– weapons of radically new types emerged in all branches of the military;

– the population was annihilated by a new virus strain;

– The Planet’s environment reached a critical state;

– the Planet’s living beings were saved from complete extinction by means of cloning;

– a processor for human consciousness recording was created;

– a cyber body was developed as an alternative to a biological one;

– the perpetual energy source was generated from the Planet’s field and the surrounding Space;

– the super conductivity principle began to be used in flights;

– the Antigravity Principle was discovered.

“All right, Abel, that’s enough for the analysis. Now put together a system and principles common to all these developments. Then search for something that unifies the factors of the Planet’s live environment, social medium and scientific achievements. Draw a system-based Principle out of all these and then transfer the obtained system-based Principle over to THAT period of my life. What do you get? Put the semantic and graphic aspects up on a projection. I see there is an imagery aspect as well. I wonder what this image is?”

“It’s a Spiral, Alex, shrinking into a point.”

(a conversation fragment)

Chapter 1

“She lived under the Sun, in a place abounding with bright stars.”

V. Vysotsky

A piercing howl of the falling jet fighter broke the silence of the desert; the aircraft crashed, raising a plume of dust and smoke. Its forebode nuzzled into the sand, with engines still turning by inertia before falling silent forever. In the sky above the crashed aircraft, a parachute canopy was seen. A pilot’s figure was hanging somewhat awkwardly on the cords without motion.

On approaching the land surface, the canopy swayed in the hot air and speeded up its descent. Hardly had the pilot’s body touched the ground, when it dragged him off across a sandy dune slope, hastened by the wind, towards remains of the abandoned town walls. The pilot had crawled along the ground like a floppy doll for some time before the canopy fastened onto a fixture sticking out of the sand and fell off sharply. The world seemed to have come to a halt again. A minute had passed before the pilot moved slowly, clumsily sat down, unfastened a pressure helmet and threw it aside. A shock of blond hair swept over the shoulders. Then her fingers began to glide on the clasps, releasing her from the straps. She examined herself and groaned in pain. The torn suit began to slowly darken in the area of her stomach.

The instruction prohibited to stay long at the place of crash.

Having unfastened an emergency set, she rose and slowly went off, pressing her palm against the wound.

A long while ago, it used to be a small lovely town with fountains and squares sunk in greenery and surrounded with thick woods. Now only dry tree trunks, half-covered with sand, and remains of structures reminded of the past.

Following the global warming, woods gave way to deserts with their stinging winds and dust storms. Life had long forsaken this place… Pieces of stone walls and some iron structures poked out of sand dunes.

Although the midday heat slackened a bit, the dust-filled air burnt the lungs. With her feet raking up the sand, she toiled along what used to be called a street. She had to get as far as possible from the smoking aircraft before she could fix up the wound. She gave a farewell look at the wreckage of her combat aircraft she had already become one with.

Ragged rifts were seen all over the aircraft body. Over there, in the warped metal pile, Eol, her Artificial Intelligence friend and navigator was left. His body was not fit for relocation, and so she was unable to save him. The navigator was obviously damaged or shattered as he failed to response to her calls.

There is a first time for everything. She had never believed the worst before, but now it happened to her. She was knocked down. She was wounded. And still she could not escape the feeling that the whole thing was unreal.

Her arms still remembered the hand wheel jarring before catapulting.

She was playing back in her head the fight details: the aircraft shaking under shell attacks, emergency mode lights flashing on the control panel, a smell of burning wiring.

Her worn outdated multi-purpose fighter was finished off by a missile from one of the enemy military groups deployed in the quarantine zone of the Wastelands. The flight had already accomplished the combat mission on ground targets and was proceeding towards the turning point, when suddenly the radar displayed missiles on pursuit course. Then the fighter shook up a few times, and everything changed. She even managed to divert the out-of-control fighter and retrace its course. The once obedient hand wheel was now trembling and raging in her arms, the engines capacity dropped sharply. At a critical height close to the ground surface, she had to catapult from her doomed "brother in arms".

Now her task was to reach an old radio tower located in the east. She knew that a reconnaissance unit was still operating in that area and hence a life-support shelter was supposed to be there, but she did not know for sure where it was. Then the “Red Wolves” squadron operator

would track her down and send help to the navigator Eol. That’s how things were meant to be according to the instruction, but in reality this is usually not the case.