The Shining World
Good afternoon!
I'm Stas Rybkin, and I'm delighted to welcome you to the channel "The Shining World." Our motto is "To the ends of the earth for a story." The story we're rushing toward right now is truly vivid and unusual. And this time we really have ventured very far — not only from the centers of civilization, but from all the traditional tourist routes as well.
Right now we're sitting in the bow of what's called a "speedboat." This is a relatively expensive way to get around the local sea. The speedboat has six of the most powerful engines and races along exceptionally fast.
Look at this stunning pale-pink haze on the horizon. At the bulging, glossy, green waves. Look at the sky. The clouds here resemble fantastical towers flaring out toward the top. Nature in these parts can be unbearably beautiful. Sometimes it feels as though we're not on Earth at all.
If you've read Frank Herbert's novel "Dune," you'll remember the blessed Caladan, the home of Paul and Leto Atreides. When I read that book, that's exactly how I pictured Caladan to myself. Excessively, unpredictably, unexpectedly beautiful.
See how it tosses us around? If you're afraid of the rocking, you're better off sitting in the stern of the speedboat. It smells of gasoline, sweat, and fuel oil back there, but the pitching and tossing are far gentler.
The bow of a speedboat is always tipped up a little above the water. The heavy engines in the stern weigh it down. The bow leaps from side to side, powerfully and unpredictably. It's a thrill ride all its own on this sort of journey.
It's wonderful here in the bow. It's windy, cool, damp, fresh, beautiful, and constantly takes your breath away. The whole time it feels as if you've just barely kept yourself from flying overboard. But that's only an illusion. I've traveled on boats like this many times in my life. And every single time, all the passengers riding in the bow of the speedboat reached their destination safe and sound.
I once even saw a high-speed ferry capsize. But someone falling into the water from the bow seat of a speedboat — that I have never seen.
Meanwhile, we're drawing near the goal of our journey. Right now you can see on the horizon a pale conical mountain with two peaks, and around it several lower summits. This is the very cluster of small islands, one of which we're striving to reach.
I'm not allowed to name these islands. Not allowed to give their coordinates. Not allowed even to name the sea in which these islands lie. Although I'm sure many of you have already guessed which sea we're racing across right now. But, all the same — mum's the word!
I promised to keep the secret, and the secret will be kept. The last thing in the world I'd want is to offend in any way the remarkable man who did us the honor of inviting us to visit him.
This man, in a certain sense, has won today's grand prize. He's someone to envy. But we won't envy him, because envy, on principle, is not a good thing.
We want to see how this man lives. And he lives a very unusual life. And we want to hear his story. The story of a strange, ornate, very modern miracle.
This miracle is — quite literally — something infernal. It seems to me that it really has no exhaustive rational explanation. More precisely, it has a multitude of explanations on the border between rationality and everything else, but it is utterly impossible, having discarded all the other explanations, to settle on a single one.
This whole thing is like the events of the Strugatsky brothers' novel "Definitely Maybe." In that novel, strange and unexpected things kept happening to all the characters. The characters tried to explain just what was happening to them. They even tried to predict the possible consequences of the events described in the book. And none of the explanations the characters offered was exhaustive. Not one of the hypotheses was any better than the others. And right up to the end of the book, the characters never did decide just what was happening to them.
The Strugatsky novel in question, and the case we ourselves are setting out to look into, both seem to hang, as it were, in a mysterious murky depth of ignorance and uncertainty.
We don't understand the meaning of what's happening, neither in the particulars nor in broad strokes. We have no notion of the nature of the mechanism setting all this in motion. But we have a witness who confirms that the strange "systems-engineering miracle" we're going to discuss really does exist. And we have a thousand reasons to trust our witness.
In particular, this man should be trusted because he has no reason to lie. He already has everything that lies are usually used to obtain. This man lives by his own happiness. In seclusion. He doesn't seek the public's attention. He cares for no one beyond his very narrow and very strange inner circle.
He didn't seek contact with us. It was I who found him online. Found him with enormous difficulty. And with still greater difficulty talked him into meeting.
This man's name is Oleg Gennadievich Batygin. He's a software developer. A legendary developer. The architect and inspiration behind several high-profile projects.
And he also writes in a very interesting, vivid way. Once he wrote a great deal for "Computerra," then for a long time was reputed to be a shining star of "Habr," but at some point he vanished.
There were rumors that he works at a wealthy offshore bank, somewhere either in the Caribbean or in Oceania. Someone wrote that he'd been killed in China while illegally crossing the border into Kazakhstan. I recall coming across, in the then still-robust LiveJournal, an entire piece of investigative journalism into the murder of Oleg Batygin by gangsta-communists from the Golden Triangle.
But it turned out that all of this was made up. That Oleg Batygin is safe and sound. That he lives an interesting, vivid life on an island we are now approaching at high speed.