Continuation of the author's debut work - the fantastic story "Eve". Humanity's first interplanetary expedition was a fiasco, but what will happen to its participants? Will they return home or will they have a different future? Prisoners of eternal life, languishing in the form of an electronic copy of themselves, dream of liberation, but what will they have to sacrifice for the sake of salvation? An alien, indistinguishable from a human, has gone to Earth. Will he be able to cope with the difficulties awaiting him along the way? How to make a difficult decision if it is impossible to find a compromise between reason and emotions? "Zugzwang" is a chess position in which any subsequent move worsens the position on the board. This is precisely the situation in which the heroes of this story find themselves, when an obvious, at first glance, decision entails irreversible consequences.