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“Your worst enemy is your nervous system. At any moment, the tension inside you is liable to translate itself into some visible symptom. And like just like that, its betrayal gets picked up by Sybil’s psychosomatic scanners, and you are branded for life,” Makishima Shougo said, turning his back to the glass wall that offered a view of the night-time Tokyo. Someone with a soul more poetic than Choe’s might, perhaps, have described it with a pithy epithet or two. To him, it was just dark and blurry with rain.
Choe looked up from his screen and smiled at Makishima.
“I think I recognize your quoting voice,” he said, closing the laptop. He knew Makishima well enough to expect a certain kind of conversation when his friend was in a mood like that. And even if Choe felt out of his depth with all the literary references Makishima threw left and right, it always paid off to listen. Trying to retroactively piece together the clues and allusions Makishima left so generously was a laborious and time-consuming task, but not unlike solving a particularly hard algorithm bug. For both, you needed patience, creative application of the source material, and sufficient time on your hands. Enough of it to read a book per day, probably.
“Do you know what sets apart a writer and a prophet, if they are both sharing their visions of the future?” Makishima asked him, clearly not expecting any, especially correct, answers. Choe didn’t take it personally: he was pretty content knowing that in this time and day, being a well-rounded erudite was an intellectual relic, when the same thing could be achieved by a stable Internet connection. On the other hand, it was admirable on someone who wielded equally archaic razorblades and words with the same efficiency, and Choe felt it was something worth trying to grasp, so he listened keenly as Makishima continued.
“It is much easier to subject a prophecy to a thorough scrutiny and take it apart when it has been recorded in innumerable copies of a given published book. Few works can survive such test and trial. But ancient oracles’ prophecies had the benefit of being passed down viva voce, by word of mouth, if you will, and inevitable nebulousness in place of precise, recorded wording did wonders for the credibility of those prophecies.”
Makishima paused, as if choosing a long-forgotten quote that would best illustrate his point, shook his head and turned to the window again.
“However, on occasion prophecies committed to paper in form of books prove to be essentially more accurate than most detailed analytical prognoses of their time, and that warrants utmost respect. Incidentally, the dystopian genre has been particularly generous with examples – like in this instance,” he said, placing his hand on the glass. “For the first decades after George Orwell wrote those words in his most well-known book in 1949, it was a common assumption that it referred to totalitarian authorities of the twentieth century. It wasn’t wrong as such – the same way that using a surgical knife to cut through a paper sheet isn’t wrong. And yet the humans of the Sybil System era can feel the truth of this statement more intimately than any of our ancestors could possibly imagine, as if the author had written it with precise knowledge of the workings of this system a hundred years prior to its conception.”
He turned his back on the skyscrapers of the night Tokyo and all of the ‘humans of the Sybil System era’, as if disappointed by their lack of reaction, and looked at Choe with a disarming smile.
“True, next generations might discover even greater truths in Orwell’s words, and thus prove me wrong. In them, the future is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed.”
Choe felt his back straighten in recognition of the reference – if there was one book he knew better than anyone, probably even Makishima, that would be it - and saw Makishima nod at him with approval.
“Don’t you find this sort of uncertainty about dystopias delightful, Choe Gu-sung?” Makishima walked over to sit on the sofa, facing Choe. “There is surgical precision in those dystopian works. You read and you’re pierced by the truths in them.”
Wondering how many more quotes flew above his head in the course of his conversation, Choe leaned back in his armchair and smiled apologetically.
“I take your word for it, Makishima-san,” he acknowledged the other man’s authority. “And you say this is common for dystopias in general?”
“The percentage is certainly very high. Comes with the situation that sparked the inspiration for these works, I’d presume.” Makishima’s smile turned that shade of angelic which meant he was thinking murder, and Choe felt an urge to open his laptop. “They really are a good read, though. Apart from being quality food for thought, dystopias traditionally offer good entertainment in form of dynamic plot as well.”
“So basically, I could pick up any dystopian novel to see it for myself?” Choe asked, secretly amused by Makishima’s thinly veiled dismissal of entertainment value of plots.
“Quite so. Every decade or so had its favourites, and there are timeless classics, of course, but I have never read a disappointing dystopian novel yet.”
“Sounds promising.”
Makishima nodded and silently went back to the window, as if to say the impromptu meeting of the book club was adjourned. Choe opened the laptop and made a note to himself.
A week later, Choe was seriously questioning his ability to appreciate works of literature.
After that late-night conversation with Makishima, Choe dutifully approached his new homework and made some time to look into dystopian novels. With a free pass for any book of the genre, he allowed himself some creativity with the research, and improvised a little code that displayed historically accurate top search results for dystopian novels. Choe left it to generator to choose a year between 1920 and 2020, which a quick search indicated as a period when dystopias were most popular, and picked one of the first book suggestions from the list, very pleased with his newfound historical approach.
He was looking forward to a fast-paced plot – not in the least because it was not very common for books recommended by Makishima – and was prepared to highlight the parts that could fit the description of successful prophecies for future discussions.
First ten minutes into the book, and Choe already started asking himself whether it was of a more metaphorical genre than he realized. Because if he took things at face vaule, dividing the population of a city into five factions according to one predominant personality trait displayed at some aptitude test seemed about as logical and sustainable an idea as separating them according to their shoe size, and even that would have made more sense as a measurable trait (and how was fashion related to dominant personality trait, anyway?). There was no mention of any in-universe equipment fit to make verifiable assessments of anything, traits or no, and by the point he got to the description of the aptitude test itself, he had to close the book and count to twenty, which was exactly the number of loopholes and bugs in it he could name off the top of his head.
All psychological intricacies of aptitude tests aside, it was based on such a crude, simplistic algorithm that Choe had to double-check the publication date to rule out the possibility that the author lived at a time when basic algorithms were not well-researched. 2011 sent this theory straight to hell, and yet the book told him about a sorting system that was basically a quiz of four questions that required the test subject to answer two questions based on two predetermined fictional scenarios. That was it. No verification, no variations, and it wouldn’t take a computer hacker or a psychology scholar to understand how unreliable the results of one-answer-rules-out-one-option approach would be.
Confused, he decided to bring it up to Makishima, thinking that maybe there was some further historical content that explained it.
Choe found him in his usual place – on the sofa with a fragile paperback in his hands, a leather bookmark peeking from where it was tucked between the pages.
“Am I disturbing you, Makishima-san?”
“Any exciting news from Sybil?” Makishima asked in response, looking up from his book.
“Not yet, it’s pretty quiet on that front so far. In fact, since nothing much was happening, I thought I’d look into dystopias while we had the time, and there is something that I don’t quite understand.”
“Oh?” Makishima put his book away – but not before meticulously changing the location of the bookmark – and turned to Choe. “What is it?”
“See, in this book,” Choe sheepishly pointed to his phone, belatedly remembering the disregard his friend had for electronic copies of texts, “I came across the description of an aptitude test that doesn’t seem credible even by the laxest standards, and I was wondering if I was taking it too literally?”
“What is the aim of this test?”
“It’s supposed to sort teenagers into one of the five factions, corresponding to the one predominant trait they display.” Choe frowned, trying to explain it as clearly as possible. “Rather, the test eliminates one of the five factions with its every question, and the option that remains is the recommended lifestyle choice and profession for the individual. That isn’t even a proper algo-”
“Four questions to determine one’s lifestyle?” Makishima asked incredulously. “Were they heavily coded, perhaps? Reliant on some previous knowledge?”
“From what I saw, they seemed pretty straightforward. The test required the subject to pick a cheese or a knife to defend against a dog, and tell the truth or a lie in a situation that could determine a stranger’s fate. And, say, if a person told the truth that could potentially trouble them to save a stranger, they were sorted into the faction of the honest people, and once they join the faction, they worked as lawyers and wore black and white, because that’s how they saw the world. But isn’t that sort-”
“Wait, what are those factions, once again?” Makishima interrupted him again.
“Well, there are five in total. For example, there is one where people are segregated based on selflessness as their primary trait, and make up the political leadership of society. They use mirrors only once every few months, wear gray-”
“How is rejection of mirrors conducive to good leadership?” There was genuine incomprehension on Makishima’s face, and Choe didn’t have the heart to tell him that the regulated mirror usage was the second day of every third month – which stroke him as a very specific regulation for a society that believed that four-question tests were a workable algorithm for determining a predominant trait of an individual.
“How is - ” Makishima paused with a frown. “No, what I should be asking is, what are you reading?”
Wordlessly, Choe handed him his phone. Makishima took it without usual signs of subtle distaste reserved for e-books, stared at the screen in silence, tapped at it until the book opened at the first page, and started reading.
Fifteen minutes later, Choe had to resign himself to the fact that his phone has been usurped for the time being. Good thing Makishima was a fast reader, the thought dryly, as he went back to his laptop.
Before the day was over, it was Makishima who approached him, looking like he had a bad toothache. He handed Choe his phone back, holding it with two fingers, and spoke in a slightly raspy voice a person who has just spent hours in complete silence.
“You cannot open a book without learning something,” he said, slowly and carefully. “A truer thing has never been said. So next time, Choe Gu-sung, remind me to be more precise in the wording of my recommendations.”
With that, he sighed and turned to leave, but stopped with his hand on the door handle.
“E-books are not too bad, actually,” he added thoughtfully. “If anything, one can dispose of them with zero regrets.”