Chapter 42

For a very long time I looked at the yellowed slip on my knee.

"Now ask Harris about Anna."

That name set off no mental flash in me. No blurred silhouette of a face in the gloom. No echo of a voice. No smell. Emptiness — absolute and flat, like the concrete walls around us.

And yet, somewhere deep beneath my ribs, I felt a strange, dull, pressing weight. Sometimes the body reacts to the truth far faster than the bewildered mind.

I raised my eyes to Harris.

"Who is Anna, Thomas?"

The old man didn't answer at once. He needed time to gather the last of his unravelling consciousness into a fist.

"I kept waiting..." he said slowly, with effort. "All these weeks I waited for you to finally say that name yourself."

"And?"

"She loved you, Michael. Very much."

I frowned:

"Who is she?"

"Part of your real life." He raised his inflamed eyes to me. "Stop trying to remember. That memory is no longer in your active sectors. It was erased among the first."

"Then tell me yourself."

Thomas looked at me unexpectedly sternly:

"No."

"Why?"

"Because this story shouldn't be brought back to life by my dying memory." He carefully touched the body of the dictaphone on the table with his fingers. "Everything you need is there. On Side B. But you have to get to it yourself."

We left the underground office almost an hour later.

On the whole way to the exit not one of us said a word.

London met us at the surface with unexpected sun. After several days of unbroken grey rain, the city seemed to have decided to pretend that no catastrophe existed. On the boulevard along the embankment, passers-by sat peacefully. Some tramp in a worn coat was feeding pigeons from his hand. By the parapet a street musician with his eyes closed played an old, drawn-out melody on a saxophone.

That pointedly ordinary world was almost physically painful.

Helen walked beside me — slowly, as if rationing every step. And only now, in the harsh daylight, did I truly notice how much she had changed over these weeks. The severe wool blazer hung on her far too loosely. Deep bluish shadows lay under her eyes. She looked like someone who had slept two hours a night for a very long time — and had long since stopped noticing it herself.

"Helen, are you all right?"

She turned and tried to smile with pale lips:

"Yes. I'm fine."

I stopped:

"Stop lying to me. Please."

She stopped too. For a few seconds we just stood in silence in the middle of the human current and looked into each other's eyes. All her usual, calibrated armour had cracked.

"Do you know what's the most terrifying thing about the process of systemic disappearance?" she asked quietly.

I shook my head.

She turned away toward the river.

"It's not at all that living people stop remembering you. I've more or less got used to the information vacuum over the past week." She spoke with remarkable calm, without a shadow of self-pity. That's how dispassionately you read out lines from someone else's archive report. "First your degree vanishes from the databases. Then your registered address is wiped. Your insurance is annulled. Facial-recognition algorithms stop finding your profile in photographs. It's horrifying. But you can technically go on living with it."

She took a deep, convulsive breath.

"And then one day you wake up and understand that in this huge city there's no longer a single person left who could simply confirm: you ever existed on this earth at all."

I said nothing. In my vocabulary there wasn't a single word capable of outweighing that abyss.

We reached the old cast-iron railing. Helen suddenly, as if her legs had given way, lowered herself onto a wooden bench under a spreading tree.

"Sit with me."

I sat down beside her. For a few minutes we simply stayed silent, listening to the distant wail of the saxophone. Then Helen slowly took a smartphone out of her pocket. For a few seconds she just held it in her hand, without unlocking it.

"You know, after that evening when the whole correspondence vanished..." she nodded at the device without looking at me, "he found me himself. Three days later. Wrote from a new number — he saw the chat was gone and decided I'd blocked him. Got scared." She gave a mirthless chuckle. "I had to explain everything all over again. Well, almost everything."

She unlocked the screen and turned the display toward me.

An open messenger. The name in the top line: Mo. The last incoming message — three days ago.

"You've disappeared somewhere for a week again. I've started catching myself thinking I just made you up."

I silently handed the phone back to her.

"He still doesn't know what really happened, does he," I said. "What did you tell him about that vanished chat?"

"That the phone broke. That I'd replaced the SIM." She shrugged. "The most banal lie possible. And of course he believed it. Because a banal explanation is exactly what you want to believe when the alternative doesn't fit in your head."

She was quiet, smoothing the creases on her trousers with her palm.

"You know what's the strangest thing, Michael? He wrote to me again not because he was especially persistent. He just... didn't give up. I was ready for that to be the end of it. That a person whose chat with you simply disappears one day is a finale. And he just went and wrote again. From another number. As if it were the most natural thing in the world."

She turned back to the river, and the sun picked out the deep little crease at the bridge of her nose.

"Several times before that he'd suggested meeting in a neutral city. Sent tickets. Every time I found a reason to refuse. Work. A ministry inspection. A business trip. Tiredness." She gave a quiet, helpless shrug. "And then all of this started in my life. The investigation. You. The Protocol."

She didn't finish the sentence.

"Why are you showing me this now, of all times?"

Helen turned and looked me straight in the eye — openly, with all its frightening clarity:

"Because last night I understood one simple thing. If tomorrow the Protocol wipes me from the registries for good — this time forever, with no chance to write again from a new number — he won't know why I stopped answering. To him I'll just disappear. The way thousands of random people disappear from other people's chats every day. He'll think I lost interest in him. And in his own way he'll be right."

I felt something inside me tremble painfully.

All these weeks I had seen in the woman walking beside me a function. An archive auditor. A professional investigator. And only now, on this bench, did it land on me: all this time a living, fragile person had been sitting beside me, someone who also had her own life. Very ordinary. Very human. And that life was, right now, before my eyes, being erased just as mercilessly by soulless lines of code.

"Write to him, Helen. Right now. Write the truth. Or at least say goodbye."

She shook her head:

"No."

"Why?"

"Because the last thing in the world I want is for the last memory of me in his life to be an absurd digital goodbye." She closed her eyes for a second. "Better he thinks I just disappeared again. That I changed my number again, or got scared, or changed my mind. A banal human hurt like that is much easier to get over and forget than a mystical vanishing without a trace."

Carefully, gently, I covered her cold hand with mine.

Helen didn't pull away.

We sat like that in silence for about five minutes. Without discussing the investigation. Without mentioning the Protocol. Just two mortally tired people who had suddenly grasped with utter clarity: the end of the world almost never begins with a nuclear blast on the horizon. Sometimes it begins with a quiet, unread message in an empty messenger.

When we were already about to get up, the smartphone in Helen's bag vibrated sharply.

She mechanically took the device out. Her eyes slid across the screen.

And she froze.

I clearly saw all the blood leave her face — fast, drop by drop, leaving only a deathly pallor.

"Helen?" I leaned forward. "What is it?"

She didn't answer. She only slowly, like someone else's puppet, held the phone out to me on an open palm.

It wasn't Mo. An official system notification from the state employment archive portal. On the grey background of the display one line burned:

"System error. No record of your current or past periods of employment found in the ministry registries."

Helen slowly lowered the hand with the device to her lap.

And for the first time in our whole acquaintance I saw in her wide-open eyes a real, primal terror. Not for the outcome of the investigation. Not for my lost memory.

For herself.

Because this morning the Protocol had stopped erasing her distant past.

It had begun burning out her present.