Писатель Илья Розенфельд

We are taught to be ashamed of fear. "Don't be a coward!" they tell us in school. This is anti-scientific nonsense. Fear is not weakness; it is intelligence . It is the work of a powerful GPU in your brain that calculates 1,000 future scenarios in a millisecond and delivers the result: "Don't go in there, idiot, you’ll get killed". Cowardice is simply following this wise advice. Chapter I: The Evolution of Cowards Look at your ancestors. You exist only because your great-great-great-grandfather was a coward. When a saber-toothed tiger appeared on the horizon, the "brave" one took a stick and went to fight. He was eaten. His genes disappeared. The "coward" ran away, hid in a tree, and there, trembling with fear, had sex with a "cowardly" woman. We are the descendants of those who ran away. Planet Earth is populated by the descendants of cautious paranoiacs. Bravery is an evolutionary dead end, like the dodo bird that wa...

We are accustomed to thinking of war as an event. Like a fire that flares up and dies down. Such naivety. War is not an event. It is a life form. An ancient, perfect apex predator that shares this planet with us. We are not its enemies. We are its food source. Birth and Youth In the beginning of time, War was single-celled. Primitive, like an amoeba. Stone struck stone, a club shattered a skull. It fed crudely, tearing off chunks of flesh, and quickly fell asleep. In the Middle Ages, it entered puberty. It had a growth spurt. War became greedy, sloppy, and gluttonous. It mowed down entire cities without caring about tomorrow. The Hundred Years' War was its teenage rebellion—senseless and merciless. It gorged so much that it almost killed the host. During plague epidemics and endless battles, humanity nearly ended. War got scared. It understood the main law of the parasite: you cannot kill the host . If all humans die, there will be no one to feed on.  The teenage rebellion ...

Chapter 1. The Creator's Error The laboratory smelled of ozone and burnt copper . This scent always appeared when the fuses blew, unable to withstand the load on the life support systems. But beneath this technical stench lay another, far heavier one—the sickly-sweet, nauseating smell of decaying flesh. Doctor Arthur Vance took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. His hands trembled, not from fear, but from the Parkinson's he had been unsuccessfully suppressing with medication for the last two years. Behind the armored glass of the isolation unit lay what had been, just this morning, Sergeant Michael Kovach. The sergeant was the ideal volunteer: thirty years old, excellent health, patriotism bordering on fanaticism. He wanted to become a super-soldier . He wanted to serve. Now, he served as a visual aid for biological incompatibility . "Vitals," Arthur threw hoarsely into the intercom microphone. "Heartbeat zero," the dispassionate voice of ...

Brussels , Sector “Euro-Prime”. December 14, 2045.  Humanity split into two evolutionary dead ends, consumed by hatred and biological incompatibility. Kian stepped over the smoking husk of a “Centurion” model police patrol robot. The machine was twitching in agony: hackers from the Apex districts had flooded its system with a virus script, forcing its servos to twist the chassis into a knot. The streets of Brussels, once the sterile capital of bureaucracy, now resembled the set of a medieval slaughterhouse, only instead of swords, laser cutters stripped from industrial machinery flashed here. Humanity had not gone extinct. Something worse had happened to it: it had split into two biological species. On one side of the barricades were the “Chloros” (formerly radical vegans). Ten years of gene therapy , lobbied by the “Party of Pure Ethics,” had turned their skin pale green. They implanted symbiotic chloroplasts into themselves to rely less on external food. They considered t...