I’m not a good person. I tried very hard to be one, but unfortunately I lived in a very turbulent time, a time of change, progress and most of all - death. I was a firm believer in humanism, in improving and saving the world. I believed the books of my childhood which told me stories of great engineering feats, of conquering the wilds, sailing the sky and reshaping seas. I was an idealist and lived for a goal, a dream - the improvement of life for all humanity. It was a dream which had shattered as those in power had betrayed us.

Our leaders did not follow the propaganda they had instilled in the hearts and minds of children and USSR citizens like myself. They spoke of bringing peace to the world while they ordered the construction of fifty thousand nuclear warheads. How many people could those warheads have fed? How many beautiful roads, hospitals and schools could that money have built?

But, I cannot blame the Soviet government for everything. Perhaps the dream we were following was flawed to begin with. The very tenets of Bolshevism called for the deaths of anyone who opposed it and the millions of lives that it took to lay the foundation of USSR during the six-year-long Civil War had haunted our supernation until its very end.

I myself am to blame. Without realizing it, one doctorate after another, one success in the field of biochemistry and virology after the other and I became the administrator of Aralsk-7, a top secret Soviet facility that worked to wield death itself.

Without intending to do so, I became a tiny gear in the machinery of war that I had once dreamt of preventing. By the orders of those above me, I ended up working on Vozrozhdeniya island war base, managing the design of new biological weapons. Many scientists like myself, the brightest stars raised by USSR, had been caught in the trap of the living manifestation that was our Union. We were all trapped in a beautiful lie, a paradox, where we bred death while propaganda posters around us declared “Workers of the world unite to bring peace to all mankind”. At the end, none of us could honestly tell each other why we did what we did.

I looked out of the window of my lab towards the dying Aral sea. Rusted, derelict ships stuck out from the desert that was once the sea floor.

In 1960 we had diverted the local rivers to irrigate the fields of Kazakhstan, and everything around Vozrozhdeniya island slowly dried up and became a dead zone of salt and desert, causing massive sand storms around the area. The newspapers of the 90’s called it “one of the planet's worst environmental disasters”. They weren’t wrong.

I found it ironic how the lab that produced death was located on an island in a sea we had foolishly killed. Even more so, the Russian name for the island - “Vozrozhdeniya” meant "Rebirth" and it was anything but!

"I'm broadcasting this last message from the central radio tower of Aralsk-7 to anyone willing to listen because I have nothing left and nothing to be afraid of.

"Perhaps some will hail me as a hero. Know this, people like me deserve no accolades - I am only correcting my terrible mistakes, narrating my final chapter.

"In harnessing the power of the atom the Soviets had caused the Chernobyl catastrophe - the worst nuclear disaster in the world. The explosion of the 4th reactor of Chernobyl made a 2600 km² exclusion zone in Ukraine and spread a cloud of radiation as far as Scotland. That was in 1986.

"It is now 1992 and something just as horrific is likely to happen, unless I stand my ground. Unless I do what has to be done to destroy my legacy."

I lowered the microphone and looked at the fading, cracked mosaic of Yuri Gagarin, the first man we had put in space. Yuri stared down at me from the wall of the Viral Research Laboratory, his hand raised to the sky as if he was trying to capture the heavens themselves. The symbol of USSR, the renowned hammer and sickle, was embedded into the cracked, hexagonal mosaic with gold-plated tiles. It shone above Yuri as if it was the core of a nuclear reactor that was attempting to irradiate the entire world with divine blessings of the glorious tenets of communism.

“I’m sorry, Yuri. We have failed you,” I spoke, my voice cracking. My finger shook on the trigger of the flare gun pointing at numerous burlap sacks beneath my feet.

The Bioweapons laboratory was now empty of people. Its halls which were once filled with doctors, assistants and various personnel were now barren. The Soviet Union had fallen and its greatest achievements and accolades meant nothing now. Various shiny medals I had received from numerous General Secretaries of the time meant nothing. My bank account was practically nullified as the Soviet Ruble plummeted. Just last week I saw soldiers carrying millions of Rubles to be buried in a mine shaft nearby and that’s when I knew that it was all over. Millions! Now worth less than the paper they were printed on.

One of the soldiers gave me a bag full of money from the truck as a “parting souvenir”. The plastic bag with a one hundred thousand rubles now sat in the corner, taunting me. I looked at it and remembered how my mother struggled to save fifty rubles in a glass jar in 1950 to buy us something nice. It was heartbreaking.

I had acquired the fertilizer that now sat beneath my feet from a farm supply depot located on the mainland. It only took a small bribe of several bottles of vodka to the guards and a promise to share the profits from the under-the-table sale. The local administrator had let me relocate their entire stock. I wasn't the first - the desperate and corrupt were already taking apart the Soviet legacy. Simply enough - nobody wanted to deal with 2000 tons of this stuff.

I had no plans to sell the fertilizer. I tricked the depot administrator to make my last stand. It took a lot of effort on my part to get the bags here - thankfully the army had abandoned tonnes of fuel and equipment when they left.

“Doctor Kerenski! Give us the keys!” A bald man in a black coat growled at me from behind the barricade of fertilizer bags. I shook my head, refusing to budge. He knew my name because he was a local gangster and marauder aiming to make profit from my dangerous work. The marauder gave a sign to his men. They rushed into the building, breaking down the doors, trying to shove aside numerous fertilizer bags.

Behind me, beneath the mosaic of the first cosmonaut, were shelves upon shelves of research papers and fridges containing the first living machines the universe itself had crafted over millennia - viruses and bacteria. Labels made in my handwriting announced their names, feared by many: anthrax, smallpox, black plague, brucellosis, tularemia, coronavirus and many, many other RNA viruses and bacteria that we had studied, modified and improved ourselves. Computer databases hummed off to the side, containing bacteriological and virulent research data gathered nearly over half a century by the team that was working under me.

Traditionally, the captain went down with the ship. I was the metaphorical captain of Aralsk-7, the last guardian of its no longer beating heart - the Bioweapons lab. Throughout the last week 1500 people who lived on Vozrozhdeniya island and worked in Aralsk-7 were rapidly evacuated by the army. Civil and military infrastructure became abandoned and the Soviet installation became a ghost town.

I refused to leave, refused to abandon my post. The soldiers didn’t care enough to drag me out of the lab - they knew that the currency they were getting paid in was now obsolete. They knew that the people in charge had given up on this place. There was no proper procedure, no clear order to decommission the facility, everything was simply to be abandoned, left behind. Kazakhstan had broken away from USSR on December 16, 1991. Whatever had remained belonged to them now. The facility along with all of its containers of death was theirs, according to the barely stable, newly minted, democratic Russian government.

Two hundred tons of anthrax plus other far more abominable things held within the base were declared Kazakhstan’s problem! Kazakhstan had no way of dealing with the microscopic nightmares held within this place. Its breakaway from USSR and collapse of demand for heavy industry products resulted in a terrible shock for their economy. Anarchy and chaos escalated with every passing day with no end in sight.

Kazakhstan would do nothing about protecting or destroying this place, I knew. The carelessness of the post-Soviet government was insane, but such was the norm these days. The empire that we had toiled so hard to build had fallen and all of the people who once worked here creating death had left this place forever, abandoning everything.

Dangerous-looking men in black balaclavas had arrived on a hovercraft just a week after the soldiers had departed. Damned scavengers! I knew that they were looking to raid the labs.

The blueprints of death behind me could be worth a lot in the right hands - if the gangsters were connected enough they could sell them to the Chinese or Americans to be unleashed in some distant future. Alternatively, if the marauders were stupid and careless, they could get infected and spread death and misery across the entire planet.

>[THREATEN THE GANGSTERS TO MAKE THEM LEAVE]<

[RELEASE THE TRIGGER]:

I would not let my work be released upon humanity! Aralsk-7 would not become another Chernobyl. As they rushed towards me, I let go of the trigger and the flare gun fired into the ground igniting the fuel oil that I had poured all over the fertilizer bags. An open oxygen tank hissed at my feet. It took only a few seconds for the fire to reach 300 degrees Celsius.

I smiled as the gangster’s face twisted in panic as waves of fire blossomed all around me. I laughed as my clothes burned.

Neither he nor anyone else would be able to wield my legacy of death. I knew that under the right conditions ammonium nitrate within the fertilizer changed from a solid to a gas almost instantaneously. When such a reaction occurred, the detonation wave traveled at supersonic speeds obliterating everything in its path.

Hundreds of tonnes of ammonium nitrate all around the lab and beneath me flashed with the catalytic reaction as I took my last breath on this weary earth.

I did not see the mushroom cloud that was now Aralsk-7, but I knew that it would be beautiful.

Pure, absolute darkness. Nothingness. The end of everything, the end of my life. I did not know how long I stared at the void because time had no meaning here. Sparkling lights, stars suddenly began to twinkle in the endless, vast night.

For a brief instance I wondered if this was something that Yuri Gagarin saw on his orbital spaceflight when he had departed from planet earth on April 12, 1961 on the Vostok rocket. Why was I seeing stars? Was I lucid dreaming in the last second of my death? How could that be? Had the fertilizer failed to detonate? The destructive power of the blast should have been equivalent to 1 kiloton of TNT or approximately 1/20th yield of the first nuclear bomb exploded by the United States over Hiroshima.

Aralsk-7 and I should have been reduced to dust! I should not be able to formulate thoughts! If this was just a dream, then I wouldn't be able to recall specific things at will, pull up dates or big numbers. I focused my mind, pulled at my memories of Hiroshima. One by one, like falling dominoes, my memories flashed into being.

The greatest act of war perpetrated by humanity with the power of science occurred over Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th over Japan in which American nuclear bombs killed 355'000 people. For many months after the bombs detonated over Japanese cities, large numbers of civilians continued to die from the effects of burns, radiation sickness, and injuries, compounded by illness and malnutrition. According to one newspaper I read, the people close to the explosion were nearly vaporized, organs and bones carbonized and the rest turned into shadows imprinted onto stone. I was thirteen at the time. I recalled how Soviet Union declared war on Japan on the same day, our tanks rolling into the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo held by the Kwantung Army.

I was born in 1932... when the Soviet–Finnish Non-Aggression Pact was signed. When I was seven, USSR invaded Finland. When I was nine Germany invaded the Soviet Union. I was too young to help, but I recalled how my mother was conscripted along with thousands of other women to dig anti-tank trenches and moats around the city as means of desperate defense against the invasion.

In 1952 I was selected to join the team of Dr. Lebedev at the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering to help assemble BESM-1, the first Soviet mainframe supercomputer composed from five thousand vacuum tubes.

I remembered absolutely everything! I realized that I couldn't feel or perceive my body, as if I was just a pinprick of light myself in the shawl of eternal night. I was dead, there was no question about it now... and yet I could recall everything with perfect clarity. I clung to the memories of my entire life with all of my being, as if they were a life-saving vest amidst an ocean of darkness.

The stars around me slowly began to spin in an endless circle, accelerating with every passing moment. Soon the long, orbital curves formed brilliant rings... a tunnel to elsewhere. Perhaps the stars weren't spinning at all. Maybe it was me that had started rotating?

The tunnel of light gained more colors, attained vibrant brilliance to it, as if it was woven from flames. I realized what it was. Soviet urban legends had perpetuated the knowledge of the "eternal wheel" seen by people who had a near-death experience. Some of the Academy of Sciences researchers even claimed to identify the common elements that define NDEs: a sense of being dead, lack of negative emotions, sense of well-being, painlessness and most of all - "the tunnel". The people perpetuating the life after death mythos in USSR had called this tunnel, "Samsara", referencing ancient Vedas Hinduism texts from the oldest layer of Sanskrit literature. As the Orthodox religion was being actively dismantled and propagandized as an absolute evil by the Soviet government, some people like my father had turned to a mixture of Buddhism and Hinduism to explain what science could not. The tales of rebirth, remote dreaming, levitation powers and Samsara sort of squeezed into my childhood as a fun, mystical thing he often talked about over dinner.

I was seeing the damn thing for myself now. It was real! I couldn't believe it.

The Great Wheel of Life, Samsara!

I could not determine what the wheel and the limitless tunnel it formed was made from anymore. Stars? Angels? People? A multitude of strings, innumerable things reached out to me. A billion hands, for a billion souls, to take me beyond the veil of death.

Something had grabbed at me, turned me. The helmet of my hero - cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in his full spacesuit stared down at me. Galactic spirals and the Wheel of Samsara spun ceaselessly in the reflections of his helmet's glass. He silently watched me, observed me for what felt like a moment that lasted a second or perhaps forever.

“We saw your sacrifice and found it beautiful,” Yuri spoke with a whisper woven from a hundred male voices that gradually rose in crescendo like a wave arriving at the beach shore. He did not sound like himself. This was someone, no… something else entirely. Something inexplicable, something that our science did not reach, did not understand yet - a thing from beyond the veil of death.

“We?” I thought tentatively.

“The Omniscience,” the cosmonaut answered as if he could read my mind. It probably did since I wasn't actually speaking, lacking lungs or a mouth.

Soviet science had not discovered evidence for a soul or a god, yet here I was - now quite well aware of both.

“God is... real?” I trembled in a sudden realization, my Soviet atheism cracking for the first time. “Are you god?”

Now, normally I would have at least shed a tear in this terrifying and impossible moment. However, as I was currently deprived of my body… I felt exceptionally calm, lacking stressful feelings.

“We are the narration that underpins and pierces what you define as reality. Your soul is but a minute echo that cannot truly perceive us. You see only a symbol, an idea, a concept that you worship.”

“I worship nothing and no-one!” I mentally asserted.

No comment came from the spaceman. He simply floated there, observing me from behind his helmet.

“Will I be going to hell for my crimes then?” I asked, thinking of the three people who died because of me and countless others who had suffered from bioweapons and nuclear tests I’ve helped conduct in Kazakhstan.

“No, you’ll be going somewhere far more interesting,” the cosmonaut replied. “Somewhere where you perhaps make a difference. Or not. An interesting experiment, as it were. Do you agree to a continuation of your narrative?”

A window divided in half flashed in my mind with the words:

YES NO

This thing, whatever it was had to be a hallucination, an illusion created by my concussed brain. There was no such thing as god, no such thing as life after death.

Inevitably, this delusional dream would end and I would likely wake up in a hospital. My fertilizer bomb had obviously failed to detonate and the marauders must have pulled me out of the building, saved me. Maybe one of them knew me, worked with the military. How else would they have acquired a hovercraft? They must have taken it from one of the nearby bases!

Whenever and wherever I would wake up from this bothersome dream, I hoped that I would be free to make my own choices, ones not based on ridiculous, floating, blue text windows.

The text started to flash, at about one flicker per minute.

I decided to...

[ignore the nonsensical offer]