Publisher's Synopsis
When Chance is caught in the grip of Necessity, it will always find the right solution. As the January 2021 summit opened in Davos, where the bosses talked about how radiant the new world would be - an era of establishing a purely pragmatic world order, with power in the hands of corporations, including anonymous network managers, and with only two functions left in the hands of the state - fiscal and repressive), a mass rally was peacefully taking place in London. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Trafalgar Square and the surrounding streets, but they did not fight the police, did not burn cars, and did not smash shop windows. They simply stood shoulder to shoulder, thus breaking the "social distance" (which literally means "the distance between rich and poor"), and sang intimately, with defiant British politeness looking out on this shining world of a rapidly asserting "bright pragmatic future", with its only chance of succeeding without paying the price of failure: suicide. Their song repeated the same refrain. The police were silent. Translated into Russian, the lyrics were, "Shove this new world order up your ass!"
