The visualizer, or the man who alters reality

Synopsis for novel "The Visualizer, or the man who alters Reality

What you die of hardly matters

far more impotant is why were born

The novel The Visualizer, or the man who alters reality is the first book in a series published under the collective title The Visualizer, a series devoted to the struggle against the forces of chaos that are trying to tear apart the world order we know. A professional book trailer for the novel has been published on YouTube, capturing the central idea of this philosophical and psychological work. Human beings must never be used as guinea pigs. Those who do so will be made to pay a heavy price: the heroes will find a way to fight back against injustice, and the truth will prevail. It will not be easy, of course — the characters will have to battle for their future and their very lives.

The authors previous series, featuring CIA secret agent Steven Cheeskane and comprising three novels — Gifts of the Gods, The Heavenly Gates of Ta Keo, and Secrets of the Ocean Depths — became a genuine bestseller and attracted an international readership. Those books are currently sold through the leading Russian and foreign retail platforms: Litres (Russia); Altaspera (Canada); Ridero (Russia); Amazon (USA); Tsifrovaya Vitrina (Russia); AliExpress (China); Wildberries (Russia); Ozon (Russia); Google Play (USA); NTV+ (Russia); Livelib (Russia); Bookmix (Russia); and Lulu (USA). You can see this for yourself by visiting the website of the author of this wonderful novel, where many reviews, quotes and illustrations are also available.

Given the climate of military hysteria that has swept the globe, the novels of the new The Visualizer series carry a frankly anti-war message. The first novel in the series, The Visualizer, or The Man Who Alters Reality, is devoted to the dark phenomena that will accompany humanity in the process of developing and deploying psychotronic weapons. I have tried to portray the dangers our generation will face if such a weapon is ever created.

It should be noted that this is the most terrifying non-lethal weapon that could appear on Earth in the very near future. Some experts argue that the force of its impact would surpass the consequences of nuclear warfare.

In this respect my work has much in common with Alexei Tolstoys novel The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin, which anticipated certain aspects of laser weaponry — technology that emerged almost exactly a hundred years after the books publication. The threats facing the heroes of my novel, however, are far more serious. The plot is more densely packed with events, and the novel moves at a brisker pace.

The action of the novel takes place in our own time. The principal characters of The Visualizer, or The Man Who Alters Reality are patients at the I. M. Rabinovich Psychiatric Clinic, on whom a series of secret experiments aimed at developing and producing PSY weapons is about to be conducted. No one knows where these dangerous trials on human subjects will lead, and everyone is proceeding in the dark.

As a result of these extremely complex experiments, the people being irradiated acquire new abilities that enable them to break free. They want to destroy the dangerous apparatus through which inhumane tests have been conducted on human beings. In the end they succeed in neutralizing a powerful torsion-and-spin-field generator that has been irradiating both them and the entire territory of all the Eastern European countries. This gives the novel an additional detective-story dimension that lends it a unique flavor.

Because the action takes place in our own time, many of the characters have recognizable real-life prototypes, and the events in the novel intersect with those terrible wars that have not ceased for a single moment on the Eurasian continent. In a certain sense the novel is a tracing over reality. Even so, the reader should not assume that the plot has been taken from real life.

It should be treated as a wholly invented work of fiction. There is no need to pursue the author, launch journalistic investigations, write letters to the secret services, or pester me with correspondence. The people depicted do not exist, and all resemblances are coincidental. They are the products of the authors imagination.

I hope you will enjoy this novel and that together with me you will fight for peace and prosperity on the land belonging to our long-suffering peoples — and that you will, of course, follow the heroes of my fantastic works.

The cover art is a striking work by Canadian artist Daniel Sundahl, for which I would like to express my particular gratitude to him.

Prologue

The one whom life has beaten

will go farther,

The one whos eaten salt will

sweeter find the honey.

The one whos wept will laugh

with truer feeling,

The one whos died will know

what it is to live.

For three months now, Vera Ivanovna Maslova — a certified clinical psychologist — had been unable to find work. Frantically sifting through vacancy listings at employment agencies and HR departments, she was astonished to discover that her specialty had still not become truly marketable.

Demand for professionals in the humanities was weak. Everyone wanted accountants and lawyers, and openings for psychologists were rare. The few positions that did exist came laden with inflated requirements, and the salaries on offer were nowhere near enough for a decent living. They were pittances, and they stirred in her only one feeling: irritation.

This weighed on her deeply — not only as a sensitive person but as a credentialed specialist with years of experience. The culture of seeking professional counseling, so long established in the West, had still not taken root in this country.

There were reasons for that, no doubt. People were afraid of psychologists, and in many ways their fear was justified. In Soviet times, psychiatric hospitals had been instruments of political repression, and people still assumed, by force of habit, that nothing had changed. Russian television bore part of the blame: it kept frightening ordinary viewers with the specter of the psych ward.

But Vera Ivanovna saw things differently. She believed that life never stands still — that people and the world around them are constantly changing, and that the authorities no longer used the methods they had so recently employed against opposition leaders. All of this gave her grounds for hope, and her deep knowledge of psychology helped her believe in her own abilities. And so she kept searching, relentlessly, for steady employment, relying on no one but herself.

Of course, some freelance work remained available. She had long since registered as self-employed on the Gosuslugi portal, and her strong qualifications and professional skills let her take part in paid seminars and symposia as a lecturer or presenter. She did that from time to time. But she had no steady job. The prospect of finding one was dim. Freelance income provided just enough to get by without constantly borrowing from her parents and acquaintances. And the contact with the people who attended her seminars created a sense of being needed.

Some of those who came to her lectures eventually became her private clients. That, too, gave her confidence, and in time it began to bring in modest earnings. Over several years of this kind of work she had built up a fairly broad clientele, made up mostly of young businesspeople who were struggling to find customers.

They were former schoolchildren with burning ambition who believed they were special and could, in a very short time, conquer the financial capital of the country without the help of their fathers connections. But not many of them succeeded. It was hard to find your footing in Moscow. Life in the Russian capital could break anyone. As a rule, it dealt harshly with young people, and they turned to a psychologist in the hope of finding the root of their problems within themselves.

Now she herself was in an equally difficult situation. And perhaps she too needed the services of a more experienced and accomplished psychologist — someone who could instill in her confidence in her own strengths and hope for future success in her search for that elusive position.

Today, though, felt different, and Vera Ivanovna sensed it right away. She had woken up early and seen brilliant sunshine streaming through her window, filling her with a sense of warmth she had been missing for a long time. Every decent person has moments like that in life, when their guardian angel arrives to sort out whatever has been piling up.

Perhaps Vera Ivanovna had such a guardian angel watching over her. She had, after all, graduated with honors from the Psychology Department of Moscow State University, and then spent two years working as a clinical psychology resident at the Pavlov First Saint Petersburg State Medical University in St. Petersburg — surely that counted for something.

Vera Ivanovna switched on her computer and began reading her incoming email. Several messages had come from her former employer. There had been a time when she was proud to hold a staff psychologist position at the Russian representative office of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. In those days she earned a decent salary in foreign currency, enough to feel like she was living well. The Foundation operated generously, and Vera Ivanovna had assumed it would go on that way forever.

But times had changed. Eastern winds began to blow. First the Foundations activities were declared harmful, and then the Foundation itself was designated a foreign agent. Mutual sanctions were hitting both sides of the conflict, and ordinary citizens who had nothing to do with politics sometimes found themselves caught in the crossfire.

The government had not forgiven the organization for the inconsistent presentations given by Russian schoolchildren before the German parliament — addresses in which, at the behest of their Western handlers, they had argued for revisiting the outcome of the Second World War. The Russian government took careful notice of those presentations. It was a serious blunder by the Foundations leadership, made through sheer thoughtlessness. But it carried equally serious consequences.

Funding dried up significantly, and the Foundation let go of a number of its permanent staff members, including some it had long worked with productively. Non-core managers were the first to be cut. Eventually the psychologist was made redundant too.

Vera Ivanovna had left her well-paid position with regret, but life moved on and she had to think fast. That the Foundation had engaged in activities hostile to the state barely concerned her. She had nothing to do with politics. But that episode was now one of the reasons she could not find new work, despite all her experience and credentials.

Prospective employers who might otherwise have found her professionally and personally suitable looked askance at the glowing references she had received upon leaving her previous job. Nobody wanted to associate with someone who had been tainted by a connection to a foreign organization that the state had officially designated a foreign agent. Most Russian organizations wanted loyal, spotlessly clean employees — people whose biographies were beyond reproach.

She no longer worked for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, but that fact continued to cast a shadow over her new life, and she regretted having ever decided to take that attractive position at such a well-known foreign firm.

Generally speaking, the only employers who might now offer her work were the major Russian resource-extraction companies. But those companies underwent periodic government inspections, and former foreign agents could become an unwelcome irritant that state officials at various levels might take an interest in. Officials could start poking around in the companys affairs, leading to serious expenditures and even premature bankruptcy. Unnecessary scrutiny from officials was the last thing anyone wanted. There were already more than enough headaches involved in obtaining permits, licenses, and certificates, all of which cost enormous sums.

So employers kept turning her down, even though they showed genuine interest at first, recognizing they were dealing with a top-tier specialist. Interviews almost invariably ended the same way: she was wished every success, but was never invited back for a final meeting with the head of HR or the company director.

Vera Ivanovna surfaced from her gloomy thoughts. She was still looking at her monitor, and she still had not worked through all the mail in her inbox. Several messages were from former clients with whom she stayed in touch by email.

One letter she read twice. A young man was thanking her for the help she had given him the previous year and writing to tell her that his life had finally turned around. My life has changed completely, he wrote. Your lectures pushed me to switch fields. In my new line of work I have achieved remarkable results. Letters like that were easy and pleasant to read. They strengthened her belief in herself and her hope for success — her conviction that she had chosen the right profession, and that the difficulties she was now facing in her job search were only temporary.

As she was clearing her inbox, Vera Ivanovna noticed a message from an unfamiliar address. Normally she deleted such things immediately. This time, for some reason, she decided to do otherwise. She opened the message out of habit, expecting another piece of spam that had wandered into her inbox by mistake. She was already about to delete it, but something stopped her. She looked at the sender and read on, puzzling over this unexpected communication that had somehow found its way to her email address. The message contained a job offer — exactly the kind of offer she had given up hoping for.

At first Vera Ivanovna did not take the offer seriously. She was being invited to work at a private psychological clinic — a psych ward, in common parlance. What was more, the employer needed specifically a psychologist with residency experience who had spent at least two years in a private organization and held a medical qualification or had extensive practical experience as a physician.

Vera Ivanovna skimmed the offer and found herself intrigued. She met most of the listed requirements. True, her experience as a physician had been brief, but she could compensate for that gap with her long track record in the field.

She thought it over. Vera Ivanovna was a workaholic who feared no task. She wanted to help people who had found themselves in difficult psychological situations, and she liked being paid well for doing so. She could calm a senior executive under severe psychological pressure just as easily as a manager whose work life had hit a rough patch. She had been known to guide chronic alcoholics out of drinking binges and help neurotics find their footing. In other words, she had no doubt she could handle the new responsibilities. The pay also seemed to be in order: the salary on offer this time was acceptable, the figure stated in the message was one she could live with. Moreover, the clinic was not looking for an ordinary staff psychologist but for a chief medical officer — a fairly senior medical post that matched her ambitions. Perhaps that is why Vera Ivanovna decided she would go to the interview after all, and take a look at what this private psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of the city was actually like.

She opened her computer to look up the clinics location. With an address in hand that was easy enough: maps available online could pinpoint any object within minutes. Although the institution was situated practically in the Moscow Region — in the new construction zones of New Moscow — that did not put her off. The Mayor was personally overseeing development there; the district was destined to become a new showcase for the city, with attractive new buildings and new metro stations going up. Getting there would not be difficult.

She read online that the district had only just been built up. The hospital occupied a recently completed building. The nearest metro station was within walking distance of the clinic — an important detail, since Ms. Maslova disliked commuting by car. She had no husband yet, and she had not yet learned to drive with any confidence. A metro ride held no terrors for her.

Vera Ivanovna decided to respond positively to the offer that had landed in her inbox by chance, and wrote back. She was honest about herself and her qualifications, since she genuinely met nearly all the requirements of the position described in the offer. She wrote that she was ready to attend an interview for the vacant post of chief medical officer at the earliest opportunity, and was prepared to come to the address given in the message at whatever time suited the administration. She could not wait to hear back from the employer so they could discuss the terms of her employment.

The reply came quickly. That evening a letter arrived from the clinics director, proposing a meeting the following Wednesday at eleven oclock in the morning. The time suited her, even though she was fond of sleeping in. Today was Monday, which left Vera Ivanovna time to think everything through carefully.

Chapter 1

Beneath this sky life is a

chain of torments,

And

will the sky take pity on us? Never.

O

you unborn! If you could learn our sufferings,

You

would not choose to come down here at all.

The I. M. Rabinovich Private Psychological Clinic occupied a pleasantly picturesque corner of New Moscow. Not so long ago the area had been dense suburban forest where villagers from nearby settlements went mushroom-picking. But New Moscow was expanding at a furious pace, devouring every patch of open land and filling the newly annexed territories with apartment blocks and roads, with the noise and clamor of youth.

Construction was under way everywhere. Workers were laying paving tiles and planting young saplings along the pathways. The building never stopped, not for a minute. The constant noise and dirt did not sit well with everyone. The local residents had at first tried to fight the infill development, but the big money that arrived paid no attention to their wishes or their needs. What was more, the locals were unhappy that a psych ward of all things was going up in their district. But they were powerless to stop construction of this large, closed medical facility.

Several times they had written complaint letters to the local borough administration, and once they had even tried to block the road connecting the new neighborhoods to the city center. Construction continued all the same, and before long a sizeable stretch of their suburban district was fenced off behind a solid three-meter wall, behind which three state-of-the-art six-story buildings were rising, designed to the latest architectural standards.

By the time Vera Ivanovna arrived, the buildings were already finished and fitted out with the most modern medical equipment the domestic market had to offer. A new director had been appointed and a qualified medical staff assembled — people capable of meeting the demands ahead. The clinic had long since opened and was accepting new patients.

Vera Ivanovna looked around. The private medical facility stood near a park zone. It was a well-kept, leafy part of the city. She liked the fact that freshly planted greenery lined the pathways, bringing the surrounding landscape to life and making it more inviting.

Rowan trees had been planted along most of the paths, with young maples, larches, and lindens visible here and there. In the distance a few handsome pines could be made out — survivors of the suburban forest that had stood here until recently, only to be felled without mercy by the construction crews.

The air here was considerably cleaner than in the district where she lived. It was a degree or two cooler than in the city center, but far fresher. The spot was lovely and well-tended. Isaac Moiseevich — the director of the private clinic — must have had connections at City Hall, given that he had managed to build a modern facility in such an outstanding location, next to a metro station, despite the resistance of the local population. These were Vera Ivanovnas thoughts as she approached the gate of the institution that was to become her second home.

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