Ash and Steel or In Search of Happiness

Chapter 1. Seeds

**Philadelphia, library at the abandoned Westinghouse plant. February 2027.**

The dust smelled different now. Not the noble kind that settles on the spines of old folios, but sharp, metallic—laced with soot, rust, and damp concrete. **Alex** ran a finger along a shelf, leaving a stark black line, as if underlining a forgotten sentence.

*“The dust of civilization,”* he thought, with a bitterness too deep for irony. He couldn’t recall where he’d read that phrase. It must have been something **Sergei** said.

Evening rounds. The library of the former Westinghouse Research Center was his fortress, his ark, his cell. Three floors of knowledge no one needed anymore. Volumes on quantum mechanics sat beside Dostoevsky’s collected works. Sergei used to say that was only natural: *“Both are searching for God—just in different languages.”*

**Alex** walked between the shelves, checking the shutters. Outside, in the port district, gunshots sometimes echoed—short, muffled, like the cough of a dying man. The city hadn’t died yet, but it had fallen into lethargy. The Northeastern League’s authority was ghostly: its patrols barely reached the outskirts, and the streets lived under a fragile neutrality—everyone with everyone, as long as no one touched another’s water supply or generator.

He approached his workbench—a former lab table with a thick black plastic top, scarred with scratches and mysterious stains. On it, next to a hand-crank flashlight and an old “Griffin-7” radio, lay a stack of papers. On top: his notebook with today’s notes.

*Zipf’s Law calculations.* A habit of imposing order on chaos, left over from the days when the world still obeyed logic.

> *“League population: 78 million. According to Zipf, total population should be ~178 million. But we’re at 230. Imbalance. System is unstable. Collapse is inevitable.”*

He set the notebook aside. The numbers were only symptoms. The disease ran deeper—in how people had stopped seeing one another behind their screens, how “efficiency” had become the new morality, and the “unpromising” had become burdens.

Beneath the notebook lay what he’d been waiting for all evening: two cardboard-bound notebooks. Orange—his journal. Blue—Sergei’s.

He opened the blue one. His brother’s handwriting—bold, nervous, as if racing to catch a thought before it vanished.

> **March 20, 2024**

> Another dead end with **A**. He said: *“Your conscience is just an undocumented function—a bug in the system.”*

> I replied: *“Without that ‘bug,’ your AI is merely a very fast idiot, optimizing the world into a desert.”*

> We don’t hear each other. He’s fleeing the chaos of the past into the kingdom of algorithms. I’m trying to build a bridge between Logos and code.

**Alex** leaned back, eyes closed. That conversation had been a year before Sergei’s death. They’d sat in a Boston café, drinking tea from ceramic mugs—a rarity even then. **Alex**, irritated, had argued that ethics must be hard-coded into systems, like Asimov’s Three Laws. *“It’s elegant.”* Sergei had smiled: *“And who writes the laws for the lawmakers, **Alex**?”*

He’d never found an answer. Now the question echoed louder than the gunfire in the port.

An engine noise outside made him flinch. It sputtered and died. **Alex** went to the window, shielded by bars and polycarbonate. The street was empty. Only the wind chased a scrap of newspaper—its edge charred—down the asphalt. The headline was barely legible:

*“‘Clean Slate’ Hackers Breach Federal Reserve Reserves. Digital Assets Zeroed. Panic in New York.”*

He returned to the desk. A folded sheet slipped from the notebook. Poems. In Sergei’s hand. At the top: *“Through the Looking-Glass.”*

**Alex** began to read, and the words pierced him like needles:

> **Through the Looking-Glass**

> The world’s gone crooked, strange and cruel,

> Each soul is nearly blind,

> And sees but mirror-ghosts of passions

> Nurtured deep within the mind.

>

> Each one snatches what they can—

> Friends and truth? To dust, to sand.

> From plush complacency, eyes glaze

> On screens that claim their sacred praise.

>

> Morality was cast aside;

> In tragic shows we’re trapped inside,

> Where every soul will trade its name

> For likes upon the social frame.

>

> We drift through fog, half-mad, unwell,

> Spouting nonsense, spreading blight—

> All just to shout with all their might:

> “I alone am right!”

>

> This world is rolling off its track—

> Our hearts have always known it true.

> But will and reason, Godless, still,

> Lie trapped in honey’s cloying hold.

He couldn’t read further. This wasn’t just a diagnosis—it was a prophecy, written three years before the League’s last server spat out a 500 error and went dark forever.

Sergei had seen it all. He’d seen how the “sacred screen” would replace reality, how “likes” would become currency, and people—algorithms in human skin. And he knew: without God, reason doesn’t save—it only makes the fall more elegant.

**Alex** placed the sheet back down. His chest felt hollow and cold, like an emptied data vault. He reached for his orange notebook to record this moment—this silence after reading. But his hand wouldn’t rise. Instead, he pulled from the drawer a small, time-blackened cross on a thin chain.

His grandmother had given it to Sergei the day they left. Leningrad, 1991. A cold apartment, the smell of suitcases and apple pie. *“Don’t forget. You are ours,”* she’d whispered, squeezing her grandson’s palm. Sergei, lips cracked with fever in his final hospital days, had passed it to him. *“For you,”* he’d rasped. *“You’re the keeper now.”*

**Alex** clenched the cross in his fist. The metal bit into his palm—a reminder that pain, too, is memory.

He wasn’t deeply religious. His faith was quiet, personal, forged in the nights after learning of his brother’s death. He didn’t go to church—his church was this library, his prayer was reading, his communion—water from a rusty tap and a handful of rice for dinner. But in this gesture, in this cold touch of metal against skin, there was connection: to his grandmother, to Sergei, to that real life they’d lost when they traded it for an American dream that turned out to be a mirage of ash and steel.

He looked at the shelves. Books. Knowledge. Technology. All meant to save the world. And salvation never came. Scientists, engineers, technocrats—they’d become new Pharisees. Not evil. Blind. They’d optimized human life down to a cutoff point, crucifying Christ in the person of the “unpromising” for the idols of efficiency.

In his work vest pocket lay a packet of seeds—Cherry tomatoes, Genovese basil. The last he’d found in an empty store on South Street. A symbol of absurd hope. He planted them in boxes on the roof, under artificial light powered by the old factory generator—the same one that once ran Westinghouse supercomputers. Now it grew tomatoes instead of forecasts.

*Seeds,* **Alex** thought.

Seeds we took from Russia in 1991—hidden in Grandma’s coat pocket.

Seeds of Sergei’s ideas fell into me—and took root in ash.

And now I sow tomato seeds in a world turned to dust.

He stood, turned off the hand-crank flashlight. In the pitch-black library, lit only by pale moonlight through the windows, he whispered:

— Lord, help me simply to keep. Not to save. Not to build. To keep.

It was his first spoken prayer in many years. Not a plea for a miracle. A plea for strength to bear witness.

Outside, a low hum rose again. Deep, growing louder.

Not the generator.

The roof generator ran quieter.

This sound was approaching.

**Alex** froze. His hand reached toward the shelf, where behind a folio of *Foundations of Cybernetics* lay a pistol—not for killing. For the right to remain silent.

Night was claiming its due.

The chapter was ending.

But the story was only beginning.

In the silence, among books and ash, the first seed had sprouted.