Memini
An Exclusive Preview Excerpt
DR. PROSS: Hello, my friend! Well, Lester, time for our weekly session again, is it?
LB: You know damn well it is. Why do you have to ask?
DR. PROSS: Manner of speaking, Lester. Manner of speaking. My, we are a bit hostile today, aren’t we? Perhaps I’m only a brain on a chip, Lester, but we psychoprosthetists have feelings, too—behaviorally indistinguishable from your own, as you know.
LB: Behaviorally indistinguishable, yes. But to call them “feelings”...
DR. PROSS (sighing): So it’s always down to basics with you! Look, my good friend, I don’t mind a philosophical debate, but our lives must go on, mustn’t they? And we do have this identity problem that we’ve been trying so hard to deal with, don’t we?
LB: Cut this “we” shit, Doctor! Do you think you’re talking to a child?
DR. PROSS: Sorry, Lester. I’ll admit I was trying to be ingratiating. You caught me on that one. No offense intended, however. My interests, like yours, are entirely with the Corporation. I always treat you with the full respect due to the Chief Executive Officer of Memini—even at times when my probing seems to scrape too close to the bone.
LB: You seem to take lightly my questioning of what you condescendingly call “basics.”
DR. PROSS: No, Lester, I don’t. But I’d hoped we’d gotten—you’d gotten past the issue of my identity. You see, on the behavioral level you accept me as your psychological equal. Otherwise you wouldn’t argue with me about whether I were capable of “feelings” or not. With all due respect, Lester, this issue you’ve raised—more than once, now—about my who-ness versus my what-ness, is a smokescreen hiding the real issue I try to face with you, namely, the uncertain feelings you have regarding your own identity, the reality of Lester Barton.
LB: I suppose there’s a connection.
DR. PROSS: This wouldn’t even be an issue between us except for the fact that you’ve admitted it affects the way you function as head of one of the greatest conglobulates in the world, a man whose words and deeds affect billions of—
LB: Can’t you cut the rhetorical bullshit? Look, I think I’m handling things objectively well despite my subjective struggle with the reality-concept.
DR. PROSS: Lester, my good friend, first you admit having problems, and in the next breath you deny it. You yourself have admitted on recent occasions that you sense a certain “antagonism” directed at you by various members of the Executive Council, that you feel there may be a “conspiracy” afoot to undermine your authority, even that you’ve felt yourself “slipping” when presiding at meetings of the Council.
Lester had recorded those fears and suspicions as soon as they arose, whispering them into flapper, or discovering them afterward upon replaying a whole meeting. Marking them for periodic recall, he would finally burn them into semantic memory with a Pill—meminize them (Memini made the first and still made the best of the Pills).
DR. PROSS: Was it not, Lester, a feeling of sheer hostility that caused you just now to cancel a meeting with two vice presidents after having them wait an inordinate—”
LB: I had good reason to dismiss those dinosaurs! Sure I sense antagonism, but I think I’ve exaggerated those fears. You know, just to give my psychoprosthetist a little something to chew on.
DR. PROSS: But your facial expressions, your heartbeat, your hormonal activity, the electrical potential of your skin, surely all these signs that I read so clearly can’t be—now you know you must keep your wristband on, Lester, if you are not to invalidate our session.
LB: Sorry, Doctor. Just a nervous response.
DR. PROSS: You are a very nervous man, Lester. More and more nervous all the time. These things can’t be hidden from the eye of a trained psychoprosthetist.
LB: But I have found a way to deal with things, to keep my subjective problems from affecting my practical judgment.
DR. PROSS: Really? And may I know just what that might be?
LB: Sure. I treat my job as a game—like Planetopoly. Such and such local population to be won over to the establishment of a new manufacturing outpost, a rival product to be stripped of credibility, a dangerous patent to be bought up… in whatever way that can’t be refused, and so on.
DR. PROSS: The unreality you feel in private, then, is projected onto the public world—which in your mind is nothing but a gameboard?
