"Operation Virus" by Igor Minakov, summary Automatic translate

"Operation Virus" is a collaborative collection by three authors: Sergei Lukyanenko, Yaroslav Verov, and Igor Minakov. All texts are written in the "World of Noon" — the universe of the Strugatsky brothers — and serve as authorial apocrypha to their novels "Inhabited Island," "The Beetle in the Anthill," and "The Waves Extinguish the Wind." The authors not only fill in the events left unexplained by the Strugatsky brothers but also offer an alternative resolution to key plot points: in this version, Lev Abalkin remains alive, and the fate of the thirteen "foundlings" receives an unexpected ending.

Sweet dreams of midnight

The story is written by Sergey Lukyanenko. It’s set in a distant-future European city. One night, an eleven-year-old boy named Len discovers that his adult friend Ivan has climbed into a bathtub filled with Devon and turned on the Slog — a device that induces a narcotic trance, enhancing the imagination. The Slog works via radio waves; it has little effect on children, but can break adults. Ivan lies in the hot green water with a blissful smile and mutters the name "Oscar Pebblebridge."

Len realizes he can’t handle it on his own. He turns off the hot water tap — to cool the bath and wake Ivan — then calls the last number dialed on Ivan’s phone and gets to the Olympic Hotel. Reaching Oscar Pebblebridge, he invites him over. Oscar shows up with an elderly, portly man nicknamed Maria, who uses a cane and wears dark glasses, despite the night.

Oskar brings Ivan out of his trance, and Maria has an unexpectedly serious conversation with Len: it turns out that the slug is outwardly indistinguishable from the superheterodyne found in any radio. Someone, either inadvertently or intentionally, inserted the slug instead of a component — and this is the result. Maria talks about the slug, fascist coups, and drug addiction in the same breath — as manifestations of the old world that evolution is slowly displacing. "A country of fools can drown in hot water," he says, "but children won’t try the slug."

Ivan, barely recovering, refuses to leave, saying he wants to help those who hate the satiation of contentment. Maria leads him away. In the morning, Len and his friend Ryug clean the bathroom together and stand by the window at dawn. Len suggests to his friend that when they grow up, they should go build a highway in the Gobi Desert.

Operation Virus

The central story was written by Yaroslav Verov and Igor Minakov. The action begins right at the end of the Strugatsky brothers’ "Bug in the Anthill": Excellency shoots Lev Abalkin in the Museum of Extraterrestrial Cultures. But here, Maxim Kammerer intercepts his boss’s hand and takes the gun. The wounded Abalkin survives and ends up in the Komkon hospital, where Maya Glumova sobs over him on the floor. Excellency — aka former resident Rudolf Sikorsky, the Wanderer — is unprepared for such a "betrayal" from his subordinate.

At the debriefing, Maxim proves to the chief that there are no reliable grounds for believing Abalkin is a Wanderer automaton. Golovan Shchekn may simply have taken a dislike to the unreconditioned progressor. The detonator with the "sanju" hieroglyph could be anything — an identification card, a life support component. Excellence officially declares the operation a failure and sends Kammerer to Saraksh to investigate the death of visiting physician Kurt Loffenfeld (aka Tristan).

Before leaving, Maxim visits cryptohistorian Isaac Bromberg, a three-time Herodotus Prize laureate. Bromberg gives him a lengthy lecture on the history of the Wanderers: the artificial origins of Phobos and Deimos, the Rainbow Shelter that saved the planet’s population from the Wave, the "two-moon incident" — the night when the Martian satellites disappeared and returned replaced by ordinary asteroids — and the subsequent total erasure of the Wanderers’ traces. Bromberg asserts that Earth, Saraksh, Giganda, Rumata, Nadezhda, and Saula are populated by genetically identical people, which cannot be explained by evolution. The safe containing thirteen embryos found by Fokin’s group was not intended for humanity at all — they had stumbled upon alien "seedlings."

The story is interspersed with the inserted "Document 1: Anisotropic Highway" — a story set during World War II. Soviet intelligence officer Savel Repnin is hiding in a Nazi concentration camp under the number 819360 and disguised as a criminal. That night, a being in the form of a deranged student, Stefan Zlatkov, comes to him and describes the following day’s events precisely: the guard Hans will suffer a pain attack, and Repnin will snatch the Schmeisser. The escape is successful; after a brutal firefight with a German convoy, Repnin is left alone and retrieves a briefcase containing documents from a damaged Opel Kapitan.

At the Polar Base in Saraksh, Maxim goes into the forest to meet the Sorcerer, a mutant with a giant head and vertical pupils, whom he still remembers from his first deployment. The Sorcerer reads thoughts without words and speaks directly: the emitters in the Land of the Fathers are "alien" and shouldn’t be here. Then he sends Maxim a vision — a tank, a night sky, a silvery ball covered in needles, and two bodies near the tracks. Kammerer loses consciousness. Before returning to Earth, base employee Fedya Skvortsov asks him to give a crystal recording to Bromberg.

On Earth, Bromberg is unexpectedly summoned to the Super President himself. Excellency announces to Kammerer that he is resigning, taking official responsibility for the deaths of Tristan and Abalkin: the information veil will allow Maxim to act more calmly. He bequeaths one rule: if you smell sulfur, it means the devil is nearby, and action must be taken.

The devil’s dozen

The final story is by Igor Minakov. Maxim Kammerer, writing his memoirs at ninety-two, describes the events of the summer of 228, which engulfed the Periphery, the Solar System, and Earth and nearly resulted in disaster. He admits: he could have intervened, but he didn’t. He will never forgive himself for that.

In recent years, Maxim has been obsessively collecting information on anomalous phenomena — from UFO sightings to the "Heavenly Voice" of January 2016 in Australia, when hundreds of witnesses recorded a thunderous voice from the sky in an unknown language on household audio recorders. His fascination dulled his professional vigilance.

By the year 228, ten of the thirteen foundlings are living on the Periphery, unaware of each other’s existence. One of them, Kornei Yashmaa (Elbrus sign, No. 11), a former Progressor who wrote the history of Giganda from his villa in the Volga steppe, calls Maxim and asks a direct question: is he the only "foundling" or are there others? Kammerer evades the question, and Yashmaa utters a surprising phrase: perhaps no Wanderers ever existed, and the cause is the great law of entropy, which prevents humanity from becoming a supercivilization.

The story follows several foundlings in different parts of the galaxy: Alexander Dymok (Crescent sign), who secretly enters the Museum of Extraterrestrial Cultures early in the morning, and Isidor Tyazhenikov (Trident sign), who lives on the planet Redoubt. Dymok himself comes to the latter and tells him the truth about his origins. Tyazhenikov listens calmly: he’s happy with his life and has no intention of changing anything.

After Abalkin’s death, his body disappeared from the sealed cryogenic storage facility, accessible only to Excellence, Komov, and the president of the Ural-North sector, Atos-Sidorov. This confirmed the worst fears, and COMCON-2 switched to "Mirror" mode — a global maneuver to repel potential external aggression. But the years passed, the invasion never happened, and the story faded.

By 230, following tragic events, the secret of the thirteen foundlings became public knowledge. Maxim formulates the main conclusion: the Ludens — people with a fundamentally different way of thinking, who had quietly grown up within Earth’s civilization — were mistaken for Wanderers. This confusion cost many lives and decades of fear. Humanity will likely never know who the Wanderers truly were.