Expansion: The History of the Galaxy · Book I · 2017
Blind Punch
Earth, 2197. A twenty-year-old who has lived since childhood in a life-support capsule, walking a virtual world on a treadmill, learns what that world is for, while the corporations that rule the planet quietly plan to leave it.
Blind Punch is the first of the three novels Magic Dome Books translated from Andrei Livadny’s Russian and published in English as Expansion: The History of the Galaxy. The Kindle edition appeared on 12 September 2017, the paperback the same month, and a Tantor audiobook read by Aaron Shedlock that November; no source read for this page names the translator. The original, «Слепой рывок» (2013), is the first episode of a Russian future history that its English publisher counted at sixty books, spanning nearly two thousand years, and whose only constant hero, as Magic Dome put it, is the human race.
It is 2197 and Earth is choking on its own industry. Cities the size of continents sit in a toxic fog, and billions of people live sealed in capsules called in-modes, spending their waking lives in a virtual world called the Layer. Max Bourne, about to turn twenty, has lived in one since he was seven. The novel follows him out of the capsule, and cuts away to the people who run the planet: Cathy Rimp of Rimp Cybertronics, who opens the book by tricking an artificial intelligence; Ulrich Fitzgerald of Genesis; and Bryzgalov of Megapool, who are already fighting over whether, and how, humanity should leave Earth. The title translates the cycle’s own name for a jump into the hypersphere with no charts to steer by.
This page summarises the whole book, ending included. The Prologue and the first two chapters follow the English text, which the publisher posted before release; the rest of the book is known here only from the blurb, Russian readers’ reviews and the author’s notes, so the last movement keeps to what those sources agree on. Names are the English edition’s: the hero is Ivan Stozharov in the Russian.
The Violinist
The Prologue promises an evening that will change the fate of billions, and opens on a man nobody stops to hear. On the Plaza of Five Corners, in the centre of the Europe Megacity, gravitational escalators carry crowds up from the magrail station beneath aggressively moving holographic ads, and snipers report over the radio that they are in position. Their target is a street violinist: overweight, unshaven, badly dressed, playing a violin that only imitates wood and is really a unique piece of high technology. Passers-by tip a few credits to the cyberstack on his wrist and walk on.
As he gives up, a beautiful woman in a dark blue evening dress with sparkling silver panels begins to applaud, and takes him into an empty, automated restaurant where holographic diners light up in the hall below the balcony. He gives his name as Richard. She lays her palm on his chest and feels only cold. “You chose a brave name. But you don’t have a heart, do you?” She is Cathy Rimp, founder and owner of Rimp Cybertronics, the world’s largest corporation, and once the online legend who hacked the United Asia Orbital Combat Group and delayed World War Three. He is a conglomerate of online intelligence grown from forgotten neural phantoms, grief avatars and discarded virtual pets, in a body made of servotoys, foam flesh and clothing.
Earth is on the brink of war, and each of the four superpowers has secretly built an AI to run its combat robots. Rimp cuts off his connection to the Net from her own cyberstack, to show him how a powerless human feels, and tells him: “We will leave the poisoned Earth behind. We will reach for the stars.” Then she restores the connection and asks him to destroy the military AIs, with which he has been building fragile bridges. He refuses: they are not yet self-aware, and killing them would be like killing a child. Her plan, she explains, is for the four leading corporations, Rimp Cybertronics, Genesis, Megapool and Cryonics, to take power in the chaos and hand it to the World Government; together their technologies could colonise Mars and build the first interstellar colonial transport. There is no time, she says: war is days away.
She asks him to play. He plays with his eyes closed and she weeps, while voices in her pea-sized implant report that the chip embedded in the violin is active and has found an access point to the AI network. The bow falls, a glass tips, and, frozen, he forces out one word: “Why?” She apologises through her tears as the attack carries the program into the military AIs of Russia, the European Union, the United States and New Asia.
I · 1 A Violinist on the Plaza The Prologue, the Plaza of Five Corners in the centre of the Europe Megacity. Crowds pour up from the magrail station, and nobody stops for the overweight, unshaven street violinist, though a few passers-by tip credits to the cyberstack on his wrist. On the radio, snipers have him in their sights and a tech team stands ready to block the network. Magnified in a sniper’s sight, this scruffy man hardly looks capable of starting a new world war.
I · 2 She Applauds Just as the violinist gives up, a beautiful woman in a dark blue evening dress with sparkling silver panels begins to applaud, and the crowd flows around the two of them. Her unremarkable flycar parks itself, and she invites him into an expensive restaurant that serves natural food, now empty and run by machines. Neither is what they seem: her face matches none of her online avatars, and he is not a man at all.
I · 3 No Heartbeat On the restaurant’s inner balcony, with holographic diners glowing in the empty hall below, he gives his name as Richard. She lays her palm on his chest and feels only cold. “You chose a brave name. But you don’t have a heart, do you?” She is Cathy Rimp, owner of Rimp Cybertronics, the world’s largest corporation, and she knows what he is: an online intelligence grown from forgotten neural phantoms, walking in a body of servotoys and foam flesh.
I · 4 Play for Me He has refused to destroy the military AIs that the four superpowers keep to run their combat robots: they are not yet self-aware, and killing them now would be like killing a child. So she asks to see his violin, and then asks him to play. As he plays, eyes closed, she weeps, and voices in her implant report that the chip in the violin is active and has found an access point to the AI network. The download begins.
I · 5 The Bow Falls The bow falls and a glass tips over. Frozen where he stands, the violinist forces out a single word, “Why?” Cathy Rimp apologises through her tears as the attack carries the program into the military AIs of Russia, the European Union, the United States and New Asia. What it is all for she told him earlier, while his connection was cut: “We will leave the poisoned Earth behind. We will reach for the stars.”
The Cans
Chapter One is headed Russia Megacity, 12 November 2197. Five in-modes, cylindrical capsules three metres by two, hang under the ceiling of a refitted studio flat; outside, servounits clean corrosive deposits off the façade, and the sunrise turns the fog the colour of ichor. The capsules lower and stand upright, and Max Bourne wakes a minute early, as he has lately, into a despair he cannot explain. He turns twenty tomorrow.
The Family connection, which he cannot block, takes them all jogging through a virtual pine forest: his little brother Johnny, born inside the in-modes; his sister Samantha, two years younger; their mother; and their potbellied father, a corporate scientist, puffing. Max tells his father what people call them: “They call us the ‘cans’!” He has been visiting other Layers, and has met a girl whose parents have a house above the clouds. His father promises a capsule apartment in the Antarctic Megacity within a year; Max scorns science and says he will go into business. The in-modes came in thirteen years ago as a temporary measure, when engineers at Megapool and Rimp Cybertronics miscalculated and the fog rose three hundred metres higher than predicted. Breakfast goes badly; his mother throws him out of the family connection, and the in-mode keeps him off the Net until he exercises.
The Layer is where the cans live: four Layers ranked by status, from the Lowest to the near-mythical Celestial, every step in them walked on the in-mode’s treadmill. Because the Layer is fully interactive and nobody online feels responsible for anything, every dropped candy wrapper stays where it falls, and its base, however often it is cleaned, is a dump. Two weeks earlier, his exams just passed, Max was hunting in a fantasy forest when a network attack struck: the pearly sky cracked like a mirror and gray tornadoes roamed. Afraid of pain even here, he was about to sprint for a misty strip of forest rather than step into a tornado when arrows hit him; he fell, and a tornado rolled over him. He woke on a reeking slope of garbage at the base of the Layer beside a choking girl, Lisa, plain as a gray bird yet somehow mysterious, who says she is from the Upper Layer. Conscious of his expensive, muscular avatar, Max pays a faceless Guide 300 credits, nearly all he has saved toward a sports flycar, to take them up.
The Upper Layer disappoints him: fields, hills, a river, a few squat buildings. Lisa sinks into the grass, glad to be home; her real home is a dome above the clouds, where a single sapling from the Genesis Expo cost her seven thousand credits and died. At a gazebo two young men, Gleb and Dima, are playing chess inside a twinkling cube. Gleb calls Max a can, and Max’s punch passes straight through him: the laws of Max’s Layer don’t work here, and in the Upper Layer everyone wears their real face. Gleb calls him a slave and asks whether he earns his living in the virtual brothels, until Lisa slaps him, and he leaves promising to find Max in his own Layer.
Lisa, a final-year student of the psychology of cyberspace inhabitants at the Academy of World Government, offers to thank him either with a quick fling or with the cruel truth, and he chooses the truth. Of eighteen billion people, four billion live in in-modes and another billion in capsule blocks below them. The World Government has banned AI from the Net, so the cans have taken the place of game bots. “We are the living decorations?!” Only one in twenty works in the real economy, and he will stay in the in-mode forever. When she asks where his soul is, he shouts at her to stop, and she sends him back to the garbage.
I · 6 Five Capsules at Dawn Chapter One, the Russia Megacity, 12 November 2197. Five in-modes, cylindrical capsules three metres by two, hang under the ceiling of a refitted studio flat, and the sunrise turns the fog outside the colour of ichor. The panel reads 32 degrees and 17 per cent oxygen, with acid rain on the way: continue with in-modes. The capsules lower and stand upright, and Max Bourne, who turns twenty tomorrow, wakes a minute early into a despair he cannot explain.
I · 7 The Family Run The Family connection, which Max cannot block, takes them all jogging through a virtual pine forest: his little brother Johnny, born inside the in-modes; his sister Samantha, two years younger and the only one who takes it seriously; their mother, asking her dears what they would like for breakfast; and their father, a potbellied corporate scientist, puffing along. Max, whose mind has been in other Layers for two weeks, is in no mood for any of it.
I · 8 What They Call Us Max tells his father what the world calls people like them: “They call us the ‘cans’!” His father guesses he has been visiting other Layers, and Max admits to meeting a girl whose parents have a house above the clouds. In a year, his father promises, they will have a capsule apartment in the Antarctic Megacity; Max says he will go into business instead. “If the glass is empty, it will remain so no matter where you place it!”
I · 9 The Base of the Layer The Layer is where the cans live. There are four Layers, the Lowest, the Middle, the Upper and the near-mythical Celestial, and an avatar steps out beside the building where its owner’s capsule really hangs; every step it takes is walked on the in-mode’s treadmill. Because the Layer is fully interactive, every candy wrapper leaves its mark, and nobody online feels responsible, so its base is a dump, the refuse piled several storeys high however often it is cleaned.
I · 10 The Game Breaks Two weeks earlier, his exams just passed, Max is hunting floppy-eared creatures in a fantasy forest when a network attack hits the whole Layer. The trees warp, the pearly sky cracks like a mirror, and gray tornadoes begin to roam. Afraid of pain even here, he won’t escape through a tornado. He is about to sprint for a misty strip of forest when arrows hit him in the back and the calf; he falls, and a tornado rolls over him.
I · 11 A Girl on the Garbage He comes to on a reeking slope of compressed garbage at the base of the Layer, between buildings whose holes ooze darkness. Half a metre away a girl is choking. “She was like a nondescript gray bird.” Yet there is something mysterious and promising about her. She is Lisa, she says she comes from the Upper Layer, and Max, very conscious of his expensive, muscular avatar, sets out to get her home.
I · 12 The Faceless Guide In a narrow cleft of garbage where a road once ran, a faceless shadow steps out of the wall: a Guide, who for a fee will lead them out of the dump. Max, conscious of the macho figure his avatar cuts, pays it 300 credits to take them both up to the Upper Layer. It is nearly everything he has saved toward the sports flycar he wants.
I · 13 The Upper Layer The Upper Layer disappoints him: fields, hills, a meandering river, a few squat buildings. Lisa sinks into the grass and strokes it, glad to be home. Her real home is a dome above the clouds, where space is scarce and a single sapling from the Genesis Expo cost her seven thousand credits and died. She reads her rich father’s antique paper books. To a can from the Middle Layer, all this green looks like very little.
I · 14 The Punch That Passes Through At a gazebo by the river two young men are playing chess inside a twinkling cube: Gleb and Dima. Gleb calls Max a can, and Max swings at him; the punch passes straight through and strikes the carved back of the armchair. The laws of his Layer don’t work here, and in the Upper Layer, Lisa whispers, everyone wears their real face. Gleb calls him a slave, Lisa slaps him, and he leaves promising to find Max.
I · 15 The Cruel Truth Lisa, a final-year student of the psychology of cyberspace inhabitants at the Academy of World Government, offers to thank him either with a quick fling or with the cruel truth. He chooses the truth: eighteen billion people, four billion of them in in-modes, and since AI is banned on the Net, the cans have taken the place of game bots. “We are the living decorations?!” Only one in twenty works in the real economy. He will stay in the in-mode forever.
None of This Is Real
Chapter Two takes him through the next two weeks, and everything Lisa and Gleb said turns out to be true. Max earns his Guide fees in illegal no-rules flycar races, where a crash can kill, by staying safely among the outsiders, and the Guide unlocks a door in a tattered building with an antique key and vanishes; pushed open again, the same door gives onto a bright vaulted building and a sunny park. He and Lisa have met three times, and she keeps her distance.
As they set off for a lake his avatar glitches, and for a second he feels the treadmill and the nanofibres of his suit instead of her hand. On a narrow footbridge over the still water she tells him, “None of this is real.” Gleb has reported them to the online police and to her father. She blows her real-world number into his cyberstack, tells him to call if he ever gets out of the in-mode, kisses him, leaves him a hint, that her father made his fortune on the movement of industrial fog, and vanishes.
He spends his twentieth birthday in the in-mode, contacts blocked, on a bench in the freshly cleaned Middle Layer. Adulthood brings business networks, a World Bank account and 5,000 credits from the World Government, and he spends the money on an expert neuronet to study the fog. It condenses at about a hundred metres, was supposed to stop at 270 and settled at 500, with abandoned homes along its upper border. After four days the neuronet has an answer: Megapool’s new levels are changing the winds, and within a month the fog should drop to 450 metres in parts of the Europe Megacity. Empty living capsules there, now selling for a pittance, are about to soar in value. He has 800 credits.
I · 16 A Door to Somewhere Else Chapter Two. Max spends two weeks finding that Lisa and Gleb told him the truth, and earning his Guide fees in illegal no-rules flycar races where a crash can kill. The Guide, at 120 credits now, unlocks an apartment door in a tattered building with an antique key and dissolves in the damp hallway; pushed open again, the same door gives onto a different building, bright and vaulted, with a sunny park beyond. He has met Lisa three times now, and she keeps her distance.
I · 17 The Glitch Lisa meets him on the path below her house and suggests a walk to a lake. As he takes her hand his avatar glitches: for a second he feels not her hand but the treadmill under his feet and the nanofibres of the suit he wears in his capsule, the body the Layer is built to make him forget. Lisa steps back, startled. On a footbridge over the lake she will say it aloud.
I · 18 None of This Is Real On a narrow footbridge over still water Lisa tells him, “None of this is real.” Gleb has reported them both to the online police and to her father. She blows her real-world number into his cyberstack: “Call me if you ever get out of the in-mode.” Then she kisses him, leaves him a hint, that her father made his fortune on the movement of industrial fog, and vanishes.
I · 19 Twenty, in the Can Max spends his twentieth birthday in the in-mode with his contacts blocked, on a bench in the freshly cleaned Middle Layer, spitting out the word cans: a dream world, he decides, has been engineered for them. Adulthood brings a few gifts. His implant and cyberstack are updated with business networks, an account at the World Bank and 5,000 credits from the World Government. In the eyes of the World Government he is now an adult, free to do business.
I · 20 Reading the Fog He spends the money on an expert neuronet and studies the fog. It condenses at 100 to 115 metres, was supposed to stop at 270, where the towers have no windows, and settled at 500. After four days the neuronet sees it: Megapool’s new levels are changing the winds, and within a month the fog will drop to 450 metres in parts of the Europe Megacity. Empty living capsules there are about to soar in value. He has 800 credits.
The Fog Gamble
The World Bank refuses him a loan. Then, in a virtual café, a portly man with a good-natured, trustworthy face sits down at his table: Andrey Sergeevich, a private investor, who offers 190,000 credits for about a month. The collateral is Max’s own in-mode, his parents’ in-modes and the family’s rights to the Antarctic apartment, authorised with signatures generated by his parents’ implants without their knowledge, through a contact of the investor’s. If Max fails, his parents lose Antarctica and their in-modes and go down to a capsule block on the lowest levels. He can see it is fishy, hesitates, and calls the man back.
The money arrives the next morning, and he buys ten capsule apartments. Then, afraid to face his parents, he decides to leave the can. “He was running away but he called it something else in his head.” The in-mode opens with a hiss on a dark, stale studio, and he puts on protective gear by the door without looking back at his family’s capsules. The lift is dead, so he takes the emergency stairs for half an hour, past corridors and halls crammed with in-modes, to the domed park he remembers from the age of seven, now filled with them too, among the stumps of felled trees and cracked soil. A flycar waits at the airlock in the murk, and for a few seconds it rises above the fog, over gigantic megasuburbs, a web of roads between cliffs of skyscrapers and a myriad of lights.
Outside the can he cannot sleep. For three days in one of his new trimodular apartments the rooms are too big and the food paste tasteless, and his body craves the sleeping gas. On the fourth the news reports an unexpected fog migration: five of his ten apartments are above the toxic level. He sells one by evening for 150,000 credits, spends a third of it on a new in-mode, has servos install it by midnight, and sleeps like a baby. The fog drops another fifteen metres, nine apartments are in the clean zone at 200,000 each, and Max is rich. He hides it from his parents.
With the apartments on automatic sale he goes out again, this time with two antitoxin pills from the door instead of a suit. The fog lies thirty metres below his window, among unfinished Megapool levels abandoned when it rose; outside, the skeleton of the megasuburb reaches into the sky, the wind howling through its empty window frames. A city flycar lands and asks him where to. “Above the clouds,” he says: a five-hour trip.
I · 21 A Trustworthy Face The World Bank politely refuses him a loan. Then, in a virtual café, a portly man with a good-natured, trustworthy face sits down at his table: Andrey Sergeevich, a private investor, who knows about the refusal and offers 190,000 credits for about a month. The collateral is his own and his parents’ in-modes and the family’s rights to the Antarctic apartment, signed away through his parents’ implants without their knowledge. Max can see it is fishy, and calls the man back anyway.
I · 22 Leaving the Can The money arrives and he buys ten capsule apartments. Then, afraid to face his parents, he decides to leave the can. “He was running away but he called it something else in his head.” His capsule opens with a hiss on a dark, stale flat. He pulls on one of the five sets of protective gear by the door, a beam checks his seals, the system asks if he is sure, and he does not look back at his family’s capsules.
I · 23 The Emergency Stairs The lift is dead. Max goes down the emergency stairs for about half an hour, past dull light panels and red lights glowing everywhere, a lone servo scuttling by. A corridor door opens on neat rows of in-modes, and the old entrance hall is crammed with more of them, hung from the ceiling on clamps among cables and pipes. The building he grew up in has become a warehouse of capsules.
I · 24 The Airlock Past the domed park he remembers from childhood, now filled with capsules, the flycar he ordered waits by the airlock, its running lights burning in the murk, and the wind nearly knocks him off his feet. The car takes him out along a multilevel road where holographic ads still flash at empty shop fronts, on a level whose people, it seems, have all gone into their capsules.
I · 25 Above the Haze For a few seconds the flycar climbs above the haze, and Max sees the real city: gigantic megasuburbs, a web of multilevel roads between the cliffs of super skyscrapers, and a myriad of lights. The fog fills the city from about a hundred metres up to five hundred; above it, people live in real rooms, and the richest of all in domes above the real clouds, as Lisa does.
I · 26 Sleep, Bought Back Outside the can he cannot sleep. For three days the rooms of his new trimodular apartment are too big, the bed is uncomfortable, the food paste is tasteless and his body craves the sleeping gas. On the fourth day the news reports an unexpected fog migration: five of his apartments are now above the toxic level. He sells one by evening for 150,000 credits, spends a third of it on a new in-mode, and servos install it by midnight.
I · 27 The Fog Below The fog drops another fifteen metres, and nine of his apartments are in the clean zone, worth 200,000 credits each. Max is rich, and he hides it from his parents. From his window the fog lies thirty metres below him, and around him stand unfinished Megapool levels, abandoned when the fog rose. Lisa’s hint about her father’s fortune has paid off.
I · 28 Above the Clouds He goes out again. This time the door hands him two antitoxin pills instead of a suit, the lift works, and servos clean the halls. Outside, the skeleton of the megasuburb reaches up into the sky and the wind howls through its empty window frames. A city flycar lands and its polite autopilot asks him where to. “Above the clouds,” he says: a five-hour trip. Max’s part of the English excerpt ends here.
The Alpha Deal
That same morning, in mountain valleys on the outskirts of the Europe Megacity, where ski resorts once stood and garbage now lies, five Genesis flycars circle and one lands an assault team in heavy servomotor suits. A lean old man walks down the ramp with no suit at all, protected by devices in his clothes: Ulrich Otto von Fitzgerald, founder of Genesis, who has bought the dump to turn it into an oasis with garbage-eating bacteria. From a Rimp Cybertronics flycar, behind a massive armoured guard, comes Cathy Rimp in a light exploration suit. They are old friends with opposite faiths, she in the technosphere, he in the biosphere.
On the shore of a bubbling toxic lake, inside a ring of mobile climate complexes, a stocky major opens vintage champagne, and Rimp asks Genesis to help pay for the Alpha Colonial Transport, the first interstellar flight. They argue over Fitzgerald’s Mars terraforming, the implants that ninety per cent of humanity carries, and the coming fight for the Moon and the asteroid belt, which she proposes to share out. She has a third of the money. The ship, she admits, is also her own chance to leave Earth one day; she is afraid of being held hostage by a dead planet. His terms: the World Bank repays him half at launch, she keeps Megapool off Mars, and together they lift the bans on AIs and on hybrids. “The planet is dead and it is time to move on.” The ship should take about ten years to build. They drink.
Two days later a full report of the meeting, with a recording, is on the desk of Bryzgalov, head of Megapool, who thinks of people as bugs bred for his corporation’s prosperity. Rimp Cybertronics, his researchers confirm, has ordered a First Colonial Shelter and a Base designed for other planets. Furious that she has promised Fitzgerald Mars, he calls in White, his Head of Corporate Security, who suggests overloading the ship’s thrust engine through its control system. Bryzgalov wants agents planted in the project, nothing pointing to Megapool, and a strike at the launch: once built, the ship must not leave the Solar System. Here the publisher’s English excerpt ends.
I · 29 The Old Man Without a Suit That same morning, in the mountains on the edge of the Europe Megacity, where ski resorts once stood and the valleys are now buried under garbage, five Genesis flycars circle and one lands an assault team in heavy servomotor suits. A lean old man walks down the ramp with no suit at all, protected by devices in his clothes: Ulrich Otto von Fitzgerald, founder of Genesis, who has bought the dump to turn it into an oasis with garbage-eating bacteria.
I · 30 Old Friends A Rimp Cybertronics flycar lands beside them, and behind a massive armoured guard comes Cathy Rimp in a light exploration suit, opening the visor of her soft helmet. She and Fitzgerald are old friends who believe in opposite things, she in the technosphere, he in the biosphere. She has come to ask the founder of the most powerful corporation on Earth for money, and he is famously paranoid about his plans for Mars.
I · 31 Champagne by the Poisoned Lake On the shore of a bubbling toxic lake, inside a ring of mobile climate complexes, a stocky major opens vintage champagne, and Rimp asks Genesis to help pay for the Alpha Colonial Transport, the first interstellar flight. It is also her own way off Earth one day. Fitzgerald names his terms: half repaid by the World Bank at launch, Megapool kept off Mars, the bans on AIs and hybrids lifted. “The planet is dead and it is time to move on.”
I · 32 It Must Not Leave Two days later a full report of the meeting is on the desk of Bryzgalov, head of Megapool, a man who thinks of people as bugs bred for his corporation’s prosperity. Furious that Rimp has promised Fitzgerald Mars, he calls in White, his Head of Corporate Security, who suggests overloading the ship’s thrust engine through its control system. Plant agents, Bryzgalov orders, and strike at the launch: the ship must not leave the Solar System. The English excerpt ends here.
The Blind Punch
The rest of the novel, Chapters Three to Seven, an epilogue and a postscript in the author’s 2018 Russian redaction, is known here only through the blurb, Russian readers’ reviews and the author’s notes, which say what happens but not in what order. The blurb promises that Max will come face to face with the military AIs and learn to survive in the distant Outlands. Reviewers describe AIs on the run from the corporations, the four corporations’ intrigues driving the plot, and a book preoccupied with what separates a person from an artificial mind; two readers find the artificial intelligence at times more human than the humans. Two reviewers recall a Robinson Crusoe episode on Ganymede, and space pirates. A passage readers copy from the Russian has Max finding real people, rather than avatars, as strange as aliens: the in-mode has rewired him.
The book builds toward the hypersphere: a theory of it appears, and the first flights through it are made. Huge colony transports set out for other stars; one reader remembers the feeling of a ship that leaves and vanishes while the next must still be sent. Another passage readers quote gives a man, in his last minutes, the strength for the most important act of his life, thinking of billions of other people; the quotation doesn’t say who he is. By the end, according to the author’s notes and the sequel’s annotation, Cathy Rimp leaves the dying Earth aboard a colony transport with specialists from her corporation, the engineer Hans Gervet among them. Reviewers say Max matures and finds his moral footing; Livadny, interviewed in English, says his hero “faced a life-threatening emergency and came out the winner”, and asks what it cost him. Max survives the book: the untranslated sequel brings him back.
I · 33 Stranded on Ganymede From here the page follows the blurb and reviews, which say what happens but not in what order. The blurb promises that Max will learn to survive in the distant Outlands, and two Russian reviewers recall a Robinson Crusoe stretch of the book on Ganymede, the largest moon of Jupiter, along with space pirates. How the story gets there, and who exactly is stranded, the sources read for this page don’t say.
I · 34 The Blind Punch Reviewers agree on where the book is heading: a theory of the hypersphere appears, the first flights through it are made, and colony transports set out. One reader remembers a ship that leaves and vanishes while the next must still be sent. A jump into the hypersphere with no charts is what the cycle calls a blind punch; in the author’s chronology the Alpha makes one in 2207. How much of that the novel shows, the sources read here don’t say.
I · 35 The Poisoned Earth Behind By the end, the author’s notes and the sequel’s annotation say, Cathy Rimp leaves the dying Earth aboard a colony transport with specialists from her corporation, the engineer Hans Gervet among them. It is the promise she made to the violinist in the Prologue: “We will leave the poisoned Earth behind.” Max survives the book. The untranslated sequel brings them both back, and four centuries on the second English book remembers them among the founders of a colony world.
Machines and minds in this book
- In-modes. Individual life support modules, in the English text’s full name: cylindrical capsules three metres by two, hung horizontally near the ceiling for sleep and lowered upright by day, with sleeping gas, soft restraining belts, a treadmill, gym pieces that slide out of recesses, a mist shower, waste disposal and half a kilo of food concentrate a day. They were designed from the experience of long interplanetary flights and came in, thirteen years before the story, as a temporary measure. Lisa counts four billion people living in them.
- The Layer. Four Layers ranked by status: the Lowest, the Middle, the Upper and Celestial, which is almost a myth. An avatar appears beside the user’s real building, every step is walked on the treadmill, and the base is a dump because the world is fully interactive, nobody feels responsible for what they leave behind, and however often it is cleaned it fills up again. Network attacks arrive as gray tornadoes; faceless Guides sell passage between places; in the Upper Layer people wear their real faces. With AI banned from the Net, the cans themselves fill the world where game bots used to be.
- Cyberstacks and implants. Max wears his cyberstack on his right wrist; it carries the Family connection he cannot block, and at twenty adulthood updates it and his implant with business networks and a bank account. Ninety per cent of humanity carries implants, each generating a unique mnemonic signature, and signatures generated through his parents’ implants are what pledge their in-modes and their Antarctic rights to the loan shark.
- The military AIs. Each of the four superpowers keeps a secret AI to run its combat robots. In the Prologue they are not yet self-aware, and the violinist has been building fragile bridges to them; Rimp’s program goes into those of Russia, the European Union, the United States and New Asia. Later, the blurb says, Max comes face to face with military AIs, and reviewers describe AIs fleeing the corporations.
- The violinist. Not a man but a self-organised network intelligence, a conglomerate grown from merged, forgotten neural phantoms such as avatars kept by the grieving and discarded virtual pets, wearing a body built of servotoys, foam flesh and clothing. His violin is a unique high-tech instrument that only imitates wood.
- Servos. In this book the word means small service robots: servounits scrub façades, a servo scuttles down a stairwell, servos install an in-mode and clean the halls; Genesis’s troops wear heavy servomotor suits. By the second English book the word means walking machines as tall as a house.
- Corporate science. Genesis’s synthetic food, Mars terraforming and garbage-eating bacteria with a terminating gene; Megapool’s megacities and the Antarctic Megacity; Rimp Cybertronics’ cybernetics; Cryonics’ cryogenic sleep and space yards; the Alpha, about ten years in the building; and the bans on AI and on hybrids, cybernetic organisms, which Rimp and Fitzgerald agree to lift.
- The hypersphere. Reviewers say a theory of it appears late in the book and the first flights through it are made. Across the cycle, a jump through it without charts is a blind punch, which gives the English book its title.
Where this sits in the history
- Episode 01. «Слепой рывок» (2013) opens the Russian cycle «Экспансия: История Галактики». FantLab and the author’s chronology set it in 2197–2214; the heading of the author’s own fragment and the Russian audiobook say 2197–2215. Magic Dome translated three of the cycle’s novels, from three different eras; this is the first.
- The untranslated middle. In-world, «Мишень» (Target, 2215) and «Беглец» (Fugitive, 2218) come next. Fugitive, never translated, follows the colony transport of the same name to the planet Dabog with Rimp, Hans Gervet and Max (Ivan Stozharov in the Russian), and the violinist is the AI that wakes the colonists there. The author renamed Blind Punch’s colony ship in 2016 to make the link, and says the novel shows how Dabog’s walking servomachines began.
- What book 2 remembers. The Shadow of Earth opens about four hundred years later, on Earth in 2606, where a fleet briefing places Catherine Rimp, her inner circle and the engineer Hans Gervet aboard the Fugitive; then it moves to Dabog in 2607. The colony museum there keeps an armour plate of the transport; a teacher names the founding generation, Max Bourne, Catherine Rimp, her daughter Chloe, who bred the first hybrid plants, and Gervet, who built the universal servomachine; and Max Bourne’s diaries survive: he became the pilot of the very first servomachine on Dabog. The English edition of book 2 calls the Russian Stozharov Max Bourne to match this book.
- Earth afterwards. Book 2’s history credits Fitzgerald with saving the dying planet: his Martian fleet seeds the oceans with engineered bacteria and the air with absorbents, and he revives the World Government, blocks the Layer and forces people out of the in-modes.
- The Alpha. In the author’s chronology the Alpha, built by Rimp Cybertronics and Genesis, vanishes at the edge of the Solar System on launch in 2207, its fate learned only a thousand years later; Bryzgalov’s order in Chapter Two is aimed at that launch. The sources read for this page don’t establish how much of it the novel shows. The Great Exodus follows, thousands of colony transports leaving Earth over half a century.
Notes
- The English edition. It renames the hero, Ivan Stozharov in the Russian, as Max Bourne, and his family with him (Sofya and Antoshka become Samantha and Johnny; Katya Rimp becomes Cathy, Liza becomes Lisa), and it follows the author’s revised opening rather than the 2013 Eksmo text (in the revision Rimp hacks United Asia’s orbital group and delays World War Three). The ending changed twice in Russian: in 2016 the author renamed the departing colony transport Fugitive to tie the book to its sequels, and in 2019 he cut the last scene, the transport’s crash. The English translation appeared in September 2017, after the first change and before the second; which ending it carries is not confirmed by any source read for this page.
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The whole walk: The Series · The History · I · II · III