Five people sat around the table in the second deepest level under a mental institution of discrete nonsensical wealth. They ran the place. Other than this shared privilege they had in common a well-founded belief in the reality of the prophetic. That they disagreed on the matter of its nature was irrelevant to their work.
For the semi-religious one prophecy was a divine gift or supernatural ability — which one he believed true depended on his own state of mind — that exacted the familiar, terrible cost of the prophet’s sanity.
The psychologist knew it as a form of savantism characterized nowhere but in the institute’s private records: a rare symptom of mental illness that showed as an hyperdeveloped capability to understand and predict historical trends.
It was a statistically solid correlation for the mathematician. A causal mechanism was of course a theoretical desiderata but she considered it was still decades too early in the research program to worry too much about it.
For the owner of the institute it was a resource – one that had been immensely profitable ever since the premature shell shock of some patients before 1910 had later raised the suspicions of his uncommonly open-minded grand-grandfather. An epidemic of depressive symptoms in the 1920s had been almost too transparent to interpret, but they had done it just in time to avoid disaster and profit from it. At that time the committee was formed to exploit this unique resource while discretely using their wealth and influence to steer everybody else’s research to different paths. The terrible psychotic breakdowns of the mid 1930s had been misinterpreted as harbingers of nothing worse than war, but the terrible paranoia that preceded the Cold War had been well-used, and so on through the decades, always a step or two ahead of the world’s path. A century of experience had made the institute able to profit from even coarse messages from the future written in the strange alphabet of the ways in which a mind can break.
The current message had first been received more than twenty years ago. The committee and their blinded consultants had yet to find a way to read it.
How do you read catatonia? Patients in the area known since the 1930s as the Prophet’s Corridor passed the days and years with vacant eyes, unresponsive to everything that could be measured in the environment and perhaps to everything that could only be measured by themselves. Silent. Immobile. Hypothesis ranged from the inability to process what they saw to the inability to process the absence of something to see. Each member of the committee had their own hypothesis and hence their own nightmares.
As it had happened for years they left the table without having made any progress on resolving either.
The fifth person had a different identity from the other four and also another identity hidden below that. The assassin went down to the deepest level of the institution and walked through the corridor describing a future to each patient. They remained becalmed in the Sargasso of time or lack of time; the assassin was well-trained in reading expressions and saw not a flicker in their faces of a recognition or plausibility or anything else.
The assassin had joined the committee long after the silence had begun. Ostensibly to help understand it, in reality to provide a retroactive cause (for the institute had its hidden, jealous, vengeful enemies; as unavoidably they would). But over the years he had developed his own hypothesis and his own nightmares, and he left the corridor with both as unchanged as the prophet’s silence. Next time, he thought, conscious of not knowing what.