Prefect
The dream lasted a long time. Actually, it was not even a dream, but some other world, where everything around existed in a different way than one was used to seeing it. A world in which Raphael was alive, and his wife and their child were beside him. Already grown up and looking with such lively and full of something new eyes. Something new that his grandfather could give him. A grandfather who is still a prefect.
So many times these thoughts have gone round and round in circles, and they only stopped at the word "prefect". Yes. It is. And no one else can be. No one else is capable of even thinking about being in this place. It was created by him, for him, and for no one else. All others are just parts, cogs in the mechanism in which he is the brain. No organism can live without a brain, and the business of the whole organism is, first of all, the preservation of the brain. If the brain dies, the whole organism will die.
Somewhere outside, Gora felt a light. A slightly different one, not the one that had been there before for this long time before. A simpler light, not capable of opening his eyes, but only to keep his eyes from getting in the way of scrutiny… His eyes began to open. And along with his eyes came his essence. The essence that wouldn't let him lose.
Around him, he immediately recognized the bedroom walls of one of his offices. It was impossible not to recognize those walls – the Deese sector. His cradle. Where he had risen from the ashes to give people freedom and safety. Yes, that was exactly what he'd been thinking when he'd started all this. No one should die by accident. Or at the hands of the plagues. No one.
Then he made the rules. And no one got killed at all. At no one's hands. He remembered it very well… The mortality that had gone before had ceased to exist as a given. People became different very quickly, no longer seeing death. Sometimes they even started fighting each other.
The very people who just yesterday could have been killed for nothing, suddenly suddenly forgot to value their own lives and the lives of those around them. Simply because they stopped seeing death. Gora, in making these new rules, forgot something very important. Something he had
realized while he was in the other world, raising the dead.
He turned his head and saw two men from his guard. One of them, seeing the waking prefect, immediately ran out of the room, and then slowly approached him. It was Kolya Lesin, who had once been in his own 381st soma of workers. Gora's personal guards were selected exclusively from there.
– Mr. Prefect… – he said timidly. His eyes showed that he trembled at the mere sight of the living leader of an entire faction.
– Who did your partner run to report to? – The Mountain asked immediately.
– To the doctor. – A little lost, Kolya answered. – To Dr. Kupavsky.
At least as long as things are set up properly. Once upon a time, Hora had ordered their best doctor to be kept as a practitioner for the entire sector, not a personal one for himself. His qualifications were too high for him to treat just one person, rather than several thousand. But times were obviously changing, and he would definitely need his own personal doctor. One who, for obvious reasons, would not be allowed to have contact with other patients.
– Give me your gun.
Kolya looked back at him at first – the TT-33 holstered in his holster was an addition to the main weapon of the security units – the AK-74SU. Even when the units were being formed, there was a choice between what to give them as a supplement. That is, the weapon that, in fact, they would not use, but rather for status. The choice was Makarov (PM), Tokarev (TT) or Stechkin (APS) pistols. And, although by all accounts the APS was indisputably better than all the others, then personally Gora chose the TT – this gun was legendary, of the times of the Great War, and of the power he considered exemplary for himself. Especially now. When he had survived another assassination attempt.
Retrieving the gun, Gora pulled out the clip, checked the cartridges, then inserted it back in, carefully twisted the bolt, and placed it under his pillow. This was a time when one should especially think about the fact that a gun for his position was far from being a weapon for his position.
Then he pulled his legs out from under the blanket and placed them on the floor. There wasn't much strength in them, but there was some. And he didn't need more than that. Next to it was a drop cloth with a needle stuck in it, which he carefully pulled out and stuck into the mattress.
Getting up, Hora went to the closet that contained his clothes, opened it, selected his tunic with almost no insignia, except for the Self-Government chefron, consisting of a large fang in the middle and crossed working picks. To the tunic the same dark brown pants and black boots.
By the time he had time to put on his boots the second guard and Dr. Kupavsky had returned. Both of them looked dumbfounded, though the doctor tried not to show it:
