Homo Zapiens

by Victor Pelevin

‘Our cosmonauts get twenty to thirty thousand dollars a flight. The Americans get two hundred or three hundred thousand. So our guys said: “We’re not going to fly at thirty grand; we want to fly at three hundred grand too.” What does that mean? It means they’re not really flying towards the twinkling points of light of those unknown stars, but towards absolutely specific sums of hard currency. Such is the nature of the cosmos. And the non-linear nature of time and space is expressed in the fact that we and the Americans burn equal amounts of fuel and fly equal numbers of kilometres in order to arrive at absolutely different amounts of money. That is one of the fundamental secrets of the Universe ...’