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ISBN eBook 978-3-6956-6733-8 · English edition
The story
A monastery south of Kyiv. An asylum before the war, a killing site under German
occupation, and then, for three winters, the birthplace of continental Europe's first
stored-program computer. Feofanija Verbytska, hired at eighteen as a lab girl, knows
every stone of the place. She winds copper wire around ferrite cores, first at the
MESM in the monastery ruin, then in Moscow at the Setun, the only ternary computer
ever built in series, a machine that counts in three states: minus, nought, plus.
In 1959 the KGB lays her murdered father's file on the table and sends her as a
swallow to the American National Exhibition. Her assignment is Thomas Reiner, an IBM
engineer. In a hotel room the next wall is wired to overhear, the operation slips its
own script: the third state between order and feeling, between loyalty and betrayal.
Sixty years later her granddaughter sits in the same forest, under shellfire,
learning a dead language: the number system of a machine that was sawed apart. Each
decoded notebook opens another year. What did Fanya do, and for whom did she write it
down, in a code only a reader who thinks in three states can break?
"Binary did not win because it was better, but because an entire
industry was already committed to two states."
How it begins
She counts the notebooks because counting is what her hands do when the
rest of her has stopped. Eleven. Twelve. School notebooks, squared paper, the Soviet kind,
covers gone soft as cloth. […] Not words. Three marks. A dash, a small circle, a cross.
Minus, nothing, plus. Line after line, decade after decade, the hand of her dead
grandmother, unmistakable, and not a syllable of it legible. Until the eye catches
something in the middle of the columns: a single line in letters, small and quiet,
addressed to a reader Fanya pictured as she wrote. For
those who can read in three states.
Imagine …
The monasteryImagine building Europe's first computer in a
monastery ruin where, a few years earlier, the patients of the asylum were murdered:
no running water, six thousand tubes turning the room tropical, and the last bus leaving at five.
The third stateImagine there was once a computer that reckoned
not in noughts and ones but in three states (minus, nought, plus), the only ternary
machine ever built in series. And it was sawed apart and carted to the dump.
The hotel roomImagine lying in a hotel room you know is bugged,
and the man beside you does not know it. And in the middle of an assignment a state has
given you, you have to decide whether what you feel is real.
The notebooksImagine a grandmother leaving twelve notebooks
filled with three symbols instead of words, and her granddaughter having to learn the
language of a machine that no longer exists to find out who this woman really was.
Fact and fiction
The history in this novel is real and largely untold in the West: the MESM in the
Feofaniya monastery, the ternary Setun, the Soviet internet OGAS buried by the
Politburo, the IBM-copy decision that ended an engineering culture. A detailed
Author's Note separates fact from fiction chapter by chapter and dismantles the
standing myths: the "swallow school" of Hollywood, the legend of sex-for-chips.
The dates are exact and are not moved. Where the sources conflict, the book says so.
The invented heroine fills the exact gap the sources leave: the nameless women who
wound and programmed these machines while history kept the men's names. This website
is the research she stands on, every date checked against the archives.
"The diaries are invented. The silence they fill is not."
Explore the world of the novel
Contact & updates
Publication details, retailer links and reading dates will appear here soon.
Press and reviewers: the press kit above has everything quotable.
Reader reactions
Test readers, critics, personal discussions. Unfiltered.
Illustrative, in-universe reactions, not verified press quotes.
Halyna P. – Kyiv”I read the Feofanija chapters in the metro during an air alarm. A book about my city, written like it knows what that feels like. I cried at the bread queue scene and I do not cry.”Email to the author
Prof. em. Dieter K. – Karlsruhe”The ternary arithmetic is correct. I checked. Forty years I taught computer architecture and nobody ever made balanced ternary romantic before. I am not sure it should be, but here we are.”Personal Feedback
Megan R. – Ohio”Started it for the KGB seduction plot, stayed for a grandmother soldering memory cores at 3am. Did not expect to finish this book knowing what a trit is.”Triple-F Feedback
Oleksandr V. – Lviv”My grandmother worked at the Institute of Cybernetics. I called my mother twice while reading. This book opens drawers that our families kept shut on purpose.”Voice message, transcribed with permission
Sandrine M. – Lyon”Too long in the middle. The diary structure repeats itself and I skimmed maybe fifty pages. And then the last chapter got me anyway, which is honestly annoying.”Beta Reader Notes
Ainura T. – Bishkek”I have known Elara since university. She talked about this dead Soviet computer for YEARS. At parties. On hikes. I am so relieved it is finally in a book and out of her system. It is also, and I hate saying this, very good.”Personal Feedback After a Reading Session
Tom W. – Manchester”A historical novel where the most erotic scene is two people debugging a machine together. I mean that as the highest possible praise.”Book club feedback
Dr. Iryna S. – Kharkiv”The archive scenes are the truest thing here. A form you lied on stays a broken wire. Anyone who grew up with Soviet paperwork will feel this in their teeth.”Personal Feedback
Rustam N. – Tashkent”Half of it is brilliant. The other half is a lecture on Soviet computing wearing a trench coat. Pick one, Elara.”Triple-F Feedback
Claire B. – Montreal”I checked whether the Setun was real at page 40. It was real. Then I checked MESM, Lebedev, the monastery, all real. At some point I stopped checking and just trusted her, which no book has made me do in years.”Personal Feedback
Anonymous”Boring. Nothing explodes. The spy stuff takes 200 pages to start. One star.”Review, reposted with pride
Vasyl D. – Chernihiv”Write 'died', not 'perished'. Press harder, the third copy travels. I have carried that line around for a month now.”Email to the author
Judith E. – Berlin”As a translator I want to fight her over the Russian transliterations. As a reader I surrender completely.”Personal Feedback After a Reading Session
More by Elara S. Novikova
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