“Mariann! In this place I am god!”

A thin boy with glasses lowered his arms and looked at the girl standing a few steps away from him.

“In this place, you are god.” The girl in black repeated in a contemplative voice.

She looked around, at the pasture the two of them were standing in. Golden yellow grass reaching to her hips, and a few nettles and thistles visible in the grass as well. Above the grass flew bumblebees and butterflies. She raised her face towards the blue sky without a single cloud present. Only bright scorching sun. Somewhere on the horizon far away black forest loomed and above that stood steel towers carrying high tension power lines.

“In this pasture?” She asked. “You are god?”

“In this pasture.” The boy replied confidently, pushing up the glasses on his nose. “Here, everything is exactly how I want it to be. There is nothing I would want to change. That’s why I am god in here.”

“Because here you cannot give an unreasonable command that the World would not fulfill?”

“Exactly.” The boy smiled. “This place is here. You are here. I am here. Nothing else is required.”

“You know this is not an ordinary pasture, don’t you?” Mariann asked, a faint smell of dry rot reached her nose.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“Exactly because of that I am god in here. Exactly because of that I want to be god in here.” The boy said. “This the only pasture with missile silos. Once a long time ago, Vilaski base was here. The warheads here were aimed at Western Europe.”

The boy snapped his fingers and further away in the middle of the pasture, suddenly four gray concrete domes appeared out of thin air.

“Come!” He grabbed the girl’s hand and they started down the footpath in the grass towards the domes.

“Do these domes also belong to a World existing according to your will?” The girl asked.

“These domes, the silos underneath them, everything that belongs with them.” The boy nodded. “I cannot rip out of the World that which is not to my liking. That would not be fair to the World.”

The boy let go of the girl’s hand and then ran up the crack dome. He crouched down and then gently caressed a leaf growing out of the concrete dome.

“Come.” He beckoned.

Both of them laid down on the concrete dome.

“1757 different military facilities, 2 per cent of our country that is small as it is. All of this is Zone. Zone of Tarkovsky and the Strugatsky brothers. Somebody else came here, just took the land, transformed it in monstrous ways and then gave it back to us. And like ants we started to climb about their place of picnic. All of this is a historic fact. But as we lay here, it doesn’t feel like it.”

“How?” The girl asked, gazing at the blue sky.

“Everywhere the pasture is the same. Only in this place it is not. Not for us, who currently live. History is irrelevant, the only relevant thing is all this happened before the current time, before our time. This makes these domes and all the other facilities a Zone. We are here, but all these places no longer are. These domes no longer are. Their time has long since passed.”

“Do you know what apocalypse means?” Mariann asked, looking in the boy’s eyes. “It is not only the end of the world, it is the moment all of god’s knowledge becomes human knowledge. And this pasture here...”

“...is post-apocalyptic.” The boy smiled. “For this base it makes no difference whether it is forgotten due to a bomb strike or because the world for it ended.”

“Exactly.” The girl said in a dreamy voice. “This place is the end of the world. But not our world but the world of this place.”

“That’s why I am God here.” The boy said. “God at the end of the world.”