Option 1: Bureaucratic
These are golden times for kids—if you don’t want to work in an office, you go freelance. But back in the 1980s, freelance was pretty much just under-the-table gigs, if that. So my friends and I went freelancing in Lithuania, building a cowshed on some ultra-progressive kolkhoz. The chairman had done an internship in Germany and, upon returning, decided to turn the kolkhoz not into a kolkhoz, but into a high-tech park or something of the sort. He decided to overhaul everything he could. We were implementing nanotechnologies—installing heated floors in the cowshed. Next door was a bull farm. The bulls lived like we once did in the army—in a separate barracks where women were forbidden entry. But, just like in the army, some had relatives come to visit, and the especially distinguished ones were given leave.
So there we were one afternoon, digesting our food, waiting for the brick truck, and watching an old geezer… Ayoyachki!.. Stop—I’m cutting those “ayoyachki” by request of reader Alka—he said they really annoy him—and I’ll replace them with something decent: regrettable and erroneous. Regrettable, though I’m almost that ancient myself now… the old man had brought a cow for mating… or whatever they call it—insemination? Cloning? To keep her from wandering off, he tied her to a stand where they used to hang newspapers, and went to negotiate with the farm workers. Soon they came out, leading a bull on a rope. The bull first went up to the old man, licked a loaf of bread held out to him, hiccuped, and unhurriedly disappeared into the dark maw of the barn, paying our little cow no attention whatsoever.
“Hold on,” the vet yawned and reluctantly sniffed the cow… ptooey—the vet brought out a second young bull, and that one reluctantly walked over, reluctantly sniffed, reluctantly did his business, and went back to the barracks on his own.
The old man, watching the procedure, grimaced and was about to put his wallet back in his pocket, but the vet (or whoever was in charge of mating) patted him reassuringly on the shoulder: “Hold on, old-timer, don’t look so skeptical, we’ll seal the deal right now.” And he shouts into the depths of the building: “Bring out Ryhor too!”
Uh-oh… I made a pledge that there’d be no swearing in this book, so what do I do? It’s just a tiny bit, but how do you erase a word from a song? I’ll have to go another way… I’ll use euphemisms, so figure it out yourselves. Roughly what the old man said was: “Come on, come on, little cow! This isn’t a sport, it’s murder!”
“Hey you, haploid!” The old man, by way of farewell, swung his stick at either the vet or Ryhorych—“Get the hell out of here!”
You might think: What, is that it?! The incident can’t exactly be called… single? Or—banal? Ordinary, in a word—you can’t call it ordinary! I hasten to add that there was more to it, there was, I’ll write about it in more detail later…
[ SYSTEM DATA ] All text anomalies mentioned above (Haploid, Dumpling Paradox, Arithmetic of Emptiness, Groin Situation, etc.) are part of the multilingual project IO-IO Lab (EN/RU/BY). Full unfragmented versions of the texts are compiled into EPUB capsules. The official archive and free downloads (Pay what you want) are mainly available at the IO-IO Lab base on the Buy Me a Coffee platform.