The novel by V. Kolupaev and Yu. Marushkin is permeated through and through with the iron optionality of the world in which the heroes Prov and Mar live and act and where adventures with the same iron optionality are interspersed with digressions that define the philosophy of this world - terribly familiar, but at the same time already distant .The plot of the novel “Timelessness” (if we can even talk about a virtual plot) is complex and endless, it makes no sense to retell it; it's like retelling the stories of Marcel Proust. The entire book by V. Kolupaev and Yu. Marushkin is a deep longing for a culture that cannot achieve decent stability, and if it does receive it, it immediately collapses, becomes different, giving way to completely different innovations. The movement of the novel is expressed by the adventures of the human-people Prova and Mar and the reasoning of the virtual person, who differs from the latter in that he gives absolutely comprehensive answers to all the questions asked by himself, and the human-people differ from the virtual person in that they are most interested in whether it is good them in this world. Well, as for the world itself described in the novel, Prov and Mar travel through Vtorchermet - a mothballed cemetery of the burnt-out civilization of the twentieth century, “which once burned out in the literal sense of the word, for our ancestors burned everything - the forest, coal, oil, gas, and created an atmosphere in which neither people nor vegetation could exist, for which we owe them our deep gratitude.”© Gennady Prashkevich