A great vehicle called Time rumbles down a street named History.
We are all travelers on this bus, always trying to look back and make sense of those fleeting storefronts called Progress.
Yesterday, February 28, 2026, I received an urgent telegram from Soviet Moscow.
The massive national infrastructure project began yesterday.
Heh. Surviving the war was already more than enough.
No one wants to go to Moscow.
As usual, I slipped past the barbed wire and glided into the human settlement of Blagoveshchensk,
trying to escape the foul atmosphere of the tarmac.
The sky had been unpleasantly overcast for a week, with no sign of clearing.
It was already six in the afternoon.
In the distance, urban construction raged on, the faint noise of the worksite drifting over.
A neon-lit city was rising from the ground.
Surely no one has noticed me, I thought.
This is a border checkpoint; only idle youths come here.
Heh.
Apart from some suspicious remains of a log and a fire, I saw nothing out of place.
I walked toward the deserted border post and leaned against the wall.
Moldy, tattered posters still hung there—more than twenty years, I reckoned.
I pulled out a cigarette I’d waited two hours in line at the supermarket to buy,
and lit it behind my jet engine.
My four rear-mounted engines… well, even now I wasn’t sure if that was a blessing or a curse.
D-30KU. Huh.
Before I knew it, my tire tracks left a trail over the poster behind me.
The wind smelled fishy and bitter, like rain was coming.
I thought about the young one I’d met on the tarmac—an MC-21, less than 18 years old…
Wait, what was his name again?
Flotsky? Orlansky? Ah, never mind.
I turned off all the lights inside my fuselage.
In an instant, everything went black.
But a light—bright, piercing—cut through the dusk.
A car was approaching: a Lada 2107.
I shut down my engines.
A middle-aged man in a blue shirt stepped out of the army-green vehicle,
sat on a nearby log,
drained some fuel from the tank, and started a fire.
Maybe it was the weather, but he didn’t seem to notice me.
What was this man doing here? He was suspicious.
Maybe he’d seen me long ago.
I could be charged with trespassing, fined, even imprisoned.
No. He couldn’t leave.
I thought: crushing his car into powder would be child’s play for me.
But soon, I abandoned that absurd idea.
Forget it.
Sleepiness washed over me.
Dazed and heavy, I leaned against the tattered poster and closed my eyes.
When I opened them again, it was the next morning.
The man was gone. The fire was out. The car had left.
On the ground lay a note.
I knew it. He had seen me.
Let me see what the letter says.
“Dear Comrade Natalia Alexeyevna Sidorova,
I have come from faraway Leningrad, bringing you a message from Moscow…”
After reading it, Natalia’s golden pupils flickered with a faint light.
To run away… should I be grateful? Or regretful?