This book is about the difficult moral choice between conscience and protocol, between spirit and letter, in situations where a person decides the fate of people who depend on him. The book reveals the inevitable conflict between the system and the person who is appointed by it, but tries to act, guided not so much by its demands, but by humanity and kindness. The novel takes place in the near future on an island in the Sea of Okhotsk. The head of the expedition of the Ministry of Emergency Situations sent there accidentally meets people in difficult situations - seventh-grader Andrei and fugitive criminal Antip, and tries to solve their problems. The book touches on eternal Russian questions - the dialectic of spirit and letter, independence and fatalism. Moderate futurism, expressed in technologies related to artificial intelligence, is combined in the book with traditional Russian life issues - corruption and theft. The book also reflects the problems of interaction between the Russian population and the indigenous people of the Far East.