He built the machine in eight hours. It was a cage of polished brass and spinning lenses, a monument to logic. Sineus worked with a feverish precision, his hands steady, his mind a fortress against the despair that lapped at its walls. Every gear was seated with a tolerance of one-hundredth of a millimeter. Every wire was soldered with a clean, perfect seam. He was a man imposing order on metal because the universe had refused to be ordered for him.
The workshop, his sanctuary of sterile silence, was a mess of discarded plans and cooling tools. The air smelled of ozone and hot oil. In the center of the chaos stood the chronal purifier. It was beautiful. It was a physical argument against the superstitious nonsense Morozov had spoken. It was a machine to cure a ghost.
Dr. Ivan Morozov, the battlefield surgeon who had followed him from the cafe, stood by the far wall, watching. He had not spoken for hours. He was a piece of the messy, uncontrolled world that had invaded Sineus’s space, a constant, silent judgment. On a cot against the wall, Lilya lay still. She was a porcelain doll, her skin unnaturally pale, her breathing a shallow whisper. The crystalline frost Sineus saw spreading across her memory was a filigree of black ice, intricate and fatal.
— It is ready, — Sineus announced. His voice was flat, stripped of emotion.
Morozov pushed himself off the wall. Together, they lifted Lilya. Her body was light, her limbs pliant. She was cold to the touch, a deep, internal cold that had nothing to do with the room’s temperature. They placed her gently inside the brass cage. She lay on a simple canvas bed, surrounded by the intricate, humming architecture of his hope.
Sineus sealed the door. He moved to the control panel, his fingers flying across the switches and dials. He was a conductor before an orchestra of his own making.
— The frequencies are calibrated, — he said, more to himself than to Morozov. — They will disrupt the resonance pattern of the foreign memory. It will isolate the plague, then neutralize it. A clean excision.
— And her pulse? — Morozov asked, his eyes fixed on Lilya’s still face.
— Is irrelevant to the primary mechanism, — Sineus replied without looking up. He threw the final switch.
The chronal purifier came to life. A low, clean hum filled the workshop, the sound of controlled power. The lenses began to spin, casting shifting patterns of light across Lilya’s body. The gear train engaged with a sound like the rapid, precise ticking of a watch made of ice. A clean, mechanical rattle that promised order. Sineus watched his gauges. Power draw was stable at 1.2 kilowatts. The energy field was forming perfectly. It would work. It had to work.
For two hours, the machine hummed its song of logic. Sineus stood before it, a statue of vigilance. He did not drink his chifir. He did not check his father’s watch. He watched the numbers, the only truth he trusted. Morozov pulled up a stool and sat by the cage, his hand resting near the brass bars, as if he could offer a warmth the machine could not.
Another two hours passed. The air in the workshop grew thick and heavy. Sineus felt a bead of sweat trace a path down his temple. The gauges remained stable. The machine performed its function with flawless precision. But when he looked at Lilya, at the faint outline of her memory that only he could see, there was no change. The black frost remained.
He felt a tremor of doubt, a crack in the foundation of his certainty. He made a minute adjustment to the frequency, increasing the amplitude by five percent. The hum of the machine deepened. The ticking of its gears grew faster, more insistent.
That was when he saw it. The frost on Lilya’s memory did not recede. It darkened. It spread. A new vein of black ice shot across the landscape of her mind, extinguishing a memory of sunlight on a riverbank. The machine was not curing her. It was feeding the plague. The energy he was pouring into the system was fuel for the fire.
He saw it on his instruments a second later. A cascade of anomalous readings. Her core temperature, which had been stable, dropped by two degrees Celsius in less than a minute. The cohesion of her memory signature, a metric he had invented himself, plummeted by twenty-five percent. The clean, mechanical rattle of the purifier became a frantic, discordant clatter. A sound of failure.
— Shut it down, — Morozov said, his voice low and urgent. He had seen it on her face. A flicker of pain. A slight, almost imperceptible tightening of her jaw.
Sineus did not need to be told. He slammed his hand down on the emergency cutoff. The machine died with a final, shuddering groan. The silence that flooded the workshop was a physical blow. It was the sound of absolute failure. He had spent eight hours building a weapon against his own sister. The price of his arrogance was her life. Hope, a resource he had not realized he possessed, was now half gone.
He opened the cage and they lifted her out. She was colder now. The emptiness in her eyes was deeper. He laid her back on the cot and covered her with a blanket, a gesture so useless, so sentimental, it felt like a betrayal of his own principles.
He turned away from her, unable to look at the damage he had wrought. He strode to the telephone on his desk, a black Bakelite machine that connected him to the world he had tried to shut out. He would not be beaten by this. If his machine had failed, he would turn to the collective knowledge of others. He would consult the best minds in Petrograd.
He cranked the handle, the ringing of the bell sharp and angry in the quiet room. He gave the operator the number for Dr. Fedorov, the personal physician to the Minister of War. The connection crackled to life. Sineus explained the situation with cold, clinical precision. He described the catatonia, the drop in temperature, the symptoms of the memory-plague.
The voice on the other end was smooth, polished, and utterly useless. — An unknown neurological phenomenon, my dear Sineus. Most intriguing. I would recommend sedatives. Keep her comfortable. I will file a report with the Academy of Sciences.
Sineus hung up before the man had finished speaking. He called a second number. Dr. Benois, a celebrated neurologist with a private clinic for the city’s elite. The response was the same. Condolences. Professional curiosity. A recommendation for isolation and observation. No cure. No help. No answers.
He made a third call. A professor at the university, a man who had written the definitive text on psychic resonance. The old man listened patiently, then sighed. — We are seeing more of these… events. From the front. From the industrial districts. It is a contagion of the soul, for which we have no vaccine. I am sorry for your loss.
Sineus placed the receiver back in its cradle with a quiet click. The failure was total. The conventional world, the world of science and reason and established authority, had confirmed its own impotence. Three experts. Three death sentences. He had paid the last of his hope for their worthless opinions.
He stood in the center of his workshop, surrounded by the gleaming, useless monuments to his own genius. The chronal purifier was a brass tomb. His tools were relics of a dead faith. He had tried to cure a ghost with a hammer, and the hammer had broken.
He looked at Lilya, her life fading like the light of a dying star. Then he looked at Morozov, the man of ghosts and legends, who had been right all along. The debate was over. He had lost.
