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A cyberpunk novella about digital addiction.

When a person lets a machine give their life meaning,

when the signal cuts out, they shut down too.

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 gray shreds of cloud across the low sky, like ash from a distant fire.

Five men walked from the aul—the steppe village—to the radio tower.

Three were soldiers with rifles. The fourth was a lieutenant. The fifth was bareheaded, his hands tied behind his back with telephone wire. The wire was new and black, smelling of rubber and machine oil. The condemned man kept scuffing his boots through the dry feather grass, as if trying to memorize its rustle.

“Stop,” the lieutenant said.

They halted at the tower’s concrete base. It looked too tall for this empty land. Steel latticework vanished into the clouds, and a horn loudspeaker swayed at the top. News bulletins sometimes came through it, and then the whole aul gathered around its only radio: women clutched their headscarves, old men stared at the floor, and children learned not to ask questions.

No one else was at the tower that day.

The lieutenant took out a papirosa—a thin Soviet cigarette—lit one for himself, then placed another between the prisoner’s lips. The man did not thank him. His name was Tulegen, but it had been misspelled on the charge sheet. He was going to die under that misspelled name.

“Any last words?” the lieutenant asked.

“For whom?”

One soldier gave a nervous snort. Another turned away toward the steppe.

The lieutenant pulled the cigarette from Tulegen’s mouth and threw 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 in the back, and for an instant he thought it was already the bullet.

The lieutenant unfolded the paper.

The words about treason, sabotage, and ties to the enemy sounded hollow. The wind carried them off at once. Tulegen was not listening to the charges. He was listening to the horn above. For the past three nights, he had heard whispers through it, though no power was being supplied to the tower. The whispers repeated the voices of people from the aul—their pleas, fears, and prayers. Sometimes the horn spoke in the voice of his dead brother.

“Firing squad—ready!” the lieutenant ordered.

The rifle bolts clicked almost in unison.

Tulegen breathed in the smell of cold earth.

“Aim!”

The rifles rose. Three muzzles leveled at 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 a burst of static. Then a firm voice, familiar to every one of them, announced:

“From the Soviet Information Bureau…”

The soldiers froze. The lieutenant looked up.

The voice cut out. A thin, piercing tone stretched from the horn. It was higher than a human scream and deeper than the drone of an aircraft. It slipped beneath Tulegen’s skin, traveled up his spine and lodged deep inside his head, as if it had found the place where his thoughts were born.

Inside that 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 fell.

The order to fire never came.

Tulegen waited. One second. Two. Ten.

He opened his eyes and slowly turned around.

There was no one behind him.

Three rifles remained on the ground. They lay neatly, as if the soldiers had placed them there with care before disappearing. The lieutenant’s cigarette smoldered nearby. The wind stirred the charge sheet but could not turn it over.

Tulegen backed away. He wanted to run, but he could not tear his eyes from the horn.

The lieutenant’s voice came from it, quiet and 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. The farther he ran, the more clearly he heard a chime that did not yet exist: the brief, cheerful notification of a new message.

PART ONE — NO SIGNAL

Chapter 1. Glitch

Almaty, 2036.

The city ran on algorithmic schedules. Business-district facades changed their ads to match the expressions of passersby; driverless buses glided between streams of people; courier drones hummed overhead in designated flight corridors. The mountains were reflected in the glass facade of the high-rise Nomad-Link business center—the only thing no one had yet learned to personalize.

Thirty-five-year-old Yernar sat on the forty-second floor, surrounded by transparent screens. On one, a map of the country pulsed with green dots showing network availability. On another, the security system flagged anomalous requests. On a third, the corporate assistant ZHYLTYR confidently explained that there was no threat.

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

ZHYLTYR replied at once in a soothing voice:

“Your skepticism improves decision quality.”

“Exactly.”

A colleague in the next pod raised an eyebrow.

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

“Someone has to remind it where it belongs.”

“Does it know where you belong?”

Yernar did not answer. A name flashed on his personal screen: AZHESHKA.

He smiled before he noticed himself doing it and accepted the video call.

The camera showed a low-ceilinged room with whitewashed walls. Evening light trembled behind a lace curtain. Kulzhan-apa sat at the table, holding the phone far too close to her face.

“Balam—my boy—you’re too thin again,” she said instead of hello.

“It’s the wide-angle lens.”

“The camera isn’t feeding you.”

“We get free food at the office.”

“Anything free comes without a soul.”

She laughed. So did Yernar. For a few seconds he was not a cybersecurity specialist, not a man who saw a vulnerability in every system, but the boy who had been sent from the aul to study in the city.

“When are you and Aigerim finally coming?” his grandmother asked. “Will I at least see the two of you somewhere other than a screen before the wedding? Or has she figured out how stubborn you are and run away?”

“The wedding’s in a month.”

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

The connection stuttered. Kulzhan-apa’s face broke into squares, then assembled itself again.

“See?” she said. “The tower’s acting up again. One minute we have a connection, the next we don’t. Yesterday the shop wouldn’t sell me bread without the network. The clerk says, ‘The register doesn’t know the price.’ I tell him, ‘I know the price.’ He says, ‘The system doesn’t.’ Now the system matters more than a grandmother.”

“I’ll check it remotely.”

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

Something moved behind her.

Yernar stopped smiling.

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

The lieutenant. Three soldiers behind him. Gray greatcoats, side caps, rifles. The image was black and white, yet it overlaid the full color of his grandmother’s room without the slightest transparency.

“Azhe,” Yernar said quietly, using the Kazakh word for grandmother. “Who’s there with you?”

Kulzhan-apa smiled as though she had not heard.

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

“Azhe, turn around.”

“What is it, balam?”

The three soldiers raised their rifles.

Yernar shot to his feet. His chair flew into the partition.

“AZHE!”

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 fell on its side. Her motionless hand remained on-screen.

The connection dropped.

Yernar stood among his frozen colleagues, pressing his palm against the empty air where his grandmother’s face had been a second earlier.

Then the phone rang again.

The screen read: AZHESHKA.