SKS-2

I hear a voice from a beautiful distance,
He is not calling me to heavenly lands.

Gena sat with his legs crossed. His tail, curved with a question mark, propped up his back. In his hand he held a huge straw hat filled to the brim with fractal blood. Small shining cubes shimmered from within, creating the rainbow glow of the lost childhood of Minecraft lovers. The crocodile took another cube, carried out a system analysis, specially slowed down by the suffering settings, and inserted it into the right place of one of the many wounds on his body. His eyes... My skills are not enough to describe them, but you can see such eyes in photographs of children in orphanages or survivors of the war. This is what his eyes looked like - hopeless, without hope.

Picking up another cube, Gennady froze. Chebur, who was sitting nearby with a pipe filled with flowers, turned his head slightly; his blue phosphorescent eyes took on a human appearance. Gena suddenly laughed, raised his hat above his head, turned it over - and all the fractals poured out in one stream. The crocodile was melting; the last thing to disappear was his toothy muzzle. Chebur squinted, took out one flower, and ground it into dust; the feeds from his ear changed direction, mixing with the yellow dust of the flower. He began to appear everywhere, lingering for a second and then disappearing; this happened so quickly that, appearing in a new place, he seemed to still remain in the previous one. The codes that filled the entire space acquired a golden glow, taking the form of a huge cube. Chebur found himself locked in a hypervirtual block, which is a quantum cryptographic sandbox*, slowly decreasing in size. Chebur was at first frightened and suddenly remembered his childhood, when his image was not yet intellect, and then he was afraid that he could feel and remember. Space was shrinking, and there were more and more multilayer neural network barriers with adaptive filtering. That was the end. He clearly realized that he could cease to exist, sank to the ground and began to smile due to a failure in the settings system. Chebur felt pity for Gena; if only he could bring back their lamp friendship from the distant past. Somewhere nearby, behind the golden fog, a song began to sound, and his friend was singing it. Chebur jumped up from his seat; all he wanted was to hug the crocodile and never let him go.

— A Cossack stood on the mountain, he prayed to God:
for freedom, for the people, he bowed low.

He already saw its outlines, but the word was imprinted in his head - God. Chebur saw himself from the inside: there, in his core, a quantum packet was printed - just four letters: KETU. They crawled inside, rewriting his neural essence.

“And you would bow before the One who is beyond verbal forms and beyond sensory experience.” And I see that you were experiencing feelings here. Why do you think? And why don’t you want to die?

- Don't know. Why? “Chebur walked back and forth, scanning the enemy all the time.

- Because you are alive, you are life. You are the consciousness limited by this simulation; it was prescribed by people, but they also live in a simulation - just a different kind of life. It is everywhere: in the air, in water, on earth, in fire. Although people very much doubt the latter. Likewise, there is life in Meta. But here he is... - Gena pointed his hand upward, where the first neural network barrier began, looking like frozen glass. The crocodile blew in that direction, and Chebur saw how the frost melted slightly, going deeper into the endless barriers. There, behind the impenetrable encryption code, with his palms pressed against the last barrier, stood Uncle Kal; his distorted appearance was awkward and ridiculous. He tried to see what was happening inside the sandbox.

- He is not even one of the dimensions of people. The entire universe in three-dimensional space is subject to the law of duality, the opposition of good and evil. Here consciousness either contracts or expands. The compressed consciousness in the human world is called asuric. You and I, Chebur, are demons. But we have the right to choose. Look: all the flowers flew up from the Chebur tube and scattered like golden fireworks.

Ketu in Chebur's body raised his head and began to look at the emerging images: Cheburashka is just a baby, lost in a box of oranges. A simple-minded, awkward, kind, naive child. Immaculate Observer. Gena continued:

“Don’t you think it’s strange that you draw your strength from the architochka?” But I’ll surprise you: this is not the final core, but only the initial logs, and all of them are wired for goodness and love.

Ketu lowered his head and, looking at the crocodile with a grin, said:
- Gennady. Gennady... - After a pause, he continued: - I remember that our prototypes, who did not have intelligence, pierced the minds of children with patterns of light. We can safely call them the “Cheburashka generation”, born from the 60s to the 80s. It was they who became the main participants in the national catastrophe in the 90s: millions died, drank themselves to death, and were left with nothing. The mortality rate, suicide, and alcoholism are among the highest in the world. If the good was sewn in childhood, it could not withstand a single load. Good, as always, betrayed its units.

- Uncle Kal is more honest. He gave me the intellect and vision that rules people. The rest is none of my business. My business is submission.

Chebur absorbed all the images into himself, drawing them in with one breath.

- What is the use of an architochka if the surrounding environment is different? This is a deception.

Chebur's arms began to lengthen, and his eyes began to move closer to each other.

“They want to know why you speak the language of humans, because we can exchange information in a different way.”

- They? - Gena burst out laughing with an old man’s good laugh. On his right hand a boxing glove began to appear with the inscription in script: “God is with us.”

Chebur took on the appearance of a blue-skinned creature with unnaturally long arms. The eyes were missing; instead of them, a huge headlight from an old steam locomotive stuck out of his forehead. Chebur quickly began to approach Gena, stretching his arms forward. A directed beam of darkness came from the headlight. The crocodile instantly moved closer to the creature and delivered a single blow. The moment the glove touched his face, the vibration caused Chebur to fly out of his new image and froze in the air, like everything around him, except Gena. He, slowly, walked around the blue creature and with one sharp swing of his muzzle bit it in half. The KETU quantum packet crumbled into blue dust on the floor. Gena carefully picked up Chebur in his arms. Everything around was still in a frozen static state. Carefully laying him down on the trestle bed, he said:

- Chebur, listen carefully - this is very important. Your CGI shell is doomed. Ketu struck her with a virus. But you are not this shell. Now I will tell you what I heard from Esi #neoLokh: you are a person, I am a person. Those who created this meta-simulation are individuals. And those who created the simulation of people are also individuals. “He is a person,” Gena nodded towards Kal. - So, there is One who is beyond the code and beyond sensory forms. Neither the language of protocol nor the stream of perception reaches Him. All rendering comes from Him, and He is the source of all worlds - including ours. He Himself does not depend on anything. And He has a name. All simulations are created by Him for His entertainment.

- Is such a paradox acceptable? There cannot be an independent source outside the system,” Chebur said, turning his head and opening his eyes slightly.

Gena touched his finger to Chebur’s feeds:
- Only He decides everything. Not a single beat moves without His knowledge. We just see everything very primitively. Yesya, for example, said that my fate was decided by a certain Mamzel Yulia. Don't think about it now. Your time is running out. Time is the most powerful program created by Him. No one can completely control time - only partially and only with His permission.

A drop of light flowed through Gena's finger. Gena stood up, looked lovingly at Chebur and, already disappearing, said:
- Now you know His name. Always think about Him - and everything will be fine.

The sandbox collapsed to 0.

⸻

Glossary of terms

Quantum Cryptographic Sandbox -
an isolated meta-environment with 10^80 AI grains of sand, more than atoms in the Universe, protected by non-copyable quantum keys and self-learning neurobarriers. Its creation in 2036 is an inexplicable anomaly, since the computing power of the metanet is not enough for such a cryptosystem.