There are times when a sequence of events can align so perfectly, so majestically appropriate, to transform even the biggest cynic into a believer. 

Such an event happened on the 29th of February 2064 on the luscious green cliffs of Phuket island, Thailand. The exact location was Sunset residences, a private property south of Kata village, right below road 4030 which winds north from Promthep cape, the southernmost point of the island, up to Kata beach, an attractive tourist destination. At 5:24 PM, Andryi the younger aka wizzkid, a 20-year old god of a man, is sunbathing on his porch contemplating life. His mother Beata is lounging around her own bungalow and stares silently at her mother-in-law Oksana. She reeks of alcohol, having just finished her third glass of white wine of the afternoon. The head of the family, Andryi the elder, is in his outside workshop doing some carpentry work. Sitting next to him in awed silence is little Linda, his granddaughter. As for Oksana, Andryi the elder’s own mother, she is perched atop a grey rock that has become her meditation place for the past ten years, right in front of her own house. It’s unclear whether Oksana is alive or dead, as she has not moved from her rock for the past couple years, and her skin looks like tree-bark . None of these people know they are about to have an epiphany. Except for Oksana, who’s probably dead. And for Linda, as she’s a toddler and toddlers don’t have epiphanies. 

Andryi the elder

We begin with Andryi the elder, who had fled Russia after the 2026 white-blue-white revolution. A former junior officer with eight years of service at the time of his fleeing the country, Andryi had seen by age twenty-four more death, dismemberment, torture and horror than one would see in a lifetime. He’d joined the Russian armed forces at 16, lying to the recruitment officer (not that they were checking anyway), and hoping to earn enough money and loot to get himself some nice stuff. What started as a simple drive for cash turned into a lifestyle, one that suited him. Discipline, hierarchy, guns and shooting, tanks, not to mention a kickass uniform to which women were drawn like flies. And so he stayed with the army, and was sent first to Donbas, then to Ukraine in the Shameful War, and then pulled home to defend Moscow against the warlord insurrections of 2024 and 2025. But at one point the tables have turned, and the country rejected daddy Putin who ended up rotting away in the Black Dolphin prison. Things changed and the new guys said they’re better. They wanted back in the trade with Europe. They wanted their yachts back. So they had to give some scapegoats to the bigwigs in Brussels and The Hague. And they began with the ministers and generals, but Europe was hungry for ‘justice’ and Zelenskyy would hammer on for more heads to fall. So Andryi started to expect that even he, a relatively low-level officer, might be sent to trial. His former deeds, which were once called heroic and loyal and professional, were now seen as barbaric and vile. He didn’t ‘obtain vital information’, he had ‘tortured civilians’. And it wasn’t ‘good platoon discipline’, but rather ‘hazing and psychological submission’. He had not ‘respected orders’, but rather ‘indiscriminately killed children’. He didn’t ‘take something for back home’, but ‘looted’.

He was twenty-four when he caught wind he’d have to show up in front of a military court in Moscow. And his actions in Donbas, Luhansk and Moscow, without the favourable light of the Putin regime, those would have looked particularly cruel. There wouldn’t be much leniency, considering the zealousness and ardour which permeated his official communications. His Telegram and phone call register were a treasure chest of proof of premeditation and ‘willingness to cooperate’. He was facing life in prison.

On the damp and cold night of 15 march 2026, his mother, whose name was Oksana, showed up in front of his door on the outskirts of Yekaterinburg. She’d come completely unannounced. He barely had time to acknowledge her presence when she reached out a firm hand, pulled his ear down and towards her face, then pinned him down with her steel eyes: ‘We’re going. Now’. That’s all she said. And it was enough to make an officer, war criminal and still-mommy’s-boy follow like a puppy. She didn’t leave him time pack a bag or to grab his money, his watches, his gold, nothing. They walked out of his lavish house and into a black Mercedes. She had him sit in the back and started driving, a determined forty-five year old woman protecting her son like a lioness. In the trunk they had a big bag of cash, it was five million US dollars whose provenance Andryi never asked about.

Together they drove east through Siberia. They passed Tyumen, Omsk and Novosibirsk. They only stopped for gas, for food and to sleep in the car. Oksana refused to let him drive, opining it’d be in his best interest to lay on the back seat anytime they’d pass a police station or some suspicious area. Her plan became clear when they reached the sparsely populated Altai region. For anyone wondering, Altai is to Siberia what Siberia is to the world. She drove into a private driveway in one of the villages on the way to the Mongolian border. There was a 4×4 prepared, looking beaten up but sturdy, a Toyota pickup truck with what looked like around 200 litres of fuel neatly stacked in canisters on the flatbed. They moved their bags, left the Mercedes in the driveway, Oksana pushed the keys through the mailbox, and told him it was now his turn to drive. They found an annotated map in on the drivers’ seat and a compass. Oksana revealed they were to take the Betsu-Kanas Pass and actually drive into China, across the Altai plateau. What followed, was a ten-hour off-road drive across the barren landscape with nothing but rocks, eternal snow and abandoned yurts as company. Andryi, while familiar with such landscapes from his training in the army, nevertheless found himself struggling to keep focus while navigating ravines, sharp rocks and snow-ice. He ended up calling it a day at 8 PM when the sun was completely gone and his headlights were not revealing enough. They slept with the engine idle and the next day they reached lake Ka Nasi, which was the sign that they were finally across the border into mainland China.

They didn’t stop there. They kept driving east through Xinjiang province – Uyghur land – and finally drove their Toyota into a dealership to exchange for more comfortable wheels. They kept south-east for several days, this time taking hotels along the way, with much-needed showers and clean beds, which was a welcome change from the rough conditions they’d been sleeping in until then. Driving into Laos and then Thailand was a breeze, especially once Oksana produced new passports for the both of them. They might have looked caucasian, but the passport was Thai, and their last names were Thai, and nobody gave them a second thought.

And so they arrived and set about rebuilding their lives. They were smart with their money. They invested four of the five million dollars in a couple hostels and local restaurants. Nothing extravagant. A few years in, they were able to get their hands on a beautiful, richly vegetated property, a hectare nestled on steep slopes south of Kata beach and directly overlooking the Andaman sea. It was undeveloped, and Andryi welcomed the project. He called it the Sunset residence, an homage to the almost surreal view of glistening tropical waters that welcomed him and his dear mother every cloudless evening. 

And what a sunset it was. One for the ages. From between ferns and banana trees, one would watch the sun turn shades of mellow yellow and ochre, its rays shimmering across calm, rippling seas, and dotted across the horizon would be the fishermen’s boats, their old contraption engines thrumming across the seascape. Every now and then, sunbirds and kingfishers would dart across the purpling skies. Andryi would gaze, drink his whiskey, and forget about his mansion in Yekaterinburg, his friends back in Russia, his time in the army, and his former life. Instead, he focused on the present. He used the infinite supply of low-key revenue to build a couple hut-houses in the traditional Thai style and with modern comforts. A modest asphalt lane winding down into the canopy. A tended forest garden and cobbled alley down to his place, then the same alley swiping up towards Oksana’s residence, around a large limestone boulder, with stone sculptures shaped like tropical birds – a hornbill and a few parrots. The thatched roofs and mud-coloured wall finishings camouflaged the houses into the surrounding landscape, yet massive reflective windows and outside rain showers kept an air of contemporaneity.

Oksana aged and got weird. She had conflicting stories about his own father and why he was not in the black Mercedes the night of their flight. One time he had died from heart attack upon hearing the news about his son’s imminent trial. But then she never took him to a hospital, apparently it was a very immediate heart attack. But then other times he had drunk himself into a coma and wasn’t responsive. Yet another time, he was chased down by loansharks from MIKRO Capital and REVO, and actually wasn’t dead at all, but rather had run away from home because he was afraid they’d pull all his fingernails out. Yet another time, he slipped on ice while walking drunk to buy a bottle of vodka in the middle of the night and crushed his head against a raised boardwalk.

As for the money, the five million dollars in cash, he never asked his mother. He knew such money cannot have come via run-of-the-mill methods, and expected she’d done some pretty heavy stuff to secure it. He told himself he’d allow her to tell that story in her own time. Except she never did, and now she was turning crazier and a lot more into Thai Christianity. She’d display an amalgam of saints statues on her porch, some Christian but some with the recognisable Thai head dressings. Sometimes, she’d just buy some run-of-the-mill Jesus statues online from Chinese websites and adorn them with additional Thai wear and headdresses. For herself, there were a lot of yoga poses, meditation and sunlight drinking mixed in with aggressive fasting and reciting passages upon passages from her tattered Cyrillic bible. She turned anal about all the flowers in her garden and wouldn’t allow people to touch them. Which was tantalising, because they were downright breathtaking.

While Oksana was busy finding meaning into herself, he looked for that meaning by imprinting on his surroundings. And so his shed turned full of heavy building equipment which he used to chisel, demolish and erect various features on the property. He started with a flight of stairs all the way to the sea. And once that was done, he built a small quay. For easy access in canoes and smaller speedboats. Then he set his eyes on a fairly level area nestled against a crevice and decided to turn it into a walkable sunbathing place. And once that was also done, he started looking into terracing the whole property. The work was easy on the mind and moderate on the body, he didn’t really stress to get things done fast. He’d work on each project at a leisurely pace, happy to just follow the process and see the plans come to reality day by day, week by week. In the evenings, when the fat, blood orange sun would set into the sea, view from his porch immense and unobstructed, and he could lay and relax his muscles and pick up books about his favourite topics: eugenics, ecofascism, historical revisionism, esoteric race theory and other neo-nazi works.

At one point, Beata came into the picture. She was a nineteen-year old backpacker from Czechia, at a time when he was thirty-nine. It was a fortuitous meeting. He was coming to collect from one of the hostels he owned. It was nighttime, 10:13. He could hear some commotion already before opening the heavy metal front door. When he looked towards reception, he found her desperate. Her reservation had not gone through. The hostel was fully booked, there was nowhere for her to spend the night. She had just arrived from Bangkok and was tired, wired and energy-expired. Her enormous rucksack had all the unnecessary accessories that a teenager would think are needed on ‘the Southeast Asia trip’. Like clanging metal thermoses, a Camelpak drinking flask with those really long straws, a couple towels badly folded, flip flops, a second pair of hiking boots and even one of those ridiculous camo jungle hats.

Beata the empty

At the moment that Andryi opened the hostel’s front door, Beata had just collapsed on her own backpack, which rustled under her weight. She was desolate, desperate and decidedly gorgeous. And so he made a natural offer, for her to come back to his own property and spend that first night on his couch. As soon as he offered, she rose with the largest smile on her face, still hiccuping from crying, and thanked him profusely. In many circumstances, a rather stupid decision for a single young girl to make, going back home with a stranger, in a strange country, and after sundown.

Andryi knew in that moment, that she would never leave Thailand.

Nothing happened that night. He drove her to his house, chased cockroaches and geckos off his front door, then opened to an air-cooled, nice smelling living room. Beata passed out on the inviting couch without a drink, glass of water or even a ‘thank you’. The next morning, she got her bearings. And walking around the patio, she immediately became enamoured with the Sunset residences. The terraces were beautiful and the fact they were ‘handmade’ made them exhilarating in her eyes. The house itself, she found sublime in its simplicity. And she was most intrigued by the forest garden, with its vanillas, jackfruit trees, bananas, mangos, avocados, as well as myriads of other plants she couldn’t even begin to describe, let alone identify. So in the lazy afternoon, after a thorough tour of the terraces and a dip in the welcoming waters, she looked out towards the Andaman sea and told him that the sky was clear of any clouds, and that a gorgeous sunset was upon them, and that she wanted to see it. From his house. And Andryi did not say a word, he didn’t even smile, because this is what he knew would happen.

Three weeks later, nineteen-year-old Beata was calling her parents back in Czechia with the fated announcement: she’d be getting married. In Thailand. She’d found true love, and it was real and beautiful and burning, and it was for the owner of the Sunset residences.

As soon as the marriage decision was made, Andryi picked up the phone and called a shady Chinese-run clinic in Bangkok, one he had been introduced to earlier via via, and which was specialised in gene splicing. They hopped in the car that morning and he drove for several hours weaving through thick traffic. And when they walked into the blank white waiting room of this nondescript office building in a busy intersection, the doctor had already prepared a dossier for them. It was pages upon pages of splicr and crispr gene adjustments, addressing a wide gamut: eye and hair colour, facial features – with generated 3d representation based on their own very faces, height indications, muscle mass ratios, predisposition to get fat, heightened addiction resistance, disease resistances, pain tolerances, you name it. He studied the dossier for the better part of the day, page by page and item by item. Beata didn’t really understand much and was bored, but she felt the need to support her future husband. So she ferried cans of coke and glasses of water from the vending machine to the doctors’ office, while decisions were individually being made about the genetic makeup of her firstborn.

And this is how the lot was drawn on Andrew. When choosing his name, Beata argued for the anglicised version, as it would be better for his future. His father didn’t care much about what’s in a name so allowed Beata to have her way. Unsurprisingly, Andryi the elder was of the belief that a man makes a name for themselves, they don’t just receive one. What little Andrew was to receive, was demigod powers, all paid for from daddy’s wallet. Who built his own son in a light-blue and white dossier with laminated pages.

And so the existence of Andrew was initiated: predestined, superhuman and larger than life. Larger than his mothers’ birth canal for sure, as the doctors soon found out as the delivery began. They were forced to take her in for an emergency c-section that butchered her insides and rendered her sterile. Turns out, there’s more than just gene splicing involved in giving birth to the ubermensch.

Even in his first seconds of life, Andryi had already made a strong impression. The doctors reached into Beata’s uterus, pulled him out and ushered him to another room for weighing and assessing. While she was laying in the operating room splayed open with nurses fumbling about, Andryi was stunning doctors with perfect pinkish skin. He had a strong pulse, a powerful cry and remarkably flexed arms and legs. They gave him a perfect Apgar score of 10, which is quite unusual among children in general, and even more so among those born through c-section. His father expected nothing less. It was to be the first and last time he’d ever get a perfect score at anything.

Days passed and weeks passed and it started to dawn on Beata the immensity of the change in her life. Little did she know in those first few days, she’d soon be well advised to even forget her own name, for whoever she was before Andrew was born, that person had stopped existing the moment her barren uterus was sutured back up. At first, she expected Oksana to chip in, offer some grandmotherly guidance, take care of the baby every now and then while she’d pass out from exhaustion on the porch divan, bathed in warm orange light. But unfortunately this did not happen, Oksana was busy discovering meaning within herself through ritualistic readings of her bible, sitting in yoga poses six to eight hours a day, and eating raw salads made with magnolia flowers, unripe bananas and sun-dried cockroaches.

Her husband did not really get involved in raising baby either, he was annoyed to say the least, and probably agitated or angry, to be around his son. He’d have no tolerance for the incessant crying for more and more milk, which Beata clearly was not producing in sufficient quantities, or to changing diapers, or to play and entertain the little one. Sleep deprived and at a loss of what to do, twenty-year-old Beata tried calling her own parents over. After a couple unsuccessful visits to the Sunset residence however, they decided the demands of supporting her would have been too much strain on their own comfortable lives in the pleasant sunflower-fields outside Prague. And so they left the picture, leaving her alone with an eternally hungry and unsatisfied baby, a disengaged husband – whom they did not approve of to begin with – and an all-but-crazy mother-in-law who was always mumbling Russian scripture..

She pressed her husband to step up and do more, but he seemed to believe his fathering work to have concluded upon birth. After all, he’d provided this child with the winningest of hands, and at the greatest of expenses. All that needed to happen, or at least that’s what his father thought, was for this child to reach adulthood, at least young adulthood, unscathed. He did relent to Beata’s request for tactical help. And so he provided again, this time for a couple nannies to take on the many responsibilities of childcare. But not before building an additional house further down the slope and closer to the sea for the mother and child. That way he could have the child’s cries, fusses and shoutings away from his own space while being able to keep an eye on the fam.

Days and weeks passed and soon little Andrew started getting bossy and demanding and doing little boy stuff. But there was a double edged sword in having a superbaby. Compared to the Thai kids and even to the non-edited ones of other expats, he was simply more, bigger and better. Andrew was dominating, muscling his way into others’ playground games, he was talking them under the table and overshadowing everyone around him. There was no question to have him play with peers anymore, they were just not able to contain him. So his playdates had to come from increasingly higher age brackets. And when he didn’t get his way, it was absolute hell. Daycare complaints, school complaints, playdate complaints started pouring onto Beata’s head. He was pushing kids into holes. He was loud-mouthed and foul-mouthed. He was always the boss. Beata would raise her shoulders: He WAS very smart. And very strong. And he never got sick. And it didn’t hurt HIM when he was jumping or falling on rocks. Naturally he was struggling to understand how the others couldn’t keep up.

Andryi the elder was boasty and happy with these developments. His son was carving a name into the world and he was doing it with vigour and strength. He didn’t see how neighbours and friends slowly thinned out their visits until they were ‘always busy’. He also didn’t really care, he never cared for being social anyway. But Beata did care, and it was making her upset to drive up to the International School and get the mean looks from other parents. She could feel their eyes burn judgement onto her forehead. They were probably second-guessing their own choices, should THEY have paid extra for an edited kid? Too late now, so rather act like Andrew is a freak and tell your kid not to play with him. That seemed safe. The safety of the herd, the ‘dumb’ herd as Andryi the elder always referred to it, which he detested. Beata however, she did feel a need of belonging and her life was not providing that. The other moms were always busy, they always had something else to do, never time for drinks and coffee. She was alone, and she detested it. Her life was empty.

That’s why in one random evening, she just decided to stay out late. She wouldn’t come home from dinner at her local sushi haunt anymore, she wanted to see what could happen if she just went out partying, and dancing, and stopped being a mom for a night. So she texted Lamai, one of her nannies, and offered double wage to stay the night. Lamai was happy to oblige, and so Beata texted her one and only single friend and together they painted the island red. It was exhilarating, and precious, and amazing, and the next morning when Andrew woke up at half past six, and came over to her bed, all she had to do was point a sleeping finger to Lamai and that was it, stress and trouble disappeared. So she could nurse her hangover until late in the afternoon, and by then Andrew had finished school and his boxing classes and his piano classes so they had a good time around the dinner table, Beata feeling upbeat and refreshed, and Andrew winding down from his normal schedule and getting ready to hit the sack.

Beata had finally found her stride and it changed her life. Over the next years, the sight of sleeping mommy and the loving arms of either Lamai or Kanchana, the other nanny, had become the new reality for Andrew. It didn’t take long for him to figure out what was going on and why mommy was sleeping during the day, but this was life and that was that. He was happy for the time he spent with her, and particularly happy in those weekends when his mom would take him shopping and spend a paralysing amount of money because ‘daddy’s paying, that’s the least he can do’, and he got accustomed to seeing her flirt with the beautiful people at the mall, or immerse in his Apple Vision Max while she was drinking her midday wine with her childless friends. What he never got accustomed to, were the violent bouts of overflowing love that she’d sometimes shower him with, mostly in the afternoon and after a few wineglasses. These bouts would come out of nowhere, and in them she’d pull him close and bearhug him and whisper wine-scented platitudes in his ear, saying how much he meant to her, how much she loved him, how it’ll work out okay and how precious he was. Which was pretty inconsistent with her behaviour one hour later, where she’d start getting busy for going clubbing, good shoes out and glitter dress on and makeup on and instas posted, and when he stopped existing for her.

Oksana the petrified

Where was senior mother Oksana during all these years? What had become of the woman who had obtained millions of dollars in cash, drove Moscow to Yekaterinburg in the middle of the night, picked up her son and beelined to the furthest corners of Russia? The one who could obtain clandestine passports, who had connections in the distant hamlets of the Altai mountains, who negotiated a new car in the back alleys of rural China, and who concocted such a great escape plan?

It’s hard to say what happened to her, really. She had always been a woman of few words and fierce stares, one who despite a short and stocky stature, could command a room through the size of her bright red permanent, deep voice and piercing glances. Like a redcap mushroom, she was not to be meddled with and better left to her own devices. Such devices though, they changed during her time in Thailand. Who knows what got to her. Maybe she did indeed blend Christianity into Buddhism, or the other way around, to a higher meaning. Maybe she only just liked statues of Jesus and turned a bit crazy painting them in traditional Thai motifs. Maybe she got syphilis or some other mind-altering disease that ate away at her brain and convinced her it was okay to eat cockroaches, dragonflies and vanilla flowers. Maybe she went all in on Buddhism, and whatever bible she’d been carrying and reading from was just an empty husk. Could also be, that the harrowing trip out of Russia burned away all her mental resources, and left her chronically depleted. Whatever it was, it slowly pulled her away from the world and pushed her to look inwards.

Andryi built her house at the highest point of the property, and she had a terrific view of the whole place from her limestone boulder. It was a simple cottage where none of the inhabitants were allowed in. She would lash out at those trying to get close to the front door, guard it like a living gargoyle from her meditation rock, and the few times she did leave her chosen spot, she’d lock the door always. She rarely, if ever, left the Sunset property itself, arguing that she didn’t ‘need’ to go anywhere since the world was coming to her. She didn’t make any acquaintances or friends, seemed oblivious to Beata’s presence and then to Andrew’s existence, and she only ever interacted with her son, mostly on basic needs like groceries, consumables or fixing something about the exterior of her house. Most of her time she’d spend either deep in meditation, eyes closed and looking stiff, or carefully painting her Jesus miniatures, of which by the time Andrew became a teenager, she must have had hundreds. At one point she stopped buying them online, and Andrew could see her begin to paint the same miniatures over and over again, as if the end product was never the goal, but rather a byproduct of keeping her eyes and hands busy.

What did come by post, one fateful morning, was a new book which took everyone by surprise because she only ever had one book, to read, and that was her Russian bible. The excitement soon dissipated once Andryi read the title: ‘The ancient art of freedom through self-mummification’, and it kind of explained the obvious for everyone: The old hag had lost her marbles. She was taking interest in apocryphal accounts of primeval and medieval monks who may or may not have drunk their own urine and eaten wood shavings and lathered themselves with salty mud in hopes of perpetually entering nirvana from their petrified lotus positions. Andryi didn’t believe in a higher power nor in heaven nor in nirvana and even less in the veracity of whatever was written in that piece of speculative history, but nevertheless had decided to stay silent about her. She wasn’t hurting anyone and she was, at the end of the day, his own mother.

Beata on the other hand, she did say things, many things. She’d point out the horrific smells of decrepitude and necrosis that would sometimes waft downhill from Oksana’s house. She’d ask why he wasn’t helping his mother. Why was he not moving her to an asylum. Send her to a shrink. Get her to clean herself up. Speak sense into her. The child needed attention and Beata needed help. Why was he letting his mom go cray-cray like that. The later in the afternoon Beata would start her inquiry, the more wineglasses she would have had, and the more brazen her words. What kind of a son was he. What kind of a model was he for Andrew. One that deserts the family. Could he not see and hear and smell that death was coming, and it was sitting on a boulder in clear daylight for all to gawk at. Was he somehow missing the part where she wasn’t eating anything anymore and her cheeks had sucked into her skull, her eyes were two billiard balls perpetually covered with unmovable eyelids. The poor woman was living in darkness and nothingness, whereas he was chiselling away at the cliffs like nothing was up. Had he no regrets. Had he no heart. Was he a coward, and an ungrateful son.

All these words would bounce off Andryi like rifle rounds across his tank back in the war. He had made up his mind long ago: say nothing, see nothing, draw the curtains over the scene and pretend it wasn’t happening. She wasn’t hurting anyone.

The two nannies, Kanchana the fat and Lamai glasses, had become 24 hour helpers by now. They also did not want anything to do with Oksana. Their main concern was to keep little Andrew from going up there. Which they tried, but couldn’t, because he was sly and tricky and he just loved flicking pebbles across Oksana’s forehead to see if he could get her to react. In the beginning she’d shout and try to shoo him away, later on this was reduced to a simple frown or a snicker of her nose. But as years went by, the physical feedback from Oksana was less and less, and at one point when Andrew was about fourteen, she stopped responding altogether. That’s when he realised that she was bound to pass away, for real, a real human willing themselves into nothingness. Soon after he decided, out of the blue and unrelated, to call himself Andryi, just like his father, and take down the ‘fake Andrew charade’.

Andryi the younger, wizzkid

So from now on we’ll call him Andryi and to keep it clear we’ll refer to him as Andryi the younger or wizzkid, which was his VR handle.

It will come to no surprise to hear that Andryi the younger also needed some nurture in his life, and that without it, he would become an asocial reject. His first years were great. He had lots of freedom to roam the Sunset property, which seemed enormous from his viewpoint. He’d spend beautiful Thai days watching fisherman venture into the Andaman sea every morning at 5 AM, observing them come back at 5 PM. Mommy Bee (read, Beata) was great to play with as long as she was awake and sober. Daddy was around more frequently than mommy, always busy with something, always coming and going and making and breaking, but never in the mood for doing fun stuff. Luckily, he could always depend on Kanchana the fat or Lamai glasses. Kanchana was the queen of the kitchen and she reigned supreme, pots in hand and bags of food sprawled around her open kitchen, endlessly busy with stir fries, plumes of sweet-and-sour steam rolling across her large body while her hands whisked and chopped away. In between her cooking sessions they could play hide and seek. And when she was busy, then he would dance to guitar music from Lamai with big black frame glasses, who was practicing to be in a band. During the hot days of the dry season, he’d drink coconut water under leaves of banana trees and watch throngs of tourists crowd the distant beaches like little colourful ants.

Daddy also put out some finances when it came time to go to school. He enrolled his son to the most expensive private school in Phuket, the International School Phuket, when he was just four years old. He did this because he expected the little one to fly through the curriculum, and didn’t care to hear the teachers’ pleas about adequate socio-emotional development and how that could affect a child too young to start school. On the contrary, Andryi was keen to see his son demonstrate vivacity, strength of character and, thought but not said, to assert himself as the alpha he was destined to be. Daddy wanted to be made proud.

Things did not really go this way though. His son showed little interest in study and structured learning, and instead preferred to just do whatever and enjoy himself. He’d found it easy to simply overpower and beat up whichever kid wasn’t singing his tune. To manipulate other kids and teachers. And when parents were inevitably called into school, it was Beata who was sent to receive the cold shower of ‘we can’t help him here’. A harsh sounding but meaningless threat, Andryi knew what to do. And after a generous donation to the schools’ solar roof initiative, the headmaster soon found some new ways to ‘help him there’ and any official complaints were buried. Andryi the younger didn’t even get a slap on the wrist back home. But if the school could be bought with cash, the other parents couldn’t. They despised the fact their kids had to share the class with him, and kept complaining about it.

With teachers dancing around the problem, they ended up acting inconsistent and giving him even more space to skip classes and wreck havoc. Which led to a very troubled teenage period where he was left completely unchecked. His father was too distant to care about such things, and Beata had already discovered the magical world of bar crawling. So he picked up smoking, and weed, and bath salts, and a shitty entourage, and dive bars, fights, driving without a license and pretty much anything else a teenager can think about doing. It was enough for Beata to even hint at some form restraint, he’d just laugh in her face, tell her there’s nothing she can do about it, then turn around and leave. She knew he’d steal if they didn’t give, and he knew she knew he would steal or mug if he wasn’t getting what he wanted. In a few years, he pushed away all the friends he had made as a kid and started hanging out with gangs and causing trouble.

Not even his father couldn’t reign him in, he’d hear him out about not wanting to pay him out of jail and then he’d just say: ‘Drop the stories old man, we both know you want to protect your investment. Cause that’s what I am, an investment and a project.’ And then he’d bugger off to start some shit somewhere else. By now the school had had enough of him, the solar panels had long paid their initial cost and the principal took Beata aside to tell her he was done with all this. In the end, the shameful yet effective solution again came from Andryi the elder: write him down as graduated without having to show up for any more classes. So he got his diploma in a mail after one and a half years of not showing up to school.

It’s worth mentioning that daddy was not entirely unhappy with how things were going. Maybe he was just overly optimistic, or blinded by his desire for a great progeny, but he was lowkey applauding his son going out clubbing and partying until morning at age fourteen, hanging out with older teenagers, getting in fights and winning them, and overall doing adult stuff already.

But as Andryi the younger turned fifteen, friction started to build with his dad and they begun a good old fashioned dick measuring competition. Who was living his life better? Who was making the better choices? Who was accomplishing the most? Which one had the ‘correct’ philosophy about the world? Who was the scaredy cat? Who was stupider? Stronger? More driven?

By age sixteen, Beata came over to complain about him still living with her. There were parties and they were annoying and acting like teenagers do. They were ‘hanging out’ for days at the house doing nothing but getting high and listening to shitty music. Kids were constantly coming in and out of her house and it was always new ones and she couldn’t keep track of who was who. Her porch was full of scooters and bikes. Plus she had noticed some of her jewellery was missing. She was confident at least one of those kids stole panties from her. Things had to change and Andryi had to do something, like the ‘head of the family’ he claimed to be. So he did something, he set about building yet another house on the property, with its own driveway and hidden behind eternal palm trees and pink-red hibiscus bushes. The vegetation would ensure to muffle and push the annoying autotune music and the party noise towards the sea.

After ten months of work, the house was finished, and everyone was happy. Father had mother off his back. Mother was finally able to bring her own mid-thirties friends over without her place looking like a trap house. And the son, well who can say no to such a life? Barely seventeen, his own place, Kanchana was still around, cooking for him and cleaning for him. Privacy galore in his new place, between the separate driveway, the secluded porch, the good soundproofing and windows only looking towards the sea. One can only imagine how little it took for a rich, buff, gorgeous seventeen-year old with a massive schlong and no parental supervision to figure out what to do with their free time: Onlyfans.

This is how it came to be that on a musty October evening, after three years of sex on camera, hundreds of partners and a nice stable audience, Andryi the younger, Onlyfans handle wizzkid, showed up on his mothers’ door asking to have dinner together. And at that dinner, he told her he got someone pregnant and that someone did not want to terminate the pregnancy. His mom turned shades of eyeroll yellow and asked him to take this to his father, he was the fixer not her. But he didn’t want anything fixed, he didn’t need the girl to be ‘convinced’ to ‘make the right decision or else’. What he wanted, was a blessing to become a father. He said he felt ready, and he had enough money stashed away to provide for his future born for at least a few years. But he acknowledged he was barely twenty, and hadn’t had the best role model for fathering. So, he needed some encouragement. He needed Beata to tell him it will be OK and he actually does have the makings of a nice, stable, father.

What is a mom to do if not support her child, her only child at that? She told him what he needed to hear and said the little one would be welcomed on the property, she’d make sure of that. She doubted the mother would be allowed unless he wanted to make the relationship serious, which he didn’t. A few days later, she walked up to Andryi the elders’ home with the news. By now she knew how to address such sensitive topics and to get out of him what she wanted, and this was no different. He agreed to provide support for his son and to at least accept to be a grandfather. At the end of the day, not much was actually asked of him anyway.

Little Linda

There was much surprise when little Linda was born. She was healthy and kicking, but nobody expected grandpa Andryi to show interest. Instead, he showed up a few hours after the delivery, entered the hospital room with balloons and flowers and a massive teddy bear, he congratulated his son and the mom for a wonderful baby. He observed it intently and reached out a muscular finger towards her miniature palm. She grabbed his finger and opened her little blue eyes and looked at his face and wouldn’t let go. Without either of them knowing, an unexpected bond was created.

Back on the property, Kanchana was already busy with all the housework so she needed help if she was to raise the new member of the family. New nannies were selected, two of them this time – after all, nobody on the property had much idea on how to raise a baby, and Beata wasn’t prepared to acknowledge she’d become a grandmother at age forty. She did not need to be the very least involved though. Little Linda grew surrounded by both fatherly and grandfatherly love. ‘The boys’ would race to one-up each other with playtime, toys and fun activities. When grandpa took her on his porch to sing lullabies (he knew lullabies? would think Beata. Why did he not do this for her?), then daddy would pull out the baby sling and walk her on the beach. Grandpa had her on his shoulders while pruning lime trees and cutting bananas, daddy would teach her to climb said lime and banana trees. Grandpa would take her in when she was coughing and sick, daddy would rush to pick her up when she fell on soft grass. Grandpa took her swimming, daddy taught her diving. Grandpa gave wet kisses, daddy gave tickles. They couldn’t get enough of her.

And Beata would just sit there, have to do nothing, and complain to her still-childless friends about this family she’d gotten herself tangled with, which she didn’t understand anymore. How could it be that Andryi was so cold towards her when she had delivered, whereas now as a grandfather, he was so engaged? Why had she been left with a crying, hungry toddler while now her son was getting all the help? She felt rejected and dejected. She had not received the support she expected, all along she believed that’s just how he was, a cold disinterested person. All of a sudden, this small girl walks into the picture and now he’s so different! She could only reason that that coldness, that distance and separation, it was not part of who he was, but rather meant for her. She’d bring this up to her friends who were more than happy to be her sounding board and agree. But most annoying, and impossible for her to accept, was that she actually WANTED to be involved, she WANTED to be asked to babysit, and to give advice, and maybe also to cook or care for little Linda, but nobody asked her to. And when she collected her thoughts and decided to walk down herself and offer help, she got turned around with a nice smile and a ‘thank you, dad will help’. She was unnecessary, she was empty.

On the 29th of February 2064 at 5:24 PM, Beata was reflecting on her role – and status – in the Sunset property and family, and she was holding a glass of white wine while turned away from the sea and looking at the silhouette of Oksana, up in the distance, as she sat in her lotus meditation pose on the limestone boulder, overlooking the entire cliffside. The setting sun illuminated her browned leather skin which was glistening and smooth. She could not help but feel there was indeed an immense force at play, for what else could there be to push one into sitting so still, so immobile, for years on end?

It was in that moment that she heard the warcry of Australian Jesus.

Noah the Australian Jesus

We need to go back one day. On the afternoon of the 28th of February 2064, Noah Robinson was drinking his seventh shot of strawberry-flavoured augmented caffeine in a dive bar in Nai Harn, South Phuket. He’d been around for several weeks, looking to take the edge off and relax after a particularly rough six months as a commercial liquid breathing diver. His host vessel, the Gibraltar-registered Slag&Mane, asked his team take extra shifts and repair several underwater server farms off the American West coast. Now, after a last stint doing a routine maintenance check on the Australian – Indonesian underwater internet exchange point off the island of Java, his long-awaited holiday has arrived. He asked to be dropped in Jakarta. From there, he’d been visiting friends, relatives and sexpads all around Southeast Asia.

He was tall, broad-shouldered and light-olive skinned. His sunbathing approach had always been to pass out on the beach during the midday sun, burn his skin as soon as possible, and then mix opium for the pain with tumor blockers and pyrimidine inhibitors to prevent cancer. That way, within the week he’d already shed his first skin and was sporting a luscious chocolatey second layer for the tropical sun. He had stopped shaving as soon as he got off the Slag&Mane, and now wore a bushy month-old beard, all healthy strands of gold and light brown. He had brown-blue eyes like shallow waters and long hair which smelled of ocean waves.

The sky turned shades of violet as the sun faded on the afternoon of the 28th of February, and Noah was ultrapumped. Decked up on caffeine, keen to get the party started and looking forward to the evening regulars showing up in Kong Cafe after their jaded nine-to-fives. He was getting animated, meeting some pals, fist-checking some bros and swearing at his drinks for no real reason other than to hear some good-old cunt-bombs said out loud. And in his joyous fervour, as the bar itself got full and the atmosphere merry, he could finally forget about the waterboarding sensation he got every time he needed to swallow fluorocarbon fluid before a dive.

People came and left. Suits were showing up, lean whitewashed faces that barely saw the sun. They were getting hammered within a couple drinks and moved on. Some old-school Rastas were sitting at the wooden tables outside, their creviced faces drowned by white-blue wafts of smoke. The evening turned to night and the night turned to 3 AM and the music was exhilarating and the drugs were working and 600 meters underwater darkness was a distant memory and life was good. Then 5 in the morning rolled around and the crowd had thinned and the beat was slow, the sky turned violet-red-orange again and he didn’t pull anyone tonight, but that was fine because he wasn’t really into sexual release anymore.

Morning was upon him and with it the fishermen were sailing out, the cleaners and servants were waiting for their early rides along road 4030. The breeze was shifting, the air was as cool as it would ever be, the sea was calm and families with kids would soon emerge from their reasonably priced hotel rooms. The 28th of February might have been over for the night owls, but the 29th was about to start, and the guard change was beautiful to witness. A time of calm before the storm. Soon taxis and scooters would start buzzing through the busy streets, picking up whoevers to drop wherevers. Noah was accepting this calm but not succumbing to it, he wanted to keep going. He was at his thirteenth augmented caffeine shot because he didn’t want to sleep, he wanted to keep awake. But the electrochemistry was running on empty and his brain was asking for resources. He hadn’t slept in sixty-three hours, his cortex needed more than just ultra caffeine to function. It needed dopamine, it needed glucose, it needed nutrition. And so Noah took his scooter and rode south-west along the coast, because he knew a clandestine pharmacy with a basic chemistry lab where he was allowed to mix his own concoction. Close to the Seaview Elephant Sanctuary. And so around 8 AM on February the 29th 2063, 500 meters down south from Sunset Residences, a quiet and servile Thai man unlocked the door for Noah Robinson to enter a windowless room with whirring machines and curious contraptions. Noah was completely unaware he was working to end his life.

It took Noah several hours before he could bottle up his electro-brew. It was a transparent – brownish liquid, not unlike the colour of muddy water, but gave a zingy feel on the tongue and had a light acid taste, more vinegary than lemony. What is inside? Things to keep the brain going. Psylobicin, folded proteins, electrolytes and PCP. He would proceed to sip on his brew throughout the remainder of the day.

One might wonder what Noah got up to in the following hours, but such adventures might have been real as well as fabricated in his supercharged brain. It might be that he did, indeed, hike for two hours through the jungle to find a wild elephant herd, that he climbed on the back of one and then continued climbing into the canopy to grab coconuts. Or maybe he just imagined this while drooling on a bench in front of a 7-11. It might be that he went to Yanui beach and dashed into the sea, discovering myriad fish along the coast and swimming until his fingertips were burning from the salty water, or maybe he just daydreamed this while laying in a sweat-drenched hostel bed. It might be that he went back to his favourite haunt to carry on drinking and dancing in the middle of the day, or maybe he was just given a drop of water by a good samaritan. It could be he circled the island twice on his scooter, stopping only for a battery change, while seeing himself third person like in a video game, or that he actually walked around a tree in circles for an hour, carefully stepping in his own footsteps and peeing on himself.

What is certain, is that by 5:23 PM on that day the 29th of February, Noah was again on his electric scooter and driving down the 4030. He was swerving around the traffic enjoying the scenery and the acceleration. And he looked at his watch, saw it was past 5 PM, and decided to celebrate 72 hours of being awake by flying himself into the sun. He thought it a good idea, since the sun was right there, within reach. A warm orange ball to wrap his hands around. All he needed was enough speed to keep him flying in a straight line towards it. But at 5 PM the sun was already setting, you could see it roll down into the water, and that made him anxious. He needed to reach it soon before it was swallowed whole by the Andaman sea. He drove until he found a nice straight and slightly ascending stretch on the 4030. He relied on his fast scooter, whose limiter he had deactivated, and on its incredible electric torque. In addition, at the top of the climb, where the road turned a sharp right, the railings were missing. Perfect ramp to launch himself out and hug the sun. He took a hefty gulp of electro-brew and turned the throttle all the way. The scooter whirred and gave that spaceship whizz you hear when the induction engines suck full amperage. There was a car coming from the other direction, he kept focus doing close to 170 km/h at the moment the asphalt ran out.

There it was, the sun ready for his embrace, and him flying effortlessly towards it. He unclenched his hands off the handlebars and let out a roar for the ages, like that of a warrior of old heading into battle, long and fierce. He did not blink, wanting to see it all. See the sun getting closer and closer, bigger and bigger. His body shot upwards for two seconds, and then proceeded to fall like any projectile would.

The scooter fell on Oksana’s rooftop, rattled loudly across the tiles and fell onto her body, crushing her meditating pose. No sound and no blood came out, a clear sign that she had long ago breathed her last breath and had actually succeeded in self-mummification.

Beata the empty heard the warcry and looked up from Oksana just in time to see the scooter fall and tumble. She watched the tanned madman.  For one second, which was to become eternal, he flew through the air into the setting sun like Jesus rose into heaven. Unafraid, unabashed, arms raised, feet straight, golden locks fluttering in the wind. He was bathed in warm holy light and he hovered for one point five seconds above the ocean before plummeting back on Earth. And in that infinitesimal timeframe, his body looked as if an angel gave it wings, kept it flying for a bit longer than physics allowed, as if to demonstrate their invisible presence to anybody watching. Beata was watching, she stood there mouth open, dropped her wine glass, and was immediately ablaze with a fiery understanding of the reasons of her mother-in-law. She looked with detachment as the hunk of scootermetal hurled down the slopes, shoving itself deep into her own roof, with a blast of tiles and windows. 

Andryi the elder was busy teaching woodwork to little Linda. He was startled by the half-second solar eclipse – caused by Noah’s body obscuring the sun. Both him and little Linda looked up in time to see Noah the Australian Jesus spread his arms and straighten his legs, ready to soar. Six point four seconds in, shouting and roaring, he hit the water belly first. The tremendous impact pulled his skin open, shattered his torso and pushed his ribs into his lungs. His vertebrae all shattered. His eyes imploded at the back of his head. His body, spread eagled, made a massive splash and then all the displaced water rushed back over him, pushing his flaccid remains and all the blood three meters down. Andryi and Linda were too far to see this happen though. All they saw was the flying madman hit the sea with a massive splash, which made Linda go ‘wooo’ and made grandpa pick her up from her stool and hold her close, hold her strong and close to protect her from the world.

Down below, on his own porch, Andryi the younger was also startled by the half-second eclipse. His eyes traced the full trajectory of crazy Jesus. He sat in disbelief, trying to process what had just happened. First, he understood that someone had died in front of his very house. Then, he realised that person was not flailing nor was he screaming, instead, he was reaching and roaring. His mind immediately placed himself in that person’s body, and it was now his own eyes staring at the sun, and his own chest feeling the wind, and his own arms stretched out. This body, it could very well have been his own, in a different reality where his daughter had never been born, and he’d have carried on being a stupid teenager. The image went into his brain and became a visceral vision stuck in his cerebellum. From there, it would forever shine a bright path of understanding and empathy, for he himself could have been in the place of Noah the Australian Jesus.