The Before Short Story Series. Part 1 - Иван Перепелятник

Tonya! Give me the phone!’ Gleb tried to grab the communicator. Tonya covered it with her hand, stopping her friend's cheeky attempts. ‘Open it yourself then! Under the heading “What happened”. That's exactly what everyone is always interested in. There’ll be the most of views there.’

‘OK, let's look through “What happened”, Tonya agreed. ‘Well, well, what do we have here… – “A happy reunion. A five-year-old girl lost her parents in the Siberia Shopping Center. The store employees helped the child and the girl's parents…”, “A dangerous accident in the city center. An old electric car lost a wheel when turning from Zhelyabov to Federation Street. The rescue service helped the owner to evacuate the car…”, “The buyer could not pick up his order at the self-service point. The equipment breakdown led to a short-term malfunction of the passport scanner…”

‘Oh yeah, very impressive’, Olga drawled, covering her mouth with her hand and yawning. ‘The place is just so lively. The views are sky-high, 314 about a wheel on a wreck in the city center.’

‘Wait a minute! There may be something in it!’ Gleb started tapping his fingers at the table, looking Olga into the eye. ‘Let me have a better look at the message about the passport’, Gleb turned to Tonya.

‘Well, OK, have a go’, Tonya pushed the communicator across the table towards Gleb.

‘So’, Gleb began reading the message carefully.

“A Citizen's Passport.

Ilya Ponamarev, the Irkutsk News editorial office correspondent, recently met with a resident of the city who couldn’t have picked up his order at the self-service department of the MegaMarket delivery service due to a failed passport scanner of a citizen of the Republic.

Why did this seemingly ordinary story attract the attention of our editorial staff? Our readers might ask such a question. What's so special about this story? Let's figure it out.

Let us briefly cover a historical and political-organizational situation. This case requires an understanding of the modern social system, the interaction of an individual, society and governmental structures. Let us remind our readers the basics in terms of structural and technical components.

Since the end of the 21st century, the passport of a citizen of the Federation, or, as it was also called, the Tracker, was implanted into the body at the stage the woman started carrying the child or while it was growing in special incubators, in maternity hospitals. The Tracker or passport, if you prefer it, has long been the key to all the modern infrastructure. Whatever you did and wherever you were, the digital identifier provides you access to everything—from the ability to enter your apartment or house, to get by transport to any point within the city or the country, even to travel all over the planet. You would not have been able to go to a grocery store or a beauty shop, and, perhaps, to any business or trade company without a passport. A person just would not have been served without a citizen identification. The passport provided continuous monitoring and control of the medical indicators of its owner, which was required not only for the citizen support by appropriate services in emergency situations, but was needed primarily for timely, and therefore early detection of negative trends in the health condition, allowing to make required amendments to the individual health program. Finally, last but not least, an important function of the Tracker was security. If the situation occured when the life, physical or psychological health of an individual were threatened by something or someone, the PAX system—a distributed system of quantum computers which was monitoring, analyzing and managing the main life systems—would identify relevant situations and would react to them even in a preventive mode. Summing up, without a passport, a person was not a citizen of the Republic and could not interact with any part of it in the official or commercial sphere. One was simply invisible to society.

It would be safe to assume that bearing the functions of the tracker so critical for a person, the counterpart of the PAX system, responsible for identification and interaction with a person, has to be reliable as a must. For a smooth functioning of the system with a high degree of probability, close to 100%, any built-in scanning system even for the least critical public infrastructure at the very least has a double for back-up. And in critical applications, for example, in automatic control systems of a high-speed mainline shuttle, the system has a four-fold redundancy. Moreover, two of the four backup control units operate remotely via ultra-high-speed communication networks. In the entire history of the PAX, not a single failure of control systems with triple redundancy has been registered, and malfunctions in systems with two modules have been an exceptional event subject to thorough investigation and identification of the reasons for failure. Each such situation is thoroughly investigated by the PAX security specialists in order to identify potentially weak links and eliminate them.

Taking into account the theoretical basis and the unique nature of the situation that took place in Irkutsk in an ordinary post office in the first week of October 2142, our agency could not help but pay attention to it. We found a resident of Irkutsk, who came as a first-hand participant of the story, and asked him about what had happened.

Irkutsk news: Alexey Petrovich, please tell us how it was—what happened to you on October 7 at the MegaMarket post office.

Alexey Petrovich: There's nothing to tell. There's not much to tell, I’d say, there's nothing. In the evening after work I went to the post office, next to my house. I wanted to pick up my order—I bought my daughter a birthday present. Her birthday was on October 10th. Anna, my wife, and I decided to make a gift for my daughter …

Irkutsk news: Alexey Petrovich, please tell us in some more detail just what it was that happened there in the post

office.