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All this led to the phrase "No knowledge now is knowledge in the 'old sense' where 'to know' is to be certain." And politicians especially liked it.

The world, consisting entirely of assumptions, allowed you to build these assumptions for yourself regardless of actions – in fact, you could do anything at all, as long as it was properly presented. Exactly presented. Twenty or fifty years ago, you had to prove or justify something, but now it was enough just to present it, to present it in such a way that it would be perceived as you needed it to be. Gustav was much more interesting in this atmosphere. People who are more responsible for themselves are much more difficult to destroy, to bring to a state of despair, to take away the last thing. After all, a person no longer has a single pillar of all things, as it happens with believers or nationalists. When a person attributes everything that happens to him only to his own zone of responsibility, when he knows the price of a mistake, when he is ready to correct this mistake as soon as he notices it, then he becomes not just a man, but a life-sustaining machine for achieving the goal. He becomes a goal-oriented willful hunter in life. And even with Gustav's abilities and centuries of experience, he had to act more and more unconventionally, as if clinging to the strings of other people's mistakes, and it was more and more dragging than before.

Katherine, for example, was the easiest to deal with, although she was initially supposed to be the tough nut, but she was simply let down by her attitude towards animals.

Natalie, whom Gustave had recently killed, lived up to expectations, showing a willingness to rely too much on a strange man, believing in some "signs" in her destiny, while constantly remembering how many people she had wiped her feet on before simply because she could do so with impunity, and did so with a satisfaction in her own beauty that was incomprehensible to her.

Vladimir Arkadyevich was experienced, but old. There was no need to "read" him or to invent combinations. One just had to wait for his mistake, like the one that forms in anyone if you don't sleep for a long time or do everything yourself. And his main enemy, fatigue, would never show up directly and remind him of himself. Such an enemy is always at the ready, and therefore always wins.

The only one of the latter with whom one could act according to standards was Oksana. But that's just luck with alcohol. When alcohol is involved, there is no longer any room for the person playing, or responsibility for one's image and ability to have a point. It's as if a person goes into the stone age of primal needs and comes back from there as if from a cesspool, unsure not only of whether he will be accepted back, but whether he himself deserves it.

"Requests" for such a return were expected by Gustav sometime in the afternoon or nearer the evening, but certainly on this day.

By five in the morning the Irishman had reached the regional center. His house was located in a dense forest on the road from the cottage village "Grafskaya Usadba". Initially he had considered the possibility of settling there, in the elite part, where the houses stood almost in the forest, separated by frequent trees and separated from the other part of the settlement by three ponds, but he was slightly shaken by the inevitable fact of being in the neighborhood with people. Having once been in France in the first half of the 18th century, he was living in a suburb of Paris. Opportunities for seduction at court were plentiful, and the romance of the time, was deeper and more refined in its essence. One of his lovers, left with a broken heart, did not kill himself at home poison or drown himself in the Seine, and hanged himself right in front of his house and so that it was clearly visible to all. Of course, there were no consequences for him, although a day later the girl's relatives, having found out what the matter was, came to his house, intending to tear him to pieces and hang him in the same place where she had hung herself. By that time Gustav had already left, having remembered well that in his case it was necessary to live separately from everyone else, or at least in a place where neighbors would be closed off from each other by concrete walls of a stone jungle. This time he chose the first option and was very satisfied: he had his own house with autonomous power supply and water purification system, only two floors with 4-meter ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows so that from the second floor you could look into the forest with a hunter's eyes. On the edges of the house were two outbuildings. Actually, they were the most important part of the whole complex: the first was a tower, the top floor of which reached such a height that from the panoramic windows you could see the tops of the trees going away like a green sea, sprouting in the wind – such a view inspired Gustav with new thoughts, new possibilities. Besides, it was here that Gustav could most enjoy other people's suffering, remember the right steps, the goals achieved, and the edges of the trees seemed to agree with him, nodding their heads and confirming every thought. The second building looked no bigger than a barn from the outside, but it was just an entrance. Underground there were two more floors, both black as night and full of all sorts of equipment. The minuscule second floor was a single room with a black leather chester couch in the center. It was a good place for solitude, when some process just needed to wait or think of something new, because dungeons gave the most exquisite and extraordinary ideas and ways of their realization, and sometimes it was even surprising how much difference in the course of thought could be only because of where this thought was born – the darkness made the thought richer, freer and allowed it to do anything.

And I also needed this bunker for treatment, and I had to treat it thoroughly… Headaches. When it happened, your brain would just explode and you could go crazy. And it could last a day or several days in a row, or a week, and when it was over, it was hard to think or think about anything, to think at all, or to move from place to place, as if you had to learn it all over again.

The reason was the same as Gustav's need, only in reverse. He couldn't live without the suffering of others, objectively built on their own inner guilt, but that suffering didn't have to be too much. Like an overdose or alcohol poisoning, like an overabundance of vitamins or an allergy to a favorite food he once consumed inordinately. And it was precisely when Gustav's successes were out of proportion that he himself began to ache. Of course, it was not the soul, or the emptiness in his chest, or hopelessness, or the loss of the meaning of life, but this pain in his head became more real and natural than the sun rising in the morning or the freezing cold for a polar bear.

He noticed this peculiarity of his organism a long time ago: in 1648, when a German village celebrated the end of the Thirty Years' War, the first all-European conflict. Gustav alternately seduced and drove to suicide eight girls in just two days – the general rejoicing was so great that everyone wanted his own happiness, so everything turned out much easier and faster than usual. After a day Gustav began to have white spots in his eyes, that is, his eyes were all right, only in the place where they looked, there was a white spot. And a strange feeling of weakness, as if the body had weakened on purpose, about to surrender to the ailment. Then the former stains passed, and the pain began – it seemed that it was time to die, it seemed that the punishment had finally arrived, and everything would be over. And it was over – the pain was over, and Gustav realized that it was only the price of greed, of time to be reckoned with; that even for him there were limits and a certain line. He knew it well now, though he didn't know the exact boundaries of what was permissible – maybe someone else's suffering was deeper, or maybe the suffering of someone else's death was greater than the suffering of his own loss.

Gustav didn't know how to measure it, and sometimes he just wanted more, so he broke his own prohibitions, suffering from satiety himself. There was a bunker for that.

After putting the car in the garage built into the main building, Gustav went up to the second floor. When he saw his new Carlo Pasolini shoes, he remembered how recently the Labrador puppy he had given to Catherine yesterday had been lying in them, waiting for him. It was the first animal that had ever lived in the same room with him for any length of time. His attitude to animals was somewhat different than to people – animals always show their intentions directly, completely devoid of the concepts of truth and untruth, having only "given", that is, "as it is": to love, to hate, to attack, to defend, to want to eat or sleep, or maybe to play. Animals hide nothing and show everything, and only in proportion to what they are actually experiencing. For this the Irishman respected them very much. While he had been in the house, he had done nothing but try to please him, and during the whole time he had been away he had chewed only on the one shoe that had been set aside for that purpose, and had not touched anything else. Gustav knew what it was like for animals at an early age, what it was like when they were teething, their main weapon, and how important it was for them, especially at that age, not to be left alone. Especially since this chestnut-colored female puppy was the friendliest and most lonely Labrador in the world.

Outside the window, the wind blew, and a row of branches passed at the windows of the house as if to greet the returning host.

This movement of the trees immediately brought Gustav back to his thoughts – the "silent majority", nowadays it is called that. And this majority was formed by the fact that everyone began to reflect in communication, and to build their image in society; relativism in worldview, the very relativism when absolutely everything can be questioned, even that which was once set as a dogma. And on top of that, game semantics, in which any meaning has a game meaning that has to be guessed, but everyone can do it in their own way. And clip culture, in which the development of cognition goes hand in hand with the development of evaluative opinion, closely constructed by a multitude of short clips, colorful and rapidly changing.

Thus, the "silent majority" has chosen two interesting ways of its existence:

either a return to confessional culture, in which many things acquire bright outlines again, having formed a "safety cushion", or the revival of ethno-cultural traditions, within the framework of which it will be not only pleasant to model the new, but also to look at the old with interest and respect, which will give confidence and pride in one's own "I".

At this time, a new concept was even born – "emergence": properties of the whole system not as a sum. After all, it is also clearer and more logical when Indian chiefs go home in SUVs after performing all the rituals, which may be more than one thousand years old; or when a new smartphone of a student in the capital is painted with ancient Russian patterns, and when he drinks milk with honey instead of antibiotics of the 3rd or 4th generation; or when a country house of a newly minted businessman is made without a single nail as it was built 800 years ago. Everything else may look like modernity, but a piece of the old has turned out to be very pleasant to put into the whole, without attaching it to the whole, as if it does not complete the picture, but creates a new one, next to the existing one, but of much smaller size, which makes life more complete.

"The new toys turned out to be much more interesting, and, most importantly, more dangerous than the old ones. – Gustav thought. – Now it's not clear to everyone where the toys are and where you are. It's as if you've become a toy yourself.

These toys were much more fun to play with, and one of them was just now calling. Oksana.

Of course he didn't pick up the phone. What was the point of picking up the phone? She wouldn't tell him anything original or new anyway – it was easy enough to describe her train of thought in such a state.

First, alcohol made her think in terms of a constant "now-now", the frequency of repetition of which is as great as the duration of their existence, so that time ceases to have any more or less distinguishable intervals.

Secondly, the surrounding environment in the form of nightclub bacchanalia with unquenchable deafening rumble completely dissolves the personality and the desire to decide something – you just want to move in the seemingly from the look of it, but useless in its essence, the general rhythm of the raging wave on an empty place.