The record

This book is a set of diary entries, called "records." The writer is a man whose name is a letter and a number: D-503. He lives in a place called OneState. He is a mathematician, and he is the builder of a huge machine called the INTEGRAL. He starts his first record by copying out a notice printed that day in the State Gazette, the official newspaper.

The notice says the INTEGRAL will be finished in 120 days. It will then lift off into space. A thousand years ago, the notice says, the people's ancestors brought the whole Earth under OneState's power. Now the INTEGRAL will carry OneState's way of life to other planets. Beings out there may still live in what the notice calls the primitive state of freedom. OneState plans to bring them a happiness that it says is mathematically certain. If they refuse it, OneState will force them to be happy. But first it will try words. So every citizen who can write is ordered to compose poems, essays and other works praising OneState. These writings will be the INTEGRAL's first cargo. The notice is signed in the name of the Benefactor, OneState's leader, and it calls the citizens Numbers.

D-503 is thrilled. His cheeks burn as he writes. He loves the idea of taking the messy curve of the universe and straightening it into a perfect line. To him, OneState's way is a straight line, the wisest of all lines.

He admits he is no poet. He works with figures, not rhymes. So he decides simply to write down what he sees and thinks. Then he corrects himself: what we think. He decides to call these records WE. He hopes that because they come from OneState's perfect life, they will turn into an epic poem on their own.

He ends with a strange comparison. The feeling of writing, he says, may be like a woman sensing a new baby growing inside her. She feeds it for months, then gives it up to OneState. He says he is ready, like everyone else. Then he adds: or nearly everyone. That small slip is worth noticing.

The record

It is spring in OneState. The wind blows sweet yellow pollen over the Green Wall from wild plains beyond. It dries everyone's lips and, D-503 admits, gets in the way of clear thinking. The sky is perfectly blue with no clouds, which he loves. Everything around him seems made of the same glass as the Green Wall and all the buildings.

That morning, at the hangar where the INTEGRAL is being built, he watched the machines moving and saw them as a beautiful ballet. He decides a dance is beautiful because it is not free. Every move is controlled. He starts to argue that people have always had an instinct for unfreedom. Then his screen clicks. It is O-90, coming to take him for a walk. She is short and round, with a round pink mouth, and he finds her sweet. When he excitedly explains his idea about machines and dance, she just says it's spring. He thinks this is typical of women.

During the Personal Hour after lunch, the avenue is packed. Thousands of Numbers march in rows of four to music, all in sky-blue uniforms called yunies, with gold number badges. D-503 feels proud, as if he himself built this whole glass world. Then he remembers a museum picture of an old-time street, crowded and messy. He laughs out loud. A woman on his right laughs too. She has very white, sharp teeth, and eyebrows that rise at an angle like an X. She teases him that he looks like a god admiring his creation.

He tries to explain that the past and present are completely different. She suggests the old world also had drums and marching ranks, almost repeating what he wrote that morning. He insists everyone is now the same. She asks if he is sure. He looks along their row of four and sees that they are all different: the slim, sharp woman, round O-90, and a bent man shaped like the letter S. She asks to see his hands. He hates them because they are hairy, and calls them a monkey's hands. O-90 says D-503 is assigned to her. He thinks she talks faster than she thinks.

The woman's number is I-330. As the hour ends, she leaves with the S-shaped man, whose face seems familiar. She tells D-503 to come to auditorium 112 in two days. He says he will if he gets the order. She says he will. She bothers him like an extra term in an equation that won't cancel out. Alone with O-90, he is relieved. O-90 asks to come to his room right now and lower the blinds. But they were together yesterday, and their next Sex Day is in two days. He kisses her eyes three times and they part.

The record

D-503 rereads his last record and worries it was not clear. He remembers that his readers may live somewhere else, perhaps on another planet, and may not know the basics of OneState. It feels odd to explain everyday things, like a writer having to explain what a jacket is. Still, he tries. First he says that since the 200-Years War, no one has ever gone beyond the Green Wall. He knows this may shock his readers.

He argues that human history has always been a move from wandering to settling down. So the most settled life, OneState's, must be the most perfect. After the war, roads were destroyed and grass grew over them. At first, living in cities cut off by wild green land may have felt strange. But he compares it to humans losing their tails long ago. Today nobody could imagine having a tail, and he cannot imagine a city without a Green Wall.

Next he describes the Table of Hours, which hangs on his wall in purple and gold. He feels almost like praying to it. The Table sets the exact minute when millions of Numbers get up, start work, stop work, eat, walk, go to the auditorium, exercise and sleep. They do it all together, as one body. He admits OneState has not quite perfected happiness. Twice a day, from 16:00 to 17:00 and from 21:00 to 22:00, there are Personal Hours. Then some people lower their blinds, some walk, and some, like him, write. He dreams that one day every second of the day will be on the Table.

He finds the past hard to believe. People once ate and slept whenever they liked, and streetlights burned all night. To him, that wasted life and was a slow kind of murder. He works it out as a sum. Killing one person was a crime, but letting millions waste years was not. He mocks old thinkers for not building an ethics based on arithmetic. He is just as shocked that people once had sex and children with no control. OneState has Maternal and Paternal Norms for that.

He insists he is not joking, because every joke is really a lie. Besides, OneState Science says this is how the past was, and it cannot be wrong. Even now, he says, a wild, ape-like echo sometimes rises from deep inside people. But these are small faults. The Benefactor's hand and the Guardians' watchful eye remove any bent bolt from the great Machine. This reminds him of the S-shaped man. He thinks he once saw him leaving the Bureau of Guardians. That explains his respect for him, and his discomfort when I-330 spoke so boldly in front of him. He starts to confess something about I-330, but the bell rings for sleep at 22:30.

The record

D-503 says that until now, everything in life has seemed clear to him. Today, though, he doesn't understand. He did get an order to go to auditorium 112, exactly as I-330 said he would. That seems very unlikely: there are 1,500 auditoriums and ten million Numbers.

The auditorium is a huge glass dome full of rows of shaved heads. He looks around for O-90 but doesn't see her. Everyone sings the Anthem of OneState. Then a phonolecturer, a speaker with a golden loudspeaker, begins. He tells an old story about a savage who wanted rain. The savage noticed the barometer said Rain before it rained, so he let some mercury out to make it point to Rain. The audience laughs. The lecturer says the savage at least tried to link cause and effect. At this point D-503 suddenly feels he shouldn't have come, and that everything is empty. He stops listening for a while.

When he tunes back in, the talk is about music. A new machine, the musicometer, lets anyone make three sonatas an hour by turning a handle. The lecturer mocks the ancients, who needed inspiration, which he calls a kind of epilepsy. To show how silly old music was, a curtain opens on an ancient instrument, a grand piano. And I-330 walks onto the stage. She wears an old-style tight black dress with bare shoulders. She smiles at D-503 in a way that feels like a bite, then plays wild, jerky music by an old composer named Scriabin.

Most of the audience laughs, and D-503 knows they are right. But a few people don't, and he is one of them. He feels a slow, sweet pain and imagines a wild, burning sun, not OneState's calm blue one. Then the man beside him giggles, and a tiny bubble of spit on the man's lips pops. That brings D-503 back to himself. He laughs like everyone else. Afterward, a demonstration of modern mathematical music seems wonderfully regular to him. Leaving in rows of four, he sees the S-shaped man and bows to him.

At home he gives the duty officer a pink ticket and gets a pass to lower his blinds. Blinds are allowed only on Sex Day. The rest of the time everyone lives behind glass, in full view. D-503 says this makes the Guardians' job easier and that nobody has anything to hide. That evening O-90 arrives, gives him her pink ticket and kisses him. Afterward he shows her his notes and talks about the beauty of squares and straight lines. Suddenly she cries, and her tears make the ink run on page 7. She begins, "Dear Dee, if only you..." but doesn't finish. He thinks she means her old wish for a child. Or perhaps something about I-330. He decides that would be too stupid.

The record

D-503 catches himself again. He keeps writing as if his reader were his old friend R-13, a well-known poet. But his reader could be anywhere, even on the Moon or Mars. So he explains why this is hard. He imagines a living square telling its life story. The square would never think to mention its four equal angles, because they are too normal to notice. He is like that square. Things like pink tickets are ordinary to him but may be strange to his reader.

He quotes an old saying that love and hunger rule the world. So to rule the world, people had to rule love and hunger. OneState's ancestors beat hunger first, at a terrible cost: the 200-Years War, fought between the City and the Country. In the year 35 before OneState was founded, a food made from petroleum was invented. Only two tenths of the world's people survived. But D-503 calls the result a cleaner, brighter Earth, and says the survivors found happiness in OneState.

Next came love. He sets happiness out as a fraction: bliss on top, envy below. As long as some people were loved by many and others by nobody, envy remained. About 300 years ago, OneState passed the Lex Sexualis, a law saying any Number has the right to any other Number as a sexual partner. The system works like this. The Sexual Bureau tests your hormones and gives you your own Table of Sex Days. You name the Number or Numbers you want, and you receive a book of pink tickets. With envy gone, D-503 says, happiness becomes infinite. Love has become a pleasant, useful body function, like sleeping or eating.

Then he notices something odd inside him, something cloudy and spidery, shaped like an X. Or maybe it is just his hairy hands, which he dislikes as a leftover from savage times. He starts to wonder if he himself contains something wild, then wants to cross the thought out. Instead he decides to leave it in. His notes should work like a seismograph, recording the smallest tremors, which can be early warnings. Then he calls that idea absurd, since OneState controls nature and no disaster can happen.

Finally he settles on an answer. The feeling only comes from being like the square. There is no X in him, he insists, but there might be one in his readers. He asks them not to judge him harshly. No writer ever had it this hard, he says. Others wrote for their own time or the future. He is writing for people as wild as his distant ancestors.

The record

D-503 admits OneState is not yet perfect. In the ideal state, nothing would ever happen. But the State Gazette says there will be a Justice Gala in Cube Square in two days. That means some Number has broken the rules again. And something has happened to D-503, too, though during the Personal Hour.

At 15:50, I-330 phones. She offers to fly him to the Ancient House. She annoys and almost scares him, and for that very reason he says yes. They fly in an aero, a flying vehicle, under a blue May sky. A single fluffy cloud bothers him. Near the Wall they see green patches beyond it, then drop down to the Ancient House. It is an old, shaky building kept inside a glass shell. An old woman with a wrinkled, sunken mouth keeps it. I-330 calls her Granny and clearly comes here often. On the stairs, I-330 says she loves the old woman for no reason at all. D-503 starts to say "it's clear" and catches himself. He uses that word too much.

Inside is an old-style apartment. It has the same kind of piano, wild colours, books, a Buddha statue and curved furniture. There are children's beds, because children were once private property. D-503 can hardly stand the mess. I-330 calls it her favourite, then quickly corrects herself to "the stupidest." She mocks the ancients for loving without reason, and it sounds like his own opinion. Yet her smile hides something. At a mirror he looks into her dark eyes. He sees a flame inside, like a fireplace, and his own reflection, looking unlike himself. He feels trapped and afraid.

She sends him into the next room, where a bust of an old poet, Pushkin, he thinks, seems to smile at him. She comes back in a short yellow silk dress, black hat and black stockings. He accuses her of showing off. She agrees, too smoothly, that being original breaks the rule of equality. She asks why people once adored poets like this one instead of wiping them out. Then she laughs, and he trembles.

At 16:50 he checks his badge watch. He has a lecture at 17:00. She asks him to stay. She knows a doctor in the Bureau of Medicine, assigned to her, who could write a note saying D-503 was sick. Now he understands where her game was heading. He says an honest Number should report this to the Bureau of Guardians. She asks, curious, whether he will. She then phones some unknown Number and says she'll wait alone at the Ancient House. D-503 takes the aero and leaves. The old woman asks if I-330 is staying by herself, and he says yes.

He reaches the lecture exactly at 17:00 but can't listen. He realises he lied to the old woman: I-330 won't be alone. That evening he has time to report her, but he is tired. The law gives him two days. He decides he still has twenty-four hours.

The record

D-503 has a strange night. He dreams of the Ancient House: bright colours, the piano, the yellow dress, and the bronze Buddha opening its eyes. Then juice starts oozing from everything, even from him. He wakes in a fright. The glass room calms him. But he is worried. In OneState, dreams are a sign of serious mental illness. He feels something foreign in his brain, like an eyelash stuck in your eye.

At 7:00 a bell wakes him. Through the glass walls he sees hundreds of other people doing exactly what he does, and that cheers him. He praises Taylor, an ancient thinker who planned work down to every movement. He thinks Taylor deserves more fame than Kant. After breakfast and the Anthem, everyone takes elevators down. The drop reminds him of the aero ride. He tells himself all that is finished, and he was firm with her.

On the underground train to the INTEGRAL, he is working out equations in his head. Someone sits beside him and says sorry. It is the S-shaped man, with pink wing-like ears. His badge reads S-4711. His eyes feel like drills digging into D-503's soul. D-503 suddenly realises that S is a Guardian, so he decides to report everything now. He stammers that he visited the Ancient House with I-330. S-4711 calls her a talented woman with many admirers. D-503 wonders if S is assigned to her and can't go on. S smiles and leaves. Then D-503 reads a news item. It says there are new signs of a secret group trying to free people from the State. He is shocked. To him, freedom and crime go together, so the only way to end crime is to end freedom. He vows to go to the Guardians after 16:00.

At 16:10 he meets O-90, who wants a walk. When he tells her he is going to the Guardians, her mouth turns down. He loses his temper and calls women unable to think in abstract terms. She calls the Guardians spies. She had brought him lilies of the valley from the Botanical Museum. He grabs them and lectures her. Smell is just smell, neither good nor bad. The old world's spies were like henbane, a nasty-smelling plant. OneState's spies are like lilies of the valley. People turn to stare.

O-90 asks if he is sick. Suddenly he remembers the dream and happily agrees that he is. She says it is his duty to be healthy and he should see a doctor. So he goes to the Medical Bureau instead of the Guardians, and is kept there until 17:00. In the evening O-90 visits. They don't lower the blinds. They work maths problems from an old book together. He finds her childlike and charming and feels calm. After she leaves, he smells something in his bed. A lily of the valley stem is hidden there. He finds this tactless of her. He insists it isn't his fault that he's sick.

The record

D-503 remembers his school days. His maths teacher was an old machine the boys called Pliapa, because its loudspeaker crackled "plia-plia" before each lesson. One day Pliapa taught them about the square root of minus one, a number that can't be pinned down by ordinary sums. Young D-503 cried and banged his fists. He felt it growing inside him like something alien that he couldn't control or make sense of.

Now that feeling is back. Rereading his records, he admits he has been lying to himself. Being sick was an excuse. A week ago he would have gone to the Guardians without a thought. Today at 16:10 he stands outside the Bureau of Guardians. Through the glass he sees a line of Numbers waiting to report their loved ones, friends, even themselves. Their faces glow like lamps in a church. He longs to join them, but his feet won't move.

R-13, the poet, calls out that he's daydreaming. R-13 has shiny laughing eyes and thick lips that spray when he talks. O-90 is with him. D-503 snaps that he was admiring, not dreaming. R-13 jokes that D-503 should be a poet. He says D-503's science is really cowardice: a little wall around infinity, built so he won't have to look beyond it. D-503 says walls are the basis of everything human. He suggests they all come to his place to do maths problems. But O-90 has a pink ticket for R-13 today. R-13 invites them to his room instead. D-503 goes, because he is afraid to be alone with the new, unknown self inside him. He and R-13 have been friends since school. Three years ago they both chose O-90, and that brought them closer still.

R-13's room is the same as D-503's, but R-13 shoves the chairs out of line. The three remember school: how the boys loved Pliapa, and how R-13 once jammed a chewed-paper spitball into the law teacher's loudspeaker. They laugh. O-90 sits on R-13's lap in the sunlight, and D-503 feels calmer. He asks what R-13 is writing for the INTEGRAL. R-13 says nothing today. He had to put a verdict into verse instead. A fellow poet he sat beside for two years suddenly declared himself a genius above the law. R-13 turns away, his eyes dull. D-503 cheerfully says the old days of great writers are over. R-13 agrees, but bitterly, saying they are all just average now.

D-503 suddenly thinks of I-330. He senses some thin thread between her and R-13, and the troubling root stirs again. It is 16:25, and the couple have 45 minutes left on their ticket. He leaves. Looking back, he sees R-13's blinds already down on the seventh floor. Still, he feels the three of them form a triangle, or what the ancients would call a family. It is good to rest inside it.

The record

It is the day of the Justice Gala, bright and proud. D-503 says that on such a day you forget your doubts and weaknesses. Cube Square is packed. Sixty-six rings of stands circle a giant cube. Children sit at the front to see best. The crowd is silent. D-503 compares it to an ancient church service. But he says the ancients worshipped an unknown God who only asked for pointless sacrifice. Numbers worship OneState, and their sacrifice is calm and reasoned. The Gala celebrates the whole winning over the part.

A condemned man stands on the steps of the Cube. His face looks colourless, like glass, with dark empty eyes. His number badge has already been taken. His hands are tied with a purple ribbon, an old custom. Up on the Cube, beside a device called the Machine, sits the Benefactor. From below, his face is just stern square lines. But his hands look huge and heavy, as if made of stone.

The Benefactor slowly raises one hand. A State Poet comes forward and recites a poem about the guilty man. It describes fire destroying the world. Then Prometheus, which means OneState, tames fire inside machines and binds chaos with law. A madman sets the fire loose again. D-503 can't remember the poem well but finds it uplifting. The hand rises again. A second poet comes up, and it is R-13. His thick lips are grey and trembling. D-503 is surprised R-13 never told him about this honour. R-13 reads sharp, fast lines about the crime: a poem the condemned man wrote that insulted the Benefactor. D-503 can't bring himself to write down what it said. R-13 returns to his seat pale, not looking at anyone. For a split second, D-503 thinks he sees a sharp face beside him, and then it is gone.

The hand rises a third time. The condemned man climbs the last steps and lies face up on the Machine. The Benefactor walks once around it and lays his hand on a lever. Everyone holds their breath. The hand drops. A blade of light flashes. The body gives off a puff of smoke and melts away until only a puddle of pure water is left. D-503 says everyone knows the science of it, but it still feels like a miracle. To him it proves the Benefactor's superhuman power.

Ten women with flushed faces decorate the Benefactor's damp uniform with flowers. He walks down through the stands like a high priest, with white hands raised and a million voices praising him. They praise the Guardians too, who are hidden somewhere in the crowd. D-503 wonders whether the ancients were really imagining the Guardians when they spoke of archangels. He ends by feeling sorry for any reader who has never known a moment like this.

The record

The morning after the Gala, D-503 feels clean, like a liquid that has been filtered. Downstairs, the controller at the desk notes each Number who passes. Her name begins with U, but he won't give her number, in case he writes something unkind. Her cheeks hang down like gills. She tells him, with an inky little smile, that a letter is coming for him. Letters go through the Bureau of Guardians first. Her smile troubles him so much that he makes a mistake in his sums at the INTEGRAL, something that never happens. At 12:00 he gets the letter. It is an official notice: I-330 has been assigned to him. He must go to her at 21:00.

He is stunned. His mind spins through the Buddha, the yellow dress, the lilies, O-90's frown. He decides not to face O-90 and simply to send her a copy of the notice. Then he looks at his hairy hand and remembers I-330 studying it. That evening, on a pale, greenish white night, the whole glass city feels thin and fragile to him. His ribs feel like iron bars squeezing his heart. At I-330's glass door he hands her his pink ticket and says he's reporting for duty. She keeps writing for a minute. He studies her face. Her brows make one triangle and the lines beside her mouth make another, together forming an X, as if her face were crossed out.

She asks if he really went to the Guardians. He says he was sick. She expected something would stop him, she says. But now he is in her hands, because anyone who fails to report within 48 hours is guilty too. She lowers all the blinds and changes behind him. Listening, he feels like one of the new street membranes, giant ears that record conversations for the Guardians. When he turns, she is in a thin saffron-yellow old-style dress. She is smoking, and a green drink sits on the table. It is alcohol. Both smoking and drinking are crimes that get no mercy in OneState. She jokes about letting her most devoted admirer appear naked before the public. D-503 realises she means S-4711 and feels jealous. Then he tells himself that S-4711 has as much right to happiness as anyone.

She says she knows he won't report her. Then she kisses him, and he tastes the burning drink. He feels he is spinning off the Earth. He sees two selves in him: the old D-503 and a hairy, wild one breaking out of its shell. When she says the drink came from a doctor, one of hers, the wild self screams in jealousy that he'll kill anyone else. He grabs her and tears her dress. She slips away. He ends up on the floor kissing her knees and begging. Silently, she holds his badge watch up to his eyes. It is almost 22:30.

Being outside after 22:30 is forbidden, so he runs. On the empty avenue his badge falls off. As he picks it up, he hears footsteps and glimpses something small and bent turning a corner. He gets home with one minute to spare. He can't sleep, though sleeping is a duty. He writes that he is finished.

The record

It is a misty evening, and a milky gold haze hides the sky. D-503 says the ancients believed God was up there. Numbers know it is just empty blue. Now he isn't sure what is there. He used to be certain he knew himself. Now he doesn't. He looks in the mirror and, for the first time, really sees his own face. He has straight black brows with a crease between them like a scar, and grey steel eyes ringed from lack of sleep. The man in the mirror seems like a stranger. D-503 insists he is not that man. Then he tells himself this is nonsense, the effect of last night's poison, either the drink or I-330.

R-13 calls and comes over. D-503 is glad not to be alone. He sincerely praises R-13's poem at the Gala. He says it did more than anything to destroy the lunatic. He even says he'd like to work R-13's lines into his drawings of the Benefactor's Machine. R-13's eyes go dull and his lips grey. He says he is bored and doesn't want to hear about the verdict anymore.

Then R-13 brightens. He says he is writing something for the INTEGRAL, about Paradise. In the old story, two people in Paradise had to choose between happiness without freedom and freedom without happiness. They chose freedom, and people longed for their chains for centuries after. OneState, he says, has helped God defeat the Devil, the serpent who tempted people to taste freedom. Now everyone is simple and innocent again. The Benefactor, the Machine, the Cube, the Gas Bell and the Guardians are all good, because they protect people's unfreedom, which means their happiness. D-503 loves the idea and thinks how straight R-13's mind is, despite his crooked looks.

R-13 laughingly calls him Adam and mentions his Eve. O-90 has a pink ticket for D-503 in two days, and R-13 asks if he still wants her. D-503 says yes. R-13 adds that O-90 is shy, and that she won't say who the fourth person is who has crept into their triangle. D-503 suddenly blurts out a question: has R-13 ever tried nicotine or alcohol? R-13 hesitates. He hasn't himself, he says, but he knew a woman who did. D-503 shouts her name, I-330. R-13 laughs and asks if D-503 is with her too.

In the mirror, D-503 sees his own brows twist and hears a wild voice demanding what "too" means. It is the other, hairy self. He grabs hold of that self and apologises, saying he is sick and hasn't slept. R-13 says he understands, in theory. He tosses D-503 his latest book and bounces out. Alone, D-503 feels jealous, as in the old books. He decides he will never see R-13 again. The triangle is finished. He wonders who and what he is.

The record

D-503 thinks he may be getting better. He slept soundly, with no dreams. O-90 is coming tomorrow, and life will be simple and neat again, like a circle. He says he isn't afraid of the word limitation. Reason, to him, means cutting infinity into small, manageable pieces. That is the beauty of mathematics, which I-330 will never understand. He doesn't know why he thought of her.

On the underground train he is reading R-13's new book, the one R-13 left yesterday. He senses someone leaning over his shoulder to look at the page. Out of the corner of his eye he sees pink wing-like ears and a double-bent shape. It is S-4711. D-503 doesn't think S-4711 was in the car when he got on. He pretends not to notice. Being watched makes him feel safe, he says, as if a guardian angel were protecting him from mistakes. He feels S-4711's warm breath on his neck and ear. He even turns and looks into his eyes, as if asking for something, but S-4711 asks nothing.

The poem he is reading is a sonnet called "Happiness." It is about two plus two, always joined lovingly in four. D-503 thinks it is beautiful and wise. He calls R-13 a Columbus who discovered a new world in the multiplication table. Steel rusts, and the old God made mistakes, but the multiplication table never does. Numbers that follow its laws are perfectly happy. It would be silly, he says, for those happy twos to start thinking about freedom, which only means making a mistake.

From R-13's poem he moves to the Institute of State Poets and Writers. He thinks the ancients wasted the power of words by letting everyone write about whatever they liked. It was like letting the ocean's waves crash all day just to stir up lovers' feelings. OneState turned the waves into electricity, and it has tamed poetry the same way. Poetry is now government service. He lists famous works. There are Mathematical Rhymes that taught children to love arithmetic. There is a children's rhyme about a boy pricked by a rose's thorn, where the thorns stand for the Guardians protecting the State. There are Daily Odes to the Benefactor, verses on court verdicts, a tragedy about being late for work, and verses on sexual hygiene.

Modern poets, he says, march in step with everyone. Their music is toothbrushes humming, the Machine's spark, the Anthem, lowering blinds and the whisper of street membranes. OneState's gods are now in the kitchen and the office, so people have become like gods. He ends by promising his planetary readers that OneState is coming to make their lives rational too.

The record

D-503 wakes at dawn feeling well and happy. O-90 is coming that evening. But when the morning bell rings, a thick fog has covered everything. The glass buildings seem to melt away. People inside them look like specks floating in milk. Nothing feels solid. At 11:45 he checks the clock just to hold on to numbers.

As he stops at his room before his scheduled work, I-330 phones. She tells him to wait on the corner. He says he is going to work. She says he knows he'll do as she tells him. He goes, meaning to show her that OneState is in charge of him, not her. He stands watching the clock while minutes pass. By the time she appears, he is already late. Her red lips look like a fresh knife cut. She leans her shoulder into him, and he feels a deep joy in giving in, like iron snapping to a magnet. She starts using the familiar form of "you," an old form a master once used to a slave. He feels he is her slave and that this is right. He says he hates and fears the fog. She tells him that means he loves it, because you can only love what you can't master.

They walk through the glowing fog together. He feels the whole world is a womb and they are ripening inside it, and that everything exists for him. She stops at the Bureau of Medicine. The doctor on duty is the one she mentioned at the Ancient House. He is a very thin man who seems all profile, with a nose like a blade and lips like scissors. He laughs that they have a most dangerous disease. He writes notes for both of them saying they are too sick to work. D-503 knows this makes him a thief of OneState's labour, someone headed for the Machine. But it seems far away, as if in a book.

They fly in an aero to the Ancient House. The old woman calls him a scamp for skipping work. She promises to run and warn them if anything happens. Inside, behind the opaque door, they kiss. His old dream of juice now makes sense to him. They make love. There is no pink ticket, no OneState, no him. Afterwards I-330 says softly that she knew him. Then she puts on her biting smile, goes back to the formal "you," and calls him a fallen angel who is now ruined. She asks if he can get home alone.

She opens a mirrored door in the wardrobe and waits for him to leave. He steps out, then suddenly needs to feel her shoulder once more and rushes back. The ring on the wardrobe key is still swinging, but she is gone. The room has only one exit. He searches everything, even the old dresses in the wardrobe, and finds no one. He admits this sounds impossible. But the whole day has been like a dream. He feels sure he'll explain it logically someday. He ends by saying how full he feels.

The record

D-503 writes about the evening after his day with I-330. He was too busy to write then. What stays with him most is a very cold floor.

It was O-90's day. He went down to the duty desk for his pass to lower the blinds. The duty officer said he looked odd. D-503 said he was sick, which felt true. Then he found the doctor's note in his pocket. It proved the whole day had really happened. He handed it over, his cheeks burning, and the officer looked surprised.

Back in his room he paced. Through the glass wall on his right, he saw his neighbour reading. The man has a bumpy bald head and a wrinkled forehead. D-503 felt the man's eyes on him and imagined the wrinkles were about him. He was in torment. How could he be with O-90 after I-330?

At 22:45, O-90 arrived in a happy rush and threw her arms around his neck. But her hug soon weakened, and her arms dropped. She said he wasn't the same, that he wasn't hers anymore. He thinks "mine" is a savage, ancient word. Then he realises he is now living in that ancient, unreasonable world himself. As the blinds came down, he saw his neighbour drop a book and reach for it, and he longed to hold that hand. O-90 said she had wanted to see him on the walk, because she had so much to tell him. He couldn't tell her what had happened. That would make her his accomplice. He knows she isn't strong enough to report him, so she would be guilty too.

O-90 lay on the bed and he kissed her, even the little crease on her wrist. Then he felt an emptiness and found he couldn't go on. His lips went cold. O-90 trembled, pulled the cover over herself and hid her face. He sat on the freezing floor saying nothing. He mumbled that he hadn't meant it and had tried. He thinks of himself as iron that can't help obeying a magnet. O-90, crying, told him to go away. He went into the hall, cold and numb. Fog was gathering outside again. O-90 walked past him without a word to the elevator. He shouted for her to wait, but she had gone. He feels that she, I-330, has taken R-13 from him, and taken O-90 too. And yet, he writes, and yet. He doesn't finish.

The record

D-503 arrives at the hangar where the INTEGRAL is being built. The Second Builder comes to meet him. He has a round, white face like a china plate. He eagerly shares some news. Yesterday, while D-503 was sick, the guard at the door caught a man with no number trying to leave with the workers. Nobody knows how he got in. He was taken to Operations, where they'll get the truth out of him.

D-503 explains Operations to his readers. The best doctors work there under the Benefactor himself. Their main tool is the famous Gas Bell. It is like the old school experiment of putting a mouse under a glass dome and pumping out the air, but improved and using gases. He says it protects OneState's security, and so the happiness of millions. Some people once compared Operations to the ancient Inquisition. He thinks that's as silly as calling a surgeon a robber because both hold a knife. Then his thoughts snag. He remembers the key ring still swinging on the wardrobe and I-330 gone. He feels her shoulder against his in the fog again. He loves everything now. He says aloud that everything is okay.

The Second Builder is alarmed. If a man with no number got in, he says, then "they" must be everywhere, all around the INTEGRAL. He can't say who "they" are, but he feels them. D-503 mentions a rumoured new operation that removes the imagination and suggests he get it. The Second Builder is insulted. A week ago D-503 would have been insulted too. Now he knows he has an imagination and is sick, and he doesn't want to get well.

The morning sun turns everything pink and alive. The INTEGRAL's glass hull, a long egg shape, is almost done. The rocket engine will fire every three seconds. Below, workers move in perfect rhythm, as do the glass cranes, like parts of one great machine. D-503 longs to join them and feel calm, like sailing on a smooth, mirror-like sea. Then one worker kindly asks if he is feeling better after missing work. D-503 blushes. He can't lie to that innocent face, so he says nothing.

The Second Builder calls him from a hatch about a technical problem, and D-503 runs off in shame. He feels he is a criminal and a poisoned man. He will never again fit into the calm rhythm, and is doomed to burn and hide forever. Then a cold thought strikes him. If he confesses, it won't only be about him, but about her too. Up on the deck, the sun looks dim and the INTEGRAL grey and dead. The Second Builder has been shouting at him for a while. D-503 feels like an aero with no rudder, racing either down to crash or up into the sun's fire.

The record

D-503 hasn't written for several days. They have all blurred into one, like dry yellow sand with no shade or water. He can't live without I-330, but since she vanished at the Ancient House he has seen her only once. She passed on the walk hand in hand with S-4711, the paper-thin doctor and a fourth Number. All D-503 remembers of that man are his very long, thin white fingers, like rays. I-330 waved, and D-503 heard her say the word INTEGRAL to the man with the long fingers. Then all four looked back at him. She had a pink ticket for him that evening, but she never came. He tortures himself wondering who she is with: the long-fingered man, R-13 or S-4711.

S-4711 seems to follow him every day like a flat grey shadow. D-503 hears his flat feet squelching behind him. He wonders whether the Guardians already know about him. Knowing he is watched makes his arms feel like someone else's. He phones I-330's room, but nobody answers.

Yesterday, from 16:00 to 17:00, he wandered around her building looking for her. Rows of Numbers marched past. He imagined her eyes with fire inside and begged her in his mind. Then he heard the music and realised it was past 17:00 and he was late, alone in the empty glass street. He saw himself reflected upside down in the pavement. He knew he should get a sick note, or else be taken. He half wished they would take him to Operations and end it.

Then S-4711 appeared before him and asked why he was just standing there. D-503 said he had to go to the Medical Bureau. S-4711 ordered him to follow. D-503 walked with his eyes down, sure he was being led to Operations and the Gas Bell. When he finally looked up, the sign said MEDICAL. Inside were two doctors. One was short, with legs like posts and eyes that seemed to toss patients like horns. The other was I-330's thin doctor. D-503 poured out his story: no sleep, dreams, a shadow, a yellow world. The thin doctor told him he was developing a soul, and that it was incurable.

He explained with a mirror. A normal person reflects things and throws them back. Someone with a soul absorbs everything, and every trace stays forever. D-503 said he could still hear the drops falling in the Ancient House. The doctor said people lost wings because they had nowhere left to fly. The short doctor burst in, alarmed. He said they should cut out everyone's imagination and asked to preserve D-503 in alcohol for study. The thin doctor said D-503 builds the INTEGRAL, and the short one left. Then the thin doctor whispered that D-503 isn't the only one with this illness. He suggested an early walk tomorrow to the Ancient House. D-503 thought he saw a name hidden in his smile. He left with a sick note, his heart flying, sure happiness waited tomorrow.

The record

D-503 is confused. Just as he thought he'd solved every unknown, new ones appeared. Following the doctor's advice, he walks to the Ancient House the long way, along the road beside the Green Wall. Beyond the glass, wild green plants seem to surge toward him like a wave. He praises walls as humanity's greatest invention. Then a beast with yellow eyes looks at him through the glass. They stare at each other for a long time. A thought creeps in: what if this animal, in its messy, uncounted life, is happier than OneState's people? He waves it away. The beast may be happier than him, he decides, but only because he is sick.

At the Ancient House he asks the old woman if I-330 is there. After a sly look, she says I-330 arrived not long ago. At her feet grows a silvery plant, wormwood, and she strokes it in the sunlight. For a moment D-503 feels that he, the sun, the old woman, the plant and the yellow-eyed beast share one blood. He kisses the old woman's soft, sunken mouth. She wipes it and laughs.

He runs to the bedroom, but it is empty. Only the tap drips into the basin. The other apartments are all locked. As he heads back upstairs, a door slams below and footsteps cross the floor. He calls out, then sees the head of S-4711 with his wing-like ears. He feels he must not be seen. He creeps back into the bedroom. Remembering the swinging key ring from the day I-330 vanished, he climbs into the wardrobe and shuts the door. The floor gives way and he sinks down into darkness. He blacks out for a few seconds, which he calls dying. He keeps falling, scrapes his finger bloody on a rough wall, and finally lands. When he steps out, the little platform rushes back up, leaving him behind.

He is in a narrow underground corridor lit by a line of bulbs, made of some old material, not glass. He thinks of caves where people may have hidden during the 200-Years War. After about twenty minutes he hears humming behind a heavy door and knocks. The thin doctor opens it, stunned to see him. The doctor pushes him down the corridor, tells him to stay there, and leaves. Then I-330 appears in her saffron silk. D-503 babbles about the shadow, dying in the wardrobe and his incurable soul. She laughs, and his panic melts. The doctor returns. I-330 tells him to tell "them" she will be back in fifteen minutes.

She presses against D-503 and they walk together in the dark, up endless steps. He wakes in a niche in the courtyard of the Ancient House. She says, "Day after tomorrow at 16:00," and leaves. Was it real? His fingertips are scraped. But at the INTEGRAL the Second Builder says he saw D-503 touch a sanding wheel. D-503 says he knows nothing anymore.

The record

D-503 sleeps deeply and wakes early on a cold green morning. A ray of sun on the mirrored wardrobe door hits his eyes. He opens the wardrobe and finds I-330 inside, pink, pushing through the clothes. He isn't even surprised. He climbs in and they make love in the dark. A sharp blade of sunlight through the crack falls across her bare throat. It horrifies him, and he screams. Then he wakes up. It was a dream. Yet his heart pounds and his fingers are numb, so it feels real. He can no longer tell dreams from waking life.

Lying in bed before the bell, he follows a strange chain of logic. In maths, every formula matches a shape you can see. Irrational formulas, like his square root of minus one, have no shapes we can see. But since the formulas exist, the shapes must exist too, in a hidden world beneath the surface. So perhaps the soul is as real as his boots, which he can't see right now behind the wardrobe door. And if boots aren't a disease, why is the soul? Even his mathematics, the one solid thing he had left, has come loose. He pictures the root of minus one as a scorpion with a hidden sting.

The bell rings. At breakfast everyone chews each mouthful exactly fifty times to a ticking metronome. D-503 goes through the routine, but he feels sealed off from everyone behind a soundproof wall. He worries that his records are turning into an adventure novel instead of a poem praising OneState. Then he decides that may be fine. His readers are probably like children, who will only swallow bitter medicine coated in the syrup of adventure.

That evening he feels as if he is flying high in an aero, the Earth forgotten, and O-90 forgotten too. He knows he must land some day. Obeying the doctor, he walks the empty avenues for two hours while everyone else is in the auditoriums. He feels like a finger cut off from its hand, hopping along alone. The finger doesn't want to rejoin the hand. It wants to be alone, or with I-330.

At home, U, the woman on duty, hands him a letter with a deep sigh. She knows what it says, since reading letters is part of her duty. Smiling tenderly, she calls him a poor thing. She says she has watched him for a long time and that he needs someone experienced to walk through life with. She will think about it, she says. D-503 is horrified at what she seems to mean. He tears open the letter, sure it is from I-330. It is from O-90. In the corner is a stain where a drop of something fell, probably a tear (my guess, because her tears made his ink run in Record 4). She writes that she loves him and can't live without him. She is grateful to R-13 for helping her through these days. But she sees D-503 needs only that other woman. In a few days she will cancel her registration for him and never come again. D-503 says that is better. But why, he asks, and doesn't finish.

The record

Today is the day I-330 named, two days after the tunnel. At the hangar the INTEGRAL's rocket engine is tested for the first time. D-503 hears each blast as a salute to her. At the first firing, about ten Numbers who were careless under the exhaust are burned to crumbs and soot. D-503 proudly notes that no one stopped work for even a second. Ten Numbers, he says, are a tiny fraction of OneState, too small to matter. Pity of that kind belongs to the ancients. He even laughs at himself for being upset yesterday by an ink stain.

At 16:00 he waits in his almost empty building in case she comes. A thin grey shadow, U, passes slowly on the stairs, and he feels her plaster-like smile on him. Then a male Number he doesn't know arrives, with a forehead that seems to hang down over his eyes. He looks around nervously and hands D-503 a letter from her. He says she asked that everything be done exactly as written. A pink ticket falls out with her scent. But the letter says she won't come. He should lower the blinds as if she were with him, because she needs "them" to think so. She is very sorry. He tears up the letter and almost tears up the ticket. Then he remembers her orders and leaves the ticket on the table.

He has to sit through a two-hour lecture in auditorium 13. The recorded voice is soft and female, and makes him think of the old woman. The lecture is about raising children, and a real baby on a table is used as an example. D-503 notices every detail, including a puffy crease on its wrist. The baby wriggles toward the edge. A woman screams, runs onstage and catches it, kissing its wrist. It is O-90. She sits behind him. He senses that she, he and the child are three points joined by lines leading to some hidden future.

Walking home, he hears S-4711's squelching footsteps behind him. He decides he won't be someone else's blinds. In his room, he finds O-90 standing limply by his table. She wants an answer to her letter. Cruelly, enjoying it, he says she is right about everything. She is about to leave. He hides I-330's crumpled ticket inside his manuscript, which is now 170 pages long. O-90 remembers the tear she let fall on page 7. Then she begs: she will leave forever, but first she must have a child by him. He asks if she wants to go on the Benefactor's Machine. She says she doesn't care. She just wants to feel the baby and see its little wrist crease, even for one day.

He remembers leaning over a high railing on the Accumulator Tower as a boy, thinking "what if." Now he jumps. He takes the ticket downstairs. When he returns, O-90 asks if that was I-330's ticket. He says yes, so what. He grabs her wrist hard, leaving red marks on her baby-like crease. Then the lights go out, and he falls over the railing.

The record

D-503 looks back at the night with O-90. He calls it a discharge, like an electric spark jumping between two poles. For days his pulse grew drier and faster until the spark finally jumped. Now he feels quiet and empty inside, like a building after everyone has left. He can hear his own thoughts ticking like metal.

He wonders whether the discharge has cured him of his soul. He feels no pain now when he imagines O-90 on the steps of the Cube, or under the Gas Bell. If she names him in Operations, so be it. He imagines his last act would be to kiss the Benefactor's punishing hand gratefully. He even says Numbers have a right to be punished, the most precious right of all. Then he rethinks it. The very idea of a "right" is just an old superstition.

He explains how to test an idea. You drop acid on it, an old method he calls reductio ad finem, following an idea to its very end. Clay ideas melt. Gold and glass ones last. He drops the acid on "rights." Rights come from power, he says. Put "I" on one side of a scale, like a gram, and "We," OneState, on the other, like a ton. Saying a person has rights against the State is like saying a gram weighs as much as a ton. So the ton gets the rights and the gram gets the duties. Greatness means forgetting you are a gram and feeling yourself a tiny part of the ton.

He imagines grumbling from readers on other planets: plump, rosy Venusians and sooty Uranites. He tells them that only arithmetic lasts forever, and only a morality built on it will last. From that height, a woman who gives birth against the law, like O-90, is no different from a murderer, or from the poet who attacked OneState in verse. All get the same sentence: early death. He says the ancients' God punished insulting the Church just like murder. He guesses the stern Uranites, who once burned people at the stake, agree with him. The soft Venusians, he imagines, talk of torture and barbarism. He pities them.

Finally he says history climbs in spirals, like an aero, and returns to zero. But OneState's zero is a new one, reached from the other side. He pictures it as a huge, knife-sharp cliff. Humanity set off from its dark side and sailed for centuries, like Columbus, until it reached the bright side, lit by OneState. Only a knife's width separates the two sides. He praises the knife as humanity's greatest invention. It was the guillotine, it cuts every knot, and paradox walks along its blade.

The record

D-503 writes this record in OneState, the glass city behind the Green Wall. Yesterday was I-330's day to visit him, and again she did not come. She sent another note that explained nothing. As the earlier note told him, he took her pink ticket to the duty desk and lowered his blinds, then sat alone. He insists this is not weakness. The blinds keep away the "sticking-plaster" smiles of U, he says. And I-330 is the only key to the mysteries he has met: the wardrobe, his "temporary death" and the tunnels. As the author of these records, he feels he must solve them. He wants a life with no question marks left in it.

So at 16:00 he flies an aero to the Ancient House. A strong wind pushes against the aero. Below, the city looks like blocks of blue ice. When a cloud passes, the ice seems to swell, like river ice in spring just before it breaks. D-503 catches himself and asks why he is writing such strange thoughts. Nothing could break through life in OneState, he says.

The old woman who keeps the gate is standing by the Green Wall, looking up. Black birds keep flying at the Wall and are thrown back by its electric field. She tells him nobody is there and he should not go in. He is annoyed that she treats him like someone's shadow. He tells her only to open the door. Inside, the courtyard is empty. He searches the barns, corners and arches. Beyond a gate he finds a wasteland left over from the 200-Years War: broken walls like yellow teeth, an old stove, a ship turned to stone. He feels he has seen these yellow teeth before, but he cannot find the lower exit from the tunnels. Maybe, he thinks, it was all a dream.

Dusty and tired, he turns to leave, and there is S-4711, with his pink, wing-like ears and his double smile. S asks if he is out for a stroll and whether he feels better. D-503 says he is getting back to normal. Overhead, ten or twelve Guardian aeros fly low with long spy-tubes hanging down, far more than usual. When D-503 asks why, S says a real doctor treats people before they fall ill. As he walks off, he looks back and warns: "Be careful!"

That evening D-503 tries to write about the coming Day of Unanimity but cannot. He keeps listening to the wind. He is glad when U visits. She works at the Childrearing Plant, and today the children drew a picture of her as a fish. She reported it to the Guardians. She says cruelty is the hardest kind of love. Delighted, he reads her part of Record 20. She wants copies for the children to learn by heart. Then she whispers that people are saying something about the Day of Unanimity. He jumps up, alarmed. She offers to stay by his side that day, but he refuses, because he has other plans. She says she is still thinking about choosing him. That night he dreams of wings and of an old wooden chair that climbs into his bed.

The record

D-503 describes something that shocked the whole city. During the daily walk, the marching ranks of Numbers suddenly broke step and stopped, like waves freezing in mid-air. According to OneState's records, the last time this happened was 119 years ago, when a meteorite fell into the middle of a walk.

The Numbers were marching as usual, a thousand heads moving as one body. From the far end of the avenue, near the Accumulator Tower, came a rectangle of guards. Inside it were three prisoners whose gold number badges had already been taken away. At exactly 13:06, one prisoner broke the pattern. He was a young man with a long thin neck and blue veins at his temples. He seemed to spot someone in the crowd, rose on his toes and stopped. A guard struck him with an electric whip, and he squealed like a puppy. The guard kept striking him every two seconds. D-503 watched the neat zigzag of sparks and thought how much better this weapon was than the old whips.

Then a slim young woman burst out of the ranks, shouting at the guards to stop, and threw herself into the rectangle. The whole walk froze. From one twist of her hips, D-503 was suddenly sure it was I-330. Two guards moved to grab her. Without thinking, he ran toward her. He felt a thousand horrified eyes on him, and the "hairy-handed savage" inside him ran even faster. Then she turned around. She had freckles and reddish eyebrows. It was not I-330.

D-503 felt wild joy. He wanted to shout "Grab her!" but only a whisper came out. Then a heavy hand seized his shoulder and guards began leading him away. He tried to explain, then gave up. He felt like a falling leaf, catching at every familiar thing as he went. Just then S-4711 appeared, waving his arms. In his flat voice he told the guards that D-503 was ill and had been carried away by natural anger. D-503 quickly added that he had even shouted "Grab her!" A voice behind him said he had shouted nothing. He swore he had meant to. S looked into him with his drill-like eyes, wrote a note and handed it over. D-503 was released back into the ranks. He does not know whether S believed him or had some secret reason to spare him again.

The prisoners vanished round a corner, forever. The walk went on as one huge body. D-503 thinks about the old Christian idea that humility is good and pride is bad: "We" comes from God, "I" from the Devil. He is marching in step, yet he feels separate. He notices that only a sore eye or an aching tooth feels itself; a healthy one does not. So, he reasons, being aware of yourself is a disease. Perhaps he is no longer one of OneState's healthy cells but a germ, and perhaps there are thousands more like him, pretending. He ends by wondering whether today was only the first meteor of a whole storm about to fall on the glass paradise.

The record

D-503 opens with an idea about flowers. Some bloom only once in a hundred years, he says, so why not once in a thousand? Today feels like that rare day. He is drunk with joy because I-330 is finally coming to him. On the stairs, everything seems to burst into bloom, even U's spotted cheeks.

At the duty desk he hands U the pink ticket and points happily at the moon. U glances at the number on the ticket. She tells him he does not look normal, that he is sick and destroying himself, and that "no one" will tell him so. D-503 understands that "no one" means I-330. He admits to himself that U is right: he is sick, he has a soul, he is a germ. But blooming is a kind of sickness too, he thinks, since it hurts when the bud bursts.

Up in his room, I-330 sits in his armchair. He sits on the floor with his head in her lap. He feels like a crystal dissolving into her. He seems to shrink and grow at the same time, until everything is part of him: the chair, the old woman at the Ancient House, the wild land beyond the Green Wall, a door slamming far away. When he tries to explain this, it comes out as nonsense, and he apologises. She says nonsense might have become something precious if people had cared for it as they cared for reason. She loves him even more for what he did on the walk yesterday. He asks why she tortured him by staying away. Perhaps she had to test him, she says, to learn whether he would do anything she wanted and was completely hers. He says yes. She teases him about the "duties of every honest Number." He realises that nothing in his recent pages shows any sense of duty.

His inner metronome has stopped, and he grabs his badge in fright. There are still twenty minutes. He wants to tell her everything: about O's letter, the evening he gave O a child, his childhood, Pliapa the teacher, the square root of minus one, and how he cried at his first Day of Unanimity because he got ink on his uniform. At this, I-330's face darkens. She starts to say something about "that day," stops, and grips his hand. She asks if he will always remember her. He does not understand. Suddenly he hears the wind beating the glass and remembers the birds over the Wall.

She asks for her stockings, which lie on page 193 of his notes. He knocks the manuscript and scatters the pages. Then he tells her he cannot go on like this. She always seems to be behind a wall. She has never explained the tunnels, the doctor, or where he was. She asks if he wants to know everything, and if he will follow her anywhere, to the very end. He says yes. She promises to tell him after the holiday, "if only..." Then she asks how the INTEGRAL is going and whether it will be ready soon. At the door she says only, "You'll see." Alone, he is left with her scent and with questions like fishhooks. Why did she ask about the INTEGRAL?

The record

It is the day before the Day of Unanimity. D-503 says he feels like a machine running too fast, with its bearings about to melt. He tries to cool himself with logic, but the logic just hisses away like steam.

He tries a piece of maths. Yesterday he felt himself "dissolving in the universe" with I-330. Taken to its limit, he reasons, that feeling is death, because death is the fullest possible dissolving into the universe. So love is a function of death. That explains why he fears I-330 and fights her. Yet he still wants her, and he wants that blissful "death" again. He will see her tomorrow, but only from far away, and even that pain he wants. This shocks him. Pain is a negative number, he says, so it should lower the total sum of happiness. His logic leads nowhere.

In the evening, a windy, pink sunset shines through the walls. He reminds himself that he is writing for unknown readers in the future, and turns to the Day of Unanimity. He has loved it since childhood. He compares it to the ancients' Easter. As a boy, he made a little calendar of hours and crossed them off one by one. He would do the same now, if no one could see, to count the hours until he sees her. His new uniform arrives, as is the custom before the big day, and he hears happy noise in the hallway.

Tomorrow, he explains, is the yearly election of the Benefactor. It is nothing like the messy elections of the ancients, who could not even know the result in advance. In OneState there are no surprises. The vote is only a symbol of unity, and no voice has ever broken the harmony. The ancients voted in secret, he says, maybe even in masks, perhaps for some criminal reason. In OneState everyone votes openly, in daylight, and everyone sees everyone else vote for the Benefactor. And if anyone did step out of line, hidden Guardians in the ranks would stop them at once.

He is about to add "one more thing" when, through the left-hand wall, he sees a woman undressing before the blinds come down. Yesterday floods back. He forgets his point and no longer cares. All he wants is I-330, beside him every minute. He wants to tear up everything he has just written about the holiday. For him, the only true holiday is being with her. Without her, tomorrow's sun will be a disk of tin.

He phones her and softly asks her to be with him tomorrow, calling her "darling." The word reminds him of a joke at the hangar that morning: a hundred-ton hammer swung down and stopped just short of a little watch. There is a pause, and he thinks he hears someone whispering in her room. Then she says no, she cannot, though she would like to. He must not ask why. He will see tomorrow.

The record

It is the Day of Unanimity, in the great stands of OneState. As the anthem rises from millions of voices, D-503 forgets everything for a moment. He feels like the little boy who cried over an ink spot on his uniform. Now he feels covered in black stains no one else can see. He wishes he could stand up and scream out the truth about himself, just to feel clean for one second.

Everyone looks up at a dot in the sky. It is the Benefactor, coming down in his aero. D-503 calls him a new Jehovah, wise and cruel in his love. Seen from above, the circling stands look like a spiderweb, with the Benefactor as a white spider at its centre. When the anthem ends and everyone sits, D-503 senses that the web is stretched and trembling. He notices certain people signalling to each other with tiny finger movements. He realises they are Guardians, and that something has upset them.

A poet reads the election ode, but D-503 hears only its steady beat, like a pendulum. He searches the faces. Then he spots S-4711 hurrying through the passages between the stands. S stops and bends down beside a row. There D-503 sees I-330, and beside her the grinning lips of R-13. The jealousy is like a lightning bolt, a real pain in his heart. He stays frozen in his seat.

The five-minute silence before the vote feels like the air before a storm. A voice asks those who vote yes to raise their hands. D-503 lifts his only with effort. Someone gasps. Then comes the question no one ever answers: "Those opposed?" To his horror, he hears a soft rustle like a dying sigh. A thousand hands shoot up against the Benefactor. Among them is I-330's, her face pale. Then chaos breaks out. Numbers run and scream, and Guardians rush about. D-503 sees thousands of mouths open in silent screams. For a second he sees O pressed against a wall, arms crossed over her belly to protect it.

Then R-13 leaps onto a bench above him, red and spitting. He is carrying I-330. Her uniform is torn from shoulder to breast, and there is blood. R bounds up the stands like a gorilla. D-503 rams through the crowd, grabs R's collar and shouts at him to put her down. R thinks he is a Guardian, then tries to run on. D-503 hits him on the head, and feels a strange lightness and freedom. I-330 slips down and tells R to get away. R vanishes. D-503 lifts her and carries her up, filled with wild joy.

That evening, exhausted, he writes that he cannot believe OneState's walls have fallen. He asks who "they" are, and who he is. At the top of the stands, I-330 had sat bleeding, her shoulder bare. She said that everything known has come to an end, and tomorrow is unknown. If nothing unusual happens, she will take him "there" tomorrow. He did not understand, but nodded. Now he sits in his glass room, afraid to move. The whole building is silent, waiting.

The record

It is the morning after the Day of Unanimity. The sun rises round and ordinary through D-503's glass ceiling. He is almost surprised. He had half expected a square sun, or people dressed in animal skins. Does the world still exist, he wonders, or is it just running on, like a machine that will stop after a few more turns?

Feeling lost, he grabs the State Gazette, looking for something solid. It says the Benefactor was elected for the 48th time. A "slight disturbance" was caused by enemies of happiness. Their votes, it says, count no more than a sick person's cough during a great symphony. D-503 finds this wonderfully wise. The paper also announces a joint meeting of three Bureaus (Administrative, Medical and Guardians) at 12:00, and says important government action is coming soon. He feels the walls are still standing. Everyone is going to work as usual.

He marches along the avenue with a firm, ringing step. But at a corner, people are stepping sideways around something, as if dodging cold water. On a wall, about two metres up, is a sheet of paper with a strange word printed in poisonous green: MEPHI. Beneath it, S-4711 is jumping up, trying to tear it down, but he cannot reach. Passers-by stay away, each afraid of looking guilty. D-503 has the same fear. But S has saved him so often that he walks up and tears the sheet down himself.

S's drill-like eyes dig into him. Then S raises an eyebrow toward the wall, and D-503 thinks he sees a small, happy smile. D-503 decides this makes sense. A doctor prefers a clear rash and a high fever to a hidden illness, because at least he knows what he is facing. "Mephi" is the rash breaking out.

In the subway there are more MEPHI sheets: on the steps, the walls, a bench, a mirror. They are stuck on crookedly, in a hurry. The silence is tense. One man drops his papers when someone touches his shoulder. Another reads the same line again and again, his paper shaking. D-503 feels the city's pulse racing. He imagines a thermometer climbing to 41 degrees today, when he and I-330 "get there."

At the hangar the machines stand silent. Cranes are loading blocks of frozen air into the INTEGRAL's tanks for its test flight. D-503 asks the Second Builder whether the loading will be done in a week. Then he sees a white square of paper stuck on a block high up near the roof. He hears himself laugh. He tells the Second Builder a story: imagine falling in a broken plane and planning tomorrow's schedule on the way down. That, he says, is just what they are doing. The Second Builder stares. D-503 thinks: what if he could see through me, and know what I will do in three or four hours?

The record

D-503 is back in the endless underground corridors beneath the Ancient House. Water drips somewhere, and behind the same heavy door comes the same muffled humming. I-330 said she would meet him at 16:00. The minutes pass and she does not come. He feels a gloomy relief and starts to walk away. Then the door bangs open and she runs to him, out of breath. She knew he would come. They kiss, and he admits he used the word "soul." She says there will be time later. For now, they must go.

Writing almost a day later, he says it is still hard to describe. They climb worn steps into noise, whistling and light. At first he thinks the Green Wall has been blown up and the wild world is flooding into the city. I-330 laughs. No, they have simply gone to the other side of the Wall. He is standing where no living Number has been. The sun here is broken into jumping spots. Trees rise like candles, crouch like spiders or spray like green fountains. The ground is soft, springy and alive. He feels deafened and choked, and clings to a branch. I-330 and the paper-thin doctor take his arms and drag him, laughing, through moss, branches and birdcalls.

In a clearing, around a stone shaped like a skull, is a crowd of three or four hundred. Some wear OneState's gray-blue uniforms. Others are naked and covered in short glossy fur, black, red, tan or white, like the stuffed horse in the Prehistoric Museum. The women's faces and breasts are bare and smooth, like OneState women. The men's faces are partly furred, like the ancients. D-503 can only stand and stare. Suddenly I-330 is gone. He grabs a black-furred man to ask where she went, and is told to hush.

She is standing high on the stone, dark against the sky. She calls the crowd "Brothers." The INTEGRAL, she says, would carry OneState's walls up to other worlds. The crowd shouts "Down with the INTEGRAL!" No, she answers: the INTEGRAL must be theirs. On its first flight they will be on board, because its Builder is with them. Long live the Builder! D-503 is lifted up above the heads. He feels, for the first time, like one person, a world of his own, not one of many. Back on the ground, a golden-haired woman gives him a wooden cup. He drinks something sweet and stinging, and everything feels fast, easy and clear.

On the stone he now sees the word "Mephi," and a rough drawing of a winged youth with a glowing coal for a heart. When someone shouts that this is madness, D-503 leaps onto the stone. He cries that everyone must go mad, as soon as possible. The rest comes back only in pieces: a bird that looks at him like a person, an insect with see-through wings on a furry back, people eating a long yellow fruit. Then he thinks he sees S-4711's ears in the crowd. He warns I-330. She laughs. Nobody in the city could dream that they are here, she says. He smiles too, and the earth feels drunk and light.

The record

Back in OneState, the day after the forest, D-503 says yesterday was like finding a lost continent. He owes his readers a full description of that world, but events are coming too fast. He cannot catch them all.

First, loud voices outside his door. I-330 and U burst into his room together. I-330 smiles at U with only her teeth and asks whether D-503 has given U permission to protect him from her, like a child. U, her gill-like cheeks quivering, says he is a child, and cannot see that I-330 is dragging him into a farce. D-503 jumps up, holds back his hairy "other self," and shouts at U to get out. She turns red, then gray, and leaves. He tells I-330 that U only wants to be registered to him. I-330 says U is too late. After yesterday, she adds, she is in his hands: he could report her at any moment. He begs her never to say that. Who knows who anyone really is, she replies. A person is like a novel: you do not know the ending until the last page.

Then she tells him these may be their final days. All the auditoriums are closed from tonight. Inside she saw tables being set up and medics in white coats. Nobody knows what it means. D-503 says fighting OneState is like covering a gun's muzzle with your hand. She reminds him that someone shouted yesterday that everyone must go mad. He offers to give up everything and run away with her beyond the Wall. She shakes her head. It is too late.

She lifts his hairy hand into the light. Few people know, she says, that some women from the city have come to love the people beyond the Wall. He probably has a few drops of that "sunny forest blood" himself. He begs her to tell him who those people are. Pressing a glass triangle to her cheek, she tells the story of the 200-Years War. He remembers mostly pictures: pools of blood on grass and snow, starving ragged people and dogs, black smoke over forests and villages, long lines of people driven into the city to be "saved" by force. A few escaped into the forest. They learned from trees, animals and the sun, and grew fur over their warm red blood. City people, she says, grew numbers instead. She explains Mephi in his own language. There are two forces, entropy (calm, balanced stillness) and energy (disturbance and endless movement). The ancient Christians worshipped entropy as God. The Mephi are "anti-Christians."

Before she can finish, the flat-faced messenger with the low forehead rushes in. Guards are coming, with S-4711. I-330 laughs and says there is time. She tells D-503 she still has something to discuss with him tomorrow, and leaves. D-503 panics about his notes. Everything is glass, so he cannot hide them. He sits on some pages and scribbles nonsense praising the Benefactor. S enters and demands the page. Behind him is U. She tells S that D-503 always works this hard. S reads the page, smiles a little and leaves. U whispers that he is lucky she... That evening, three Numbers are taken away. People talk only about the weather.

The record

D-503 writes that the barometer is falling in OneState. There is no wind yet, only silence. High above, storm clouds race along in ragged pieces. He imagines a city has fallen up there, its walls and towers tumbling down toward him. They are growing fast, but still have days to fall.

Down below, thin, almost invisible threads float in the air. Every autumn they drift in from beyond the Wall. One lands on your face and you cannot brush it off. There are many near the Green Wall, where D-503 is walking this morning. I-330 has asked him to meet her in "their" apartment at the Ancient House.

Near the Ancient House he hears quick steps behind him. It is O-90, hurrying to catch up. She looks rounder and fuller than before, as if her body might burst out of her uniform. He thinks of green shoots pushing up through the earth in spring. She says she saw him on the Day of Unanimity. He remembers her pressed against a wall, hands over her belly, and he glances at it. It is round now. She turns pink and says she is so happy, "full to the brim." She keeps listening to what is happening inside her.

Then she does something no one has ever done to him. She kisses his hand. He feels hurt and ashamed and pulls it away too roughly. He tells her she has lost her mind. Has she forgotten what will happen to her, in a month or two? O seems to go out like a candle. D-503 feels a painful squeeze in his heart, a feeling he knows is pity. He argues that a heart is only a pump, so such feelings must be diseased.

Then he has what he thinks is a brilliant idea. He can save her. She will not have to see her baby once and then die. She will be able to feed it and watch it grow. She clings to him. He tells her that the woman from the walk long ago is at the Ancient House right now. He will take O to her, and settle everything. He already pictures the three of them going down the corridors toward grass and flowers. But O steps back, her mouth trembling. He means that woman. She refuses to go to her, and tells him never to mention her again. She hurries off, then turns and shouts that if she dies, it is none of his business.

D-503 walks on toward the Ancient House. The clouds keep falling, and the threads keep landing on his face. The painful squeeze stays in his heart.

The record

D-503 writes down, word for word, a conversation he had with I-330 yesterday in the Ancient House, among its wild colours and under the stone smile of the old snub-nosed poet. He believes it will decide the fate of OneState, and he hopes his readers may find something in it that excuses him.

I-330 gets straight to the point. The INTEGRAL's first test flight is the day after tomorrow, and that is when the Mephi will take it. They cannot wait. Yesterday the Guardians seized hundreds of Numbers at random, and twelve were Mephi. In two or three days they will be killed. Her plan is this. Electricians, mechanics, doctors and weather experts will be on board to watch the test. At exactly 12:00, the lunch bell will ring and everyone will go into the dining room. The Mephi will stay in the corridor, lock the others in, and take the ship. With the INTEGRAL, OneState's aeros will be nothing. If needed, they can even turn the engine blast against them.

D-503 jumps up. This is revolution, he says, and revolution is impossible. OneState's revolution was the final one. I-330 asks him, as a mathematician, to name the final number, the biggest one. He says there is none, since numbers go on forever. Then there is no final revolution either, she says. The idea of a last one is a bedtime story for children. He asks what the point is, if everyone is already happy. Fine, she says, suppose they are: then what? He calls that a child's question. She says children are the only bold thinkers. Then nothing, he answers; everything is spread evenly everywhere. That is entropy, she says. Only differences, like hot against cold, make life. You have to smash things together to make fire. He reminds her that the ancestors did exactly that in the 200-Years War. They were right, she says. Their only mistake was thinking they were the final number, like Galileo, who was right about the earth circling the sun but did not know the sun moves too. The Mephi will grow old and fall one day too, she says, as D-503 will the day after tomorrow. Then she stops herself: not him, because he is with them. Before leaving, she makes him promise to remember: 12:00.

Alone, he suddenly feels that strange thing on his face again, like the threads. He remembers U shouting at I-330. He hurries home. Ahead, the city glows red in the sunset: cupolas, cubes, the Accumulator Tower. He cannot believe he is about to destroy all this beauty with his own hands. Passing an auditorium, he sees benches piled up and tables covered with white glass, with a spot of sunlight on them like blood. Something unknown is coming tomorrow. He feels like a blindfolded man walking along a cliff edge. He ends by wondering whether it would be best to jump over the edge himself.

The record

D-503 opens with relief. He feels saved at the last moment, like a man on the steps of the Benefactor's Machine who wakes to find it was only a dream. Yesterday he even thought of ending his life. He is ashamed of that now.

What saved him is the front page of the State Gazette. It tells the Numbers to rejoice: they are about to become perfect. Machines have always been more perfect than people, it says, because machines have no imagination. Pumps do not smile dreamily and cranes do not sigh at night. But the Guardians notice more and more Numbers smiling and sighing. The cause is an illness called imagination. Now State Science has found it, in a small knot in the brain. Three doses of X-rays will burn it out forever. Everyone, young and old, must hurry to the auditoriums for the Great Operation. D-503 feels like a giant. He phones I-330, thrilled. She is quiet for a long time, then says she must see him at her place after 16:00, without fail.

Outside, a cutting wind blows, but he feels nothing can knock the walls down now. At a corner, people press against a glass wall, watching. Inside, a man lies on a white table with medics bent over his head. D-503 asks why they are not going. Someone asks why he isn't. He says he will go later, after he sees I-330. He cannot say why "after."

At the hangar, he strokes the INTEGRAL's cold engine tube and calls it darling. Tomorrow it will come alive. He shudders to think that, yesterday, he was planning to betray it. The Second Builder tells him the test flight has been put off by a day because of the Operation. D-503 thinks how little this man knows.

At 15:30, U is waiting in his room. He forgives her everything and holds out his hand. She is so happy for him, she says. Soon he will be well and born again. His despairing pages from yesterday lie on the table, but he no longer cares. He tells her that tomorrow there will be no shadows, the sun will shine through everything. She says he is imagining things. She tells him she took her whole class of children to the Operation, and they had to be tied down. You must love without mercy, she says. Then she leaves.

At 16:00 he is at I-330's. He sits at her feet and talks wildly about flying among the planets, like the sun. She asks whether the "apex" of happiness is just stones organised into a society. Happiness, she says, means having no desires at all, so it should have a minus sign. Absolute zero is minus 273 degrees, he mutters. Exactly, she says. She laughs too loudly, kisses him and says "Farewell." He is sick, she says, and has committed crimes for her. The Operation will cure him of her. Does he not want happiness? He cannot live without her, he says. Then, she says, she will see him at 12:00. He tells her the test flight is now the day after tomorrow. So much the better, she says. Walking home in the wind, D-503 sees that everyone else can be saved, but he cannot. He does not want to be.

The record

It is the day before the INTEGRAL's test flight. D-503 asks his readers whether they truly believe, in their bodies, that they will die. Nobody does, he says, or they could not go on living. He feels the same about tomorrow. He knows it is coming, but he does not believe it.

So he keeps working. He climbs aboard the INTEGRAL, which rocks on the river. Glass cranes feed fuel into its engines. Everything feels flat and far away, like a diagram. The Second Builder asks how much fuel to load for a three-hour test. D-503's calculator shows 15 tons. He says 100. The Second Builder is puzzled: that is enough for far more than a week. D-503 says you never know. He knows.

Out on the avenue, a strong wind blows, and the marching rows of four start to wobble. At a corner the crowd jams into a frightened clump. Out of an auditorium comes a column of about fifty men who have had the Great Operation. They move like tractors in human shape, as if nothing could stop them. They carry a white banner with a golden sun saying they are the first, and everyone should follow. They form a chain, hand in hand, then swing round to trap the crowd and push it toward the auditorium doors. Someone screams that it is a roundup. Everyone stampedes for a small gap by the wall. D-503 glimpses S-4711 for a moment, then he is gone, and D-503 runs.

He stops in a doorway to breathe. O-90 appears. She has been following him. She does not want the Operation, she says. Now she agrees to his plan. She sinks onto the cold steps and he strokes her head. He feels big and she feels small, like part of himself. He thinks this must be how the ancients felt about their own children. She says that if they cure her, she will have nothing to live for. Every night she thinks about the baby. D-503 feels sure he must help her, even though it is another crime. He tells her he will take her to I-330. She says yes.

As they walk through the windy dusk, D-503 hears S's squelching steps behind them. He talks loudly about tomorrow's wonderful test flight, waving his arms. He must not lead S to I-330. He turns right instead of left, crosses a bridge, and brings O into his own building. In a corner of the lobby, with S's shadow pacing outside, he writes a note. He tells O to take it and go alone. S will stay here, watching him. Her round belly shifts under her uniform. He says farewell. She starts away, comes back, and her whole face repeats one word to him. Then she hurries off.

At the desk, U is angry and upset. A crowd of Numbers is arguing. One man swears he saw a naked man covered in fur near the Ancient House. U calls it delirium. For a moment D-503 wonders if everything he has seen is delirium too. Then he looks at his hairy hands and remembers I-330's words about forest blood. No, it is not delirium, fortunately and unfortunately.

The record

This is a very short record, written in a hurry. Its heading says there is no time for contents and calls it the last note. The day of the INTEGRAL's test flight has come.

D-503 grabs the State Gazette, hoping for some news. He says he reads it with his eyes as if they were a tool, something separate from himself, like a pen or a calculator. Across the front page is a warning. The enemies of happiness are not asleep. Hold on to happiness with both hands! Tomorrow all work will stop and every Number must report for the Operation. Anyone who does not will go to the Benefactor's Machine.

D-503 wonders whether there will even be a tomorrow. Out of daily habit, he reaches to file the paper in his gold-embossed binder with all the others. Halfway there he stops. What is the point? He will never come back to this room.

The paper drops to the floor. He looks around the room, every centimetre of it. He tries to pack it all into an invisible suitcase: the table, the books, the chair where I-330 sat while he sat on the floor at her feet, the bed. A minute passes, then two. Perhaps he is waiting for a miracle, for the phone to ring and I-330 to say something that changes everything. No miracle comes.

He writes that these are his last lines. He says farewell to his unknown readers, who have shared so many pages with him. When he fell ill with a "soul," he showed them everything, down to the last broken spring inside him. Then he writes simply that he is leaving.

The record

D-503 is writing again, so he has come back. He wishes he had smashed everything, or vanished beyond the Wall with I-330 and never returned. It would have been far easier. He forces himself to set down calmly everything that happened on the test flight.

He boarded the INTEGRAL. Everyone was at their posts, like bees in a glass hive. In the wardroom, the Second Builder and his assistants looked gray and gloomy. D-503 could hardly look at them, knowing that within an hour he would cut them off from OneState forever. They reminded him of a school story, "The Three on Leave." Three Numbers were given a month off as an experiment. Lost without work, they mimed their jobs in the air. After ten days they joined hands and marched into the water until they drowned. In a narrow passage, D-503 saw the low-browed messenger. The Mephi were aboard. A fine trembling began in his body and never stopped.

On the bridge he gave the order to lift off. The city shrank below, they broke through the clouds, and the sky turned black and full of stars, with a silent, blinding sun. They had left the atmosphere. D-503 felt light. A short man with arms that reached his knees blocked the wardroom door. D-503 said he was the Builder in charge, and the arm dropped. In the engine room the messenger told him I-330 was in the radio room. He found her there in a winged headset, like an ancient Valkyrie, with blue sparks overhead. He took her to a tiny cabin, pretending to dictate a message. She said how marvelous it was to fly without knowing where. Then she whispered that O came to her last night with his note. She knows the baby is his. She has sent O beyond the Wall. O will live.

Back on the bridge, D-503 stopped the engines and let the ship fall like a stone. Then he ordered slow power, and the INTEGRAL hung about a kilometre above the land beyond the Wall. Everyone crowded the rail to stare at autumn woods, a lake and yellow ruins with an old church steeple. Someone spotted brown horses galloping, with furred riders on their backs.

The noon bell rang. As the lines moved toward the wardroom, the long-armed man barred the door and shouted "Halt!" Lifted on someone's shoulders, he spoke in the name of the Guardians. They know everything, though not yet the rebels' numbers. The INTEGRAL will not be theirs. The rebels will finish the flight with their own hands. I-330 hissed at D-503: so it was him, doing his "duty." She pulled her hand away. Through lunch she never looked at him. He screamed inside that he had told no one, only his pages. Flying on, he suddenly understood: U had seen his notes on his desk. In the radio room I-330 looked through him as if he were glass. He dictated a message to the ground: prepare for landing, stop all engines, it is all over. He stopped the engines and the ship began to fall toward the green earth. Someone shoved him hard, probably the white-faced Second Builder (D-503 is not sure). D-503 hit his head. As he blacked out, he heard someone order the engines full ahead, and felt the ship leap upward.

The record

It is the day after the test flight, in OneState. D-503 has not slept. His head is bandaged, but it feels like a steel hoop squeezing him, and inside it is one thought: kill U. Then he can go to I-330 and ask if she believes him now. The idea of smashing someone's skull disgusts him. It leaves a sickly sweet taste in his mouth, and he keeps spitting into his handkerchief.

He takes a heavy broken piston rod from his locker. He rolls his notes into a tube around it, so U can "read all of him," and goes down to the duty desk. U is not there. Then he remembers that all work is cancelled today, because everyone must go for the Operation.

The streets are chaos. People move in every direction, not in rows, like letters flying off a page. In a glass room, a man and a woman kiss as if for the last time. A crowd waves banners saying "Down with the Machines!" and "Down with the Operation!" A boy runs past, crying, chased by someone. D-503 thinks U must be at her school and heads for the subway, but the trains have stopped. The platform is packed. Then he hears I-330's voice. She is mocking the crowd. Go up and be cured, she says. They will fill you with happiness and you will snore in time with everyone. She wants to want things for herself, even impossible things. A heavy voice argues back. She answers with the old story of the donkey, kept walking by a carrot tied just out of reach. If he ever eats it, he stops. D-503 pushes toward her, but someone shouts that "they" are coming. The lights go out, and the crowd tumbles through the tunnel until it spills back onto the street. He has lost her.

U is not at home either. At 21:00 she walks into his room. She has heard he was hurt. He stands up, breathing loudly, staring at a spot on her head. He notices the bald neighbour watching through the wall, and lowers the blinds without a right to. U rushes for the door, but he blocks it. She falls on the bed, begging for one day. Tomorrow she will do everything, she says. He swings the rod. He admits he is a murderer at heart, because he would have struck. But she cries out that she agrees, and tears off her uniform. She thinks he lowered the blinds for sex. The shock makes him howl with laughter. The rod falls to the floor. A laugh, he learns, can kill even murder.

The phone rings. A cold voice says it is the Benefactor. D-503 must report to him at once. Terrified, D-503 tells U to dress. At the door he grips her hand and asks if she gave them I-330's name. She says no. Why not, if she went to report? Crying, she says she was afraid that if she named I-330, he would stop loving her. He sees it is the truth, a foolish human truth, and opens the door.

The record

D-503 says his memory of going to the Benefactor is like a blank white page. He cannot remember how he got there or how long he waited. When he comes to, he is standing before the Benefactor, too frightened to look up. All he can see are the huge iron hands resting on the Benefactor's knees, so heavy that the knees bend under them. The face is far above, as if in mist.

The Benefactor asks how D-503, of all people, could do this: the Builder of the INTEGRAL, who was meant to be a great conqueror and begin a new chapter in OneState's history. Then he points a finger and asks whether "executioner" is the word D-503 would use for him. D-503 meekly says yes.

The Benefactor is not afraid of the word. He tells D-503 to picture an old scene: a hill, a cross, a crowd. Some people above are nailing a body to the cross, others below are weeping. Those above, he says, played the hardest and most important part. Without them there would be no great tragedy. And the Christians' God of love roasted rebels in hell forever. Christians burned at least as many people as were burned for being Christian. Yet people worshipped that God as love for centuries. This proves, he says, that even ancient people understood that true love of humanity must be inhuman. Cruelty is the sign of truth, as burning is the sign of fire. He challenges D-503 to argue. D-503 cannot. These were once his own thoughts.

Then the Benefactor asks what people have always wanted. Someone to tell them, once and for all, what happiness is, and then chain them to it. That is what OneState is doing. In the old idea of paradise, the blessed had no desires, pity or love. They were happy because their imaginations had been removed, like angels, slaves of God. Now, just as OneState has caught this dream in its fist, D-503 has...

He breaks off and asks D-503's age. Thirty-two, says D-503. As naive as a sixteen-year-old, the Benefactor says. Did D-503 never suspect that "they" wanted him only as the Builder of the INTEGRAL? D-503 shouts "Don't!" But it is like shouting at a bullet. He remembers U's angry face on the morning she and I-330 were both in his room. Then he bursts out laughing and looks up. In front of him sits only a bald man who looks like Socrates, his head covered in tiny drops of sweat. It all seems ridiculously simple. Choking with laughter, D-503 covers his mouth and runs out.

He wants to see I-330 just once more. Again there is a blank: only stamping feet, a rude song, someone shouting at him. Then he is in an empty, windy square beside the Benefactor's Machine. It makes him picture a white pillow and a head with half-closed eyes and sharp teeth. He knows how that picture connects to the Machine, but refuses to say it. He sits on the Machine's steps, his face wet (he thinks from rain), silently calling for help. He wishes he had a mother like the ancients had. To her he would not be the Builder or D-503, just a hurt piece of herself, and she would hear him.

The record

It is the next morning in the dining hall of D-503's building. His neighbour on the left whispers in fright that he must eat, because they are watching him. D-503 forces a smile, and it feels like a crack across his face. He spears a cube of food, and his fork starts to shake. Then everything shakes: tables, walls, dishes, the air itself. A huge iron boom rolls over the city and fades in rings, like ripples on water.

Faces turn white. Forks freeze in mid-air. Then the great orderly machine of the dining hall falls apart. People leap up without singing the Hymn and rush out, still chewing, asking what happened. Out of every building, Numbers pour into the avenue. D-503 says they look like tiny creatures in a drop of water under a microscope, darting every way.

A man points up at the sky, and hundreds of eyes follow his finger. Storm clouds race by. The dark aeros of the Guardians hang among them with their spy-tubes. In the west is what looks like a swarm of tiny black aeros, very high. As they come closer, D-503 sees they are birds, thousands of black birds, filling the sky and landing on roofs, domes and balconies. The pointing man turns round. It is the messenger with the low forehead, now smiling with his whole face. He shouts that they have broken through the Wall. Some people hurry indoors. A stream of operated Numbers marches heavily west.

D-503 grabs the messenger and asks where I-330 is. Is she beyond the Wall? Here in the city, the messenger shouts, grinning like a drunk. She is doing it. They are pulling it off! About fifty men like him, loud and happy, carrying electric weapons, head west along Avenue 48, beside the operated column. D-503 wonders who this "we" is, and who he is.

He runs toward I-330's building through a city that feels wild and strange. The birds' cries never stop. It is like Doomsday. Through glass walls, he sees couples making love openly, with no blinds and no tickets. At her building, the door hangs open and the duty desk is empty. The lift is stuck, so he runs up the stairs, past the door numbers to I-330.

Her room is wrecked. A chair lies upside down like a dead cow. The bed is dragged from the wall. Pink tickets are scattered over the floor like trampled petals. He picks them up. All of them have his number, D-503. He lays them out on the table and laughs. Laughter can be colourful fireworks, he writes, or bits of a body flying apart. Then, on some of the tickets, he spots another name, one he has never heard of. He remembers only its letter: F. He sweeps the tickets onto the floor and grinds them under his heel.

He sits on a windowsill opposite her door and waits. An old man shuffles past, tears running down his crumpled face. D-503 asks if he knows I-330. The old man waves his hand hopelessly and walks on. At dusk D-503 goes home. In the west, the sky flashes pale blue with each dull rumble. Birds sit on the roofs like black burning sticks. He lies down, and sleep falls on him like an animal.

The record

This is a short record. Its heading says D-503 does not know what to call it, except perhaps "a cigarette butt." He wakes in his room in OneState to a light so bright it hurts. His head feels full of blue smoke. He never turned the light on. Then he sees I-330 sitting at his table, chin in her hand, smiling at him with irony.

He is writing only ten or fifteen minutes after she left, at the same table. It feels as if she has just shut the door, and he could still catch her.

He rushes toward her, saying he saw her wrecked room and feared the worst. But halfway there, her sharp, still gaze stops him. She looked at him the same way on the INTEGRAL. He has one second to explain everything. His mouth is so dry he cannot even pour water, so he grabs the jug with both hands. The blue smoke, he sees now, is from her cigarette. She tells him not to bother explaining. It does not matter. She came anyway. People are waiting for her downstairs. She drops the cigarette, reaches for the button, and lowers the blinds. Then she holds him tightly.

Suddenly he remembers the trampled tickets on her floor, the letter F on one of them. It all rolls into a ball inside him. He holds her so hard she cries out in pain. Her head lies back on the white pillow, eyes half closed, teeth showing. This reminds him of something he should not think of. He grips her more tenderly and more cruelly, leaving blue bruises.

Without opening her eyes, she asks if it is true that he went to the Benefactor yesterday. He says yes. Her face turns white until only her eyes seem left. He tells her everything, except one thing: the Benefactor's claim that the rebels needed him only for the INTEGRAL. Slowly her face returns, like a photo developing. She goes to the mirrored wardrobe door. He asks if that is why she came, only to find out about the Benefactor. In the mirror, her eyebrows rise in their mocking triangle. She turns as if to speak, but says nothing. He feels he does not need her to. He believes he knows.

Saying goodbye, he stumbles into a chair and knocks it over, like the dead-looking chair in her room. Her lips are cold, as cold as the floor by his bed once was. When she has gone, he sits on the floor and bends over the cigarette she threw down. He cannot write any more. He does not want to.

The record

The heading of this record is "The End." After I-330's visit, D-503 feels everything has hardened inside him, like salt crystals forming in water. He has decided. Tomorrow morning he will do it. It will be like killing himself, but perhaps that is the only way to come back to life, since nothing can rise again unless it has died first.

All night the western sky flashes blue. He sleeps only at seven, when roofs full of birds appear in the dawn. He wakes at ten. No bell rang. He drinks yesterday's glass of water and hurries out.

The storm has cleared, leaving an empty blue sky and sharp, fragile shadows. He tells himself not to think, only to register. There are leafy branches on the pavement, birds and aeros crossing overhead, crowds waving branches and shouting. Then come streets as empty as if a plague had passed. He trips over something soft. It is a corpse lying on its back. He knows the thick lips that still seem to be laughing. It is R-13. D-503 steps over him and runs on. He must act fast or he will break.

Twenty steps further is the Bureau of Guardians. Inside, a long line of Numbers waits with papers and notebooks, inching forward. D-503 runs along it, begging to go first, like a sick man begging for a quick end. A woman mocks him and sends him to the toilet. People laugh. Then someone grabs his elbow. It is S-4711, his wing-like ears now crimson, his Adam's apple bobbing. S asks why he is here. D-503 is glad, and also sorry, that it is S. S knew her too. Maybe they can do this together.

In S's office, D-503 pours out the whole story, everything in these records. He tells of his two selves, of what she said about his hands, of the false medical notes, the corridors, the world beyond the Wall. He stumbles for words, and S, smiling crookedly, keeps supplying them. S seems to know it all already. D-503 goes cold and asks how. S says D-503 has hidden one thing. He named everyone he saw beyond the Wall but forgot one. Did he not glimpse S himself there, just for a second? D-503 realises in a flash that S is one of them. His great, painful sacrifice was a joke, like the old story of Abraham raising the knife over his son, only to hear it was a jest. D-503 pushes back his chair and runs.

He finds himself in a public washroom in the subway. Above, the city is in ruins, but down here everything is spotless. He groans. A hand touches his shoulder. It is his bald neighbour with the wrinkled forehead. Calm down, he says, it will all come back. He has made a discovery: infinity does not exist. The universe is finite, a sphere, and everything can be calculated. D-503 is amazed at his calm. He asks for paper to finish his records. Then he grabs the man and asks: where the finite universe ends, what is beyond it? Before he can answer, feet come pounding down the steps.

The record

This is the last, short record. Its heading is "Facts. The Bell. I Am Certain." It is a clear day in OneState, and the barometer reads 760. D-503 looks at the 225 pages he has written and asks whether he really wrote them, or really felt those things. It is his handwriting, he says, but only the handwriting is the same. There is no more delirium, no silly comparisons, no feelings. Just facts. He is completely well. He cannot stop smiling. They took something like a splinter out of his head, and now his head is light and empty, or rather, it holds nothing strange to stop him smiling. A smile, he says, is the normal state of a normal person.

These are the facts he gives. That evening, he, his bald neighbour and everyone with them were seized. They had no certificate showing they had had the Operation. They were taken to the nearest auditorium, number 112, which he notes was somehow familiar. There they were strapped to tables and given the Great Operation.

The next day D-503 reported to the Benefactor and told him everything he knew about the enemies of happiness. He cannot understand why that once seemed hard. The only explanation, he says, is his former illness, the "soul."

That same evening he sat beside the Benefactor, for the first time, in the famous Gas Room. "That woman" was brought in to testify in front of him. She stayed silent and kept smiling. He noticed she had sharp, very white teeth, and found that beautiful. They put her under the Gas Bell and began pumping out the air. Her face turned white, which made her large dark eyes beautiful too. She threw her head back, half closed her eyes and pressed her lips together, and this reminded him of something. She kept looking at him, gripping the arms of the chair, until her eyes closed. They pulled her out, revived her with electrodes, and put her back. This happened three times, and she never said a word. Others brought in with her were "more honest," and many talked after the first time. Tomorrow they will all climb the steps of the Benefactor's Machine.

This cannot wait, he explains, because the western parts of the city are still in chaos, with corpses, animals and many Numbers who have betrayed reason. But across Fortieth Avenue a temporary wall of high-voltage waves has been built. He hopes they will win. More than that, he says, he is certain, because reason has to win.