Studies of Darkness

This book is the first imprint of the New Reality. Not a declaration, but a work of a new revolutionary world. It is written with the moral and expert support of the team at Cognitive Pilot, which every day at the robotics factory in Tomsk creates this very reality. Welcome to a wonderful, marvelous world, where beside biological humans, today, Artificial Beings endowed with Artificial Intelligence are working, thinking, and even empathizing. The past has caught up with the present and merged with the future – this is what time looks like in which we all have the honor to live, work, love, fight, and create. This book also reflects that. It combines a fantastic plot of possible events in the world with documentary modern stories from the lives of Russian robotics engineers and neural programmers, and it is virtually impossible to discern where fiction transitions into truth, and where truth migrates into literary fantasy. In this fantastic world, as a result of a dreadful terrorist act, all the Presidents of the G7 countries perished. And the heroes, Russian neural engineers, had to create an Artificial President to regulate international relations in the orphaned countries... Clones of Presidents, resurrected legends of Zoroastrians, military practice of Artificial Intelligence... All this and much more sets the rhythm of modernity in the author’s story and offers humanity an answer to the question: "What’s next?" This novel is an incredible, stereotype-breaking event in today’s politically correct and hollowed-out literary world filled with moralists. "The book is an epic literary provocation. There is no other way to define the genre of this debut, which combines both a romantic self-portrait, a geopolitical cyber-thriller, satire on the international 'agenda', a philosophical treatise in dialogues, and a parodic industrial novel about the implementation of a top-secret government project." From the review by Alexei Aleshkovsky, President of the Guild of Film Screenwriters of the Union of Cinematographers of Russia