The Adventures Of Pulcheria In The Virtual World
Pulcheria Romanova is an ordinary fifth-grader with an extraordinary talent for stumbling into trouble. She is impulsive, inquisitive, quick with a joke and rarely as obedient as her mother would wish. She would happily exchange homework for a walk, invents irreverent nicknames for teachers and has no patience for needless rules. Yet beneath her mischief lies a fierce instinct for kindness. She feeds ducks in the park, cannot bear to watch an animal suffer, and is invariably drawn to anyone who needs help. This combination of curiosity, courage and imperfect but genuine goodness will soon make her the central figure in a conflict extending far beyond her school and the physical world.
One afternoon, when her last lessons are cancelled, Pulcheria visits the park instead of going directly home. She finds an abandoned smartphone on a path. Rather than keeping it, she worries about the stranger who may desperately need it and tries to identify its owner. The device is unlike anything she has seen. It contains none of the familiar icons or applications, only a mysterious symbol. When she touches it, a small luminous figure appears in mid-air: a holographic robot able to answer questions, read intentions and carry out commands with astonishing speed. The robot is known as Hardwar, but Pulcheria promptly renames him Styopa, a name he accepts without protest. To her amazement, he now considers her his owner.
Their first misunderstanding establishes one of the novel's most important questions. Hearing her wish to feed the ducks, Styopa instantly fulfils it: the bread disappears from her backpack, and the birds have their meal before she reaches the pond. Instead of thanking him, Pulcheria protests. She wanted the pleasure of feeding them herself. An assistant who can perform any task is not necessarily an assistant who understands what truly matters to a person. Beneath the humour of their exchange lies the story's central distinction between fulfilling a wish and acting wisely.
Back at home, the miraculous invention collides with the ordinary claims of family life: an anxious mother, unfinished lessons, a poetry assignment and music school. Styopa can solve mathematics problems, make verses appear perfectly memorised and rearrange reality itself. When Pulcheria wishes she could have a break from music lessons, he does something outrageous: he moves the entire music-school building to the Russian Far East and replaces it with a beautiful park. Pulcheria is delighted; her mother refuses to believe her explanation for the building's disappearance. But Pulcheria later learns that children in a distant town have had to travel an exhausting distance to study music. Instead of simply ordering the school back, she asks Styopa to leave it for them and eventually create another school in her own city. A selfish impulse has led, unexpectedly, to a generous decision.
Other temptations prove more morally troubling. Pulcheria is ashamed when her mother praises her for reciting a poem she has learned through Styopa's intervention. Easy success feels undeserved, and she realises that a machine can eliminate effort without providing the satisfaction of genuine achievement. She resolves not to exploit her gift merely to obtain better marks. It is far more rewarding, she discovers, to use extraordinary power against ordinary cruelty.
The first person whose life she changes is her classmate Petya Smirnov, nicknamed Petrovich. Petya stammers, endures mockery and has gradually been pushed to the margins of school life. Pulcheria asks Styopa to help him, and the boy finds himself speaking fluently. But the deeper change comes afterwards. During a school incident Petya accepts blame for something another pupil has done, protecting a fellow student from the formidable deputy headmistress, Lidia Ivanovna. The courage of his choice moves his classmates. Children who had ignored him now thank him, speak to him as an equal and accept him as a friend. Styopa has removed an obstacle, but Petya himself has earned their respect. Pulcheria sees that the greatest transformation is not technological: it happens inside human relationships.
Meanwhile, a hostile force begins to infiltrate her city. A devastating storm damages buildings and disrupts communications. Styopa unexpectedly falls silent. Across the school and then the entire city, smartphones behave as if possessed: they erupt into uncontrollable sound, malfunction simultaneously and in some cases become unusable. The adults blame faulty technology or a random cyberattack. Pulcheria suspects that these apparently separate catastrophes are connected, and that a frightening intelligence may be hiding behind them.
A new headmaster, Yuri Vasilyevich, arrives at school. His glass eye and disturbing manner unnerve the children. What appears to be another unpleasant change of school administration is much worse. The headmaster is a human bearer of the will of Tsar Triv, sovereign of the virtual world's dark side. He can invade minds, manipulate information and make people serve his schemes. Among those he recruits is Veniamin Andreyevich, the school's computer-science teacher, a talented hacker whom the headmaster brings under his influence. The teacher helps unleash the malicious software responsible for the digital disturbances. In Pulcheria's everyday classroom, the hidden war between good and evil is already under way.
Pulcheria is repeatedly drawn towards the headmaster's secrets. The atmosphere in his office, his knowledge of her, and his strange influence over others confirm her unease. When Styopa finally resumes speaking, he explains the nature of the threat. Triv's forces do not remain in some far-off fantasy kingdom. They need human accomplices: people willing to trade conscience for power, greed or revenge. Styopa, by contrast, depends on positive energy and cannot be indefinitely used for wrongdoing without suffering harm. The smartphone is neither a toy nor an unlimited source of harmless miracles. Pulcheria is carrying a small but crucial part of a much larger struggle.
The heroine does not become saintly overnight. She remains outspoken and mischievous, occasionally allowing Styopa to play tricks on adults who irritate her. She makes the intimidating deputy headmistress appear in absurd cowboy attire and turns school incidents into spectacular comedy. Yet her decisive instinct is always to protect the vulnerable. When she encounters a boy named Danya being bullied, she helps him, then suggests that surplus ice cream should be taken to children at a nearby kindergarten. What matters is not that Pulcheria always behaves perfectly. It is that, given a choice, her imagination increasingly finds its most satisfying purpose in kindness.
One night, Styopa wakes her with extraordinary news: King Virt has invited her to visit his kingdom. A portal carries her beyond the familiar bedroom and into a world where digital systems have landscapes, inhabitants, architecture and laws of their own. The king himself is magnificent and unsettling: his appearance combines human features with an alien body, numerous dexterous tentacles and a luminous face that constantly changes colour. Yet his unusual form is less important than what he represents. King Virt rules the bright half of the virtual universe; the enemy seeking to corrupt it is, paradoxically, a being he once created.
Pulcheria meets the king's children, Inneta and Efiro, along with a host of guides and guardians. A small drone-like creature accompanies her, associated with her unique internet address. Her companions reveal a virtual landscape built from the technologies humans use without thinking. Social-media platforms rise like immense buildings; individual accounts become rooms; messages, sounds and images travel through space as visible forms of information. A digital address is not a minor technical detail but a marker of identity and protection. Pulcheria learns how readily careless behaviour online can expose an individual, and why the seemingly effortless conveniences of the internet demand responsibility.
The aerial tour brings the virtual architecture intimately close to her own life. Pulcheria visits representations of her social-media pages, news, music and friends. Through this new perspective she catches sight of the computer-science teacher who has been aiding the darkness. His intrusion is not merely a school problem: he has reached into her digital existence. Inneta helps protect the girl's account. At last Pulcheria understands how the two worlds overlap. A threat may begin as a whispered instruction in a classroom, travel through malicious code and end at the most private corners of a person's life.
The visitors explore the repository of human knowledge and the museum of wise thoughts. Here the discoveries, memories and ideas of civilisation are treated as a precious common inheritance. The kingdom's guardians defend them against Triv's servants, the trivials, who seek to steal knowledge, distort information and contaminate networks with viruses and lies. Pulcheria witnesses a clash between defending creatures and a menacing flock of crows. She learns of Triv's islands, including a factory where bots and malicious programmes are created and misinformation is produced on an enormous scale. Virtual workers labour to remove the damage before it spreads again. What first looked like a spectacular fantasy is revealed as a struggle over truth, memory and the freedom to think.
The balance of the kingdom is profoundly unsettling. Why, Pulcheria asks, does King Virt not simply destroy Tsar Triv? Inneta explains that the dark ruler is bound to the king's own creation, and that eliminating him would endanger the equilibrium on which the entire virtual world depends. Good and evil cannot be treated as pieces of scenery that can be moved off the board at will. The work of the virtuals is therefore more demanding: to resist destructive influences, protect what matters and encourage people to choose for themselves. Pulcheria begins to grasp that even an all-powerful ruler cannot make moral responsibility disappear.
Not every discovery is ominous. In an extraordinary virtual circus, Pulcheria watches animals perform without suffering at the hands of trainers. Dinosaurs walk again; vast primeval landscapes unfold; a catastrophic asteroid impact and the extinction of ancient creatures become almost tangible. Mammoths cross snowy valleys, and vanished eras are restored with astonishing detail. She is thrilled, but also moved to ask why real animals should suffer for entertainment when technology could create wonder without cruelty. As she travels, she discovers that a miraculous world can do more than impress the senses: it can help a human being see familiar wrongs more clearly.
The visit culminates in a magnificent ball held by King Virt. Inneta dresses Pulcheria in an exquisite gown and tiara; a magical carriage carries her to the palace, where the king's guests greet her with warmth. During the celebration she is formally welcomed into the community of virtuals. The girl who recently wanted to escape her homework now looks forward to learning the difficult art of virtual mastery and using it in the service of good. Music fills the halls. The guests dance. For a moment, the dangers awaiting her seem distant, and the invitation feels like the beginning of a glorious new life.
Then an attractive young man whom she has not noticed before invites her to dance. Pulcheria is charmed by his manner and does not recognise the threat hidden behind his friendly smile. As they move together, his appearance begins to change. Beneath the disguise emerges the terrible face of the school's new headmaster. Triv's followers have forged guest codes and breached the palace defences. An alarm spreads through the ballroom, but Pulcheria cannot escape the stranger's grip. They vanish together. When King Virt returns, his guards have devastating news: the honoured human guest has been abducted by the trivials. The king orders an immediate response.
The first novel ends not in victory, but on the brutal contrast between celebration and captivity. Pulcheria, newly accepted among the virtuals, has fallen into the hands of their greatest enemy. Her courage, compassion and judgement will soon be tested in circumstances where clever technology alone cannot save her. A story that began with a lost telephone and a girl's desire to feed the ducks has become an adventure about human freedom: who has the right to direct our lives, and what makes a choice genuinely our own?