Epilogue

This is where the last travel video of “The Shining World” channel breaks off. More than five years have passed since that video was posted.

Oleg Batygin’s ideas about the approaching “fragility threshold” are being borne out with ever greater clarity. Oleg himself, meanwhile, has managed to become a public and even popular figure.

He is the founder and head of the “Not Satellite Internet” (NSI) foundation. The foundation invests in projects that resist the growing centralisation of internet networks.

Space-based network channels require very large investments and in the end invariably fall into the hands of some specific institutions. This runs counter to the idea of the internet as a decentralised space. The foundation Oleg heads offers cheap and efficient alternatives to satellite internet. As a rule, these are systems of autonomous, undemanding relays.

The progenitor of all such systems links the legendary Batygin’s Island to the mainland.

Besides this, Oleg has established a global prize called “Exchange an idea for a dream”. The prize comes with a television show of the same name. It is awarded through a competition of original, whimsical technical inventions with no obvious commercial potential.

The inventor hands their invention over for the use of Oleg and his foundation, and in return the foundation “makes the inventor’s dream come true”. That is, it fulfils a package of a one-off wish and a long-term one. One could say that Oleg does to other gifted engineers what Byung Min did to him.

We became curious about what had become of Zhenya Vinokurova and Stas Rybkin, the hosts of the once popular channel “The Shining World”. And we undertook a little investigation into the matter.

To begin with, we tried asking Oleg Batygin about it directly. We were unable to reach Oleg himself. He is a man of Rabelaisian wealth and, of course, exceptionally busy. So we spoke to his press secretary — a charming British lady by the name of Susan.

She explained to us that although she does know where Zhenya and Stas are, she has no right to share this information, because that is Zhenya’s and Stas’s personal choice. A certain contract was concluded between Oleg Batygin’s foundation and the video bloggers, one clause of which is the non-disclosure of their whereabouts and other circumstances. However, she, Susan, personally and officially states that nothing bad has happened to them.

We tried to get in touch with the missing video bloggers’ parents. It turned out that Stas had no close relatives left even at the time of his disappearance, and Zhenya’s mother had also gone missing — roughly six months after her daughter vanished.

Naturally, we studied what has been published online on the subject. In the first year after Stas and Zhenya disappeared, quite a lot was written about them. As a rule, the story was that the new, young and therefore especially ferocious Avatar of Global Capitalism — Oleg Batygin — had fed the young bloggers to genetically modified swarming locusts, controlled by radio by a gigantic and malevolent artificial intelligence hidden for the time being in the gloomy depths of Batygin’s Island.

For all the drama of this version, we find it hard to call it solid. Oleg Batygin is a stern and powerful personality. But he is certainly no devourer of children.

According to the second version, Batygin acted as a Paladin of Light trying to save the lives of the young bloggers, whom the Dragon of Global Capitalism, dwelling somewhere in South Korea, had fed to the locusts. Batygin shamefully failed in this operation, which he now carefully conceals.

To our taste, this version is considerably less contradictory. But there are circumstances that hint to us that Stas and Zhenya are not only alive but thriving.

That Stas and Zhenya could so easily get lost somewhere in the world is no cause for surprise. A moment came when hundreds of thousands of educated and gifted Russian-speaking young people began trying to escape and lose themselves quite deliberately. Against this background the case of Stas and Zhenya naturally and quickly faded.

But there are far more distinct hints that Zhenya, at least, is alive and thriving.

Last autumn Delphine exhibited a new collection of work in Tokyo at the SCAI The Bathhouse gallery. Literally all of her new paintings featured a new character — a thin, pale young woman who strongly resembles Zhenya Vinokurova.

Delphine was helped to prepare this exhibition by a very attractive, fragile white lady whom journalists knew as Tina Hyde (Tina being short for Actinia). Tina appeared in public exclusively in a carnival half-mask, which, combined with her telling surname, leads us to suspect that this dazzling bohemian lady is Zhenechka.

Tina accompanied Delphine to all the parties held in honour of the exhibition. Oleg Batygin attended only the opening and the closing of the exhibition. From certain distinct signs, journalists concluded that Tina and Delphine are bound by, at the very least, a very deep and lasting friendship.

No one even remotely resembling Stas Rybkin has appeared in public since. However, there is at least one YouTube channel that the public associates with Stas’s name. This is the exceptionally popular life change coaching blog “Paradise Call”. The blog is devoted to the art of living a quality life in the modern world amid attractive landscapes without selling one’s time.

“Paradise Call” is an English-language blog. Praat shows an almost total correlation between the male voices of “Paradise Call” and “The Shining World”. The female voices of the two channels do not correlate at all.

Moreover, the narrator of “Paradise Call” has a faint Russian accent. However, AI Voice Detector shows that the voice in “Paradise Call” is, with high probability, generated. If that really is so, the quality of the generation is absolutely staggering.

And finally, the last thing we managed to find out about the people who appeared in this story. Batygin’s foundation has a fairly powerful finance department, and that department is located, as it should be, on Wall Street. It is run by Sunil Rajapaksa — a former doctor, born in Sri Lanka.