7

After an hour on the production line (working on colour today, a simple job topping up tiny funnels with pigments, adhesives and glitters – Hand painted: no two Holophins are alike, outside or in! – and making sure the automated painting system runs smoothly) Hatsuka and Max have English with Mr Harris. They are on friendly terms with Harris, and frequently drink tea in his office. He smells like a second hand bookshop and claims to hate Holophins, which is as it should be. A computer, a confidant, a carer, a friend! Mr Harris is nicknamed Mr Harassed – a pun on the ludicrous English pronunciation – because he is English and has a put-upon air.

Max takes an extra-credit module with Harris called Post-Industrial Dystopias. Like the whole Arts Faculty, Harris uses paper in his lessons, and students are required to take off their Holophins. They stick them to their exercise books. This is a peculiarity of the Takin International School and the subject of no little controversy. They keep their own sustainable forest in the South of the country, which doubles as a theme park.

In today’s lesson Mr Harris confesses to the class that the eleven poets they have studied for the last three months were all made up. By him.

The class is too shocked to murmur disconsolately. Hatsuka is particularly upset: the unique phrasings of Anya Kochinskaya, 20th century Belarusian dissident murdered in a camera shop, particularly touched her heart. She feels like she has spent a month comforting a friend whose illness turns out to be bogus.

‘I apologise for the deception, of course,’ says Harris. ‘But it was in the service of an important point re. the credibility of the first Holophin poet, whose work we move onto later today. Now, I fabricated the life stories, bibliographies and major works of all eleven poets. It took me about a year. Not one of them is real. Does it matter? Of course not.’ Several hands go up. Harris ignores them. ‘Culturally speaking, after World War Two we lost our nerve altogether. The show was over, you might say, and since then Western culture has been a late revue for the people with no good reason to go home. The last two generations, me and you, we’re not even that. We’re an open-mic session tailing off into the remaining drunks in the theatre bar who can’t take a hint, and we all think we’re artists.’

‘Sir,’ says Max. His hand has been up for some time.

‘Literature is a programme like anything else,’ says Mr Harris. ‘Now, you can say what you like about Holophins, but they have an innocent belief in their own talent. And this gives them the potential to produce some beautiful literature. You’ll notice I say “innocent” and not “naïve”.’ Mr Harris writes NAÏVE and INNOCENT on the board, with some hopeful spider-legs shooting out. ‘Who’d care to parse these terms?’

Silence. Adalmut raises her hand.

‘Naïvety is, like, an excuse,’ she says. ‘Like you’ve done something stupid which needs to be justified.’

From the row behind, Hatsuka looks at Adalmut’s slender neck, like the magnified curve of a stamen. Her hair is up in a bun to show off her gold teardrop earrings. Adalmut answers every question as if you had asked her how she was feeling. Hatsuka almost envies it. Is Adalmut naïve or innocent?

‘Great, that’s great,’ says Mr Harris. ‘Anyone else?’

‘To be innocent is to be uncorrupted by negative influence,’ says Hatsuka. ‘To be naïve is to lack experience. Critically, it is to lack the insight to realise that you lack experience. We were naïve to trust you, for instance.’

‘Good,’ says Mr Harris, thinking better of the brainstorm and wiping the board clean. He is, in so many ways, a total trainwreck as a teacher, which is why Hatsuka likes him. It is our weaknesses which decide the nature of our virtues. Our faults which we can least afford to lose. A system which recognises this is Hatsuka’s dream. Codename St Paul, or something.

‘The Holophins have “read” everything,’ says Mr Harris, taking a swig of coffee from his Holophin mug. ‘Everything. More than a human could read in a hundred lifetimes. But they are innocent of ambition, uncowed by those they might consider their betters. They have no jealousy or ulterior motive. They share our will to create, hysterically they share that, but eschew our wanton ambition.’

‘But that’s what makes us human,’ says Max.

The Holophins should have flaws, is the feeling among the upper echelons. Wabi. Nothing lasts, nothing is finished and nothing is perfect. They are currently appointing a professor to teach Wabi-Sabi. This is why Hatsuka and Max are working on Status Anxiety. Mr Harris clearly hasn’t been informed, but then why would they tell him? He’s been teaching English here for twelve years and is still an adjunct.

‘A good note,’ he says to Max, ‘on which to introduce Holophin #6406348364’s poetry.’ [See Appendix 1, ‘Dolphin With a Time Machine’ reprinted with kind permission from Holophin #6406348364’s fourth collection.] [N.B.: RETRACTED.]

Mr Harris delivers his photocopied handouts by hand. He literally hands them out. Most Arts teachers leave them in a pile and you pick them up as you go in. If you forget, you get up and collect one. Harris’s gesture would be agreeable if it didn’t take up five minutes of a forty minute lesson.