Redemption

In a split window on your second monitor, Tyler Cowen is giving a TEDx talk. He says, "Every time you're telling yourself a good vs evil story, you're basically lowering your IQ by ten points." There are only a few such grand stories, he says — seven, or maybe a dozen. Monster. Rags to riches. Quest. In fact: "There's the old saying," Tyler says, "just about every story can be summed up as, 'A stranger came to town.'" If you limit yourself to those simple structures, he says, you lose most of the world's richness. Also your brainpower, apparently.

Well, you have smart friends and a smart spouse and an intellectually demanding job and play chess in your spare time, so you can't afford to put all that in jeopardy. You stop going to the movies. You trade novels for meta-analyses. When someone starts to tell an anecdote at a party, you hurriedly redirect the conversation toward their opinions instead. "What's your contrarian take?" you ask. Or "What's something you changed your mind about recently?"

It seems to work. You develop a reputation as a measured, rigorous thinker. One of your blog posts about mistake theory goes viral and is broadly well-received. People invite you to lots of board game nights. You retire with a handful of influential papers to your name. You don't pick up any weird crank theories in your old age.

And then one day, you find yourself on your deathbed, and you think, I can't take those IQ points with me. After all these years, something in you relaxes. You smile, imagining — imagining?! — the treat awaiting you. The exchange rate is steep, but you don't need a lot. After all, there are only seven, or maybe a dozen, to choose from.

You've never actually taken an official IQ test, but running a rough estimate based off your SAT and GRE scores, which you still remember precisely, you should be up in the mid-100s, so you'll be able to afford a few variants on each of your favorite archetypes. You could even pour your whole budget into one, retold in many ways. But it's been a long time since you let any of them permeate your thoughts, so you have no idea which ones you'll like the best. Are you even supposed to like a story? What are you supposed to do with a story? Reach conclusions? It's not like you can take those with you, either.

Once you've made your selections, feeling rather like a trick-or-treater groping around in a bowl, you realize you should probably optimize the ordering. Which stories do you need almost all your wits to digest the meat of? Which will land well when you pass the top of the bell curve, and which will work nicely when you sink below the level where you can comprehend hypotheticals — perhaps an obvious plot twist that a smarter self would anticipate? Down below thirty or so, you won't even understand language, so you'll have to mentally represent the story some other way, maybe more abstractly. You hope the tales you'll turn to at that point will at least be something more than morality plays.

A hacking fit overtakes you. Even when the cough subsides, your lungs feel smaller and raspier with each breath. You can’t quite pinpoint the moment when it ceases to be labored respiration, and instead becomes intrepid oxygen molecules struggling toward the depths of your windpipe where their quest transforms them into carbon dioxide and at last returns them home triumphant into the atmosphere.

And then your life unwinds into fables, each simpler than the last. A power struggle. A journey. Mistaken identity. A betrayal. A reunion at long last. Star-crossed lovers.

A funny expression sets into your face. You drool. There is you, and then there is something else. That's all. You can’t distinguish anymore whether it is man, nature, society, monster, supernatural, technology, fate, or self.

Then the question is just: are you the something else?

Your eyes close.

A stranger comes to town.