§ 11. The Backstory
Once upon a time, that was exactly how it all began. Now, when the arithmetic of the world had finally cracked, Grandpa realized: the signs had been everywhere, but he had foolishly mistaken them for ordinary urban gloom. The sky that day resembled a poorly cooked lead porridge—gray, sticky, and completely inedible.
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Two crows ripped open this viscous dome right before his eyes. One stubbornly cut a course due north, into that very zone of metaphysical prohibition where normal birds don't dare to venture. The second was just provocatively ginger—the color of industrial red lead used to coat ship hulls. Grandpa thought to himself back then: "Well, what a ridiculous bird." He didn’t realize it was the first stroke of alien paint on the canvas of his new reality. He just watched as the city held its breath, deciding it was merely the usual calm before a storm. Logic—his crutch—was still trying to help, keeping him from plunging into the abyss.
At an altitude of fifty meters, a flock of jackdaws was feverishly "darning" the air. They were flying west, and it wasn't a migration, but the fulfillment of an eternal debt to gravity. The birds broke their wings against the dense autumn silence, forging ahead so laboriously as if each flap cost them several years in purgatory. The fifteen-story building ahead loomed like a gray tombstone to unborn ideas.
And then a puncture appeared in the fabric of reality. A lagging Shadow.
It wasn't just flying—it warped space with its mass. This jackdaw seemed to consist of pure contempt for aerodynamics. While the rest worked "without sparing a feather," it glided, piercing the viscous ether with predatory grace, rapidly closing the distance. At one point, the bird furiously screwed itself into the sky, gained altitude, and once again froze in a motionless glide, bypassing the flock as if they were standing still. It was the first to mount the rooftop antenna, taking its throne with the look of a victor.
No, not a "she." A "he."
Looking at him, you stopped believing in evolution and started believing in reincarnation as a sick joke by the demiurge. Grandpa had a brother, Sashka. A knot of muscles masquerading as Lou Ferrigno—the very Hulk whose biceps could rival Napoleon's ambitions in volume. Sashka was slightly shorter than the original monster, but a bench press of a hundred and fifty kilos made his arguments indisputable in any coordinate system. His driving style was the quintessence of his nature: flooring the gas up to a mad two hundred, followed by a long, mocking coast in neutral until the needle dropped back to a hundred. The pulse rhythm of a maniac. A dead ringer for this **Galk**.
Around Galk on the antenna, a harem instantly formed—noisy, bustling, smelling of cheap perfume and old down feathers. It was Sashka's entourage reincarnated into feathers, retaining the habit of riding the alpha's tail, even if instead of a leather steering wheel, he held the rusty iron of an antenna.
Galk listened to their chirping grievances for a long time, and then he saw Him. The asphalt paver. A chthonic monster spewing steam, resembling the breath of the underworld. The bird plummeted down.
"Where do you think you're going, you dog?!" his wives seemed to scream at his back, but Galk remained silent.
He unfurled his black sails and entered the thermal. The sweet, toxic stream of tar steam caught him, lofting him into the sky. It was a communion by bitumen. Galk inhaled an organic aerosol of heavy metals and sulfur dioxide, heated to one hundred and forty degrees, and relished this infernal freedom.
Grandpa opened the window and shouted into this brew as if into a well: "Get out of the updraft, Sashka! It’s death! Nitrogen, sulfur, carcinogens!" He coughed, swallowing the nasty gunk, but did Sashka ever listen to the voice of reason? Even in that life, people told him, "Don't drink so much, you'll burn out," but he'd just hit the gas, vanishing into a speck on the horizon.
The road workers below, resembling orange ***kaskali*** crawling out of cracks in the earth, sensed something was amiss. They waved their shovels, trying to drive Grandpa away from the edge of his own reality: "Get lost yourself, four-eyes! Don't mess with the laying of eternity!" drifted out from the cloud of bituminous stench.
By the way, Grandpa didn't live in the window—he just decided that breakfast with a view of the apocalypse was far better for digestion than the blue flicker of a monitor broadcasting other people's catastrophes.
§ 12. The Arithmetic of Emptiness
Galk became a mere speck, dissolving into the tar haze, but the poison dredged up from the bowels of the street did not dissolve in the sky. It began to thicken, turning into an invisible jelly that slowly trickled down the drainpipes straight into the belly of the old theater across the street, condensing in the damp orchestra pit. Grandpa couldn't even guess, nor could he read it in his foolish books, that the one everyone considered mere folklore background was already fumbling for the blue lenses in his pocket. Arithmetic had already begun its harvest, while he still hoped that one plus one always equaled two, rather than a fortress to be defended, and that the one who measures life not in kilometers on a treadmill but in the emptiness between digits was already on his way.
The arithmetic of emptiness—it appears when you try to subtract breakfast from eternity and end up with pure entropy...
One person is a "one," proud and lonely like a telegraph pole in the steppe. Another is a fool, an absolute zero, a hole in space draped in cobwebs. Don't flatter yourself: their union won't breed a ten. At best, it will be a "zero-point-five"—a half-measure, a half-human, the rattling sound of a broken bottle. More often, it’s a "zero-point-one," barely noticeable dust on the boots of the universe.
The law of this world is harsh: if you bring together two "ones" capable of understanding each other by the twitch of an eyebrow (when you've barely opened your mouth, and she has already passed a verdict on your idea: "think again, that's too flat"), a tectonic shift occurs. The result is not a sum, but a product. Creation. The magical number—eleven. A resonance that cracks the mirrors in neighboring realities.
But the world, alas, is densely populated by "chekushkas" and "merzavchiks."
"What happens if you mix a zero-point-five and a zero-point-seven?" asked the lecturer on the stage, resembling a pale shadow of himself, as he took a sip of brown sludge from his glass—the spitting image of dissolved time—and wiped his lips with disgust. "Their product will equal zero-point-thirty-five. A sum would be more honest, but life is always a multiplication of flaws. Fractions grind each other down, striving toward absolute nothingness."
In the orchestra pit, that citadel of dust and multi-year stale booze breath, a laborer nicknamed Merzavchik—a fragile and transparent creature—elbowed his companion, Chekushka the cleaning lady: "Hey, look at the philosopher go! Pour us a round, let’s partake in higher mathematics!"
Chekushka, whose cheeks burned with the flush of cheap port wine and existential despair, tossed back a shot and screamed into the black maw of the auditorium: "And what if one is a 'one' and the other is a total zero? What is their union equal to, smart guy?! Hey, you, calculator in a suit?!"
The lecturer stared into the abyss of the pit for a long time, as if expecting a conductor’s baton to fly out and pierce his throat. Then, surreptitiously, he extracted a phone from his pocket—the crutch of his lame intellect—and, after feverishly tapping the screen, solemnly proclaimed: "Zero! A total annihilation of meanings!"
"Q.E.D..." Chekushka stood up, patted Merzavchik on the shoulder (the sound was like striking an empty bucket), and headed for the stairs.
"Where are you going, you fool?" Merzavchik stared at the half-emptied container where their shared destiny sloshed.
"Elementary, Watson. Out of the pit and into the light. Through the thorns to the stars, before I completely multiply by your zero. Farewell, arithmetic!"
Merzavchik was enlightened for a split second—the entire tragedy of non-Euclidean geometry reflecting in his eyes—but immediately collapsed to the floor, struck down either by the scale of the discovery or the quality of the booze.
But to hell with calculations. The main thing was that in this world, sawn into tiny fractions, there remained people whose "ones," leaning back-to-back like a grandmother and a grandson, stood as almost the sole exception. Their one to one, back-to-back, meant nothing less than eleven! An indivisible monolith. The Fortress-Number, against which all of reality's attempts to grind them into dust shattered.
§ 13. The Nip
The Nip was slowly coming to his senses. He recovered with difficulty, breaking through the non-existence like a small green sprout...
"Ugh, what an ugly comparison. Let’s say, like a corrupted disk sector after a system error... yes, that's better," he thought, smoothly turning his head first side to side, then up and down. Then he sat up and, swaying like a lone dim lantern in the wind on a damp autumn night, looked around. Seeing a bottle in front of him, he brought it close to his eyes with a nearsighted squint: "What's the latest news?" And then, with a sweeping motion, he launched it into a mountain of brass instruments lying in the corner, which crashed down with the roar of a collapsing building.
"There we go," he thought with satisfaction, "that’s what I'll do to every... every who? How did I get myself into this? I'm too sensitive... *and here I walk, all in Dolce & Gabbana...*"
He stood up. There was no longer any of that fluid, port-wine sloppiness in his movements that makes a person resemble melted jelly. Now he moved with the mechanical precision of a drafting compass. From the pocket of his greasy jacket, which smelled of lost lives, the Nip extracted a case.
Inside lay the item. Glasses with thick blue lenses.
The moment the earpieces touched his temples, reality performed a quiet *"click."* The blue filter excised all the "warm noise" from the world: Chekushka’s blush, the golden dust, the gleam of copper. All that remained was a cold, sterile blueprint. The Nip’s face began to erase, to average out, until it turned into a smooth surface where features could barely be guessed—neither age, nor gender, nor sorrow.
The Nip ceased to be a fraction. He became **The Null** (Zero). The dust in the orchestra pit, which had been lazily swirling in the spotlight beams, suddenly froze, as if frightened by his first breath.
The Lecturer on the stage, having recovered from the sudden crash from the trash can... I mean, the orchestra pit, was still reveling in his triumph. He waved his glass of sludge like a scepter.
"Do you see?!" he appealed to the empty auditorium. "Mathematics does not lie! Zero is the finale of any worthless union!"
He didn't hear the footsteps. The Null didn't walk—he simply reduced the distance between points A and B. When the blue shadow fell across the Lecturer's notes, the man faltered. Under The Null's gaze, the letters on the paper began to fade, turning into blank sheets.
"Who... who are you?" the Lecturer babbled, feeling his own voice lose its volume, becoming a barely discernible rustle.
The Null adjusted his glasses. In the blue lenses, the Lecturer saw not his own reflection, but an infinite column of numbers rushing toward a vacuum.
"I am the very answer you were looking for on your calculator," The Null’s voice sounded like white noise. "You called the void, you fool? It has come to audit your accounts."
The Lecturer backed away. His suit jacket began to blend with the backdrop of the curtains, becoming just as gray and unimportant. He felt the names of his loved ones being erased from his memory, his phone number, the formula for the volume of a sphere... He was turning into a footnote that the author had decided to delete.
"Please... I was just giving a lecture..." he croaked.
"You multiplied by zero without having the authorization to do so. You are a multiplier..." The Null turned away indifferently. The Lecturer remained standing on the stage, semi-transparent, like a plastic bag in the wind. He no longer existed in the registry of meanings.
The Null froze. His blue lenses detected interference. In this world where he had just conducted a deep clean, something continued to burn.
There, outside the window, in a space that was supposed to become an even field of entropy, little lights were glowing. A grandmother and a grandson, a grandfather, someone else. They weren't numbers that could be added or subtracted. They stood back-to-back, forming the unbreakable vertical of **Eleven**. He tried to look at them from a different angle, but no matter how hard he scrutinized them, the result was always eleven!
To The Null, it looked like a system error. Like nails driven into the sky, holding up this entire dilapidated set. They didn't multiply by his emptiness. They ignored it.
The Null slowly tilted his head. His blue lenses frosted over. In a world of perfect zeros and pathetic fractions, "11" was a provocation. It was the Fortress-Number.
"Disorder," The Null rustled, and the air around him began to crystallize into sharp blue needles.
At that moment, the silence of the empty hall, which had become a sterile blueprint, was ripped open by an inappropriate, living sound. On the wall, behind the dusty curtains, hung an old wooden clock. It suddenly gave a convulsive swing, a tiny door flew open, and a mangy bird popped out, delivering a cracked, mechanical "cuckoo."
That sound, smelling of time and old newspapers, struck The Null's blue lenses like a physical object. His featureless face contorted with unbearable irritation. The void could not tolerate a rhythm it could not control.
The Null made a sharp, mechanical movement—the blue shadow darted toward the wall. Scraping his fingers against the wood, he furiously tore the clock from its nail, shattering the casing and ripping out the chains by the roots.
"Too much weight for such a thin reality," he added, crushing the broken mechanism in his hands, while the wretched cuckoo remained half-stuck in the jammed opening, still trying to emit a final, pitiful exhalation.
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[ END OF FILE: § 11-13 ]
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