turnsheet_bureau:6:а_нас_друзья_и_наше_время [APERIS]

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======А нас, друзья, и наше время======

=====Planning can go up here, if you want=====


=====Writeup=====

{[artyom_vladislavlevsky]}

> ...in the very same second in which an overturned jug of water has not yet had time to spill...

Your expedition is not one for Unit 871. 

Not this time. It is not undertaken in service of Liu Lian’s order or designs—she'd be horrified at the thought of it—nor in obedience to any order the JCP might once have given. It is not even for the sake of your old dream or for the memory of Soviet glory. You are too old now for fantasies of that sort. 

Nor is it driven by the same fever that once led you toward the final truth, the peak of human knowledge waiting to be conquered by the sufficiently devout. No. Rather, it is for the opposite reason: not to prove that the pursuit was righteous, but to prove that it was never worth the cost. You have already walked this road. You know where it leads. Death has long been approaching to crown your old age and absolve you of your labours, and you decide that this is the time to welcome it now. 

What you have already crossed, Andrei need not cross again. 

//After all, he is your future.//

It is not difficult to retrace the path of your first expedition. Whatever distortions others later claim to see, the world had always arranged itself consistently before your eyes. Is this a reward for the courageous? Is this a siren call drawing you into a trap? Either way, the map of this journey aligns almost perfectly with the first, as though no real time has passed at all. The labyrinthine pathways open one after another. With recognition, with expectation, as if it had been awaiting your return. When at last you find the Absence, it is the same as you remember it: a flat and simple erasure of light, without reflection or diffusion, without even the wandering dust particles inside of it. Time is stagnant, and not even light can travel through it. You stare at it for some time, mesmerised. Yet the longer you look, the less empty it seems. From the pure blackness there glimmers something celestial, the darkness bright as a field of stars, vast and crystalline, iridescent colours bending and flowing within it in silent distortion.

You force yourself forward by increments—not steps, even—they are so small that all human measurements fall short. By the end of the first hour, you have advanced less than a hand’s breadth. By the end of the third, scarcely more. Soon, even the idea of //going forward// begins to morph and change freely in your mind. What does it mean to //advance// when each part of you enters that stagnant realm of time at a different depth, and therefore under a different law of time? 

In truth, your body is divided against itself. The skin of your hand crosses first while the bones remain behind, the edge of your chest slower than the muscle behind it; your heart is still faithfully pumping, in some tissues the blood still moves, in others it's blocked almost permanently by time. You try to breathe, but no air can pass through your lungs in time. One half of you labours desperately for the next breath, the other half lies waiting for the next supply in eternal stillness. The heart persists in an imitation of beating, until it, too, is waiting for its next movement. The excruciating pain you initially suffered pushing //into// it has already ceased. To put it plainly, the pain has ceased to remain intelligible to your fallible mind. The comprehension of such pain still presumes sequence, and thus the existence of linear time: //it's// effect upon you, leaving an injury, then the recognition of that injury, and eventually the body’s protest in response. It impacts some regions too soon, others too late, and they no longer go back to your brain. It's almost as though you're no longer one single Artyom Vladislavlevsky but one stitched together from shifting substances and incompatible temporal parts.

The body, faithful servant that it has always been, which had seemed sufficient to house a man, proves inadequate now.

And so is your mind. 

Not instantly. Such an instant is stretched indefinitely so that it matches eternity. There is still time before the End—too much of it, or not enough, same thing—but you're quickly losing the understanding of the world you're in. Was it that your heart beat precedes the pulse, or the pulse precedes the beat? The in and the out, the before and the after, the self and the non-self, the beginning and the end, all begin to fray. The caves, the blackness, the colours moving within it like drowned aurorae, none of them remain external to you, but rather an extension. Your perception wanders, and so does your memory. 

You continue, perhaps, to push inward, but in some ways you have already stopped. To enter //it// completely would require another moment. And then another after that. And another still. Each moment is divided again into the next, and the next after that, without end. In the realm where //will be//, //is// and //was// are the same, you move closer and closer to the still point, always approaching it, never quite crossing the final threshold. Zeno’s paradox. From the perspective of the world with a flowing time, you are forever advancing. Yet in your mind, there is but one thought left, that you will enter it in the next moment.

What remains of you is no longer a traveller, nor even a dying man, but rather //something// in the middle of an unfinished motion. The gesture of entering remains eternally incomplete, as Time seals you up inside of it, a snapshot of reality, an ant in amber, trapped in the forever stillness. Inside of you, the End and the Beginning merging as one. You, or the body of Artyom Vladislavlevsky, stop //experiencing// time. At the threshold of stillness, the direction of time becomes uncertain. The current that once carried you forward now seems to reverse itself. The years rush past you—not toward their end, but back toward the beginning.

In the final moment of your life dilated into infinity, your mind drifts through the river of its own past, each drop a fragment of your shadows. A life strung together from all the things you failed to keep, like pages of a book blown backward by the wind, opening first to its deepest folds.

Failures. A gunshot. Radio breaking into static. A distress call ignored, then another. A report crossed out in red. Wrong coordinates. Wrong map. Knives stabbed in your back. Faces turning away. A friend who stopped writing back. One thing after another. Leaving. Left. Your son, looking at you with cold pity. A young man seeing your caution not as wisdom but as weakness, and any more of your warnings pushes him away. 

A big crack runs on the colossal building that you chose not to see, a building falling, and will fall no matter what. The country that formed you, and the country that outlived its own name. Taking down portraits. Emptying desks. Quiet whispers in corridors. A hollowed great machine standing—still standing—hollowed by day before going still. Committees and projects are dissolving one by one. New faces replacing the old. Your fist strikes the table, a failed protest. Rearranged offices. Renamed departments. They are all going down with it. All of them.

A terminal glowing in a darkened office, wires under the floor. The low electrical hum of machines, typing, and more typing again. Information and messages are moving and flowing under your very fingers. A shouted order. A failed order. A cancelled mission. A mission ending before it begins. A medal in a drawer. An empty bunk. A gravestone half-buried. A grave without a body. Repeated. Refracted. Same pattern under different names. 

The dead of winter, January. The father, Mikhail, comes home from the mines with coal in the seams of his hands, his boots leaving dirty water on the floorboards. The smell of cabbage, coal dust, and wet wool. A boiling samovar, witnessing a fight, then more fights. His fear is what kept him in the pit. His failure is why you left. A fight that you declared as necessary, survivable, righteous. //dulce et decorum est pro patria mori// You //had// to fight it. You had to //never stop// fighting this. They //trained// you for this.

You see <del>remember</del> snowflakes falling quietly, the wind driving them sideways across the ice. Then the snow becomes rain, cold drops landing on metal and canvas, drawing darker circles on your trench coat. Water running along gutters and down the grooves of concrete, washing away the last grey dust of winter, the leaves growing from the bare branches, a mixture of orange and yellow. Then it's dry. A pale film of earth lifted by passing trucks and drifting slowly through sunlight. Dust and more dust, settling on your shoulder. Then the dust lifts, more rising heat in the air, and within the heat—

//Sound.//

A vibration in the trees. The endless triumphant shrill of cicadas in the branches above the street. The blizzard sleeps inside the summer air. It's the first and the last summer. You're twenty-one. Cicadas shrilling in the hot, humid air; the smell of concrete and rail lines warming under the sun; bright red banners stirring above streets, promising a future not yet built. A future within reach of your own hands. Your shirt smells of cheap soap, engine smoke, newspapers, and dust. You were so young, young enough to unquestioningly believe that such greatness was not merely possible, but imminent—and that you had been born just in time to help realise it. The Party, too, was young then. Like you, it's impatient, formalising a conviction made years earlier. Like you, it has a belief that history itself could be sculptured with your own hands. When this mission was complete, you believed you would join the Central Committee. 

Behind you, the world slows, before it begins to accelerate.

In the strange eternity of your suspended moment, you glimpse another figure—another young man with the same fervent ambition, the same unwavering devotion. Your son. When this mission ends, he too will enter the Central Committee of a new organisation, young and certain of its destiny, believing that what is unfinished may still be built. The faith of a young man arising out of the ruins of old ones. Your eyes—and the body to which they belong—are no longer capable of observing that world with clarity. Within this almost motionless time, you do nothing but await the arrival of the next moment. 

And when that moment finally comes, you will die, as the world continues its transformations. Seas turn into land, land into ice, all things rise and collapse like temporary weather. Past and future fold into one another. Perhaps all things are already there, the first word and the last, the summer square and the polar night. All that is new unfolds before you just as all that is old stretches behind you.

Like the soft languor before an afternoon nap, you drift toward a final quiet. After that, nothing changes any longer. Sorrow is severed, joy lingers forever, and even death is banished. As though all things, briefly estranged, were returning to their source, from which it had never truly departed—

as the last page of the book writes itself into the first.

{{tag>writeup6 gm_xinyi complete}}