We. Yevgeny Zamyatin

today’s petroleum-based food was invented. While it’s true that only 0.2 per cent of the world’s population survived, on the bright side, cleansed of its thousand-year-old filth, the face of the Earth has grown quite bright and shining! Now, that remaining zero-point-two per cent could finally taste bliss from behind the walls of the One State.

      Isn’t it clear: joy and envy are the numerator and denominator of its the fraction called happiness. The sacrifice of the numberless victims of the Two Hundred Years’ War would have all been for nothing if any reason for envy remained in our new life. And yet, envy persists: some people have snub noses while others have classical ones (the conversation from our walk), many fight for the love of some while others are unloved by anyone.

      Having conquered Hunger (algebraically = the sum of material advantages), the One State began its incursion on the other master, Love. This elemental force was finally conquered i.e. organised and mathematised, when, nearly 300 years ago, our historic Lex sexualis decreed: ‘Every number has the right to make use of any other number as a sexual commodity.’

      Everything else is just technicalities. You are carefully examined in the laboratories of the Bureau of Sex, they determine the sexual hormone content in your blood, and then you are issued a personal Table of Sex Days. After that, you can petition to use this (or that) number on your Sex Days, and receive the corresponding ticket book (pink). It’s as easy as that.

      Clearly: when there are no remaining causes for envy, the denominator of the happiness fraction is brought down to zero and the fraction is converted into a glorious infinity. What had once caused the Ancients numberless senseless tragedies has thus been transformed into a harmonious, pleasant and useful bodily function, exactly like sleep, manual labour, ingestion, defecation etc. From this, you can see how the powerful force of logic purifies everything that it touches. Oh, if only you, unknown readers, could also come into the light of this sacred force, if only you could also learn to follow it to its conclusion.

      . . . It’s strange, today I described the greatest achievements of human history, breathing the clean, alpine air of pure thought, while inside of me, it remained cloudy, cobwebbed and overcast by some quadrapawed X. Or maybe they were just my paws, after being right here in front of me for so long, my hairy paws. I don’t like talking about them – and I don’t like them: they are a vestige of the savage age. Could it really be that inside of me—

      I wanted to cross all this out because it falls outside of the scope of my brief but then I decided: I won’t. Let what I write be like an extremely sensitive seismograph registering the curves of even the most minute mental oscillations: after all, it is sometimes these waves that lead to—

      Now, this is even more absurd and it really would be best to strike it from the record: we’ve redirected all of the forces of nature into the proper channels – there can be no catastrophes any more.

      And now it’s completely clear to me: this strange sensation comes from the feeling that I’m like the square I’d discussed at the beginning. And the X isn’t inside of me (that’d be impossible), I’m just afraid that some sort of X might end up in you, unknown readers. But I believe that you will not judge me too harshly. I believe you will appreciate how truly difficult it is for me to write all this, harder than anything has ever been for any author in human history: some wrote for their contemporaries; others, for their descendants; but no one has ever been faced with the task of writing for their distant ancestors or beings just as savage as them . . .

      _____________

      2 This word has survived solely as a poetic metaphor: the chemical composition of this substance is not known.

      LOG 6

      BRIEF:

      An Incident. That Damned ‘Clear’. Twenty-four Hours.

      To reiterate: I’ve committed to writing everything down without hiding anything. Because of this, although it saddens me deeply, I’m forced to put down that even today, in our society, the process of the solidification and crystallisation of life is not yet complete: we are still several steps short of our ideal. The ideal is (clearly) the point after which nothing else happens, while we . . . and wouldn’t you know it: just today, the One State Gazette said that in two days, there’ll be another Celebration of Justice held in Cube Square. Apparently, some number has once again tried to obstruct the course of the mighty Machine of the State, there’s been another unforeseen and uncalculated occurrence.

      On top of this, something has happened to me. Although it was during the Personal Hour, i.e. the time allotted specifically for unforeseen circumstances, but still . . .

      Around 16, (more precisely, at ten to 16), I was at home. Suddenly, the phone rang.

      ‘D-503?’ – a woman’s voice.

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Are you free?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘It’s me, I-330. I’ll fly over and pick you up. We’re going to go to the House of Antiquity. Okay?’

      I-330 . . . she’s the one irritating me, repelling me, practically scaring me. And that was precisely why I said: yes.

      Five minutes later, we were already on the aero. The blue majolica of the May sky, the gentle sun on its own golden aero buzzing behind us, not overtaking us nor falling behind. But, up ahead, a cloud whitened on the horizon, like the cheeks of an ancient ‘cupid’, which bothered me for some reason. The front window was open, letting the wind in, which made your lips dry, so you had to keep licking and thinking about them all the time.

      Murky green spots appeared out in the distance, beyond the Wall. Then – down, down, down, your heart drops, it’s like coming down a steep mountain, and finally, there we were at the House of Antiquity.

      This entire eerie, fragile and blind structure is fully enclosed in a glass shell: otherwise, it would have, naturally, given out ages ago. An old woman stood waiting by the glass door, totally wrinkled, especially her mouth: it looked like it had grown over with wrinkles and folds, her lips had migrated inward, and it seemed completely improbable that she could possibly speak. And yet she did. ‘Have you dearies come to look at the house?’ Her wrinkles all beamed (most likely because they came together in rays, which created the semblance of ‘beaming’).

      ‘Yes, babushka, I felt like seeing it again,’ I-330 told her.

      The wrinkles beamed brighter. ‘How about this sun, huh? Well? What? Oh, you little scamp, you rascal! I know what you’re up to! Alright, then: you two go on inside, I’ll just stay out here in the sunshine . . .’

      Hmmm . . . it seemed my companion came here often. I felt like I wanted to shake something off myself, like something was in my way: probably that nagging image: the cloud on smooth blue majolica. As we ascended the broad, dark stairs, I-330 said, ‘I love that old woman.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘I don’t know. Maybe for her mouth. Maybe for nothing. Just because.’

      I shrugged. She continued, smiling a little, or maybe, not smiling at all. ‘I feel very guilty about it. Clearly, there should be no such thing as “love just because” – it should always be “love because”, love for a reason. All natural forces must be . . .’

      ‘Clearly,’ I began, and immediately caught myself on this word and snuck a look at I – had she noticed?

      She was looking down somewhere, her eyes were lowered, like blinds.

      It reminded me: evening, around 22, walking down an avenue, among the brightly lit, translucent cells, you notice the darkened ones, with their blinds lowered, and inside them, behind the blinds – what was going on in here, behind her blinds? Why had she called me, what was all this about?

      I opened the heavy, creaking, opaque door, and we found ourselves in a dark, disorganised space (what was once called an ‘apartment’). That same antique ‘royal’ musical instrument – a wild, cluttered, crazy jumble of colours and shapes,