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forever. I forgot the quantum realm in an instant as it gave way to abstractions and neural networks. A shrewd scout, a talent recruiter, knocked me off the path in about a quarter of an hour. He got a large order, and I was one of the first to bite at the bait he was offering. It was a decision I never regretted.
    I entered a new world – the world of thinking machines. With a helping hand from the scout, I ended up in Basel at a giant corporation engaged in everything under the sun, in addition to its famous pills and vaccines. I got an Austrian for a boss, energetic and greedy for success. I had never even imagined Austrians could have so much ambition. He thought up a bold move: creating the model enterprise of the future. This meant, first of all, getting rid of several divisions, sacking the idlers, and replacing them with an electronic brain. Let computers do the same job, only better – thinking faster and never getting tired or asking for a raise. Knowledge engineering – this is what it was called then. The naïveté of the idea shared a common thread with the naïveté of the Director’s dream at the School. Later, when everything ended, this became as plain as day. But at that time nobody knew enough, and the Austrian did a mind job on his bosses by skillfully choosing the most appealing arguments.
    They gave us carte blanche and, along with it, half of a new building, decent money, and all the technology our hearts desired. There were twelve of us, all young and filled with a passion to change the world. I remembered three from Brighton, and one of them, the short, dark-haired Anthony, soon became the unofficial leader – to the surprise and envy of the ambitious Austrian. He was the one who devised the rigid rules that brought order to the initial confusion. It was his methodology, later named for someone else, that was applied widely and then forgotten or even forbidden.
    The others from the School also stood out. We were united by our common passion; something goaded us forward and would not let us look back. We carried the others along, urging and hastening them on mercilessly. At the forefront stood progress and the plan – and, besides, as soon as I felt sorry for someone, I would remember the Brighton waves or the wandering circus and that heart pounding under the sawdust – or, for some reason, Simon’s threadbare coat and bird-like profile. That was enough not to have sentiments, if you get what I mean.
    Those who later had to be fired – something like several thousand – were not informed of the project’s goals. Of them, the Specialists – the best of the best, the most respected – were selected. It was from their heads in particular that we had to extract everything worthwhile. We brought them and ourselves to the brink of exhaustion, eliciting the necessary data and combining the fragments into a cohesive whole – comparing, systematizing, and linking them to each other. We needed to be inventive; the procedures included the “method of disbelief,” the “method of many repetitions,” and even the “grueling interrogation,” in which your active consciousness grows numb and shuts down, and your tongue wags freely to reveal what lies deep down inside, far away, locked up tight.
    Of course, the Specialists didn’t like this, but at first no one complained openly. They feared only that our efforts would reveal their emptiness and falsehood, which is exactly what happened. Soon we saw gaping holes at every step. At times their ignorance was appalling. It seemed they had never studied a single science as they should have. Their expertise was in squeezing the juices from those who were young and voracious, tenacious and intelligent, able to think. They would use them and then push them aside to avoid breeding rivals. Some newcomers, though, were not to be pushed away so easily; they fought fiercely with their elbows. Then, in time, they themselves grew into Specialists – and lost