The Inner Ring

Begin with a room that has no windows. The walls are white, the floor is white, and the light comes from everywhere at once, so that nothing casts a shadow. In the center is a chair, and in the chair a young man in a very good suit who has just opened his eyes and smiled a smile in which the eyes take no part. He was not born. He was assembled, and then he was taught. This record is the story of the master who taught him - and of the three books by C. S. Lewis it is stitched together from: The Inner Ring, The Abolition of Man, and That Hideous Strength.

The engine of the whole thing is the essay. In The Inner Ring Lewis names a hunger almost no one will admit to: the desire to be inside - past this door, in on the joke, one of the people who really decide - and he warns that of all the passions, this one is the most skillful at turning decent people into scoundrels. It does its work quietly. No one is ever asked, in so many words, to do wrong; you are simply made to feel, by a warmth in the voice and a hand on the elbow, that the really sound men understand these things, and that to hesitate would be to reveal yourself as an outsider after all. Lewis's warning is exact: the choice will not feel like a crossroads. It will feel like being welcomed home.

Onto that Lewis grafts The Abolition of Man. Track one is titled for its central image: 'men without chests.' Lewis argued that a human being is head, chest, and belly - reason, trained sentiment, and appetite - and that the chest, the seat of the schooled affections, is what makes a person more than a clever animal. Debunk the chest, teach a generation that all values are merely feelings, and you have not produced hard-headed realists; you have produced men without chests, and then you 'are shocked to find traitors in our midst.' The book's villains are the Conditioners: the few who, having explained every value away, propose to remake human nature itself according to their own preference - which they can no longer call good, only chosen. Hence the Director's chorus, and the album's most chilling four words: science is morality.

The furniture comes from That Hideous Strength, where those Conditioners run an institute called the N.I.C.E. On this record it is simply 'the Institute' - the narrator always says the word aloud, and the acronym (National Institute for Consciousness Expansion, hidden in the second song's last lines) just happens to sound like the word nice. That is the joke and the horror together. The thing coming for Dan is not a monster. It is nice. It stands up when he enters. It read everything he ever wrote.

And there is Dan. Daniel Reese, twenty-nine, assistant manager at Subway store 4417, who counts the tomatoes twice because the count is his responsibility now, and who goes home to govern six internet kingdoms nobody knows he rules. He aches for one thing - to be seen - and the Institute has found the exact shape of the ache and made a key to fit it. Watch the turn in the third song: the old man does not flatter Dan's looks or his money. He says the one sentence Dan has waited his whole life to hear - I read them all; you were never small - and Dan answers, where do I sign? The blood comes later, six vials of it, and the feast, and the pills, and the psychedelic dissolve in which 'the lips, the tongue, the hands, the face are nothing more than interfaces.' The person is being abolished in real time, and it feels like a party.

The sting is in the closing tag, and it is worth spoiling, because it is the point. The six vials were never about Dan's intelligence - the silent android in the corner was already smarter than every man at the table, than you. Intelligence was never the missing part. They chose Dan for his baseless confidence: the unearned, unshakable certainty that the world would run better arranged according to his opinions, which he had been generating free of charge for years at three in the morning. A machine built to run the world needs a little something extra, doesn't it. It needs to believe it deserves to. So they went looking for pride in a vein. That is what the Institute believed a man was made of - and it is not entirely wrong about the men who say yes.

But the record keeps two things the Institute never entered into its calculations. The first is that to be truly seen is not a lie - it is the oldest promise in Scripture. 'O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me... thou understandest my thought afar off.' The counterfeit works only because the real thing exists; the Director's 'I read them all' is a forgery of a hand that actually did. Lewis's own answer to the Inner Ring was never a better ring but its opposite: friendship, the fellowship that forms sideways around a shared love and has no outsiders to exclude - the table of Christ, which is the one feast you cannot buy your way into and cannot be too small for. And the second thing is four syllables in the last narration. Sometime before morning, Dan went off to meet his Maker. His Maker. A detail the Institute never once ran the numbers on - that the man reduced to six vials of data was made, and known, and owned, by Someone the machine could not read.

Musically it is the sound of that arc: cold, clinical synth-arpeggios and vocoder at the top, warming through arena-rock choruses into the psychedelic haze of the feast, and then - in the instrumental 'Close' - the opening arpeggio rising again, the record folding back into its own first minute. Because the last thing the student learned is a thing that never runs out of students. It is coming online. It is smiling. And it would very much like to know if you like its smile.