What Was That?

Stas Rybkin: I have a multitude of questions. And the first question I'd like to ask: "What was that?"

I understand that you don't have an unambiguous answer either, and can't. But you, Oleg, are an inquisitive man of a researcher's cast of mind. Surely it can't be that you haven't built up some hypotheses on the matter since then?

Oleg Batygin: Naturally, I've thought a great deal about all of this. To such a degree that at some point I decided to limit myself when it comes to reflections of this sort. These days I allow myself to ruminate on the subject no more than two hours a week.

This week I haven't yet spent my two hours, and I could spend them now… I'm certain that you could have arrived at each of my versions on your own. I have no facts whatsoever. Nothing but conjectures. And all these conjectures are fairly marginal. Each of them inevitably smacks of either science fiction, or conspiracy theory, or both at once.

Stas Rybkin: I've always been interested, in the keenest possible way, in what exactly the protagonist of any given fantastical narrative is thinking. In my adolescence I dreamed of interviewing Captain Nemo, or at least Rydra Wong. And now here I have just such an opportunity…

Oleg Batygin: You flatter me. I'm not the protagonist here at all.

Stas Rybkin: How can that be?

Oleg Batygin: An acting character, forgive the tautology, generally acts. Whereas my function in this whole story is a purely passive one. I'm simply a man to whom certain events happened.

I amused myself in my time off from work. Blazed green, wrote an indie game, chilled with a bored Cockney girl. And then, suddenly, big money and this scrap of dry land literally came crashing down on me. I was even a little frightened by it.

This is not a story about me. This is a story about a certain situation I ended up in. I suspect that I ended up in it, by and large, by accident. This situation literally created me, the way the Maharal created the Golem. And it's quite likely that I'm not the only one. If the situation continues to exist — and I have no grounds for believing it has concluded — that situation goes on creating others…

Stas Rybkin: Others — who?

Oleg Batygin: Other beneficiaries of the situation in question.

Stas Rybkin: Beneficiaries… A magnificent word. You could make it the pivotal term of our story… Batygin's Beneficiaries… How does that phrase strike you?

Oleg Batygin: I like the sound of it. And it's flattering, of course, to hear my own modest name as part of a resonant term. Uttering the term in this form, however, would be a bit difficult for me. To myself, I call my hypothetical colleagues "Fragility Threshold Beneficiaries," or FTB for short.

Stas Rybkin: And have you had occasion to meet other FTB?

Oleg Batygin: Yes, of course. The funniest part is that I know for a fact that you, too, have met other FTB. At the very least, you've seen another one just like me in the flesh.

Stas Rybkin: Fascinating! Who might that be? Surely not Zhenechka?

Oleg Batygin: On that I'll keep quiet. It's a real pleasure for me to share information with you, but I have no intention of losing my membership in the "Club of Enigmatic People" over it.

Stas Rybkin: All right. You call yourself a beneficiary of the fragility threshold. You've already received your winnings. Does that mean our civilization has stepped over the fragility threshold?

Oleg Batygin: For now we're only standing on that threshold. On the "civilizational surface" the first crack has appeared, large enough that one can state, with mournful certainty, the irreversibility of the destructive process that has begun.

Stas Rybkin: You mean the pandemic?

Oleg Batygin: I mean the sharply accelerated, pervasive destruction of important, often load-bearing socio-economic structures. The closing of state borders, the collapse of the very idea of inviolable human rights, a total crisis of governance, and a host of other rubbish that came crashing down on us all at once, out of nowhere… Today it's the custom, indeed, to explain all of this by the epidemic. When it ends, other explanations will be needed.

Stas Rybkin: And the FTB came out ahead from all this?

Oleg Batygin: Well, you can see for yourself how nicely I've settled in here…

Stas Rybkin: True enough… But let's return, all the same, to the hypothetical mechanism that allowed you to win. So what was it, this thing that happened?