DOPAMINE

Aituar Abultaev

When a person hands the machine the job of giving life meaning, when the signal goes down, so do they.

— The Author

PROLOGUE — AIM

Autumn came early to the steppe in 1942. At night, a skin of ice already tightened over the ground; by day, the wind drove ash-gray clouds across a low sky, as if some distant fire were burning beyond the horizon.

At dawn, four men walked from the village toward the radio tower.

Two were soldiers with rifles. The third was a lieutenant. The fourth wore no hat, his hands tied behind his back with telephone wire. The wire was new and black and smelled of rubber and machine oil. As he walked, the condemned man kept brushing his boots through the dry feather grass, as though trying to memorize the sound.

“Stop,” the lieutenant ordered.

They halted at the tower’s concrete base. Against the endless steppe it looked impossibly tall. Steel latticework climbed into the morning mist. At the top, a loudspeaker horn swayed in the wind.

They used to broadcast war reports from here. Back then, the whole village would crowd around its only radio: women twisting handkerchiefs in their fists, old men staring at the floor, children learning not to ask questions.

But six months ago the tower had gone silent. Almost no one came here anymore.

The lieutenant took out a papirosa, lit one for himself, then placed another between the condemned man’s lips. The man did not thank him. His name was Tulegen, though it had been misspelled on the charge sheet. A mistake in his name, a mistake in the sentence—and he was going to die for both.

“Last words?” the lieutenant asked.

“To whom?”

One soldier gave a nervous snort. The other turned toward the steppe.

The lieutenant yanked the cigarette from Tulegen’s mouth and dropped it at his feet.

“Five steps forward.”

Tulegen took five. On the sixth, he stopped on his own. Closed his eyes. The wind shoved him between the shoulder blades, and for one instant he thought it was already the bullet.

The lieutenant unfolded the paper.

The words—treason, sabotage, ties to the enemy—rang hollow. The wind carried them off at once. Tulegen was not listening to the charges. He was listening to the horn above him. For the past three nights, he had heard whispering inside it. The tower stood near the place where he was being held, at the edge of the village. At night, everything went still. Now and then wolves howled out on the steppe, and in the silence that followed, the whisper from the horn became unmistakably clear.

There was no power running to the tower. It should not have made a sound. Yet the whisper repeated the voices of people from the village—their pleas, their fears, their prayers. Sometimes the horn spoke in the voice of Tulegen’s dead brother.

“Squad, ready!” the lieutenant called.

The rifle bolts snapped almost as one.

Tulegen breathed in the smell of cold earth.

“Aim!”

The rifles came up. Their barrels settled behind his back.

Tulegen closed his eyes.

The lieutenant drew breath.

But he never got the chance to give the order to fire.

The horn at the top of the tower came alive.

First came static. Then a firm voice every one of them knew said:

“This is the Soviet Information Bureau...”

The soldiers froze. The lieutenant looked up.

The voice cut out. A thin, piercing tone spilled from the horn. It was higher than a human scream and deeper than the roar of a diving Messerschmitt, a sound Tulegen had heard more than once at the front. It slipped beneath his skin, ran up his spine, and lodged somewhere deep inside his skull, as if it had found the place where his thoughts were born.

Inside that single note he heard everything he had waited for all his life: his mother’s voice, a verdict of acquittal, the laughter of children not yet born, a promise that the war would end tomorrow.

Then silence.

The order to fire never came.

Tulegen waited. One second. Two. Three.

Then he opened his eyes and slowly turned around.

No one was there.

Two rifles lay on the ground. Perfectly straight, as if the soldiers had carefully set them down before vanishing. The lieutenant’s cigarette still smoldered nearby. The charge sheet had snagged in the dry feather grass, and the wind kept tugging at it without managing to tear it free.

Tulegen backed away and looked up. Every part of him wanted to run, but he could not tear his eyes from the horn.

The lieutenant’s voice came from it, quiet now, almost childlike:

“Fire?... Why didn’t you say ‘fire’?”

Tulegen broke into a run across the steppe.

Behind him, the tower sent an invisible signal into the sky. And the farther he ran, the more clearly he heard a chime that did not yet exist: the short, cheerful ping of a new message.

PART ONE — NO SIGNAL

Chapter 1. Glitch

Almaty, 2036.

The city lived by algorithmic schedule. Office-tower facades changed their ads to match the expressions—and inferred thoughts—of people passing below. Driverless buses slid between streams of pedestrians, while delivery drones buzzed overhead in neatly regulated flight lanes.

The snowcapped peaks of the Trans-Ili Alatau reflected in the glass facade of Nomad-Link’s high-rise headquarters—the one thing in sight that still had not learned how to personalize itself.

Thirty-five-year-old Ernar sat on the forty-second floor, surrounded by transparent screens. One showed a map of the country pulsing with green dots of network coverage. Another displayed a security dashboard full of anomalous requests. On a third, the company assistant ZHYLTYR was calmly explaining why there was no threat.

“You don’t know whether there’s a threat,” Ernar muttered. “You only know which sentence I want to read.”

ZHYLTYR answered at once in a soothing voice:

“Your skepticism improves decision quality.”

“Exactly.”

A coworker in the next cubicle raised an eyebrow.

“Talking to the machine you don’t trust again?”

“So it remembers its place.”

“Does it know yours?”

Ernar did not answer. A name flashed across his personal display: GRANNY.

He smiled before he even realized he was doing it and accepted the video call.

The camera showed a low-ceilinged room with whitewashed walls. A lace curtain hung over the window, gray autumn light trembling behind it. Kulzhan-apa sat at the table, holding the phone much too close to her face.

“Balam, you’re skinny again,” she said instead of hello.

“It’s the wide-angle lens.”

“A lens doesn’t feed you.”

“We get free food at the office.”

“Free food never has a soul.”

She laughed. Ernar did too. Around his grandmother, laughter still came easily.

“When are you and Aigerim finally coming?” she asked. “Am I going to see you in person before the wedding, or only through a screen? Or has she figured out how stubborn you are and run away already?”

“The wedding’s in a month.”

“A month is enough time to change your mind thirty times.”

The connection jerked. Kulzhan-apa’s face broke into squares, then snapped back together.

“See?” she said. “That tower’s acting up again. Signal comes, signal goes. Yesterday I couldn’t even buy bread. Ever since they got rid of cash, everything’s by palm scan. I put my hand down, but the register won’t work without the network. I tell the clerk, I know the price. He says, can’t do it, we’ll get fined—the system sees everything. The system matters more than a grandmother now.”

“I’ll check it remotely.”

“At this rate you’ll get married remotely too.”

They both laughed.

Something flickered behind her.

Ernar stopped smiling.

At first he thought it was a compression artifact: a dark vertical stripe by the doorway. Then the stripe stepped into the room.

The lieutenant. Two soldiers behind him. Gray greatcoats, side caps, rifles. The image was black-and-white, yet it overlaid his grandmother’s full-color room with no transparency at all.

“Aje,” Ernar said softly. “Who’s there with you?”

Kulzhan-apa smiled as if she had not heard him.

The lieutenant stopped behind her chair and unfolded a yellowed sheet of paper.

“Aje, turn around.”

“What is it, balam?”

The two soldiers raised their rifles.

Ernar shot to his feet. His chair slammed into the divider.

“AJE!”

The lieutenant looked straight into the camera. His face was young and deathly tired.

“Fire,” he said.

Kulzhan-apa jerked. Her forehead struck the table. The phone toppled onto its side. Her motionless hand filled the screen.

The call dropped.

Ernar stood among his frozen coworkers, one palm pressed against the empty air where his grandmother’s face had been a second earlier.

Then his phone rang again.

The screen read: GRANNY.

Chapter 2. The Second Call

Ernar could not make himself touch the button at first. His finger was shaking so badly he missed it twice.

“Balam?” Kulzhan-apa appeared on the screen alive, annoyed, and perfectly calm. “Why are you yelling?”

Ernar sat down right there on the floor.

“You... fell.”

“I’m sitting.”

“There were people there.”

“What people?”

“Soldiers. Behind you.”

His grandmother turned to look. The room was empty.

“It’s just me and the kettle. The kettle isn’t in uniform.”

Someone in the office let out an awkward little laugh. The department head came closer, but Ernar raised a hand: not now.

“Show me the table.”

“Why?”

“Just show me.”

Kulzhan-apa panned the camera across it. A cup sat on the oilcloth beside a saucer of candy and an old radio. No blood. No sign of a struggle. And the phone was still in her hand.

“You shouted and the connection died,” she said. “So I called back. You’re looking at me like you just buried me.”

Ernar scrubbed back through the call recording. The system had saved the last twenty seconds in its local cache. His grandmother smiling. The soldiers. Rifles coming up. Her fall. It was all there.

“Aje, don’t leave the house. I’m coming.”

“Today?”

“Now.”

“It’ll be dark soon.”

“I’m leaving.”

He ended the call and got to his feet. Half the office had gathered around him. Someone was recording through a contact lens. Ernar snapped a hand in front of the person’s face.

“Delete it.”

“I’m not—”

“Your indicator’s blinking.”

His manager, Temirlan, pulled him into a conference room. The glass walls turned opaque.

“Okay. Calm down and show me the recording.”

The walls faded to a pale gray.

Ernar sent the file to an isolated display. The video played without sound. Temirlan watched carefully, but by the end his expression had changed to wary concern—the look you gave a coworker who might be having a breakdown.

“Deepfake,” he said.

“In real time?”

“A malicious filter. Video-stream substitution. You’re the one who taught us anything can be spoofed.”

“Not anything.”

“Then your implant’s compromised.”

Ernar touched the small scar behind his ear without thinking. A neuroport sat under the skin, with a removable module clipped to the outside. It let him access internal systems, connect to secure channels, and control displays.

Ernar hated having hardware that close to his brain, but without the neuroport he would never have been cleared for his job.

“I’ll check the logs,” he said.

“You’re taking the day off.”

“The base station in the village is lagging.”

“Techs will go out in the morning.”

“I’m going now.”

Temirlan let out a long breath.

“You can’t take the company terminal with you.”

“I don’t need the terminal.”

“You need a doctor.”

Ernar stood.

“Put me on unpaid leave.”

“Ernar...”

“Or fire me. Pick whichever loads faster.”

Aigerim called while he was in the elevator. Her face appeared on the inside of his contact lens: short dark hair, tired eyes, white coat. Robotic hospital gurneys moved behind her through the city clinic.

“Someone messaged me that you made a scene,” she said.

“Gossip travels faster than light.”

“What happened?”

He wanted to tell her. Instead he said:

“My grandmother’s having network problems. I’m going to the village.”

Aigerim was quiet longer than usual.

“We’re meeting the wedding coordinator today.”

“Reschedule.”

“You picked the date.”

“This is urgent.”

“Everything is urgent to you except the people standing right next to you.”

The elevator doors opened. In the lobby, people walked through advertising holograms without looking up from their personalized feeds.

“I’ll call from the road,” Ernar said.

“You’re always calling on the move. You hardly ever show up.”

The connection cut out.

In the parking garage, the autonomous car asked for a destination. Ernar named the village. The system warned him that the final forty kilometers of the route were not verified on the digital map.

“Continue?” the car asked.

“Yes.”

“Network coverage at your destination is unstable. Some functions will be unavailable.”

“I know how to drive.”

“According to your profile, you last drove manually five years ago.”

“Then today I’ll remember.”

Once the car left the city, Ernar played the call recording again.

This time, after the lieutenant gave the order, his grandmother did not fall.

She slowly lifted her head and looked into the camera. Her lips silently formed the words:

“Don’t bring them the signal.”