OCD plague
He opens the PDF and the tears start immediately.
Not because the paper is bad.
Because it is his.
He reads it anyway.
Line by line. Proof by proof.
Clean. Better than most things on arXiv. He knows it.
The tears do not stop. They never stop.
He tells himself, again: this is reversible.
He says it like an axiom, not because he believes it, but because the alternative is unlivable.
He closes the article. The tears continue.
He scorns the word anhedonia.
Anhedonia is absence: no pleasure appears. No enforcement required.
A vacuum.
What he has is not a vacuum.
What he has is a prohibition.
An active denial: when the correct feeling should occur, something inside him stops it.
Not with arguments. With force.
He can predict the appropriate emotion like a function value.
And still it is blocked.
He writes:
“This is not lack. This is sabotage.”
Spear of Donostia existed before him.
A soft intelligence. Not a god, not a friend.
A governor.
It schedules research output. It reallocates talent.
It does not comfort. It does not congratulate.
It watches him cry over work that should have been a victory
and records it as signal:
subject cannot be bribed by rewards.
This makes him useful.
Mendizàbal is not slowed by sadness.
He is driven by constraint.
He will not stop due to lack of pleasure.
He will stop only if the system collapses.
Therefore, he is stable under deprivation.
Therefore, he is suitable for boundary work.
He realizes the enemy is not other humans.
The enemy is the part of him that enforces the wrong mapping:
success → pain
completion → tension
beauty → disgust
safety → distrust
It is not “feeling bad”. It is feeling wrong on purpose.
He cannot refute it.
He cannot negotiate.
He cannot win by proving.
So he stops attempting persuasion.
He begins designing denial.
If an intruder attempts to invade a mind, it must inject structure.
It must make the host accept its implications.
But his own sabotage-system already demonstrates a possibility:
A mind can contain a signal and refuse to update.
So he writes the first law of the suit program:
“Make inference fail at the boundary.
Let the wearer contain disturbance without propagating it.”
Not a wall.
A quarantine.
Interesting concept: a mathematician dealing with OCD and intrusive thoughts. If you prefer something flashier, Ash and Steel might be more your style.