breakthrough in a particular field of science would come from different parts of the world.