Society: The Rectodus

Another man stood. Then another. They began to walk—not efficiently, not directly, but in wavering, zigzagging paths, bumping into chairs and each other. They were learning to deviate. It was the most inefficient thing the Rectodus Society had ever done. And it was glorious.

“No,” Crispin said. “I won’t choose.”

Crispin looked at the circular door, which had not been opened in living memory. Then he looked at the straight, righteous rectangle. And for the first time in his life, he did something irrational. He laughed. the rectodus society

“It’s worse than that, sir.” Crispin laid out a parchment. He had plotted every major decision of the Society on a Cartesian grid. “For two hundred years, we have optimized for straightness. But look here—in 1887, we funded a railway that went straight through a sacred grove, causing a landslide that buried a village. In 1923, our linear economic model caused a bank run. In 1976, our ‘direct method’ of conflict resolution involved sending a single, straight-forward letter to the Kremlin, which was interpreted as a declaration of war. We averted it by accident. The straight path is not the shortest. It is often the most destructive. It ignores the mountain. It ignores the swamp. It ignores the heart.”

Crispin turned from the bricked window. “Take the crooked path, Aldous. It’s longer. It’s harder. But at the end of it, there’s a view.” Another man stood

“The founding axiom is a mis-translation,” Crispin whispered, in the clock tower’s main hall, where every chair faced due north and the chandelier hung from a single vertical chain.

They were not, as rumor sometimes whispered, a cabal of financiers or a sect of assassins. They were, far more terrifyingly, a society of logicians. Architects who refused to design curves. Philosophers who rejected paradox. Accountants who balanced every ledger to the penny, then burned the penny because it was a fraction. Their leader, a man named Aldous Vane, had not smiled in forty-three years. He considered smiling a “lateral deviation of the facial plane.” They were learning to deviate

“Crispin Wain,” he said, “you have introduced a variable. A bend. A curve.” He walked to a black lever on the wall. “The penalty for deviation is exile. You will choose the circle.”