Chapter 37

In the end we never went inside.

The barman, apologizing awkwardly and pleading a full room, went back into the gloom of the place. And the three of us were left standing on the wet cobbles of the deserted backstreet.

Harris went on staring for a long time, without looking away, at the swaying sign above the door. Then he dug his hands deep into the pockets of his coat and asked unexpectedly, without turning his head:

"Do you remember, Michael... do you remember why we ever started this project in the first place?"

I shook my head in the familiar, almost mechanical way:

"No. A blank."

He gave a quiet, joyless chuckle:

"Well then. That means at least this part of our shared history I still have the right to tell you myself."

We set off slowly along the embankment again. Sometimes Harris fell silent for long stretches, simply moving his feet and leaning heavily on the walking-stick umbrella. I didn't rush him or ask leading questions. Now I understood too well: every memory came to him with enormous, almost physical effort. As if he were single-handedly, with bare hands, hauling colossal, slimy stones up from the bottom of the silty Thames.

"None of it started with people at all," he said finally, as we drew level with another line of cast-iron railing. "And certainly not with spy conspiracies. It all started with banal system errors."

"What kind exactly?"

"Governmental ones." He shrugged — almost indifferently, like a man who had long ago stopped being surprised by human sloppiness. "You see, Michael, sometimes the huge machine of the state makes mistakes. Purely technically. Information flows overlap one another. Because of that, a child is born in the databases who physically doesn't exist in reality. Or an old man dies in some remote province, but his departmental card is active, and the system keeps dutifully paying him a pension. Or one and the same citizen, because of an indexing fault, ends up registered twice — and lives two parallel tax lives."

He spoke with remarkable calm. There was no denunciation in his voice, no anger, no political pathos. That's how an experienced, tired engineer reasons, discussing the joints of a faulty mechanism with colleagues.

"And back then, at one of the closed meetings, you said an astonishing thing," Harris went on, and for an instant the distant light of the bridge was reflected in his eyes.

"What thing?"

He stopped, turned to me, and almost smiled — with his eyes only:

"You stood up, straightened your tie, and said: 'If a system has the absolute resource to remember a person — it must have exactly the same resource to be able to forget them.'"

I went still.

That syntactic construction sounded too familiar in my head. Too natural. Frighteningly concise. As if once, in a past unreachable life, I had formulated it very often and with confidence.

"The idea was beautiful to begin with," Harris said quietly, savouring every word. "Piercingly beautiful. It wasn't about physically deleting a person, you see. It wasn't about destroying folders of documents or breaking lives. We simply wanted... to correct system errors in a coordinated way. In one click. So that all the ministry registries, all the databases and archives would start saying the same thing that very second. Data synchronization. Absolute purity of structure."

I felt a cold slowly beginning to spread inside me. I already clearly understood where this even, logical account was inevitably leading.

"Then, about a year into development, the first closed demonstration of the prototype took place," Harris continued, drawing us along with him. "Everything went perfectly. Not a single failure. Not one data conflict. The archives cleared in fractions of a second. The commission members were happy. The ministry curators — utterly delighted. But the one who rejoiced most of all was you, Michael."

He smiled sadly:

"Back then you walked the lab corridors repeating one phrase like a mantra: 'There. At last this country will have perfect order.'"

I closed my eyes.

And suddenly — completely without warning, for some fraction of a second — an image flared up bright in the darkness under my eyelids. A huge conference hall flooded with fluorescent light. A snow-white screen the whole width of the wall. Complex interweaving branches of data-reconciliation graphs. Deafening applause from every side. Someone's heavy hand firmly shaking my palm. And that incredible, intoxicating feeling of my own triumph.

The picture shattered and vanished before I could grasp even one material detail.

"Was that your first real memory?" Helen asked quietly, coming closer.

Slowly, without opening my eyes, I nodded.

Harris was silent for a long time, giving me a chance to recover. Then — somehow as if cut down — he lowered himself onto a frozen wooden bench at the edge of the lawn.

He looked genuinely bad at that moment. His breathing had become wheezing, ragged. Every inhale was accompanied by a dull cough he tried to muffle with his fist.

For the first time I was frightened. But not for the outcome of the investigation and not for the answers I hadn't got. I was frightened for him. For this fragile man fading before my eyes.

"And then..." Harris forced out with effort, wiping his lips. "A few months later we got a letter from the very top."

"From whom exactly?"

He shook his head helplessly:

"I don't remember. The Protocol wiped that name in my head among the first. But the substance of the technical brief I remember down to the smallest detail."

Thomas paused, gathering the last of his strength.

"It contained one concise request: 'Try, as an experiment, to remove a person from the system completely. With all their connections.'"

A dead, ringing silence hung. Even the London wind seemed to fall still in that second, stopping its rustle of the leaves.

"And what did you do?" I asked, feeling beads of sweat break out on my forehead.

Harris raised his head and looked me straight in the eye — heavily, openly, holding nothing back:

"Back then I immediately said a firm 'no.' I was afraid of the consequences." A long, agonizing pause. "And you... you turned to me, looked at me as if I were a panicker, and said: 'Thomas, don't overcomplicate it. It's only a technical test. We need to check the algorithm's breaking strain.'"

Those words hit me harder than any physical slap. And the most frightening thing was that they didn't sound like someone else's accusation. I almost physically heard that intonation of my own voice. Calm. Absolutely rational. Cold and boundlessly certain of being right. That's exactly how an absorbed engineer talks about a new mathematical problem. About data arrays. About elegant algorithms. But never about a living, breathing person.

"I really..." I began, feeling my throat go dry, and couldn't finish.

Harris gently helped me:

"You weren't a monster, Michael. You never wanted to break anyone. You didn't think in those categories at all when you sat at the terminal. For you there existed only data flows, structures, elegant algorithms for optimizing registries. And if it all worked mathematically without failures... then you sincerely believed it could be done completely safely."

For the first time all evening Helen intervened decisively, taking a step toward the bench:

"But surely someone in that chain should have shown common sense? Someone was obliged to stop this project before it got out!"

Harris turned his inflamed, endlessly tired gaze on her:

"Of course, miss. Someone should have."

"And why did no one do it?"

He smiled very sadly:

"Because absolutely every person in our lab sincerely thought that this hard decision would definitely be taken by someone else. Just not by them."

That simple, ordinary sentence turned out to be more terrifying than all the technical talk about the Protocol.

In this story there was no single great villain. There was no demonic secret society or dictator who one day slammed his fist on the table. There were dozens of ordinary, cultured, diligent people. Programmers, engineers, analysts, officials. And each of them, at some moment, simply gave up their principles just a little. Made a tiny, imperceptible compromise with their conscience for the sake of a career, of order, or simply out of an unwillingness to cause a scene.

From those microscopic concessions a colossal, soulless machine grew.

We were silent for a long time, digesting this simple anatomy of a catastrophe. Finally Harris pulled himself up off the bench with difficulty, leaning on the umbrella.

"You know, Michael..."

"What?"

"All this time, all these weeks of investigation, you've persistently been asking yourself one fundamentally wrong question."

"Which one exactly?"

"You kept asking: 'Who exactly controls the Protocol right now?'" He shook his head. "That's completely unimportant. The real question of this story goes differently."

Thomas took a deep, wheezing breath — as if before a dive into water:

"Why did none of us... including you yourself... switch this mechanism off back then, five years ago, when it could still be done with a single keystroke?"

Inside me, in the very foundation of my worldview, something shifted with a dull sound. Irreversibly.

Until that minute I had behaved like a classic detective — furiously hunting for a specific culprit, an external enemy who had broken my life. Now, for the first time, I thought about the scale of complicity. And I understood that the gulf between those two concepts is simply enormous.

We were already about to part when Harris called after me:

"Michael."

"Yes?"

For a few seconds he looked silently at the envelope I was still gripping in my hand. At the inscription in my handwriting: "When you forgive."

"Soon," he said quietly. "Very soon now you'll be able to open it."

I looked at the yellowed paper:

"And what if I still haven't managed to forgive that man from the lab?"

Harris smiled. This time warmly, openly, and gently — probably for the first time all evening:

"Well... that means you simply haven't read your own story to the end yet."

When we finally went our separate ways, I stood for a long time by the stone wall of the embankment.

At my request Helen had gone on ahead — I watched her silhouette slowly dissolve into the fog by the bridge. Harris left too, blending soundlessly with the sparse evening passers-by.

I was left alone with the lazily flowing river and one single thought, completely unexpected to me.

For all these past weeks I had furiously tried to find out who exactly had destroyed my life, who had erased my identity and turned me into a ghost with no past. But this evening, looking at the dark water of the Thames, I asked myself a different question for the first time.

If five years ago I found myself again in that sterile lab in front of the terminal screen — and if I knew about the future only what I know right now — would I then, at the peak of my triumph, have found the strength in myself to refuse this project?

And to my greatest horror, I understood: I still had no direct, honest answer.

It was that silence inside me that frightened me more than anything else.