The hero of the story is engaged in research into predictions of scientific discoveries during the years of perestroika. He made one discovery himself in his youth, and it changed his whole life. The essence of the discovery is that a person acquires the ability to live in several worlds simultaneously: he sees one world, hears another, and physically the body lives in a third. As a result, the strongest stress associated with the impossibility of synchronizing sensations. The science-fiction idea of the story is quite accurately expressed in Petrashevsky’s internal monologue: “I called this connection the third signal system. The first signal is our feelings, sensations, how we perceive this world. The second signal is speech, the way we are connected with our own kind. And the third is what unites us, the intelligent ones, living in all conceivable and inconceivable dimensions of the world. A person cannot live without the first signal system - he will be blind, deaf, will not touch, smell, will remain a stone. And he won’t live without a second signal either - without communicating with his own kind. And, of course, without a third - although this communication takes place outside consciousness. Such are the laws of nature.”...