“I was abandoned, devastated, abandoned, innocent, and I feel damn sorry for my current self, and my knee knocks out shotgun pellets under the tabletop, naively trying to hold out without hourly pleasure. Reduce the desire to its core: I don’t want to smoke. I don't want to smoke. I want to smoke. Smoking.” Every day you kill yourself and hope to survive, you test your fate, you play roulette with the deities. Every day could be your last. For the sake of the right to breathe smoke, not air, humanity goes to its death, desperately clinging to life, inventing excuses, writing philosophy and transforming art. Here is Richard Beard's first novel, “X20”. Now you won’t be able to look at cigarettes without remembering how fleeting time is and unpredictable turns of fate. Without remembering death.