One Percent of the Future

My name is Maximilian Veresk, for friends—Max. I’m an engineer of urban voices: I fine-tune the intonations of the announcements with which the Republic lulls its residents—to keep them from panicking, asking unnecessary questions, and staying within the lines. I always thought I was the most ordinary person: a little timid, too dreamy, and definitely not made for coups. But after the explosion in a café, the resistance kidnaps me and calls me by a different name—Max Nolevik. A terrorist. A symbol. Someone who knows how to break the system’s calculations.

The trouble is, I don’t remember it.

Now the state is hunting me. The people who took me also don’t inspire trust, and in my mind I keep seeing flashes of someone else’s skills, access codes, and fragments of memory. At the very heart of the city stands the Zaslon (“Barricade”)—a mechanism that has learned to anticipate the future. And if tomorrow still has even a crumb of freedom left, maybe it’s me who will have to hold on to it. Even if I still don’t understand who I really am: a poet, a traitor, a weapon—or a glitch that the world simply hasn’t had time to eliminate yet.