Reform

The authorities seized his hours from the population and banned the calendar. This is a new story by Dmitry Glukhovsky

- It looks good like, huh? Fresh, - Inna sighed.

- Maybe the record? They usually write in advance, on the telly it is called “conservatives” - Tanya shared with knowledge.

The flat TV slightly glanced: the screen knocked with plastic crystal of a chandelier, thick with mayonnaise salads, cellulite mandarins from a “penny”, prickly golden tinsel. As if the black rectangular ice hole managed to drag on a thin layer of ice - and mirror everything from this side. And on the other hand there was an abyss. And in this abyss, a hail of kitezh, made of red with white brick and chervon gold, was drowned, and there was circling unhealthy snow - slow and solemn, under water impossible, and therefore, probably, not snow at all, but a plankton who was heading over a million years; And there stood a graying but not gray-haired man with cheeks-crushed apples in a black baggy coat, and affectionately, like a doctor on a sentenced patient, looked from this deep eternity at the fussy creatures on this side of the ice film.

- Previously, at least the chimes could be checked. And now what? - sniffed Matvey.

Before the reform on the chimes, there were arrows, but then they were removed one night, and only Roman figures remained, in which the Russian person saw the obsessive letters U, X and I in different combinations.

And without arrows, the chimes became like either a steamed wheel frozen on a half -land in a lantern beam, not on the eclipse sun, eaten with a black shadow in a fiery crown.

“Yes, even if I had a shit,” Andrei said categorically, prayed, looked at the rest of the guests and clarified, “at the chimes.”

A man in a black coat held a glass of champagne in his hand. In the pale yellow glass, if you look closely, tiny bubbles walked up, why Matvey had a glass seemed to the upper flask of sand watch. Phantom pains, he grinned invisibly to himself: who about what, and all about the bathhouse.

Matvey had a good job before the reform. On Kutuzovsky Prospekt there were three hourly pawnshops, where people, at first healed unexpectedly for themselves too well and therefore wanted to always have evidence of the authenticity of this miracle, and then healed badly and forced evidence to melt back into money, handed over their Swiss watches with and without turbines. There were a lot of such people along Kutuzovsky Prospekt, it was there that some important transport artery ran on the topographic map of their fate. Matvey worked in one of these pawnshops and was there in good account.

He had to accept the clock, evaluate and underestimate them, establish rheumatic turbiions and start their move again, so that, then, having re -evaluated the mechanisms again, to hand them to the next generation of the owners of life, who had just entered their shift and therefore were ready to be content with other people's hours from the commission.

As a result of natural selection and reduction of the resource base

The owners of life became less and less, but new ones came to this world with the same appetites and behavioral cliches that the previous ones, so trade did not subside.

Some were regularly ruined and, before contacting the planktonic Kroshevo, handed over their self -warmed regalia to the moneylenders, perhaps as a matter of the idea that the turbions would spin and things will still be advocated. However, the course of time and the laws of evolution attached to it were inexorable, and no one came at their hours.

But others came - for strangers.

Looking around with a ceremony, sniffing in shakali, they pretended to be beneficial and tried to bargain for each of the trace of the previous human being left on the expensive Swiss mechanism, for each evidence that the innocence of these watches went to another that they considered the seconds of someone else's existence. It was as if it could somehow discredit them!

The era of raw materials raiders left, the era of budget parasites went away, the era of sibarite oprichniki came,

The eras were keen in his eyes, but Matvey believed in the future: after the guardsmen, other sibrits would have come for the guardsmen, in Russia, Siberism and the need to prove to themselves the authenticity of the miracle remained unshakable and would continue to be all-conquered, experiencing the change of signs on the facade of the empire and icons in bureaucouscys.

And here is the reform.

It cannot be said that she completely struck like a thunder in the middle of a clear sky, in a sense, it went to her, and, be Matvey with a slightly less optimist, or if he were a little less enthusiastic about his business, so to speak, often taking his eyes off in a monocular from the spinning of the clock gears and directed him to the mechanisms that control the Russian macromic, he would have time to notice that he would have time to notice The giant gears of this world slow down with a rattle, and would have managed to sit down, like colleagues from two other time pawnshops, retraining in time in jewelry users, the benefit of jewelry in Russia was not yet forbidden and needed to change their fingers and neck in the same way as the clock in the replacement of the wrists.

The paradigms were not replaced by the people at all: one day they spent the reform through both wards of the Federal Assembly, and immediately rushed through the streets of the UAZ of the color of the summer night with red stripes, people in balaclavs and epaulettes rained down, unanimously rang door calls in all time shops, workshops and pawnshops, and did not manage to have dealers, and did not manage to manage the rasters, and the Rostov workers and the Rostov workers and the Rostov workers and the Rostov workers and the Rostov workers and the Rostov workers, Simple watchmakers gasp, as it was over. The entire unrealized clock fund was seized in favor of the state, and the state has already disposed of it at its discretion; Apparently, it turned exactly the same into an invaluity and according to her habits fed the poor.

The rest were given a week to get rid of any hours, both mechanical and electronic, and collected them in special tanks that were installed at each metro station.

For a week, everyone who did not have time to dispose of the clock in the first month threatened the administrative, and then the criminal, and there was even a couple of high -profile processes -

One against the opposition activist, and the other against the fencing embezzle, who not only the stubborn desire to harm the homeland suddenly put on one board, but also a stubborn unwillingness to abandon the useless obsolete habit, which, in fact, was simply inertia, and which other people easily neglected.

They forgot seconds, they forgot minutes, and even the watches were forgotten, although they were still trying to guess them by the position of the sun in the sky, and then they simply began to speak-at noon, in the morning, in the evening; Yes, only in the winter it is difficult to distinguish from the evening in the evening, so it’s easier to say - “then” and “then”.

And this easily took root, successfully - laying the path of the next part of the reform; Namely, the abolition of the calendar.

Some remnants remained nostalgic, like a television congratulations on the New Year, according to which these new years could still be considered; But there was a flip side, therefore, Tanya gossiped, and there were not many these congratulations left ahead: they planned to cancel them too. They were still snags on the living fabric of the great time, which even to think was blasphemous.

“I still don’t understand whether it was so necessary,” Matvey sniffed his nose, wiping his glasses with a holey handkerchief.

“As if it was younger,” Inna sighed.