The Maya Pill

by German Sadulaev

  All fell silent. A portable throne was brought out and the crowd cried out, summoning the new Khagan:

  “Khagan! Khagan! Kha-gan!”

  The Great Bek roused the crowd:

  “You call that a chant? The Khagan will not come forth, there will be no celebration, unless you let him hear you!”

  And they shouted louder:

  “Kha-gan! Kha-gan! Kha-gan! Grandfather Kha-gan!”

  Someone poked Saat lightly on the back, and he emerged from the secret room into the great hall.

  “Hurra-a-a-a-a-a-ah!”

  The crowd roared, and loud music filled the hall. And Saat, embarrassed and blushing bright red like a fish from the Itil, approached the throne and took his seat. Oh, it’s hot in the hall, so hot! Hot as a skillet!

  The Bek spoke:

  “Here he is, great Khazars, sovereign people, our new Khagan, Osya the Thirteenth! Let us be loyal to him, as we were loyal to his forebears, ancient Khagans from the beginning of time!”

  “We will be loyal!” shouted the people. “We will!”

  And again the Great Bek pounded the floor with his crook: silence!

  “First we must observe our ancient tradition and test the new Khagan, to determine the duration of his rule.”

  From behind the Khagan’s back emerged an executioner arrayed in camouflage from head to toe, branches sewed onto his clothing, his face covered with a black stocking with holes cut for the eyes. Now this was a surprise! No one had said anything to Saat about this.

  The executioner came up behind Saat and wound a fine silken noose around his neck. So this is the end. It wasn’t your destiny to fall and rot on the field of battle, nor were you fated to end your days in poverty and starvation; no, Saat, in celebration and revelry are you to perish, in peacetime, amid sweet feasting, to the sound of joyful music. Such is human life: There is no escaping death!

  Saat thought this thought, then stood calmly, prepared to meet his eternal rest. But the Great Bek came up before him.

  He spoke:

  “Tell us, Saat, son of Nattukh, how long will you rule as Khagan of Khazaria? The executioner will begin to strangle you, and you will speak the numbers—count up from one, leaving no number out! And when you can go on no longer, lift your right hand and speak, say you have had enough. Then we will know.”

  And the Great Bek gave a sign to the executioner, then stepped to one side. The executioner pulled the silken noose lightly toward himself. Saat began counting:

  “One, two . . . ”

  The executioner pulled tighter on the silk string, oh, how it hurt!

  “Three, four . . . ”

  And now Saat’s strength was failing; he couldn’t go on, the light went dark, the crowd multiplied and oscillated before his eyes; the people flailed about in a demonic dance. But Saat strained with all his might:

  “Five, six, seven . . . ”

  And he felt that he could not possibly go on; he was drained. Death was upon him. He lifted his hand and rasped out: “Enough!”

  The executioner immediately released the noose; servants rushed forth to pour water over the Khagan, to fan him, to rub his neck gently with fine oil.

  “Glory to the Khagan!” howled the Khazar elite.

  And the Great Bek spoke:

  “You have spoken, O Khagan! Your time on the throne ruling the land of the Khazars is to be seven terms. And after that your body will be hewed into seven pieces, and into every piece will enter the sins of the Khazar land, one piece for every year of your rule, and we will curse and revile you, and will burn the pieces of your body. Now, though, you are to give no thought to yourself, for it is clear what is to be your fate. Your mind is free for the concerns of the realm!” Touched, the Great Bek shed a tender tear. And Saat rose from the throne and blessed his people. And a sweet fog billowed up and filled the air of the hall. And a ringing sound . . . a ringing sound filled every corner . . . but where was the sound coming from?

  IT’S IN THE WATER

  In Saat’s . . . uh, Maximus’s, apartment, the alarm clock was emitting a metallic ringing sound. Recently an entire delegation of his neighbors in the apartment building had presented him with a formal request that he keep the volume down in the morning. How they had managed to persuade him, Semipyatnitsky would not reveal, but now he had to use an ordinary alarm clock to waken him into this reality so that he could get himself to work on time.

  His first order of business every morning was to solve the problem of his identity, that is, to answer two questions: Who was he, and why did he have to get up this exact minute and go out somewhere? The answer to the second question was to flow naturally from the answer to the first.

  Maximus said to himself: I am a middle manager in the Import Department of the Cold Plus Company, in St. Petersburg, Russia. Tenant in an apartment located at 6-66 Dybenko Street. Debtor, signatory on three different loans. Hence, whether I want to or not, I must quit my bed now, hasten to the bathroom, and shave. And then get dressed and go to the office. There is no other option.

  Semipyatnitsky thought it would make sense to write this mantra down on a piece of paper and simply read it out loud to himself every morning. Or, even better, record it on tape and set it to play . . . wait, a tape player wouldn’t work; it would bring on the neighbors again.

  The neighbors . . . they were such pests! Not just the neighbors; people everywhere were generally just as bad. But only God is perfectly beautiful, anyway. As it says in the Hadith: “Allah is beautiful and loves beauty.” And if that’s the case, then He doesn’t love people. Why should he? And why should I?

  Preoccupied with these and other deep thoughts, Semipyatnitsky somehow made his way to work. He was desperately thirsty. He tossed his briefcase and car keys onto his desk and headed for the break room, where employees who couldn’t even afford the Barf Bar could sit and eat the snacks or lunch that they had packed and brought from home.

  There was only one person there, a girl nibbling at a thin sandwich, chasing down every piece with a sip of watery instant coffee from the office stash, which was kept in a giant economy-size bag on the counter. This was the very same coffee that was left over in the form of a fine powder after the best beans—according to the ads for this particular brand—were taken from the unfortunate Africans.

  Maximus politely initiated a conversation.

  “Morning! Still asleep?”

  “Yes, I could barely get myself to work this morning. All I wanted to do was stay in bed.”

  As if anyone actually wanted to come to work! Maximus himself, no matter how he tried, couldn’t come up with any convincing arguments for it, except for the threat of being kicked out of his apartment and losing his car and starving to death. On a practical level, these arguments made perfect sense, but philosophically speaking they were inadequate. Maximus launched into a tirade:

  “For a man of our day and age the Shakespearian question ‘to be or not to be’ is no longer of any relevance. To be—of course, what’s the alternative? For some extremists, like the skinheads, the question becomes ‘to beat or not to beat,’ but they got their answer long ago, which is why they decided to shave their heads. But they’re the minority. For the majority of people, the key existential question today is: ‘to go to the office or to let it all go to hell?’ Considering the fact that society won’t allow you to live for free, once you’ve dispensed with office work you’re left with the following options: You can become a prostitute on the street, in a salon, or in a virtual chat room. You can become a drug dealer: sit at home in your apartment, aka drug den; poke around on the Internet and the client will show up on his own. You can get into direct sales—Herbalife or vacuum cleaners that cost as much as used cars. Or you can sign a contract with the devil, and he’ll make you a rock star, a popular writer, a celebrity, or some other brand of high-profile parasite. And in return you sign over your soul. What your soul is, and why you need it—you don’t know yourself. But the devil, well, the devil knows who
needs it and why . . . ”

  The girl hastily gulped down her coffee and muttered nervously, “That’s not what I meant. I like my job. It can be very interesting. And the pay isn’t bad. It’s just that I got to bed a little late last night. Other than that, everything’s fine, really. Right, then, gotta go. I’ve got some . . . data to enter . . . reports, too.”

  She grabbed her purse and evaporated.

  There you have it, yet again. No one understands anything.

  Maximus got his yellow mug out of the cupboard and filled it to the brim with water from the big upside-down plastic bottle on the cooler. You know those coolers, there’s one in every office now, with a red tab for hot water and a blue one for cold. Office managers everywhere, even the stingiest ones, cover the costs for regular, year-round delivery of drinking water. Transparent twenty-five liter bottles are delivered in special vans and brought up to the office by mute guys in blue uniforms.

  Semipyatnitsky downed his water in one long swig and immediately remembered the things he had to do this morning. His mind filled with work-related thoughts, phrases from correspondence, numbers, facts, and figures. He even felt a sudden zeal for accomplishing these tasks.

  Still holding the empty cup, Maximus reflected briefly on this sudden change in his consciousness, and, rooted to the spot, erupted in wild, demonic laughter:

  “But of course! How could I not have guessed? The pills! They dissolve the Dutch pills into the office water supply: PTH, Positive Thinking! Of course, it’s chemistry! Otherwise, why would anyone bother to come to work? All of the pills must have the same basic ingredients, but the formula can be modified for each individual office, based on employers’ requests. Or maybe not, maybe it’s all one standard formula that adapts to the specifics of each individual brain. The effect varies depending on the interaction between the chemicals and the neurons of the manager in question, which are configured for the needs of his company’s business and his own particular job. It’s cheaper that way, of course!”

  Praise be to Allah, no one else came into the break room, and so Semipyatnitsky’s moment of enlightenment went unheard.

  ESCAPE

  Maximus went back to his desk and settled into his work. Whatever task you take on, you should do well. This simple maxim was one of the few principles that he adhered to in his life. There’s no need to burn with childish enthusiasm or demonstrate excessive passion for your work. In fact, that approach isn’t very conducive to quality results. Simply fulfilling your duties calmly, whether you like them or not, is quite a different matter; that does produce results, and without causing any extra trouble. Karma yoga, pure and simple! Purposeful activity undertaken in an enlightened state of mind, combined with a renunciation of the fruits of such labor.

  If you want to partake of the fruits of your efforts, even the tiniest little morsel, be aware that every company has its own security department, every country has an economic police service, and hell has demons waiting for you. They’re down there brandishing hot frying pans, or whatever they use these days, undoubtedly something more technologically advanced—microwave ovens, maybe. They’ll grab you by the arm and give you what you deserve. They’ll rip those fruits out of your mouth and jam them up a different orifice.

  Maximus knew, as everyone did, that the buyers for the stores that carried Cold Plus products operated through bribery. Nowadays there are more eloquent words for it: bonus, incentives. In an extreme case—kickbacks. The Criminal Code, though, still defines it as “commercial bribery.”

  They were driving past Maximus’s office window this very moment, in their Audis and Nissans paid for with cash, not credit. They can even afford to own their own apartments. Girls fall in love with them; simple office workers envy them. Books are published about their lives, and in those books they are so sensitive, so spiritual, and they have such good taste. Even their cynicism is endearing.

  Blue-collar workers from the company’s warehouses regularly spewed angry accusations at Maximus and his colleagues at the office, calling them bastards and thieves. But Maximus only snickered in response. Compared with the other contract he’d been offered and had rejected multiple times, all of this was petty stuff.

  The devil takes no kickbacks. Hell doesn’t work on commission. The managers of sin and perdition have only one bonus, one incentive system: your eternal soul, all of it, along with its complete set of transcendental viscera.

  Just keep on doing what you’re doing, Maximus told himself, just do your job. Give no thought to success or victory, expect no rewards.

  Plus, can you really call this work?

  Maximus understood that he wasn’t really doing anything. Not creating anything, not changing anything. At least in the real world. All his manipulations of the keyboard weren’t going to increase the number of frozen crab-paste claws in the universe, not by one measly package. Only the hands of Chinese women, earning a dollar an hour, could accomplish that. Though actually it was considerably less than a dollar an hour.

  Maximus earned his keep on a completely different order of magnitude. All he did was stare into a computer monitor, occasionally tapping something on his keyboard as though playing some kind of computer game, never having to leave his comfortable office or hoist his ever-widening backside up out of his chair. That’s how his job would look to those Chinese women as they labored away, crouching in rows by a shipping container, or to the dockworkers as they those dragged frost-covered cartons back and forth day in, day out.

  Like millions of others of his kind, Maximus performed his sacred rituals in the World of Information. But that is the way, in fact the only way, surplus value is created in today’s world. Because the price of a crab-paste claw, assembled out of fish-processing waste products, chemical additives, and other shit, was practically the same as the price of the initial raw material, that same shit before it was mixed together. And only by dispatching the product through all the circles of the information inferno, from the exporting country’s customs service to the importing country’s customs service, through the veterinary inspection, marketing analysis, and all the incentive systems designed to motivate workers at home and abroad, could that very same shit end up in the form of a food product on a supermarket shelf, with a price exceeding its initial shitty value many times over.

  So Maximus avoided thinking about the fact that he was eating his own yeast-free healthy vitamin-fortified bread on the backs of others. Though he was fully aware of the cost to himself. Maximus had long ago realized that he wasn’t being paid for work; it wasn’t really work, after all. Rather, his salary represented rent that he was paid for his individual consciousness, for allowing himself to be turned into a computer chip in the great processor of commercial information.

  Semipyatnitsky recalled a movie where the handsome actor Keanu Reaves had allowed his brain to be used as a vehicle for smuggling pirated programs. In order to avoid paying customs duties, some businessmen had loaded this program in Reaves’s head and had sent him across the border, where other businessmen downloaded the program. Pure fantasy of course. But an office worker lives in a far worse nightmare: His brain isn’t merely a chip for storing information; it actually processes it as well, on an ongoing basis, like a computer. So Reaves’s mission as a courier in some anti-utopia was trivial in comparison with the daily ordeal of a mid-level manager.

  Whatever he does—eat, sleep, walk down the street, watch TV, or screw his girlfriend—through it all, the processor hums and works. Assessing the status of the system. Making adjustments. Wake a mid-level manager up in the middle of the night, and he will tell you how many containers are scheduled to be unloaded this week at the transit port, what paperwork needs to be completed, and what still has to be done to initiate the letter of credit.

  Even your average, clueless CEO spends all his time thinking about this stuff. A clever business owner, though, even as he signs his annual contract with a major client, is only thinking about how he’s going to get fellated to
night by some glamorous new whore. There’s no reason for him to worry about the details of his business deals. All the necessary programs have been loaded into the brains of mid-level managers specially hired for that purpose. It’s called “delegating authority.”

  It is quite convenient, really. The new-generation “Mid-Level Manager Processor IV” comes in on his own accord, hooks himself into the system, connects to the other processors, disconnects as necessary, maintains himself at his own expense during his free time, and at the end of his life, when he’s all used up, removes himself from the system. The ideal device!

  All the corporation needs to do is protect him from viruses.

  Because although innumerable resources exist to keep the system functioning smoothly—magazines, books, and TV shows that provide processors with useful information about how to keep themselves in working order, how to improve their productivity and even how to find meaning and take satisfaction in their work—you never know when some dangerous new malware might pop up out of nowhere, making your processor suddenly start thinking about itself, about the server through which he works, about his ISP, and other matters that ought not trouble anyone beneath the rank of SysAdmin.