“Now I’m actually worried,” Felix fussed. “Sniper a day behind on the news! The Earth will shake.” The Headmaster is not one to exaggerate, and Sniper knew it.

The watching Fellows knew it too, students and instructors, researchers and researchees who leaked like fugitives from the bright pastoral ant farm of the Adolf Riktor Brill Institute of Psychotaxonomic Science. The Institute complex covered a series of artificial slopes above the festive city center, its dorms and classrooms, tiled in blue and white porcelain, nested among precisely measured hills and banks of flowers, still waiting for April to awaken them. Have you visited it, reader? The Cognitivist’s city? I remember well when Mercer Mardi first brought me, eight years old and still on crutches from the accident, to limp my way through these too-calculated gardens: paths precisely wide enough to fight off claustrophobia, banks of carefully chaotic flowers, so test subjects can say what shapes they see in the living Rorschach. As Headmaster Faust’s Heir Presumptive, Mercer Mardi had enjoyed the finest office with the finest view: three-quarters mathematical perfection, while in the corner of the window one could just see the Old City below, historic Ingolstadt, lurking like an archenemy with its one-horse-wide organic streets, its fort and cathedral towers alive with pigeons. Matter and antimatter must not meet, so, to separate the Institute from the Old Town, Brill conceived this Spectacle Strip between, where Faust and Sniper stand. Here the great sculptors and architects of each generation are invited to build ‘abstract self-portraits,’ anything they can dream, a rainbow tree, a singing obelisk, a warren of mirrored tunnels, a sausage stand in the shape of a chambered nautilus, anything so long as it is a reflection of themselves. Old Town, Spectacle Strip, and Institute; if only the most successful revolutionaries cease to fear their teachers, how better could Brill boast his conquest of Master Freud than to let his capital flaunt its Id, Ego, and Superego so conspicuously?

“So, what’s the question of the day?” Sniper asked.

“The Cousins’ Feedback Bureau.”

The hermaphrodite did not flinch, but in the videos you can see Faust smile, spotting something. “You mean Masami Mitsubishi’s Black Sakura Seven-Ten list article about CFB Chief Darcy Sok?” Sniper supplied. “Never let it be said that I’m completely out of touch.”

“I’m sure it never will be. So, do you find it credible that the bureaucrats who sort the letters before sending them on have a major political impact on the Cousins? Traditionally you’re the one at the bottom of everyone’s Seven-Ten lists; this mess has quite stolen your spotlight.”

Sniper scratched its black hair with childish modesty. “If the experts involved say they don’t know yet, then certainly I don’t. So far as I understand it, the letters sent to the CFB are actually sorted by computer. All the CFB people do is tell the computers what criteria to use. It must be true that those criteria influence things, but I’ve no reason to think they’re any less objective than the criteria the World Food Production Index uses to count foods, or the Romanovan Censor uses for population and economy. No one doubts that the data that comes out of the Censor’s office has more global impact than just about anything, but that doesn’t mean that Ancelet dictates it. If I were a sinister conspiracy, Vivien Ancelet isn’t the someone I’d try to bribe. Neither is Darcy Sok.”