SIGNATURE

“SIGNATURE”

Moscow, Russia

2027

RECORD I: MOSCOW, 24 AUGUST 2027

At eight in the morning, I read on my phone that we would end the war in absolute victory by 2030. The same sentence as last year, word for word. Only last year there were four years left, and now there were three, and nobody had recalculated the figure out loud. The man who said it was someone I’d had lunch with in Kuntsevo in April. I know where he got that date. The table he read it from came out of my department.

The phone is Chinese. Since last year, so is the official car: large, comfortable, heated seats, a menu that switches from Russian to English three times a week and has to be reset by hand. My wife’s washing machine comes from there too. The lift in our apartment block has been out of order since May, waiting for a controller. That is coming from there as well, only more slowly than the washing machines, because lifts are not a state priority.

I am deputy district commander for armaments. I live in Moscow and have never been to war. This is not a confession, merely a description of my position: my war consists of sixteen signatures a day and Tuesday meetings where men over sixty argue about entries in a spreadsheet.

My department has an office in the Lubyanka complex—not in the part they show on television, but in the wing facing Furkasovsky Lane, where the windows overlook an inner courtyard and nobody outside ever sees a light on. In autumn, when the cold sets in and darkness falls before four, there is something strangely melancholy about the place. The corridors smell of old linoleum and vending-machine coffee. Footsteps echo as though the building remembers more people than remain inside it today. Nobody talks about it, but anyone who has worked in that wing for more than a year eventually understands why.

I’m writing this in the kitchen, at one in the morning, because for three months I haven’t been able to sleep without a pill, and I’ve stopped pretending it’s the heat.

The block dates from 1978. Prefabricated panels, concrete, seams sealed three times and still leaking. Since June, the stairwell has smelled of something the caretaker cannot identify, and everyone has got used to it. The air is stagnant. The same has hung over the city for a week now—yellow, because the peat bogs are burning again, and putting them out is an item in a spreadsheet, just not one that belongs to us.

On deadlines.

A deadline is not a forecast. It is an accounting instrument. You name a year to unlock a stream of funding—and everyone at the table knows it, including the man naming the year. Nobody says so, because saying it would mean admitting that the previous three programmes were never completed either.

They weren’t. They were closed out with a report stating that their principal objectives had been substantially fulfilled.

2030 will pass the same way. In 2029, someone will write about force regeneration and name 2040 as the new target. He’ll be right, because by 2040 everyone in the room today will be retired or in the ground.

On what we are really buying.

People outside imagine sanctions mean shortages.

Sanctions do not mean shortages. They mean margins.

Everything gets through. Turbojet engines for new aircraft—those get through. Communications modules, the small mesh-networked ones our factories cannot make at that price or in those quantities—they get through. Optics, cells, controllers for next to nothing, by the million. It all moves through companies whose names change every two quarters, across three intermediary countries.

On paper, those three countries always have the same names. Nobody says them out loud, because formally we are a neutral trading partner doing business with neutral trading partners.

Kazakhstan. Azerbaijan. Sometimes Kyrgyzstan, if the other two happen to be experiencing a quarter of heightened attention from Western customs observers.

Companies registered there can exist for eight months, sell a single shipment worth more than their entire declared turnover in previous years, and disappear before anyone has time to send a question about the origin of their founding capital. In every one of those countries, someone adds a percentage for courage.

We pay that percentage. It goes under “transport and logistics,” and nobody has ever asked about it.

Last summer, they arrested people from one holding company. They took money from the import-substitution programme, used it to buy finished airframes from the south, repainted them in a hangar, then delivered them to military units as domestic production.

I read the case files. In the department, people discussed it in hushed voices, but not because the men had cheated. They had cheated stupidly.

We all buy from the south. The difference is that we have a line item for it, while they wanted two line items for a single shipment.

They were arrested for their accounting, not for the substance of what they did.

The substance is state policy.

I write “from the south” because that is what goes into official notes and what people say at meetings. The crates bear a different name.

The crates say Shenzhen.

These are not isolated components. They are an entire management layer: a system that calculates convoy routes, allocates fuel, decides which depot opens first and which division gets priority. The interface is in Russian. The menus are in Russian. The voice reading out the notifications has our accent.

Underneath, everything is Chinese, from the first line of code to the last.

People know this, although nobody says it out loud. I once heard a junior officer in the canteen ask whether it was safe to run the entire logistics command system on someone else’s engine, one nobody here could open up and inspect.

Someone else told him the question was irrelevant. There was no alternative. We could not build a system of that class in this decade, and without any system at all the army would stop moving within a week.

People are afraid quietly, the way a man is afraid when he knows the lift might break down but has to use it every day because there are no stairs.

On the price.

I’ll say this once, because it is not something you put in a document.

A human being is our cheapest component.

I don’t say that out of cruelty. I say it because the spreadsheet says so.

I know the one-off payment to a family, including the associated benefits, by heart. The figures pass through the department next door. A complete communications and optics package for a single attack aircraft costs more.

It used to be the other way around. I even remember the quarter when the columns crossed. No meeting, no decision. One figure simply passed the other, and nobody said a word.

Planning has been simpler ever since. Equipment must be conserved because it takes three months to travel through three countries, and every intermediary adds their cut.

People do not need to be conserved. They take two weeks to arrive from their home region, and they come of their own accord, for money they could never earn any other way back home, money they know will only be paid after—

The form calls it replenishment of personnel strength.

That is the only thing in this record that concerns me personally. Not that it happens. That I have handled this entry three times this week and no longer feel anything when it crosses my desk.

In May, I asked a colleague from the department next door whether he still read the figures and understood what they meant.

“What is there to understand? A number is a number.”

“And when you dream?”

“Then I take the same pills you do, and I don’t dream.”

We had a cup of tea each and went back to our offices. Both of us signed off on the full allocation that day.

On what we do not buy.

The law on models was passed last year and came into force in January. Western models were to be blocked because they operated through hidden manipulation and discriminatory algorithms. Southern models were to be deemed safe, subject to localisation requirements.

Localisation means translating the interface and changing the emblem.

I know because my department reviewed the military provisions.

My daughter had an English-learning app on her phone. She used to talk to it in the evenings. It corrected her accent and answered her questions about pronunciation. In January, it disappeared overnight, along with her entire account.

She was given a replacement, one from the approved list. A week later, she told me the new one was more polite and understood less. She meant something simple, but she put it better than I ever could in an official note.

Manipulation is what a product sold by the adversary does. The same thing, sold by a partner, is called digital sovereignty.

The entire difference lies in the commercial agreement.

On our neighbours.

Last year, in June, the Americans cut the Europeans off from access to their two most powerful models. On a Friday evening, by letter, without giving a specific reason, without consultation and without any appeals process.

Their own treaty allies were affected too, including those who had considered themselves insiders.

Eighteen days later, access was restored, after the company agreed to coordinate the procedures for releasing subsequent versions with the American government.

I read about it with a professional satisfaction I would not have been wise to display at a meeting.

Because it is exactly the same arrangement as ours. They sit on someone else’s stack, and so do we.

There is one difference, and it does not work in our favour. Someone tugged their leash and then let it go. Now they know where it is fastened.

They drafted a package, came up with four levels of sovereignty, have been arguing about them in public for a year, and are calculating out loud how long it will take them to get out. Their estimate is ten to fifteen years.

Ridiculous, but at least they have done the arithmetic.

Nobody has ever tugged our leash. Our partner has no reason to, as long as this war keeps doing for him what he does not have to do himself.

So we have no package, no four levels and no public argument. We have a law that calls dependence sovereignty and, by doing so, removes it from the agenda.

They measured their leash. We have never checked ours, and we call that an advantage.

On the allocation module.

In June, we received a decision-support module for the command centre: target analysis, queue management, priorities. Purchased through an intermediary and localised.

During exercises in August, it stripped priority from a division that had requested resources and assigned them to a sector where nobody had asked for anything.

The exercise report recorded a finding.

In July, on the southern front, the same rule was applied in a live operation. I have the communications transcript because it was attached to the supporting material. I have read it four times and know it by heart, though I never wanted to.

The company requested fire support for twenty-two minutes.

“Falcon, this is Ninth. I have them two hundred metres to the right. Put fire down at bearing three-four-zero.”

“Ninth, the allocation is pending. It’s being held on the adjacent sector.”

“What do you mean, held? Who’s holding it?”

“The system is holding it. Priority assigned to the node.”

“What node? Nobody’s firing there! There’s nobody fucking there!”

“I know.”

“Then override it manually.”

“I can’t release it without higher-level authorisation. Reporting.”

“Then report faster, because they’re going to fucking tear us apart down here.”

“Reporting. Hold on.”

Four minutes missing from the recording.

Then:

“Falcon... Falcon, they’re in the trench.”

“Ninth, allocation unchanged.”

—

“Unchanged. Fuck. I’m sorry.”

—

“Ninth, respond. Ninth.”

Ninth did not respond.

The duty officer requested authorisation for a manual override six times in twenty-two minutes. Each request was properly submitted, with the grounds stated. Nobody refused.

Nobody answered. An answer required someone at a higher level, and at that hour there was nobody there who wanted to take responsibility for it.

Forty-one bodies were evacuated from the site in bags, along with one collective entry because the remains could not be separated into individual names. They were listed as unidentified remains.

They remain unidentified to this day, because identification is a billable procedure.

The losses were recorded as the result of a successful enemy drone strike.

That was not even a lie. There had been a strike.

The module had not frozen. It had not made a mistake. It had executed the rule—correctly, consistently, with a complete log.

The problem was that the rule did not come from our doctrine. It came from someone who had written it earlier, in another language, for another army and another theatre of operations. It remained embedded in the system because nobody had ever removed it.

A colonel wanted to know who had introduced the rule. The question came to me because I sign off on acceptance.

He arrived in person, without an appointment, and stood in the doorway until I had finished my telephone call.

“Comrade General, who entered this rule?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then I’ll find out.”

“You won’t. There is no documentation for that layer. They didn’t sell it with the equipment, and they won’t sell it now. It costs extra, and not for us.”

“Then send it back and make them fix it.”

“We’d have to return two thousand sets and bring everything to a standstill for a quarter. You know what that would do to the plan.”

He did. He knew everything from the beginning, better than I did, because he had seen it from the other side.

He stood there for a while longer, looking at me the way you look at something you understand completely and suddenly have no words for.

“God fucking damn it,” he said at last.

Not to me. To the ceiling, the building, the whole arrangement.

“Agreed,” I said.

“Will Comrade General sign for the next batch?”

“On Monday.”

“I thought so.”

He saluted. Properly, like he had been taught at school, then walked out.

On Monday, his division would receive another twenty sets with the same rule inside. He would accept them, count them and sign the receipt, because he was an officer and that was his job.

I did not refer the matter further.

I’ll be honest about why, because this is the only honest thing in this record.

I know what happens to people in my department who start asking questions nobody wants answered. Two years ago, a major in contracts asked out loud, during a meeting, why one shipment had two different specifications in two copies of the same contract.

A month later, he received a transfer. A promotion, on paper. Zaporizhzhia, a field headquarters, where field headquarters are positioned as close as possible to the line they are defending.

Someone sent him a photograph from a funeral because his name had been added to the condolence list. Nobody had to say anything directly. Everyone in the department read the spreadsheet the same way.

It was not fear, and it was not loyalty.

It was arithmetic.

There is no position in my establishment for a person with the time, access and language skills needed to read that layer all the way through. If such a person existed and found something, deliveries would be halted pending an investigation.

Halted deliveries mean failure to meet the production plan. Failure to meet the plan means a report explaining why. The report needs a signature.

The signature is mine. It is always mine.

My entire function is to make sure there is a name in the right place—a name that can be crossed out without stopping the line.

On windows.

Since 2022, more than twenty people from the upper ranks of the largest corporations have gone down, and that is only the ones somebody counted. Fuel, gas, banking, rail, internet.

Last year, a forty-two-year-old executive at an internet giant. Two months later, the director of the VIP terminal at the largest airport in the country. Found on the balcony of his own apartment.

This year, two more. Nothing was published about either of them beyond an industry obituary.

In the West, they came up with a name for it and think it is funny.

Nobody here laughs, because here we count.

People outside think these are punishments for political views. Almost none of those people had political views. I checked, because it matters professionally.

They had signatures. Procurement, transport, freight, settlements, terminals, warehouses. They sat exactly where I sit: at the point where money becomes equipment, and equipment becomes missing equipment.

This is not a political purge.

It is an inventory.

When a hole appears in the accounts that can no longer be closed with a report, somebody has to become the place where the hole ends.

There is no trial. A trial is expensive, public, has two sides and takes time.

A window does not.

Officially, it is always something ordinary. The heart. An accident. A cigarette on a windowsill. Nobody investigates, because investigation—as I wrote above—is a billable procedure.

I live on the fourth floor. Three years ago, I considered that a disadvantage of the apartment.

I did the arithmetic on myself too, because I do not know how to do anything else.

My wife would receive the benefits payable to the family of a deceased officer. The apartment would remain in the family. My daughter is two years away from her degree.

The figures told me I cost less than a commission of inquiry, and less than suspending deliveries while an investigation took place.

I cost more than a soldier.

I still cost less than stopping the production line.

That is my entire position in the spreadsheet, and I know it down to the last rouble.

Sometimes, in the evening, I wonder where the people who make decisions above my level go to end their day.

Not in blocks built in 1978, with cracking seams and a lift waiting for a controller from Shenzhen.

They end their days on Rublyovka, behind a high wall and another wall beyond that, in houses that have no numbers, only names. Places where a square metre of land costs more than a colonel earns in a year.

There are dachas there too, but their windows do not have to be opened at night. The air conditioning runs around the clock. The system keeping it running probably arrived in a crate bearing the same name, one nobody on Rublyovka needs to read because nobody there has to sign anything.

So on Monday, I will sign for the delivery.

The crates will arrive with Russian labels. On the inside of each lid, embossed in small characters in a different alphabet, will be the same thing as always, in the place nobody looks because the lid is thrown away with the wrapping.

We declare ourselves ready to confront the enemy on any strategic axis.

That is true of the equipment. The equipment exists. There is plenty of it, and it is cheaper than it has ever been in the history of this army.

Only one word in that sentence is false.

It is always the same word.

The bill will be presented by someone who did not have to send a single soldier. And it will not be presented to me.

It will be presented to whoever occupies this chair after I am no longer on the establishment. That man will sign in exactly the same way, because he too will be bound by the production plan.

Between one signature and the next there will be forty-one bodies in bags, and one collective entry without a name, because the remains could not be assembled into anything the paperwork could recognise.

A collective entry costs less.

No one receives a payment for it.

The kitchen window is open. In this heat, there is no other way to sleep.

I close it.

The pill begins to work. Tomorrow is Tuesday. The meeting is at nine. Item fourteen.

RECORD II

Shenzhen Robotics Group — Autonomous Systems Division

Evaluation Memorandum 2027/Q3-114

To: Colonel Chen, Office of Unmanned Systems Programmes
Classification: Internal. Not for circulation outside the division.
Date: 2 September 2027

1. Subject

Assessment of the operational performance of equipment sets delivered to the northern partner between April and August 2027, through an indirect channel spanning three jurisdictions.

2. Scope of deliveries

— XK-T22 turbojet engine, export series — 1,420 units

— XK-F358 mesh communications module — 61,000 units

— SR-9 optical heads, power cells and drive controllers — continuous deliveries

— SR-TAC/4 decision-support module, “Northern” localisation package, version 4.2.1

The localisation package covers interface translation, symbology and reporting formats. The base rules layer remains unchanged, in accordance with the design specification and the contract provision that the partner did not challenge.

3. Validation event

July 2027, southern sector of the partner’s theatre of operations.

A partner subunit requested fire support for twenty-two minutes. SR-TAC/4 maintained the allocation on the adjacent sector, in accordance with Priority Rule 3.7: protection of a supply node takes precedence over support for a frontline subunit.

The module reported no fault. The log was complete, the sequence consistent, and the decision reproducible.

Partner losses: 41 identified casualties, 1 collective entry.

The data were taken from the partner’s own report, attached to a hardware complaint submitted in August. The complaint concerned damaged radio sets.

4. Analytical value

Rule 3.7 had previously been validated only in simulation and on the proving ground.

This is the first confirmation of its behaviour under live fire, with real channel loading and real operator resistance.

Data of this class cannot be obtained through our own programme without incurring our own losses.

Acquisition cost: zero.

The partner paid for the equipment and supplied the boundary conditions.

5. Conditions for maintaining the channel

The partner classified the losses as the result of an enemy drone strike. The classification is consistent with the facts in part and has not been challenged. No investigation has been initiated.

An inquiry into the origin of the rule surfaced at district level and subsided without escalation. This conclusion is based on the receiving terminal’s session log.

#LogikaRzezni #CGProtocol #MilitarySF

Attachment: SR-TAC/4 return channel

Fictional events. Not the methods.