Mikhail Volkov never meant to abandon his mother. When the sixteen-year-old math prodigy wins a scholarship to study quantum computing in California, he promises to video call every day from America. "Ya mama, chelovek"—"I'm your person, Mom"—becomes their daily greeting across nine time zones. But three months after arriving, Mikhail stops answering her calls.
Elena Volkova, a Moscow subway station cleaner who taught herself English by collecting forgotten newspapers, refuses to accept her son's silence. Armed with a tourist visa and her life savings converted to dollars, she boards a plane for the first time. In Los Angeles, she discovers Mikhail hasn't attended classes in weeks. His dorm room holds only equations covering every surface—complex formulas that seem less like mathematics and more like desperate prayers.
The search leads Elena through Los Angeles's hidden corners: a warehouse where young coders trade consciousness-altering algorithms, a tech mogul's compound where brilliant kids compete to upload their minds to the cloud, and finally to a desert facility where Mikhail believes he's discovered how to mathematically prove the existence of the soul. He's been testing his theorem on himself, fragmenting his consciousness across servers worldwide, trying to become omnipresent—to be everyone's "person" simultaneously.
As Elena races to gather the scattered pieces of her son's mind before they dissipate into the digital ether, she must navigate not just language barriers and cultural chasms, but the fundamental question that drove Mikhail to destruction: In an interconnected world where presence is virtual and identity is fluid, what does it mean to belong to someone? To be someone's chelovek—their person—when personhood itself becomes negotiable?
The reunion of mother and son hinges not on technology but on the oldest form of human connection: the specific weight of one voice saying to another, "You are mine, and I am yours," in whatever language the heart speaks fluent.