Prayer
Father,
if You are not an address, but a distance,
shorten it.
If You are silence,
make it at least symmetrical.
We do what we must,
because not doing means thinking,
and thinking is forbidden now.
Amen.
Protocol
Date is irrelevant.
Place is interchangeable.
Goal is formulated as necessity.
Identify the enemy.
(The enemy must be abstract enough to have no face,
and concrete enough to shoot at.)
Explain why otherwise it is impossible.
(History, safety, children's future, will of higher order.)
Repeat steps 1–2 until a sense of correctness is achieved.
Note:
Doubt is permissible at early stages.
Later — classified as sabotage.
Fairy Tale
Once there was a world very tired of fear.
And then it decided to make fear big,
so that the small would no longer be noticed.
It grew war.
The hero here — adult, but inwardly still that child from the field and sky. Only now the field is mined, and the sky belongs to airplanes. He wears a uniform because form saves time: you don't need to decide every day who you are.
He does not shoot first.
He shoots correctly.
This is important.
The war around him — not chaos. It is astonishingly organized. It has schedules, norms, reports. Even death behaves with discipline — en masse, according to plan.
He sees camps.
Not immediately.
First — evacuation points.
Then — temporary solutions.
Then — infrastructure.
The most frightening things always start as temporary.
— This is not about hatred, — they tell him. — This is about order.
And he understands again.
He understands how one can hate not people, but categories. How one can destroy not living beings, but mistakes of a system. How easily the word "human" can be replaced with "unit."
Somewhere deep in memory, something ancient stirs. A spiral. A tail biting itself. But now it is drawn not on stone — it is embedded in logic.
On one of the days, he stands before a door.
Behind the door — people.
In front of the door — instructions.
He does not open it.
He passes the order along.
And the world takes another breath.
Prayer (Second)
Lord,
if this is evil —
let it not be ours.
If it is necessary —
let responsibility be distributed.
If You are silent —
then we have understood You correctly.
Protocol (Addition)
In case of moral conflict,
appeal to the future is recommended.
The future cannot object.
Fairy Tale (End)
The war grew so big
that everyone fit into it.
Even those who thought they stood aside.
And the dragon?
The dragon does not fly here.
It works.
It is — in trains that arrive on time.
In lists written in neat handwriting.
In furnaces that ask no questions.
In people who say:
"I was just doing my job."
The hero feels this, but does not yet see it fully.
He will see it fully later — in the ash, in the silence, when everything is already complete.
Now he is simply tired.
And fatigue — the best ally of any mechanism.