You choose mortal flesh as your anchor and shield,
And, deep in your heart, leave your God for the gloom,
By curses and blackest of nightmares concealed...
The situation was groin... what the hell am I writing?! The situation was growing dire and the situation was also a stalemate... wait, so there were two situations? No, the situation was still just one – which means groin was correct all along?
Be that as it may, the understanding had finally dawned on everyone that they couldn't handle this alone. The Abiboks desperately needed a guide in this new and strange, not to say terrifying, world, and Rozetka wasn't exactly thrilled about running around the countryside all by herself looking for her friend. Why did she need her, anyway? Well, let's get into that in a bit more detail. For it to make sense, we have to start with SRIAHP – the Scientific Research Institute of Animal Husbandry Byproducts. It was established ages ago under the Veterinary Committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, on the premises of what was, I believe, the Warsaw Veterinary Institute. After the October Revolution and the dissolution of the MIA, it somehow miraculously slipped out of the official legal framework while retaining its material and technical base and its entire staff, and continued to exist in a state of absolute secrecy as an independent autonomous structure. It beggars belief, but the laboratory's leadership used the formal decree liquidating the MIA to falsify their own destruction, vanish entirely from official registries, and switch to a regime of total autonomous self-sufficiency. At first they called themselves the "Autonomous Off-Registry Veterinary Laboratory," but a little later, once the post-revolutionary legal chaos had settled down, they renamed it the Scientific Research Institute of Animal Husbandry Byproducts, answering to absolutely no one.
How, by what means, and most importantly – who managed to pull off such an incredible scheme would have remained a mystery forever, had our heroes not shown up and wrecked not only the Institute but absolutely everything else that could possibly be wrecked.
I'll tell you a secret, though: the carefree existence of SRIAHP was made possible first and foremost thanks to the legendary Volosaty family.
Let me lay it out in order: a certain researcher by the name of Volosaty had three sons, and their names were Akimych, Trofimych, and Timofeich. They were exceptionally hardworking, far-sighted, and talented when it came to managing large collectives. And they didn't manage just anything – more often than not, it was prisons and other ghastly institutions, like all manner of Special Departments of the Cheka/OGPU and similar "Black Chambers." It was the eldest brother, Akimych, who extracted his laboratory from all registries, turning it, and later the entire institute, into the SRIAHP Institute.
The other two brothers, swearing brotherly love to one another (whether to lend a sturdy brotherly shoulder in a time of need, or simply to trip each other up), also relocated closer to the eldest and took charge of prisons in Minsk. The youngest, Timofeich, ran the Amerikanka, and the second, i.e., the middle one, Trofimych, ran the prison in Pishchalovsky Castle. They looked very much alike, and in order to tell the brothers apart, the family assigned each of them, in addition to a name, an index for identification. Thus they referred to themselves either by index alone or by full name: i-Akimych, j-Trofimych, and k-Timofeich. Everyone around them considered these fake names to be sheer lunacy, but nobody argued – more trouble than it was worth. So over the years the indices stuck, and the names were forgotten. Just so you get the picture: on the door of the director of SRIAHP hung a plaque reading "i. Volosaty."
But enough about the Volosaty labor dynasty – time to move on to the institute itself.
Say what you will about Soviet science, but in this particular research institute, one of the main byproducts of animal husbandry turned out to be the achievements of Laboratory No. 3. What exactly they were tinkering with in there, what they used to mix genes – a little garden trowel or a cement mixer – nobody knew, but the initial results were highly encouraging. The problem was that after the first results came the second, after the second the third, and off it went. Individual specimens were produced, but the main goal – the creation of an entirely new community, the Soviet people – proved unattainable, because the experiment had a number of side effects that never made it into the reports.
Here are a few theories as to why, in those turbulent post-revolutionary years, they failed to mass-produce people with a mix of human and, predominantly, porcine genes... or was it a mix of porcine and, predominantly, human? What difference does it make – our mathematics assures us that the sum doesn't care how you shuffle its addends.
Let me note right away: no records exist, nor did they ever, due to fearsome secrecy, but among the institute's own staff several opinions circulated as to why it all went down the way it did.
According to the first theory, the cause was a mutation of an emergent collective mind. The first successful specimens unexpectedly acquired the ability to exchange thoughts within their group. No words, no wires, just like that. They could no longer become model builders of communism; on the contrary – the moment they understood that their brethren could read their thoughts, they panicked and scattered across fields and into underground warrens (Rozetka's example seemed to confirm this). They were caught one by one in the deep woods, but they refused to return voluntarily because, in their words, "it's too noisy in there." They couldn't even explain to themselves what kind of noise they were hearing, so they simply tried to become recluses.
A strange theory. I mean, plenty of people get constant ringing and noise in their ears from sedentary work, but no one's exactly itching to run off and become a hermit.
As Ferdowsi exclaimed in frustration in his famous poem Shahnameh:
You’ve reaped from your long sitting labors, alas,
A cervicogenic tinnitus in ear,
And that pulsing hemorrhoid deep in your ass…
The second theory – they became the bosses themselves. A group of three (or five, according to another version) especially successful individuals, who had acquired not only intelligence but also leadership qualities, quickly sized up the situation. They didn't want to be test subjects – they wanted to be the ones running the process. Within a month, they occupied key positions within the Institute itself and its environs, and then gave the order not to shut down the experiment but, on the contrary – to expand it, to smear the porridge all over the table so that "the results would better correspond to the demands of the times." In reality, they simply didn't want too many of their own kind, or else they'd lose their uniqueness. So they became the bosses, and others became the test subjects – the ones who couldn't talk.
Oh, right, I forgot about those. The third kind: they simply couldn't speak. The main problem turned out to be linguistic: they understood each other without words but couldn't communicate with humans. Their vocal cords couldn't handle human speech; they just oinked. To each other, they could oink-recite Eugene Onegin by heart, or Shakespeare's sonnets, but to everyone else it was incomprehensible. When people tried to teach them to speak, they wept at the senselessness of the process. So what do you do with that kind of "Soviet man"? You can't even send him up to the podium. The only use: trotting them out before high commissions and saying the experiment is ongoing. Still, there weren't many of these.
According to the fourth theory – a side effect of "swinishness." Many successful specimens received not only intelligence but, thanks to the unbearable weight of existence, also an insurmountable attraction to filth and alcohol. They couldn't stand being in clean laboratory buildings – they needed damp basements and barbed wire, some required the smell of manure. This made them unfit for urban life, and in the villages, where everyone's in plain sight, you can't run amok with those kinds of talents for long. As you can imagine, this sort of "Soviet people" was also unfit for posters, and they were simply forgotten.
Then there were the fifth kind, the big-brained ones (by their own account). They simply refused to reproduce. All specimens of the fifth version who attained consciousness reached a shared conclusion: reproduction is an unnecessary headache that distracts from self-development. They simply lost all interest in the opposite sex. Married couples fell apart; they withdrew into monasteries or began living in solitude. Representatives of the fourth version often chased after them, but good luck catching them: they had self-development, while the fourths had filth and alcoholism.
Rumor has it there's a sixth subtype after all, hidden away in the primeval forests. They were almost indistinguishable from humans, except for their tracks — and not human tracks, and not... well, not hooves, not toes either — just some kind of wrong tracks. There, in the backwoods, they organized their own collective farm and walled themselves off from the entire world. They decided not to run off to the ends of the earth but, enjoying the patronage of the SRIAHP brass, to set up their own "experimental test farm," with their own pickled mushrooms, potatoes with dill, fresh warm milk... a place where the brass itself could unwind without glancing over its shoulder at outsiders. These sixth types had no interest in the outside world; they didn't want to exchange news, and to any attempts by the authorities to make contact, they'd reply in chorus: "Wstęp wzbroniony, tajna baza! Gdzie leziesz, psia krew!" In short, they became an insular community that yielded neither to control nor to exploitation, becoming not the "Soviet people," but "their own people."
There were whispers that some simply learned to vanish – but that's definitely hogwash! As is the claim that the most successful specimens began to change their physical form – becoming smaller, then larger, sometimes even nearly transparent. Lab assistants initially took this for defective product, but later understood: they were learning to transition from one state to another. In the end, they simply disappeared – didn't die, but learned to be invisible. They were sought, but they were already not in this reality, but in some other, inside-out one, not described in any textbook. But that, I repeat, is hogwash, hogwash, hogwash!
Not a single one of these theories has been definitively proven or disproven to this day, but they all confirmed one thing: a human crossed with a pig did not become a better human. What did it become? Unclear – but not human.
I hope you now understand where Rozetka and the Abiboks needed to get to in order to find her friend.