June 20th

Vagankovo Cemetery, Moscow. A hot, dusty heat out of Central Asia hangs over the great city. Cars crawl in the baking heat, skyscrapers wilt, shutters double down against the sun’s punishing rays. Under the wide green canopies of the cemetery’s many trees, the air is mercifully cool. Crucifixes, headstones, and tombs jostle together, little glassy picture frames and brightly-coloured flowers and aging trinkets. The roar of the city is dulled.

A fresh headstone has been recently planted. The earth before it is undisturbed - there is no grave. It is a plain grey. The inscription reads:

Artyom Mikhailovitch Vladislavslevsky
1948–2011
May your service not be forgotten

A young man stands before the grave. He stands upright, and looks healthy, despite the lingering signs of injury. He is clean-shaven, and has cut his hair, which is black and glossy in the dappled sunlight. His clothes are new, smart and well-pressed, his shoes recently polished. He smells of aftershave, applied uncertainly, but pleasant nonetheless. Behind a sleek pair of glasses, sharp grey eyes fall over the inscription with a knowing sadness. He carries a bouquet of fresh flowers, generous and blooming, which he lays gently on the grave. He stays there a long while, in the soft shadow of the trees, lost in thought.

June 27th

The summer heat lingers, gradually growing in strength. Moscow bakes, slowly. Today, the sky is overcast and grey, trapping the heat down. Down in Vagankovo Cemetery, the trees offer little protection from the sun’s invisible power.

The young man has returned to the grave. This time, he has not polished his shoes, a thin stubble is developing round his chin. He trades the old bouquet, now turning grey, with a new one, slim and plain. He stands for a while, considering his work, tapping his foot uneasily. His eyes wind back and forth over the inscription, trying to unravel it. Eventually, he lights a cigarette, breathes in deeply to calm the rising tide of anxiety. The grainy scent of tobacco smoke lingers about him, in his fingertips, his uncombed hair, the folds of his clothes.

July 4th

The brooding clouds have grown ever more oppressive, and finally let loose rain, heavy summer rain, the warm and dust-heavy kind which leaves the streets dirtier than they were before. The heat has only grown, and the humidity makes it ponderous, sticky. Fat raindrops fall from the branches of the trees in Vagankovo, darkening the wood of the crucifixes, blurring the faces in the picture frames.

The young man has returned to the grave. His cigarette smoulders doggedly in his thin hand. There is no new bouquet. His eyes have grown heavy, lined with tiredness. They trace smoothly over the familiar name at the top of the headstone, now pooling with rainwater, but stop short at the inscription beneath it. In exhaustion, the young man wanders over the empty incisions below the date, blank and formless, unyielding.

He shakes himself, blinks, steps back, glares away. The young man lowers his cigarette to take a long swig of fiery vodka from a battered hip flask deep in a pocket of his creased trousers. Now, the stench of alcohol hangs on his grimy clothes. His bright, angry eyes flash back again to the headstone, to its empty message filling with acidic Moscow rain. It remains silent. In frustration, he turns to go.

He does not come back.

Written by Ralph W.

Dr. Andrei Vladislavlevsky wakes in a good bed in a good house, a guarded residence outside Moscow, as he checks his emails before he's fully awake. Most are administrative; one from Antarctica catches his eye, though it contains nothing substantive.

From: andrei@itmp.msu.ru
Date: Saturday, 30 Apr 2033 at 09:03
To: evelina@ara.org
Subject: Re: Monthly Report

Dear Evelina,

Thank you for your update on Antarctica. Unit 871 is more than capable of advancing research entirely on its own without reinforcement. Please continue your work and submit the next report in due course.

Regards,
Prof. A. Vladislavlevsky
Academician, Russian Academy of Sciences
Head, Institute for Theoretical and Mathematical Physics, MSU
Chair, JCP Security Council
Author of "On Governance"

Evelina is intelligent, certainly, but increasingly a threat to his position. Shi Liu is too methodical, and Pyotr too eccentric. Altogether, Unit 871 is too cautious to be of much real use. He can praise all the glory they have brought to the Commission, but any reinforcement is a waste of money. Unit 871 has vacancies again. It always has vacancies. Many were lost in the past expeditions; such is the nature of the job. Some young researchers might do.

Andrei takes his coat from the chair and shrugs it on. Lecture at eleven in Moscow State University; after that, a shooting session at the base. Last night, he dreamt again of red strings tightening around his throat, choking him. So he needs to keep firing until the dead stay dead. A few recruits are there when he arrives, saluting him as he steps into the lane. Noticing they're staring, Andrei offers to demonstrate. He shows them the grip and the stance, then adds that even the finest technique means nothing without the conviction to kill. As he fires, it occurs to him that someone must once have taught him the same lesson. Strange that he cannot remember who.

Andrei lives an orderly and enviable life: lectures, council meetings, then evening, and the next day, and the next. For days at a time, Antarctica barely crosses Andrei's mind. Yet victory and peace are curdling into boredom, and boredom into desire: the desire to uncover some hidden piece of knowledge meant for no lesser mind than his own.

On the flight to Antarctica, Andrei opens his diary. His days had grown too dull to record; he had almost forgotten the habit. Now, at last, life is becoming interesting.

17 February 2049
I believe that one who is prepared to see the truth may yet find it, and I shall find the truth. I no longer trust anyone else to go in my stead: they are hiding something from me; of this I have become nearly certain. If the anomaly reports are nothing but a farce, then I will have to put an end to this absurd expenditure. But if there is something—something that may aid me against the threat of INDOPACOM—

The helicopter touches down as Andrei closes the diary and steps out into the Antarctic cold. A slip of paper falls from the pocket inside the back cover, covered in writing. He stares at it, dumbfounded. For years, he had thought the pocket empty.

He picks it up.

Andrei, my only son. There are many words you must have for me.

It's a note from his father, written fifty-two years ago.

And in that moment, he understands. The destruction of the Commission begins in him, long before this day, long before Antarctica. A building falling, and will fall no matter what. They are all going down with it.

All of them.