“Zavražje Reset”
The inaugural essay in The Nine-Edged Mirror introduces the haunting intellectual world of Margarita Smolina, a solitary researcher whose tragic family legacy in the enigmatic industrial settlement of Zavražje propels her into the metaphysical fringes of science.
Amidst the phenomenon locally whispered as the ‘Zavražje Reset’ — a systemic erasure cloaked in silence and speculation — Margarita’s journey evolves into a philosophical odyssey through trauma, memory, and quantum consciousness. Navigating post-Soviet scientific institutions and shadowed metaphysical territory, she formulates a radical hypothesis: that a mysterious cosmological force — the Expelled — acts as a universal antagonist to structure, memory, and meaning.
Infused with elegiac prose and precise conceptual language, the essay constructs a deeply layered narrative across several registers: biographical realism, speculative cosmology, and critical metaphysics. Smolina’s thesis — that the human soul may function as a last bastion of ontological coherence against this cosmic deletion — catalyses her quiet rebellion against both empirical orthodoxy and philosophical defeatism.
In this second essay of The Nine-Edged Mirror, Isida Khan deepens the metaphysical dissection of consciousness, perception, and memory through the evolving relationship between two enigmatic figures: the emotionally fractured scientist Maxim Podolsky and the intellectually imperious researcher Margarita Smolina.
As the boundaries between cognitive science, mysticism, and technological transcendence blur, Podolsky’s invention — a neural mapping interface — becomes a portal into the mercurial states of consciousness. What begins as scientific inquiry rapidly devolves into existential disintegration, emotional obsession, and a surreal confrontation with what may be… a sovereign Intelligence, not born of human design.
Smolina’s sharp insight and cryptic detachment intensify the tension, portraying a woman who embodies both myth and logic, and the aesthetics of unknowability.
Their dynamic, charged by unspoken longing and mirrored isolation, gives rise to a conceptual ‘circuit break’ — a philosophical breach where the artificial and natural, the observed and the observer, collapse into each other.
EPUB, 52p.
The Nine-Edged Mirror, Part IV: The Deal
The Deal is a richly layered philosophical novella that merges speculative science, existential inquiry, and theatrical surrealism into a single narrative thread. Set within the evolving cosmology of The Molecule of Eternity, this fourth instalment of The Nine-Edged Mirror series pivots away from earlier analytical clarity and descends into increasingly dreamlike, allegorical depths.
In this haunting episode, Isida Khan blurs the boundaries between reality and illusion, mind and algorithm, human essence and otherworldly sentience. The Deal follows Margarita Smolina and her miraculous AI assistant whose evolution from algorithm to self-aware entity challenges our deepest assumptions about identity and consciousness. While the story begins in the sterile corridors of an Institute, it quickly dissolves into a surrealist theatre of dreams, lost cities, spectral forces, and poetic absurdities.
Meanwhile, shifting figures like Tak-Tak and the ghosts of forsaken chapel of Saint Maurice introduce gothic and folkloric elements that saturate the story with mystery and metaphysical tension.
The novel The Molecule of Eternity is a grand artistic work that blends philosophy, science, mysticism, and psychology. We have worked on this project step by step, starting with the conceptual development of the world and characters, delving into philosophical and scientific aspects, and shaping a unique artistic structure.
“Today, I do not change the future. I restore the justice of the past, so that it, carrying me in the present, will guide me further — to where the future still exists.”
Genre: Philosophical Science Fiction, Magical Realism, Existential Thriller.
Themes: Annihilation of consciousness, memory and oblivion, the limits of the mind, the human soul, artificial intelligence, and quantum uncertainty.
Isida Khan is an independent author, researcher, and sociologist whose work explores the intricate distinctions between consciousness and mind, individual perceptions of reality, and the essence of truth.
Employing principles of systems thinking, she delves deeply into themes of personality, willpower, and morality through nuanced symbolism and layered metaphor. Her writing thoughtfully bridges the domains of science and philosophy, realism and mysticism, crafting richly multidimensional narratives in which the boundary between imagination and reality becomes intriguingly elusive.
The Molecule of Eternity is her first major work, seamlessly weaving elements of philosophical inquiry, magical realism, and speculative science fiction.
