‘Julian Orley is your father?’ the program asked, just to be sure.
‘Yes.’
‘He’s not the person you trust, though.’
It wasn’t a question, it was a statement of fact. The man sitting across from her leaned forward. Lynn breathed heavily, and the sensors in her T-shirt dutifully registered her breathing and stored it in the database. The polygraph measured her body temperature, pulse, heartbeat and even her neuronal activity; the program scanned her voice frequencies as she spoke, measured her gestures, the way her pupils expanded or contracted, every movement of her eye muscles, each drop of sweat that formed. With every passing second of measurement, Lynn supplied more information for ISLAND-II, giving the program more to work with when it made statements about her.
The man seemed to stop and think for a moment. Then he smiled encouragingly. He was strongly built, completely bald, with friendly, thoughtful eyes. He seemed to be able to look through every veil that Lynn had wrapped around herself, her diorama of concealment, to pierce every layer with his glance but without that cool invasive gaze that psychologists so often used to put their patients under the microscope.
‘Good, Lynn. Let’s stick with the people around you right now. Tell me the names of the people you feel close to right now. And please leave a couple of seconds between every name.’
She looked at her fingernails. Talking to ISLAND-II was like walking a tightrope in the darkness to an unknown goal – along a torch-beam. The trick of it was to think of yourself as just as unreal as the program. The best thing was that there was no way of making a fool of yourself. For instance, Lynn had no idea at all whether there had ever been a real person who had served as the model for the bald man; the only thing she knew for sure was that it was impossible for him to feel contempt for her concerns. ISLAND-II – the Integrated System for Listening and Analysis of Neurological Data – was only as human as the therapists had programmed it to be.
‘Julian Orley,’ Lynn repeated – although the program had already struck him from the list of people she trusted – and she obediently included a brief pause. ‘Tim Orley – Amber Orley – Evelyn Chambers – that’s all of them, I think.’
Evelyn? Did she really trust America’s most powerful talk-show queen? On the other hand, why not? Evelyn was a friend, even if they hadn’t spoken much since the trip began. But the question had been about people she felt close to. What did ‘close’ have to do with trusting a person?
The man looked at her.
‘I’ve learned a great deal about you in the past quarter of an hour,’ he said. ‘You’re afraid. Less because of any actual concrete threats than because you have thoughts which make you horribly afraid. For as long as you do that, you can’t feel anything else. And then because you’ve lost that ability to feel, you lurch into a depression, this makes you more afraid, and most of all you’re afraid of fear itself. Unfortunately, when you’re in this frame of mind, every one of your thoughts grows to monstrous size, so you make the mistake of imagining that there’s some substance to what you’re thinking and that’s to blame for your condition. So you try to get rid of them at the level of substance, and you end up doing entirely the opposite. They only look like monsters, but the more seriously you take them, the bigger and stronger they grow.’
He paused to let his words sink in.
‘But in point of fact the substance is practically interchangeable. It’s not the substance of your thoughts that makes them frightening. Fear is a physical phenomenon. It’s the fear that creates the substance. Your heartbeat speeds up, your chest tightens, you tense up, stiffen, you become rigid. Your inward horizons shrink down and now you feel helpless and no longer free. You rage against it, like an animal in a cage. All these physical symptoms taken together make you give your thoughts such weight, Lynn, that’s why they have such horrible power over you. It’s important that you learn to see through the mechanism. It’s nothing more than that, you see. As soon as you manage to relax you’ll be able to break the spiral. The more intensely you feel yourself, the less power your thoughts have to torture you. That’s why any sort of therapy will have to begin with physical exercise. Sport, lots of sport. Exercise, feel the burn, make your muscles ache. Sharpen up your senses. Hearing, sight, taste, smell, touch. Leave all these projections behind and get out into the real world. Breathe deeply, feel your body. Do you have any questions?’
‘No. Actually, yes.’ Lynn wrung her hands. ‘I understand what you mean, but – but – it’s just that these really are very specific fears. I mean, I’m not just making this up! What I’ve done here, what I’ve let myself in for. My thoughts only ever have to do with – destruction, disaster – death. Other people, dying. Killing, torturing them, destroying them! – I am so horribly afraid of turning into something, suddenly slipping my leash, that I’ll leap on the others, tear them to shreds, people I love! Something eating away at me from inside, until there’s nothing left of me but a shell, and inside that shell something awful, something strange, and – I don’t know who I am any longer. I don’t know how much longer I can take all the pressure—’
Suddenly there were tears in her eyes, drops of sheer despair. Her chin trembled. There seemed to be fluids spouting from everywhere, from her nose, the corners of her mouth, spilling over her lower lip. The man leaned backwards and looked at her from under lowered eyelids, maybe expecting that she would add something, but she couldn’t say any more, she could only gasp for air. She wished she could vanish from this world, back to the womb, not to Crystal’s though – the woman had never been able to offer her safety or warmth, all she had done was pass on her melancholy poison, the bad code written in her genes. She wished she had a father who would tell her that it had just been a bad dream, but not Julian – he would take her in his arms and comfort her, yes, but he wouldn’t have the least idea of what her problem was, any more than he had been able to understand Crystal’s depression and her later mental illness. That didn’t mean though that Julian despised weakness, he just couldn’t understand it! Lynn wanted to be back in the loving arms of parents who had never existed.
‘I have very high expectations of myself,’ she said, straining to sound businesslike. ‘And then – I feel sure that they’re too high, and I hate myself for falling short – for failing.’
She felt herself become transparent, and clutched her arms tightly around herself though it did nothing to make the feeling go away. She was talking to a computer, but she had rarely felt so exposed.
‘I’ll just suggest another way you could look at it,’ ISLAND-II said after a while. ‘These aren’t your expectations. They are other people’s expectations, but you’ve bought into them so completely that you think that they are yours. So you try to bring your actions into line with these expectations. You don’t place any value on who you truly are, but rather on how other people would like you to be. But you can’t deny your real self for ever, you can’t spend for ever running yourself down. Do you understand what I mean?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I think I do.’
The man looked at her for a while, friendly, analytical.
‘How do you feel right now?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘The person you really are knows. Try to feel that feeling.’
‘I can’t,’ she whimpered. ‘I can’t do something like that. I can’t get – close to myself.’
‘You don’t have to conceal anything here, Lynn.’ The man smiled. ‘Not from me. Don’t forget, I’m just a program. Albeit a very intelligent one.’
Conceal? Oh yes, she was the queen of concealment, had been since her childhood, when she had spent hours in front of the mirror, herself and her reflection practising concealment together, until she was able to project any possible expression onto her pretty face: confidence, when she was about to fall to pieces, easygoing calm when the winds of stress were screaming all around her, bluffing with an empty hand. And how quickly she had learned what such tactics could a
chieve, when the man she most wanted to please disapproved of the very idea of such concealment. But he couldn’t see through her mimicry, and in the end even she couldn’t see through it. In the hectic attempt to keep up with the pace he set, she developed a deep-seated aversion to finer feelings, her own included. She began to despise her fellow man’s maudlin moods and public passions. Souls stripped bare, suffering on display, the clingy confidentialities of unearned intimacy. Letting the whole world know what side of bed you’d got out that morning, letting them all peer in at the bubbling chemistry of your mind – all this was repulsive. How much she preferred her own clean, hygienic concealment. Until that day five years ago when everything changed—
‘What you’re feeling is rage,’ ISLAND-II said calmly.
‘Rage?’
‘Yes. Unfettered rage. There’s a Lynn Orley trapped inside who wants to break out at last, and be loved, wants herself to love her. This Lynn has to tear down a great many walls, she has to free herself of a great many expectations. Are you surprised that she wants to maim and kill?’
‘But I don’t want to maim and kill,’ she sobbed. ‘But I can’t – can’t do anything to stop—’
‘Of course you don’t want to. Not physically. You don’t want to do anything to anyone, Lynn, have no fear on that front. You’re only torturing one person, yourself. There’s no monster inside you.’
‘But these thoughts just won’t leave me alone!’
‘It’s the other way around, Lynn. You won’t leave them alone.’
‘But I’m trying. I’m trying everything I can!’
‘They’ll become weaker the stronger the real Lynn grows. What you think is some monstrous transformation is really just a new birth, a beginning. We also call it liberation. You kick and bite, you want to get out. And of course as you do that, something else dies, your old self, the identity that was forced upon you. Do you know what the three childhood neuroses are?’
Lynn shook her head.
‘They’re as follows: I have to. I mustn’t. I ought to. Please repeat.’
‘I – have to, mustn’t – ought to—’
‘How does it sound?’
‘All fucked up.’
‘From today, they don’t count for you any longer. You aren’t that child any longer. From now on, all that counts is: I am.’
‘I am what I am—’ Lynn sang in a wavering voice. ‘And who am I?’
‘You’re the one who knows what you think and what you’re doing. You are what’s left when you have shucked away all those people you think are you, until all that’s left is pure awareness. Have you ever had the feeling of watching yourself think? That you can see the thoughts rising up and then vanishing again?’
Lynn nodded weakly.
‘And that’s a very important truth as well, Lynn. You are not your thoughts. Do you understand? You are not your thoughts. You are not the same as what you imagine the world to be.’
‘No, I don’t understand.’
‘An example. Are you aware right now that you can see the holographic image of a man?’
‘Yes.’
‘What else can you see?’
‘Furniture. The chair I’m sitting on. A few gadgets, technology. Walls, floor, ceiling.’
‘Where are you, exactly?’
‘I’m sitting on a chair.’
‘And what are you doing?’
‘Nothing. Listening. Talking.’
‘When?’
‘What do you mean, when?’
‘Tell me when this is happening.’
‘Well, now.’
‘And that’s all we need. You are well aware of the world that’s really there, around you, you can cut through to the world as it is. To the here and now. Then after that there’s another now, and another now, and now, now, now, and so on and so forth. Lynn, everything else is just projections, fantasy, speculation. Do you find the here and now threatening?’
‘We’re on the Moon. Anything could go wrong, and then—’
‘Stop. You’re slipping away into hypotheticals again. Stay with what really is.’
‘Well then,’ said Lynn, unwillingly. ‘No. Nothing threatening.’
‘You see? Reality is not threatening. When you leave this room, you’ll meet other people, you’ll do other things, you’ll experience a new now, then another now, and then another. You can look at each moment as it comes, and ask if it’s threatening, but there’s only one thought not allowed here – What if? The question is – What is? And then you’ll find, nearly all the time, that the only threat is in your imaginings.’
‘I’m dangerous,’ Lynn whispered.
‘No. You think that you’re dangerous, so much so that it frightens you. But that’s just a thought. It pops up and goes boo, and then you fall for it. Eighty-five per cent of everything that goes through our heads is rubbish. Most of it we don’t even register. Sometimes, though, a thought comes along and goes boo, and we jump with fright. But we are not these thoughts. You needn’t be afraid.’
‘O-okay.’
The man was quiet for a while.
‘Do you want to tell me any more about yourself?’
‘Yes. No, another time. I’ll have to end the session – for now.’
‘Good. One more thing. Earlier I asked you whom you trust.’
‘Yes.’
‘I assessed your physiological responses as you named each name. I recommend that you confide in one of these people. Talk to Tim Orley.’
Confide in a person.
‘Thank you,’ Lynn said mechanically, without even thinking whether ISLAND-II cared for the common courtesies. The bald man smiled.
‘Come again whenever you like.’
She switched him off, removed the sensors from her forehead, took off the T-shirt and put on one of her own. She stared at the empty glass plate for a while, unable to stand up, even though standing up was easier here on the fucking Moon than anywhere else.
Had it been wise to come here? To sweat and strain in front of a mirror that she really didn’t want to look into? Famously, ISLAND-II could deliver some astonishing results. Since it had come along, manned space-flight without regular psychotherapy was unimaginable. During the 1970s, of course, the age of hero-worship, people would have been more likely to believe that Uncle Scrooge McDuck was real than they’d have believed that astronauts could suffer from depression, but now, in the era of the long-haul mission, everything depended on the mysteries of the human mind. Nobody wanted to screw up grotesquely expensive undertakings such as the planned missions to Mars just because of neurotic compulsions. The greatest danger didn’t come from meteorites or technical failure, but rather from panic, phobias, rivalry displays and the good old sex drive, all of which urgently demanded a psychologist on board ship. Simulations had been tried, which yielded much food for thought. In two cases out of five, the psychologist lost his mind before anyone else, and began to drive the other crew members mad with his analytical skills. But even when he managed to keep it together, his presence didn’t have the desired effect. It became clear that the other astronauts would rather swallow their own tongues than confide their troubles to a living, breathing fellow crew member, who could pass judgement on them. There were tragically obvious reasons for such self-censorship: men were worried for their careers, and women were scared of judgement and scorn.
Which was how virtual therapists had joined the game. At first, simple programs ran through questionnaires and gave advice straight out of the self-help shelves, then later came scripted exchanges, then finally software capable of complex dialogues. There was nothing here that could replace a video-link and a chat with friends and family, but what could be done on Mars, where it was virtually impossible to get a connection? In the end, prize-winning cybertherapists had developed a program which combined advanced dialogue capacity with simultaneous evaluation of the most extensive corpus of knowledge that any artificial intelligence had ever had access to. Sceptics proclaimed that every indi
vidual human being had their own specific needs, that only another human being could ever understand, but results seemed to show quite the opposite. There might be many doors to the labyrinth of the human soul, but once you’d wandered around in there for a while you always reached familiar ground. There weren’t millions of different psychological profiles, just a few basic patterns repeated a millionfold. In the end, you always hit the same old neuroses, complexes and traumas, and most of them were acute in nature, such as squabbles over who had eaten whose last pot of chocolate pudding. Since then, ISLAND-I had been used in space stations, remote research installations and corporate headquarters all around the globe, while the incomparably more advanced ISLAND-II was so far only installed in Gaia’s meditation centres and therapy rooms. Even its programmers didn’t quite understand this pseudo-personality, a creature with no Promethean spark but able to learn astonishingly fast and reach remarkable conclusions.
After a while Lynn summoned up the energy to leave the therapy centre. As she walked to the lobby, her body language shifted to exude good cheer and brisk confidence. Guests walked past, euphoric, fidgeting restlessly, eyes as wide as children’s, back from their excursions to the lava caves in Moltke Crater, the peak of Mons Blanc or the depths of the Vallis Alpina. They chattered away about mankind’s civilising mission in the universe (specifically through tennis and golf), about the thrill of water sports in the pool here, about shuttle flights, grasshopper trips, moon-buggy rides, and of course, over and over again, about the view they had of Earth. Quarrels and disagreements seemed buried in the regolith by now. They were all talking to one another. Momoka Omura actually used words like creation, humility; Chuck Donoghue said that Evelyn Chambers was a real lady; Mimi Parker giggled as she agreed to take a sauna with Karla Kramp. Good cheer hung like a miasma over any honest, straightforward resentments they might have harboured. They were all hugs and smiles, even Oleg Rogachev, who forced each and every one of his fellow guests into a round of judo and sent them flying through the air for metres at a time with a nage-waza, grinning like a fox, and of course nobody got hurt! It was enough to make her throw up, but Lynn the chameleon listened to all the stories as though she were learning the secret of life, accepted compliments as a whore accepts payment, smiled as she suffered, suffered as she smiled. Quarter to eight, time to look forward to dinner. In her mind’s eye she saw the first course served and devoured, saw a fishbone stick in Aileen’s throat, saw Rogachev spitting blood, Heidrun choking, saw Gaia’s faceplate burst open and the whole merry gang of bastards sucked outside, defenceless in the vacuum, popping open, boiling, freezing.