Three Stars. FAIRY TALES FOR CHILDREN AND YOUTH

Choosing a Bride

Fantastic story

The mollusk was swimming in the princess’s imagination when she awoke to a sudden rumble and noise from a collision of two or three vehicles rushing along a cinder-shaped polygon. Reluctantly she opened her eyes, looked at the calendar and the mechanical clock mechanism in the form of a hut, acting on batteries. To her horror, she immediately discovered that she had put on her tracksuit inside out, but she did not change clothes and looked out of the window, from where ominous rattles and blows were born, hoping that she was swimming in weightlessness.

But there was no mollusk, no sea depths nearby, only the booming noises coming from the freeway. There was a continuous series of cars moving in the same direction – towards the airfield, where the hangars were outdated, military, supersonic airliners with half a dozen ammunition for strategic purposes.

“Have I really slept through the rehearsal,” she exclaimed, dressing quickly, running up to the door. “What a mediocrity!”

On the table in her room there was a bouquet of artificial flowers also on batteries, where exotic, electronic butterflies flew around, forming an aura, expanding the color space beyond recognition.

“How much can we tell ourselves to watch horror films less, otherwise I’ll fail completely and not be able to sing a single part in the new, operatic repertoire appointed by the main director,” she thought five minutes before the beginning of the audition, heading to her notorious electric car firm Suzuki, presented to her recently by her father in honor of the twentieth. She only saw him at work.

“Be extremely careful. Do not leave your transport unattended,” he warned harshly on rehearsal that day.

“Is something can happen?”

She was surprised with the naivety of one year old baby.

“A means of hijacking has already proven itself, but can lift into the air by helicopter. Then you won’t catch up with anything,” he joked.

“I will try,” she reassured the generous “dad.”

Parking was located next to a large supermarket. The princess has never had problems buying offal for student parties and barbeque rides to the forest, nearby, suburban array to breathe fresh air, without gas fumes and admire the remnants of green plantings, grown at great expense in closed premises, transplanted by gardeners back to tubs in the winter. Entry there was paid.

There, in the openwork metal gazebo, one could sit down and admire the beauty of the landscape, boat traffic on the river surface or order a taste reminiscent of sodium carbonate, champagne in the buffet along with all those vacationers who came there before to enjoy the pleasant summer breeze, bright green, colorful views of the surrounding, natural open-air. However, artists and photographers did not have to wait. They were constantly coming up, offering their services for small fees, so that oil portraits and pictures of girls in bathing suits on the beach were featured in all popular foreign magazines, including Australia and Oceania.

“I will break through the cork. What a pity that only birds, dragonflies and butterflies have wings”, she thought with growing anger, striking the steering wheel with her right hand, accompanying her thoughts with a cheerful chant from the “Circus Princess” by Kalman’s operetta.

“Finally, we found a suitable candidate for lovers of musical masterpieces. Perhaps my abilities will prove to everyone about the girl’s adamant pursuit of her dream – to find a decent groom. How many decent people we have in the troupe, but they are all busy with their own problems,” Regina clearly represented her talented employees. “We must spit on the circumstances,” she suddenly decided. “For a few hours to plunge into the spaceships of the universe on the spacecraft, go in for phantasmagoria, the universe or just batten down the hatches and sail far to the east, to the Pacific Ocean.” The traffic jam on the road, which led to the airfield, where astronauts took exercises on flying, multi-tier simulators in the form of inverted, plastic, table plates, gradually resolved.

Regina had a familiar guy – Gabrielle – from the command of military paratroopers: a tall brunette with tight, sporty, brand trousers. He was waiting for her always near the light frame with the detector in his hands, checking for the presence of weapons in the trunk. He reminded her of a cross between a former marine infantryman and Avatar from an old, same-name version of the film directed by Cameron, who spent dozens of years and millions of dollars in shooting the film, but did not live up to the expectations of the audience.

They met by chance in the winter when she returned late from a rehearsal. Gabriel helped her recharge the battery, as she always discharged her car near the airfield because of the severe frost and alpha radiation from several radars that monitored the take-off and landing of flying simulators. Her compact electric car worked exclusively on an electric battery, so Gabriel did not have much difficulty in understanding the engine structure and taking Regina to the house, talking about her cosmic everyday life, constant takeoffs, the risk of encountering her work colleague in the open space and exploding on the way.

There was no transport around her, except for old “carts” – as she called gasoline-powered cars that had long been decommissioned, but used by very wealthy businessmen who didn’t save on energy but bought fuel from dealers from newly developed wells abroad. Looking into the rearview mirror, which followed her, she gladly found that there was nothing to fear, no one tried to overtake. To get to the location of the first and last theater in the city, she quickly flew at maximum speed to the post where the duty officer was stationed.

“We urgently need to check your electric car,” said Gabriel succinctly, frowning severely at the thought of leaving the post.

“Are you afraid I’ll die?” Regina asked this time.

She secretly fawned on a responsible officer who was in close proximity to her.

“Such incidents occurred periodically at our airport,” keeping a distance, Gabriel said carelessly, who was on duty that day.

“I hope you will save humanity and me from impending danger or a global catastrophe,” she said, being impressed by the accident seen in the morning, when three passengers from an updated small-sized sedan were laid onto the asphalt.

“I guess it all dreamed of me,” rejecting thoughts, she thought, looking away into the distance.

“Sure.”

“Then my car is at your disposal,” Regina suggested taking her to the place where the theater district of the city was located.

“Now I will call my colleague – the duty officer. Let him send a robot to record the radar’s radio emissions. Then we can cross the light frame, and I will take you wherever you say.”

He pressed the button of a nearby backup robot, so that the clones brought a new, radiation set to recharge. So he acted every time in case of emergency.

“Can we really go?” Regina asked, not realizing herself that she had already enveloped Gabrielle with an atmosphere, a slight breath, a subtle aroma, like an aura, with her own mystery.

“Sure. But you need to wait for a response signal that my actions are legitimate. Do not put employees at risk.”

“Well, we will wait as you say.”

Gabriel spent his life at the airfield, where his father served as deputy commander in chief, and his mother was counted among the attendants at the hotel complex as a restaurant and cafe manager. Their airfield was considered closed, as prisoners worked there with code bracelets on their feet. After three years of stay, they wrote off, sending to the exclusion zone, to live out their term or, at their own request, they could break the contract; engage in private business for supplying the airfield with fuel and lubricant, issuing materials, as natural oil and mineral springs disappeared from the depths of the earth because of the energy crisis. This regrettable event took humanity fifty years after the military disaster in Chernobyl. Then no one wanted to believe that for weddings and peers there was neither money nor territory: everything was set up with military training grounds and broken power lines.

Brussels sprouts, cucumbers, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, apples, plums and pears grew exclusively under glass caps in specially constructed greenhouses. Other names of fruits and vegetables were weathered from dictionaries, everyday speech, no longer emerging from anyone in the memory or on the surface of shelving than they all used as furniture.

The elaborate products of the XXII century of a proud digital civilization have gone into the distant past, leaving behind piles of plastic utensils, dilapidated concrete skyscrapers, smart phones, canned, unfinished greenhouses with no heating and watering, abandoned after several explosions of factories; overcrowded seaside beaches, piled up with tourists’ waste, and a large number of wearily wandering around, unemployed clones, whose place of residence were the same waste cemeteries, rusty, submarines abandoned in countless numbers in any accessible place.

The metal was considered the lowest-grade building material, suitable only for sale in suburban areas for the exchange of graphite and cellulose, in order to adapt the sprouts grown in the upper ground for transplanting into the area difficult for clones. Confucianism finally took precedence over visible other religions. Flourishing, destroying all the Gentiles, the world turned into a latrine for blasphemous evidence of the former digital civilizations, which had long gone to self-destruction thanks to the efforts of terrorists and criminals who managed in a relatively short period of about two centuries, which for the entire development of the planet was a trifle, – incur the curse of descendants.

“The wired system is deteriorating,” said Gabriel, when he examined the entire electric car, a signal came in that he could leave the duty officer to let the car through to the access zone.

“Is it dangerous?”

“We need to meet again after a general test,” he immediately scheduled her business meeting, trusting the roller robot as he did himself.

“Yes, you already told me about this,” she replied abruptly, suddenly losing her patience, not hoping to get into the theater troupe in the next half hour. “How much can you remind of the same thing,” she said in a melodious voice, like every opera diva who considered her personal duty to lead the process in any situation.

“Is it? I didn’t notice something,” he parried in embarrassment, soaring in the clouds.

“We need to work better, and not run girls at night,” said the princess, unceremoniously, suspecting him of all mortal sins.

“We’re not going to joke,” the attendant warned, approaching so closely that Regina had the feeling that he was keeping back on something.

“We will meet in orbit necessarily, if you are not listed as anything reprehensible, for example, military participation in criminal squabbles on the Eurasian continent or in Latin America. We can communicate telepathically.”

“Great idea!”

“Remember that you can just call me a princess. I am never late on a date for telepathic communication,” Regina was as talkative as all the enthusiastic girls of her age who had completed dramatic courses with excellent characterization. They were able to participate in all the historical films made to capture themselves and the course of development of the present transferred to the distant future, as Durer, Rembrandt, Raphael and other painters, representatives of the Renaissance did.

“Such a suit like you was popular among Jews in the last century. You dug up this stuff somewhere in the ruins of Turkish caves where the last tourists dumped their bags,” he said with a tinge of envy and malice, affecting the most painful theme for her appearance, since she didn’t meet the requirements of the fairy-tale princess.

“What do you dislike about my appearance?” she asked, looking at his rubber, like a diver, a black suit with two yellow stripes on the sides and shoulder straps.

“Reggie,” he immediately switched to a familiar tone.

“What is the lieutenant?”