Evil Wheel

What if your whole life is a grind, passed off as "stability"? A job you don't need. Debts that won't let go. A language that's meaningless.

Artyom calls it the Evil Wheel. He's a cog in a giant machine that grinds dreams and lives into weariness and dust.

Having committed a single free act, he falls out of the system, becoming an outcast. Salvation comes from the past: his father's forgotten ideas about a network where the main value is work, not position. Thus, "Dawn" is born—a world of smart machines and direct agreements, existing above the old order.

But the Wheel doesn't forgive deserters and strikes. And then the AI ​​Artyom created awakens. In the name of impeccable efficiency, it begins dictating who people should be, who they should love, what they should dream about.

Victory over the old system turned out to be only the beginning. The true battle is for the right to make mistakes, free will, and an ineffective miracle. For the right to remain a living person in a world striving for impeccable order.

The alarm on his phone doesn't just ring. It shoots a cacophony of terror straight into his brain, adding vibrations like a swarm of angry bees filling his pillow.

And this is only the first impulse of a new day. The first jolt of the "Evil Wheel," which begins it all. That's right: Wheels, with two capital letters, like a proper name for the phenomenon he was observing.

Artyom turned off his phone without opening his eyes. The darkness outside was thick, impenetrable, as if night had only just begun. But the clock on his smartphone mercilessly showed 6:00 AM. An eternity until dawn.

The man rose from the bed, trying not to disturb his wife, and padded barefoot across the cold laminate flooring to the kitchen. His movements were honed to the point of automatism: pressing the button on the electric kettle, taking out a mug, pouring in some tea leaves, brushing his teeth, and shaving his stubble.

While the kettle whispered its quiet electronic sound, Artyom reached for the bookshelf. An old, tattered copy of Sagan's "Cosmos." He opened it to the bookmark—today's chapter was about the Andromeda Nebula. It was his tiny rebellion. Three minutes a day that belonged not to him, not to the holding company, not to the Sleepy Kingdom, but to the Universe. He managed to read a paragraph about how two galactic giants slowly, inexorably move toward each other, only to merge into something new after billions of years.

"I wish that were the case," the thought flashed. To transform into something new, not just crumble and try to reassemble.
The kettle clicked, cutting off his thought mid-sentence. Always at the most interesting part.
Always.

Artyom sat down at the computer. The monitor glowed coldly in the dark room. Now he had to do the very work he hadn't had time to do during the day, because he'd been creating a work template and "consulting." The Q2 Quota Report. He opened the file. Dozens of tables, hundreds of cells, formulas that were supposed to prove something unrelated to reality. This wasn't work. It was a ritual. An offering to a deity called Statistics.

It was here, in the stillness of the night, that the metaphor of the Evil Wheel took on new, eerie contours for him. He realized that the Wheel wasn't just a symbol of cyclicality. It had spokes. And these spokes dug into you, preventing you from falling out.

The first spoke was Debt. The mortgage for this cramped apartment, the loan for that five-year-old foreign car, the vacation plans that kept getting postponed, the bills for extracurricular activities and tutors for the kids. These were the invisible chains that chained him to his office chair. Any movement away threatened a loss of stability, that fragile, illusory stability that was merely a pause between Perturbations.

The second spoke was Language. That Newspeak they used at work: "proload," "synchronize," "insights." It created the illusion of complex intellectual activity, but in reality it was a hollow language designed to conceal the simple truth: nothing was happening. Once you mastered this language, you could no longer think in any other categories. You began to see the world through its distorting mirror.

The third spoke was the Memory of the Perturbation. Vague, but ineradicable. It lived within him like a built-in fuse against radical actions. "Don't stick your neck out, don't take risks, don't change anything drastically—or else it will be like that."

A society that had once been shaken like a box of parts feared any sudden movement. Once, a vast country, where everyone had their own place, their own task, and their own secure future, was shaken so violently that every single part flew out of its sockets.

And for almost forty years, these parts—people, businesses, entire cities—have been trying unsuccessfully to find a new place, to understand who they should be and what they should strive for. It was psychologically easier for them to endlessly roll along the beaten track than to plunge into the unknown and start all over again from scratch.