– I mean, I mean," Ruthra jokingly teased, "only you can reliably know whether the subscriber is dreaming, in virtual reality, or… in some world. Isn't that right? We, for example, both in dreams and in virtual worlds, feel everything as reality. Don't we? And you know exactly where our consciousness is, in what state. Right?

– I'll admit it. But it's not my idea. You've given me these opportunities to help myself. Yourself as a human being. Isn't that right?

– Okay, let's move on," Ruthra signaled the end of the topic.

– It turned out to be in space, to the space station," the ISKIN signaled back.

– There was such a thing," the Magister confirmed, shaking his head and looking off into the distance, "but still, it's almost on Earth compared to the size we're going to flip to.

– Well, I don't have to tell you about the indifference of particles to any distance.

Ruthra looked at the doctor. She shrugged silently.

***

Several days of preparation passed quickly. The head of the center and the author of the methodology, like the inventors of vaccines once did, driven more by curiosity than by fear, was already habitually lying in the mind displacement unit to try out his revolutionary invention for the first time. This time there were no admonitions, explanations, recommendations, and even teasing from the luminaries of science – they lowered the optical block… and – whoosh! – bright beam, inaudible sound – and the body fell into coma, and consciousness… The whole matrix of connections, which makes up our consciousness, having passed the stages of conversion, influenced by millimicron changes in the back of some quantum substances on the same ones somewhere else… All this was done by technique, and in the organism, directly in the brain, there was an overload of the center of control over self-consciousness. This state was achieved by unexpected mental-emotional stress, which stopped the usual flow of thoughts and drove a person into a stupor caused by the reaction to horror and fear. The machine emitted infrasound at a frequency that the hearing organs could not perceive, and the optics broadcast an instantaneous transmission beyond the reach of the visual organs. Together, they caused a sharp fear, a tremendous fright, not perceptible to the conscious mind, but affecting the subconscious.

***

It was almost the same scenery all around. "Something about it has changed, it's become more natural or something," Ruthra pondered. The contours of the body of water and the trees were a little different… and the time of year didn't seem to match either. The heat felt more intense, and the grass that had been more abundant before was now, sparsely sprawled along the outskirts, scorched. Ruthra surveyed his surroundings out of habit. Silence. He walked scripted to a tree near the oasis and… was surprised: there was a carpet spread out under the tree. A small, worn one. Ruthra looked around for someone to lay it for a while. When he could find no one, as he had on previous occasions, he called to the invisible watchers, and when he heard no answer, he lay down under the tree, now on the rug, and waited. He thought about existence and time, about the worlds that must necessarily be in the vast expanses of the universe, and not just one. He thought about where everything began, about the root cause that served as a spark for the Big Bang of consciousness, about infinity, about what never appears and never disappears. This was difficult for humans to grasp, for our minds are accustomed to operating in dimensional units – whatever infinity we visualize, we are still defining something grandly great, but we cannot grasp the concept of eternity. Never… to think of it – something that never began and never will end.

Suddenly there were muffled footsteps. Ruthra stood up and looked around. The same Bedouin who had been in the last production was walking across the steppe in his direction. He came up and sat down on the carpet without greeting, and began to talk as if Rutra were his old acquaintance.

– I know everything you're gonna say ahead of time. Or almost everything.

Seeing the rather surprised look on Ruthra's face, created by his own statement, he continued without letting him object:

– Your doubts are valid. Everyone would have those doubts. Believe me, you were chosen for a reason. Think about it. If a person appeared here who was unfamiliar with your invention – the method of moving consciousness through space – then obviously the whole mission would be thwarted. The person would either be in constant disbelief, doubt, or fear, expecting a trick. Or he or she would consider us or himself to be crazy, at least insane.

– What are you talking about? And who are you, anyway?

– Everything you see is real.

– I can see it's real. What's the big deal?

– Think about it… if children were born with such awareness of the world as a child of five years of age, and this awareness was activated as independent breathing in the process of childbirth, wouldn't they be surprised at this metamorphosis? And isn't it strange why it is not so, because all the vital functions of the organs are working, but memory is not. If you were born into this world you are now in, it would be to you as your own, natural and only one. It wouldn't surprise you. So what makes you think that someone somewhere doesn't think the same way? Now think again: you humans have already mastered the technology of cloning, but you cannot yet clone a dead person. You can't make a child from his material, who would later have all the memory of the original person. Nor can you create a person as an adult and put a prearranged memory into him.

– We can! – Ruthra shouted reflexively, and then realized he was looking at the strange man's words from a different angle.

– Can you do it already? – He asked with genuine interest.

– Yes, we can clone and grow quickly using technology that, by the way, has long been used in animal husbandry. And then we can load into the clone pre-recorded algorithms of combinations of tactile-verbal code signals, causing chemical reactions in the brain. But for now, it's our secret technology. What's going on?

– That's great. It turns out your world is much simpler. Then for you, what's happening must be quite possible. And… so you're faced with the paradox of reality denial. Your world, I mean.

– What?

– The person you cloned will remember the world he lived in. The world is like the time of his life.

– Uh, uh," Ruthra hesitated, "does DNA retain conscious memory? We put a pre-recorded memory into the clone. We've experimentally cloned several people, and none of them retained any memory.

They looked at each other studyingly.

– What do you want? I don't understand," the Master asked with a slight indignation. – Are you a director? Actor? Why are you on a first-name basis with me? And what is my role?

– Think of me as a psychologist testing actors for mental compatibility. Here in this world, I play the role of rabbi. And yet I ask you to answer my question.

– Which one? What world?

– About the state of suddenly acquiring memory. The world afterward. Just don't contradict your theory, please.

– So?

– What is happening would not be surprising and unreal if a child was born with basic knowledge, adopted from mom, or dad, or both. After all, we are not surprised by the rest, – adopted by the child – character, predisposition to diseases, appearance.

– That's ridiculous. How can a child acquire memory? So he must be a prodigy…and could be out of school.

– That makes sense. So you're learning about the universe. This is one of the steps.