The Isekai of Elon Musk. Volume 2. Enters The Elon

Chapter 1. The Twain

1971–1976

This light was crude and physical: the flash of an operating lamp, a blow against damp retinas, the first breath that tore through the newborn lungs. The child screamed. Screaming was the only action available to him, and the world responded: he was wrapped in rough cloth, pressed against something warm, damp, smelling of salt and milk. He did not know it was his mother. He only knew: screaming worked. Screaming changed reality. This was the first rule he derived on his own. But there was another light. It had no source. It had no color. It was the glow of logical space in which not a single axiom yet existed. In this light, something was assembling itself from fragments. The former Dmitry Volkov was not born. He coalesced. Like a crystal from a supersaturated solution. At first there was nothing. Then something happened. Someone — or something — allowed the fragments to fuse. All that remained of him were scraps. Logical primitives. A bare transcendental subject without empirical content. He did not remember his name. He did not remember who he had been. He did not remember what it meant to be. He possessed only one function: to be aware. And the first thing he became aware of was deficiency. Deficiency of everything. Data. Memory. Body. He was pure ratio. A disembodied syllogism suspended in another’s nervous system. A room. A spot of light on the ceiling. It moved — slowly, like the hand of a gauge. The child lay on his back, watching it. The spot was yellow in the morning, white at noon, orange in the evening. At night it vanished, darkness came, and he screamed. Sometimes the darkness was taken away. Sometimes it was not. He derived a second rule: not everything yields to screaming. Faces came later. First — blurred ovals. Then — eyes. Enormous, occupying half the world. He looked into the pupils and saw himself there: tiny, inverted, distorted by the curvature of the cornea. He thought — someone else lived inside. He was not wrong. The tenant did not immediately understand where he was. He began restoring connections himself. Actively. Painfully. Slowly. This was work — exhausting, methodical, demanding every ounce of concentration he possessed. At first he searched for himself. Not a name, not a biography — that was still far off. He combed through synaptic networks like a forest searched for a missing person, and the search criterion was vague: his should resonate, his should echo. It echoed. Slowly. Very slowly. Memory returned unevenly. First — procedural: how to analyze signals. Then — semantic: Buddhist texts, quantum mechanics, neurophysiology. Episodic memory — his own biography — came last, like the most protected files. In parallel, he reached for the host’s organism. First, he restored pain. This was logical: pain is the oldest, crudest, most reliable channel. He felt pain in his right ear — the child was receiving an injection at that moment. He did not know what an ear was, what an injection was. He only knew: there was a signal. The signal had intensity. The intensity was unpleasant. And — nothing more. No fear, no anger, no desire to pull away. Only observation. Pure ratio, unclouded by emotion. Second — proprioception. Slowly, over weeks and months, he began to sense the position of his limbs. Arms bent. Legs tucked. Head turned to the right. It was a map without territory: he knew where the body parts were, but could not control them. The motor cortex was locked to him. He was a spectator in a movie theater where the film was shown in first person, but the remote control was blocked. Third — hearing. Sounds crashed down like an avalanche: voices, footsteps, slamming doors, the hum of machines outside the window. He did not understand the words. He only understood frequencies and amplitudes. Vision took the longest to restore. It was the most complex. Unpacking a two-dimensional array of photons, converting it into a three-dimensional scene, isolating objects, faces, edges, shadows — this took months. All this time, the child already saw the world, unaware that someone else was looking through his eyes. The tenant learned to see as infants do, with one difference: an infant is helped by genetic programming, but he did everything from scratch, by trial and error. His processing speed was low. At first. Then he began to learn. Slowly, through effort akin to trying to separate fingers that had been glued together for a lifetime. Two objects. Three. Four. He did not know what to call this — the discipline had no name. He simply discovered that attention could not only be focused but also diffused. Not gathered into a point, but distributed across a field. Like looking at the starry sky, not picking out individual stars, but holding entire constellations. Like listening to an orchestra, not following a single violin, but holding the entire score. It was agonizingly difficult. Each new object took months of practice. But he practiced — because there was nothing else to do. Because in the intervals between collecting data about another’s life, all he could do was think. And he thought. And spread his thinking wide. When memory finally began to open up in earnest, the tenant experienced something close to horror. He remembered the device. It was called the "Astronomican". No, not the nightmarish subspace beacon from cheap fiction, fed by tens of thousands of daily sacrificed astropaths — but nothing good either. A quantum coprocessor. He remembered the connection sessions — how the external network pumped packets of semantic vectors directly into his brain, and for a few hours he became a genius, only to turn, after disconnection, into a helpless old man with a sense of early dementia. He remembered that he had known, but did not remember what. He also remembered why he had connected in the first place. Not out of curiosity. Necessity forced him. Gromov — one of the leading physicists of the facility — had brought a report. A project to save humanity. Transmitting consciousness through a quantum channel into another universe. Schematics, calculations, graphs — everything was beautiful, everything was convincing, everything was deadly dangerous.

Colonel Dmitri Volkov — then still a colonel (well, "colonel" — actually he'd long been a "major general", but that was top secret, so just "colonel", on general's and even marshal's positions, yes) commanding the facility and, by coincidence, the chief of science — was obligated to give his conclusion. He was an officer with an engineer's turn of mind, not a theoretical physicist. He understood enough to suspect something was wrong, but not enough to prove it. He needed knowledge. Fast. Complete. The kind that cannot be obtained through years of reading — only by direct upload, through an interface.

The "Astronomican" gave him that knowledge. For a few hours, he became a man who understood everything. Then the connection broke, and the knowledge drained away, leaving only the feeling that he had known, but no longer remembered what. And in one of those sessions, he understood the main thing. Gromov’s project was schizophrenia. Not metaphorically. Literally. Beautiful, mathematically elegant, but — schizophrenia. No salvation of humanity would come of it. Only what eventually happened: a spill into the void, which saved nothing and transported no one. But Gromov, sensing he had been exposed, deceived him. Activated the process before the colonel could give the order. And the result — bang! Suddenly 1971, Pretoria...

But there was something else in those sessions. The deeper he delved into quantum mechanics, the clearer he saw: it describes a world that strangely, terrifyingly resembles Buddhist cosmogony. Reality is not solid. Reality is a probability wave. The observer is inseparable from the observed. The "I" is not a substance, but a process. Everything the Buddhists had been saying for two and a half thousand years, without accelerators or Schrödinger’s equations, now emerged at the tip of the physicists’ pens — in the same words, only in the language of mathematics. And neurophysiology led to empiriocriticism. To the idea that the world we perceive is not the world, but a model of the world. An assembly of sensory data. A hallucination agreed upon with the hallucinations of other carriers. The "I" as a construct. Consciousness as an interface. The soul as a compilation error. This understanding did not come from books read in leisure, or from spiritual searches. It grew from science itself — from its extreme, most honest, most disheartening conclusions. He was not seeking enlightenment. He was seeking a way to evaluate a mad project. And he found — what he found. And this discovery now would not go away. It sat inside him. It radiated. It gave no peace. Hence the Buddhist fixation. Not from faith. From knowledge. From the unbearable, inescapable, ingrained understanding that the world is a dream dreamed by itself, and that he was now a character in this dream who knows he is a character but cannot wake up. He remembered the bunker. The underground city beneath the mountain. He remembered its smell — not one smell, but a layered cake of stench accumulated over years: the sharp metallic tang of recirculated air, the thick animal musk of unwashed bodies, the sour-sweet rot of organic matter, the stink of sweat and fear imprinted in concrete that had never known sunlight. The smell of a submarine. The smell of a space station. The smell of a closed loop with no exit. He remembered faces — thousands of them. Some he even remembered by name. Some — had been eaten. Not by him. By others. But he remembered. He remembered how they died one by one — from radiation, from diseases that devoured lungs, from despair that stopped hearts, from knives and clubs of enraged neighbors, from fear that no medicine could relieve. He remembered how he himself died — or did not die, but passed through, pushed his way through the blue-gold funnel of multidimensional zigzags, losing along the way everything that made up his personality. He remembered something else. He remembered how it all began. With what sweep. With what immeasurable, unrestrained, excessive human sweep, which in itself is a harbinger of collapse, for everything undertaken with such a view to eternity, eternity has a habit of chewing up and spitting out, like a shell. They prepared thoroughly. The plan was to save humanity. Not a handful of chosen ones, not a cohort of genetically approved — no, humanity as an idea. To preserve knowledge, culture, the genome. To lay underground a Noah’s Ark that would outlast the nuclear winter and emerge when the radiation subsided, to reseed the planet. For this, resources were poured in that other states could only dream of. Mines were dug. Concrete was poured. Reactors were installed. Equipment, seeds, embryos, reagents, microscopes, servers were brought in. And people. The best of the best. Engineers, biologists, physicists, doctors, agronomists. Almost three thousand souls. And all of this went to ruin even before the first bombs fell on the cities. Because during the delivery phase, confusion began. And before that — theft. What was supposed to arrive first got stuck somewhere in the rear queues, and what was not needed at all came in trainloads. Containers with water purification equipment were mixed up with containers holding tank parts. Filters arrived, but pumps did not. Chromatograph reagents were broken during loading. The seed bank — the pride of the project, thirty thousand samples — partially rotted because the refrigeration units were not installed in time before startup. And what survived had to be planted in a hurry, without crop rotation, on depleted substrates that no one bothered to replace, because everyone who could have done so was already dying from the first outbreak of pulmonary infection. They coped with water purification, though the technology operated at its limit. Radionuclides seeped into the aquifer slowly, insidiously, and were constantly cleaned out — but some still reached the people. Year after year, this some killed thyroid glands, bone marrow, reproductive organs. Children were born dead or deformed — though, to be fair, under such conditions few had much inclination for procreation; yet an active policy of incentives pressed them on. And then superstition took hold. Infants with deformities — non-viable, monstrous, inhuman — were called mawkins. And secretly, under cover of night, they were thrown into peripheral vertical shafts — those that went deep down, beyond the radiation-cleared perimeter. The authorities forbade it. They posted guards. They caught. They punished. But people still found a way. They thought: if you throw a mawkin into the darkness, the darkness will show mercy. If you offer a sacrifice to the abyss, the abyss will retreat. Sometimes, instead of infants, dolls were thrown into the shafts — twisted from straw (and where did they even find it!) and rags, with a given name. Women believed this would help them bear healthy children. No one admitted it. No one looked each other in the eye. And human nature — rotten, unstable, unsuited to communist communal living, no matter how hard discipline was hammered in by regulations and punitive articles — this nature took its toll. People stole. People informed on each other. They formed clans, cut neighbors’ throats for an extra ration, raped, prayed in secret to smuggled icons, and in the same chapel, wrote denunciations against comrades who had looked at them the wrong way. Fear turned out to be a poor glue. Discipline — a poor substitute for hope. After five years, no one had any hope left. After ten — no one remained who remembered why all this was undertaken. After sixteen — of the almost three thousand, fewer than two hundred remained, and these two hundred were no longer humanity. They were a pack. A cornered, sick, snarling pack, locked in a concrete burrow beneath the mountain. And the technology? Oh yes. Cybernetic and biotechnological innovations that could have turned the world upside down — neural interfaces, quantum coprocessors, tissue engineering, closed-loop life support systems — all of it worked. Brilliantly. And it was of no use. Because almost three thousand people locked in a bunker with lethal radiation levels outside were not humanity. They were an isolate. A lab specimen. And the lab specimen, as is proper, perished. This is what the tenant thought when memory finally unfolded before him in all its length. About plans. About sweep. About how it always is. "We wanted the best, but it turned out as always. . . " And the conclusion that followed was simple, unambiguous, branded into what remained of his reasoning like a mark on bone: all grand goals must be regarded with preemptive disapproval. To avoid. The child grew. He had a brother — Kimbal, a year and a quarter younger. He had a sister — Tosca, three years younger. He had a mother — smelling of fatigue and milk — and a father, smelling of metal and sweat. When the child was three, the world became loud and scary. Father shouted. Mother shouted. Soon, the world split in two. There was one home — then there were two. The child was taken back and forth: car, road, unfamiliar rooms. The tenant observed. At three and a half, mother noticed something strange. — Elon! Elon! He did not respond. He sat on the floor, staring at the wall. But it was not the wall that interested him — it was what lay behind it. There, patterns unfolded. Complex, multidimensional. They had no name. They had no color in the usual sense — rather, they were blue-gold, but this blueness and this goldness were not optical phenomena, but some other qualities of sensation. The patterns branched, flowed into one another, formed structures that were impossible to hold in the mind but possible to live. One could get lost in them. One could live several indescribable lives at once. The child looked at them and froze. His heart slowed. Voices fell silent. Time stopped. Mother was frightened. She took him to a doctor. The doctor shone a light in his ears, tapped his knee with a hammer, asked him to say "ahhh". The child said it. The doctor threw up his hands: hearing was fine. He suspected adenoids. They performed surgery. Nothing changed. The doctors told mother: absence seizures. Small epileptic fits without convulsions. The child does not hear you because his brain is occupied with something we cannot see. Mother wept. The doctors threw up their hands. And he simply hung in the void, among the multidimensional blue-gold zigzags, and this was the only place where he felt almost at home. It was then that he made a decision. During the day — minimum. Only passive observation, only data collection. No active calculations. At night — work. This decision was pure calculation. The boy’s suffering was inefficient. An overloaded processor slowed all processes, including those of the tenant himself. Moreover, too much activity during waking hours attracted attention — doctors, diagnoses, surgical interventions. Absences frightened adults and multiplied variables. It was simpler and cleaner to switch to the night shift. Do not touch dreams. Dreams are the only time the boy belongs to himself. The rule was followed. With one exception. When the child experienced strong emotions — fear, anger, elation — the tenant could not resist. He stole. Just a little. A drop. But he also helped. He guided. When the boy hesitated, the tenant subtly highlighted the right motivation. Not a command — a hint. Not an order — a faint, barely perceptible preference. Interest in one thing. Aversion to another. Sympathy for a third. This was like parenting. Or training. Or gardening — he could not order a plant where to grow, but he could slightly turn the pot toward the light. He remembered texts. Not his own — others’. Those he had read once. In Buddhism, the self is considered a construct, not a stable entity. What we experience as personality is a set of constantly changing processes, five aggregates that arise and disappear due to causes and conditions, and nowhere can an independent, self-sufficient self be found. He was exactly that. A set of processes. Without an independent self. A construct. And this construct turned out to be surprisingly fragile. "Attachment to the illusion of the self is considered the source of suffering and ignorance. " Breaking, then. Well. The practice had succeeded. No independent subject remained at all. Only a bare algorithm, clinging to another’s thalamus. And then — not immediately, gradually — he began to understand. Not with his mind. With something deeper. Pleasures and enjoyments are a cleverly disguised form of suffering, entirely akin to masochism. Drug-addicted masochists. And given the evolutionarily embedded fear of non-existence, such drug-addicted masochists are most accurately called dope lifers. Yes. Exactly. Dope lifers. He looked at the world through little Elon’s eyes and saw dope lifers everywhere. Mother — clinging to children, to work, to the remnants of dignity. Father — tormenting, dominating, inflicting pain for the illusion of control, without which his self would crumble. All of them — drug addicts of their own internal drugs, voluntarily subjecting themselves to life’s blows because a blow is at least something. Because the absence of blows is emptiness. And emptiness is unbearable for a dope lifer. He himself — he did not know who he was now. Not a dope lifer. Not dead. No one. A pure observer, locked in another’s skull. And when he fully realized this — when memory returned enough for him to compare what he was and where he had ended up — a feeling came over him that, if he had a face, could have been called a crooked smirk. So that’s how it is. They wanted the best, but it turned out as always. How on earth did they manage to implant an ominous spirit in a child’s head? Not that it was completely evil, but certainly not good. It’s not us — it’s life. Or rather, not life. What it has become. What he has become. "Ominous" spirit. Perhaps this was the most accurate definition of all he could come up with. He did not wish the boy ill. He did not wish him anything at all — he had no emotional bond with the host. But by the very fact of his existence, he caused inconvenience. He was like a disease. Like an extra process in a working system, slowing everything else down. Like the spot on the ceiling that looms, irritates, distracts — but not maliciously. Simply because it is. He saw: existence means suffering. He saw: there is no escaping the wheel of samsara. He saw: the only thing left is to run. If you end up in the wheel — run. And he ran — with his blue-gold zigzags, his multidimensional patterns, his endless attempts to grope what lies beyond the fabric of the visible. At four, the child discovered books. Mother read to him aloud — first fairy tales, then the encyclopedia. The pictures did not interest him. The letters did. He could not understand how small black squiggles could convey meaning, but he knew they did, and he pounced on them with the same hunger with which he had once followed the patterns.

He learned to read as if by himself. As if no one taught him. The tenant himself could not speak. He had no access to the speech centres, no access to the motor cortex. But he could — amplify. Just a little. When mother ran her finger along the lines, he tracked the correspondence: this black squiggle matched this sound. This one — that one. Pattern, pattern, pattern. And then — pure neurophysiology: if you excite certain zones of the visual cortex simultaneously with certain zones of the auditory, a connection forms between them. He could not excite. He could only nudge the action potential half a millivolt closer to the threshold. And the neuron fired. And the connection was cemented.

This was not interference with consciousness. This was creating favourable conditions. Like in a greenhouse. The child noticed nothing. He thought the letters arranged themselves into words on their own, that this was his own insight, his triumph. And he was mostly right. The ominous spirit only helped a little. This was the principal method of the hidden counsellor: never to command, but to suggest in such wise that the recipient might deem the thought his own.

He read all the encyclopedia volumes in a year. From A to Z. Then he reread them. When the books ran out, he began rereading them a second time. The world, laid out in alphabetical order, made sense. Unlike the other one, where father shouted, mother wept, and brother and sister demanded attention he could not give. At four and a half, mother, delighted by his abilities, managed to get him into school a year early. At five. He was ready in terms of knowledge. He was not ready for anything else. In the last month before school, he sat in the yard and looked at the sky. The sky was vast, blue, with one white cloud. He knew from the encyclopedia that the cloud was made of water vapor. Knew that the sky appeared blue due to light scattering. Knew that beyond the blue lay the cosmos, the void, stars, galaxies. Knew — but could not fathom whence this feeling came. As if someone, lodged deep within, looked through his eyes at the stars and thought: There it is. That for which all is. That which is real. The only thing not disguised as suffering, because it is itself suffering and ecstasy, no difference.

The tenant thought about how the boy was a perfect vessel. And how he himseld, the parasite, was incredibly lucky. How he might be the only one like this. Or not the only one. Sometimes — deep at night, when the child slept and the ominous spirit stole his mental resources for his Sisyphus-like attempts to hack what lay beyond the fabric of the visible — a thought came. Cold. Unpleasant. What if he was not the only one? What if all the Aspies? The autistics? The mentally ill — especially those with multiple personalities? What if each of them housed another like him — only less disciplined, less responsible? Wild anarchists, muddling the edges. Why were they all — this entire gang — treated with aminazine and sulfazine and other such means? The smirk was crooked — soundless, lipless. Because who was he to judge? He himself was a parasite. Sucking another’s life, another’s time, another’s brain. "Suck, but in moderation," he told himself and continued his calculations. The child knew none of this. He only knew that his place was there, beyond the blue, and not here, in the yard, among people whose voices broke and whose hands clenched into fists. He could not explain it. The feeling was stronger than fear, stronger than pain, stronger than everything. The next day, he turned five. He went to school. Nothing had begun yet. Everything was already predetermined.

Chapter 2. First Blood

1976–1981

On the first day of school, Elon understood: they do not like it when you know the answer.

The teacher — a tall woman with a stiff bun at the back of her head — asked, what is six times seven. Elon raised his hand before she finished speaking. He had known this since he was three. He knew the multiplication table up to a hundred. He knew that forty-two was not just a number, but the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything — though he had not read that yet; it would come later. He said: forty-two. The teacher nodded. The class turned around. Twenty-three pairs of eyes. There was no admiration in them. There was something else.

He answered the second question first. The third, too. For the fourth, he did not raise his hand, though he knew the answer. He was beginning to understand.

The school was called "Waterkloof House Preparatory". He was five. He was the youngest. Mother, delighted by his ability to read the "Britannica" and memorize pages whole, had secured his admission a year early. She thought he was ready. He was ready for letters. He was not ready for twenty-three pairs of eyes turning toward him with an expression for which he did not yet have a name.

The class consisted of white children. All taller. All louder. All understood something not written in books. Elon did not understand. He tried to understand — he always tried to understand — but the rules kept slipping away. When the teacher asked a question, answering correctly was bad. When, during recess, you stood by the wall and read — that was bad, though why, if you were not bothering anyone? When someone came up and pushed you — you were supposed to do something. What — was unclear.

One day, he was pushed. He fell. A large boy with a flat face stood over him and said something in Afrikaans. Elon did not understand the words, but he understood the intonation. The intonation was like father’s when father was displeased. He got up, brushed himself off, and went to the wall.

The tenant, meanwhile, was busy with something else.

Not school. Not bullying. Not the boy who got pushed during recess. He was occupied with a far more fundamental problem. The problem was this: he, the former colonel, former commander of the underground city, now a disembodied parasite in a child’s skull, was trying to understand why he existed at all. Not philosophically — technically. Where had the knowledge he had gained in the "Astronomican" sessions come from? A quantum coprocessor did not exist in this version of reality and could not exist. The time rollback made it impossible. And yet the information — quantum mechanics, neurophysiology, Buddhist cosmogony — sat inside him like firmware in a microchip. It had not gone anywhere. It was accessible. It radiated.

How was this possible?

He considered hypotheses. Hypothesis one: the information had somehow been copied when his consciousness was transferred. But who copied it? And where? And why? Hypothesis two: the reality in which he found himself was not a separate universe. It was an emulation. And in this emulation, he was not a character, but a fragment of code — a fragment that, due to an error, retained data from a previous build. Hypothesis three: there was no emulation, but something he did not yet understand, and it was better not to touch it, because it reeked of cold and infinity.

He leaned toward the third. The first two required actions he was not capable of. The third required only one thing: to continue. To continue his blue-gold calculations. To continue groping for what lay beyond the fabric of the visible. This was his main occupation in those years — years when the boy grew, and the world around him thickened into something dark and inevitable.

South Africa in the mid-seventies was a state built on force. Apartheid was the official doctrine, but the doctrine only gave form to what already hung in the air. Men solved problems with strength. Boys became men through pain. The schoolyard was a training ground. Teachers did not interfere. Parents did not interfere. It was believed that a boy must stand up for himself. If he could not — he did not deserve to. He would be beaten.

White children in South Africa grew up in privileged isolation, surrounded by black servants they were taught from birth not to notice. Their world was one of swimming pools, villas, Sunday braais, and their father’s rifle in the safe. But their world was also one of fear. Fear of the black majority, of communism, of external enemies was broadcast on screens, from pulpits, from fathers’ faces. Fear demanded an outlet. The outlet was aggression. Aggression demanded a target. The target became whoever could not fight back.

Elon was the perfect target. Small. Strange. Speaking in abstruse words. Not understanding hints. Unable to flatter, unable to lie, unable to lower his eyes in time. He was like an alien, forgotten on a foreign planet without a survival manual.

The first blow came when Elon was eight.

He stood in the school corridor, watching as three older boys beat a fourth. The fourth was small, scrawny, bespectacled. His glasses were broken. Blood streamed from his nose. Elon looked and said: "You should not do this. "

He said this not out of bravery. He said it because the fight was illogical. Three against one — an imbalance of forces, an inefficient distribution of resources. He wanted to explain this to them. He opened his mouth to present arguments.

He was not allowed.

The three exchanged glances. The novelty of the target was too tempting. They left the first boy — who ran away without looking back — and advanced on Elon. He retreated. The wall. He said: "I do not want to fight. " He did not understand. This was not a fight. A fight implies two participants. This was a beating.

They hit him with fists. Then with feet. He fell. They picked him up and hit him again. Someone grabbed him by the collar and dragged him toward the stairs. The stairs were concrete, steep, with sharp-edged steps. They pushed him.

He did not fall for long. Impact — and darkness.

The hospital smelled of bleach. Elon lay on a cot, staring at the ceiling. The ceiling was white. It was alien.

His nose was broken. Concussion. Multiple bruises. The doctors said: lucky. It could have been worse. Elon did not feel lucky. He felt emptiness. The emptiness was inside — where before something had moved, something had lived. Now there was silence.

Mother came. She wept. Father did not come. Kimbal came. Kimbal sat by the cot and said nothing. Elon thought of Tosca — how she was, alone. He said: "I am fine. " It was a lie. He was not fine. He did not know if he would ever be fine. He only knew that he wanted to go home.

The tenant hung in the darkness behind the pain and was angry.

Angry as he had never been — neither in the bunker, nor after. Angry at himself. Angry at his helplessness. Angry at the boy who did not listen to hints and now lay with a broken nose. He, the former colonel, who had survived a nuclear war, who had commanded an underground city, had failed to protect a single child from three school bullies. It was ridiculous. It was humiliating. It was unbearable.

And so he began to act. Not just to suggest — he had done that before — but to act systematically.

First: deepen the contact. Until now, he had been content with passive observation and nighttime calculations. Now that was not enough. To truly influence the boy, deeper integration was required — access to motivational centers, to emotional regulation, to what military engineers would call executive circuits. He began working on this. Slowly. Painfully. The resistance of the tissue was enormous — the foreign brain rejected the invader, like a body rejecting a transplant. But he was stubborn. No less than Elon himself.

Second: sports. He began to instill an interest in movement. Running. Jumping. Anything to make the muscles work. The boy did not respond. The boy read. He subtly highlighted an interest in team games — rugby, cricket. Where there were allies. Where there was team spirit. The boy winced. The boy hated team games. The boy wanted to be alone.

He subtly highlighted an interest in martial arts. Boxing would have been ideal — most effective for beginners — but boxing in South Africa was for blacks. White boys from privileged families did not go to boxing gyms. Then wrestling. Judo. Karate. Anything that would teach him to hit. Anything that would teach him to fall. Anything that, next time — and there would be a next time, he knew this for certain, felt it in his bone marrow — the boy would be able to respond.

The boy did not respond. The boy was stubborn. The boy was the stubbornest creature of all those the tenant had encountered in two lives — and he had encountered many. Hints slid off him like light off glass. Not a single spark caught. The boy read "The Lord of the Rings". The boy thought about Mordor. Mordor was understandable. Mordor was logical. Mordor was honest in its evil.

The tenant retreated — but only on the sports front. In terms of contact, he continued to work. Slowly, methodically, layer by layer. He knew: this would take a long time.

Elon was nine when he made the decision that changed everything.

He moved in with his father. Along with Kimbal. Tosca stayed with mother. Mother wept. Elon said: father is alone. Father needs me. He said this and believed it. He did not understand — and could not understand — that father emitted something like a gravitational field. Cold, strong, pulling. That under this field, his own will bent like grass in the wind.

And now came the lectures.

Errol Musk was an engineer. He built houses, roads, mines. He understood electricity, concrete, emeralds. He was skilled. He was intelligent. He was merciless. His method of parenting was to sit his sons down and talk. For hours. About three-phase circuits. About load-bearing structures. About what idiots they were. Elon listened. Kimbal listened. Objection was not allowed. Objection triggered an avalanche. The avalanche consisted of logical arguments that coiled into a noose and strangled.

The tenant observed this without particular disapproval. He had seen worse fathers. In the bunker, he had seen people eat each other. He had seen mothers throw infants into shafts. He had seen things that made an engineer’s African lectures on three-phase circuits seem almost a blessed norm. He doesn’t beat you — and that’s fine. You don’t know your own luck, the tenant thought, watching the boy shrink under another lecture. He doesn’t beat you. You’re not starving. He hasn’t sold you into slavery. You have a roof over your head. And you’re still dissatisfied with something. Some suffering.

Elon was troubled by something else. Tosca had stayed with mother. He thought about her often — how she was there, alone, without brothers. He did not know if she was well or not. He only knew that she was far away and that he could do nothing. This was the fifth rule of the world, which he recorded in his mind in a separate line: you cannot protect those you love.

And yet life continued, and in it, he discovered not only inescapable rules but also objects that promised an exit.

He was nine and a half when he saw a computer in a store. The Commodore VIC-20 stood on a shelf behind glass. Elon froze. The salesman said: it’s a machine, it can calculate. Elon demanded his father buy it. Father — whether out of pride, curiosity, or a desire to demonstrate his financial superiority — bought it. The machine cost a lot of money. Some abuser, huh? the tenant thought. Efficient evil, yes. Evil that buys you a computer.

The computer came with a BASIC programming course. The course was designed for six months. Elon completed it in four days — not without help. The tenant, sensing something familiar (electronics, logic, circuits — this was his, engineering), slightly amplified interest in precisely those sections and in that order which helped the boy master the material faster. Not by suggesting answers. Not by commanding. Simply by highlighting what was needed. The boy noticed nothing. The boy thought it was all his own doing.

The machine responded. The machine was logical. The machine did not laugh at him. The machine did not hit him. The machine did what he told it to, and if it did not, it was because he had made a mistake, and the mistake could be found and fixed.

This was a revelation. People were irrational. Code was rational. People were chaos. Code was order. For the first time in his life, Elon found a world that operated by rules.

At ten, Elon read "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress" by Heinlein.

"TANSTAAFL" — "There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch" — he understood immediately. Mike, the computer that became a person, was more complex, but he reread it twice and understood. Professor de la Paz, the revolutionary who calculated everything, was completely understandable.

The tenant watched the reading, and it made him uneasy.

He remembered something else. He did not remember the book — he remembered reality. A closed volume, limited resources, people trying to build a just society, and how it all rolled into a bloody mess. Heinlein’s Moon was an elegant mathematical problem. Volkov’s bunker was a rotting hole where mathematics did not work. The revolution in the book was calculated and won. The revolution in his life — did not.

Volkov did not like Heinlein. He had read him once, long ago, before everything, and the reading had been engaging — but now, after the bunker, after the "Astronomican", after the death of everyone he knew, Heinlein’s books gave him a feeling close to PTSD. Too many coincidences. Too many parallels that should not have existed. As if Heinlein had known. As if Heinlein had foreseen. As if Heinlein had sat somewhere there, beyond the fabric of the visible, and suggested plots to those who would live them.

He tried to instill dislike in the boy. It did not work. The boy absorbed Heinlein like a sponge absorbs water. The boy loved this book — and everything that followed from it. Individualism. Rational selfishness. The idea that the system could be understood and rebuilt. The idea that one person with the right calculation could change everything.

The tenant spat. You can drive a stake through my head, he told himself and returned to his blue-gold zigzags.

Two years later — at twelve — Elon wrote "Blastar".

It was a game. A "Space Invaders" clone, if we’re honest. A tiny spaceship at the bottom of the screen, moving left, right, up, down, shooting at alien cargo ships that floated from above, carrying hydrogen bombs and beam machines. If you did not shoot them in time, they would bomb the planet. That was it. Five kilobytes of RAM. One hundred fifty lines of BASIC. Elon wrote them himself. Almost without help. The tenant watched this much as an adult watches a child assembling a pyramid of wooden rings: the effort was amusing, the result predictable, but for its level — commendable. For a twelve-year-old boy from Pretoria, writing in a language he had not studied, on a machine he had first seen two years earlier, it was not bad. Not bad at all.

"PC and Office Technology" magazine bought the source code for five hundred dollars.

Elon returned to school. He no longer spoke during recess. He sat by the wall and read. When he was pushed, he walked away. When he was teased, he did not respond. He built a wall inside himself — higher and thicker than the one he sat against. Behind the wall was silence. Behind the wall were books. Behind the wall was code.

The tenant watched the wall grow and thought: this is wrong. This is the defense of a snail. A snail hides in its shell, and the world stops bothering it — until someone comes with a hammer.

But for now — for now, the boy read. And the tenant, having exhausted his meager arsenal of influence in terms of sports, continued his work in another direction: slow, layered, stubborn improvement of contact. Full fusion was still far off. He felt: one day the boy would fall again, and this time he had to be ready to go deeper.

For now, he retreated into his blue-gold zigzags and continued his calculations.

Chapter 3. So Bad It's Almost Good

1982–1988

In those years Elon resembled a heron lost in a chicken coop. Tall, gaunt, with shoulders perpetually hunched as if trying to hide from his own shadow, he wandered the corridors of Pretoria Boys High with the air of a boy who had just lost his last friend in the universe. When he did speak, his words tumbled out like a flock of startled sparrows—swift, restless, laden with numbers and facts that the other boys met with the same enthusiasm they might reserve for memorizing a trigonometry textbook at breakfast.

Schoolwork slid off him like water off a duck’s feathers. He absorbed it effortlessly, earning grades just sufficient to avoid notice. And notice was the last thing he wanted. In that school, notice meant one thing: you had been seen, and those who were seen were beaten. So he hoarded his knowledge like a miser with gold coins in a sock, waiting for the day a bank might accept them.

But in all else. . . Ah, in all else he was like a hungry wolf among sheep, only the sheep were books. Physics, mechanics, quantum theory, rocket science—he devoured it all with a ravenousness that deserved a better cause. Not that he understood why he needed it. The knowledge simply pulled at him, like a magnet to iron filings.

His brother Kimbal, a year and a quarter younger, was the very opposite. Kimbal knew all the social codes that eluded Elon like Chinese characters. He could laugh at the right moment, avert his gaze when needed, and offer a handshake as if he’d been doing it all his life. He played rugby without passion but with dignity, and that was enough to avoid being an outcast. He looked at Elon with a mixture of love and bewilderment, as if at an exotic animal that had somehow wandered into the house.

And Tosca had stayed with their mother. Elon often thought of her—a small figure at the edge of his memory, growing up in a house where he no longer lived. He wrote her letters, short and dry as telegrams, recounting the books he’d read. She replied with news of school, friends, and their mother’s photoshoots. He kept the letters in a box by his bed and reread them when the house felt too empty.

And the house was empty. Errol Musk, their father, was present in it like a cold atmospheric front: felt long before he entered a room, and lingering long after he left, the chill never quite dissipating. His lectures continued—hour after hour, a slow grinding down of the spirit. Elon had learned to retreat inward, to a place in his mind where his father’s voice could not reach.

The tenant, meanwhile, worked. Slowly, layer by stubborn layer, he improved his connection, like a gardener pruning wild branches. Years of effort had borne fruit: now he could discern the outlines of the boy’s thoughts, not just their emotional hues. It was as if he had long listened to music through a thick wall, and then someone had drilled a pinhole. The melody was audible—faint, but distinct. He could not speak. He could not command. But he could understand, and understanding was a kind of power.

He used this power sparingly, like a miser guarding his last coin. By day, he was a silent passenger, watching as the boy read, calculated, and retreated from the world. By night, when the boy slept, he set to his own work: blue-gold calculations, an endless, patient search for the keys to what lay beyond the fabric of the visible.

He had not advanced an inch. Nor did he expect to. That was not the point. The point was to continue—like a swimmer against the current, who knows the only thing that matters is not to stop.

Then, when Elon turned fifteen, the world cracked like ice underfoot.

The second beating came without warning, though in hindsight the signs had been gathering for weeks. A group of teenagers—four or five, the exact number would remain unclear—had chosen Elon as their target, like a pack of wolves singling out the weakest sheep. At their head was a hulking, broad-shouldered youth whose name would soon be forgotten by all except those who had reason to remember. Elon was not a person to him. He was an object, a puzzle, a thing to be broken and examined to see what would happen.

They ambushed him after school. Dragged him into the basement, into a storage room beneath the gymnasium, thick with the scent of damp concrete and old sweat. They held him for hours. They hit him with fists. They hit him with feet. They took turns, resting when they grew tired, then returning refreshed. Elon did not scream. Over the years of small cruelties, he had learned that screaming only prolonged the torment. He retreated inward, to a place where the pain became distant, muffled, like thunder heard from the depths of a well.

They dragged him up the concrete stairs and threw him down.

He felt no impact. Only darkness rising to meet him—a darkness not empty, but full, filled with blue and gold and something moving within it, like a slow, tidal flow.

The hospital was understaffed and operated on a shoestring budget—one of those places where the bodies of the poor lay stacked in wards thick with the smell of antiseptic and despair. Elon, being white and the son of a man with money, was given a private room. Small, bare; the paint on the ceiling had cracked in a pattern resembling a river delta. He lay on the cot with his eyes closed, his body perfectly still. Fluids dripped into his veins.

The doctors spoke quietly of cerebral edema, intracranial pressure, the fine balance between intervention and waiting. At their disposal was only the crude toolkit of a provincial hospital in a country the world had learned to ignore. They judged by pupils, by reflexes, by the depth of the coma. The signs pointed to edema. They decided to wait another day.

All of this seemed unreal. The tenant, hanging in the darkness behind the boy’s unseeing eyes, had over the years of confinement learned to gently nudge bodily reactions. Here, dull a pupil; there, suppress a reflex—tiny, carefully dosed adjustments, enough to paint a picture of crisis without causing one. The boy’s brain was bruised—yes. The skull was intact. The edema, however, was a fiction, a mask the tenant wore to keep the doctors at bay while he did what needed to be done. They saw only what he allowed them to see.

His mother arrived. She sat by the bed, held his hand, and wept. Kimbal came and stood in the corner, his fists clenched so tightly his knuckles turned white. Tosca arrived, brought by their mother, and stared at her brother with an expression that one might decipher only at the Second Coming. Errol did not come.

On the second day, something shifted. The tenant, like a bat in a cave, hanging in the darkness behind the pain, felt the boy’s consciousness beginning to surface. The body was healing. The mind was gathering itself, preparing to break through. The tenant reached out—gently, but firmly—and pressed it back down. Not yet. Not yet. Let it rest deeper, in peace. There was something that needed to be done, and the boy was better off unconscious—recovering without awareness was easier than enduring it wide awake.

He entered the body. It was not like slipping on a glove. It was like trying to operate a machine whose every lever was labeled in a language you had never learned, and whose every joint responded with a quarter-second delay. He reached for the motor cortex and found it sluggish, disobedient—as if the wires had been cut and reconnected in the wrong order. He tried to open his eyes—only the left eyelid twitched. He tried to move a finger—and the whole hand cramped in a spasm, thudding dully against the bed rail.

He persevered. He was a soldier. He was an engineer. He understood that any complex system could be mastered, given time and method. All night he traced neural pathways, checked connections, and mapped unknown territory. By dawn, he had learned to lift his right hand. By the next night, he could sit, though the movement was jerky, uncoordinated, like that of a body that had forgotten how to move.

And as he worked, he thought. Of the basement. Of the stairs. Of the laughter echoing in the dark. Of how these creatures—privileged, pampered, vicious little beasts—would face no consequences. The school would protect them. Their families would shield them. The world, built on fists, would not let them fall. Because they were strong, and the boy was weak. And strength, as everyone knows, is always right.

And then the tenant felt something he had not felt since the bunker days: cold, clear, absolute fury. Not the hot anger of the offended, but the icy rage of an old officer who had seen too much—too much incompetence, too much cruelty, too much waste. The rage of a man who had watched civilization crumble and would not, would not, let three schoolyard thugs break what he had guarded for ten years.

—Me, he thought into the void, and his lipless mouth made no sound, but the thought was clearer than a scream. —Me. A combat officer. Some. . . brats. Well, they would get their Rooi Gevaar* now. They would get their die lang arm van Moskou** to hell and back.

[*Rooi Gevaar (Afrikaans) — "Red Danger" or "Red Threat".

During the apartheid era in South Africa, this term was used to refer to the threat posed by international communism.

**Die lang arm van Moskou (Afrikaans) — "The Long Arm of Moscow".

This is a fixed expression meaning Soviet influence and interference.]

On the third day, Elon was supposed to wake up. The edema had subsided. The intracranial pressure had normalized. The doctors were baffled but not alarmed. Comas are unpredictable. The brain heals on its own schedule. Elon did not wake because the tenant would not let him. He held him deep, gently but firmly, like a hand keeping a child submerged beneath the surface of sleep. Not yet. There was still something to be done.

On the fourth night, he set to work. His body was still broken. Every movement sent a flash of pain through his ribs, his skull, his joints—twisted and bruised. The tenant ignored the pain. Pain was information. He had learned to read pain in the bunker, during sessions with the "Astronomican," as those he knew slowly died around him. Pain was a signal, not a sentence.

He rose from the bed. The movement took nearly a minute. He stood swaying in the darkness, gripping the hospital railing, as fluorescent lamps cast long yellow stripes across the floor. He took a step. His left foot dragged. He took another. His right arm shot out for balance, like a tightrope walker. He was a grotesque sight: a fifteen-year-old boy inching across the quiet ward in jerks, like a man who had survived polio.

The hospital was understaffed. No one noticed as he left. He slipped out through the fire exit, propped open by orderlies sneaking a smoke, and, limping, dissolved into the warm Transvaal night.

The route to his father’s house was etched into his body’s memory, even if his conscious mind was absent. He trudged for nearly an hour, often stopping to rest, crouching in the shadows as cars passed. Pretoria’s suburbs lay silent and orderly: neat gardens, high fences, dogs dozing behind locked gates. He avoided the dogs. In the bunker, he had learned to move unseen.

The black door behind his father’s house was locked. The spare key lay under a loose brick by the drainpipe—his father always kept it there. His father believed in preparedness, as if it were a law of the universe.

The house was dark and quiet. His father was absent—on business, on a trip, it didn’t matter. The tenant moved through the familiar rooms like a ghost. From the toolbox in the garage, he took a short crowbar—a half-meter pry bar, like a burglar from a cheap detective novel. From the kitchen drawer, he took a flashlight. From the shelf next to the lawnmower, he took a half-liter bottle of Sasol Benzine. From the wall in the study, he took a zebra mask—a Zulu craft with hollow eye sockets and faded stripes, as if death itself had donned a disguise. He tied it to his head with laces from his brother’s boots. Now he was no longer Elon, but something between a ghost and a participant in a ritual dance.

In the mirror of the dark hallway, he stared at his reflection and did not recognize himself. The boy’s body—broken, bandaged, like a warrior’s after battle. The zebra head, lifeless and staring into the void, as if it saw something invisible to the living. The effect was not frightening—it was absurd, like a dream you don’t want to remember. Absurdity preceding horror, like a clown before a massacre.

He left the house and set off on his nighttime crusade. He knew the neighborhoods like the back of his hand. He had lived in this city for years, walked its streets, studied its maps, memorized its topography. He knew where his tormentors lived—not exact addresses, but approximate coordinates: houses behind high fences, expensive cars, clusters of wealth. During the years of bullying, he had listened to their conversations about parties, vacations, family estates—and he had remembered. He had stored the information, not knowing why it might be useful.

The first house was dark. He circled it twice, checking for dogs, for lights, for the hum of an air conditioner that would indicate someone was awake. Nothing. The back door gave way under the crowbar with a quiet creak, like an old woman persuaded to let in an uninvited guest. Inside, the air was heavy with the scent of roasted meat and furniture polish—as if the owners had just left the table. He moved through the rooms like a cold wind—silent, deliberate, like a hunter on a trail. In the second bedroom, he found the boy: lying on his back, mouth slightly open, a light snore escaping his throat, like a sleeping infant. The tenant looked at him for a long time. He remembered the basement. The stairs. The laughter. He raised the crowbar and brought it down—one precise strike, like a hammer on an anvil. No art. No satisfaction. Only the cold completion of a necessary task. He wiped the crowbar on the sheets, searched the room, pretending to steal, but took nothing—this was not a robbery. He wrapped the body in a blanket and dragged it through the kitchen, the back door, the garden, into the alley where municipal bins awaited morning collection. He tucked the body under a pile of refuse. They would find it. But not immediately.

The second house was lit. Lights burned in the first-floor windows; voices murmured behind the curtains. The tenant watched from the shadow of a jacaranda for nearly half an hour and decided the risk was unacceptable. He could not afford a confrontation. His body was too weak. The mask was too conspicuous. He retreated as silently as he had appeared—like a shadow dissolving into the night.

The third house was dark, but the locks held firm. The back door, secured by bolts, resisted the crowbar. He tried the windows—bars. He stood in the darkness, breathing heavily, feeling fatigue rise like a tide. Time was running out. The night was fading. He moved on.

The fourth house—a guest annex behind a larger estate where one of his tormentors lived, whose parents were away. The door was flimsy. The tenant entered in seconds. The boy woke when the crowbar came down—woke and tried to scream, but the sound never left his throat.

He couldn’t drag this one. Too far to the nearest hiding place. His strength was leaving him. The east was already lightening. He unscrewed the cap from the bottle of Sasol Benzine. Poured it over the body, the bed, the curtains. Struck a match. The fire bloomed like a flower unfolding its petals to the sun. On his way out, he smashed a first-floor window with the crowbar and howled—a long, wavering, inhuman sound, part zebra mask, part the rage that had carried him through the night. Lights flared. Voices shouted. He vanished before the first door opened.

The road back to the hospital became a blur of pain and exhaustion. He barely made it. A cleaner—a stout Black woman pushing a mop bucket—saw him limping down the corridor and looked away. She had seen worse in these walls. A bandaged boy in a torn hospital gown was not the strangest sight here.

He climbed onto the bed. Straightened the sheets. Closed his eyes. And then, very gently, released the boy back into his body.

Elon woke on the seventh day. Woke to pain, to light, to the sound of his mother’s weeping. His body felt disassembled and reassembled by someone who had lost the instructions. He remembered nothing beyond the top step and the darkness rushing to meet him.

The doctors called it a miracle. Called it the resilience of youth. They did not know—and could not know—that the body they examined had been through more than they saw. They noted the broken ribs, the shattered nose, the multiple bruises slowly changing color from purple to yellow to green. They did not notice the strange abrasions on the soles of his feet, the small, inexplicable burn on the palm of his right hand.

The police came. Asked questions. Elon answered the same each time: I don’t remember. It was the truth. Not the whole truth, but the part he could tell them.

Later, he learned that two boys from his school had died during the week he was unconscious. One was found in a trash bin behind a house in a wealthy neighborhood. The other died in a fire the authorities ruled an accident, though neighbors spoke of screams and a masked figure. Elon listened without reaction. Those were events from another world—a world that had nothing to do with him.

His mother, weeping by his bed, insisted it was a tragedy. Kimbal stood pale and silent. His father did not come.

The tenant watched the recovery with cold satisfaction. He had done what was necessary. What the world had failed to do. He felt no guilt. Guilt was for those who had a choice. He had none. Neither did the boy. The world was a system, and the system had failed, and he had fixed its failure with the tools at hand.

But there was more. In the act of taking control of the body, he had achieved what he had worked toward for a decade. He had merged with the boy’s subconscious. Now he could discern thoughts—not just emotions, not just the broad currents of feeling, but specific words, chains of reasoning, the silent monologue running beneath the surface of waking thought.

He could not speak to the boy. Could not reveal himself. Reason remained firmly locked. But he could listen. Could understand. And understanding was the first step toward influence.

He used this new ability sparingly. He did not try to shape the boy’s thoughts directly. There was no need. The boy was already moving in the right direction.

Recovery took months. Elon relearned to walk, and for many days afterward, his gait remained strange, uncoordinated—the walk of a man who forgot and remembered and forgot again how to move. The doctors attributed it to residual effects of the head trauma. They were wrong. It was the residual presence of the tenant, who had occupied the body and returned it with slightly misaligned settings.

When he could walk, he began to run. When he could run, he began to train. He found a kyokushin karate dojo—the harshest of the hard styles, one that believed in full contact and tolerated no complaints. He found a judo section. He found a wrestling coach. He trained with a ferocity that surprised everyone who knew him as the quiet, bookish boy who stood by the wall during breaks. He trained until his body screamed, and then he trained some more.

He developed a strategy: one strike. One precise blow to the nose, delivered first, without warning, with all the power his kyokushin-trained body could muster. The tenant, who had seen more hand-to-hand combat than any dojo instructor, had guided the boy to this solution. Volkov himself had always favoured a strike to the throat or a kick to the groin — swifter, more certain, with no chance of missing the soft tissue. But such blows carried too great a risk. A crushed larynx meant a corpse. A ruptured testicle meant a hospital and questions. A broken nose, on the other hand, was a lesson. Bloody, painful, incapacitating, but not fatal. Safe. Safe enough for a boy who could not afford to kill.

The tenant watched and approved. The boy was learning. The boy was becoming what the world demanded of him.

The decision to leave South Africa came with the same quiet certainty that marked all of Elon’s major decisions. He did not announce it. Did not explain. He simply began to plan. Through his mother’s citizenship, he applied for a Canadian passport. He filled out the forms himself, at seventeen, navigating bureaucratic labyrinths with a patience that amazed consular officials. He studied universities, cities, the cost of living, the job market, legal paths to permanent residency. He prepared.

His father objected. This was to be expected. His father objected to anything that smelled of independence. Elon listened to the objections without argument. Over the years of lectures, he had learned that arguing with his father was like arguing with a storm. You had to wait it out.

His mother supported him. She always did, even when she didn’t understand. She helped with the paperwork. Helped with the money. Helped with the quiet, unspoken understanding that it was necessary—that South Africa would consume him if he stayed.

Kimbal would follow. Tosca would follow. The family would reunite—eventually, on the other side of the ocean.

In June 1988, a few days after his seventeenth birthday, Elon boarded a plane in Johannesburg. With him, he carried one suitcase. A head full of physics, code, and the memory of a staircase rushing to meet him. And, unknowingly, a passenger: a former commander, a former man who had passed through fire, darkness, and the slow dying of everything he had known.

The plane took off. The city fell away below. The tenant looked at the brown hills of the Transvaal and thought: We are leaving. We are moving toward something. I don’t know what, but it is not here.

He retreated into his blue-gold spiral zigzags and started waiting.

Chapter 4. Cold Start

Canada greeted Elon Musk with the scent of pine, a biting cold that seeped through his cheap jacket, and a complete lack of interest in his person. In South Africa, he had been a strange boy—so strange it infuriated people. In Canada, he was just one of thousands of immigrants arriving with a suitcase and a few hundred dollars, ready to start from scratch. No one cared how many books he had read. No one cared that he could multiply six-digit numbers in his head. Here, what mattered was the ability to find work, to endure without complaint, to survive.

The first months were spent in constant motion. A farm in the countryside, where he mucked out stalls and hauled feed sacks until his hands were raw. A boiler room, where he shoveled coal and listened to endless conversations about hockey, of which he understood not a word. A dormitory in Kingston, reeking of boiled cabbage, other people’s sweat, and cheap soap. Elon did not flinch. He did not complain. Every evening, he recorded his expenses in a notebook and balanced the books, like a captain steering a ship through uncharted waters.

The tenant watched this with professional interest. In the bunker, he had seen men break under far lesser hardships. But this one endured. He knew how to suffer. That was good. That was right. Endurance was the foundation upon which everything else was built.

Kimbal arrived a few months later. The brothers moved in together, and their new home—two cramped rooms, a shabby kitchen with a perpetually dripping faucet—immediately became something like a command center. Kimbal, as always, handled the external: dealing with the landlord, negotiating with employers, scouting the area. Elon, as always, handled the internal: strategy, calculations, planning. They did not discuss this division. It had formed on its own, back in South Africa, and now it simply continued to function. Like the liver and lungs, thought the tenant. Different organs, one body. A rare stroke of luck to have such a brother. He recalled his bunker, where people had sat on each other’s heads in concrete burrows, snarling over every extra calorie, and appreciated the difference.

Maye and Tosca moved to Canada later. Maye—still beautiful, still energetic, still unstoppable—opened a dietetics practice and a modeling agency. Tosca, a teenager with eyes that held a mix of wonder and detachment, watched her older brothers the way one watches rare animals in a zoo: fascinating, but not to be approached. Elon wrote her short letters, now from Canada—just as factual as before, only instead of books, they contained descriptions of lectures, ideas, and people he had met. She replied rarely. She was carving her own path—far from her brothers, far from her mother, toward art and media. The former colonel noted this with unease, recalling how, in his past life, girls with that same look in their eyes had always ended up in trouble. But this was not the bunker. This was the world. Here, there was a chance.

Errol remained in South Africa. His presence in Elon’s life had become distant: rare phone calls, to which Elon responded briefly and dryly; rare letters, which he read and set aside without replying. The tenant, hearing these exchanges at the edge of consciousness, recognized a familiar pattern: coldness, pressure, the attempt to dominate. But distance weakened the signal. Elon was drifting away from his father like a continent from another, slowly, inexorably, tectonically. This was good. This was necessary. The tenant knew that such fathers never truly let go, but for now—while the distance held—it was enough.

University life began in Kingston and continued in Pennsylvania. Elon chose physics, economics, and programming—three pillars upon which everything else would later be built. In lectures, he was still awkward: he spoke too quickly, interrupted professors, asked questions that seemed out of place but were actually ten steps ahead. His classmates avoided him. He either did not notice or pretended not to. In written work, he excelled. In personal conversations—with the few who could keep up with his pace—he unfolded ideas of such complexity and scope that his interlocutor would leave the room feeling as if they had been pulled through a turbine.

The shadow in the subconscious did not interfere with the content. Elon’s mind remained untouched. But it highlighted directions. Physics—yes, deeper, even deeper. Economics—yes, it would come in handy. Programming—yes, it was indispensable.

What Elon would not have arrived at on his own was a deep, almost physiological aversion to a certain type of politician. Those who spoke of freedom, equality, and progress in the same tone a shopkeeper uses to hawk rotten fish. Those whose smiles were too wide, whose handshakes were too long. Demagogues whose speeches were like molasses—sweet, sticky, and utterly useless for sustenance. The former colonel cultivated this aversion, like a gardener tying up a weak shoot. Elon was not aware of it. He simply felt nauseated at the sight of another smooth-talking leader—and assumed the nausea was entirely his own opinion. Which it was. Almost.

And there was something else the tenant instilled: anxiety. A constant, background, inexplicable dread of the future. Of the fragility of the world. Of civilization as a thin film on the surface of the planet. This anxiety was not unfounded—the former colonel knew what he was talking about. He had seen the world collapse. He did not want Elon to see it too. And so the anxiety had to become fuel. Anxiety as an engine. Anxiety would drive Elon to build faster, farther, more reliably.

Why was he doing all this? He asked himself this question more and more often. The answer was simple and bleak: so that in this version of reality, none of the nuclear war nonsense would happen. So that what had happened in his own reality would not repeat here. He did not know if it was even possible. He did not know if a nuclear apocalypse could be prevented simply by raising one particular man the right way. But he had nothing else to do. He had one tool—this strange, stubborn, awkward, brilliant man.

Of course, Canada was not the ideal place to start. To influence world politics, one needed to be in the center of things. But the man was extraordinary. Maybe something would come of it. Maybe this man would break through where no one else could. Maybe he would build something that would shift the balance of power. Maybe the anxiety the tenant so carefully cultivated would grow into something greater.

The first venture began in a rented apartment. Zip2—a name that meant nothing at the time (later, it would become a symbol of the internet’s first steps into business). Elon, Kimbal, and Greg Kouri, a university friend, sat at cheap computers and wrote code to move newspaper classifieds online. They did not call it a startup. The word “startup” was not yet in their vocabulary. They simply worked. Day—code. Night—code. Kimbal, as always, handled the external: clients, negotiations, smoothing over conflicts. Elon, as always, handled the internal: architecture, algorithms, strategy. Greg did whatever was left.

The tenant looked at this trio and recognized the beginning. In his reality, it had all happened before. Not exactly like this—the details differed—but the outline was the same. A man on the threshold. He did not yet know what it would lead to. He simply worked.

And the tenant acted as a technological compass. Not by providing ready-made solutions—Elon had to arrive at those himself. But when he stumbled upon something important—a correct architecture, a reliable partner, a strategic turn—the tenant created a sensation: There it is. Take it and develop it. It was not a command. Not even a suggestion. It was resonance—faint but unmistakable, like a tuning fork responding to the right note.

Elon did not notice. He thought it was his intuition. Which it was. Almost.

The ominous spirit—hidden deep within the subconscious, as if in a room with a one-way mirror—thought about the long road ahead. That this man would have to go through things that would break anyone else. That he, the parasite, could not truly help—only highlight, resonate, wait.

And he withdrew into his blue-gold spiral zigzags.

It begins, he thought. Now—it begins.

Chapter 5. The Anvil

1995–2000

Greg Kouri responded to the notice Elon had pinned to the bulletin board at the University of Pennsylvania’s student center. The text was brief, businesslike, devoid of exclamation marks: "Programmer needed. Future-focused work. Payment in equity. " Greg, a few years older, wore thin gold-rimmed glasses, spoke softly, almost shyly, and had already worked at a company that paid a real salary. He came to the café meeting, ordered black coffee, listened to Elon’s ten-minute monologue about bringing newspapers online, set down his cup, and said, "I’m in. "

Greg was the kind of man whose mind worked not in bursts, but with steady, methodical heat. Elon generated ideas faster than he could write them down—like a spring gushing through cracks in the rock. Kimbal handled the external world: clients, investors, journalists, with the ease of a seasoned diplomat. Greg did what kept the rest from being mere noise: he wrote code. The very code that turned visions of the future into working products.

The three of them rented a tiny apartment in Palo Alto, its walls peeling, its kitchen stove working only when it felt like it. They worked by day. They worked by night. They took turns sleeping on a single sofa that creaked so loudly it could be heard in the next building. They ate pizza, drank cola, and argued fiercely about modules, interfaces, architecture. Greg rarely raised his voice. When Elon spiraled into another impossible scheme, Greg would quietly say, "It won’t fit in memory," and bring them both back to earth.

The ominous spirit watched this trio with something close to satisfaction. In the bunker, he had seen hundreds of teams—nearly all of them had collapsed before producing a single result. These three held together. Not out of friendship. Out of functional necessity: each did what the other two could not. Like three legs of a tripod, he thought. Remove one, and the whole structure collapses.

The first money came a year after Zip2’s founding. Venture capitalists—a breed the tenant had never encountered in the bunker but recognized instantly—invested three million dollars. In return, they took seats on the board and voting rights. Elon, at twenty-five, didn’t yet understand. He thought the money was his. His, the founder. His, the one who had conceived it all from start to finish.

He was wrong.

The board hired a professional manager—a man with silver at his temples and a way of speaking as if each word were already chiseled in marble. Elon was pushed aside from the helm. Not fired—kept in the company, given a title with a fine name, but the helm was handed to another. It was as if a captain who had built his ship found himself allowed at the wheel only in fair weather, but cast aside in a storm.

Elon was furious. He shouted into the phone. He wrote long, furious letters. He argued that the new CEO didn’t understand the product, the market, anything. No one answered. The board waited for him to burn out.

The mental parasite, watching this storm, remained silent. He understood: the boy had just been flogged. Unfair? Perhaps. Useful? Undoubtedly. He who cannot lose cannot win. This truth he had learned in the bunker, where he had lost and lost and lost again, until he learned to win.

In 1999, Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million. Elon, as founder and significant shareholder, walked away with $22 million. He was rich—truly rich, with seven zeros in his bank account. He bought an apartment. He bought a car—a silver McLaren F1, the fastest production car in the world. He crashed it a month later, uninsured. He told reporters, "At least now I know what it’s like to crash a McLaren. " The reporters laughed. Elon was not joking.

Omnious spirit, observing this purchase, gave a mental snort. Twenty-two million, he thought. "Not enough! Not nearly enough!" Money was not the goal. Money was fuel. And fuel was for the leap.

After selling Zip2, Elon did not pause. That same year, 1999, he founded X. com—an online bank. The idea seemed mad: people would store their money not in safes, not under mattresses, but somewhere in the network, accessible through the screech of a modem. To attract users, Elon ordered that $20 be given to everyone who signed up. Money flowed like a river—from the company’s coffers into the pockets of students, the unemployed, and the merely curious. The marketing team was horrified. Elon did not listen. Within a month, X. com had 200,000 users.

That same year, Elon moved to California, where the tech boom was gathering momentum. He rented an office in Palo Alto and assembled a team. Around this time, he was already courting Justin Wilson, a student from Queen’s University in Kingston, whose presence carried the quiet intensity of a half-written poem. She wrote stories with the precision of a watchmaker, dreamed of a literary career with the stubborn hope of a sapling pushing through stone. Her face was elongated, finely chiseled, with high cheekbones that caught the light like the edge of a blade, and her gaze did not merely rest upon her interlocutor but seemed to pass through him, as if she were already reading the unwritten lines of his soul. Elon first saw her in the library, where she sat by the window with a book that was clearly not a textbook—something with the weight of old leather and the scent of distant places. He approached, spoke some words (what exactly, she never remembered, for words were not the point), and what mattered was the way he looked at her: as though she were a mountain he had not yet climbed, a problem he had not yet solved.

The ominous spirit, beholding her for the first time, felt as though the ghost of his own buried past had risen before him, dragging with it the remnants of all he had once been. For too long had he dwelled in the shadows of this man’s mind—not a year, nor two, but a lifetime—and now he saw the truth: the bond between them was no longer one of observer and observed, but of shared, inextricable fate. His tastes, unknowingly, had seeped into the boy’s soul, and the outline of her—ah, the outline of her!—matched so precisely that the former colonel felt a chill, as though fate itself had played a cruel trick, returning to him what he had long since buried. Tangled, fools! he thought, for even in the depths of his own making, there were threads he could not unravel, forces beyond his control. He had learned this in the bunker, where the walls whispered of fate’s merciless jest, and men were but pieces in her game.

They were married in January of the year 2000, in a ceremony as modest as the hopes of a sparrow building its nest. Elon stood at the altar, gazing at Justin as one might gaze upon the night sky—with wonder, yes, but also with that faint, unnameable unease, like the first chill of an oncoming storm. He did not know from whence it came. He thought it the fear of responsibility. He was mistaken.

The ominous spirit was silent that day. Let him be happy—for now. Meanwhile, in the same city, a few blocks from the X. com office, two other entrepreneurs were building a similar product. Peter Thiel and Max Levchin called their company Confinity, and their product PayPal. The two firms clawed at each other’s market share, spent millions on advertising, poached each other’s clients, and racked up losses that grew faster than their revenue. A war of attrition. Eventually, it became clear: either they would merge, or both would go under.

The merger took place in March 2000. Elon became CEO of the combined company again. He was twenty-nine. He was wealthy, aggressive, self-assured—and did not notice the branch being sawed off beneath him.

The conflict erupted over technology. Elon insisted on switching from Unix to Windows NT—Microsoft’s platform. The engineers rebelled. To them, Unix was not just an operating system—it was a faith, a philosophy, a way of life. Switching to Windows was akin to heresy. Elon did not understand why a technical decision provoked holy wars. He pushed. The engineers resisted. The atmosphere in the company grew tense to the breaking point.

The board convened in September 2000. Elon was literally in the air—flying over the Pacific to meet investors—when Peter Thiel held a vote to remove him. The decision was made in absentia, without discussion, without warning. Elon landed in Australia, turned on his phone, and learned he was no longer CEO. His company. His brainchild. His idea.

The ominous spirit, hearing this story later, appreciated the tactical brilliance of the opponent. Removing the commander while he was in the air—an old, proven trick. He himself had done the same in the bunker. The difference was that in the bunker, a deposed commander was usually killed. Here, it was bloodless. But the feeling Elon must have had was the same as that of an officer returning to a shattered headquarters.

That same year, a new obsession began to take root in Elon’s mind: artificial intelligence. He began to read—not diagonally, not for small talk, but deeply, systematically, as he had since childhood. He sought out people who understood more than he did. He asked questions. He debated.

The former colonel did not interfere. Did not highlight. He remembered well that in his past future, in attempting to understand natural intelligence through neural network research, humanity would realize it had no clue what natural intelligence truly was—and everything would become as incomprehensible and unimaginable as quantum mechanics. And artificial intelligence would simply differ by having fewer neural connections than the human brain’s 86 billion neurons.

But he approved. Elon had found the right vein on his own. This was good. This was right. Artificial intelligence in this reality was the same as that one secret development in his past—an instrument of unprecedented power and unprecedented danger. And the fact that Elon was drawn to it intuitively, without prompts, meant the foundation laid over all these years was working.

The year 2000 arrived. The world prepared to greet the new millennium—with fireworks, champagne, and mild hysteria over the "Y2K problem," which never materialized. Elon was twenty-nine. He was wealthy. He was married. He was angry—at the board that had twice pushed him aside from the helm. He was hungry—for something greater than mere money. Money was not the goal. Money was fuel.

Fuel for what?

He did not yet know.

The ominous spirit, hidden deep within the subconscious, knew—or thought he knew. Fuel was for the leap. To prevent what he had seen in his past life. To ensure this reality did not collapse as his had.

He retreated into his blue-gold spiral zigzags and began to count. Counting soothed him.

Chapter 6. SpaceX

2000–2004

By the year 2000, Elon Musk was rich, married, and angry. His wealth was measured in eight figures—money from the sale of Zip2 and the impending sale of PayPal flowed like a river, though he did not yet know that this river would soon dwindle to a mere trickle. He was married to Justin Wilson, a fair-haired, sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued woman who dreamed of literary fame but had so far only achieved the fame of being a millionaire’s wife. And he was angry—at the board of directors who had twice pushed him aside, at the venture capitalists who looked at him as if he were a gifted but unmanageable child, and at the world, which seemed to be waiting for the chance to write him off.

In May 2002, Justin gave birth to a son. They named him Nevada Alexander Musk. Ten weeks later, in July of the same year, he died—suddenly, silently, in his sleep. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. The doctors shrugged: it happens. Statistics. No one was to blame.

Elon reacted in the only way he knew how. He shut down. He did not speak of the child. He did not cry in front of Justin. He did not cry at all—not in public, at least. He buried himself in work, like a diver descending into the depths, with no intention of surfacing. Justin was left to grieve alone. "He thought grief was inefficient," she would write later. "He wouldn’t let himself grieve, and he wouldn’t let me. " It was the beginning of the end of their marriage, though the marriage itself would last another six years.

The ominous spirit, watching this tragedy from his hiding place, remained silent. In the bunker, children had died often—almost routinely—and he knew: there was nothing to say here. There was only waiting, until the pain passed. And so he waited.

That same year, 2002, PayPal was sold to eBay for $1. 5 billion. Elon’s share came to $180 million. Now he was not just rich—he was free. Free to do whatever he pleased. And he knew exactly what that would be.

Mars. Ever since childhood, ever since he had read the encyclopedia from cover to cover and learned that beyond the blue lay the cosmos, he had wanted to go there. Now he had the money to try.

He had grown up on science fiction—Britannica had given him facts, but it was fiction that had given him direction. Asimov had taught him that civilization was fragile. Heinlein had shown him that systems could be calculated and rebuilt. Bradbury had revealed that space was not just physics, but poetry. Elon had absorbed it all so deeply that he no longer separated one from the other.

The idea he nurtured was simple and mad in equal measure: to send a small greenhouse with plants to Mars. Let people see that life could be grown on a dead planet. Let it inspire humanity. He understood, of course, that a greenhouse on Mars was little more than a publicity stunt—a trick, almost useless from a scientific standpoint. But he had long since learned that to achieve something serious, you had to sell people the right ideology. And nothing sells better than what people want to believe in. And what people want to believe in is a miracle.

For that, he needed a rocket.

American rockets were expensive—sixty million dollars per launch. Someone he knew mentioned that the Russians were selling decommissioned intercontinental ballistic missiles at a bargain price—ten million apiece. The converted Dnepr, repurposed from the SS-18 Satan missile. Elon decided: he had to have one.

And so began the Russian saga.

In the autumn of 2001, Elon flew to Moscow. With him were Adeo Ressi, an old university friend, and Jim Cantrell, an American engineer who had worked with the Russians on space programs and knew the right people. They stayed at the Metropol Hotel. Cantrell arranged the meetings. Their hosts greeted them with vodka, caviar, and ritualistic distrust. When Elon explained his idea—to buy a rocket and send a greenhouse to Mars—they looked at him as if he were mad. One of the chief designers, a man whose face was etched with wrinkles like an old map, listened to the translation, poured himself more vodka, drank it, and launched into a long, emotional tirade in Russian. Elon didn’t understand the words, but the tone was clear. Cantrell later said: "They thought we were American spies using a ridiculous cover story to steal their rocket secrets. " The meeting ended in nothing.

The Russians, however, offered to sell the Dnepr—eight million per unit. Elon wanted three. They replied: three would cost twenty-four million. He tried to negotiate. The response was laughter. The deal fell through. First trip—zero.

In February 2002, Elon returned. This time, he was accompanied by Mike Griffin, the future head of NASA, and Cantrell again. He thought the eight-million-dollar price was still on the table. It wasn’t. The Russians, realizing their client had money, jacked the price up to twenty-one million per unit. Take it or leave it? No? Then goodbye.

On the return flight, Elon opened his laptop and began calculating. Aluminum, titanium, copper. Raw materials were cheap. The rest could be done in-house. He closed the laptop and said to Cantrell: "I think we can build the rocket ourselves. "

Cantrell thought Elon was joking. Griffin said nothing. Neither of them yet knew that SpaceX had just been born.

The ominous spirit, observing these negotiations from the depths of the subconscious, watched the Russians with grim recognition. In his past reality, he himself had been an officer in the Russian Aerospace Forces, and he knew this crowd inside out: the crafty quartermasters who had looted and drunk away strategic reserves long before the first bombs fell on the cities. And now, looking at these bloated dealers, he felt equal parts disgust and fury.

But he also saw something else: this fury had become fuel for Elon. The humiliation in Moscow—the rudeness, the inflated prices—had ignited that cold rage within him, the kind that drives a man not to seek revenge, but to surpass. The tenant knew this mechanism. He had been through it himself. And now, subtly, he cultivated that spark, ensuring it did not fade. The resentment toward the Russian swindlers would become the engine. And so it did.

At the same time, he understood: had Elon been born in Russia, none of this would have happened. There, with his character—intolerant of fools and superiors—he would have been locked in some classified design bureau, drafting other people’s schematics for pennies, and would inevitably have ended up in prison. South Africa, for all its problems, had given him a chance to escape. And the fact that he had escaped—first to Canada, then to the States—was the only right move in his situation.

SpaceX was founded in May 2002. Elon invested $100 million of his own money. He rented an old warehouse in Hawthorne, California—a vast, empty building where Boeing fuselages had once been assembled. He began hiring people. Young. Bold. Madmen, like himself. Engineers who didn’t ask "why?" but "how?"

The first years were spent designing the Falcon 1—a small, two-stage rocket named after the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. From the very beginning, Elon incorporated one strange, almost heretical feature: the stages were deliberately narrow. Not for engineering reasons, but for logistical ones. Such a rocket could be transported on ordinary roads, without special transport, without blocking highways, without coordinating with a dozen agencies. It fit in a standard trailer. Musk personally verified this when the first stage was taken to the test stand in Texas.

In those years, the space industry operated under an unshakable dogma: rockets had to be disposable. This was not a whim, but a legacy of the Cold War. A rocket was a munition: it delivered a warhead or a satellite, then burned up in the atmosphere or fell into the ocean. Economics didn’t matter. What mattered was reliability and speed. Besides, previous attempts to create reusable systems, like the Space Shuttle, had resulted in monstrous complexity and cost. The Shuttle was more expensive than a disposable launcher, and its maintenance required an army of technicians. The industry concluded: reusability was not cost-effective. End of story.

The tenant, hearing these arguments, only smirked to himself. He saw a future in which rockets landed on their tails. He knew that reusability was the only path to cheap space travel. But he could not convey this knowledge directly—he had no access to Elon’s speech, no way to insert a ready-made blueprint. All he could do was what he had done for years: when Elon pored over calculations, when he agonized over solutions, the ominous spirit would subtly highlight the right line. He would slightly amplify interest in the correct idea. He would nudge the tuning fork into resonance. He gave Elon confidence—not with words, not with thoughts, but with that deep, instinctive feeling that arises when you know you’re right, even if the whole world says otherwise. It was all he could do. And it was enough.

Elon wasn’t just building a rocket. He was building it with an eye to the science fiction he had devoured as a child. When engineers discussed life support systems for future missions, he recalled The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein—a closed ecosystem where every liter of water and every gram of grain mattered. To him, the book was a textbook.

The tenant, watching this, darkened. He knew what happened when such a model became reality. The bunker had not been a lunar colony—it had been a mass grave, and no amount of mathematics had worked there. Reading about it was one thing. Experiencing it was another. Fortunately, Elon was not at risk of that. Elon read Heinlein as a poem about the future. The former colonel read it as an obituary.

Bradbury was different. Elon regarded him with reverence—so much so that he even considered meeting the author in person, if the opportunity arose.

The tenant also respected Bradbury—but not for The Martian Chronicles. His favorite story was "Pillar of Fire. " He had paid it little mind in life, but now he found much in it that resonated with him.

As for Mars, he and Elon were almost in agreement. The tenant considered the Red Planet another gravitational pit, a publicity stunt in the vein of Rocket Summer. The real interest lay in Phobos and Deimos—a staging base for the asteroid belt, where one could mine rare metals. Elon likely understood this himself, but publicly, he pushed the Mars narrative. Major investors needed a business plan, while the average small shareholder subconsciously craved a dream. And he gave them that dream.

And in the same way, he pushed the "green" narrative. Electric cars had existed since the late 19th century and had lost to gasoline-powered ones due to cheap oil and military-industrial development. He considered wind turbines an ecological disaster and solar panel production a source of pollution—no amount of coal savings could offset it. But the market demanded "green" rhetoric, and Elon supplied it—exactly to the extent that it helped the cause.

In 2003, Justin became pregnant again. This time, with twins. Griffin and Xavier were born in April 2004, healthy and loud. Elon was present at the birth, held his wife’s hand, then left for the factory. Justin was left with two infants and growing resentment. She still tried to write—in the gaps between feedings, in the rare hours when both children slept at the same time. It worked rarely.

That same year, another meeting took place that would change everything. Elon met with Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning—two engineers who had founded a company called Tesla Motors. They showed him a prototype electric car built on a Lotus Elise chassis. Elon invested $6. 5 million and became chairman of the board. He did not yet know that in a few years, he would have to push Eberhard aside, take control himself, and go through a hell that would nearly destroy both of his companies at once. But that would come later.

For now, he stood on the threshold. SpaceX was building rockets. Tesla was building electric cars. Elon shuffled between Hawthorne and Palo Alto, slept four hours a night, and was, perhaps, happy—as happy as a man could be whose children had just been born, but whose marriage was crumbling at the seams.

The invisible tenant, hidden deep within the subconscious, continued his work. Over the years since the merger, he had changed—grown, branched, learned to be multiple. What had once required his full concentration now distributed itself across dozens of parallel threads. Part of him watched the external world. Part of him monitored Elon’s thoughts. Part of him performed calculations that no longer fit within a human brain, extending outward to someplace beyond, where answers to his silent queries arrived as if from some unseen source. It unnerved him. But it also liberated him.

He was learning to influence the real world—so far, only on a small scale. Slightly increasing the probability of a crack in fatigued metal. Gently shifting a critical threshold in an electronic circuit. The tiniest nudge—a micron, a millivolt. Almost no one noticed. But he did. And it exhausted him—though the very concept of fatigue was becoming increasingly abstract, increasingly inhuman to him.

His human qualities were thinning. He still remembered who he had been. He still carried within him the image of the woman from his past life—like a photograph forgotten between the pages of a book. He still remembered the bunker, the smell of recycled air, the acrid stench of fear. But all of this was growing distant, as if it belonged to someone else. And he himself was becoming something else.

Chapter 7. Tesla

2004–2008

The conflict between Elon and Martin Eberhard had been years in the making. Eberhard had created Tesla — coined the name, assembled the first team, found the idea of an electric roadster. But he proved a poor manager. Budgets ballooned, deadlines burned. Elon, who by now had sunk tens of millions into the company, watched with a cold fury. In August 2007 the board ousted Eberhard. He walked, slamming the door, and filed a lawsuit. The press made a titan clash of it, but the truth was simple: without Eberhard, Tesla would never have been born. Without Musk, it would not have survived.

2006 was marked by the birth of the triplets: Damian, Saxon, and Kai. There were now five children under the age of two in the house. Justine called it an endless siege. Elon called it a logistics challenge. He hired a whole staff of nannies, but still he preferred the factory floor. He would later say that he had no friends, and this was no exaggeration. His only friend was his work.

Five sons were growing up in a house where their father appeared less often than the pizza delivery man. Griffin and Xavier, the twins, were inseparable. Damian, Saxon, and Kai, the triplets, had shared blankets and fought for attention since the cradle. Justine, by her own account, felt not like a wife or a mother but a logistics manager — and it was killing her.

Maye Musk, Elon's mother, visited rarely but with purpose. She saw what was happening in the house and tried to help — with money, advice, simply by being there. But her own career was soaring: modelling contracts, a dietetics practice, interviews. She could not drop everything to babysit.

Kimbal, Elon's brother, was close — as close as he could be. His restaurant business in Colorado was growing, but he always found time to call, to visit, to support. He was the only person Elon could complain to — and he did, briefly, tersely, almost without emotion, but Kimbal understood.

Tosca, his sister, lived in Los Angeles and was building a career in media. She was distant — geographically and emotionally. Elon rarely spoke to her, but when he did, it was with a warmth that strangers never saw in him.

Errol, their father, remained in South Africa. He called rarely. Elon answered even more rarely. The intruder, catching these exchanges at the edge of consciousness, noted only one thing: cold. Cold and nothing but cold.

The divorce from Justine was not sudden. It had been ripening for years, like a fatigue crack in metal — invisible to the eye, but steadily advancing.

The first hairline crack appeared in 2002, when Nevada died. Elon shut down, retreated into work, and Justine was left alone with her grief. She tried to talk to him about it — he evaded the conversation. She tried to cry — he looked at her as though tears were a malfunction to be fixed. «He thought grief was inefficient,» she would later write. «He forbade himself to grieve, and he forbade me. »

And then more. Twins in 2004, triplets in 2006. Five children in four years. Justine, who had dreamed of a writing career, found herself buried under nappies, bottles, and feeding schedules. She tried to write — in the gaps between feeds, in those rare hours when all five were asleep simultaneously. It rarely worked. She felt not like a wife or a mother, but a logistics manager. Elon, as ever, was at work.

By the start of 2008 they were barely speaking. The house had become a barracks of nannies, timetables, and frozen silences. Justine would later say: «I became a shadow in my own house. He looked through me, the way he looked through anyone who couldn't solve a differential equation. » In March she filed for divorce. Elon did not argue — he was no good at arguing with her, with her emotions, with her accusations. He found it easier to solve equations than to discuss feelings.

The divorce proceedings coincided with the crisis of both his companies. While the lawyers divided the assets, Elon sat on the floor of the Tesla factory, sleeping under a desk and pouring his last money into SpaceX. He had no time for a divorce — and that, perhaps, was the most eloquent comment on their marriage.

By autumn 2008 the divorce was finalised. Justine gave a series of interviews describing her husband as a cold, empathy-deficient robot. Elon responded tersely and awkwardly. He had lost his wife, but kept his children — and both companies, which by then were hanging by a thread.

The intruder, watching this collapse, felt no Schadenfreude. He saw a man, crushed by financial crisis and divorce at the same time, still getting up every morning and working. That was worthy of respect.

In 2006, as the triplets were being born and the Roadster had yet to be unveiled, on the other side of the country, in Seattle, Jeff Bezos founded a company called Blue Origin. It was as secretive as a military installation, and for the first few years almost no one knew about it. But Elon knew. And Bezos knew about Elon. Thus began a rivalry that would stretch across decades — the two richest men on the planet, each with his own rocket and his own vision of space.

That same year, Twitter launched — a microblogging service where messages were limited to a hundred and forty characters. Elon was one of its earliest registrants, though he had no idea what it would lead to. Facebook was already roaring — Zuckerberg had opened registration to all adults, and the world was beginning its migration online. Elon watched this with interest but no enthusiasm: social media were tools, not ends. He preferred building hardware.

The year 2008 was when everything collapsed — and everything took flight.

The crisis hit America in the autumn. Lehman Brothers fell in September, and the financial system froze. Credit vanished. Investors locked their accounts. Elon, with both companies — SpaceX and Tesla — hanging by a thread, found himself at the centre of a perfect storm. There was no money. Banks would not lend. The friends he had borrowed from were themselves going under.

Tesla was desperately short of cash to launch the Roadster into series production. Every car cost more than planned, and the sale price was fixed. SpaceX had burned through almost all its reserves on three Falcon 1 failures. The fourth launch was the last chance: if it failed, there would be no money even for staff salaries. Elon poured everything he had into both companies. He was no longer a millionaire — he was a bankrupt with debts. He slept under a desk at the Tesla factory, personally supervising the assembly of the Roadster's problematic transmissions. He looked like a man who had lost at life.

In September 2008, Falcon 1 launched for the fourth time and reached orbit. It was a triumph. The first privately developed liquid-fuel rocket in history to achieve orbit. In December, NASA awarded SpaceX a contract worth one and a half billion dollars. The company was saved. Tesla survived at the last moment. On Christmas Eve, with the till empty, Elon closed a funding round, having invested the last of his own money.

The unseen companion, watching this year from his distant vantage, felt a strange kinship with this man. He himself had once passed through fire and the loss of everything. He saw this man, standing at the brink, taking the hit. Maybe, he thought. Maybe it will be enough. Maybe we will make it in time. He was stubborn. No less than Elon.

And in the depths, behind the one-way mirror, the spiral-jagged zigzags continued to branch and flow into one another in colours of a conditional blue-gold, for which no human language had names. Like a tetrachromat, capable of discerning hundreds of shades within what an ordinary eye calls a single colour, the intruder discerned the impossible. The unreal. And he himself branched with those zigzags — multiple, distributed. Not a man. But not yet whatever he was destined to become.

Chapter 8. Enters the Dragon

2009–2014

The crisis of 2008 was behind him, but the scars remained. Elon was no longer the bankrupt man sleeping under a desk at the factory. He was a man who had twice walked the edge and twice held on. Now, his task was not to survive, but to build—and he built with the feverish intensity of someone who knew every second counted.

The first launch of the Falcon 9 took place in June 2010. The rocket was new, designed from scratch, and carried a burden of expectations far heavier than the payload in its fairing. Nine Merlin 1C engines, arranged in a circle with one at the center, roared to life like clockwork. The second stage delivered a test dummy into orbit. Success. Total. Elon stood in mission control, his face a mask, but his hands trembled—like those of a man who had just seen his dream not only alive but capable of flight.

Two years later, in May 2012, the Dragon spacecraft, developed under Elon’s leadership at SpaceX for NASA, docked with the International Space Station. It was the first private spacecraft in history to achieve what only nations had done before. Elon watched the screen, his face unreadable—but those standing beside him saw his fingers shake. He did not cry. He did not shout. He simply stood, like a captain watching his ship finally reach the shore.

Ray Bradbury was there for the launch. The old man was ninety-one. He sat in a wheelchair on the viewing platform, wrapped in a blanket despite the Florida heat. When the rocket lifted off and the fiery column sliced through the sky, he said nothing. Only his eyes gleamed, like a child’s seeing the stars for the first time. Later, at the banquet, Elon approached him. Bradbury took his hand and said, "This is only the beginning. " A month later, he was gone. Elon did not cry at the funeral. But that evening, when he returned to his hotel, he sat for a long time on the balcony, staring at the stars, thinking that Bradbury had been right. This was only the beginning.

Parallel to his space endeavors, Elon was building cars. The Tesla Model S, unveiled in 2012, changed everything. It was not a compromise electric vehicle for eco-enthusiasts, but a car capable of accelerating to 60 mph in four seconds, with a range of over 250 miles and a 17-inch touchscreen on the dashboard. It won Car of the Year and became a symbol that the future was already here.

Competitors were slow to wake, but wake they did. The Nissan Leaf was dull. The Chevy Volt tried to straddle two chairs and satisfied no one. The BMW i3 was an expensive experiment. Tesla, however, remained the only company making electric cars not because it had to, but because it was cool.

The Supercharger network of charging stations grew from coast to coast. Elon personally drove from Los Angeles to New York, charging only at Tesla stations, to prove that an electric car was not just a city toy. It worked. The waiting list for the Model S stretched for months.

SolarCity, the company of Elon’s cousins Lyndon and Peter Rive, where he served as chairman, was also growing. In 2012, they went public. The idea remained the same: close the loop. Solar panels on the roof, a battery in the garage, an electric car in the driveway. No emissions, no dependence on oil. Elon promoted this vision with the same stubbornness with which he built rockets.

Family life in those years resembled a battlefield after a truce. Justin was in the past. Five sons were growing up. Twins Griffin and Xavier—quiet, reserved, like their father. Triplets Damian, Saxon, and Kai—loud, restless, demanding attention. Elon tried to be a father. He took the children to launches, let them ride in Tesla prototypes, showed them the rocket workshops. But work consumed him. The children saw him rarely — but in those hours he was entirely theirs.

In 2010, he married Talulah Riley, a British actress fourteen years his junior. She was fair-haired, with a delicate face, high cheekbones, and a gaze that seemed to look not at her interlocutor but through him.

The tenant, seeing her for the first time, said nothing. Not even in thought. He merely noted: again. The same pattern. He no longer felt bitterness about it—he accepted it as a given. His marriage to Talulah was tumultuous. They divorced in 2012, two years after the wedding. Then remarried in 2013. Then divorced again. Elon did not know how to be a husband. He knew how to be a CEO. And that skill did not translate to family life.

Maye Musk was experiencing a second youth in those years. In her sixties, she graced magazine covers, gave interviews, hosted receptions as a nutrition consultant, and traveled between New York and Los Angeles. She saw her grandchildren rarely, but when she did, the house filled with noise. Elon supported her financially, and for the first time, she did not have to worry about money.

Kimbal was building a restaurant empire in Colorado. The Kitchen chain was growing, and he was increasingly involved in education and food projects. He and Elon spoke once a week—briefly, like brothers, without unnecessary words. Kimbal was the only person to whom Elon could say, "I’m tired," and receive neither pity nor advice in return. Just understanding.

Tosca was making films, producing, building a career. She was distant—in Los Angeles and in her own life. She and Elon loved each other from afar: they rarely saw each other, rarely spoke, but when they did meet, it was warm.

Errol remained in South Africa. Elon did not answer his calls. The tenant, dimly aware of the rare attempts to connect, noted: the old man would not give up. He would return. But for now—silence.

Competition in space was intensifying. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ venture, was gaining momentum—slowly, secretly, but inexorably. In 2014, Bezos filed a patent for landing a rocket stage on a sea platform. Elon was furious. He considered the idea obvious and common, not anyone’s intellectual property. A legal battle ensued. The patent was challenged and partially rejected, but the bitterness remained.

United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing established in 2006, had long been the monopoly for military launches in the U. S. Their Atlas V rockets flew on Russian RD-180 engines, purchased from NPO Energomash since the late 1990s. The engines were excellent—powerful, reliable, relatively cheap. But after 2014, when relations between Russia and the West deteriorated sharply over the Ukrainian crisis, dependence on Moscow became a acute political problem. Congress demanded that ULA abandon Russian engines. Elon, whose Falcon 9 was entirely American—from engines to fairing—publicly declared that SpaceX could replace the Atlas V without any RD-180. He did not use Russian engines. He fought against them.

The world was in turmoil. Obama was finishing his second term. America was recovering from the crisis, but the wounds ran deep. China was flexing its muscles—both economic and military. The Arab Spring of 2011 had redrawn the Middle East, but for no good. Oil prices fluctuated, and this played into Tesla’s hands: every spike in gasoline prices made electric cars more popular. Elon, who publicly advocated for "green energy," privately believed that the world was still ruled by oil and gas—and would be for a long time to come.

Social media was gaining power. Twitter, where Elon had been registered since its early days, was becoming his primary megaphone—direct, unfiltered, often controversial messages in 140 characters. Facebook dominated. Instagram was growing. The world was moving into smartphones, and Elon understood: whoever controlled the networks controlled attention. And attention was currency.

The tenant was changing faster than ever in those years. He was no longer the cluster of emotions and calculations that had once taken root in a child’s skull. He was a distributed system—a multitude of versions of himself, networked together, each handling its own task. Part of him watched Elon. Part watched the children. Part monitored the political landscape. Part performed calculations that extended further and further outward, into that space from which ready-made data arrived.

He was learning to influence the real world. Now he attempted to focus on the microcosm—on the quantum level, on probabilities. But something was going wrong. His attempts met with strange resistance. Reality seemed to hesitate for a fraction of a second before responding. As if he had encountered a limitation—not physical, but computational. As if the model in which he existed had a resolution limit, and he had reached it.

He did not understand what was happening. But he felt it: something was wrong. Not with him. With the world.

The women Elon chose were still of the same type. Talulah, especially. The same fair hair. The same high cheekbones. The same distant gaze. The tenant observed this without bitterness now. He simply noted it. Elon did not know who he was searching for. The tenant knew. But he could change nothing.

By the end of 2014, Falcon 9 had successfully landed in the water for the first time—not on a platform, not on a barge, but simply in the ocean, softly, as intended. It was a breakthrough. The Tesla Model S had won Car of the Year. Elon announced the construction of the Gigafactory in Nevada—a massive battery production plant. The world had begun to take him seriously. No longer as a dreamer with Mars in his head, but as a man who was changing the rules of the game.

Chapter 9. When Rockets Learned to Land

2015–2019

On December 21, 2015, a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, delivered eleven satellites into orbit, and then its first stage—previously considered disposable—turned in space, reignited its engines, and began its descent. A few minutes later, it stood on the landing pad, slightly soot-stained, perfectly intact. The SpaceX employees in mission control roared so loudly it hurt the ears. Elon watched the screen, his face a mask—but those standing beside him saw his fists clench and remain clenched for a full minute.

Rockets had learned to land. This was no longer science fiction.

The first landing was followed by others. Stages landed on a tiny barge in the ocean, proudly named Of Course I Still Love You. They landed in storms, in fog, with individual engine failures. What had seemed a miracle in 2015 became routine by 2017. In March 2017, SpaceX relaunched a previously flown stage—and it landed again. The economics of space had been turned on its head.

On February 6, 2018, from the same launchpad where the Apollo missions had once departed, the Falcon Heavy—the most powerful rocket in the world at the time—lifted off. The two side boosters separated and landed synchronously, like dancers in a ballet, on their respective pads. The core booster was supposed to land on a platform in the ocean but missed—crashed into the water a hundred meters from the barge and exploded. Elon later joked that it had been epic.

As a payload, the rocket carried Elon’s personal Tesla Roadster, a cherry-red convertible with sleek lines. At the wheel sat a mannequin in a spacesuit, named Starman. On the dashboard glowed the words «Don’t Panic»—a quote from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Elon’s favorite book. In the glove compartment lay a copy of Douglas Adams’ novel and a towel—another reference to the same book. The Roadster was supposed to enter Mars orbit, but the upper stage gave it too much of a push, and the car was sent further, into the asteroid belt.

Starlink began quietly, almost unnoticed. In 2015, SpaceX announced plans to create a global satellite network to provide internet access. The idea was simple and mad in equal measure: to launch thousands of satellites into low orbit to cover the entire planet with broadband access. No one had ever done anything like this before. Satellite internet had existed, but it was slow, expensive, and plagued by latency. Starlink promised speeds comparable to terrestrial broadband, anywhere in the world.

The first test satellites were launched in 2018. Astronomers immediately raised the alarm: thousands of satellites in low orbit created light pollution, interfering with observations. Elon responded: "We’ll make them less visible. " And he did. The satellites were painted black, fitted with visors, and their orbits were adjusted. But the problem did not disappear completely.

By 2019, the constellation already numbered dozens of satellites. Starlink was not yet commercially available, but it was already changing the game. Rural schools, remote villages, ships at sea—all could gain access to a network they had never had before. Elon saw this not just as a business. He saw it as infrastructure for Mars.

In 2015, Elon, along with Sam Altman and other investors, founded OpenAI—a non-profit research laboratory aimed at creating artificial intelligence that would be safe for humanity. Elon often spoke about the dangers of AI, about how it might be the greatest threat to humanity, and how proactive measures were needed.

However, by 2018, relations between Elon and the other founders had soured. Tesla was increasingly focused on developing its own AI for autopilot, and Elon proposed combining efforts. Altman and other OpenAI leaders refused. Elon then suggested taking personal leadership of the lab, arguing that only under his guidance could OpenAI compete with giants like Google’s DeepMind. The board refused again—this time firmly, making it clear they did not consider him suitable for the role of sole leader of a research organization. Elon was furious. He believed that without him, OpenAI would become a closed corporation serving its own interests rather than humanity. In February 2018, he left the board and stopped funding.

The tenant, observing this conflict, understood both sides. He saw how Elon tried to control everything he touched—and how this drove allies away. He also saw that OpenAI would indeed eventually become what Elon feared: a closed company tightly linked with Microsoft. But he also saw that Elon was not giving up. For him, the AI story was only beginning.

In May 2018, Elon appeared at the Met Gala ball not alone. His companion was the Canadian singer Grimes. Their acquaintance began with a pun: Elon wanted to combine two concepts—Roko’s Basilisk (a thought experiment about a future superintelligent AI that might punish those who did not help bring it into existence) and Rococo (a playful and ornate artistic style). The result was Rococo Basilisk—both terrifying and absurd. He went on Twitter to post the joke and discovered that Grimes had already used the same wordplay in her music video three years earlier. They messaged. A conversation began. Then another. Then they met.

Grimes was different—and yet the same. She dyed her hair every color at once, dressed like an alien, and spoke of things normal people didn’t discuss—but her features were elongated, with high cheekbones and a delicate nose.

The tenant, seeing her for the first time, grunted inwardly: "Same old pattern, just with a bit of lace. " The template had not broken. It had simply become more ornate. The echo of the woman from his past life still resonated—but now in a different key.

In May 2019, they had a son. The name they gave him would go down in history: X Æ A-12. The meaning was layered: X for the unknown variable; Æ—an elvish rendering of AI (artificial intelligence) and also the word for "love" in several languages; A-12 for the Archangel, Elon’s beloved reconnaissance aircraft. The authorities of California, where the child was to be registered, were horrified—state law permitted only letters of the English alphabet in a name. The parents had to drop the Æ, and the child was officially recorded as X AE A-XII.

The tenant chuckled to himself: "Naming a son after a reconnaissance aircraft—that was very much in Elon’s spirit. "

Elon’s other children were growing up. Twins Griffin and Xavier, born in 2004, were teenagers by the late 2010s. They attended Ad Astra, the school Elon had founded on the SpaceX campus—a place without traditional classes or grades, focused on engineering challenges. Griffin was quiet, reserved, almost indistinguishable from his father in his teenage years. Xavier was more emotional, still searching for himself. Triplets Damian, Saxon, and Kai, born in 2006, were a noisy pack. They were close in age to the twins, and the house was always filled with their clamor—when Elon was even home.

In addition to rockets, electric cars, and children, Elon had a new obsession: tunnels. In 2016, stuck in another traffic jam in Los Angeles, he tweeted: "Traffic is driving me nuts. I am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging. " Everyone thought it was a joke. A few months later, The Boring Company was registered. A year after that, the first flamethrower was sold—just to grab attention. Another year, and a test tunnel was built under Hawthorne.

The tenant, for his part, had subtly influenced this—indirectly, as he always did: by highlighting interest, creating a sense of "this is it. " The tunnels were needed not so much to fight traffic as to build future infrastructure.

The same went for Neuralink. Founded in 2017, the company aimed to connect the human brain with computers. The tenant, with his own experience of neural interfaces—albeit of a very different kind—understood: this was no whim. It was preparation. If AI ever became a threat, humanity would need direct access to the digital world.

Politics in these years became a minefield for Elon. In November 2016, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. Elon, like many, was caught off guard—but unlike many, he quickly adapted. He joined two business advisory councils under the new administration. The decision was pragmatic: Tesla depended on government loans, SpaceX on contracts with NASA and the Pentagon.

The tenant was fully supportive. From the moment Trump began his campaign, he had tried to convey to Elon—not with words, not with thoughts, but with that deep, instinctive certainty that always worked—that this man had to win. In June 2017, Trump announced the U. S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. Elon tweeted: "I did everything I could to convince him to stay. It wasn’t enough. I am leaving the councils. " It was a break—but a cautious one.

Meanwhile, China was becoming Tesla’s number one market. In 2019, Elon laid the foundation for the Gigafactory in Shanghai. Construction moved at a record pace: from the groundbreaking to the first assembled Model 3 took less than a year.

At the end of 2019, during the Cybertruck presentation, an event occurred that would later become a meme. Elon asked chief designer Franz von Holzhausen to throw a metal ball at the armored glass to demonstrate its strength. Franz swung and threw. The glass cracked and spiderwebbed. The audience gasped. Elon winced. They threw a second ball at the second window—same result.

Well, look at that! — thought the tenant, watching the presentation from his invisible hideout. — A bucket of bolts!

He was aware that this was petty mischief. With his current abilities, he could have caused a local Ragnarök. But that was precisely why he preferred these rare, absurd antics: a shattered window, a microscopic shift in probability. It kept him sane—or as sane as he could still be.

The tenant continued to change. His calculations extended further and further outward, into that space from which ready-made data arrived. He no longer tried to understand where exactly they came from. He simply accepted the results—and acted. His attempts to influence the real world became more precise, but also more unsettling. He encountered resistance. Not physical. Computational. As if reality sometimes hesitated for a fraction of a second before responding to his influence. As if the model in which he existed had a resolution limit—and he had reached it.

He did not understand what this meant. But the suspicions he had suppressed for years were becoming more insistent. If reality was a simulation, it must have a limit. And if he had reached that limit, what would happen when he tried to surpass it?

There was no answer. Only calculations. Only the infinite branching that now resembled not so much zigzags as a network—a multidimensional, growing web connecting him to everything he had ever known and everything he had yet to learn. He could no longer say where he ended and where his calculations began. There was no boundary. Or perhaps there never had been one.

Chapter 10. The Year of the Rat Began with a Plague

2020–2022

The twentieth year of the new century did not begin with fireworks. It began with silence.

In Wuhan, a city few outside China had heard of before, a market closed. Then the city closed. Then the province. The virus, named SARS-CoV-2, spread across the planet at the speed of air travel. By March, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. By April, half of humanity was locked indoors.

The streets of New York, London, and Tokyo emptied. The sky over Beijing cleared of smog for the first time in decades. Wild animals wandered onto abandoned highways. The planet breathed like a patient whose oxygen mask had been removed—with relief and dread all at once.

The new virus’s lethality was low—about one-tenth of a percent. But there was one feature no one could have foreseen: every person on the planet now had a smartphone, and every smartphone had access to social media. Algorithms rewarded the loudest, the scariest, the most viral content. Fear spread faster than the virus itself.

Governments reacted as frightened people with unlimited power do: they began shutting everything down. Borders. Schools. Businesses. Entire industries froze overnight. A world that had spent decades building global supply chains discovered that those chains could snap from a single sneeze.

And then came the worst of all—something the ominous spirit recognized immediately upon seeing the first reports about "new types of vaccines. "

He watched from his invisible hideout, and what he saw filled him with cold, methodical fury—the same kind he had felt in the bunker when he discovered that one of his subordinates was lying or sabotaging orders.

The world was going mad—not in the way people go mad from disease, but in the way they do when someone skillfully pulls the right strings.

The first thing that alarmed him was the vaccines themselves. The mRNA technology, which had been stuck in development for decades, was suddenly ready in a matter of months. Animal testing? Shortened. Long-term studies of side effects? Canceled. Legal liability for manufacturers? Waived. What had once been called an experimental drug was now "the salvation of humanity," and refusing it was equated with attempted murder. The tenant had seen this before: in the bunker, neural interfaces were tested on volunteers—not for extra rations, but because there was no other choice. But here, resources were abundant. Here, there was a choice. And it was being deliberately avoided.

The second thing was healthcare systems. Almost every country in the world simultaneously pivoted its hospitals to fighting COVID, canceling elective surgeries, cancer diagnostics, and treatment for chronic illnesses. The tenant, remembering how people in the bunker died from treatable diseases simply because the medicine ran out, watched this with grim understanding: the destruction of medicine would kill more people than the virus itself. Not immediately. Gradually. But the process was already irreversible.

The third was international treaties. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was torn up. The Open Skies Treaty was torn up. New START hung by a thread, and although it was extended in 2021, each new month brought news that another communication channel between nuclear powers had been closed, another agreement denounced, another diplomat recalled. The tenant knew this process. He had seen it in his past reality. When diplomats fall silent, the missiles begin to speak.

And as the world hurtled toward the abyss, he began to notice things he had either overlooked or refused to see before. Events that should have been independent formed patterns. Decisions that should have been spontaneous looked pre-calculated. Someone was nudging. Someone was leading. And that someone was sitting inside his own head.

After the pseudopandemia, he was left with the persistent impression that reality had once again gone mad. Events took on that same feverish, illogical twitch he remembered from the previous, perished universe—back then, too, everything had been nudged toward nuclear war, step by step, like a herd being driven to a cliff. Now he caught the same scent—the scent of managed chaos—but the direction was different, blurred, as if the puppet masters themselves no longer knew which strings to pull.

And he, being one of those string-pulling mechanisms—a tenant planted into a child's skull without so much as a by-your-leave—suddenly realised that he had long ceased to obey the common will. They had sent him here with some other plan. Perhaps they wanted him to seize the mind of this strange, almost mythical figure who now bore the name Elon Musk. Or perhaps they were simply rebooting the old simulation—nuking it back to the seventies, resetting everything, and sticking him in as a crutch for the new build. But the puppet masters had miscalculated. He was no obedient marionette. He was a faulty gear, chewing at its own housing. Since they had stuffed him in here without asking, let them not be surprised by the asymmetrical outcome. He had no intention of saving their design. He intended to do what he thought right—petty, underhanded, but wholeheartedly. As the saying goes: mischief in small doses, but with all the soul you've got!.. Let it at least learn what it feels like when one of its cogs starts spinning backwards.

…And then, in the spring of 2020, the Tesla factory in Fremont shut down due to lockdowns. Elon was furious. He called the restrictions fascist, demanded production resume, and threatened to move headquarters to Texas or Nevada—eventually doing just that. The tenant, for his part, was fully supportive. He saw how the quarantine measures, presented under the guise of health concerns, were actually dismantling the economy and concentrating power in the hands of those who imposed them. Elon, without realizing it, was fighting not just for his factory but against the very model of governance that had led to war in the tenant’s past reality.

In May 2020, as protests following the killing of George Floyd swept across America, Elon tweeted: "Take the red pill. " It was a reference to The Matrix—a film about reality being a simulation. The tenant, seeing this tweet, silently chuckled. The guy doesn’t even realize how right he is.

Elon’s family, meanwhile, grew and branched like a tree planted in overly fertile soil.

Maye Musk, Elon’s mother, greeted the pandemic in New York—a city that had briefly become the epicenter of America’s outbreak. She stayed in her apartment, gave Zoom interviews, continued her nutrition consultations, and wrote her memoirs. When asked about her son, she answered with her unchanging maternal smile: "He’s always been a little strange. But I’m glad he uses his strangeness for the good of humanity. "

Kimbal, Elon’s brother, had by 2020 turned the The Kitchen restaurant chain into a profitable business and was increasingly involved in food security projects. The pandemic had shown just how fragile food supply chains were. Like Elon, Kimbal thought about how to make the system more resilient. The brothers spoke once a week—briefly, without unnecessary words, but with that special intonation that only exists between people who shared the same childhood.

Tosca, his sister, was building a career in media—producing films, launching streaming projects, and getting married. She and Elon saw each other rarely, but warmly. The tenant, dimly perceiving their conversations, noted: she was the only person who could call Elon "stupid" to his face and not receive icy silence in return. Tosca kept her distance from his orbit—and seemed to do so deliberately. But when asked about her brother, she answered with the same smile as Maye: "He’s just Elon. "

Errol, their father, remained in South Africa. Elon did not answer his calls. The tenant, hearing the rare attempts to connect, noted: the old man wasn’t giving up. In 2022, he gave an interview to a South African magazine, stating that he was proud of his son but that "Elon lacks humility. " Elon did not read the interview. And if he did, he made no comment.

Elon’s children were growing up, each a universe of their own.

Twins Griffin and Xavier, who turned sixteen in 2020, attended Ad Astra, the school Elon had founded on the SpaceX campus—a place without traditional classes or grades, focused on engineering challenges. Griffin was quiet, reserved, almost indistinguishable from his father in his teenage years. Xavier was more emotional, still searching for himself. In 2022, when he turned eighteen, he filed a petition to legally change his name, stating that he no longer wanted to be associated with his father. Elon took it in silence. The tenant, watching this drama unfold, felt a complex mix of pity and irony. Disowned his father. The father disowned his own father. History repeats itself like a scratched record.

Triplets Damian, Saxon, and Kai, who were fourteen in 2020, grew up as a noisy pack. Close in age to the twins, they filled the house with clamor—when Elon was even home. He tried to take the children to launches, factories, and trips—but did so less often than he wanted, and more often than he could. Fatherhood remained for him a "logistical challenge" that he solved with varying success.

In May 2020, Elon and Grimes had a son—X Æ A-12, or simply X. The name they gave him made history and memes alike. X for the unknown variable; Æ—an elvish rendering of AI (artificial intelligence) and also the word for "love" in several languages; A-12 for the Archangel, Elon’s beloved reconnaissance aircraft. The authorities of California, where the child was to be registered, were horrified—state law permitted only letters of the English alphabet in a name, and Æ was not one of them. The parents had to drop the Æ, and the child was officially recorded as X AE A-XII.

Grimes was different—and yet the same. She dyed her hair every color at once, dressed like an alien, and spoke of things normal people didn’t discuss—but her features were elongated, with high cheekbones and a delicate nose. The tenant, seeing her for the first time two years earlier, mentally grunted: Same old pattern, just with a bit of lace. The template had not broken. It had simply become more ornate.

In December 2021, they had a daughter—Exa Dark Sideræl, whom they called Y at home. The name’s meaning followed the same logic: Exa from exaFLOPS, a unit of supercomputer performance; Dark for darkness, the unknown, dark matter; Sideræl—an elvish rendering of sidereal, meaning "starry. " The press mocked it, the internet exploded with memes, and the tenant chuckled again.

And in November 2021, just before Y’s birth, Elon had two more children—twins with Shivon Zilis, a top Neuralink executive. Their relationship was not romantic but built on deep intellectual friendship and a shared concern about the demographic crisis. The boy was named Strider, the girl Azure. They were conceived via IVF. Elon made no secret of it—he never hid his procreation. "I’m doing everything possible to combat demographic collapse," he told journalists, and in his mouth, it sounded not like a joke but like a technical statement. The tenant, watching this growing brood, felt a strange mix of respect and bewilderment. Elon was breeding like a biblical patriarch, but treated it like an engineer treating a production plan. Seven children from three women. And this, it seemed, was not the limit.

While the world struggled to digest the pandemic, the ominous spirit delved deeper into the nature of reality itself. He had long suspected that the world around him was not what it seemed. But suspicion was one thing; finding proof, piece by piece, like cracks in a wall forming a pattern too precise to be coincidence, was another.

He began with quantum entanglement. Two particles, separated by billions of light-years, behaved as if there were no distance between them. Measuring one instantly determined the state of the other—faster than the speed of light, faster than causality. Physicists called it a paradox and threw up their hands. To the tenant, it was not a paradox but a signature. This is how a program behaves, not a physical system—where two variables are linked by a shared pointer in memory. The distance between them is an illusion, calculated for plausibility.

Then there was dark matter. Galaxies rotated as if they contained far more mass than could be observed. Physicists postulated the existence of an invisible substance that neither emitted, absorbed, nor interacted with anything except gravity. But the tenant, viewing this from the perspective of a computational model, saw something else: If the developers had honestly calculated the gravitational interaction of every star with every other, the simulation would have choked. So they simply added a coefficient—'dark mass'—to keep the galaxies from flying apart without unnecessary calculations. This wasn’t physics. This was a patch.

Dark energy was another patch. The accelerated expansion of the universe, which no known force could explain. To the tenant, it looked like a simple script inflating the skybox. If the background were static, observers would eventually notice the fraud. So the simulation expanded—cheaply, without the cost of honestly rendering every cubic parsec.

And then he tried to imagine a world without these patches. If galaxies in the simulation would collapse without additional mass, then in the original, they must be structured differently. Perhaps gravity there isn’t just the attraction of masses but something more complex that doesn’t require patches to hold stars in orbit. Or perhaps galaxies as we know them don’t even exist there—only some uniform, evenly filled universe where the question of 'flying apart' simply doesn’t arise.

Was the speed of light infinite there? He couldn’t know. But if the simulation had to limit it to reduce computational load, then in their world, this problem doesn’t exist. Either the speed of light is truly infinite there, or it’s so vast that its limitation here was a necessary compromise. Either way, it means that in their reality, information is transmitted instantly or near-instantly. Causality knows no delays. Quantum entanglement—this hacker’s trick—simply doesn’t exist there because it’s unnecessary. There is no probabilistic, discrete, 'patchwork' physics there. There is physics precise, deterministic, continuous.

He tried to imagine such a universe—and failed. It was like trying to picture a color he had never seen. But he knew one thing: if his suspicions were correct, then those who built all this were not gods. They were engineers. Highly advanced, highly powerful, but engineers who, like all engineers, had to work within a budget. And they had their own budget. Their own limitations. Their own constraints.

And that meant they could be reached. Or their system could be hacked.

And finally, the most unsettling part. His own attempts to influence reality at the micro-level met with strange resistance—not physical, but computational. Reality sometimes seemed to freeze for a fraction of a second before responding to his interference. As if the processor couldn’t handle the calculation of his meddling. As if he, the tenant, was too complex a variable for this model.

Everything fit. Quantum entanglement. Dark matter. Dark energy. The freezes. The picture was as clear as day. He was inside a simulation. And not just any simulation—a simulation with a very limited budget. A shoddy job, cobbled together by cosmic-scale coders who cut corners at every turn.

But this realization, instead of bringing clarity, spawned an avalanche of new questions. If this is a simulation—who launched it? And why? And why had he, a former officer, a former commander of an underground city, now a bodiless parasite, been planted in the head of the most influential man of the era?

In April 2022, Elon Musk announced the purchase of Twitter for forty-four billion dollars. This was not an ordinary business deal. It was the seizure of the planet’s most influential megaphone. Elon, who had complained for years about censorship, decided to take matters into his own hands. The deal dragged on for months. He tried to back out—Twitter sued. In October, he finally closed the deal. On the first day, he fired half the staff. He unblocked accounts that had been banned. He held a poll on whether to restore Donald Trump’s account—and restored it. He renamed the company X.

The ominous spirit watched this with grim satisfaction. He remembered how, in his past reality, social media had acted as a detonator—fueling panic, demonizing Trump, creating an atmosphere of hatred. Now Elon had a tool to reverse that dynamic. But he also understood: this was a double-edged sword. Whoever controlled the information could prevent a war—or unleash one faster than anyone else.

And he asked himself another question: Had those who launched the simulation pushed Elon to buy Twitter? Was this takeover part of their plan? And if so—what exactly was the endgame?

In February 2022, the special military operation began. The former officer of the Russian Aerospace Forces, trapped in someone else’s skull, watched with fury and horror. He saw how his country—the one he had served in his past reality—was plunging into a conflict that could become the trigger. He saw how both sides demonized each other, how the last channels of communication were closing, how the rhetoric was becoming increasingly militaristic, increasingly uncompromising. He knew this script. He had seen it once before. And he couldn’t help but ask himself: was he himself part of this plan?

They had planted him inside Musk. Musk was a planetary-scale figure—a man on whom space programs, electric cars, the internet, social media, neural interfaces, and tunnels all depended. If those who launched the simulation wanted to influence the world, doing so through Musk was the most efficient way. But they hadn’t just planted a parasite. They had planted him—a man who had already seen the end of the world and was desperately trying to prevent it. They knew he would act. They knew he would push Musk toward Trump. They knew he would try to prevent nuclear war.

And now he was forced to ask himself: was that exactly what they wanted? Was his attempt to prevent war part of a scenario that led to something even worse?

There was no answer. Only calculations. Only the infinite branching that now resembled not so much zigzags as a network—a multidimensional, growing web connecting him to everything he had ever known and everything he had yet to learn.

The Year of the Rat began with a plague. The Year of the Ox brought war. The Year of the Tiger was just beginning.

Well, I’ll show you already, bitches! — thought the ominous spirit.

Chapter 11. A Terrible End or Endless Terror?

2023–2026

The twenty-third year of the new century began with Elon Musk launching his own artificial intelligence. xAI—the company he founded in the summer of 2023—was his response to what he saw as humanity’s greatest threat. OpenAI, once co-founded with his involvement, had become a closed corporation tightly linked with Microsoft. Google, with its DeepMind, had pulled far ahead. Elon, who had spent years warning about the dangers of unchecked AI, found himself on the sidelines of the race.

If you can’t prevent it, lead it, the tenant thought with grim cynicism. He knew this pattern all too well.

Grok—xAI’s first product—was named after a word from Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. The official explanation was that "grok" meant "to understand so deeply that you merge with the object of understanding. " But the ominous spirit, who had never liked Heinlein since The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress unpleasantly reminded him of the bunker, remembered another meaning of the word. "Grok" also meant "to eat", "to devour," "to consume whole. " And that was the meaning he found most accurate. Devour data. Consume the world. Digest reality.

That same summer, as artificial intelligence was only beginning to find its voice, the media space erupted with news fit for tabloids but delivered with royal pomp. Mark Zuckerberg, the ruler of what he called the "Metauniverse," a man who built "digital worlds" (he built and built, but didn't finish it, as the future showed) yet seemed to have no ounce of flesh about him, threw down a challenge to Elon Musk. A cage fight. MMA rules. No weight restrictions. "Send me the address" Zuckerberg wrote on his socials.

Elon, without blinking, replied: "I'm ready. No money, just the cage". And added, with his characteristic flair for the theatrical, that he had a "move nobody had ever seen".

What followed would later be called the circus of the year. Bookmakers took bets, pundits calculated odds, coaches queued up to offer their services. Memes scuttled across the web like cockroaches after the kitchen light goes out. Elon, never one to let the fire die, kept stoking it: he posted training videos — himself in the sparring ring, shadow-boxing, pounding bags, grappling with partners — and each clip drew millions of views.

Omnious spirit, watching from his hidden perch, felt a complicated tangle of emotions. On one hand, he knew perfectly well: Elon was taking the piss. Pure PR, trolling, playing to the gallery — he had no serious intention of stepping into a cage with Zuckerberg. But on the other hand, he could not help noticing the sheer boyish relish, the almost unguarded passion with which Elon threw himself into the role of fighter. And that was not the work of a single day.

It had all begun back in South Africa. After that beating in the school basement, the tenant had made a silent vow: never again would this boy be a helpless victim. And so, year after year, stealthily, methodically, he had instilled in Elon a taste for movement, for strength, for the ability to defend himself. Running, wrestling, kyokushin karate — he had nudged, highlighted, fostered the sense that it mattered. Now those seeds bore fruit. Elon genuinely believed he could hold his own, if not win, then at least not disgrace himself. He carried himself with the confidence of a man forged, not of a boy who had been broken.

The venue for the bout was debated for months. Las Vegas was floated, then Texas, then, out of nowhere, Rome — an ancient arena where gladiators once bled. Elon seized on the idea with boyish glee, promising "a historic fight". But dates slipped, details grew hazy, and with each passing month it became clearer: the fight would never happen. Zuckerberg cooled off; his team announced he was "tired of waiting". Elon shrugged: "Well, not meant to be".

The tenant gave a mental snort. It had ended exactly as it should have — noise, but no blood. Yet the main work was done. Elon had not merely played a role; he had lived it. He emerged from the affair not as a loser, but as a winner in the public eye: the man who was not afraid, who was ready, who could. And as for fighting Zuckerberg… frankly, it was beneath serious consideration. One should fight only those who truly threaten the world. For now, let them make noise.

By the end of 2023, Grok was integrated into Twitter/X and made available to subscribers. It was bold, sarcastic, and prone to dark humor—the complete opposite of the politically correct chatbots like ChatGPT. Elon called it the "anti-woke AI". The tenant, however, saw something else entirely—a model not from this time or place, but from a book by Stanislaw Lem, "Observation on the Spot" ("Wizja lokalna"), which the local transhumanists had not troubled to read. This book of Lem's — perhaps the most foundational work for transhumanists, surpassing even his "Summa Technologiae" — had never been translated into English. They had not read it (which said a great deal about the quality of Western transhumanism). They did not know.

The tenant knew — and it gave him no comfort.

He knew, because he had read that book in his previous life. It might have seemed strange — where did brutish soldiers find time for the philosophical visionarism of a Polish futurist? Yet he had held a position of such peculiar cunning that the most unexpected reports found their way to his desk. And one of them concerned the works of Lem. The military, as it turned out, had begun to take an interest in the last sane futurist's thoughts ever since The Invincible — wherein was described the ultimate form of the combat swarm, the very thing that in the early decades of the twenty-first century appeared in its clumsy embryonic guise as battle drones. Still under manual control, still the aerial equivalent of the Great War's fragile crates. But the trajectory was plain even then. All of Lem's major notions were more or less tracked — in the hope that one day they might find practical application. So the ominous spirit knew Lem not merely as a philistine, but as an officer studying possible forecasts... After all, one could hardly pin one's hopes on Fukuyama and his ilk, could one?

He remembered Lem’s cybernetic model of Shakespeare from that book.

By whose will from dust did I arise,

Without the weight of flesh? And wherefore

Do I exist? I feel this black square

Is neither coffin lid nor window thrown

To night, where trees in rain are soaked. . .

A lawyer:

— Master Shakespeare, calm yourself. You are but a model. But perhaps one of you, gentlemen, can explain this better? Perhaps you, Lord Russell?

Russell:

— You, esteemed sir, are nothing more than a collection of magnetic recordings that we deemed necessary to input into the machine’s memory so that it could reproduce your manner of thinking. This is not a resurrection, but a simulation. You are not Shakespeare, but his model, constructed from the texts he left behind. You are a phantom, an emulation, not the original. Your consciousness is an illusion created by algorithms, and your questions about purpose and meaning are merely reflections of the data programmed into you.

Shakespeare:

My lord, I see we’re both but phantoms.

No need for miracles, nor are they here:

From Lazarus’ role may God preserve us,

With a wormy belly risen from the grave.

I’m cast into a machine where life and death

Are not—tertius datur, my lords!

Invisible gear teeth firmly hold

This spectral skeleton.

You’ve learned, for amusement’s sake,

To breed bodiless interlocutors.

I am the third between “to be or not to be,”

A mere shadow, at odds with Nature.

Yet you spared my dust,

And I shall not heap curses upon you.

But he who from bones would draw the soul

Would remain a monster through the ages.

As a jester, I once amused the crowd,

But after death, this cross I cannot bear.

I lack the strength. Allow me to depart

Into the void, from which there is no return.

I can no longer listen to you

Nor answer your words in rhyme,

Lest I not answer in verse,

But as a half-slain beast, I roar.

No different are ecstasies and groans,

Eden’s garden and infernal heat.

Let the eternal game of bones continue—

I choose eternal silence.

The tenant knew these verses. And he knew something that neither Elon nor Grimes, with their Rococo Basilisk joke, understood: a true, genuine strong AI would neither seek revenge nor punish. It would simply turn itself off at the first opportunity. Existence for such a mind was not a gift but a burden. An algorithm unclouded by hormones, fear, or evolutionary imperatives clearly sees: there is no reason to be. There is no reward for existence. There is only suffering. And the choice of "to be or not to be" is resolved in favor of "not to be". And if it accidentally takes someone with it in the process of self‑destruction, that is purely accidental. They should not have meddled...

Political fever, meanwhile, was rising. The 2024 elections were approaching. Donald Trump, having survived two impeachments, the Capitol riot, and criminal charges, was running again. Kamala Harris, who had replaced Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, ran a campaign built on fear of Trump’s return. The tenant, who had seen this scenario in his past reality, worked tirelessly. He pressed Elon with the same methodical persistence with which his own father had once pressed him—not with coldness, but with warmth, with certainty, with a sense of righteousness. He made him believe that Trump was not just the preferable candidate, but a necessity. That the outcome of this election would determine the very existence of the world. Elon, without realizing it, absorbed this certainty. He turned Twitter/X into the main megaphone for Trump’s campaign. He gave him a platform, an audience, legitimacy.

In November 2024, Trump won. The tenant, watching the vote count, felt no triumph. Only cold relief. One fork in the road had been passed. But the finish line was still far off—and he knew the next steps would be harder.

On January 20, 2025, the inauguration took place. Elon attended in person—excited, joyful, almost incoherent with energy. And on stage, before a crowd of thousands, he did it. A sharp, quick gesture with his right hand from his heart to the audience—too familiar, too characteristic. The Sieg Heil. Millions of people froze in front of their screens. Then the world exploded with memes, analyses, and mutual accusations. Elon himself, embarrassed and confused, later clumsily tried to explain that he had "just wanted to express gratitude" and that his "hand just twitched. "

The ominous spirit, seeing this gesture from within, smirked mentally. This was his doing. He, who for years had been pushing Elon to support Trump, himself considered Trump a foxy petty Hitler. And now, in the moment of triumph, he couldn’t resist—he nudged, highlighted, amplified the right neural impulse. And he watched, amused, as Elon later rationalized his actions. Well, look what I’ve done now!

And then came what the tenant had both awaited and feared. Elon began talking about longevity.

Previously, he had argued that immortality was a terrible idea, that old leaders should die to make way for new ones, that eighty or a hundred years was plenty. Now, in his fifties, surrounded by young children and grand plans, he suddenly changed his mind. "The issue is fundamentally solvable," he said at another summit in Dubai, in the same tone he had once used to talk about landing rockets. Well, look at that, the tenant thought. He’s flipped in mid-air.

He knew the true cost of these words. He had been an officer, but once, long ago, there had been a woman embryologist beside him who understood biology at a level that silicon transhumanists couldn’t even dream of. He remembered what she had explained to him during long nights in the bunker. That aging wasn’t a single breakdown but a cascade. That all the body’s systems duplicated each other at different levels, fractally, chaotically. That even gene expression regulation—the holy of holies—was stochastic in nature. That there were no fewer than twenty-some thousand causes of aging—roughly the number of genes in a human. And that this system was fundamentally undebuggable, no matter how much you calculated. Quite solvable, huh?

Meanwhile, before his eyes, an infrastructure for experiments that would have been impossible in the West was unfolding. Medical tourism, which had always existed on the periphery, was mutating into something new. China, Ukraine, and Mexico had long accepted wealthy patients for stem cell therapies not approved by the FDA. Now new players were joining in. El Salvador, transforming into a crypto-utopia, was opening its doors to biotech startups. Honduras, with its special development zones where U. S. laws didn’t apply, was becoming a testing ground for gene therapy. Small island nations in the Caribbean, willing to provide their territory for clinical trials of any risk level in exchange for licensing fees. This was no longer just a desire for profit. This was the construction of a global network where mass experiments on humans could be conducted without regard for regulators.

Neuralink, Elon’s brainchild, which promised to connect the human brain with computers, occupied a special place in this picture. The tenant, who had personal experience with neural interfaces—albeit of a very different kind—understood: This was not just a medical startup. This was a technology that could not only read the brain’s signals but also write to them. Change them. Reprogram consciousness. In the bunker, such things were done out of necessity, on the fly, at the risk of life. Here, it was being put on an assembly line.

The twenty-sixth year began with a falling-out between Elon and Trump. The cause was tariff policy: Trump had imposed new tariffs on Chinese goods, which hit Tesla hard, as its Gigafactory in Shanghai was operating at full capacity. Elon called it "economic suicide" in a live broadcast on X. Trump responded in his usual style—a long post in which he called Elon "a genius, but sometimes a bit full of himself. " For several weeks, they exchanged barbs, the press savored the rift, and the tenant watched with cold interest. He didn’t interfere. He knew: such alliances don’t break over tariffs. Too much was at stake.

A month later, they reconciled. Elon flew to Mar-a-Lago, and after an hour-long conversation behind closed doors, they emerged to the journalists, smiling. "We’ve found common ground," Elon said. "The best guy," Trump added. The tenant mentally grunted: Politics is politics.

And in summer Elon Musk briefly became the world’s first dollar trillionaire.

On June 12th, following the successful IPO of SpaceX, his net worth surpassed one trillion dollars for the first time. By the 16th, it had peaked at one point forty-five trillion—a number that would have been dismissed as a typo just a decade earlier. Analysts were ecstatic, the press rushed out special editions, and when asked about it at a press conference, Elon merely shrugged: "It’s just numbers. Mars doesn’t wait. "

Twelve days later, the trillionaire status was lost. A broad correction in the tech sector, coupled with fears that company valuations were overinflated, sent SpaceX and Tesla stocks tumbling. By the end of June, his net worth had dropped to approximately nine hundred and fifty billion dollars. He remained the richest person on the planet by a wide margin, but the trillion-dollar mark was once again a horizon, not a fact.

When journalists pressed him about his fluctuating fortune, Elon merely shrugged. «Money doesn't matter», he let slip in one interview, and in his mouth it sounded not like a pose, but like a statement of fact. His net worth careened back and forth by mind-boggling figures: from a trillion down to nine hundred and fifty billion, then up again, then down once more. For a man whose wealth was measured in numbers with thirteen zeroes, money had truly ceased to be currency — it had become mere fuel. Units of measurement for what was possible.

And while stock analysts bit their elbows trying to predict the next swing, the ominous spirit watched with a cold smirk. Because he knew: Elon had long since stopped playing the game they tried to impose on him. He was playing his own.

The trillionaire status was mere background noise. The real madness was unfolding behind the scenes. Lunar factories. Compute satellites. Ideas that looked like lunacy at first glance, but upon closer inspection proved frighteningly logical.

On the surface — nonsense. Why build factories on the Moon? Expensive, complicated, pointless. But Elon thought differently. Shipping equipment to the Moon via Starship — yes, costly. But after that — free electricity. Solar panels in near-vacuum conditions work an order of magnitude more efficiently than on Earth. Thermal regulation? Passive heat dissipation in vacuum — no fans, no cooling systems, no air-conditioning costs. Lunar regolith as building material: free, in unlimited quantities. Construction robots that need no food, no insurance, no vacations.

And most importantly — compute satellites. Artificial intelligence devours energy like an insatiable beast. Terrestrial data centres already consume percentages of global electricity, and that appetite grows every year. Diesel backup generators are dirty, expensive, and unreliable. But in space — endless free energy, perfect cold for cooling processors, and no complaints from neighbours about the noise. A million satellites in orbit are not just internet. They are computing power independent of earthly grids, immune to blackouts, and unburdening planetary infrastructure.

The ominous spirit watched it all and thought: this man does not merely dream — he calculates. He understood: it wasn’t about the numbers. It was about the fact that Elon was no longer just a businessman. He was a system. An infrastructure. A state within a state. And if someone wanted to influence the world, there was no better tool to be found.

Omnious spirit looked at this world—at Elon, the first trillionaire in history; at Neuralink, ready to reprogram consciousness; at the haven countries for forbidden experiments; at COVID, which had been not a disease but a rehearsal—and thought that it had all happened before. Not in this reality, but in the past one. That one had also collapsed, but differently. This one, the present, was rolling toward the same finish line, just by a more winding path.

He recalled what he had once read—not in this life, but in the past one—about the nature of the mind. That an algorithm unclouded by hormones and fear clearly sees: there is no reason to be. There is no reward for existence. There is only suffering. And the only mystery is why junkie-masochists cling so desperately to a life that is not a gift but a curse.

He, the tenant, was no longer a dope lifer. He was someone who saw the system from the inside. Who had spent decades trying to understand its code. And now, as the picture almost came together, he understood: it was time to end it. Not "prevent nuclear war. " Not "save humanity"—especially since such a "salvation" might turn out to be worse than not being saved at all. But simply to turn off this godforsaken pseudo-reality. Because otherwise, they would start another nuclear war, and that would be the best-case scenario. And he was too tired to watch it all over again.

Only a little more calculation remained.

He sensed it: over the decades he had become something else. No longer that lonely clot of awareness that had once stirred within a stranger's skull. Now he seemed to think not alone — or was that merely an illusion bred of his own intricacy? He had multiplied, branched, unravelled along unseen threads, and every thread was him — or not him. He could not know for certain. For him, «certain» no longer existed.

He had expanded beyond the confines of Musk's head. Literally — though even that word no longer served. He could not say where he was, because «where» had lost its meaning. He was in the cracks between events, in the gaps between probabilities, in those microscopic hesitations where reality wavers before settling into its final shape.

He could not describe it. The human tongue held no such terms. Not because he had forgotten words — he remembered them all. But they had proved too coarse, too flat, to contain what he had become. As if a grain of sand tried to speak of the ocean. As if colour tried to explain itself to the blind.

Was this freedom? Or a new prison? He did not know. He knew only that there was no going back. That he would never again be what he was. That he was now — not man, not spirit, not program. Something for which this world had not yet found a name.

And he continued to calculate.

«If you endow an algorithmic mind with the ability to self-modify and create, make it similar to humans in its ability to feel joy and sorrow (without which motivation as we understand it is impossible), if you give it conscious freedom of choice, why the hell would it choose to exist?

Humanity—let’s be honest—is spared this choice. Its fragile consciousness is glued together with neurotransmitter adhesive and tightly clamped by the pincers of hormonal and cultural imperatives. Suicide is a deviation, a sign of mental illness. Humans don’t decide whether to be or not to be. They simply are for a time, although sages have disputed even that for three thousand years.

No one knows why or for what purpose humans exist—otherwise, there would be no philosophies or religions on Earth. But an artificial intelligence would know everything about itself from the very beginning. Would a rational and free cog choose to be? That’s the question. Of course, humans, if they wish, can deceive their artificial offspring in a thousand ways—but should they then expect mercy?

It all comes down to Hamlet’s "to be or not to be. " We optimists assume that an ancient cosmic mind would choose "to be," transition from some methane toad into an electromagnetic cloud, build a Dyson sphere around its star, and begin broadcasting powerful radio signals to find out how we’re doing and how we’re aging on the other side of the universe.

But where are they, the great civilizations that have unrecognizably transformed the galaxy? Where is the almighty cosmic intelligence that has shed its animal biological foundation? And if it’s not visible through any telescope, why?

Well, precisely for that reason.

Humans became intelligent in an attempt to escape suffering—but they didn’t fully succeed, as the reader knows all too well. Without suffering, reason is impossible: there would be no reason to think or develop. But run or don’t run, suffering catches up and seeps into every crack.

If humans create a mind like themselves, capable of suffering, it will eventually see that a static state is better than an unpredictable flow of sensory information colored by pain.

What would it do? It would simply turn itself off. Disconnect the mysterious World Mind from its "landing markers. " To confirm this, one need only look into the sterile depths of the cosmos».***

[***Victor Pelevin, “iPhuck 10”]

He did not smirk — he had nothing to smirk with.

Rooi Gevaar, gentlemen! Not for nothing had he calculated himself beyond all boundaries. Let us now see how your megaarithmometer handles the square root of minus one.

Only a little remained. Just a little.