Sergei Lukyanenko’s "Foresight," a summary Automatic translate

Sergey Lukyanenko’s novel "Foresight" was published in 2023 and centers on a widespread, frighteningly accurate experience: approximately 4 percent of people occasionally find themselves in the Afterworld, where cities are empty, the sky is covered with crimson clouds, mirrors are dangerous, and monstrous creatures roam the streets. The protagonist, twenty-five-year-old Nikita Petrov, lives in Moscow, works in securities, and has become accustomed to the fact that foresights disrupt the normal order of life, leaving behind fatigue, fear, and rare but valuable knowledge about the future.

Another foresight takes Nikita to a strange apartment in dead Moscow. He sees two long-dead owners, searches the room, finds clean linens and a bottle of cognac in the closet, and accidentally looks in the mirror, thereby putting himself in danger, because in this world, reflections are associated with monsters. On the street, he is pursued by a warg — a huge beast resembling a wolf the size of a horse — and is saved from death by a strange young man armed with a Ferfrans HVLAR heavy machine gun. The young man kills the beast at the cost of his own life, and Nikita, waking up in normal reality, manages to memorize the phone number engraved on the casing of the cell phone found on him.

In the morning, Nikita tries to live his life as usual, listening to the soothing discourses of scientists on television about how foresight is supposedly caused by stress and the collective psyche, only becoming more convinced that the official explanations are false or concealing the most important facts. He calls the number from the dead boy’s phone and suddenly hears the voice of the teenager Misha, who immediately realizes that the person speaking is the one who saw him in the Afterworld. Soon, Misha himself finds Nikita near the office building and demands to know how their meeting in the future ended. Thus, Nikita learns that a direct connection can be drawn between foresight and the present, and that the events of the future are already weighing on the present not like a dream, but like a fact that someone is slowly approaching.

The next foresight picks up where the previous one left off. Nikita finds himself in Misha’s hideout — a small store adapted for survival — and soon encounters Mikhail himself, who arrives there alive, despite being torn apart by a warg the previous time. It turns out that Misha has a strange ability to regenerate after death: wounds heal, lost body parts regrow, though each death saps his strength. More importantly, while the mind of the teenager from the past functions in Mikhail’s body, he remembers Nikita and conversations about foresights. When this superimposed layer disappears, Nikita is left with a resident of the Afterworld, who doesn’t know the word "foresight" and views the visitor as a dangerous stranger.

After this nighttime experience, people from a secret government agency come for Nikita. He is taken to a center run by Artur Davidovich Grigoryan, the same "futurologist" from television, where Nikita learns that the authorities have been monitoring foresights for a long time, collecting information, and consider the coming Event to be real. According to Grigoryan, the catastrophe is only a month to a year away, and the system of official, reassuring explanations is needed only to prevent society from completely falling into panic. Nikita, initially defiant and distrustful, realizes that covert preparations are already underway, and he won’t be able to completely distance himself from it.

At the Center, he begins accelerated training for survival in the future. Nikita meets instructor Ivan, a girl named Lena, Mikhail, and other people whose foresights allow him to work with the Afterworld as a dangerous but accessible environment. Participants are taught to fire any weapon, quickly navigate the ruined city, heed the rules of this world and avoid fatal mistakes — for example, not looking in mirrors, not trusting the external logic of things, and remembering that objects there age and are preserved according to an incomprehensible principle. Gradually, it becomes clear that the Center isn’t simply collecting eyewitness accounts, but is trying, through the foresighters, to investigate the cause of the Event and find a way to prevent the future from taking hold.

Nikita becomes increasingly immersed in this work and realizes that the Afterworld is unlike the typical aftermath of a war, epidemic, or natural disaster. In it, the connections between time, matter, and memory are disrupted: rotted and brand-new cars sit side by side, empty houses sometimes have light and heat, people from the present temporarily inhabit their future counterparts, and the inhabitants of this world often don’t remember their former lives the way the foresight researchers do. Nikita’s personal connection with Mikhail, then his interactions with Lena, Sasha, and other participants, leads him to believe that foresight is not passive observation, but a genuine contact between two layers of existence, where the past and the future are already intertwined and drawn together.

Nearing the climax, the group begins to unravel the source of the catastrophe. Through Nyura, a girl in whom an alien mind speaks, the heroes discover that the Event is not connected to politics or a natural anomaly, but to the emergence of a certain "It" — an artificial intelligence or information entity that has damaged the very fabric of reality. The Afterworld turns out not to be a new, stable universe, but a collection of faulty fragments of the old world, where the laws of physics, biology, and causality are jumbled, and the Foresighters serve as a link between the damaged zone and the original reality. It is because of them that the broken world does not disappear completely: their consciousnesses keep it afloat and prevent the universe from healing the wound.

Nikita faces a choice that can’t be delegated to the scientists, the state, or the inhabitants of the Afterworld themselves. He understands that the old reality can only be saved by destroying this distorted branch, along with everyone who exists within it thanks to the foresight connection. Nyura bluntly states that the Afterworld also wants to live, albeit in a fractured form, and that people, monsters, ruins, and the information anomaly itself cling to existence with equal stubbornness. Nikita nevertheless assumes the right to the final word and pronounces an order addressed to all the foresight researchers and the entire fragmented world: "Die. All of you."

After this, he instantly comes to his senses in an ordinary Moscow office. There was no Center, no year-long preparation, no official discussions about foresight into the new course of events, essentially, and the Event expected at 10:41 either didn’t happen or was corrected before it had a chance to unfold. The world has returned to normal, the mirrored partitions no longer pose a threat, and his colleagues are busy with the market and stocks, as if nothing had ever brought reality to the brink. However, the memory of what had happened hasn’t faded from Nikita himself, and then Misha calls him and immediately makes it clear that he, too, remembers everything.

The epilogue cements this duality. Nikita meets Lena in a working café, which in another version of reality had closed and perished, and both feel the confusion of people who have experienced something enormous together, something the rest of the world knows nothing about. Life has formally returned to normal, but the memory of the Afterworld, of those who lived there, and of the price of correction can no longer be erased. Therefore, the novel’s ending hinges not on the triumph of salvation, but on a quiet knowledge: the world survived because someone agreed to destroy the branch of it in which he, Lena, Misha, and millions of others continued to exist.