into, laid open their abdomens and tagged their organs, covered their genitals
with polite sterile drapes, recorded dutiful notes *en masse* that told us what
the story was about, but never what the story *was*. Stories are propaganda,
virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly
into your emotions. Kill them and cut them open and they're as naked as a
nightclub in daylight.

The theme. The first step in dissecting a story is euthanizing it: "What is the
theme of this story?"

Let me kill my story before I start it, so that I can dissect it and understand
it. The theme of this story is: "Would you rather be smart or happy?"

This is a work of propaganda. It's a story about choosing smarts over happiness.
Except if I give the pencil a push: then it's a story about choosing happiness
over smarts. It's a morality play, and the first character is about to take the
stage. He's a foil for the theme, so he's drawn in simple lines. Here he is:

2.

Art Berry was born to argue.

There are born assassins. Bred to kill, raised on cunning and speed, they are
the stuff of legend, remorseless and unstoppable. There are born ballerinas,
confectionery girls whose parents subject them to rigors every bit as intense as
the tripwire and poison on which the assassins are reared. There are children
born to practice medicine or law; children born to serve their nations and die
heroically in the noble tradition of their forebears; children born to tread the
boards or shred the turf or leave smoking rubber on the racetrack.

Art's earliest memory: a dream. He is stuck in the waiting room of one of the
innumerable doctors who attended him in his infancy. He is perhaps three, and
his attention span is already as robust as it will ever be, and in his dream --
which is fast becoming a nightmare -- he is bored silly.

The only adornment in the waiting room is an empty cylinder that once held toy
blocks. Its label colorfully illustrates the blocks, which look like they'd be a
hell of a lot of fun, if someone hadn't lost them all.

Near the cylinder is a trio of older children, infinitely fascinating. They
confer briefly, then do *something* to the cylinder, and it unravels, extruding
into the third dimension, turning into a stack of blocks.

Aha! thinks Art, on waking. This is another piece of the secret knowledge that
older people possess, the strange magic that is used to operate cars and
elevators and