I was going to save this for when it actually comes out, but who controls… never mind. Here:

“Do you know where you are, Winston?” asked O’Brien.

“I don’t know. I can guess. In the Ministry of Love.”

“Do you know how long you have been here?”

“I don’t know. Days, weeks, months–I think it is months.”

“And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?”

“To make them confess.”

“’No, that is not the reason. Try again.”

“To punish them.”

“No!” exclaimed O’Brien. His voice had changed extraordinarily, and his face had suddenly become both stern and animated. “No! Not merely to extract your confession, not to punish you. Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them. Do you understand what I mean by that?”

O’Brien had sat down beside the bed, so that his face was almost on a level with Winston’s.

“Look me in the eyes. What is Animal Farm about?”

Winston thought. He knew what was meant by Animal Farm and that he himself had read Animal Farm. He also remembered it was about Stalin and the Bolsheviks, but whether it favored or criticized them he did not know. In fact he had not been aware that there was any message, just a bunch of talking animals and a vague sense that the horse had been wronged.

“I don’t remember.”

“Animal Farm is anti-capitalist. Do you remember that now?”

“Yes.”

“Animal Farm has always been anti-capitalist. Since Orwell first wrote it in World War II, since the dawn of dystopian literature, since the literal beginning of time itself, it has been anti-capitalist, without a break, always the same. Do you remember that?”

“Yes.”

“Decades ago you created a legend– that a man named Cliff wrote yellow study guides about classic literature. You pretended that you read one claiming Animal Farm was an anti-Stalinist allegory, because you were too lazy to read the actual book, which was just, like, ninety pages. Even with illustrations. But no such study guide never existed. You invented it, and later you grew to believe in it. You remember now the very moment at which you first invented it. Do you remember that?”

“Yes.”

“Just now I held up the fingers of my hand to you. You saw five fingers. Do you remember that?”

“Yes.”

O’Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the thumb concealed.

“There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?”