Adam Carlton here. In between the present excitement in France, the disintegration of the Nouveau Front populaire, I thought I would share with you one of the stories from my first published collection, available to you as a PDF here.
It was written in homage to Greg Bear's "Queen of Angels".
I lean across to kiss her lips - her head moves slightly to avoid my touch.
I reach my arm out to embrace her - my wife lies rigid and does not respond.
---
At breakfast this morning she was sullen and withdrawn. Yesterday she was aggressive and contemptuous. I never properly anticipate how much these things affect me; how much they screw around with my ability to think.
Must concentrate.
My first one today is a psychopath.
---
The psychopath is wired up on the table. I’m in the simulator: there are joysticks, sliders, buttons. The rising whine in my earphones is the system booting up. I'm about to enter my patient's subconscious.
The magnetic stimulators grasp the patient’s cortex, sculpting a setting for today's therapy. In the VR abstraction I see the patient as he sees himself: a vastly inflated, supersized body surrounded by dwarfed figurines of his sexual partners and hangers-on.
In a normal person, all those agents are similar. Normal empathy does its work: mirror neurons. This guy is nothing like that. He's the übermensch. His brain models everyone else as robots with paste-on human faces. Inside their chests are dials .. he's playing at adjusting them now.
He's quite the expert, I remind myself.
We've never met. Thankfully, he has no image of me, isn't aware of my presence. Not yet.
There's no cure for psychopathy. You can see why just looking at his deviant brain. Our controversial treatment is there to mitigate harm to others. Ego depletion therapy. In layman's terms I'm going to burn away that part of his brain which drives aggression, charisma and force of character. This man entered my theatre as a dangerous predator. He’ll leave as a timorous mouse.
I move in closer, centre the joystick on his self-persona, focus a reticle on his heart, select aggression/charisma and push the slider way up. Press the fire button.
In the simulation I hear pulsed gunfire.
In the world of the operating theatre, the AI maps the corresponding neural circuits, aims the lasers. The beam-constellation - tuned to penetrate the skull - converges to the target zone .. which starts to cook and die.
The brain has no pain sensors. The psychopath nevertheless feels something, some imbalance, a degradation of self-energy. You might think he would personify me as a baleful, fire-breathing dragon. But there is truth in the undermind, not physics. He can’t see the lasers, he only feels their effects
He pictures me as a worm-parasite, a lamprey with band-saw teeth, sucking at his life-force.
He scowls, raises his hands to grasp my black slimy body, to tear me loose .. yet he's deflating, weakening. Part of my skill is to know when to stop.
He still has to function afterwards.
I spit him out.
---
My wife also works at the hospital. She's in administration, budgets. I'm having my lunch when I get the call. She's collapsed, an emergency scan has identified a life-threatening brain tumour.
Normally we wouldn't ask, there's a conflict of interest, but it's urgent and you're here .. .
So I'm wired. Back in harness. My estranged, distant wife unconscious on the operating table.
I've never visited my wife's mind-country. Unbearably intrusive. Quite unethical. In the old days this would have been a difficult, dangerous and risky operation. The tumour, though small, is buried deep within the limbic/brain-stem boundary.
The AI knows about the tumour. It's accessed the scan data. Together we'll track the cauterisation. I'll watch the psychological effects as the physical malignancy is excised. I'll precisely calibrate the boundaries of the burn.
The system powers up; status goes to green. I'm projected in-country and to my surprise it's our bedroom. She has subconsciously construed her incapacity as sleepiness .. and conjured up somewhere appropriate.
Readouts show the burn has already started. With the decrease of pressure her breathing is already stabilising. She knows me of course, I inhabit her ‘husband’ subpersonality.
I advance towards the bed.
“Are you awake, kid? How are you feeling?”
I don't know if I'm the husband or the surgeon in here. There's a reason we don't do this.
Her eyes open. She focuses, catches sight of me, recoils and screams. I see myself in a mirror - see myself as she sees me.
My breath catches .. I am hideous.
A pink, fleshy polyp, crowned with a frond of sharp tiny teeth, swaying and looming towards her.
She backs away .. hyperventilating .. recoiling.
I bow in desperate supplication and back off. My eyes flick between my wife - visibly gaining in strength - and my own worm-self, detumescing by the second.
An alert from the AI. It thinks it's done. I toggle the switch to cease the burn.
Simultaneously I'm ejected from her mind.
Removing the helmet, I see her wheeled out to intensive care. It's mostly precautionary. We're done here.
All the bad bits have been burned out.
---
What did it all mean?
The textbooks would say:
The tumour caused distortions in emotional response and erratic behaviour. Later, as it grew larger, pressure on the brain stem caused her physical collapse.
It all makes sense of course. Yet somehow, I felt that things were a bit more complex, more nuanced in there.
---
I hasten to visit her, enter her private room. She’s propped up, quite conscious, looking surprisingly well.
“Hi kid,” I say, “How’re you feeling?”
She looks at me blankly.
“Who the hell are you?”
You will find my collection of short stories, published on Amazon (Kindle and paperback) here:
and my SF novel, also published on Amazon (Kindle and paperback) here:
"Donatien's Children" (2022).
Feel free to purchase both!
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are moderated. Keep it polite and no gratuitous links to your business website - we're not a billboard here.