When you hear the word “truth,” what is the first thing that comes to mind?
Perhaps the secret you never stop lying about to others?
Or perhaps the true significance of life’s meaning?
“But all this is nonsense,” thought the young man, who stood in a crowd impressive in its sheer numbers.
A secret can be exposed, or you carry it with you to the grave — whereas the meaning of life is something each person decides for himself.
To his mind, the only thing that deserved to be called truth was the real nature of the people around you.
After turning it over a while, he found the nearest bench and sat down on it.
He was an ordinary, fairly good-looking student of nineteen, so what had set him thinking along these lines?
Suddenly his eyes, dark blue, the color of the deep sea, dropped to his outstretched right hand, where an old wristwatch marked that the train would soon arrive, a fact the electronic board overhead confirmed.
Despite a face that was pleasant enough, he often lowered his head, and his bangs came down with it, half-veiling his features.
Thud.
Almost everyone within fifteen meters turned their heads toward the dull sound.
And all who saw the scene froze where they stood.
It turned out to be the sound of a fragile human body striking the hard, unyielding wall of the metro.
And judging by the sound, this was no careless step, no accidental collision with a passerby.
A woman of about forty had fallen to the floor, doubled over with pain in her stomach.
“The hell’re you lying around for?!” barked a tall, muscular man.
He looked to be past thirty, but the young man knew this rowdy, swaggering bastard was a coursemate of his.
And what was he doing now?
It was easy enough to guess that he was the one who had done something to the injured woman.
“I—!” the already-injured woman didn’t manage to finish before another heavy blow landed in her stomach.
“How dare you open your mouth in front of me!” the coursemate proclaimed, no longer holding his shout back.
In those few pathetic seconds, everyone else came to their senses and to the full horror of what they were seeing.
Whatever the conflict between them had been, beating a woman in public was plainly no display of ethics.
“This man.
He’s scum, through and through, but with his family’s standing and his bloodline’s ties to the government, he has never once had to hold himself back.
But even so, the metro is full of cameras and witnesses.
He really is reckless, choosing to do this in a place like this, and here, even connections can do little for him,” thought the young man.
“God!
Someone call the police!” a woman’s voice cried out from the crowd.
“Just who do you think you are?!” came a man’s voice.
In that moment the young man with the deep-sea-blue eyes looked round at the people surrounding him.
“Just as expected,” he thought.
“So many people here, and all they do is stand, not one in any hurry to offer the woman so much as a helping hand.”
His eyes moved once more to the woman writhing in pain.
“And rightly so.”
“What do they stand to gain by helping her?
Only the risk of a brawl, and her gratitude should they win.”
“I said get up, now!” came a shout that seemed to ignore everyone around it.
Taking the crowd in one last time, he thought, “Only an idiot would step in for a fleeting scrap of ‘hero’ fame online.”
With another glance at the electronic board, he rose unhurriedly to his feet.
Just as unhurriedly, he made his way around the people, some standing with grimaces of contempt, some shouting at the thug.
Now and then the gaze of a couple of the specimens he’d brushed past would swing toward him for an instant, fixing on his deep-sea-blue eyes with some strange expression.
But a second later they would turn straight back to that terrible scene, leaving the young man to complete indifference.
His deep-sea eyes stayed fixed on a single point, even when the silhouettes of the crowd cut off his view of the scene.
The closer he came to the by-now almost settled scene of the crime, the more light filtered through the silhouettes of the bystanders.
And at last the light fell fully into his eyes and across his body.
Tick-tock.
He immediately noticed that a silence had fallen, still as the grave.
It was so quiet that he could hear the ticking of his own watch.
The cause of that silence was simple: he had stepped out further than anyone else.
Where the crowd kept a comfortable four or five meters back, he had come almost right up to the scene of the beating.
In an instant the thug’s stare snarled toward him.
The young man looked at him, then almost immediately shifted his gaze to the injured woman.
What he saw in her eyes struck him as deeply interesting.
It was neither hope nor despair.
He saw a primal fear in the woman’s tear-filled eyes.
Just as the thug was ready to round on him or lunge, all the young man did was turn his foot ninety degrees to the left, and the thug flinched, bracing for something.
But the young man just stepped to the left, and kept walking.
Tick-tock.
It struck him as funny that the second tick made an entirely different sound from the first, and at that he smirked.
And under the eyes of what felt like the entire crowd, he reached the railway track.
After that he stopped and glanced at his watch once more, as the scene behind him took on the look usual for such things.
When he saw that the train was about to arrive, he let out a deep breath, paying no mind at all to what was happening behind him.
“As for me?
I care nothing for the three aspects of it: what has happened, what is happening, what will happen,” he thought.
“But come to think of it.”
“Hey, get away from her!” someone shouted.
He set his palm to his chin, walling himself off from reality entirely.
It seemed nothing could tear him out of the thought.
“Kindness isn’t a bad thing, but it isn’t ration—!”
He felt a hard shove at his back, and instinct snapped his eyes shut on the spot, after which the phone in his pocket clattered down onto the tracks with a crack.
“How dare you even touch me?!” the thug shouted, not noticing that his body had struck something.
The thug managed to work out that, because some idiot had shoved him, he in turn had shoved someone with his back.
And when he finally turned toward the cracking sound, along with the crowd, they fell silent; it was unclear why, but it was clear that they had.
“Huh?”
“—!!”
He opened his eyes and all but brought his own death down on himself, coming within a hair of the contact rail.
Had he so much as brushed it, there would have been no escaping death’s embrace.
He didn’t understand, didn’t understand at all!
“What the hell just happened?!” he fumed under his breath.
Cold sweat trickled down his body as he looked about him.
And when he had turned all the way around, he saw something both horrifying and beautiful.
The light was so bright that he screwed his eyes shut almost instantly and shielded them with his hand.
The crowd, meanwhile, still stood silent, frozen stiff.
Tick-tock.
Once his eyes had adjusted to that horrifyingly alluring light, still squinting, he resolved to peer into it and find its source.
“How can this be…”
Two hundred tons of steel were hurtling toward him; the thing he had been waiting for and the thing now bearing down on him were one and the same — the train.
In his blue eyes, where dilated pupils now stood out, light appeared at last, but was this the light he had wanted?
He couldn’t get up; he didn’t understand why his body would not obey him.
In the end it sank in: either the train would brake in time, or he would die right here, and there was nothing to be done about it.
All he could hear now was the roar of the train; even his watch had broken off its monotone whisper.
He closed his eyes right before the death bearing down on him.
He had heard more than once that before death a person seems to watch their whole past play back, but in his head there stood only a single question.
“What is…”
“…a human?”