Just old copypasted story "Project Besovets".
What’s really infuriating is that in the modern world, you have to understand everything. Say you decide to buy a bike. You browse a bunch of websites that sell bikes. With the help of Wikipedia, out of dozens of categories you somehow figure out which type you need (cruiser? city? track? what do you people even want from me?!). After scrolling through ten pages of Online Market, you pick out a cheap, good-looking bike from a more or less respectable store, but one thing bothers you: right next to it there’s a similar one that’s 100$ cheaper. Why? You compare the two models and find one difference: one has a steel front hub, the other has one made of titanium alloy (and the second one also doesn’t have a bottle mount). Which raises the question that’s been building up for a while now: why do I have to understand any of this? I just want to move around by pedaling.
Fine. So you type in that exact question: what’s the difference between a titanium-alloy hub and a steel one? A lot of useless stuff comes up, but then you find an interesting link: on a physics department forum, two grad students are arguing about why there’s such a big price difference between two hubs. One says it’s about weight, the other says it’s about wear resistance and the cost of the raw material. Then their academic advisor shows up and gently points out, effectively ending the discussion, that the question itself is incorrect, because there are many kinds of steel and titanium alloys, and it makes no sense to argue about them without naming the exact grades. What the hell? So you google the hub manufacturers and finally find the exact material grades they used, but since the thread is closed and there’s nobody to ask, you find one of the grad students’ email addresses and send him a message. Just to be thorough, you also jump around a bunch of godforsaken websites that mention different kinds of steel and titanium alloys.
You go to sleep, and you dream about a dusty village store selling two bicycles, with the one that has white tires costing a little more. You wake up to knocking at the door. Two polite men in plain clothes ask you strange questions: why are you interested in titanium alloys? how often do you visit aviation forums? what do you know about the fighter project called “Besovets”? You tell them the truth: I’m picking out a bicycle, I don’t visit those forums, I don’t know anything. But deep down you realize that the other day you must have wandered onto the wrong website. The visitors leave, but promise to come back if they decide you weren’t being honest. You become very curious about this fighter jet, but you hold yourself back.
That evening, the grad student replies. The material grades you listed differ in specific strength, high-temperature strength, and various other kinds of strength, but for a bicycle hub none of that matters at all, because for the difference between the two hubs to show up, you’d either have to race across a salt lake at 800 km/h or stick your front wheel into an open-hearth furnace. You write back: thank you very much for the answer, but then why is there such a huge price difference between these two bicycle hubs?
You go to an internet cafe wearing a baseball cap pulled down almost over your nose, launch Tor from a flash drive, and download everything you can find for searches related to “Besovets fighter” in every possible wording. You pay in cash. Back home, you reinstall your system and go through everything you collected. It turns out the fighter project was shut down a year ago for going over budget, a budget that had already been TITANic, and the workshop was broken up and reassigned to different projects.
The chief aircraft designer behind “Besovets” moved to the States, but died mysteriously just a couple of months later. The Besovets team had been given ambitious goals, but there was no information anywhere about what happened to the prototype, even though it was clear that by the time the project was shut down it had already reached the testing stage. Interesting, but you need to get some sleep.
The question keeps bothering you at work, too. You google the name of the youngest member of the mysterious fighter’s development team, and your instinct doesn’t fail you: on the fifth page of Google, you find his Instagram. His profile is public, and the latest photo was posted about a year ago. In it, a smiling guy proudly shows off a fish he caught. The geotag says: Besovets village. You pack a suitcase.
The airbase is heavily guarded, and there’s no way for a civilian to get closer than ten kilometers. On Google Maps, the area you need is covered with that obvious copy-pasted forest texture. You decide to go downriver in a boat, which you rent from a one-eyed local man for a bottle of port. Once you reach the fake area on Google Maps, you go ashore and, under cover of darkness, sneak toward the airbase. Ahead of you, you see the powerful searchlights of some towers.
You creep up to the barbed wire and, through the trees, watch a strange scene: soldiers are unloading a large container from a cargo plane. On the tail of the plane is a white sun inside a blue square, inside a red square. The soldiers open the container, and inside are children in khaki uniforms with opaque bags over their heads. And then something happens that you absolutely did not expect: in the dead silence, your phone loudly announces a new email. At once, you hear rustling nearby and a booming voice ordering you to come out with your hands up. You bolt and run through the night forest. Trying to zigzag as you run, you hear dogs barking and see flashlight beams flickering. You run so long that you start to panic: the forest doesn’t end, the riverbank is nowhere in sight, though the people chasing you seem to have lost the trail. You run out onto a road. The sun hasn’t risen yet, but the sky is already getting lighter.
Your legs barely work. After lying in the bushes by the side of the road for a while, you hear the sound of bicycle tires on asphalt. A woman with a berry basket on her back slowly rides by. You catch up with her and use all your charm and persuasiveness: my car broke down in the forest, I’m trying to get to a gas station, could you give me a lift? The woman agrees without hesitation. You sit on the rear rack with your legs hanging down and suddenly notice that her bicycle has a bottle mount.
You check what email gave away your presence by the barbed-wire fence. It’s from the grad student. He compared the two bicycles you sent him links to and noticed that they differ not only in the hub materials, but also in the countries where they’re assembled. Even though both companies are legally registered in the Netherlands, one of them actually has its assembly shop in Taiwan. That, the grad student notes, is what explains the price difference.
When you finally get home, you collapse onto your bed from exhaustion, but then you get visitors in plain clothes again. On the spot, you make up a story about a birthday party at a friend’s dacha that lasted until morning, but the men don’t even try to catch you in a lie. What they want to know is why your Wi-Fi doesn’t have a password. You say you just moved into the apartment and haven’t had time to set everything up yet. Then a third man walks in and they whisper about something in the hallway. From their conversation, you only catch the words “Cyclops” and “Blackberry.” When they come back, one of them nervously taps some papers against his knee, then smiles as if deciding to drop some matter entirely, and advises you to put a password on your router, because who knows what kind of criminal might use it to get online through your network. Then they leave.
You decide you don’t really need a bicycle after all. It fills you with fear because of the countless parts you know too little about and can’t fully trust with your health and safety. What if the brakes fail, assembled at a factory where two Chinese workers recently killed themselves, though of course the news never mentioned it? Or what if the saddle came from a batch confiscated at the border, where inspectors were alarmed by a Geiger counter going off the charts? Or maybe on some obscure forum you’ve never heard of, users are discussing whether the original frame design is linked to herniated discs? There are so many parts that one of them could easily be the one that harms your health, and you’ll be the lucky one among thousands of buyers who ends up running into it.
Walking is good for you too, you decide. Walking and enjoying the world around you. Besides, haven’t you been meaning to buy a good semi-professional camera for a long time? It’s just not very clear why two cameras with the same number of megapixels can differ in price by more than a factor of two. Better google it...