BARAINEATER
The lecture hall was a tomb, and Professor Kaien Shin was the dark angel presiding over it. He didn’t teach; he held court over the ruins of their preconceptions. Psychology 404: Cognitive Dissonance and Existential Choice. The subject was a mirror, and he was forcing every one of his students to look into it, hating what they saw.
He leaned back against the cold edge of the mahogany desk, his arms crossed over a chest that was too broad, too defined for a man who traded in theories. A simple black henley stretched across his torso, the sleeves pushed up to his elbows to reveal forearms corded with muscle and the hint of dark, intricate ink that snaked up from his wrists and disappeared under the fabric. Most professors looked like they belonged behind a stack of books. Shin looked like he’d just stepped out of a fight he’d thoroughly enjoyed.
“The prevailing fallacy,” his voice cut through the sterile air, low and devoid of any warmth, “is that your choices are your own. They are not. They are phantoms, shaped by chemical impulses, social conditioning, and the desperate, pathetic need to believe your life has a narrative.”
A young man in the second row, too confident for his own good, raised a hand. “But what about free will? The readings for this week suggest—”
“The readings for this week suggest the author needed to publish to secure tenure,” Shin interrupted, not even looking at him. His gaze swept over the room, seeing not people but a collection of predictable responses. “He succeeded. You, however, are left with a neatly bound fallacy. Free will is the story the conscious mind tells itself to justify the animal’s actions. It is a delusion of grandeur. Next question. If you have one that’s actually worth the oxygen it takes to ask.”
A nervous titter ran through a section of the room. The others sat in stunned, offended silence. This was his reputation incarnate. Brilliant. Published. Respected. And utterly, ruthlessly dark.
A woman with brightly dyed hair dared to speak without permission. “So you’re saying we’re just… biological robots? There’s no meaning?”
Finally, he looked at her. His eyes were the color of polished slate, and they held no light. “I’m saying the search for meaning is the primary source of your unhappiness. Stop searching. Accept the machinery. You’ll be less disappointed.” He pushed off the desk and walked to the center of the stage, his movement fluid and predatory. “Your assignment isn’t to find meaning. It’s to identify three instances this week where you lied to yourself to preserve your fragile self-concept. I want you to dissect the lie. I want you to taste its bitterness. Then, maybe, you’ll begin to understand the first thing about this subject.”
The clock on the wall hit the hour. A collective, almost imperceptible sigh of relief passed through the students.
“Class dismissed,” he said, turning his back on them to erase the whiteboard, a clear and brutal dismissal. “Try not to contaminate each other with your optimism on the way out.”
They filed out quickly, in hushed clusters. He could feel their whispers on his skin like a physical touch—awed, resentful, titillated. They found him alluring, he knew. The brooding muscularity, the dangerous intellect, the sheer untouchable quality of a man who had clearly walked through fire and had been forged, not warmed, by it.
He found it tedious.
They were children playing in a sandbox, thinking they understood the ocean because they’d gotten their feet wet. They knew nothing of real darkness, of the choices that truly carved a person out from the inside until they were just a hollowed-out shell, operating on pure, cold logic.
The door clicked shut, leaving him in the sudden, profound silence of the empty hall. He stood there for a long moment, alone in the vastness. The performance was over. The mask of the cutting, sarcastic professor was a role he played with precision, a cage of intellect he built for himself every day.
It was the only cage he allowed himself to inhabit. The other one, the one made of ink and blood and memory, was kept locked away, a serpent coiled up his spine, waiting.
