It took you time to recover.

For a couple of weeks, you were **** to devote time to regeneration and recovering from the effects of the wound to your right shoulder.

Medicines are an expensive and rare commodity in this world. Even in such a large (by wastelands standards) settlement as Axeman-City, it is quite difficult to find truly high-quality and effective medicines. Most ordinary local inhabitants are treated with all sorts of dubious herbal infusions, ointments or frankly superstitious methods that have nothing to do with medical science.

Fortunately, financial assistance from Mr. Sullivan helped find at least something acceptable for your treatment.

Brittany looked after you every day. Her care greatly helped your body to endure pain more easily and recover faster.

Elijah also tried to help you. On the very first day, he found a doctor who removed the bullet from your wound.

It was terribly painful!

The memory of this painful sensation was forever imprinted in your mind.

Also, Elijah, during another visit, whispered in your ear information about the secret surveillance of your old friend...

Surveillance through the mass use of camouflaged flying drones...

However, you yourself almost immediately guessed that you were being watched.

Professor Dylan Grice-Hutchinson...

One of the best professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Your old friend and colleague in teaching at several of the most prestigious universities in the United States.

He was 8 years older than you.

That is, if he did not look like an android now, he would have the appearance of a slightly plump white man with a receding hairline and a myopic look of light-brown eyes. At the time of the Catastrophe of the Great War, he was probably about 50 years old.

As far as you remember, Dylan quit teaching and devoted himself to more profitable activities.

His outstanding knowledge in programming, physics and robotics easily allowed him to become one of the highest paid scientists who collaborated with the RAND Corporation and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). In the last years before the start of World War III, the work of Dylan required such increased secrecy that even you rarely managed to communicate with him.

You then only roughly imagined that he was working on something outstanding in the field of robotics...

And now you see the result that gives rise to horror...

Instead of a human body - metal parts of an anthropomorphic robotic "body"...

And the brain, to which many sensors and wires are connected, floats in a strange liquid of a transparent reservoir...

How did all this affect the psyche of Dylan?

What nightmare was happening in his mind for hundreds of years?

What terrible mission did he dedicate his existence to, which is now difficult to call "life"?

Day and night you thought about these questions for a long time...

Outside the window in recent days you often heard the noise of the crowd...

Heralds announced to the population about the coming war and about the events to mobilize recruits into combat units...

Deja vu...

You saw something like this before the Great War...

From the window of your apartment in New York, you saw a line of young guys who, due to the influence of media propaganda, wanted to volunteer for the war.

Yesterday's students or even yesterday's schoolchildren...

They almost all died in fierce bloody battles due to inexperience...

At that time, local conflicts were just flaring up and many did not expect that all this would escalate into the flames of a World War...

And now the same shit...

Dylan was talking about this.

Humanity almost destroyed itself and the planet.

Dylan strives to maintain the status quo, not to allow the strengthening of any of the local "states".

Let them all live as a bunch of dirty and pathetic savages who will never have access to the achievements of technical progress.

After all, technical progress has a downside - powerful weapons that can destroy the planet.

And humanity is just an incorrigible flock of aggressive stupid monkeys...

That's what your old friend thinks.

And there is logic in his ideas.

But you feel a certain flaw in this logic.

This thought arose from thinking about your children.

Your old family perished in the flames of a nuclear war.

However, now in this cruel post-apocalyptic world, you have a chance that one of the women who got pregnant from you can give birth.

Your children...

They can live...

If they are lucky.

One dark night, trying to sleep and enduring the aching pain of your wound, you realize the fundamental flaw in the logic of Grice-Hutchinson.

Planet Earth is just an insignificant object in the vastness of space.

In nature, long before the emergence of mankind, processes of mass extinction of thousands of species of living organisms took place.

During the Phanerozoic (the last 540 million years) there were five major mass extinctions. In popular culture, the extinction of the dinosaurs is often talked about - but this is just a trifle in the general background.

A catastrophe so horrific can happen to the planet that little remains of it.

All it would take is a large meteorite strike...

Or catastrophic processes with the star that is the center of the Solar System...

There are many potential deadly threats.

And inevitably, over time, the planet will experience one or more of these threats.

What does it mean to maintain the status quo in such a situation?

This means choosing in favor of universal ****...

Only technical progress can give hope and a chance for survival to humanity.

Humanity must colonize other planets and other star systems.

Only this gives some guarantee that if one planet dies, humanity will survive as an intelligent biological species.

Progress...

This is a cruel phenomenon.

But, at the same time, it is a "medicament" against inexorable **** and the terrifying silence of space.

Either Progress or ****.

This is the true choice that humanity faces throughout its entire existence.

Progress is a steep stone "staircase" with slippery steps that is directed into the dark skies of the Unknown.

The path of Progress is inevitable temporary falls, inevitable sacrifices and inevitable pain.

However, one cannot simply stop.

There are only two possible options: Moving forward or Stopping and falling from a great height into the arms of ****.

You realized what you have to do...

Proposal of Dylan Grice-Hutchinson...

He wants a positive answer and he is watching you.

You will give him a positive answer.

But you are using one of the manifestations of Progress.

Lie.

The wife and daughter of Elijah are in this secret underground bunker.

You will try to save them.

But this is not the main goal.

Even your own survival is not the main goal in this situation.

Dylan Grice-Hutchinson...

The one who has been destroying people for hundreds of years to maintain the status quo.

He must cease to exist - that is the main goal.

So that humanity will still have a chance.

So that your children will also have children someday.

For the triumph of Life over ****.

With these thoughts you fall asleep in bed...