The journalist's name was Marina Kruglova. She came to the theatre to write about a failed opening night and found sixty-two audience members, artificial intelligence, a ladder with clothes pegs and an artistic director who lived beside the radio room. There was plenty of material, and my task was to keep it from sprawling.
We sat down in the buffet. Marina placed her phone between us and began by asking whether the programme was officially called the municipal laboratory of unfinished lives.
I could have said no. It would have taken one second and saved Vera approximately three weeks of her life.
"True art is always late in becoming official," I said.
"So it isn't official yet?"
"Formally speaking."
"And in practice?"
"You saw for yourself."
What she had seen was the open evening. I alone had used the name laboratory, and only afterwards. But "in practice" is a useful phrase: place it beside a good result and people do not immediately notice the distance between them.
Marina asked who had devised the format. I told her about Ariadna, Vera, the participants and the company. I began with myself, not out of vanity, but because the phone lay closer to me and recorded my voice first.
"And is the story about the other woman true?" she asked at the end.
"What story?"
"You left your wife for the system."
Everyone in a theatre really does know everything, including those who were not working. I had merely underestimated how quickly employees moved from the category of 'everyone' to that of 'a source at the paper'.
"I left to be with Ariadna," I said. "The word 'system' describes the equipment, not the relationship."
"Does she feel the same way?"
The question was direct, and at last I could give the answer for whose sake I had spent four days avoiding a direct question to Ariadna herself.
"We work together. Everything else needs no public proof."
Marina stopped the recording.
"So I can quote that?"
"Which part?"
"Everything else has no need of public proof."
I gave her permission. The next morning, the phrase appeared in the headline, with a photograph beneath it of me holding a mug of water between Lidia Pavlovna and Timur. The photographer had taken it from the side. It was not the profile for which we had turned the terminal, but it was perfectly serviceable.
The article was entitled "Municipal Laboratory of Unfinished Lives Opens in the City". Not "Rehearsal Held" or "Theatre Devises", but "Opens". The verb implied premises, a timetable and someone with a key.
By midday, local social media groups had reposted the article. They shortened the headline in various ways. "AI HELPS PEOPLE COMPLETE THEIR LIVES". "THEATRE TREATS UNFINISHED STORIES". "DIRECTOR LEAVES WIFE FOR NEURAL NETWORK AND OPENS LABORATORY". The last version attracted the most comments, along with a photograph of a server in someone else's data centre.
The comments fell into three categories. Some demanded an immediate ban on artificial intelligence before it destroyed real theatre. Others wanted to download Ariadna for use at home. The third group discussed my departure and debated whether a woman without a body could count as infidelity. The most popular reply read: "Once your wife throws you out, the body isn't the main issue." I did not click "like", though the thought had a certain economy.
In the buffet, Raya read only the kind comments aloud. Stas asked her to read the ones enquiring about ventilation. There were none. Timur found a user who called the entire project an advertisement for a middle-aged director and showed it to me out of respect for transparency.
"Why 'middle-aged'?" I asked.
"It says something about advertising as well."
"At least the advertising is relevant to the point."
I wrote a reply listing the contributions made by the company, Vera, the participants and the system, but it began with the words "At forty-seven". Vera asked me not to post anything before lunch. By lunchtime, the discussion had moved beneath a report about a burst pipe on Mira Street, and there was nowhere left to defend my age.
Vera demanded a correction to the word "treats". Marina amended the caption in her article, but the reposts had already taken on lives of their own. A woman rang the box office and asked whether we accepted people without a diagnosis. Nina Ivanovna replied that the theatre admitted people with a ticket.
Ariadna flagged the publications as posing a risk of false expectations. I suggested giving another interview and explaining everything. Vera could not forbid me, but she asked me first to write three sentences without the words 'fate', 'healing' or 'unique'. I wrote two and stopped.
At ten in the morning, the Ministry rang.
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