GAS

Chapter 1. Inventory of Shadows

§ 1.1. The Underside of the Mirror

At six in the morning, the Upper Chamber was not yet fully lit. The artificial dawn was only beginning to rise through the levels, like a command moving through the system with a delay of several seconds. First, warmth filled the distant cornices; then the outlines of the doors softly emerged; then golden light settled over the carpets, the heavy drapes, and the lacquered surfaces, as though checking that everything was still in place. At this hour, the residence seemed especially honest. Night had already withdrawn, and the day’s performance had not yet begun. That was why I preferred making my rounds of the Upper Chamber early. Morning does not know how to pretend as well as evening.

I walked down the main corridor alone. The carpet pile swallowed my footsteps until they vanished completely, as though what lay beneath my soles were not a floor but dense fabric stretched over emptiness. The air was cool and dry. The automation maintained the same temperature with a precision worthy of an operating room. Hidden diffusers released a faint scent of amber, wood, and something else—barely perceptible, medicinal. The smell created an impression of stability. This is what order smells like when it has been polished for long enough and maintained at great expense.

Doors, panels, niches, and decorative inlays extended along both sides, concealing sensors, locks, filters, power lines, and backup circuits. The Upper Chamber liked to pass for a palace, but in essence it was a machine. Simply a very expensive machine upholstered in silk and rare woods. Sooner or later, every luxury becomes packaging for fear. Here, that rule was observed with almost religious precision.

Two men from the new shift stood outside the doors to the main bedroom. They straightened the moment they saw me and bowed their heads almost in unison. The drowsy viscosity of this place had not yet had time to settle over their faces. People who spent many hours at a stretch in the Upper Chamber began to move more carefully, speak more quietly, and look at objects with the reverence reserved for icons in the provinces. These two were still fresh. Their shift, then, had changed recently.

I did not slow down. The reader beneath the skin at the base of my neck responded with a brief pulse of heat. The doors slid apart without a sound.

The main bedroom greeted me with half-light, silence, and mass. Everything here had been designed not for comfort but to overawe. The high ceiling receded into shadow. A heavy canopy of dark velvet hung above the bed, like a cloud forbidden to move. Drapes the color of deep wine concealed the windows behind an unbroken wall. The furniture was large and substantial, possessed of the excessive dignity found in objects designed to serve not the body but rank. In a room like this, one could not simply sleep. One could only reaffirm one’s status in sleep.

He lay on his back, his head turned slightly away, one arm tossed carelessly across the pillow. Even in stillness, the body retained its habit of occupying space as though that space belonged to it by right. I stepped closer. The air beside the bed was warmer; I felt it against the skin of my wrists and steadied my breathing. The artificial dawn had not yet reached his face in full, but what could already be seen was enough. Swelling beneath the eyes. A slight puffiness of the eyelids. The skin along the jawline had lost its firmness. A shadow of fatigue had appeared at the corners of the mouth, one that could no longer be blamed on the light.

I opened the terminal and entered a brief note, without emotion or comment:

001. Refer to the Alignment Sector.

Priority: high.

Facade correction.

Reason: visible signs of reduced tone.

The message entered the closed circuit of the Directorate of Biological Resonance. By the following morning, everything would be corrected. The shadows would be removed. The color evened out. The tissues restored to the appearance of life. The world must not notice that its leader is aging, even when his own pillow does.

I paused for a second, looking at the face of the man lying there. Not out of pity. In the Upper Chamber, pity was considered a useless luxury. I was merely checking the image against the fact. The official broadcast was still holding together. But biology was already beginning to argue with the myth.

I turned away and headed toward the far wall, where an armored door was concealed between two antique tapestries woven with scenes from some victory or other. Victories always look more convincing on tapestries than they do in documents. The system read my chip again. The mechanism engaged without a sound. A short inner corridor, stripped of all decoration, opened beyond the wall.

There was no velvet here, no carving, no heavy shades of the past. Only light, smooth surfaces, exact seams, matte metal, and sterility. Five doors. Two on the right. Two on the left. One in the center, at the very end. The four side rooms were intended for duplicates. The central room, as was proper, belonged to him.

I headed toward the central door. It opened before I had come all the way up to it.

The room beyond was small. Windowless. Free of decorative lies. The air was dry and almost empty, with a faint trace of ozone from the equipment. A narrow bed in the corner. A desk. Built-in monitors. A small kitchen area. Two armchairs. Not a single painting on the wall, not a single sign of taste, history, or grandeur. Grandeur does not need witnesses where no one can see it.

A man shifted restlessly on the bed. His movements were sharp and broken. Not the waking of a master, but a body coming out of defense. He sat up abruptly, as though surfacing from the depths, and for several seconds simply breathed with his head lowered. I went to the coffee machine and switched it on. A short hiss cut through the silence, followed by a muffled gurgle. I heard this sound every morning. It marked the beginning of the workday better than any anthem.

As the cup filled, I watched him from the corner of my eye. He passed a hand over his face. His fingers were dry and pale, trembling slightly with the morning. Without cameras, without makeup, without lighting, without the distance between himself and his own fear, Mold looked smaller than he did through the official lens. Shorter, leaner, more anxious. There was no grandeur in him. Only the habit of assembling it around himself each day like a uniform.

To the outside world, he was the Monolith. To the system, if viewed honestly, he was the bearer of a function. To himself, I suspected, he had long since become a body under siege.

I placed the cup in front of him. He did not take it at once.

To him, I was a convenient constant. Tall, steady, unerring. A person who did not confuse form with substance, yet knew how to maintain form as though she believed in it. He valued that more than loyalty. Loyalty requires a response. Precision does not.

He took a sip without looking at me and said hoarsely:

“Wake 001-02. I’m tired of him in that bedroom. Have him come out.”

Without a word, I entered the command into the terminal. An image of the main bedroom immediately appeared on one of the monitors. The man beneath the canopy opened his eyes almost at once, as though he had not been asleep at all but waiting for the signal in low-power mode. He sat up, threw back the coverlet, lowered his feet to the floor, and within seconds was already following the concealed route toward the armored door. To the outer circuit, everything appeared continuous: the Master had awakened, risen, and entered his inner quarters. That was enough.

He followed the screen and only then took another sip.

“They were there again,” he said more quietly. “Along the walls. Tall. Faceless. Standing there, waiting. And I couldn’t draw a proper breath. GAS came in surges. As though someone kept opening it, then shutting it off. Why do they come every night, Viktoria?”

I shifted my gaze to the adjacent monitor. The night’s biometric data was already displayed on the screen: respiration, microdischarges, pupil response, heart rate, sleep-phase disruptions. All of it was predictable enough. Nothing mystical. Which made it more disturbing. The system does not like terror that can be measured.

“It’s background,” I replied. “Projection requires a pressure differential. Excess load drains into images. Your nightmares are not an event but drainage.”

He looked up at me. There was no trust in his gaze in the human sense. It was closer to a need for confirmation that the world could still be described and therefore controlled.

“Drainage,” he repeated irritably. “A pretty word. It doesn’t make it any easier to breathe.”

“It is not supposed to,” I said. “For the path, it makes no difference.”

For several seconds, the only sound was the hum of the ventilation. Then I opened the general internal circuit. On the diagram of the five doors, activity markers lit up one after another. The central room was occupied. Behind the side doors, sensors registered wakefulness and readiness. Four people, surgically brought to the closest possible match with the original, awaited instructions. One of them had already completed the morning presence in the large bedroom. The others remained in reserve until the system assigned their roles for the day.

Mold watched the indicators intently, all traces of the night’s panic already gone. Here, in front of the screen, he became himself again. Or rather, the self he knew how to assemble best.

“The Third is working today,” he said. “The Second’s hand was trembling yesterday. The camera might catch it. I don’t need noise.”

“Understood,” I replied, and recorded the instruction.

The Third would be sent out along the route of public visibility. The Second would be taken in for correction of fine motor control. The First had already completed the morning phase in the large bedroom. The Fourth would remain in reserve. Everything was scheduled as though these were not people but replaceable components in a mechanism that could not be allowed to stop for even a minute.

In a sense, that was exactly what they were.

I looked at the five doors and thought that the mirror of power had long since ceased to reflect a single person. It had become a corridor. The system no longer needed a single original. It needed the continuity of an image, and it secured that continuity at any cost. The real body could tremble, struggle for breath, age, wake in terror, see faceless witnesses standing along the walls. None of that was of decisive importance anymore. For the cameras, protocols, audiences, and outer circuits, there was always someone who would emerge in his place, nod in his place, sit at the required angle, and carry his face onward like an official uniform.

I closed the diagram, put away the terminal, and stepped back from the desk.

The workday in the Upper Chamber began as usual. The large bedroom above. Five doors behind the armored wall. Four spare faces. One upper cell in which the true body of power trembled. And this entire meticulously calibrated order rested on a single condition: the outside world must not notice that the reflection had long since been living apart from the man who had once given it his face.