Строение перевод романа на английский

Prologue
It had always been there. For Artem, who grew up in a gray residential area, Building No. 17, on the outskirts, beyond the ring road, was as natural a part of the landscape as an abandoned boiler house chimney or a rusty garage cooperative. Tall, blackened by time and weather, with boarded-up windows, it resembled the skull of a giant beast. Children avoided it, adults tried not to look in its direction. No trees grew in its direction, no birds landed. It simply was. Silent. Impenetrable. Alien.
One summer evening, fleeing from hooligans, twelve-year-old Artem ran into its entrance, gaping like the entrance to a cave, for the first time. The air inside was thick, stuffy and smelled of dust, old iron and something else - sweetish and elusive, like the scent of a distant thunderstorm. The hooligans did not dare to enter. And Artem, standing in the semi-darkness and listening to his own heart pounding against his ribs, felt not fear, but a strange, nagging curiosity. He touched the rough, peeling wall. And it seemed to him that the wall barely trembled in response, as if it sighed.
At that moment, a quiet, secret connection was established between the boy and the Structure.

Part One: The Foundation
Chapter 1
Fifteen years passed. Artem, now a failed history graduate student who had lost his job and his purpose, stood in front of the Building again. The city had reached this outskirts. New residential complexes with bright signs had sprung up around it, but this grey monster from the past was still standing, untouched by time and progress. It was to be torn down in a month. They were planning to build a shopping and entertainment centre in its place.
For Artem, this news was a shock. The building was his secret refuge, his personal mythology, the only constant in his life. He learned that the building was not listed on any municipal balance sheet, had no official owner and no architectural plan. It was a ghost in the city's documentation.
In the closet of the alcoholic painter Uncle Lesha, who once worked in the housing office and “remembered everything,” Artem got the first clue.
— The seventeenth? — the old man wheezed, pouring himself some murky liquid. — They built it before the war. The Germans, or what? Or ours?.. It’s not clear. Some say it was a special facility, others say it just grew there. People disappeared there. Workers. Residents, if there were any. One old woman, Martha, lived on the third entrance, and she said it talked to her. The walls whispered. Everyone thought she was crazy. And then she disappeared. Go away, nephew. Don’t touch it. It’s not simple.
This only spurred Artem on. He decided to write about the Structure. Not a dissertation, but something like a documentary investigation. A last attempt to latch onto something real.

Chapter 2
Artem started with the archives. All information about the area ended in 1938. After that, it was clean. No project declarations, no construction permits. He found only one yellowed photograph: a group of people in overalls against the backdrop of an erected frame. The building already looked gloomy and disproportionate. The people's faces were tired and scared.
One night, Artem got inside. He wandered around the empty apartments with a flashlight. They didn't look like normal homes. The rooms had strange angles, the corridors suddenly ended in dead ends, the doorways led into walls. He found an apartment with a layer of strange, silvery dust on the floor. In another room, a bunch of wires stuck out of the wall, not copper, but some dark, flexible ones, like tendons.
And there was silence. Not just the absence of sound, but a dense, cottony substance that pressed on his eardrums. And in this silence he again seemed to hear a whisper. Not words, but only echoes of them, like the rustle of rolling pebbles.
His childhood friend, practical IT specialist Max, just shook his head:
— Doesn't it bother you that you're spending the night in a place that officially doesn't exist and where people are rumored to disappear? You're writing a story about a house that's soon going to be a pile of rubble. You'd better focus on your resume.
But Artem couldn't stop. The structure became his obsession, his personal Minotaur labyrinth.

Part Two: Walls
Chapter 5
Artem found an old man whose son, a civil engineer, worked on the construction of the Building in the 50s.
— My father didn’t tell me much, — the old man said, looking out the window at the rain. — He said that the drawings were constantly changing. They brought in some unusual material for the supporting structures. Not concrete, not metal... something composite, very strong and... warm. Yes, he said that it was warm to the touch, even in the cold. And there were also cavities. Voids in the walls, entire systems of passages. For communications, they said. But one day, an entire crew of fitters disappeared. They were looking for them, but... they didn’t open the walls. They said from above — don’t touch them.
Artem returned to the Building with a new goal - to find these cavities. After several days of searching, he found a barely noticeable crack in the wall in one of the apartments on the very top floor. Leaning against it, he heard not a whisper, but a clear, rhythmic sound. Knock-knock-knock. Knock-knock-knock. As if somewhere deep inside the building a giant mechanism was working. Or a heart was beating.

Chapter 6
Lika came to Stroenie. A young woman, an urban blogger, was looking for a topic for a new viral article. "A mystical ghost house on the outskirts" - perfect. She was the complete opposite of Artem - bright, confident, living in a virtual world.
Their first meeting was tense. He saw her as a superficial sensation seeker, she as a closed-off paranoid.
"You want to understand it, and I want to show it to thousands of people," she said, taking pictures of the peeling plaster with her phone. "Maybe then someone will know its story."
They argued, but were forced to work together. Lika, with her energy and connections, found people Artem had never heard of: former employees of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, who had put out a "chemical fire" here without flame or smoke; radio amateurs who had picked up strange impulses coming from the building.
One night, while broadcasting live from the basement, Lika pointed the camera into a deep technical well. For a moment, something pale, like a face, flashed in the lens, and a piercing, inhuman sound was heard, which blocked the ears. The broadcast was cut off. Viewers thought it was a prank, but Lika was pale as a sheet. She felt not the virtual fear of a horror movie, but real, chilling horror.
That night, she and Artem sat in his apartment with a bottle of wine, and for the first time, he told her everything. About his childhood, about whispers, about the feeling that the Structure is not an object, but an organism.
“Maybe it doesn’t want to be destroyed?” Lika said quietly.

Part Three: Roofing
Chapter 10
There was a week left before the demolition. A fence had been erected around the Building, and equipment had been brought in. Artem and Lika knew that there was almost no time. Their relationship had grown from professional to something more, united by a common secret.
They found the main cavity. By chance, using old drawings from the KGB archive, which Lika somehow miraculously got through a journalist friend. The drawing showed that a vertical shaft, not marked in the usual plans, ran through the entire building, from the basement to the attic. Its entrance was walled up in the basement behind the boiler room.
Using a drill, they made a hole in the wall. The same sweetish stormy air that Artem remembered from his childhood wafted out from there. There was emptiness behind the wall.

Chapter 11
The shaft went up and down in absolute darkness. Its walls were smooth, as if polished, and warm to the touch. They decided to go up. A spiral staircase of the same strange material led upward. They walked for an hour, two, losing track of time. The building from the outside was nine stories high, but the staircase seemed to go on forever.
Finally they came out onto the landing. It wasn't an attic. It was a room at the very top that no one knew about. Round, with no windows or doors. A light pulsed in the center. It came from a complex, crystalline structure, like a nerve cluster or mycelium, that grew out of the floor and went up to the ceiling, merging with the structure of the building. It flickered in time with that same tap-tap-tap sound.
The structure was not built. It grew. And this was its fruit, its generator, its brain.
Artyom walked up and placed his hand on the pulsating crystal. Images flashed through his mind: a starry sky above a lifeless planet, a meteorite falling, a seed that had lain in the permafrost for millions of years until humans disturbed it with their pits and foundations. It woke up and began to grow, using the materials and form it had learned from its creators to hide, to survive. It was alien, alone, and afraid. It communicated as it knew how - through the whispers of the walls, through visions, calling to those who could hear it. It did not understand that its physical form was causing suffering. It simply lived.
Lika filmed everything on her phone, with trembling hands.
"We can't let them tear it down," Artem whispered. "It's not a building. It's a living thing."

Epilogue
The equipment was supposed to arrive the next day. Artem and Lika stood in front of the Building in a crowd of journalists and onlookers. Lika posted all the materials online: videos, photos, transcripts of interviews, scans of archival documents. A scandal arose. Someone shouted about a fake, someone demanded to stop the demolition and conduct an examination, ufologists talked about the first contact, ecologists - about a unique form of life.
The bulldozers froze. People in formal suits arrived and set up headquarters in the nearest cafe. Negotiations, discussions, hearings began.
Artem and Lika watched the setting sun play on the facade of the old Building. They didn't know what would happen next. Would it become a museum? A scientific facility? Would it be classified and surrounded by barbed wire?
But they knew the main thing: they heard him. They found not a ghost or a monster, but something lonely and different. They changed his story and their own.
The building was silent. But now its silence felt not like a threat, but rather like an expectation. It was no longer just a building. It had begun a dialogue.

Book Two: PRESENCE
Part One: Resonance
Chapter 1
The viral explosion was nuclear. Lika’s video got millions of views in a matter of hours. “A living house on the outskirts of the city” was too perfect for the era of clickbait and searching for miracles in the digital desert. By morning, the square in front of Building No. 17, deserted and abandoned just yesterday, resembled a media battlefield.
Television crews with satellite dishes, bloggers with hymostats and ring lights, curious citizens and representatives of all sorts of marginal subcultures — from truth-diggers to neo-pagans praying to the “spirit of concrete and steel” — came here. The air hummed with dozens of simultaneous streams, arguments and exclamations of surprise.
The authorities tried to take control of the situation. The square was cordoned off, and access to the building itself was blocked by reinforced Rosgvardia units. Stern men in civilian clothes, hired by an unknown person, cut off overly persistent reporters.
Artem and Lika found themselves in the center of this hurricane. For Artem, accustomed to the silence of the archives and lonely walks along dusty floors, this was sheer hell. He was crushed by this crowd, these shouts, these camera flashes. He felt like a traitor - he had exposed the most intimate, his personal secret, to public view.
Lika was soaring. This was her finest hour. She gave interviews, confidently parried skeptical questions, her channel shot up to the top. But in her eyes, when she looked at Artem, one could read not only euphoria, but also anxiety. They had hit the jackpot, but now they didn’t know what to do with it.

Chapter 2
The first “official” persons who showed not just curiosity but professional interest in them were not city hall officials, but representatives of the “Institute of Noospheric Research” – a private, poorly publicized organization sponsored by one of the largest Russian IT magnates.
Their head, Doctor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Victoria Semenovna Orlova, a woman with a piercing gaze and calm, measured movements, found them first.
“You have made more than just a discovery, you have uncovered a layer of reality that science had only guessed at,” she said, treating them to expensive coffee in a tent her team had pitched on the edge of the square. “We call such phenomena ‘places of power’ or ‘anomalous geoglyphs.’ Not in an esoteric sense, but in a very practical one. These are points where matter and information interact differently. Your Structure is not an organism in the biological sense. It is, if you like, a quantum computer, randomly assembled from scrap materials – concrete, reinforcement, human fears and hopes. It does not breathe, it processes. And the whisper you heard is perhaps a side noise of its processes.
Her words sounded convincing and modern, without mysticism. She offered them cooperation, resources, protection from attacks by skeptics and authorities. Artem sensed a catch. Too smooth.
That same day, another man approached them - gray-haired, hunched over, with eyes frozen with age-old fatigue. He introduced himself simply: "Ivan from the Commission on Anomalies." His "commission" consisted of him alone and a couple of equally elderly enthusiasts with battered briefcases.
“Don’t believe them,” he whispered, nodding toward Orlova’s tent. “They want to lock it up, scan it, take it apart, and reproduce it. They see it as a tool. A new kind of weapon or communication. They don’t understand that it’s alive. Not in their way, not ‘quantum’, but truly. It feels. And it’s afraid. You woke it up, and now you’re going to bring those who come with a scalpel and a soldering iron to it.”
These two camps – Orlova’s technologically advanced, well-funded institute and Ivan’s marginal but sincere “commission” – have marked a new front in the battle for the Structure. A battle not to destroy it or save it, but to understand it and, as a consequence, to possess it.

Part Two: Symbiosis
Chapter 5
The demolition was officially cancelled by a court decision, which took into account the “public outcry and the need to conduct a comprehensive examination of the cultural and, perhaps, scientific heritage site.” The wording was vague, which gave room for maneuver to all parties.
The first scientific group allowed inside was mixed: physicists from Orlova and enthusiastic biologists who were dragged in by Ivan. Artem and Lika were guides.
As they entered the shaft and ascended into the circular room, everyone froze. The pulsating crystal structure in the center glowed a steady, deep blue. The air vibrated with a barely audible low-frequency hum.
"It looks like a mass of carbon nanotubes, but the structure is... fractal," the physicist muttered, taking readings from a portable spectrometer. "Inexplicably high energy efficiency. No heat generation. It contradicts the second law of thermodynamics."
"Look!" one of the biologists exclaimed. She pointed to the wall, where a wilted fern she had brought in a pot began to spread its leaves, fill with juice and turn green literally before our eyes. "This is accelerated regeneration! Accelerated life!"
At the same moment, Orlova's devices recorded a powerful surge of some kind of field, similar to a magnetic one, but with different parameters. All electronic devices glitched for a moment.
And Artem, standing next to the "nerve node", felt it again - not images, but pure emotion. Curiosity. Mixed with wariness. The structure studied them as they studied it.

Chapter 6
A week passed. A temporary science town had sprung up around the Building. Orlova’s team worked around the clock, trying to scan, map, and catalog the anomalies. Their main conclusion was shocking: the building’s internal geometry was constantly, albeit very slightly, changing. The walls were breathing, the corridors were lengthening or shortening by centimeters. The building was not a static object, but a dynamic system.
Ivan and his team conducted their "experiments": they brought plants, sick animals. The effect was astounding: the plants blossomed, the animals recovered at an incredible speed. They claimed that the Structure was a healing place, an ark of life.
But there were side effects. A guard who had been on duty at the entrance for too long began complaining of migraines and having obsessive dreams in which he wandered through endless, unfamiliar corridors. One of Orlova's technicians had a seizure - he felt as if the walls were closing in to crush him.
The structure was neither good nor evil. It was active. It reacted. It interacted, and the consequences of that interaction were unpredictable.
Artem became a kind of mediator. He felt the "mood" of the building better than others. He could warn that today "it is not worth disturbing" this or that area. His intuition saved from unpleasant incidents more than once.
Lika, filming all this, began to change. Her videos became less sensational and more profound. She no longer simply recorded facts, but tried to comprehend philosophical and ethical questions: do we have the right to intrude into something we do not understand? Is this something the property of the state, science, or is it its own master?
Their relationship with Artem had been tested by fame and was now being tested by real danger. They fought over Orlova's methods, Ivan's naivety, their own fear. But they were bound by a common secret that was much bigger than both of them.

Part Three: Penetration
Chapter 10
Orlova's team made a breakthrough. They managed to "catch" and partially decode the signal coming from the core. It was not a language. It was a complex, multi-layered data structure, similar to the genetic code, but based not on chemistry, but on physics.
“It doesn’t communicate,” Victoria Semenovna announced triumphantly at the planning meeting. “It projects. It creates a field around itself that affects matter and consciousness. Plants grow, people dream, devices go crazy — all of these are side effects of this projection. It’s not consciousness. It’s a machine. Albeit an incredibly complex one.
She proposed a bold plan: try to resonate with the core and send a response, a simplified signal. The simplest binary code: question-answer.
Ivan was horrified: "You're poking a sleeping lion with a stick! You don't know what you'll wake up!"
Artem felt the same. As the technicians began to adjust their equipment, he felt the familiar whispers in the walls change to a low, uneasy hum. The building tensed.
But no one listened to him. Science demanded an experiment.

Chapter 11
The signal was sent. A simple impulse carrying a mathematical sequence - the Fibonacci series.
There was silence. The instruments froze, awaiting a response.
He came in three minutes. But not through the devices.
First, the lights went out in the entire science town. Then, the same image flashed in the minds of everyone present - scientists, guards, Artem, Lika.
Endless emptiness. Cold. Loneliness that stretched for millions of years. And then warmth. Voices. Touches. The noise of construction became music. Life that came and surrounded. Fear of it and greedy curiosity. The desire to understand. The desire to connect.
It was not a thought. It was pure experience. The History of the Structure. Its feelings.
And then the second "package" arrived. And it was terrifying.
Pain. A sharp, cutting blow. Breaking. Rage. A blasted rock. A hole in the ground. A scream that no one heard.
It was a memory. A memory of drilling a foundation pit and damaging something that lay deep underground—the source, the core, the seed. And the pain of that trauma was fresh, as if it had happened yesterday.
The building didn't just show them its history. It showed them its unhealed wound.
And then they all heard a sound. Not in their heads, but in reality. A dull, powerful groan coming from underground. The floor beneath their feet shook. Dust began to fall from the ceiling of the round room.
The experiment to establish contact had been a success. But now it was clear to everyone who they had made contact with. Not a machine. Not a spirit. But a being who was wounded, alone, and possessed of a power they did not understand.
And this creature just screamed in pain.
Of course, we continue. History is entering a new, third level of awareness.

Book Three: THE CREVICE
Part One: After the Scream
Chapter 1
The silence that followed the "scream" was deafening. It weighed tons. The generators that had shut down a moment earlier began to screech to life again, flooding the camp with an unnaturally bright, unsettling light. The men stood rooted to the spot, trying to comprehend not the sound, but the pain itself that pierced them like an icy needle.
Artem was the first to come to his senses. He didn't just hear the scream - he recognized it. It was the same pain that had lived inside him all these years: the pain of his father who left the family, the pain of failure, the pain of loneliness. The building didn't just transmit a feeling - it resonated with the pain of everyone within its reach.
"Turn everything off!" he shouted, breaking out of his stupor. "Turn off your machines! Now!"
Orlova's technicians looked at him in confusion, then at their boss. Victoria Semenovna was pale, but collected. In her eyes, in addition to shock, there was the excitement of a discoverer. She had just received irrefutable proof - direct psychophysical influence.
"Continue recording! All data!" she commanded, drowning out Artem.
But it was too late. The guard at the entrance to the mine, the one who had complained about the nightmares, fell to his knees, sobbing loudly. He imagined that the shadows of his comrades who had died in the accident long ago were crawling out of the walls.
The structure no longer responded. It was bleeding. And its blood was that same pain that pierced the mind.
Lika lowered the camera, shaking. Her content, her hype, her pleasure – all of it suddenly became vile and insignificant. She was filming suffering. And for the first time in a long time, she felt ashamed.

Chapter 2
The next day, the camp was evacuated. The authorities finally realized that they were not dealing with a media hoax, but with something truly dangerous and uncontrollable. A quarantine regime was introduced. The zone within a radius of five hundred meters was cordoned off by troops. All research was frozen under the pretext of a "threat of psychological infection." Orlova and her team were removed, but they, sitting in their tent on the outskirts of the zone, refused to leave, analyzing the data they had received.
Artem and Lika were isolated in their apartment. They were interrogated by men in formal suits without identifying marks. The questions were strange: "What images did you see?", "Did you feel the urge to do anything?", "Was there anything related to state security among the visions?"
It became clear that interest in the Structure had changed from scientific to paranoid and protective. It was no longer considered an artifact or an anomaly. It was now considered a threat.
Ivan, an old man from the Commission, found a way to pass them a note through a familiar salesman at a nearby store. Short and sweet: “It’s wounded. You’ve disturbed it. Now it will defend itself. Or seek help. Look for the source of the pain. Down there.”
Artem understood. All this time they had been looking up, into the shaft, at the "brain". But the root was not there. The root was in the foundation. In that very wound inflicted sixty years ago.

Part Two: Into the Deep
Chapter 5
It was almost impossible to get into the cordoned area. But "almost" is a favorite word for those who are possessed. They used old, half-abandoned sewer passages that Artem had read about in the archives. Lika left all the cameras. This was not for filming.
The descent into the basement was like diving into a sick gut. A new sound was added to the familiar hum - intermittent, hoarse, like the wheezing of a wounded animal. The air became thicker and smelled even more heavily of ozone and something metallic.
They went down to the very depths, to the technical floor, which was not on the plans. Here, in the very heart of the foundation, they found it.
It wasn't like the "nerve knot" above. It was a festering wound. A deep crack gaped in the concrete wall, oozing a strange, dark, viscous substance, faintly shimmering from within. Around it, the material of the wall wasn't just damaged - it was changed, crystallized and melted, as if it had been struck by an alien life form. The wound was radiating a wave of the same unbearable pain they had felt earlier, only here it was a thousand times stronger. It was physically difficult to stand next to it.
"A drilling rig," Artem whispered, peering at the damage. "When they were drilling a well for utilities... they hit this. And not just hit it. They broke something."

Chapter 6
While they were examining the wound, footsteps were heard from behind. It was Orlova with her two trusty technicians. In their hands they were not holding a device, but something resembling a large syringe and a container for samples.
"I knew you would come here first," Victoria Semyonovna said without a hint of surprise. Her eyes greedily fixed on the pulsating wound. "The primary source. The morphogenetic field is distorted here to the limit. This substance... it is a pure carrier of information. The key to everything.
"Are you crazy?" Lika rushed towards her. "Do you see that it is suffering? Do you want to poke the wound with a needle?"
"Suffering is a subjective category, my dear," Orlova retorted coldly. "It's a process. A disrupted process. We'll take a sample, study it, and perhaps find a way to... stabilize it."
Artem stood between them and the technicians.
- She's right. You're not a healer. You're a robber. You don't see a sick creature, but a unique specimen. Step aside.
The air smelled not just of ozone, but of thunder. The structure felt threatened at its very core. The light from the crack flickered more chaotically. The hoarse sound grew louder, turning into a low, menacing roar. Dust began to fall from the ceiling in earnest.
At that moment, part of the ceiling collapsed with a roar, cutting off Orlova's technicians. Ivan appeared from behind the rubble with a couple of his old comrades. They were armed not with weapons, but with... bags of clay, buckets of water and some herbs.
"An idiotic way to treat a wound, isn't it?" he shouted at Orlova. "But that's all our ancestors had. And it works better than your steel claws!"
An absurd confrontation began: scientists with a syringe versus old men with clay and a fierce belief that they were dealing with a living soul.

Part Three: Healing
Chapter 10
Artem pushed both of them aside. He went to the wound itself, ignoring Orlova's protests and Ivan's approving look. He touched the wall next to the oozing crack with his hand. It was scalding hot and pulsated in time with his heavy, hoarse breathing.
He closed his eyes. He did not try to think. He tried to feel. He imagined not images, but the sensation itself, what he had felt when he first came here as a child. Not fear, but curiosity. Not horror, but awe. He imagined the Building growing, absorbing the sound of voices, the footsteps of its inhabitants, the arguments and laughter. How it became part of the place, and the place became part of him. He was not sending code, not data. He was sending gratitude. And regret.
He didn't know if it would work. It was an act of pure, irrational faith.
Lika, seeing this, cast aside her doubts. She came over and placed her hand on top of his. Then Ivan joined them, muttering his ancient incantations, but the essence of which was the same - peace and healing. Even Orlova's technicians, stunned, lowered their instruments.
A minute passed. Another. The roar died down. The trembling subsided. The flickering of the wound became more even, more rhythmic.
And then the impossible happened. The dark, oozing substance seemed to be sucked back into the crack. The crack itself began to slowly, before our eyes, close. The crystallized, dead matter around it began to darken, become covered with ordinary construction dust, and return to its original state. The pain subsided, replaced by a feeling of deep, heavy relief, as if after a long and painful illness.
They did not heal the wound. They simply let the Structure know that it was heard, that its pain was recognized. And that was enough for it to mobilize all its incredible resources to heal itself.

Chapter 11
When they came to the surface, the cordon was in a panic. The devices recorded a powerful surge of energy, which died down just as abruptly. Everyone expected an explosion, a collapse. But nothing happened. Only silence. Not oppressive, but calm, peaceful.
Orlova silently gathered her team. She looked at Artem not with hostility, but with a completely new, rethought interest. She realized that the key to the phenomenon was not technology, but something else - empathy, resonance. And this called into question her entire scientific paradigm.
Ivan simply nodded to Artem and left, disappearing into the twilight. His job was done.
Artem and Lika stood side by side, looking at the dark silhouette of the Building against the crimson sunset sky. It no longer pulsed with an anxious light. It simply stood. Silent. But now its silence was different - not ominous or expectant, but... satisfied. Reconciled.
They did not solve all the problems. The authorities will not lift the quarantine. The scientists will not give up on the study. But the foundation of interaction has been changed. The structure has ceased to be an object. It has become an Interlocutor. Wounded, powerful, infinitely complex, but now — heard.
They didn't know what would happen next. Like a dialogue with the whole world, embedded in concrete. But they knew that this dialogue had begun. And the first word in it was not "why" or "how", but "forgive".
Excellent. The story is reaching a new, global level. Let's continue.


Book Four: RESONANCE
Part One: Echo
Chapter 1
The silence after the healing lasted for three days. Three days when Building #17 simply stood there, immersed in a deep, restorative calm. The sensors left by Orlova's team on the perimeter showed background values. The anomalies subsided. The plants in the tents stopped growing wildly, the water in the glasses did not sparkle, the guards' nightmares ceased.
This was a signal for the authorities. The threat seemed to have passed. The facility had stabilized. Quarantine measures were gradually relaxed, changing the state of emergency to a “special observation” regime. The area in front of the house was patrolled again, but without bulletproof vests and machine guns.
Artem and Lika tried to return to normal life. But it was no longer normal. They were famous, journalists were hunting them, fanatics of all stripes were pursuing them. But most importantly, they themselves had changed. Artem, always withdrawn, now carried within himself a quiet, deep confidence. Lika, always looking outward, learned to look inward. Their connection with the Structure became an invisible but strong umbilical cord. They felt it like their own heart - they did not hear thoughts, but sensed its state. Peace.
But the peace was deceptive.
The first echo came from overseas. In a 1930s Chicago skyscraper that was being prepared for demolition, workers stumbled upon a sealed shaft. It smelled of ozone and emitted a barely audible hum. The builders complained of migraines and visions. One of them watched Lika's report and drew parallels. The news became a sensation.
Then there was the report from an abandoned mine in Wales. Miners who had descended to the depths reported a "singing stone", strange crystal formations in the walls and a feeling that "the mountain was looking at them".
The third echo thundered in Siberia, at the site of the Tunguska meteorite fall. Scientists conducting constant observations there recorded a powerful surge of unknown energy, emanating not from underground, but as if from the void itself.
Building #17 was not “healed” in the usual sense. Having thrown off the burden of an unhealed wound, it entered into resonance. Like a tuning fork, it began to vibrate at a certain frequency, and this frequency was heard by other, hitherto sleeping, “tuning forks” all over the planet.

Chapter 2
The world froze in anticipation. The scientific community feverishly searched for explanations. Theories poured out like a horn of plenty: global tectonic activity, quantum entanglement of inorganic matter, external influences.
Victoria Orlova, pushed to the sidelines by the military, became an unexpected star. Her theory of "anomalous geoglyphs" and "noospheric nodes" turned out to be prophetic. She was invited to closed meetings at the UN, the Pentagon, the Kremlin. She tried to convey the idea that this was not a threat, but a new layer of reality, but she was only half-listened to. The generals saw in every "awakened" object a potential target for bombing or, conversely, a weapon of mass destruction.
Completely different people came to Artem and Lika. Not military men or scientists, but… ecologists, philosophers, leaders of indigenous peoples, even representatives of some religious denominations. They did not ask, “How does it work?” They asked, “What does it say?” and “What should we do?” They saw what had happened not as a man-made disaster or a scientific discovery, but as a spiritual crisis of humanity, its first contact with the planet on a different, previously unheard of level.
Artem, to his surprise, became the voice of this movement. His quiet, unpretentious account of the pain of the Structure and its healing through empathy became a manifesto. He did not call for action. He simply described his experience. And there was power in that.
Lika became his mouthpiece, using her media skills to convey this message to the world, filtering out the noise and aggression.
They became a bridge. A bridge between the rational world that yearns to control and the irrational world that can only be felt and respected.

Part Two: The Network
Chapter 5
The resonance grew. "Awakenings" happened all over the world. An ancient menhir in Brittany began to emit a faint glow at night. In the caves of Altamira, new, glowing patterns, similar to microcircuit diagrams, began to appear on the walls, next to the drawings of ancient people. An abandoned factory in Detroit, which had not shown signs of life for decades, suddenly began... to produce. Not products, but complex, beautiful and absolutely useless from a practical point of view metal sculptures that were found in the workshops in the morning.
It became clear that these were not random anomalies. This was a network. A network whose nodes had just become active.
Building #17 was the key node. Not the most important, but the first one, the one that "saw the light" and woke up the others.
Artem could feel it. Sitting in his apartment, he closed his eyes and felt faint echoes: the cold of a granite menhir, the dull rumble of Siberian permafrost, the rhythmic beat of the "heart" of a Detroit plant. This was not information, but pure geography of feelings. The planet spoke to him in the language of sensations.
Orlova's team, having finally gained access to the Structure, tried to map it. Their sensors detected energy flows that linked the awakening points into a complex, constantly changing web. It was a map, not of space, but of states.
The military all over the world went into a state of heightened readiness. It was unclear who and what to fight against. Is it possible to bomb a menhir? To drop a bomb on the Tunguska Depression?
Humanity encountered something that did not fit into any of its paradigms: neither scientific, nor religious, nor military. This caused panic, covered up for now by official statements about “studying unique natural phenomena.”

Chapter 6
It was then that Artem received an offer he couldn't refuse. Through Lika, representatives of that very "network" of people who listened to him got in touch. They organized an international conference. But not an official one, with politicians and generals, but an informal one. It was called the "Listening Summit."
They chose a symbolic location: an island in the Pacific Ocean, considered sacred by the natives, where an ancient stone circle also “awoke”.
Artem and Lika flew there. There were no cameras. There were shamans from the Amazon, Buddhist monks, theoretical physicists fired from their posts for "unscientific ideas", artists, poets and just people who, like Artem, felt more than they could explain.
They spoke different languages, but about the same thing. About the fact that the planet is not a resource, not a habitat, but a complex, living organism, part of which has just woken up from sleep. And that humanity, being a part of it, should not fight this, but learn to listen.
Artem, standing by the ancient stones, felt how his own Structure responded to their quiet, centuries-old song. He understood that his personal history, the history of the boy and the house, turned out to be a quantum of the global shift.
He was no longer a failed graduate student. He was the "Listener of the City." The first to hear and to tell.

Part Three: Note
Chapter 10
The Listeners' Summit did not change the world overnight. But it did create an alternative. An alternative to fear and aggression. News from the island, disseminated through independent channels, became a counterweight to the official rhetoric of control and threat.
The authorities were furious. They were losing their monopoly on interpreting what was happening. Artem and Lika went from being heroes to inconvenient figures. Pressure began to be put on them. They were accused of creating panic, of charlatanism, of having ties to “destructive cults.”
At this point, Victoria Orlova cast her vote. Using her new status, she made a loud statement: “We are on the threshold of the greatest discovery in human history – the realization that reason is not the exclusive prerogative of organic life. Fighting this is fighting a tidal wave. The only reasonable way is to study and adapt. And the first step should not be isolation, but establishing a dialogue. And for this we have experts – those who have already started this dialogue.”
Her words became a bargaining chip in big politics. Artem and Lika were offered a deal. An unofficial one. They would receive access to the Structure and the official status of "interaction consultants" in exchange for cooperation and providing all data to the state.
It was a deal with the devil. But it offered a chance. A chance not to leave the whole thing to the military.

Chapter 11
They stood in a circular room at the top of the Building. There was equipment installed here now, not for sending signals, but for monitoring. Offerings from various peoples lay next to the pulsating core: a hawk feather brought by a shaman, a smooth stone from the ocean coast, a Buddhist mandala.
Artem placed his hand on the crystalline structure. He did not ask, did not ask. He simply shared. He shared images of the Summit, a sense of unity, people's fears, their hopes. He was a guide.
The building responded.
It was not a shout or a whisper. It was a note. A pure, clear, vibrant note that was heard not only by them in the room, but by all the "listeners" around the world. It sounded simultaneously in Chicago, in Wales, in Siberia, on an island in the Pacific Ocean.
There were no words in this note. There was an invitation.
An invitation to dialogue. Not to data exchange, but to co-creation. To create something new together. Millennia humanity had been remaking the planet for itself. Now the planet, through its "nodes", was offering to do something together.
What exactly? No one knew. It was the next, scary, dizzying step.
Artem hugged Lika. They looked at the shimmering core, which was no longer just the heart of one strange house, but part of the voice of the entire Earth.
Their personal story ended. A planetary one began.