I steady myself. Entering the Tower is a small execution: the weight of fattened bureaucracy lands on your shoulders like a slow rope. Many do not endure it.

​

     Security is theatre and deterrent. At the curb a scanner reads the invitation: hologram, QR code. At the gate—the first verification—an officer checks the picture. Deeper in, a second terminal cross-references your ID. Finally, the inner hall funnels you past a dozen armored guards, the so-called “turtles,” hulks in composite plates who patrol that purge of human hopes. A poet once called the main hall a place where hope goes to be taxed; he left after the first screening and never came back.

​

     Why am I here? Because a piece of paper in my hand says so. A summons—damp with my sweat, creased from being read a thousand times—tells me succinctly that I must pay a fine for speeding.

​

     Ridiculous. I own no car. I have not even a bicycle with a motor. The summons might be a clerical error—unless it isn’t. Rumors run like sewer gas through the city: the RAC’s algorithms flag people for petty violations as a pretext when they are already marked in the Tower’s registers for graver sins—dissent, conspiracy, offending the right official. A fine becomes a knock on the door. A knock becomes a question. A question becomes a sentence.

​

     My palms sweat on the paper. I will pay. It is not a large sum; I can spare it. But paying is not the point. The point is whether the Tower permits the transaction, whether it accepts a surface settlement or uses my arrival to probe, to open files, to make me prove who I am.

​

     A child’s crayon drawing hangs taped to the lobby wall—smudged suns and a crooked house. It is a ridiculous, human thing in the middle of hard bureaucracy, and it makes me ache. I fold the summons again to hide how much it trembles.

​

     A siren wails far off, an echo in the Tower’s glass. Behind the doors the scanners blink green, then red, then green again. People ahead move with the dull resignation of the sentenced. The guard’s visor reflects my face as I step forward.

​

     I breathe. I have the money. I have the paper. The question is no longer what I owe them, but what they will want in return for accepting it.

​

     Only—will the Tower allow me to settle and go, or will my small payment be the first step toward something much worse?

​

*          *          *

​

     I step through the northern entrance and into the line for the metal‑and‑bioweapon scanner. The doors sigh closed behind me. Cold air smells faintly of disinfectant and metal. There is no turning back now, I think. As if there ever was. You can ignore a summons once. The Tower sends another. Ignore again, and the Silent Ones arrive. No one has ever received a third summons.

​

I am no hero, no rebel. Just an ordinary citizen who doesn’t want his family involved. My fate will be decided today.

 

     “Show your summons!” barks a uniformed guard. The mask over his face renders the voice synthetic, almost insectile. My hand trembles as I lift the paper to his visor. A green light flickers on his mask—built‑in scanner.

​

    “Fourteenth,” he says.

​

     I stare blankly.

​

    “You’re going to the fourteenth floor,” he repeats. His gloved hand clamps my shoulder with controlled strength that could crush bone. “It’ll be fine,” he adds softly. For a moment I wonder if he means it, or if it’s just the last lullaby before the blade.

​

     I shuffle forward with the others: anxious, sweaty faces, eyes dulled by resignation. The sluggish river (abulic, as a doctor might say) splits into tributaries feeding different wings of the Tower.

​

     At the elevator, seven of us wait. The doors hiss open. Out steps a trio—two men and a woman in austere suits, smart glasses glowing faintly.

​

     “Look at them,” the woman sneers. “What are you doing here? This elevator is reserved. Scatter!” Her heels tap like impatient clocks. “God, their stench,” she mutters. One man laughs, a low hyena rasp.

​

     “But now you—” I begin.

​

     A sharp pinch on my forearm. A shove. I stumble toward the stairwell. When I glance back, their eyes glitter behind smart lenses. Scanning me, perhaps. Cold sweat runs down my back.

​

     At the first flight of stairs leading into the Tower’s heights, the human stream fractures into solitary atoms. Each person alone now.

​

     Fourteenth floor, I tell myself. I can do this.

​

     I climb. The air is stale, starved of oxygen. My muscles ache after only two flights. It is not the effort—it’s the pressure, the thin air, the wrongness of the stair’s shallow rhythm. Three steps, two, two, three, one… My footfalls form strange patterns like a code I can’t stop counting.

​

     A smoldering cigarette butt on the landing. A child’s handprint on the wall. Scratch marks on a door. A faint wail drifting from somewhere above, followed by a clerk’s mindless giggle. These are my breadcrumbs, my omens, as I ascend into the Tower’s unknowable heart.

​

*          *          *

​

     Hundred‑kilo weights are tied to my legs—or so it feels—as I trudge past the elevator. Its indicator lights strobe in a frenzied rhythm, red and green like a faulty heartbeat. The doors hiss open.

​

     “Elevator’s out,” says a pudgy man with obscenely thick lips. He steps out, crosses himself perfunctorily beneath a crucifix hung inverted above an office door, and vanishes inside.

​

     “Of course it’s out,” I mutter. “I only stopped to rest.” My own eyes flicker—three rapid blinks, like frightened birds. Lately I can’t tell what is true and what isn’t. Surely the people who work here know better. If they say the elevator is broken, then it is broken. Still, I whisper to my treacherous eyes, If you keep deceiving me, I’ll dig you out, and they flutter again, fearful.

​

     I am deep in the Tower’s bowels, somewhere around the thirtieth floor. Administrative nowhere. Where was I going? The last floor. The last. But how many floors are there? Officially seventy‑two, blessed personally by the President. Yet rumors persist of a seventy‑third, infamous and hidden. My destination? I tremble.

​

     From the street the Tower can’t be seen whole. A permanent smog veils its upper third, denying human eyes any grasp of its true height—a steel phallus stabbing the clouds, a Moloch of glass and concrete. God‑Tower, it seems to proclaim, I will be worshiped. Sacrifices will come to me.

My steps slow. This stairway is Jacob’s ladder, I think deliriously. But not leading to heaven—leading nowhere.

​

In a corridor unlike the others, dark and furred with fungi in every shade of green, a man appears. A Descender. He lifts his head; our eyes meet like two wild animals in a burning forest.

​

     “Sasha?” My voice cracks. He lives two doors down from me, a model citizen, small businessman, party member, the kind of man people point to as a pillar of the community. Yet the pillar now sways, cracked by some inner quake. I haven’t seen him in months.

​

     “What am I doing here?” he murmurs. “What is any of us doing here?” His eyes roam blankly; I’m sure he doesn’t recognize me. His clothes hang ragged, misbuttoned. Red petechiae dot his forehead. The smell of unwashed skin clings to him. In his hands he clutches a wad of gray‑brown pulp—once official documents, now a crumpled mass of paper and sweat.

​

     “Do you know where you are? You’re in the Tower,” I say, trying to anchor him.

​

     “Ah, yes.” A light flicks on behind his eyes, but not illumination—only the dim bulb of trauma. “I came here one year to submit papers…” His voice drifts. “Family?” he repeats when I ask. “Yes. Of course. The people of the Tower are my family.”

​

     He is lost. He has formed a parasitic bond with the Tower. How many such souls wander these corridors, thinking themselves at home?

​

     From the thirtieth floor up, debris piles on the stairs. One landing is streaked with blood. The air smells faintly of gunpowder. Somewhere a voice shouts, “Raise the taxes! Raise the taxes!” Others cackle madly as if their lives depend on it. A different floor reeks of Lysol so strongly I nearly choke. An enfilade of offices beckons into the depths, but I force myself back to the stairs.

​

     The thirty‑sixth floor is pure anxiety made stone. The stairway ends abruptly in a yawning gap, a horror vacui. Far below, chimpanzees in uniform applaud some invisible performance. Or perhaps I only imagine them. Suddenly a crowd surges behind me. They swing on ropes from one broken section to another, like characters in a video game. My arms fling wide in panic—my Moro reflex, some buried instinct. A rough hand shoves me. A tattered rope appears in my grasp.

​

     “Excuse me?! You don’t expect me to—” My protest dies under the roar of voices and the surreal force of the moment. The people behind cheer and sing. I close my eyes. The rope tenses. And I swing.

​

*          *          *

​

     I must be near the top—at least, I hope so. My quixotic climb has lasted too long. The numbered plaques vanished many floors ago, and before that they were already scrambled—34, 53, 36, 18, 68, 37, 14, 59. On one wall, written in what looks like blood, someone has scrawled a slogan: WE ARE ALL VICTIMS OF PARAPHRENIA HERE.

​

     Then—an open window. Impossible. Aren’t the Tower’s windows sealed, unbreakable? Or is my own perception cracked, my ideo‑affective window shattered?

​

     Fresh air touches my face. Dawn spills across the horizon. For an instant a new Weltanschauung floods me: the city is beautiful, its people good, I am happy, fulfilled, everything will be fine. Ecstasy sweeps me. Yes—just finish this business.

​

     From around the corner, she appears: a naked woman, mid‑fifties, moving as if on a stage where I am the only audience. A pale scar traces her abdomen. Purple shadows hang under her red eyes. Perhaps once she was lovely; now she is the residue of some bureaucratic process, a discarded human form. Her body jerks with small spasms.

​

     Yet she speaks in a low, steady voice, as if lecturing:

​

     “People fear the Tower. Others hate it. But one must transcend that. To find meaning in life one must accept the Tower’s teachings. We are all the Tower. The Tower is us. Don’t you see? It’s built from human bones, from tears and hopes.”

​

     She gestures at the walls, her face both saintly and defiant. Then she turns, steps through the window’s pale light—and is gone.

​

     Part of me wants to cry out. Another part accepts her disappearance with dull resignation. For a moment I even taste schadenfreude, as if she had spared me the choice.

​

     I lean out. The fog below is thick as milk, hiding the city. Perhaps the real world no longer exists at this height. No scream, no thud. Only silence—until the white dove bursts from the mist. It startles me; for a heartbeat its black bead of an eye meets mine, as if in recognition, then it disappears, folding itself into the universal whiteness, the Magnum Innominandum.

​

“Last floor,” I remind myself. “I’m summoned to the last floor.”

​

     But there is a problem. I stand before the plaque marked 72. An arrow points to the 73rd, yet the stairs end in a blank wall. I strike my forehead against it; the thud reveals half a meter of solid concrete. No way through. Another trick of the Tower? Do they want me to give up?

​

     I weigh my options: ask for help? go back down? admit defeat? My life has been nothing but small defeats. Perhaps this is simply the last. Or—I glance at the window—perhaps I can do as the woman did, step out into the beautiful nothingness. Become my own Dr. Kevorkian. The thought brings an almost pleasant relief.

​

     Then I hear it: the faint electric hum, a single click that sends shivers down my spine.

​

     I turn.

​

     The elevator has arrived. Its doors open, waiting.

​

     I step inside. It needs no buttons; it knows where to go.

​

     On the panel glows a sign: AUTHORIZED FOR PROCESSING ONLY.

​

     I feel no fear, no excitement, no joy. I am as blank as the fog that swallows the Tower.

​

     I knock.

​

     From within comes an authoritative voice: “Enter. We are waiting for you.”