There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
- Douglas Adams
Table of ContentsChapter 1: The Alarm Negotiates
The alarm did not ring so much as negotiate. The government-mandated wellness tone—a soft, ascending swell of Tibetan bowls sampled from a 2019 recording that no longer could be found in any archive—rose through the bedroom at six-fifteen, and Daniel Hirsch lay still through all three cycles before permitting himself to be awake. Over the years, he had developed a principled refusal to simply get up. Rising at the first tone rewarded a system that had no business setting up his daily rhythm.
The bedroom was cool and dim. He had taped over the surveillance lens in the smoke detector two years ago, then removed the tape last spring when the building association sent its third notice. The lens was there again, now, small and glassine, watching him from its nest on the ceiling. He tried not to think about it and mostly succeeded, except in the ten or fifteen minutes each morning when he lay still and tried to think about nothing else.
Outside, the avenue was already audible—the long percussion of delivery drones and, lower and more persistent, the crowd noise from the food queue that had formed overnight in front of the National Welfare Distribution kiosk on 113th. This was one of the government’s better ideas, he had conceded when the kiosks first appeared: automated nutrition dispensaries, open twenty-four hours, print-to-order. The concession had not lasted long. The food was fortified paste in four flavors, all of which tasted of the same mild, damp grain, and the queue discipline was enforced by an algorithm that assigned wait times based on a citizen compliance index, on which he had consistently scored poorly since its introduction. On good days, his wait was forty minutes. He did not use the kiosks and would not, a point of private integrity that cost him nothing, since he could still afford the farmers’ cooperative on Amsterdam Avenue. The cooperative itself was barely holding on—its certification renewals were three years behind because the relevant federal office had been absorbed into the Department of Economic Alignment, and the new forms had not yet been finalized.
He rose, dressed, and headed to the kitchen to make coffee. The coffee was real, sourced through the cooperative, and this small indulgence put a floor under his mornings. He stood at the kitchen window while it brewed and watched the avenue below: the queue, the drones, the gold-lacquered profile of the forty-foot gilded Trump that had been erected at the corner of 114th two summers ago, the eyes of which contained cameras that fed directly to the Unified Public Safety Network. The statue had been paid for by the Columbia University board of trustees as a gesture of institutional goodwill. There was a plaque at its base that Daniel had read once and preferred not to think about.
He thought, as he always did at this hour, about the coffee—specifically, about what it had cost, and the roundabout way in which he had come to pay for it: the cooperative’s surcharge for the federal agricultural audit, the transportation fee folded into the cooperative’s membership dues since the fuel index had been tied to the Trump Infrastructure Loyalty Bonus, which fluctuated monthly and had not, in the fourteen months of its existence, once moved in a direction favorable to consumers. A bag of ground coffee cost about what a decent restaurant meal had, back in 2024. He had written to his federal representative about this once. The representative’s office had replied with a form letter explaining that the administration’s Agricultural Sovereignty Policy was designed to protect American food independence, and that disruptions to legacy supply chains should be understood as necessary recalibrations. The letter had been signed, in the automated way, by a name he did not recognize and could not find in any public directory.
The coffee was good. He drank it standing up.
* * *
His building still had functioning hot water on Tuesday mornings, which was more than could be said for the faculty housing on Morningside Drive. He had once attempted to document the disparity as a data point in a grievance filing with the City Housing Equity Office, but the filing portal required a Unified Compliance Certificate that he had not yet managed to obtain, and the office’s phone number, when dialed, produced a recording in which a very pleasant synthetic voice explained that due to the current volume of inquiries, all complaints were being processed in the order in which they had been assigned a processing number, which required first submitting a request for a processing number, the form for which was available at the portal. He had declined to find any of this amusing at the time.
He walked to campus along Broadway, which was his habit when the weather was passable, and which he preferred to the subway not for comfort—the walk was long, and the avenue often unpleasant—but because the subway required him to scan his citizen ID at both entry and exit, and the building where he caught his local train had recently added secondary biometric confirmation. He disliked the biometric pad on principle. He disliked it in practice too, since it had a tendency to flag him for additional review for reasons the Transit Security Authority had declined to specify.
Columbia occupied its hilltop with an air of determined persistence, which was not quite the same thing as vitality. The gates on 116th were staffed now—a pair of uniformed Compliance Observers whose function was not entirely clear, since anyone with a valid campus ID could enter freely, and anyone without one could simply go around to the Amsterdam entrance, which was not staffed. The Observers had been introduced during the previous academic year as a pilot program and had since become permanent, in the way that pilot programs always did. Daniel nodded to them without making eye contact. They did not nod back.
The campus itself was in its late-semester quiet, which this year was less full than the quiet of the year before. Six more departments had been consolidated into the newly created College of Essential and Applied Knowledge—a reorganization that had required the physical vacating of three buildings, the closure of two libraries, and the termination of approximately ninety faculty positions, none of which, the Provost had carefully explained in his all-hands message, constituted a layoff, since the affected individuals had been offered the opportunity to reapply for newly classified roles within the consolidated structure. The Provost’s message had been seven paragraphs long and had contained the word “opportunity” eleven times. Daniel had counted.
His own department—Philosophy and Religion—had survived the first round of consolidations and half-survived the second. The Sanskrit and Hindu Studies faculty had been reduced to himself and one adjunct, a nervous young woman named Pallavi who had taken to addressing him as “sir” in a manner he found both touching and depressing. She believed, he suspected, that his apparent imperviousness to the reorganizations indicated protection from above, some political arrangement he had made on behalf of the department. He had made no such arrangement. He had simply continued submitting his annual review materials on time and in the correct format, which appeared to be enough of an anomaly to confuse the system.
He stopped at the departmental bulletin board in the corridor outside his office, where a new notice from the Provost had been pinned over the old notices, which had been pinned over older ones, creating a sedimentary record of institutional anxiety. The topmost notice announced the formation of a new Committee on Inclusive Knowledge Architecture, whose mandate was to review all course syllabi for adherence to the Guidelines for Epistemically Just Pedagogy. Daniel read this twice. He did not know what epistemically just pedagogy meant, though he suspected that the committee had a definition, and that the definition would not improve on contact with the Yoga Vasistha or the Mahabharata, which were the backbone of his spring syllabus and which had, among other qualities, the distinction of being several thousand years older than the present administration’s discomforts.
He had been asked, twice now, to add a Land Acknowledgment to his course materials—a statement recognizing the indigenous peoples upon whose traditional lands Columbia had been built. He did not oppose the acknowledgment in principle. He opposed it in the specific form that had been recommended, which had been drafted by a committee that had apparently consulted no actual indigenous scholars, and which referred to the Lenape people in the past tense throughout. When he raised this at the relevant faculty meeting, the chair of the relevant subcommittee thanked him for his input and moved on.
In the faculty lounge, which now served triple duty as departmental meeting space and graduate student workroom, he found his colleague Marcus Breen making tea by the window. Marcus was a political theorist who had spent the better part of the last decade writing and rewriting a book about democratic legitimacy, the argument of which shifted sufficiently with each revision that Daniel had given up trying to track it. He was an amiable man, prone to optimism, and his optimism had, of late, taken on the slightly effortful quality of someone performing calisthenics.
“They’ve updated the Professional Conduct guidelines,” Marcus told him, not looking up from his tea. “Again.”
“I saw.” Daniel had not read the new guidelines but had seen the notification.
“The language around non-affirming classroom conduct is a lot tighter.” Marcus did look up now, and his expression was carefully mild. “Some of the examples they give are... illustrative.”
“I imagine they are.”
Marcus nodded, accepting this as a complete exchange, which it was. They had long since established a conversational vocabulary for navigating the many things that could not be said plainly in the faculty lounge, where the room’s single visible camera occupied a corner mount near the door, and a second, less visible one had been noted by a graduate student behind the whiteboard the previous fall. The student had mentioned it in a seminar and had not, to Daniel’s knowledge, mentioned anything in any seminar since.
He thought, as he poured his own tea and pretended to read the Professional Conduct update on his tablet, about how completely Marcus had rearranged himself to accommodate what the institution had become—not in any single dramatic capitulation, but in a long series of small ones, each of which had seemed, at the time, merely prudent. Marcus was not a coward. He was something subtler and, in Daniel’s view, sadder: a man of genuine intelligence who had decided that his intelligence was best deployed in the service of survival. It was, Daniel supposed, rational. He also supposed that the history of the twentieth century was largely made of exactly that rationality.
He did not say any of this. He finished his tea, collected the papers he needed for his morning, and left the lounge.
* * *
The subway, in the end, was necessary. He had a noon lunch commitment on the Upper East Side that made the timing of the walk unworkable, and so at half past ten he descended into the 116th Street station and placed his hand on the biometric reader, which produced its familiar amber light, then its familiar pause, then the appearance of a Transit Security officer from the attendant’s booth.
The officer was young, perhaps mid-twenties, and wore the expression of someone performing a task he found neither interesting nor distasteful, which was its own kind of professionalism. He asked Daniel to step aside. He asked for a verbal confirmation of Daniel’s destination and purpose of travel. He asked Daniel to remove his bag and place it on the inspection table, which was a folding surface that attached to the turnstile housing and that Daniel had not noticed before. The bag contained his teaching materials, his tablet, a thermos of green tea, and a library copy of a collected edition of the Yoga Vasistha that he had been meaning to return for several weeks. The officer examined each item with a handheld scanner.
“Purpose of travel?” the officer asked again, which suggested he had not fully registered the first answer.
“Lunch appointment,” Daniel said, with careful evenness. “Personal.”
“With whom?”
He told him. The officer typed something into his handheld terminal. There was another pause. Daniel concentrated on maintaining a neutral expression, which he did not find difficult because he had considerable practice.
“Dr. Hirsch,” the officer said, after a moment, “your compliance index has a notation.”
“I’m aware.”
“It’s in the secondary review category.”
“Also aware.”
The officer looked at him and then at his terminal and then at him again. He was not, Daniel thought, unkind. He was doing precisely what the system required him to do, with precisely the level of judgment the system had trained him to exercise, which was very little. This was, in its way, the most troubling thing about him.
“I’m going to need you to complete a voluntary disclosure form,” the officer said, producing a tablet from his vest. “For the record.”
“Voluntary,” Daniel repeated.
“Yes, sir.”
He filled out the form, which asked for his destination address, the nature of his relationship with the person he was meeting, the estimated duration of the engagement, and whether he was carrying any materials he wished to declare. He declared the library book. The officer scanned it, found it unproblematic, and handed the bag back with a nod that was not quite an apology and not quite its opposite. The whole process took seventeen minutes. Daniel missed one train and caught the next.
He stood in the car, holding the overhead rail, and did not look at his reflection in the dark window opposite. He was sixty-three years old. He had a PhD from Yale, a named lectureship, a publication record that, while not wide, was deep and considered. He had been a committed man all his life—committed to ideas, to justice, to the proposition that the world could be made more coherent by those willing to think clearly and act accordingly. He had sacrificed for these commitments. He had organized, petitioned, published, testified. He had given a considerable amount in their service, over the years.
The man across the aisle from him was reading a copy of the New American Patriot, which was the only physical newspaper still in circulation, and whose front page carried a photograph of the President—or rather, the President’s AI rendering, distinguishable from any other AI rendering only by the small disclaimer in eight-point type at the bottom of the image—above a headline announcing a new trade agreement with Poland and Hungary that was expected to substantially benefit the American luxury goods sector. Below that headline, a smaller one noted that the CryptoCoin Exchange Commission had suspended trading in seven new currencies pending investigation of market manipulation. Seven new currencies. They had been introduced in the preceding three weeks. Daniel had watched a colleague in the Economics department lose forty thousand dollars in one of the earlier crashes and then, astonishingly, plow the remainder of his savings into the next one, because the algorithm, he explained, had indicated this was the correct moment to re-enter. The colleague had not mentioned the outcome of this strategy, and Daniel had not asked.
What he felt in that subway car was not despair, because despair implied a prior expectation of something better, and Daniel had not expected better for some time. What he felt was the specific fatigue of sustained clarity—the exhaustion that comes from understanding, year after year, exactly what is happening and why, and being unable to do anything about it. He had always believed that understanding was the first condition of change. He still believed this. He believed it with the particular stubbornness of a man who has built an identity around a proposition and cannot imagine what he would be without it.
The train rattled south under the island, and he stood in it and arranged his thoughts carefully, the way he always did when anger was available to him, and pressed them back into their proper compartment.
At 86th Street, he transferred to the crosstown bus.
* * *
The restaurant was on 79th, a small place with good food and the kind of quiet that indicated either excellent soundproofing or a clientele with nothing significant to say. Eduviges Chavez had chosen it, as she chose everything, with an eye toward what the choice communicated as much as what it provided. She liked being seen in the right places with the right people, and despite everything, despite the years and the accumulated debts between them, both financial and otherwise, Daniel Hirsch remained one of the right people to be seen with. He had not quite decided how he felt about this.
He was early, which was his custom, and he sat at the corner table she had reserved and ordered sparkling water and thought about her. He had not seen her in nearly four months. They exchanged messages with reasonable regularity—he kept the frequency up out of a sense of responsibility, she out of a sense of necessity that she had never once acknowledged—but the face-to-face meetings had grown sparser. Her administrative schedule was genuinely punishing; the Museum was in crisis of one kind or another continuously, and he understood that she needed the meetings to mean something, to feel like the right meetings at the right time. He tried to provide this when he could.
He had known Eduviges—had known her, he was careful to remind himself, when she was someone else, when the name and the story and the particular armor of her current self had not yet been assembled—for nearly twenty years. He had written the first of what were eventually many letters of support. He had made the first of what were eventually many calls. He did not consider this as patronage; he considered it as recognition, the acknowledgment of a mind and a capacity that the world had been slow to see. He still believed this. He believed it with somewhat more effort than he once had, but he believed it.
He was aware that she would be anxious today. Her messages over the preceding weeks had carried that particular flatness that her anxiety produced, the careful blankness of someone managing an interior that had grown too active for easy display. The Museum’s funding situation was deteriorating rapidly, and there were rumors of federal review—the kind of review that arrived with an outcomes mandate and left with a reorganization plan.
He was also aware that lunch with her would be the best part of his day, which had so far been a sustained exercise in minor and not-so-minor irritation. He felt himself straighten slightly in his chair, and then felt a small, complicated thing—close to affection, close to relief—as the door opened and Eduviges walked in, shedding her coat with the particular emphasis of someone for whom even that gesture was expressive, her dark eyes already scanning the room for him, already composing the smile she would produce when their eyes met.
It was good, he thought, to have someone to meet.
He raised one hand, and she saw him, and she came across the room.
Table of Contents - Chapter 2»
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"I’m going to need you to complete a voluntary disclosure form." That does not sound like fun at all and in New York of all places. Great story!
Deeply unsettling read 😅 loved it!