Three Recipes for Human Happiness

The exam looked nothing like I expected. (Then again, at the Academy nothing looks like I expect. You’d think “defying expectations” is a separate discipline, and Wei Lin is the tenured professor.)

It all took place on the clearing. That one, with the passage. No lecture hall, no committee, no exam slips, sheets of paper, pens, or the nervous half-voiced muttering of “what question did you get?” The hole in the stack that the four of us had found. Except now the hole was wider. As if someone had expanded it overnight. Or it had expanded on its own. Or it had always been this size and we’d just grown enough to see it.

Everyone was on the clearing: Wei Lin, Hiero, Noma, Artyom, Kira, Zoya, Marina (back — pale, quiet, but intact), Olga (with a thermos of tea, naturally) and Schrodinger (not invited; came on his own; this is his clearing no less than anyone’s).

And in the center — the passage. The point where reality is thin. Where the first floor is like parchment through which you can see the light from the other five.

— Today, — said Wei Lin, — you choose.

— Choose what?

— A school, a path, a model — how you’ll go through rewrite and what will remain on the other side.

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Hiero went first. (Of course. Hiero always goes first: it’s an old, well-honed strategy of his — whoever speaks first sets the rules the conversation will run by and the words it will be carried in; everyone else afterwards is forced to respond in his language, his metaphors, and his agenda, even when they privately disagree with them. The military have known this since the days when they had nothing but a drum; marketers rediscovered it in the sixties and have been earning billions on it ever since; Hiero knows it better than both, because in his case it isn’t a staff or a department doing the work — it’s his own signature on the fourth floor.)

— I’m not going to talk you into anything, — he said. (Smile. Thirty-two teeth. The kind of charisma that makes you want to simultaneously listen and bolt.) — I’ll state a fact. Over the last fifty thousand years, seven civilizational projects on Earth — six of which failed. Six. Out of seven. Success rate: fourteen percent. Know why?

— Because the designers were idiots? — I suggested.

— Because the designers played it safe. First school: order, control, “let’s be careful about it.” Third school: freedom, “let’s let them figure it out.” Result — stagnation and chaos. Six failures. The only project that hasn’t failed yet is this one. Ours. The current one. And you know what makes it different?

— Pressure, — said Artyom. Quietly. Like stating a fact.

— Pressure, — Hiero nodded. — Wars, pandemics, catastrophes — these are fuel. A species that feels no pressure doesn’t evolve. Comfort is poison. Stability is death. The only thing that drives forward is the unbearableness of the current state.

(I listened and thought: he’s right. Again. Damn Hiero — right every time. Not completely, but enough that you can’t wave him off. Like a fast-food commercial: you know it’s bad for you, but it looks delicious. And when I finally got ready to object — opened my mouth, caught the air before the phrase — the first thing that floated out of my throat was ready-made and neatly fitted: “but pressure is —”; a second one followed it, just as smooth, and then I understood with frightening clarity that an hour of listening to Hiero had already filled my head to the very bottom with his vocabulary, so that I simply had no objection of my own left — only his words, arranged in a slightly different order, and speaking with them against him was like fighting with someone else’s hand, which halfway changes direction and hits its own.)

— My path — Forsa — is simple, — he continued. — You go through rewrite under pressure. Hard. Fast. No “gently,” no “carefully.” Like a diamond. Either you withstand it and become the thing that withstands — or you don’t. And then you won’t. Binary.

— And those who “don’t”? — asked Kira.

— Marek. Heptarch. Dust. — He said it without remorse. The way a surgeon says “sometimes the patient dies on the table.” A fact, not a drama. — Cost. Everything has a cost. The question is whether you’re willing to pay it.

And then — the passage — answered.