We. Yevgeny Zamyatin

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      LOG 5

      BRIEF:

      A Square. Masters of the World. A Pleasant and Useful Function.

      Again, something feels off. Again, I am talking to you, unknown reader, as though you were . . . say, my old friend R-13, the poet with his thick, African lips, who knows everybody. Meanwhile, you’re on the Moon, on Venus, or Mars or Mercury – who knows where and who you may be.

      Try this: imagine a square – a wonderful, living square. And then imagine asking it to tell you about itself and its life. The very last thing that would occur to the square is to talk about how all of its corners have equal angles: it simply doesn’t notice that, it’s so normal for it, so quotidian. Writing this, I feel like I’m that square. Take, for example, pink tickets and everything else that comes with them – for me, they’re the same as my equal angles, while for you, they’re more glaring than Newton’s binomial theorem.

      And so. One of the ancient sages (accidently) happened to say something wise: ‘Love and hunger rule the world.’ Ergo: in order to rule the world, man must master those masters. Our ancestors finally conquered Hunger, but at a high price: I am talking about the Great Two Hundred Years’ War, waged between the countryside and the city. It’s likely that savage peasants held on to their ‘bread’² as stubbornly as they did as the result of religious superstitions. Then, in the thirty-fifth year before the founding of the One State, 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 . . .

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