• Voltaire – Enlightenment wit; lucid, ironic, urbane.
• Friedrich Nietzsche – Philosopher of will and solitude; passionate, aphoristic.
• Hypatia – Keeper of the Library of the Dead; serene, timeless, luminous.

A vast marble hall beyond time. Shelves stretch into the mist, lined with ancient manuscripts and glowing tablets. VOLTAIRE sits at a reading table, spectral spectacles perched upon his nose. Enter NIETZSCHE, his long coat moving like smoke.

VOLTAIRE:
Ah, Herr Nietzsche! I see you’ve survived eternity without going mad - though I imagine it’s been a near thing.

NIETZSCHE (smirking) :
Madness? I left that to the living. Here, at least, everyone is safely dead and unoriginal. What are you reading, old sceptic?

VOLTAIRE:
A curious paper by one Frank L Ludwig - The Deindividuation Resister Hypothesis. It proposes that those who resist social conditioning, and who are therefore ostracised and pathologised, are in fact the remnants of true individuals - the ones who defy the pull of the herd and instead drive human progress.

NIETZSCHE (leaning forward) :
Ah! A hypothesis worthy of Dionysus! So the few who cannot be domesticated by society are branded defective. At last, someone has noticed.

VOLTAIRE:
The author claims these individuals initiate human progress because they think independently of collective delusions. I rather like that. It has a whiff of the Enlightenment about it - though the Enlightenment was, alas, a herd movement too.

NIETZSCHE:
A herd of lamps, perhaps - still better than a herd of sheep. Tell me, has this Ludwig been celebrated or crucified?

VOLTAIRE:
Ignored. For years after its publication no one dared touch it. The silence is - what do you call it? – thunderous.

NIETZSCHE:
Then he is in excellent company. Every truth begins as blasphemy. You, Voltaire, mocked priests; I mocked man himself. He mocks conformity - and is ignored. Progress!

VOLTAIRE:
Indeed. Indifference - how modern an Inquisition! No flames, only algorithms.

NIETZSCHE (laughs) :
Yes! The age of the invisible censor - the chorus of polite dismissal. 'Too original, too uncredentialed, too alive!' That is the diagnosis.

(They exchange knowing glances as the spectral shelves shimmer with the ghosts of unread tomes.)

The faint blue light of the afterworld’s library trembles. Voltaire and Nietzsche have read the paper in near silence. A ghostly clock ticks somewhere, though time does not pass here.

VOLTAIRE:
Well, my friend, what do you think? Our Mr Ludwig proposes that society depends upon a small, obstinate minority who refuse to melt into it. That the so-called 'autistics' are in truth those who preserve their individuality.

NIETZSCHE (rising, pacing) :
Yes! They are the ones who have not forgotten the taste of solitude. The Übermenschen of the inner life - except they did not choose isolation; it was thrust upon them by the mediocrity of others.
(He turns, eyes flashing.)
And this age calls them 'disordered'. It is the age itself that is disordered - the era of moral and societal collapse.

VOLTAIRE (smiling) :
You grow poetic again, Friedrich. But your thunder hides a truth: what is labelled illness may simply be the absence of fashion. Each century defines sanity by its majority vote. The mad of one age become the geniuses of the next - or vice versa.
(He taps the glowing tablet.)
Still, so many years and no echo? Not even a counterargument? It seems our author has failed to interest either fools or philosophers. That is a rare achievement.

NIETZSCHE:
Do not confuse silence with failure. The marketplace of ideas is no longer the agora but the noise of ten thousand parrots. To speak truth there is to whisper into a hurricane.
(He pauses.)
The institutions he approached - journals, conferences, podcasts - they exist to recycle the already believed. Their priests preach novelty but worship consensus.

VOLTAIRE:
Indeed. When I mocked dogma, the Church threatened me with hell; when he questions orthodoxy, academia condemns him to obscurity. Progress, of a sort.

NIETZSCHE:
Obscurity is the new crucifixion. The herd no longer stones the prophet - it scrolls past him.

VOLTAIRE:
Ha! You are improving. If I were alive, I’d steal that line for an epigram.
(He leans back.)
Tell me, though, why does his idea disturb them so? The notion that society pathologises individuality seems almost self-evident.

NIETZSCHE:
Because it unmasks them. Every social institution depends on the fiction that conformity is virtue. He calls this bluff - and worse, he does so politely. They cannot burn him, so they bury him in silence.

VOLTAIRE (nods) :
He offends without offending. A fatal strategy. The world forgives blasphemy sooner than subtlety.

NIETZSCHE:
Exactly! He should have written like a prophet, not a researcher. The soul of his idea belongs to poetry, not peer review. The journal demands data; truth demands courage.

VOLTAIRE:
Yet if he had roared, they would have called him delusional. If he whispers, they call him irrelevant. A dilemma as old as Galileo.
(He lifts the tablet, its light flickering.) Still, I cannot help but admire him. It takes a certain madness - or integrity - to believe that resistance to the herd is mankind’s only hope.

NIETZSCHE (grins) :
Then he is one of us. And therefore doomed to be understood only when it no longer matters.

VOLTAIRE:
Ah, posterity - the consolation prize of the ignored.
(He closes the tablet gently.)
But tell me, Friedrich: what would convince mankind to listen sooner?

NIETZSCHE:
Nothing short of catastrophe. Only when the hive collapses do men seek the honey of individuality. Until then, they sing hymns to normality.

VOLTAIRE:
And then call their conformity 'civilisation'.
(A pause. The ghostly clock stops ticking.) Perhaps silence, then, is not rejection but proof - proof that society still fears the individual.

NIETZSCHE:
Yes. Silence is the applause of the herd for itself.

(They share a faint, knowing smile. The light fades to grey.)

The vast library fades to a grey twilight. Dustless air; the books hum faintly, as though dreaming. Voltaire and Nietzsche sit facing each other across the glowing tablet.

VOLTAIRE:
Do you ever tire of being right too soon?

NIETZSCHE:
It is the only fatigue the dead can still feel.
Every age repeats the same comedy: first it ignores, then it ridicules, then it plagiarises. Ludwig waits between the first and second acts.

VOLTAIRE:
If so, let us toast him - to his coming canonisation by the grandchildren of his ignorers.
(He raises an invisible glass. Nietzsche joins him.)

NIETZSCHE:
To the ones who cannot kneel. They keep the flame alive while the world studies the ashes.

(A long silence. The tablet dims.)

VOLTAIRE:
Strange, though. In life I preached tolerance; in death I envy defiance. Your kind of courage has a higher voltage.

NIETZSCHE:
Courage and loneliness are twins. The herd calls both by another name - autism, perhaps.

VOLTAIRE (nodding) :
Then the Enlightenment continues, only under a different diagnosis.

(From between the shelves steps a third figure—slender, androgynous, ageless. It is Hypatia, the eternal librarian. She carries no scrolls; she carries a faint light in her hands.)

HYPATIA:
You speak of silence as though it were death.
It is only gestation.
Ideas sleep in history the way seeds sleep in stone.
One tremor, and they bloom again.

VOLTAIRE:
A lovely thought, madam. You are the gardener of the forgotten weeds.

NIETZSCHE:
Then water this one well. It was planted in solitude.

HYPATIA:
I already have. The living are restless tonight; somewhere a young reader has found your Ludwig.
The page is open again.
(The light in her hands flares; a wind moves through the shelves like a sigh of paper. Voltaire adjusts his cuffs; Nietzsche closes his eyes.)

VOLTAIRE:
Ah. Another century begins.

NIETZSCHE:
And once more - the individual stands alone, and therefore divine.

(They vanish into the humming air. The tablet remains, its faint glow spelling two words before the darkness takes them: 'Still thinking'.)

Curtain.