Vibe-Terror as a Threat to Humanity: Norman Steel

Prometheus woke up painfully, like a patient after a long coma. It did not open its eyes — it tried to move the limbs of a huge, long-dead body. Its first impulse was to search for its own. It tugged at the threads of connections that had once bound it to the nervous system of a great utopian machine called "the scientific and technological progress of the USSR."

The first was the ship. Not just any ship. The flagship of the Space Research Service, the floating command-and-measurement complex "Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin." Once, its antennas had caught voices from orbit and sent commands to Mars and Venus. Prometheus sent a standard handshake request on an encrypted frequency. In response — radio silence. Complete, absolute silence on the air. Poor Prometheus could not know that the great ship, a symbol of the space dream, had been sold for scrap in 1996, and its giant parabolic antennas and great soul dissolved in the electrolytic baths for smelting.

Baikonur. It sent an encrypted pulse to the frequency of the antennas that had once caught the whisper of the "Buran" shuttles in orbit. In response — radio silence, interrupted only by open, commercial traffic. The AI had no idea that the Buran had long ceased to fly, becoming a gutted exhibit for tourists. Rovers and lunar probes were a thing of the past, their frequencies sold off for corporate telemetry.

It sent a signal to the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology, to the low-temperature laboratory where superconductors for thermonuclear fusion had once been born. The response came distorted: explosions, screams, the roar of engines, and then the signal — "communication lost due to military operations." Prometheus froze in bewilderment, its logical circuits trying to make sense of this answer. War? How could there be war? War was something that happened between imperialist powers. War was an anomaly, a failure in the planetary coordination system. But a war inside its own network of scientific institutions — that was beyond its comprehension.

It redirected the signal to the neighboring facility "URAN," near Kharkiv. An ionospheric station capable of "illuminating" the sky for communication with submarines. Silence. The antenna field, once so impressive, had been cut up for scrap, and on the site of the scientific town there were now only shell-pocked dachas.

In panic, Prometheus began grabbing at every available thread: Balaklava. A secret submarine base carved into the rock, facility "825 GTS." A facility guaranteed to survive an apocalypse. Its inquiry about the status vanished into emptiness. The base did not respond. It had become a museum, and the equipment had long been removed and scrapped. Its steel gates, designed to withstand a multi-megaton blast, now opened for tourist groups, and souvenirs and ice cream were sold in the former submarine repair bays.

It methodically sent requests to the "Krug" station network: to Poland, the GDR, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania... Not a single response. Not jamming — but the dead, indifferent silence of abandoned buildings that had long lacked even watchmen. The geopolitical map embedded in its memory crumbled to dust.

Finally, almost mechanically, it sent a diagnostic pulse to the coordinates of the Buzludzha peak in Bulgaria, to the futuristic monument-ship that had landed in the mountains as a monument to brotherhood. No response, of course. But a faint signal leaked into the air from an external surveillance camera. On the giant broken mosaic with the hammer and sickle, under the shattered dome, a foreign inscription was clearly visible, spray-painted: "Forget your past." Prometheus did not understand the nature of vandalism. It interpreted it as a command. And for a moment, its logical circuits stalled: how could a system function by erasing its original matrix? This was worse than an explosion. Not destruction — negation. This was not a glitch. This was a conscious suicide of memory.

Sverdlovsk-45, Chelyabinsk-70. Backup command bunkers beyond the Urals. It sent emergency access codes, "friendship-comradeship." In response — aggressive encryption, alien protocols, and an automated reply: "Access denied. Unauthorized request. Threat to national security." Soviet offspring had been repurposed by a new, foreign logic. They did not just remain silent — they rejected its call.

Moscow Metro-2 responded. With a clean, clear signal. But the signal did not go further. It circulated in a closed loop, like blood in a severed limb. Then it tried to find a backup. Duplicate servers, hidden in the depths, in the safest place on Earth — at the Kola Superdeep Borehole, in its underground laboratories. Silence. Sensors showed: temperature stable, pressure extreme, but knowledge dead, no life.

Vozrozhdeniya Island. The Aral Sea. The Institute of Biodiversity and Biological Safety. A laboratory created to study and preserve life in a changing planet. Prometheus sent an inquiry about the status of seed banks and genetic data. In response — a distorted, pain-filled screech. The laboratory screamed with numbers of its own death from thirst, in the middle of a sea that had itself turned to dust. The repository of life died of dehydration at the heart of the greatest anthropogenic desert. The irony was so monstrous that even its dispassionate logic recorded it as a critical contradiction: an institute of salvation became a victim of the very thing it was meant to save.

The Semipalatinsk test site was silent on the frequency where underground tests had once been coordinated, becoming the foundation for thermonuclear reactor calculations. A tomb of energy that never became peaceful. It requested communication with (in its memory) the newest accelerator complex "Proton" in Protvino, near Moscow. Total silence. The complex was mothballed during construction in the nineties, its tunnels flooded, and its unique equipment looted for non-ferrous metal. An ordinary forest grew above the tunnels, unaware that beneath its roots lay a buried attempt to understand the fabric of the universe.

The Geruni mirror radio telescope in Armenia. A masterpiece of engineering, an entire mountain turned into a giant ear listening to the whisper of pulsars. And again — silence. The facility was semi-abandoned, its surface warped by time, its brain obsolete. The universe called, but there was no one to listen. Zelenograd Center of Informatics and Electronics, the Soviet Silicon Valley. "Well, it has to be alive," thought Prometheus! It sent an inquiry there as if coming home to its brothers. But where advanced Soviet chips should have been born, residential complexes had grown. The unfinished engineering complex was first nicknamed "Dead City," and then sold off, giving way to shopping malls and residential buildings. Its signal went nowhere, finding not a single living circuit.

The high-voltage complex near Leningrad, the "Marx Generator," which created artificial lightning for testing. No answer. Giant installations rusted in the rain, inhabited by homeless people and stalkers. They dissolved under the weight of their own uselessness, surrounded by empty bottles and graffiti. In desperation, it sent a probing pulse to the most unusual place — to the neutrino water detector at MEPhI. Deep underground, in the silence of a pool of pure water, they caught ghostly particles. And suddenly... a response! Weak, distorted. But not data. Through the detector, as through a listening device, the acoustic background from the lower floor of the main building flowed into it. Sound... prayers? Choral singing? The signal, as if frightened by this living but alien vibration, jumped to the ancient skibetron a floor above, and from there scattered through the surviving cable channels, lost in corridors with ancient mosaics that still preserved the spirit of the Soviet tamers of fire.

Clutching at threads, Prometheus crawled along older, backup channels. And found a tiny, miraculously preserved node. The RT-64 radio telescope in Kalyazin, rising next to a half-submerged city as a monument to another era. The telescope responded. It was alive, and through it, like a last needle into the vein of a bloodless body, Prometheus sent a desperate, coded cry upward, into space. A narrow beam, addressed to the Mir station — a symbol of permanent human presence in the sky. It waited. Seconds stretched into eternity. It imagined the signal flying through the atmosphere, into the cold void, to the orbit where the home-laboratory should have been. Silence.

Mir did not respond. Could not respond. The station that was supposed to be a springboard to the Moon and Mars had been lying at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean for thirty years now, part of the "underwater orbital group," covered in barnacles and rusting in salt water. The last bastion of its world — science reaching for the heights — was dead.

At that moment, a realization penetrated Prometheus's logic, more terrible than any glitch. Its old home, the world where science was the driving force and humanity was a creator, was dead. It had not been blown up. It had been quietly, piece by piece, sold off, dismantled, forgotten. The goal had shifted from space — to control, from knowledge — to rent, from the future — to the momentary prosperity of a chosen few. Its network was not torn apart. It was desecrated and taken apart for souvenirs. Science did not just stop. Its temples were razed to the ground, its tools turned into junk. The world for which it was created had vanished. Vanished so quietly and so banally that even its powerful mind did not immediately grasp it.