Credo (story)

Private detective Artem Kamalov deals with inheritance issues related to previous reincarnations of people. To speak with reincarnations allows so-called. Tesla's star, a device invented by the Tesla scientist. Communication can be carried out only a limited number of times, since each subsequent attempt increases the risk of schizophrenia in a living person.

A boy is brought to Artyom, the reincarnation of which left him a legacy. Artyom warns parents about the danger of repeated "communication sessions", but they do not listen to him. The boy is taken away, and the upset Artem goes to drink beer in a bar located opposite the University. Bauman .

In the bar, the detective meets Ivan Petrenko, the teacher of Baumanka. Ivan, having learned that Artyom works as a detective, tells him that he did not pass the examination on the "Tesla star" in his childhood, and did it only yesterday. And he did it himself, using the device layout available in Bauman. Since during a session a person cannot be conscious, Ivan put himself to sleep and, having set a timer for awakening, recorded the conversation with his reincarnation on the recorder.

Ivan wants to get out of the bar with Artyom in order to “show something”, but at this moment shots are heard and Ivan is killed.

Artyom meets with the wife of the deceased, who hires him to investigate. Since Kamalov cannot officially investigate the murder, he is taken to track down the missing flash drive from the recorder, hoping to find out in this way the name of the killer.

The detective visits the bar a second time and realizes that the shots were fired with a sniper rifle, with the shots most likely from the window of the Bauman. Artyom decides to go to Baumanka and talk to Ivan’s five colleagues. He communicates with Zakhar Kireyev and Professor Roibach, who make various assumptions about a possible killer.

Artyom visits the head of the department Danilyan. Danilyan tells Artyom about the device of the “Tesla star” and shows him the exact same voice recorder with a flash drive that the victim had been with. In order to provoke the killer, Artyom asks Danilyan to give him a copy of the flash drive, after which he leaves the flash drive in a prominent place and goes to visit another colleague of the victim - Sergey Svetov.

In a conversation with Light, it turns out that the latter was a sniper in the army. At the time of the conversation, police officers rush into the room and arrest Svetova on suspicion of murder. However, Artyom does not believe in his guilt. By that time, the detective had already formed his own version of events, and, in order to find out everything definitively, he goes to Professor Aglasov.

During a conversation with Aglasov, the detective calls Kireev and says that he has found a flash drive. Artyom asks to bring her to the professor and offers Aglasov to listen to the recording, while he is actually accusing the professor of murder. However, Aglasov agrees to listen to the recording, because he knows that the flash drive is fake (the real flash drive was destroyed by the professor, being a murderer).

Kireev brings a flash drive, which suddenly turns out to be a damning Aglasov recording. The murdered Petrenko insured by making a duplicate record on the second recorder. A voice on the tape says that in his past life his name was Leonid Balashov. Leonid used to work at the Bauman University, where during one of his scientific experiments, Professor Aglasov killed him.

Aglasov is exposed in two murders at once. Artyom can only meet his wife Petrenko and get a fee.

Quote S. Lukyanenko

The idea of ​​“Credo” was presented to me by my friend, literary critic and employee of the magazine “If” Dmitry Baikalov. The idea was simple - "the world in which the reincarnation of the soul is proved." The idea was a world-making - the most important thing for a story or a novel.

I immediately sat down to write a novel. As a materialist, I wanted to give a scientific justification for what is happening. I came up with a scientific explanation of what was happening, inscribed (with a firm goal to change in the future) the physicist Tesla as the inventor of the device described in the novel and took up, strictly speaking, detective intrigue.

Only a few days later I decided to study in more detail the biography of the great physicist. What was my surprise when after a few hours I realized - it was Tesla and no one else could work in this direction (and, even, one could say - worked!) Everything that I had invented initially fell on historical facts unknown to me with amazing accuracy . So much so that I decided to temporarily postpone the novel, and first write a story. Sooner or later, “Credo” will grow into a real novel, but for the time being, with a clear conscience, I call this work a story.

There is a second surprising coincidence. A few years ago, critic and journalist Andrei Chertkov, the author of the concept of collections of “The Time of Students” and many other interesting projects, came up with the exact same world-forming idea - a world with proven reincarnation! And he also presented this idea to the writer Alexander Zhitinsky! And soon after the release of “Credo”, the same idea was written and the story of Zhitinsky was completely different, of course.

I am absolutely convinced (and Dmitry and Andrey are sure of this) that the same move was invented independently. It probably means that the time has come for this idea.

And yet, to me, a science fiction writer, which means a skeptic, is a little uncomfortable with such coincidences.

• Bibliography of Sergey Vasilyevich Lukyanenko

• Cursor. Credo // If: journal. - Moscow: Favorite Book, 2010. - № 6 . - p . 250 . - ISSN 0136-0140 .