The Rectodus Society __top__ (2027)

A ripple went through the assembled men. To ignore the heart was, to them, the highest compliment.

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

It was a small, choked sound, like a mouse sneezing. But in the Rectodus Society, a laugh was a seismic event. It was jagged. It was asymmetrical. It was beautiful. A ripple went through the assembled men