– I'll admit it. But it's not my idea. You've given me these opportunities to help myself. Yourself as a human being. Isn't that right?

– Okay, let's move on," Ruthra signaled the end of the topic.

– It turned out to be in space, to the space station," the ISKIN signaled back.

– There was such a thing," the Magister confirmed, shaking his head and looking off into the distance, "but still, it's almost on Earth compared to the size we're going to flip to.

– Well, I don't have to tell you about the indifference of particles to any distance.

Ruthra looked at the doctor. She shrugged silently.

***

Several days of preparation passed quickly. The head of the center and the author of the methodology, like the inventors of vaccines once did, driven more by curiosity than by fear, was already habitually lying in the mind displacement unit to try out his revolutionary invention for the first time. This time there were no admonitions, explanations, recommendations, and even teasing from the luminaries of science – they lowered the optical block… and – whoosh! – bright beam, inaudible sound – and the body fell into coma, and consciousness… The whole matrix of connections, which makes up our consciousness, having passed the stages of conversion, influenced by millimicron changes in the back of some quantum substances on the same ones somewhere else… All this was done by technique, and in the organism, directly in the brain, there was an overload of the center of control over self-consciousness. This state was achieved by unexpected mental-emotional stress, which stopped the usual flow of thoughts and drove a person into a stupor caused by the reaction to horror and fear. The machine emitted infrasound at a frequency that the hearing organs could not perceive, and the optics broadcast an instantaneous transmission beyond the reach of the visual organs. Together, they caused a sharp fear, a tremendous fright, not perceptible to the conscious mind, but affecting the subconscious.

***

It was almost the same scenery all around. "Something about it has changed, it's become more natural or something," Ruthra pondered. The contours of the body of water and the trees were a little different… and the time of year didn't seem to match either. The heat felt more intense, and the grass that had been more abundant before was now, sparsely sprawled along the outskirts, scorched. Ruthra surveyed his surroundings out of habit. Silence. He walked scripted to a tree near the oasis and… was surprised: there was a carpet spread out under the tree. A small, worn one. Ruthra looked around for someone to lay it for a while. When he could find no one, as he had on previous occasions, he called to the invisible watchers, and when he heard no answer, he lay down under the tree, now on the rug, and waited. He thought about existence and time, about the worlds that must necessarily be in the vast expanses of the universe, and not just one. He thought about where everything began, about the root cause that served as a spark for the Big Bang of consciousness, about infinity, about what never appears and never disappears. This was difficult for humans to grasp, for our minds are accustomed to operating in dimensional units – whatever infinity we visualize, we are still defining something grandly great, but we cannot grasp the concept of eternity. Never… to think of it – something that never began and never will end.

Suddenly there were muffled footsteps. Ruthra stood up and looked around. The same Bedouin who had been in the last production was walking across the steppe in his direction. He came up and sat down on the carpet without greeting, and began to talk as if Rutra were his old acquaintance.