1960s. An alternative USSR, in which the powerful Special Committee is engaged not in the atomic project, but in the study and use of foster children. A country that has not yet fully recovered from the consequences of the world war, but at the same time stretches from the borders of France in the west to the island of Hokkaido in the east. A country where the cities destroyed by the war have not yet been completely restored, but which has built a nationwide system of automatic management of the national economy based on powerful computers and sent a manned expedition to Mars. And somewhere in the distant town of Divnogorsk lives a girl named Nadezhda, who, as some are sure, is the key to the future of humanity. But what kind of future has she prepared for him? Will it destroy? Or something completely different that has not occurred to the human mind?