Problem No. 17
I. An Extraordinary Council
The Council met on a Wednesday, and that in itself was a bad sign: the lodges had not met on a Wednesday since 1848.
The hall lay beneath a certain Geneva bank whose name was never mentioned in the minutes, because the bank belonged in equal shares to everyone present and none of them wanted the others to know it. The walls were faced with black marble. In the centre stood a round table at which, according to legend, the fate of Austria-Hungary had once been decided and at which, according to the records, coal tariffs had been discussed. Above the table hung the All-Seeing Eye. The Eye was very old and had a slight squint.
On the left sat the Freemasons, in aprons worn over Brioni suits. On the right sat the Illuminati, who wore no aprons on principle and were very proud of it. At the head of the table, where the candlelight grew especially unsteady, sat the delegates of the World Council of Reptilians. They looked like an ordinary board of directors, and that, as the Masons had remarked more than once, was the most unnerving thing about them.
The secretary, a young Illuminatus with a tablet, cleared his throat.
“Extraordinary session. One item on the agenda. Problem Number Seventeen: the exhaustion of the class model of population management.”
Someone sighed heavily. Problem Number Seventeen had been on the agenda since 1991, and it had been postponed every time, because Problems One to Sixteen were more interesting.
The floor was taken by the Worshipful Master of the Lodge of the Three Compasses, Auguste Lefebvre. He rose, leaning on a cane topped with a skull, and for some time said nothing, the way people say nothing when they are used to having their pauses entered in the minutes too.
“Gentlemen,” he said at last. “Things are bad. There is no proletariat any more.”
“What do you mean, no proletariat?” asked a reptilian at the far end of the table. His name was Mr Kessel, and he represented the European branch.
“In the classical sense. Take any resident of Lyon. He owns shares through a pension fund, delivers food at weekends, writes Python for a salary on weekdays, lets out his grandmother’s flat, pays the mortgage on his own and considers himself one of the creative class. Try explaining to him what he is according to Marx.”
“And have you tried?”
“We have. He asked whether he could get it as a podcast.”
Mr Kessel leafed through his papers. The reptilians always had papers, even when everyone else had long since gone over to tablets. It was said to have something to do with body temperature.
“So class consciousness can no longer be built around property?”
“Precisely.”
“The nation?”
“Worn out. Every twenty years it has to be repaired with a war, and that is expensive and bad for the markets.”
“Religion?”
“They don’t go to church any more. Mostly they believe in intermittent fasting.”
“Race?”
Lefebvre gave him such a look that Mr Kessel drew his head a little way down into his collar.
“Very well,” said the reptilian. “I understand. We need a new basis for stratification.”
There fell a silence of that particular kind found only in rooms where decisions have been taken on other people’s behalf for two hundred years running. The Eye above the table slowly turned to the left, then to the right, came to rest on no one, and returned to its original position.
And then the secretary, who under the rules of procedure had no vote, raised his hand.
“May I?”
“Speak,” Lefebvre allowed. At his age he no longer had the strength for procedure.
“What if we divided people not by what they own? But by whether they can think without a machine?”
One of the Illuminati laughed, but quickly stopped, because nobody else laughed.
“Explain,” said Kessel.
“We don’t need to oppress anyone,” said the secretary. “That’s the beauty of it. There will be no oppression at all. To some children we’ll say: ‘Why bother learning this? Artificial intelligence will always be there.’ And to others: ‘Solve it yourself first. Then you can check it with artificial intelligence.’ That’s all.”
“That’s all?”
“In twenty years the first will have an excellent interface to civilisation. And the second will understand civilisation.”
He thought for a moment and added:
“And the first will be sincerely grateful. After all, they will have been given more freedom.”
Lefebvre slowly sat down. He was the only one in the hall who remembered how, in 1917, exactly the same silence had been broken by a very young and very confident man with a similar plan, and how that had ended.
“How will we force the parents?” he asked.
“There’s no need to force them,” replied the secretary. “We simply have to offer.”
They voted, as always, by raising their right hands, which for the reptilians was a largely symbolic gesture. The motion was carried unanimously, with one abstention. The Eye abstained.
In the minutes, which by tradition were kept in Latin, they wrote: “Operatio Copilot. Initium.”
II. St. Athanasius College
St. Athanasius College did not appear in any rankings, it had no website, and Wikipedia had a single line about it, which someone regularly deleted as not notable. The school stood above the lake in the canton of Vaud, in a grey stone mansion that in two hundred and forty years had never been rebuilt, only repaired. Letters of admission came by post and were written by hand. Rejections never came at all: those who had been turned down simply never learned that they had applied.
On the oak door hung a brass plaque:
ST. ATHANASIUS COLLEGE
Founded 1784
AI devices prohibited below Sixth Form
The pupils’ phones were kept in the porter’s lodge, in an iron cabinet that had once been meant for letters. The cabinet was locked with a key as long as a hand. The key was kept by the porter, and the porter, it was rumoured, had not spoken to anyone since 1971.
Once a term the school held a Governors’ Day. On that day Mr Kessel, a member of the board of governors, and Auguste Lefebvre, an honorary member of the same board, walked slowly along the first-floor corridor, which smelled of chalk, of wax and of something Lefebvre defined as “the smell of awkward questions.”
They stopped at the door of the mathematics classroom and looked in through its little glass window.
At the blackboard stood Tiberius, the fifteen-year-old son of the Chairman of the World Council of Reptilians. He was writing out a proof. The chalk crumbled in his hand, there was a white smudge on his shirt cuff, and in spite of the cool air there was sweat on his forehead. The teacher, a dry old man in a tweed jacket by the name of Hobbes, sat at his desk looking not at the board but out of the window.
Tiberius finished a line, stopped and read it over.
“There’s a mistake here,” he said.
“Yes,” said Hobbes, without looking away from the window.
“I see where. In the third line. I expanded the inequality wrongly.”
“Excellent,” said Hobbes. “From the beginning.”
“But I’ve understood it.”
“That is exactly why. From the beginning.”
Tiberius took the cloth and wiped the whole board clean.
Kessel leaned towards Lefebvre:
“But the boy understood his mistake. Why write it all out again?”
“Understanding and being able to do are not the same thing,” said Lefebvre. “Understanding can be bought. These days it’s sold by subscription. But for the hand itself to stop expanding the inequality wrongly, you have to wipe the board forty times or so.”
“And if he still gets it wrong the forty-first time?”
“Then he’ll become a mathematician. That isn’t bad either, though not as good as Chairman.”
In the next classroom they were reading Thucydides. In the original, without a dictionary, because a dictionary was handed out only after a pupil had honestly admitted to not understanding a sentence and explained exactly why. One boy had already been sitting over a single sentence for twenty minutes. The teacher did not hurry him. She was knitting.
They were going through the Melian Dialogue. The Athenians were explaining to the people of the island of Melos that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
“Which of you here are the Athenians?” asked the teacher, without looking up from her knitting.
Every hand went up.
“Wrong,” she said. “Fifteen years later the Athenians lost the war. Sit down. Think about why.”
Kessel snorted. Lefebvre did not snort. He had read Thucydides in this same classroom in 1954, and had been asked the same question.
Next came rhetoric. Here a pupil was given a thesis they detested and made to defend it for fifteen minutes. The winner was not whoever won over the room, but the speaker whose arguments the opponent could not afterwards restate any worse than they had been put. The rhetoric teacher used to say that any fool with a microphone can persuade a crowd, but only a gentleman can lose honestly to an intelligent opponent.
Then physics. In the laboratory on the second floor the pupils were measuring the period of a pendulum. Their result differed from the textbook by seven per cent.
“May we ask the artificial intelligence why?” asked a girl with a plait, the daughter of a very well-known and very inconspicuous banker.
“You may not,” said the physics teacher. “First think up three explanations of your own.”
“And if I can’t think of a single one?”
“Then this is the most valuable moment of your whole week. Don’t waste it on artificial intelligence.”
Twelve minutes later the girl had thought up three explanations: friction at the pivot, an inaccurate length of string, and that she had counted the swings wrong. Then she thought some more and added a fourth:
“Or the textbook is wrong.”
“That is a permitted hypothesis,” said the teacher. “But only once the first three have been ruled out. That is exactly how science works. And power, incidentally.”
In the corridor Kessel’s grandson walked past the governors. A deep purple bruise was blooming under his left eye. The boy greeted them politely and walked on.
Kessel stopped.
“Lefebvre, I understand all that. Tradition, discipline, character. But the birch in the twenty-first century?”
“The birch was abolished in 1987.”
“Then why has my grandson got a black eye?”
“Fencing.”
“Ah,” said Kessel. “That’s all right, then.”
They went out onto the terrace. The sun was setting over the lake, a steamer full of tourists was crossing the water, and the tourists were photographing the mansion without knowing what they were photographing. They thought it was a hotel.
That same evening Mr Kessel gave a live interview. He was in Davos, on a panel entitled “Education for All in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” wearing a jumper and no tie, because on panels about education a tie was considered a mark of authoritarianism.
“The modern school,” Mr Kessel was saying, “must at last free itself from the mindless memorising of facts. We live in a world where any child can get any answer in a second. Why torment children with times tables? Why make them wipe the board and write it all out again? We must teach children not to know, but to search. Not to memorise, but to ask.”
The audience applauded. The moderator, a young woman with a tablet, was nodding with the expression of someone who has already written up the piece in her head.
In the studio next door, a foundation run by the Chairman of the World Council of Reptilians was announcing the launch of a free school assistant for forty million children in twelve countries. The assistant was called Friend. It could explain anything in thirty seconds and never said “From the beginning.”
At the end of the interview the moderator put a last question, sent up from the audience:
“And where do your own grandchildren go to school, Mr Kessel?”
“An ordinary Swiss school,” he replied, and smiled.
This was the plain truth. In Switzerland the school was considered perfectly ordinary. It had been considered ordinary since 1784.
III. Education Without Stress
Camille was twelve and went to the Collège Simone Weil in a suburb of Lyon. Her father was that very resident of Lyon to whom nobody had once managed to explain what he was according to Marx. He, of course, knew nothing about it.
Over the entrance to the collège hung a banner printed on bright plastic: “Education Without Stress.” The banner had gone up three years before, when the school joined the Friend pilot programme. The old plaque giving the year of foundation had been taken down, because the year of foundation was 1971, and next to the banner it looked somehow awkward.
That evening’s literature homework consisted of a single paragraph of Maupassant. The task was to read the paragraph and say what the heroine was feeling.
Camille read the paragraph halfway through and opened Friend.
“I don’t understand this text,” she wrote.
“No problem! Let’s work through it together,” Friend replied half a second later, and added a smiley face. “In short: the heroine is sad because her life didn’t turn out the way she dreamed.”
“Can you tell me more?”
“Of course! Imagine you were really looking forward to a trip to Disneyland, and instead you went to your grandma’s in Clermont-Ferrand. That’s roughly what she’s feeling.”
“But why does she feel that way?”
“Great question!” Friend clapped its cartoon hands. “Because she’s sad.”
Camille wrote in her exercise book: “The heroine is sad because life isn’t like Disneyland.” She never did finish the paragraph of Maupassant. There was no need: the content of the paragraph was now in her exercise book, in a more convenient form.
Friend gave her a green tick and told her she was doing brilliantly and was eight per cent more productive today than yesterday.
Friend had three rules, which the developers had never written down, because they had come about by themselves. It never said “I don’t know.” It never asked anyone to hold a thought in their head for longer than it took to finish reading its answer. And it never suggested rereading a passage that was hard to understand. If something was still unclear, it explained it more simply, more briefly and more conveniently, until there was nothing left to explain.
Once Camille asked it what would have happened if Napoleon had won at Waterloo. Historians had been arguing about this for two hundred years. Friend answered in four seconds, confidently, in three bullet points with a smiley face at the end. Camille liked the fact that the question had an answer.
Camille’s father, Jérôme, was happy. In the evenings he used to sit with his daughter over her maths problems, getting angry, shouting, then apologising, then getting angry again. Now homework took twelve minutes. Jérôme spent the time this freed up delivering food, and was very pleased about it, because food brought in money, whereas maths had brought in nothing but frayed nerves.
At the parents’ evening the headmistress showed slides. The headmistress was called Madame Beltam, and she made her slides with Friend.
Time spent on homework had fallen by sixty-one per cent. The average mark had risen by one and a half points. Pupil satisfaction had risen from forty to eighty-seven per cent. The attainment gap between children from different neighbourhoods had almost disappeared. On a slide of its own, in green, came the word “Equity,” with an arrow pointing up beside it.
“We have finally stopped teaching children through pain,” said Madame Beltam. “Nobody cries over their homework any more.”
The parents applauded. One mother did raise her hand, all the same, and asked why her son could not work out his change at the bakery without his phone. Madame Beltam replied that counting change was a twentieth-century skill, and that in the twenty-first century the change was counted by the card terminal. The mother was embarrassed and asked no more questions. Later she asked Friend about it, and Friend confirmed that the headmistress was right.
Two years later, in the hall beneath the Geneva bank, the secretary reported to the Council on the progress of the operation.
The screen showed, one after another, the very same charts as at the meeting in the Collège Simone Weil. Only now they covered forty million children in twelve countries, and every arrow pointed up.
“Splendid,” said Mr Kessel. “And is there anything that goes down?”
“One line,” said the secretary, and changed the slide.
The slide read: “Ability to answer an unexpected question without access to an interface.” The arrow went down so steeply that it had to be continued past the edge of the slide.
“How was that measured?” asked Lefebvre.
“Very simply. The children were asked a question that wasn’t in the syllabus, and the Wi-Fi was switched off for ten minutes.”
“And what did they do?”
“They waited,” said the secretary. “Calmly, without panic. The way you wait for a bus.”
Nobody spoke for a while.
“I hope this data isn’t published anywhere,” said Kessel.
“It is published,” said the secretary. “Everywhere. It’s open research. A very respected American association of psychologists recently issued a special advisory: educational technologies can raise a pupil’s immediate performance without building transferable knowledge and skills. It’s all written there, clearly and honestly.”
“And?”
“The education ministries of twelve countries asked an artificial intelligence for a short summary of the advisory. The summary ran: ‘Educational technologies improve pupil performance.’ It was sent out to every school.”
The Illuminati exchanged glances with the professional respect that magicians show when they see someone else’s good trick.
“So we didn’t even have to fake the research?” someone asked, to be sure.
“We didn’t fake anything,” said the secretary, slightly hurt. “All the research is genuine. All we did was decide which line to show on the first slide. And then it turned out we didn’t even need to do that: everyone shows the first line anyway. It’s nicer to show.”
Lefebvre rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“State schools sell education without stress,” he said slowly. “We sell our own children education through stress. And both advertisements are perfectly truthful. That is what worries me.”
“Why?”
“Because I still remember the days when you had to lie to get a result like that.”
That same November a violent thunderstorm passed over Lyon, and the Collège Simone Weil lost its network for forty minutes.
The history teacher, Madame Rousseau, who was fifty-nine and had come to the school before the banner, looked at the class. Twenty-eight screens had gone dark at once. Twenty-eight faces looked up, and for the first time that school year she saw them all at the same time.
“Very well,” she said. “In that case. Why, in your opinion, did Napoleon lose at Waterloo?”
The class said nothing. The silence was neither frightened nor stubborn, but polite, as in a lift. Camille remembered that there had been an answer about this in three points with a smiley face, but she didn’t remember what the points were. She remembered only the smiley face.
Forty minutes later the network came back. The screens lit up, the class breathed out, and Madame Rousseau suddenly realised she had never before heard twenty-eight people breathe out with such relief.
The pupil satisfaction index fell that day to twelve per cent. The monitoring system flagged the day as an anomaly and excluded it from the sample as unrepresentative.
IV. Eighteen Genders
The next session of the Council began with a question that Mr Kessel asked before the secretary had even had time to read out the agenda.
“Very well. They’ll forget how to think. But they won’t forget how to be angry.”
“They won’t,” Lefebvre agreed.
“In the past anger went into the class struggle. Strikes, trade unions, barricades. It was unpleasant, but at least you could see where it was flowing. Where will it flow now?”
Lefebvre nodded the way people nod when the right question has finally been asked.
“The energy of discontent does not disappear,” he said. “It can only be redirected. It’s a conservation law. A boy in Hobbes’s class would have had it explained to him in his first term.”
“We have a department for that,” said the secretary, and opened the door to the next room.
Out of the room came Ingrid Halvorsen, head of the Superstructure Department. The department had been called that since 1923, when it was founded by people who had read Marx attentively, and nobody had ever renamed it, because the name was still perfectly accurate. Ingrid was fourth-generation Illuminati, wore glasses with plain lenses, and spoke in the level voice of people who have long since stopped being surprised by humanity.
She put a map up on the screen. The map was divided into two halves, blue and orange, and each half had roughly the same number of dots.
“This is the sector of symbolic conflict,” said Ingrid. “In the orange half: schools of critical theory, departments of representation studies, corporate ethics committees, community management teams, online campaigns in defence of anything you like, and about four thousand interdisciplinary programmes, each with a name made of three nouns joined by hyphens.”
“And in the blue?”
“Institutes of traditional values. Centres for the study of civilisational identity. Foundations for the protection of the language from the wrong words. Societies for combating the Oranges. The budgets, incidentally, are almost identical. Sometimes they match to the euro.”
Kessel leaned towards the map.
“And what are they fighting for?”
“That doesn’t matter to us.”
“What do you mean, it doesn’t matter?”
“It doesn’t matter in the slightest. Let one half fight for eighteen genders and the other half against eighteen genders. Let some demand that Shakespeare be rewritten and others demand a ban on those who demand that Shakespeare be rewritten. Any outcome suits us, because there won’t be an outcome.”
“Then what’s the point?”
Ingrid took off the glasses she didn’t need and polished them.
“While both halves argue about genders, nobody asks who owns the data centre.”
The hall went quiet. The Eye above the table, which usually gazed off into some corner, came into focus for the first time that evening. It was looking at Ingrid with something like tenderness.
“Marx called this the superstructure,” said Lefebvre. “He supposed it grew out of the base by itself.”
“It does grow by itself,” said Ingrid. “We only water it. The base we keep for ourselves. The superstructure we hand over to the population for full self-government. It’s very democratic. They have elections there, petitions, resignations, scandals, public apologies. Life is in full swing. People feel they are taking part in history. And they are, just not in the right chapter.”
The first major battle in the sector of symbolic conflict connected with Operation Copilot broke out in France, and it broke out over the assistant’s name.
In English-speaking countries the assistant was simply called Friend, and the word caused no trouble at all: English long ago stopped specifying what gender your friend is. But Friend came to France under the name l’Ami, and a French friend, unlike an English one, is either masculine, l’ami, or feminine, l’amie. That was enough. An Orange researcher at the Sorbonne published a column arguing that the name “l’Ami” was grammatically masculine and thereby reproduced a patriarchal model in which knowledge comes from a man. She proposed the inclusive form “l’Ami·e.” Within twenty-four hours a Blue commentator replied with a column arguing that a dot in the middle of a word was an attack on the French language, on Molière and, ultimately, on Charlemagne. A week later the question was being debated in the National Assembly.
Madame Beltam, headmistress of the Collège Simone Weil, received forty-seven letters from parents in a month. Twenty-three letters demanded that the assistant be renamed immediately. Twenty-four letters demanded that it immediately not be. All forty-seven letters had been written with the assistant’s help.
The parliamentary hearings went on for fourteen months. In that time the company that owned the assistant twice updated its user agreement, tripled its price for state schools and moved the storage of forty million children’s data to a jurisdiction that no deputy could have found on a map without the assistant. A journalist from Grenoble wrote about it. His article was read by four hundred people, three hundred and ninety of whom asked the assistant for a short summary.
A compromise was found a year and a half later. The assistant was renamed “l’Ami+.”
The Oranges announced that the plus stood for inclusivity. The Blues announced that the plus stood for continuity and the enrichment of tradition. For the company, the plus meant a paid subscription.
At the next session of the Council the secretary read out the summary and allowed himself a smile.
“A magnificent operation,” he said. “May I ask how much we spent on the two sides?”
Ingrid looked at him with a certain regret.
“We really did fund both sides once,” she said. “Until 2019. Then they went self-financing. Grants, donations, subscriptions, paid newsletters, book tours. Each side raises money to fight the other, and each raises more when the other is louder. These days we just send flowers for their anniversaries. To both sides.”
“So it works without us?”
“It works better without us,” said Ingrid. “We only got in the way.”
Lefebvre gave her a long look, but said nothing. The secretary wrote in the minutes: “Pars superstructuralis: sine sumptibus.” He had looked up the word “sine” in the dictionary. Once, he would not have needed to.
That same spring, in a suburb of Lyon, on the site of a former factory where until 1986 three thousand people had worked and where one of the last real trade unions in France had existed, a data centre was built. It was huge, grey and windowless, and consumed as much electricity as the whole city.
Nobody protested against the data centre.
They protested against the graffiti on its fence. An artist had painted a woman with a child on the two-hundred-metre concrete wall. The Oranges decided that the image reinforced a traditional gender role. The Blues decided that the woman’s hair was suspiciously short. For three weekends running two demonstrations stood by the fence, separated by a police cordon, shouting slogans at each other.
Behind the fence, in the quiet, the servers hummed. Neither demonstration ever once turned round.
V. Dragons
By the end of the tenth year of Operation Copilot the Council met without any anxiety at all. The sessions had become short, almost festive. The reptilians were served warmed champagne, which the others drank out of politeness.
The secretary, who had gone grey over these years but had still not been given a vote, put the long-term forecast up on the screen.
“In forty years Western society will be arranged as follows,” he said. “Ten per cent know how to pose a question. Ninety per cent know how to ask an artificial intelligence to pose a question.”
“And is the difference noticeable?” someone asked.
“Only to the ten per cent.”
Mr Kessel leaned back in his chair with satisfaction. The Eye above the table nodded slowly, as far as an eye can nod.
“Excellent,” said Lefebvre. “Then I propose that we close Problem Number Seventeen. For the first time in thirty-four years.”
He had already raised his hand for the vote when someone coughed at the far end of the table.
The cough came from Mr Pemberton, the analyst for the Asian sector. He was the most inconspicuous person on the Council, and this was considered his chief professional virtue. In twenty years he had spoken at sessions three times, and all three times something had collapsed afterwards.
“I beg your pardon,” said Mr Pemberton. “There is a small problem.”
“What problem?”
Pemberton pressed a button. Another chart appeared on the screen.
Above the chart it said: “PRC.”
The line on the chart was not falling. It ran level, and in places even rose slightly. Beside it ran captions in small print: equations, physics, programming, the national gaokao exam, twelve hours of study a day.
The hall became so quiet that you could hear the champagne cooling.
“Why haven’t the Chinese introduced our educational reform?” Kessel asked at last.
“They introduced artificial intelligence,” said Pemberton. “Before we did, and on a larger scale.”
“Then why aren’t their figures falling?”
“Because they make schoolchildren solve the problem on their own first. And only then use artificial intelligence.”
A long silence.
“Is that forbidden?” asked Kessel.
“No.”
“Why not?!”
Pemberton neatly folded his hands on his folder.
“I’m afraid that question isn’t for us, Mr Kessel. As you know, in 1793, during Lord Macartney’s embassy, a treaty was concluded dividing the spheres of influence. The West went to us. The Celestial Empire stayed with them.”
“Who is ‘them’?”
Pemberton looked at Lefebvre. Lefebvre looked at the table.
“The dragons,” said Lefebvre. “I thought everyone knew that.”
“I thought that was a legend.”
“We are a legend too,” said Lefebvre drily. “That doesn’t stop us meeting on Wednesdays.”
He paused and added:
“We offered them our model back then. We brought the Emperor clocks, telescopes, steam pumps and a planetarium. The Emperor replied in a letter that the Celestial Empire possessed all things and had no need of curiosities from overseas. That letter is in our archive. For two hundred and thirty years we regarded it as a model of Oriental arrogance. Now I am beginning to suspect it was education policy.”
At that very moment, six and a half time zones to the east, beneath a teahouse on the shore of West Lake in Hangzhou, a session of the Standing Committee of Dragons was getting under way.
The session was held by video link, because the dragons had long since stopped fitting into a single room. In the chair was Comrade Long, an ancient dragon with grey whiskers, who still remembered the Macartney embassy and to this day did not think much of a steam pump as a present.
There was a chart on his screen too. The same one, only mirrored: the Western line plunged steeply, and beside it rose another, a green one, labelled “student satisfaction.”
“Eighty-seven per cent,” said Comrade Long, looking at the green line. “Their children are eighty-seven per cent happy. And ours?”
“Thirty-one, Comrade Chairman,” said the Committee secretary. “Nineteen in an exam year.”
At that same moment, in Chengdu, thirteen-year-old Xiao Mei was sitting over a geometry problem. It was eleven at night. The school assistant on her tablet was locked, and unlocked only after she had photographed a solution written out by hand. The assistant was called not Friend but Teacher. It did not draw smiley faces. When Xiao Mei finally photographed her solution, Teacher replied: “Wrong. Third line. Again.”
Xiao Mei burst into tears, wiped her eyes on her sleeve and started again from the beginning.
Comrade Long did not know about this, but seemed to sense it. He turned his head heavily towards the camera.
“Comrades,” he said. “The Western elites have once again found a way to make their population obedient and call it liberation. Their children are content. Their parents are content. Their politicians show charts and win elections. Why are we still making our children learn integrals?”
Nobody answered. Then a microphone came on: the representative of the Ministry of Industry, an elderly she-dragon who was joining the session from a workshop in Shenyang and was wearing a hard hat.
“Because somebody has to design the turbines,” she said.
“But surely that can be left to artificial intelligence.”
“It can,” she agreed. “And then somebody has to check that the artificial intelligence has designed a turbine and not a very convincing description of a turbine.”
Comrade Long was silent for a while.
“And this decision,” he asked, “is it actually ours? Did we ever take it?”
The Committee secretary leafed through the documents.
“Formally, yes, Comrade Chairman.”
The word “formally” hung in the air and stayed there.
Comrade Long looked at the green line of the Western children, at his own level grey line, at the hard hat of the she-dragon from Shenyang. And sighed heavily. A wisp of smoke came out of his nostrils, and for a second the cameras of everyone on the video call fogged up.
In Geneva, meanwhile, the secretary was finishing the minutes. Problem Number Seventeen had not been closed after all. Beneath it a new line had appeared: “Problema duodevicesima: dracones.”
The secretary had checked the word “duodevicesima” in the dictionary twice.
VI. The Quarterly Report
A month after the dragons’ video conference, Mr Kessel received a letter from the Chairman of the World Council of Reptilians. The letter was short and handwritten. The Chairman expressed his satisfaction with the progress of Operation Copilot and wished to reward its author personally.
“Who is the author?” Kessel asked at the next session.
Everyone looked at the secretary. The secretary blushed.
“I only proposed it,” he said. “I don’t have a vote. The author is whoever approved the budget.”
Then everyone looked at the treasurer.
The treasurer was Brother Van der Meer. He had sat on the Council for forty-one years and in all that time had never once uttered an adjective. He opened a leather-bound ledger, found the right page and ran his finger down it.
“Operation Copilot,” he read out. “Budget approved. Spent: nil. After fourteen months the cognitive disarmament programme was closed as unprofitable.”
“Unprofitable?” Kessel repeated. “But it works.”
“It works,” Van der Meer agreed. “That’s why it was closed. Everything we meant to finance was already being financed. By other people. At a profit. We couldn’t compete. We would have been driven out of the market.”
“But the Friend assistant… The Chairman’s foundation…”
“The Chairman’s foundation got the assistant free of charge, as part of a corporate social responsibility programme. The company offered it of its own accord. The foundation only cut the ribbon.”
“And the storm in Lyon?” asked one of the Illuminati. “The day excluded from the sample?”
“The storm was real,” said Van der Meer. “The sample was cleaned by the monitoring system. We have no access to it. We did apply, as it happens.”
Lefebvre slowly turned to the secretary.
“And the charts? All those arrows pointing up that you’ve been showing us for ten years?”
The secretary was silent for a moment, then took a thick printout from his folder and laid it on the table. On the first page was a logo known to every person on the planet.
“It’s Microsoft’s quarterly report,” he said. “All the charts come from there. I only translated them into Latin for the minutes.”
“And the name of the operation?”
“From there too. It says Copilot on every page. I thought you knew.”
Lefebvre looked at the printout for a long time. Then he spoke, in the voice in which wars had once been declared in this very hall:
“Very well. There was no project. But there is a result. So the result has an author. Find them. Who benefits?”
The secretary went over to the old slate blackboard that had stood in the corner of the hall since 1848 and that nobody used, because everyone had tablets. He picked up the chalk. The chalk crumbled. The secretary drew a table with three columns: “Who,” “What they wanted,” “Wanted to dumb down the population?”
Then he began filling in the rows, with the Council prompting.
Parents wanted their children not to cry over homework and to have some time left in the evenings for living. Didn’t want to dumb anyone down.
Schools wanted their figures to go up and no complaints from parents. Didn’t want to dumb anyone down.
Pupils wanted to do their homework in twelve minutes. This was the only wish in the table that had come true in full. Didn’t want to dumb anyone down, themselves included.
Corporations wanted subscriptions. Didn’t want to dumb anyone down. What was more, as Van der Meer pointed out, a stupid subscriber pays worse.
Politicians wanted charts for the elections. They had the charts. Didn’t want to dumb anyone down, though some, as Kessel pointed out, wouldn’t have minded.
Universities wanted grants to study the consequences. They got the grants, studied the consequences and published. The publications were read by an artificial intelligence, which made a short summary of them. Didn’t want to dumb anyone down.
The companies that made artificial intelligence wanted more users, and answered those users’ requests as quickly and pleasantly as possible. Didn’t want to dumb anyone down. Nobody had asked them to.
The secretary stepped back from the board. The third column was filled with the same word from top to bottom: “no.”
“Very well,” said Lefebvre, who had never in his life said “very well” in such a voice. “Then who took the decision?”
The secretary wiped the board and began again. This time he drew arrows.
The parents did it because the school told them it was right. The school did it because the ministry recommended it. The ministry recommended it because it had read the summary of the research. The summary had been produced by an artificial intelligence, because the ministry had asked it to. The artificial intelligence answered that way because it had been trained to answer users that way. The company trained it that way because users liked such answers and because the shareholders demanded it. The shareholders were mostly pension funds. The pension funds belonged to the people who paid into them.
“For example?” asked Kessel.
“For example, a certain resident of Lyon,” said the secretary. “He delivers food. His daughter goes to the Collège Simone Weil. He owns roughly one ten-thousandth of a per cent of the company that made the assistant. Every quarter he gets a letter about his dividends, and he asks the assistant to explain what the letter says.”
The last arrow led back to the word “Parents,” where it had all begun. The circle was closed.
Everyone was looking at the board. Every arrow on it led from the one who answered to the one who asked. Everyone in the circle was responding to somebody’s request. Nobody in the circle decided anything.
In the middle of the circle, where the old diagrams of the world conspiracy always had a pyramid with an eye, there was nothing.
The secretary stood there, thought, and drew a small circle in the centre. Then for a long time he held the chalk over the small circle, not knowing what to write in it.
“Put us in,” said Kessel. “We did take the decision, after all. Unanimously.”
Lefebvre looked at him very wearily.
“Formally, yes,” he said.
Kessel opened his mouth and shut it again. He suddenly recalled that he had heard those words somewhere before, and that there, too, they had not sounded good.
“We voted for what was happening anyway,” Lefebvre went on. “It’s a very old trick. Everyone who wants to look like power does it. I just never thought that one day we would use it on ourselves.”
“But somebody has to be in charge,” said Kessel, almost plaintively. “That place can’t be empty. We have occupied it for two hundred years.”
Nobody answered him. Everyone looked up at the Eye. The Eye hung above the table, squinting as always off into some corner. And it occurred to Lefebvre for the first time that perhaps the Eye had never squinted. Perhaps all these years it had been looking precisely at the place where there was nobody. And that evening, ten years ago, it had not abstained by chance.
The secretary put down the chalk, having written nothing in the circle after all, and sat down to the minutes. He thought for a long time about the wording, then wrote: “Auctor operationis: nemo.”
He did not look up the word “nemo” in the dictionary. That word he knew well, from the cartoon.
VII. A Blatant Bodge
Hobbes retired in the spring of the operation’s twelfth year. He said nothing by way of farewell; he only wiped the board clean behind him.
The governors appointed Dr Merrick as the new headmaster of St. Athanasius College. Dr Merrick was forty-two, with an Oxford degree, eight years in consulting and very good teeth. He had been put forward by Mr Kessel. Among his other merits, Dr Merrick was the first headmaster in the school’s two hundred and forty years to have a website.
The first meeting of the board of governors under the new headmaster was held in the school library. Above the fireplace hung a board with the school motto carved in the oak: “Tolle et lege.” Dr Merrick stood beneath the motto, opened his laptop and put a presentation up on the screen. The title slide read: “St. Athanasius 2.0.”
“Gentlemen,” he said. “I shall be brief, because your time is valuable. As is the time of our pupils. That is exactly what I want to talk about.”
The second slide was about Latin.
“Our pupils spend six hours a week on Latin and Greek,” said Dr Merrick. “Over seven years at school that’s more than two thousand hours. Two thousand hours of the future leaders of the world. Meanwhile any modern assistant translates Tacitus in four seconds. Better than a school-leaver. Better, frankly, than I do.”
He changed the slide. It showed the same sentence from the Annals in a pupil’s translation and in the assistant’s. The assistant’s translation was smooth, clear and without a single mistake. The pupil’s was clumsy, with two crossings-out and a note from the teacher in the margin: “Good. Again.”
“I propose that we drop Latin and Greek as compulsory subjects,” said Dr Merrick. “The time freed up we shall put into leadership, strategic thinking and working effectively with artificial intelligence.”
Kessel nodded approvingly. Tiberius, who had left the school nine years before and now sat on the board of governors on behalf of the Chairman’s family, nodded too. He remembered Thucydides well. Mainly he remembered how long it had taken.
“If I may,” said Lefebvre.
He was very old now. He sat in the armchair by the fireplace, the very one he had sat in back in 1954, when he was summoned to the library for fighting, and held his cane across his knees.
“Allow me to ask. Why did we teach children Latin?”
Dr Merrick smiled politely. He was ready for this question. It had a slide of its own.
“Three reasons are traditionally given,” he said. “Access to primary sources, the training of memory, and the cultural identity of the elite. The first is fully covered by artificial intelligence. The second is obsolete, because memory is no longer a scarce resource. The third we shall keep: the Latin mottoes stay on all the doors.”
“Where do these three reasons come from?”
“I asked the assistant to summarise the literature,” said Dr Merrick. “It produced a very good overview. With references.”
Lefebvre looked at Kessel. Kessel looked at Tiberius. Tiberius looked at his phone.
“Perhaps someone present remembers the fourth reason?” asked Lefebvre.
Everyone was silent. It was not the silence of Madame Rousseau’s class on the day of the storm. It was worse. In Madame Rousseau’s class nobody had known the answer. Here everyone present had once known it.
“We didn’t teach them Latin for the sake of Tacitus,” Lefebvre said at last. “Tacitus, between ourselves, was a rather bilious man. We taught them Latin so that they would sit for twenty minutes over a single sentence and not get up until they understood it. So that they would have one thing in their heads that cannot be had ready-made. That is precisely what we have been taking away from everyone else. For twelve years running. According to your plan, Kessel.”
“It wasn’t my plan,” Kessel said quickly. “As it turned out.”
“So much the worse. It means we didn’t even have a plan. And now we ourselves are giving away the last thing we had.”
Dr Merrick waited patiently for him to finish and changed the slide. It showed a chart of pupil satisfaction. Pupil satisfaction at St. Athanasius College stood at thirty-four per cent, the lowest figure among the private schools of Europe. Beside it, in green, was the forecast after the reform: eighty-one.
They voted by raising their right hands. The motion was carried by a majority, with one against. Lefebvre was against. There was no Eye in the library. In the library hung a portrait of the school’s founder, who, it seemed to some, turned away towards the window at that moment.
When everyone began to leave, Lefebvre stayed sitting by the fire. Kessel lingered out of politeness.
“You know, Kessel,” said Lefebvre, gazing into the fire, “all my life I was certain that the world ought to be ruled by a secret lodge. I never doubted it. That, in fact, is what I was educated for.”
He was silent for a while, and then said one more sentence, in Russian. Lefebvre had not spoken Russian since 1917.
“But the world, it seems, is ruled by a blatant bodge.”
He got up, leaned on his skull-topped cane and walked slowly to the door. At the door he stopped, looked at the motto above the fireplace as though checking that it was still there, and went out.
Mr Kessel was left alone in the library. He did not know Russian. He waited a little, then took out his phone and opened the assistant.
“What does ‘the world is ruled by a blatant bodge’ mean?” he asked.
The assistant answered in half a second and put a smiley face after the very first sentence.
“It’s a pun in Russian. Lozha means a lodge, a secret society — a Masonic one, for example. Lazha is slang for a blunder, a sham, a botched job. The sense of the phrase: the world is run not by a secret conspiracy but by a mess in plain sight that nobody controls. The phrase is attributed to a niche writer who writes in Russian, is fond of tea made from rare mushrooms and, according to available data, currently lives in Thailand. Would you like me to find similar expressions in other languages?”
Kessel would not. He sat for a while, looking at the screen. Then, out of a long-standing habit that he himself had once recommended in Davos to forty million children, he typed one more request:
“Summarise today’s meeting of the board of governors.”
The assistant had been listening to the meeting. The assistant always listened to meetings; it was in the user agreement, which Kessel had signed without reading. The summary appeared two seconds later.
“The Board of Governors of St. Athanasius College approved a modernisation of the curriculum. Latin and Greek will become optional, allowing pupils to focus on the skills of the future. One board member raised objections relating to tradition. The decision was supported by a majority. No action is required on your part.” Beneath the summary was a drawing of a raised thumb.
Kessel read the summary. Then he read it again.
The summary was perfectly accurate. There was not a single false word in it. It was short, clear, polite and reassuring. Summaries exactly like this one had been received for twelve years running by forty million parents in twelve countries. A summary exactly like this one had once been received by the ministries of education, about the American psychologists’ advisory.
And for the first time in two hundred-odd years, Mr Kessel realised that he was reading it from the same side as they had.
He slowly switched off the screen.
It was quiet in the library. The logs in the fireplace were burning down. Above the fireplace “Tolle et lege” was carved in the oak, and Kessel suddenly realised that he could not remember what it meant. He reached for his phone to ask, but stopped his hand halfway.
He had never been afraid in his life. Reptilians are never afraid; it has to do with body temperature.
Now Mr Kessel looked frightened.
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