Vadim Kalinin

Batygin's Beneficiaries is a novella-travelogue. A group of video bloggers investigates the long-ago disappearance of a legendary programmer and blogger, Oleg Batygin. Oleg now lives on a secluded paradise island amid very strange surroundings. He's taken with some far-from-trivial ideas and is busy building a small but exceedingly cozy and happy society. Oleg tells his friends how he came by his island and his fortune, while sharing his thoughts on the present state and the near future of our civilization. Oleg's story is not merely the story of a brilliant engineer, entrepreneur, and recluse. It's a story with a distinct mystical aftertaste. The strange "systems-engineering miracle" at whose center Oleg and his wife, Delphine, found themselves seems to have been born far beyond the bounds within which rational thought is accustomed to feeling comfortable. This is a novella about the role of chaos in our lives, about the fragility of a "rational worldview." The author wanted the reader to notice that mystical haze which even today goes on swirling at the very edge of the knowledge accessible to the rational mind. Batygin's Beneficiaries is not "mystical literature." It is a text "on the verge of the mystical." It is a novella about the inexplicable that is always present in our lives.

Beneficiaries of Batygin