The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

consideration of equally complex signals. Tutus’s last creation—an ex to run all exes—was finally finished, largely freeing the oligarchs of the hard and nervous work of supplying innervation. The second imperative was the liquidation throughout Exinia of public education: to teach people this or that seemed utterly unnecessary when both that and this could be done by innervators: budget funds earmarked for public education would instead pay for improvements to the single central nervous system in the invisible enclave. Meanwhile, the “ex” of each and every person, his muscular potential, was registered. Sitting at the controls of the Central Ex, Zes always knew exactly how much muscle power he had on hand to apply to this or that task, to distribute or redistribute as he saw fit. Soon the cities of Exinia were studded with colossal skyscrapers of cyclopean might; true, they were all built according to a single design determined by the lines of the ether waves: streets straight as bowling alleys—from residential blocks to factories and back—ran along all parallels and meridians. The workers, from whom the innervators took all the available strength, lived in light and spacious palaces and ate well, but whether this made them happy is unknown. Their psyches—cut off from the outside world, isolated in brains separated from musculatures—gave no sign of their existence.
    The government, bent on the total exification of life, was at pains to continue that life. The Planned Love Organization requested construction of one more ex, the Mating Ex, whose brief but powerful blasts of periodic ether tumbled men on top of women, coupled and uncoupled them so that the smallest investment of time would yield the greatest number of conceptions. By the way, one of the people immunized was Zes’s personal secretary, a young man with a forelock just like our Mov’s. Rather than hunt for a name, I’ll call him Moov.
    â€œYou’ve a rather cavalier way of coming up with names,” Mov flinched. “I would advise you to—”
    â€œOrder! The right to make criticisms here is mine alone,” Zez raised his voice. “Go on with your story.”
    Well then, this Moov—long before any exifications, he had pined in vain for a lady who, in spite of his good qualities, set no store by him—this Moov decided on the following move: to enlist the services of an ex. It made no difference to the machine. At the appointed hour, it brought the woman to the appointed place, but then it would not leave; the nervous and mistrustful youth could sense it even inside the love—with an almost hallucinatory clarity he could hear the steel rotors turning, the vibrating currents closing and opening, and the monotonous high-pitched whistle. Yes, my friends, the wind that kept tugging—that first day, remember?—at the straps of those lacy hemispheres could fill them only with air. The exes too could manufacture anything, except emotion. Next morning our poor Mov—beg pardon, Moov—was sad and withdrawn. When his patron, who was kindly disposed toward him, began rubbing his hands and boasting that the reorganization of the world was as good as finished, he met with silence and a gloomy glint in Moov’s eyes.
    Now came months and years of a reality that was read off meters, correctly dosed and distributed; history, calculated in advance with near-astronomic precision, became a kind of exact science effected with the help of two classes: the inits (the rulers) and the exons (the ruled). Nothing, it seemed, could disturb Pax Exiniae , but nevertheless …
    The first “plan evaders,” as they were protocolled at a meeting of the Supreme Council, looked like chance exceptions in the world of activated persons. Instead of crossing bridges lengthwise, for instance, certain (evidently incorrectly innervated) exons did so crosswise; a fair number of these