D-503

The novel's protagonist, D-503 is a 32-year-old philosopher-mathematician who responds to a call for literary works to send to distant planets about Integral, the spacecraft he has designed and whose construction he oversees. In his youth, D-503 contemplates becoming a poet like his friend R-13, but is in love with numbers and calculations. He chooses to keep a diary to share with distant readers whom he assumes will be as unenlightened as humans on Earth before the Two Hundred Years' War. Because he believes current humans are quite evolved, D-503 is morbidly ashamed of his hairy, apelike hands.

D-503 and R-13 are licensed to O-90 for (separate) sexual liaisons on specified days. Their "triangle" is broken when D-503 meets I-330, a strange free thinker who helps him discover his human soul and the non-regimented life depicted in the Ancient House, which the State maintains as a museum, but...