“I’m not playing those kinds of game,” I told her. “No way.”
“Think about it,” she said. “It’s not to satisfy my own morbid curiosity or to indulge a hypothetical streak of sadism. I want you to find out what your psych profile looks like. I want you to understand better how you tick. It isn’t pleasant to go through these tests, trying to identify what scares you, what you don’t like, what your idiosyncrasies are. It’s stripping you more naked than anyone wants to be. But if you want any measure of command over your state of mind—and you’ll need that command for the life-prospectus you’ve drawn up for yourself—it’s something that has to be done. You can no longer afford the luxury of not being able to look at yourself and see more than a face.”
“There are other ways,” I said.
“Name three.”
“Intellectual honesty?”
“You think you’ve gone through life without ever telling yourself a lie, without ever concealing the truth from yourself?”
I guessed not. But—
“I don’t know what you have cooked up for me, but it has to be tough to break through my conscious knowledge that everything in a sim is fake. I don’t know how you intend to soften me up so that I’ll react, but however you want to do it I won’t like it. And I won’t go through with it. I don’t care whether you’re trying to help me or destroy me, I’d rather stay the way I am.”
“Nobody can change that except you.”
“Don’t talk garbage.”
“I mean it. I’m not going to put pressure on you. I only want to put you on the horns of a dilemma. I just want to find out how you can turn yourself from a loser into a winner, and I want to tell you how to do it. From there, it’s your own decision. You can act, or you can take your chances.”
“You still think I’m a loser?”
She looked at me steadily. “I can tell you one thing you’re afraid of right now,” she said. “And that’s being a loser.”
I shrugged. “So okay. I don’t like the dark either. All kinds of things scare me. I could make out a list—or tell you all about my favorite nightmares.”
“The things that scare people most,” she said, “are the things they won’t admit they’re scared of. And in any case, the spectrum of your fears is only something we need to know about. The more important thing is your spectrum of hates. Fear is negative—it can make you a loser but eliminating it doesn’t make you a winner. Hate is the other way round—it’s hate that gets the best out of you.”
“I don’t accept that.”
“That’s precisely the problem.”
“Very smart,” I complimented her. “Very glib. But it makes no difference. I know damn well that your best interests and my best interests could never get together on a casting couch to make beautiful music. Whatever you want to find out I’m happy enough to keep secret. I can get by.”
“I’ll show you the test first,” she said. “You can watch it played through in the holo from outside, as a spectator. No surprises, no tricks. The way you get softened up to heighten your sensitivity and increase your reactivity is simple enough—just a few minutes SD. Not enough to hurt. You have to remember that it’s in no one’s interests to have you get hurt. You have a fight next week and you have to win. After that, there’s another fight, which you have to be ready to win. We want you in peak shape for those fights, and this is supposed to help you, not half-kill you. You can’t lose anything by knowing the alternatives.”
“I don’t want to do it,” I said, flatly.
“Nobody wants to do it,” she replied. “Not ever. But mostly they do. It’s an accepted fact of life. If you like, take it as a challenge. Fight against the program, try to beat the tests.”
I thought about it. In a sense, it was a challenge. It was a deliberate challenge to my self-confidence and self-containment. I’d mentioned intellectual honesty, but if I were really intellectually honest I’d have nothing to fear in the tests. Sure, you ought to have privacy in your own head, but privacy is a limited thing, constantly eroded by the circumstances of everyday life. Other people can always see into your soul. It’s one of the facts of life.
In addition, there was the fact that if she really wanted to take liberties with my mind the opportunity was there virtually every day. It would be no sweat for her to switch me off Wolff’s program and into her own. The only OFF switch I had in the sim was the physiological emergency. You’re all alone in unreality, and you can’t run away if the rules won’t let you.
I knew she didn’t want to burn my mind—only warm it up a little. And she was right in saying that she couldn’t do anything by force. Valerian and his hirelings wanted to add something to me, not build a replacement.
In all likelihood, taking her test wouldn’t bother me too much. It might even be interesting. I could make it into a test of my own—a test to see how cool I could stay under pressure. Maybe if I could walk through Maria’s inferno with my emotions on a tight rein there’d be no need to worry about my mental state when I met Herrera. If I could go through this, maybe I could go through anything.
I piled up my excuses one by one, building up to the critical threshold of agreement.
“Okay,” I said, finally—and the trudging seconds of the pause must have added up to a nice stack of credit notes at the rates she was charging for her services. “Show me the script.”
She showed me the script, and ran bits of it on the holo unit which turned her desk top into a crystal ball.
It started out with about fifteen minutes SD. That isn’t enough to reduce anyone to a gibbering wreck although some people with preconceived ideas about what should happen do manage to tear themselves apart in much shorter times. So far as I was concerned it would just hypersensitize my brain.
The fear run came next. Instead of the solid models that the standard tests use she had devised vague, half-formed images that could only be suggestive in the brief times they were flashed—this was a kind of 3-D Rorschach test, reaching at my subconscious through the interpretative prejudices of my visual habits. Standard fear-reaction tests are clumsy but quantifiable—this one was sophisticated but quite unquantitative. She reckoned that didn’t matter.
After this run there was a rest phase, then more SD. She explained that situation testing had been left out entirely as I’d be incapable of identifying with most sim situations as if they were real. The exception was the ring, but she’d already observed me in the ring quite exhaustively. What she’d done instead was to put together fragments of nonsensical events—bits of dreams. Dream landscapes and dream events. These were supposed to exploit the mind-opening potential of the superficially absurd. When meaning is unclear, the mind gropes for it. The subconscious will try to find meanings to fit, and will compare them against the dream sequence, hoping to impose a pattern of common sense. The incomprehensible, she thought, was bound to engage my mind and make it work—even if I was only conscious of the activity as a kind of puzzle-solving.
I looked at some of the sequences, and they seemed innocuous enough—crazy collages of ideas like surrealistic paintings.
Finally, I confirmed my agreement and we set a time for the test—in the evening, after the day’s work-out. It would have to be late because the machine would have to be prepared and I would need time to recover from a long afternoon in the hot seat.
The first period of sensory deprivation was the worst part of the whole performance. SD is one of those things which works all the better when you put up more psychological resistance. Some people under SD are hysterical in a matter of minutes because they know that’s what’s supposed to happen and they talk themselves into it. People who fight like hell to stay calm and unbothered go hysterical in pretty much the same way—exhausting themselves in a battle that needn’t be fought. It’s like the old joke about winning a prize if you can spend five minutes thinking about a horse but not about its tail.
SD is not something you can get used to. Your brain remains awake and
alert, but cut off from all sensory input it reacts by stages, with no reference at all to consciousness. The first thing it does is to “turn up the volume” on all the input devices which ought to be bringing in information but aren’t—that is to say, it becomes responsive to stimuli which would normally be well below the awareness threshold, like the movement of the blood in the veins and the feel of internal muscular contractions.
Unless you have a particularly creaky body, though, that isn’t enough to satisfy the brain’s processing faculties. Then, one of two things can happen. Either the brain can begin to switch off its processing faculties (but without switching off or turning down its input receptors) or it can begin to process “secondary information”—information recovered from the memory tapes. In the first instance the subject goes into a quasi-hypnotic trance. In the second, he begins to dream or hallucinate. In either case, though, he is still awake and alert—the pons is not activated so as to switch off the body-machine and let the mind lapse into sleep.
A long session of SD can make the brain do peculiar things, and breaking into a long-established sequence of SD with external stimuli can cause severe disturbance. But ten or twenty minutes—provided that the subject is neither over-reactive nor over-resistant—merely serves to make the mind more receptive to stimuli, which will seem exaggerated and call forth exaggerated emotional responses. Very helpful to a PT who is vamping the subject’s mind.
When the patterns began to come at me my mind was taken by storm. I was more or less helpless to put conscious shackles on my subconscious—and thus supposedly natural—reactivity.
The images were in color, but the color was just glamour, misleading my practiced eye and undermining my ability to identify shapes on the spur of the moment. It was the shapes that were important and it was the shapes that my mind would use as signs in order to design responses. Aversion reactions would go out across the B-link clear as a bell, though I’d probably not feel anything much myself—E-resonance works off physiological changes of state connected with emotion, not the way that emotions are actually experienced—after subconscious censorship—in the mind.
I could feel myself reacting, not with the kind of fear which comes to you when you see something about to hurt you, but with the kind of vague, unreasoning disturbance which sometimes assaults you in dreams—itself rather fearful because you can’t identify its source.
I knew that somewhere out in the streaming shadows were all the things on the list of common and neurotic phobic responses—spiders and wasps, shadows and pet dogs, crowds and midgets, confined spaces and vast vistas of emptiness, long drops and sheer walls. But they all went by too fast for any kind of considered reaction.
I tried, reflexively, to recoil from it all—to withdraw, the way you sometimes try desperately to wake up from a dream which has become too nasty to stay in. But you can’t wake up when you aren’t asleep. And you can’t shut your eyes when the visual images are being pumped through silver wires straight into your inner being.
Strangely, I got a sudden burst of curiosity. I wondered what all this would look like from an objective viewpoint—from Maria Kenrian’s shoes. I tried to estimate how much of what might be getting through.
Somewhere, I told myself, my secret fear is being reflected in the jigging of a mechanical lever—pointed out by a needle swinging across the face of a dial. I’m being read, like one of those frustrated virgin books in the library—my calf covers tipped aside to make the pages yield up their meaning, display it to the naked eye.
Some people, I know, find themselves enmeshed by terror in dreams where they experience a sudden loss of support. Others find the ultimate self-test in sensations of utter immobility, where they find themselves desperate to run while their bodies are too heavy to allow them to lift a limb.
But I felt no terror, no desperation. What happened, happened—all that resounded in me was a casual nausea—a gut-twisting that threatened to knot my being. There was no semblance of retreat or of mental collapse.
But I felt lonely.
When it was over, and my sim body was sitting in a sim chair in a sim room, waiting for phase two to begin, I was struck by the thought of how absurd it is that we know ourselves so very slightly.
As the music soothed me, I almost laughed at the trivial cosmic joke which makes us need psychotherapists. How is it that we must be so unfamiliar with our own minds? How is it that we need ingenious tests of subtlety and sophistication in order to decoy the consciousness away so that outsiders can get a peep at what we really are?
Why aren’t we aware of the roots of our fears, the bases of our hopes, the fundamentals of our ambitions? Isn’t it ridiculous that others should see us as we need to see ourselves, while for the most part we cannot?
Sometimes, I think the only explanation for human existence is that God must be a committee.
Suddenly, in the room with the piped music, an image appeared. It was Dr. Kenrian, complete with white coat and synthetic smile. A nice touch.
“All set?” she asked.
I didn’t respond, not by so much as a twitch of the face. I wasn’t programmed for it.
“Phase two begins now,” she said.
Then it all went dark again. The silence rang in my ears. The sense of touch fell away from me, leaving me enfolded by nonexistence.
The vague feeling of disturbance, of existential dislocation, was still lurking in the canyons of my mind like one of those black dogs people used to talk about. I let it lurk, and tried to remain easy and comfortable while the SD magnified my mind for the second time.
Then the fragments began to feed in.
Again the rate of flow seemed fast—up-tempo of normal experience—but this time the abstraction of shapes which had initially served to conceal the visual cues from consciousness was replaced by the juxtaposition of absurd assemblies of coalesced images. The whole images usually included action—events as well as images—and seemed to last some time longer than the thirty seconds or so they actually did. They ran into one another, making a sequence which seemed totally fantastic—unreal or surreal. Consciously I could identify and make sense out of the parts of each vision, but when it came to integrating the whole into a “situation” my conscious mind was left flatfooted. Only the subconscious, with a vocabulary of symbols far more versatile—if less rich—than that available to the rational mind, had any chance to make something of them.
As is the case with dreams, very few of the elements of the sequence made more than the most transient impression on the surface of the memory.
There was a street, outside a room whose perspective misled the eye. A bulbous lamp, lighting the room from without, an external stair winding down the outer wall from above. Cobwebs over a bed—slept in but no longer occupied, possibly left untended for years. A feeling of dryness. Movement slow, invisible. Light creeping in through corners—
running into—
An eye. Reflections in the eye of standing screens, like Venetian blinds, mounted on curved legs. Between the screens, sand, wind-drifted. Clouds above. At the back of the image, behind all other reflected objects, the reflection of an eye, staring into the eye which holds it. And in the eye, screens—
And so, ad infinitum—
An eagle in a blue-violet sky, storm clouds and silence. Heavy air. Underneath, poplars in a long line. An alleyway with stones glistening, not with rain. Figures moving—a girl, gray-white and unreal, perhaps a statue—is raped. The rapists move in jerks, like puppets. She is forced to the ground, then folded. One of the men has sandals, their eyes are all concealed. An abundance of red in the image, but it will not settle on any object or field of vision. It escapes any direct association—
but flees—
Cold fire in the air, or perhaps we are under the sea. The world swirls, and sparkles. Figures entwine. It is impossible to identify the arms with the legs, to separate the limbs into sets, into identities. There is simply a liquid mass of humanity, a coenocyte. There may
be volcanoes in the distance, there may be fish skimming the surface of the sand. There are plants—dendritic weeds—etched in shadow—
which falls—
Bulbous leaves. A rich, all-engulfing foliage. In the branches, movement. In the stillness, an owl, with entrails hanging from its mouth—the torn body of mouse or shrew. In the grass, movement, but sitting still, with infinite patience in its eye, a leopard. Alive, but motionless. Hungry. Alert.
Blink—
Cobbled streets. Downhill, a river. Many bridges, so that the river flows mostly under concrete, exposed to the air in bare patches. Its waters rank. In the streets, soldiers. Other people walk too quickly, everyone in a hurry. A double-decker bus carries us among them. We are the enemy, but undetected. At any moment, there may be fighting or an escape. The bus moves too slowly. The street gets steeper. The waters are black—
swirling and swelling—
And more.
I search for faceless men, soft clocks, snakes, guns. I look for staircases enclosed by tight walls, battlements and bandages. There are none of these. The symbols are always elusive—when the mind begins to decode, the code is changed. The symbols shift and obliquity retains its supremacy. One part of the mind enquires, another conjures.
I feel sweat on my face, and realize that reality is seeping back into the dream. The tech is dismantling the apparatus. Maria is standing by, having already discarded the B-link by which she has been a spectator in my mind.
Blink—
The Mind-Riders Page 11