“I am. I think. I will.” So opens the chapter in which Equality 7-2521 re-discovers the lost and holy word, the forbidden idea for which the Saint of the Pyre was burned at the stake. The acquisition of this knowledge fulfills the intellectual quest on which Equality 7-2521 had embarked as a 10-year-old—the attempt to discover and understand the Unspeakable Word.
He had searched for meaning in life, and now realizes that he is the meaning. He had wished to find a warrant for being, but now understands that he needs neither warrant nor sanction. He is the warrant and sanction of his existence. He is overcome with the emotional experience of his intellectual realization: he has a right to his own life. He is not a mere appendage of a group. He can choose his own path in life—his own interests, his own profession, his own wife, his own home. He is a free man, able to choose his goals, and then work strenuously to achieve them. Related to this is his realization that no individual—neither himself nor any other human being—is a tool to be employed by others for some end they seek to accomplish. Humans are not servants, he claims, to bow and scrape before society, to render obedient service. An individual is “not a sacrifice on their altars.”
Equality 7-2521 realizes, after studying the books of the Unmentionable Times, what the proper relation is between individuals. He owes no unchosen obligations to his brothers and sisters, nor do they owe him such. He states that he is neither a friend nor a foe to others, “but such as each of them shall deserve.” Love, he claims, must be earned—and that requires more than the sheer fact of being born; it requires the attainment of virtue.
Equality 7-2521 will choose friends from among his fellow humans, but neither masters nor servants. He says that he will love and respect his friends, but neither command nor obey them. And when humans come together in friendship and in love, they will join hands only beyond each one’s “holy threshold,” and each will respect the personal boundaries of the other. Looking back on his past life in the city—and thinking sorrowfully of those innocent people still trapped there—he realizes that the horrors of his former society are the result of destroying the personal boundaries that each individual properly claims as their own. Equality 7-2521 proclaims that he is forever done with the code of “we,” with this creed of evil and destruction. He sees clearly the beneficent consequences that can result—as they did in the past—when society recognizes the sacred rights of individuals to mind, soul, values, and life. He observes the face of a god, the god sought by humans since the inception of the world, the god who will grant joy and peace and pride. “This god, this one word: I.”
