Division AOUA FLASH

      The operator recorded twenty-one testees. Then he re-checked the data. All the data on the twenty DNA tests were completed, now it only remained to write the report, and the thirty-four-hour shift was over.

      But now he has to write a pile of reports and to stay there as much, if not more! Now he certainly will not go to Lenka and cannot relax, though he wanted so much to get a big bonus for the work done. The operator felt like crying. The system persistently gave out the fidelity of the data. It is not an error. This is the twenty-first winner in the lottery, where the system itself declared the necessity only in twenty subjects.

      Five more days left before the announcement of the results. So it is necessary to figure out what is to be done next.

      He called an operational technical support team. For the next eight hours, they had been looking through the code manually and through the cheater.

      No errors were identified.

      After writing off several report letters and making shift schedules for his colleagues, he finally finished his shift and went home.

      After his departure, in fifteen minutes, his personal PC turned on and someone entered the AO system, someone was deleting the DNA data of the twenty-first participant remotely.

      NOVOSIBIRSK, DECEMBER 25, 2036 THE RESEARCH INSTITUTE OF ELECTRONIC INSTRUMENTS, PISAREV STR, 53

      It was very cold in the basement of the building. The staff had to warm up, drink hot tea and put on “underpants’. This winter, as forecasted by the meteorological satellites, was the coldest one in a century.

      Nechesov Aleksandr had been the Head of the laboratory for five years. And only the last eight months he had been really enjoying the process. He and his six subordinates managed to derive “living water’ and reproductive nanorobots in it. The robots were made on the basis of a genetic engineering and the new discovery, known as “celestial metal.” A unique alloy with special properties, the one of which is self-replenishment.

      At the beginning of the work, there were ideas about an eternal engine, about self-replenished sources of energy.

      But now all these ideas have become secondary. Today, Aleksandr managed to give a steady shape to the material for as much as three minutes and eighteen seconds.

      Now he was standing in the corridor, smoking his smelly cigarette, thinking that something was missing, something that would allow nanorobots to act more efficiently and keep the form for a necessary, infinite time.

      “Most likely, I had mistaken at the very beginning. Choosing not a living bacterium, but mechanical robots. But working with a living tissue is dangerous and pointless; we finally do not receive a new kind of contagious diseases, but create technical materials.” Reflecting on that, it seemed to him that he had almost found that eternally elusive truth. He looked at his watch – it was half past two. Today he should not be late. Irishka was waiting for him at their home, the institute allocated one-room apartment, as soon as he brought the old man a certificate of his wife’s pregnancy.

      He threw the cigarette butt into a bucket and headed to the sanctum sanctorum – to the second laboratory. He could not wait to check one of his many guesses.

      If in the corridor there was a bitter cold and twilight, then in the laboratory itself, thanks to the warm floors and human breathing, it was warm and, of course, imported lamps that worked better than domestic ones.

      “Lenochka, have you wrote a report on the fixation of stasis substance from the test tube no.17?”

      “Yes, Aleksandr Nikolaevich, but I must admit that the effect lasts only for zero point three percent longer in mineral water, in contrast to a simple chlorinated one’, the lab assistant was clearly disappointed.

      “You cannot be optimistic, Lena, for progress sometimes lies in billionths of the whole. So we need to keep working. Have you already had tea?”

      “No.”

      “Then I will start boiling the water. Do we still have your jasmine tea from the Celestial Empire?” saying this, he was already pouring water into the kettle. Put the kettle on, put it in the socket, pressed the button – that is all the work. He wished that everything was so easy.

      Lenochka flew into the cubbyhole for the tea.

      Aleksandr could not tear his eyes from the bubbles in the kettle. He felt that only a little bit separates him from the touch of something great, a little more is needed, perhaps, something was just preventing this, something was unwilling to open