The MANIAC

by Benjamín Labatut

he felt, nevertheless, unable to protect him from his own reckless drive toward death and self-destruction, and knew of no way to keep him safe from the strange new rationality that was beginning to take shape all around them, a profoundly inhuman form of intelligence that was completely indifferent to mankind’s deepest needs; this deranged reason, this specter haunting the soul of science, which Paul could almost see as an incorporeal wraith, an unholy spirit hovering over his colleagues’ heads at meetings and conferences, peering over their shoulders, or nudging their elbows, ever so slightly, as they wrote down their equations, a truly malignant influence, both logic-driven and utterly irrational, and though still fledgling and dormant it was undeniably gathering strength, wanting desperately to break into the world, preparing to thrust itself into our lives through technology by enrapturing the cleverest men and women with whispered promises of superhuman power and godlike control. Paul sensed its budding influence, could hear the faint stirring of its tendrils as it slowly crawled toward us, and yet he could not name or place it, and hardly dared to speak of it out loud, for how could he tell if this morbid imagining, this inexplicable bane that he felt it was his duty to arrest, was the fruit of genuine foresight, or just another malignant growth of the delusion that was slowly overcoming his mind?