* TR-DOS Ver 6.07M *
2001 CompoWellcome, Alone
Pentagon 128
A> RUN “Книжник”
Twelve days earlier. Tuesday, 17:56.
Dima chose a table wedged between overflowing bookshelves, his back firmly against the plaster wall.
Café Bibliophile smelled of paper dust and coffee grounds, a scholarly perfume once comforting, now cloying. Low-hanging bulbs cast pools of amber light across the tables where MIPT students bent over textbooks. Whispered equations competed with the café noise.
The hiss and clatter of the espresso machine made him jump. His fingers tapped a nervous rhythm on the cover of a battered Soviet electronics manual—its insides hollowed to cradle precious acetate sheets.
The door swung open, admitting a gust of damp air and, with it, Oksana. Raindrops beaded on her hair. She stood for a moment, scanning the café with cool assessment before locking onto him. Without her factory uniform, she moved with a fluid confidence he'd never witnessed on the assembly line. Her gaze took inventory of each patron before settling on him.
She crossed to his table, the worn leather briefcase swinging lightly at her side. Real Ryazanovka, not the market knockoffs.
“Dmitry Sokolov.” She stopped before his table, posture alert. “You chose a good spot.”
“I didn't think you'd come,” he managed. “I've ordered.”
Oksana slid into the opposite chair, placing the briefcase carefully by her foot. “After that night? Of course I came,” she said, her stare frank, clinical.
He fumbled with the manual, as if the hollowed pages offered cover.
“Your power rail fix on Line Three,” she began, voice low, exact. “You used the spare blue wire from the CRT harness. Rigged a wiring loom nothing like the official schematic. Documenting every modification on acetate sheets you keep hidden. Then vanishing for smoke breaks no one records.”
Before he could form a response, the café's matron approached. Oksana's posture relaxed. “Chay, bud? laska. Black, strong. No sugar.” The Ukrainian phrasing lyrical, before she caught herself and smoothed herself back into Moscow Russian. “And a pastry. Whichever you trust today.”
The woman beamed. “Will bring the good ones. Five minutes.”
Dima watched the exchange, unsettled. On the factory floor she kept her tongue flat, camouflaged. Here, it held colour, history.
“The guns,” he said abruptly. “You were photographing the night shift. The PKMs.”
Her eyes narrowed fractionally. She checked the room again.
“And you were stealing your circuit designs. The ones you hide in the speaker cabinet.” She leaned forward. “The amplifier, the power regulator—elegant.”
He exhaled, shoulders slumping. “So we both hide in plain sight.”
She tapped the manual. “The question is what we do now.”
Their teas arrived, steam rising between them. Oksana unlatched her briefcase and produced a slim wallet. She flashed a laminated card—an official press pass—before covering the seal with her thumb.
His pulse skipped. “Which paper?”
“Big enough to survive two raids, small enough to print truth,” she replied, slipping the pass back.
From a battered manilla envelope, she drew out glossy black-and-white prints, arranging them deliberately between their cups. Each frame razor-sharp. Clandestine fragments: PKM receivers glinting under work lights. Coolant streaming down the Korolev-6. The efficiency consultant's calipers locked on a finished bolt. The angle matched the mezzanine above Line Three. Her vantage point; the factory's blind spot.
His breath hitched. Touching one photo's edge, he asked, “FED camera? Long lens?”
Thumb moving along the photograph's border, she replied, “Jupiter-11. Long enough for serial numbers.”
He tugged his scarf, red and white bunching at his throat. “Worth the risk?”
She pushed forward the final print: gaunt conscripts boarding a mud-splattered KAMAZ truck, rifles slung haphazardly. Pencil scrawled on the back: ‘Volgograd draft depot.’ Dated two weeks prior.
“My brother.” Her tone sharp, stripped bare. “Six weeks' training, then Chechnya. They issue weapons pieced together on our line. I document the chain. Maybe expose it. Maybe delay a shipment.” A steadying sip of tea followed.
Dima scraped his thumbnail against the table's varnish. “If this surfaces, they'll bury it. Fast. Anyone involved.”
Oksana gathered the prints, composure regained. “Which is why I need someone who understands the factory's rhythm. The systems.”
He tried the words on his tongue. “A partner?”
“I need someone who can map supply lines once we acquire the PLC logs.”
He inhaled the dense air. “Those logs are password protected. Night supervisors only. Twice weekly rotation.”
A brief, conspiratorial smile. “Good thing we drink tea with the man who tends the VAX terminal.”
Dima clasped his hands, the decision reifying. “Orlov. The consultant. He's not just streamlining production.”
Another photo slid across: olive fabric, a flash of red star insignia just visible in an inner pocket. “Caught this when he left his jacket during an ‘inspection.’ Major Alexei Nikitovich Orlov.” Her voice remained flat. “GRU.”
Military intelligence. Dima felt a cold knot form in his stomach.
“He treats CRT shells like camouflage.” Oksana's voice softened, Ukrainian undertones returning. “Day shift hears ‘efficiency consultant’. Night shift takes orders from Major Orlov.”
“Does he even sleep?”
“Shadowed him three nights. Never saw him slow.”
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Dima pointed to a photo of Orlov examining a receiver rail, antiseptic gel visible beside his notebook on a nearby trolley.
“He scrubs his hands compulsively after handling any tools,” Oksana noted quietly. “A medic told me, you pick up that habit patching wounds where infection means amputation. It stays with you.”
Dima grunted. “So… GRU. Technical expertise. Combat experience. Field armament inspections?”
She nodded, tapping her pen. “And our plant… look.” Her finger indicated the arc of a serial number in the print. “First two digits belong to a factory shuttered in 'eighty-nine. ‘Officially’ built by ghosts.”
His grip firmed on his glass. “And they're loaded onto trucks for Grozny. On our shift.”
“Two pickups each week. I logged the plates, times, engine noise signatures.”
Dima exhaled through his scarf, the Zenith crest damp against his chin. “You're building a case.”
“A ledger,” she corrected, tapping his hollowed manual. “Documenting how they feed the war that consumes our brothers.”
Silence stretched, broken only by the espresso machine's sigh.
He met her gaze. “So we expose him?”
Oksana sipped her tea, eyes never leaving his. “With evidence solid enough that no editor folds under a phone call.” She slid the briefcase nearer his foot. “Your factory logs, my negatives, one coherent schematic. You in?”
“Two weeks ago, I got my radio scanner working. Listened to police-band radio during lunch. Caught fragments about ‘asset transfer’. Something similar this week. Lines up with those unmarked lorry arrivals.”
Oksana's pen hovered, her attention sharpening. A subtle shift, as though a new node slotted into her mental map. “What else?”
He shrugged, focus sharpening. “Machines speak, if you listen. And right now, nothing in there says ‘television factory’ anymore.”
A student at the next table glanced their way. Dima shifted. The café's studious quiet suddenly felt fragile, penetrable. Before committing, he needed to know more about her. Not just the journalist, but the engineer.
“You asked me to bring these.” He placed the manual squarely on the table, revealing the edge of an acetate sheet. “Your understanding of circuits… you mentioned your family.”
“Indeed. I learned to read circuits before I finished Pushkin.” She nodded toward the edge of acetate peeking from the electronics manual. “May I?”
“It's nothing. Just hobby sketches.” He tugged his scarf higher, as if the fabric might shield him from scrutiny.
After a moment's hesitation, he flipped the manual open, revealing the top sheet: his memory paging scheme for the Hitachi HD64180. His own secret project, born from frustration and salvaged parts.
Oksana leaned closer, her gaze following the intricate paths with an engineer's focus. “A virtual memory system… for a Pentagon?”
He nodded, a knot loosening in his chest. “With a Japanese Z80 extension. 512K paging window. Gives us thirty-two gigabytes theoretical address space.”
“With Soviet components?”
“This isn't Sunnyvale.” He revealed his materials bill. “КР537РУ10 for cache SRAM, КР1533ИЕ8 counters for the state machine.”
Oksana's eyebrow lifted. “You're using a military-grade decoder? Ceramic ИД7s aren't exactly hobbyist parts.”
Dima's mouth twitched. “Fell off a truck.”
A genuine smile touched her lips, erasing the tension. “Show me the addressing.”
Grabbing a napkin, his pencil flew across the paper. The factory hunch fell away as he sketched in blocks—the MMU extension, intercept logic, page table cache.
“CPU thinks it's in its base address space. But I reroute with this cache array—virtual to physical.”
“Your bank select.” Her finger traced the schematic. “The timing's brutal. If the КР1533s drift under load—have you stress-tested this?”
Dima shook his head. He hadn't. Not properly.
She reached for his pencil; he surrendered it instinctively. Carefully, she sketched a new connection path. “This might be a cleaner way, less chance of race conditions. Needs simulating of course.”
Considering her revision: An optimization he'd missed. Certainly plausible, obvious with hindsight. “Worth a try. Yes—if the parts cooperate.” He jotted a note in the margin, eyes flicking from diagram to Oksana, a grin forming on his face. “We'll see in practice.”
She glanced up, an understanding passing between them. “This isn't just about faster computing, is it? It's about systems. How they're built. How they break.” Her finger tapped the memory diagram. “How they hide things.”
“It's about building something that shouldn't exist.” He met her eyes. “Taking what they left us, making it do more.”
“Building your own rules into silicon.”
“Yes.”
She studied him. “Your memory system… it could hold entire technical libraries. Search them instantly.”
“Information wants to move,” he said quietly. “Even when systems try to contain it.”
They both understood the subtext.
Heads bent over a fresh napkin, they forgot the guns, the factory, the risks. Just two engineers, speaking the shared language of circuits.
“This is…” He searched for words.
“A beginning,” Oksana said, tucking the napkin into his manual. “But we have other work first.”
The café door opened, cold air preceding three students arguing loudly about quantum mechanics. Dima's shoulders tensed, then he relaxed as they settled far away.
“What we're building…” he began, then stopped, recalibrating. “The people I work with—they're extraordinary. Each brings a unique angle.”
A flicker of recognition, not disappointment. She tucked hair behind her ear. “Careful protocols. Good. You protect them.”
The atmosphere eased into alignment. She evaluated his trustworthiness by his caution.
“The factory investigation comes first,” he confirmed, tapping the spot where her briefcase hid the photos.
“Agreed.” Turning to a fresh page in her notebook, she asked, “Now, how do we document the production schedule without alerting Orlov?”
He shared his observations—Orlov's meticulous measurements, the patterns in security rotations, the previously inexplicable upgrades.
Her pen flew across the page. “The police radio chatter—those ‘asset transfer’ notices—frequencies?”
He listed them. “There's more. I've heard engineers from other factories talk. Elektrozavod, Kuntsevo—same story. Night shifts, unexplained upgrades, security tightening.”
Oksana paused, absorbing this, then extracted a map from the folder.
Western Russia. Red lines connecting industrial centres to military depots.
“Each cross represents a ‘failing’ civilian factory that received mysterious financing in the last eighteen months,” Oksana explained, her Ukrainian accent thickening. “Identical pattern: day shift neglected, night shift running at full capacity.”
Dima studied the map, his mind automatically plotting routes between nodes. “The people who bought our factory…”
“Are buying them all,” she finished. “It's a parallel production network hidden from inspections.”
A second map she overlaid charted military deployment zones in Chechnya. Blue lines connected specific factories to forward operating bases.
“The receivers manufactured in our plant last Tuesday reached this checkpoint near Grozny four days later.” Her finger followed the path.
Dima raised an eyebrow.
“I have sources. I'm not new to this.”
The abstract system solidified into stark reality. Night shift hands, assembling components. Her brother, receiving them.
“So we record everything,” he stated. “Machine settings, material logs, Orlov's movements.”
“And the money trail,” she added. “Ownership, transport orders, payments.”
Oksana produced another notebook, wrote an address near Belorusskaya station. “Dead drop. No electronics.”
“Recognition phrase?” Dima offered. “‘Seen the new Korolev motor specs?’”
A faint smile. “Reply: ‘Timing diagram needs adjustment.’ ” She knew the rhythm.
Closing her notebook with a precise snap, she placed it atop her folder.
“Three days. Same time.”
Dima pushed back his chair, boots scraping the linoleum. The smell of burnt coffee and old paper pressed closer. Keeping his voice low, steady, he said, “If this goes wrong… for either of us…”
He didn't need to finish. She gave a single, sharp nod. “The work stops. The connection breaks. No contact. No explanations. Understood.”
She paused, eyes narrowing—not defiance but the deliberate weighing of risk.
They stood a moment longer, the café's activity receding behind their pact. Dima noticed the tremor in his own hands, the way Oksana's grip lingered on the worn briefcase handle—engineers measuring tolerances in themselves as if inspecting stamped steel.
Steps measured, Oksana slipped through the archway, her posture squared as though bracing for a battlefield. Her footfalls barely registered against the battered linoleum.
The clink and shuffle of the café returned. Their circuit now closed, the current humming unseen beneath the noise.
Folding the napkin, Dima slipped it into the battered manual. His fingers brushed the edge bearing Oksana's correction—a simple line solving the last bug in the V3 Ultra's memory mapping. The board demanded completion—her solution, their breakthrough—before any external variables could delay the build cycle.
Yet Orlov's presence poisoned each calculation. Dima understood the fate of those who noticed too much. He measured the fragilities, mapped the probabilities: information to reveal, secrets to guard, data points that might shatter the factory's manufactured quiet. Trust necessitated rigour, much as circuit design—except a miscalculation in these circuits meant death.
He closed the manual, and looked over the café's shelves once more. Every project, every plan, now meant risk. But abandoning the work—or Oksana—did not cross his mind.
