The Rectodus - Society

“No,” Crispin said. “I won’t choose.”

And if you asked what happened to Aldous Vane, they would only smile—a genuine, inefficient, asymmetrical smile—and point to a footpath that led out of Prague, a path that did not go straight to any destination, but instead wandered lazily beside the river, under the chestnut trees, toward a horizon that was not a point, but a promise. the rectodus society

Membership was hereditary and rigorous. At age thirteen, every son of a Rectodus member was taken to the “Hall of Angles.” There, he was shown two doors. One was a straight, unadorned rectangle. The other was a perfectly circular portal. To choose the circle was to be cast out, shorn of the family name, and given a small purse of silver to begin a new, crooked life elsewhere. To choose the rectangle was to be anointed. No one had chosen the circle in over a century. The last who had, a boy named Leo Vane, was Aldous’s own younger brother. He had walked through the circle and vanished into the fog of Prague’s old town, never to be mentioned again. “No,” Crispin said

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.” At age thirteen, every son of a Rectodus

“The straight line is the shortest path between two points. The shortest path is the most efficient. The most efficient is the most righteous. Therefore, walk straight. Speak straight. Be straight.”

The Rectodus Society did not appear in any history book, nor was its founding charters filed in any public registry. It existed in the negative space of the world, a secret brotherhood of men who had chosen to live without deviation. Their creed was simple, carved into the marble mantelpiece of their sole meeting place—a windowless room behind a fake wall in a decommissioned clock tower in Prague: