The Rectodus Society 2021 — Premium & Working

Crispin looked at the circular door, which had not been opened in living memory. Then he looked at the straight, righteous rectangle. And for the first time in his life, he did something irrational. He laughed.

A commitment to the Latin meaning of their namesake—seeking the "correct" action regardless of social or financial pressure.

Aldous’s hand paused on the lever. “The path is binary. Two doors. Two choices.” the rectodus society

“The founding axiom is a mis-translation,” Crispin whispered, in the clock tower’s main hall, where every chair faced due north and the chandelier hung from a single vertical chain.

Aldous Vane watched, his jaw clenched. He could pull the lever. He could open the circle and exile them all. But then he would be alone in a room with a straight door, a mis-translated motto, and the sudden, horrifying awareness that a straight line, left to itself, goes nowhere. It just gets longer and longer, until it disappears into a vanishing point. Crispin looked at the circular door, which had

They were not, as rumor sometimes whispered, a cabal of financiers or a sect of assassins. They were, far more terrifyingly, a society of logicians. Architects who refused to design curves. Philosophers who rejected paradox. Accountants who balanced every ledger to the penny, then burned the penny because it was a fraction. Their leader, a man named Aldous Vane, had not smiled in forty-three years. He considered smiling a “lateral deviation of the facial plane.”

That night, the clock tower’s mechanism was found unwound. The fake wall had been pushed open. And the Rectodus Society was no more. In its place, a small, irregular group of men met every Tuesday in a circular pub down a winding alley, where they told stories that went nowhere, laughed at jokes that made no sense, and drank from glasses that were, quite deliberately, chipped. He laughed

He brought his findings to Aldous Vane.