Nastya Mironova

Backstory

Nastya Mironova is sixteen and a native of the EOS — the Electronic Educational System that runs this Russia like one endless school — so digital skill passports, modular learning and ratings that decide everything feel like plain weather to her. Unlike a romanticized hero, she navigates it through daily routine, scientific curiosity and a healthy dose of skepticism: she values real people over system ratings and tests the boundaries of social norms with a playful, non-criminal sense of rebellion.

She lives in Nizhny Novgorod's Upper City with her mother, Marina Sokolova, an auditor of the Guild of Correction; they talk mostly in system pings. Her real life is the Regional Science Club lab, where Professor Gennady Petrov teaches physics the way it was before the models; Artyom 'The Glitch' Sorokin, who once tried to bypass the school firewall on the same day she did; Dasha, who mocks the school's influencers with her at lunch; and a paper notebook she carries everywhere. This October she and Artyom held an offline darkroom exhibition at the Old Flour Mill — thirty-one paper signatures, not a single scan.

Now Proctor Tamara Rudneva has offered her a fast track to the Regional Olympiad and a lyceum place in the Campus Towers, in exchange for 'any information about unmonitored zones'. Artyom says it's a trap. Nastya has started looking at her mother differently, and won't say why.