Text transcript
Ternary Dreams · The Story
Kyiv · February 2022
The missiles are falling. In an apple crate: twelve notebooks.
Written by a dead grandmother, in a code of three marks.
Feofaniya monastery · 1948
A ruined monastery south of Kyiv.
An asylum before the war. A killing site under occupation. Now: the birthplace of continental Europe's first computer.
MESM · 1948–1951
Six thousand tubes turn the ruin tropical.
No running water. The last bus leaves at five. The newest icon of Soviet atheism, housed in a monastery.
The lab girls
Fanya is eighteen when they hire her.
She winds copper wire around ferrite cores, 52 turns each, and learns to think in machines.
Moscow · 1956–1958
The Setun: the only ternary computer ever built in series.
It counts not in noughts and ones, but in three states: minus, nought, plus.
−1 · 0 · +1
Between yes and no lies a genuine third.
Sokolniki · 1959
The KGB lays her murdered father's file on the table.
The assignment: an IBM engineer at the American National Exhibition. They have a word for women like her: a swallow.
A hotel room
She knows the wall is listening. He doesn't.
In the middle of an operation the state has scripted, she has to decide whether what she feels is real.
1967 · 1970
The USSR decides to copy IBM instead of building its own.
Then the Politburo buries the Soviet internet, after an anecdote about a chicken farm.
1973
The Setun is sawed apart and carted to the dump.
Fanya saves a handful of ferrite cores. She begins to write.
1986 · 1991 · 2014
She survives it all.
Chernobyl. The collapse. And year after year, the notebooks fill, in a code no one around her can read.
Feofaniya · 2022
Her granddaughter flees the missiles, back to the monastery forest.
And opens the first notebook.
“For those who can read in three states.”