Visions of the Future (44 page)

She smiled wearily but he still found her charming. “We don’t think we have to. Our sources tell us they are being recalled to break up the protests in the Leningrad factories. They have troubles closer to home. At sunset we go back to the square.”

He couldn’t believe they would go back. His heart pounded in his chest, his throat hurt and tears came to his eyes. She was so brave. He wanted to hold her and shout out that he was with her but it was quite impossible. His body ached.

“I probably should eat something,” he said to himself and he absentmindedly disengaged from the net and gingerly took his cramped body into the kitchen to suck down a tube of lunch. Returning to his
Sensanet
 ™ couch he called up a holographic global display and saw that another reporter was active in Magadan, Siberia. He tuned in.

The first thing he noted was the cold. The tactile mode of
Sensanet
™ was very limited. Heat, cold, and motion was all it could pick up and communicate accurately. But even this limited repertoire could be effective. His face, his wrists, and his ears all felt like burning ice. The reporter was in a large warehouse full of heavily bundled people and he was describing the end of the meeting.

“They’ve decided to go out to the nearest camps despite the storm. They feel it is worth the risk because of the danger of prisoners being massacred as they were in Kolyma.”

The shuffling, steaming mass trundled toward the door. He noticed with amazement that some of the Siberians were only now pulling on gloves and hats, even though the temperature in the hall was significantly below zero. The doors were opened and out they went into the cutting wind and the snowbound night. The reporter climbed into the truck with twenty-five other people and off it went at 60 kilometers an hour over the tundra, clearly driven by a madman. The reporter said, “It’ll be at least three hours until we get to the first camp.” He looked at the man sitting next to the reporter. He had a big Tartar mustache. Both ends were frozen solid. The Tartar handled the reporter a bottle of cheap vodka. Shrugging, the reporter took a long drink.

He disengaged the head-links and crawled out of the couch. Stumbling to his closest he got his winter coat, his scarf, and his gloves and put them on. After a moment’s hesitation he also went into the kitchen and got a bottle of vodka. He lay down in the
Sensanet
™ and took a long drink. Putting on the head-links he tuned into Magadan again.

GAMOMANIA, DYSCOMPLEXIA, MECHAPHOBIA, AND INFOMANIA

At the same moment, a hundred miles away in New York City, the Seventh Annual Conference on Computer-Related Psychological Disorders was entering its most controversial phase. The portly self-satisfied man presiding over the meeting put the issue in a nutshell, so to speak.

“Should infomania and dyscomplexia be added to the list of recognized disorders or are they simply subsets of existing disorders? First, Dr. Hill will argue against adding them to the
Practitioners’ Encyclopedia
. Dr. Hill?” A middle-aged woman with thick silver hair came to the microphone. Each word she said was vocalized fully and precisely.

“It is the validation committee’s conclusion that so-called infomania, the compulsion to use the new sensory nets, is no more than a specific manifestation of gamomania, the very first computer provoked psychological disorder. Gamomania, from the Greek
gamo
, ‘to be connected with,’ was originally discovered among video game addicts who could not function in the real world. Clearly, living within an interactive video game world is the same as the addiction to the sensory net systems, where one lives within someone else’s sensory world.

“This living in the computer microworld is just the reverse of mechanical dementia and related syndromes such as binary paralysis. They all involve bringing the computer’s yes/no and/or structure of thinking into the human world. The key element of these is projection, either of the human on the machine or vice versa. Now, with the other disorders, the important element is affective. It is emotional. Who can doubt that so-called dyscomplexia, the inability to use computers, is related to mechaphobia, the hatred of computers and other machines, and, of course, its opposite, mechaphilia, the love for them?

“So, it is this committee’s position that dyscomplexia is actually merely a severe form of mechaphobia. As computer use spreads it is only natural that the refusal to use computers by Luddites, poets, and other dissidents should become more severe in some patients. Inevitably, their refusal to use computers has now become their inability to use any machine. So we recommend that infomania not be classified as a new disorder, but rather as a specific subset of gamomania. And that dyscomplexia is not treated as a unique disorder, but rather as a form of mechaphobia.”

TECHNOSTRESS AND POLITICS

He disengaged from the
Sensanet
™ and turned it off. They had gotten to the camp and everyone was gone. It was just too cold to go driving around Siberia all night. He went to the bathroom and then to the kitchen to get some hot soup from his foodmaker. Still slightly drunk, he want back to the
Sensanet
™. Only a few lights were blinking on the map display. He looked with dread at the one in Israel. He was very nervous about going there. “All the more reason…” he muttered. He took off his coat and, chuckling at his own absent mindedness, his mittens and scarf. Sitting down he drank his soup carefully. When he finished he plugged in, turned on, and tuned into Israel.

It was warmer. Much warmer. It felt nice. He sensed a slight breeze. Looking around he realized it was almost as dark as Siberia. The reporter seemed to be in some sort of overalls. Then he realized it was a radiation suit and they were staggering through a dust cloud. The reporter, an African-American by his voice, said, “As you can see, or not see, we are experiencing incredible weather conditions here, even six weeks after the bomb went off. People tell me these storms are local in character and quickly pass.”

As if on cue, the winds started to subside and a sick yellow light filtered through from the sun. He noticed several other people were walking with the reporter. They weren’t wearing radiation suits. He wanted to ask about their safety but, of course, could not. Maybe he’d send a query to the show’s producer and get an answer. As the air cleared the devastation around them became apparent.

“We are just passing through the edge of the blast,” he heard. “Up here a few blocks the government has set up shop.” They walked on in silence. He thought several of the people he saw looked sick. He couldn’t tell if they were Arabs or Jews. They came to a large apartment block.

“The largest building left in Tel Aviv,” the reporter remarked. In front of it there was a sandbagged check-point manned by a score of soldiers armed with automatic weapons. Sadness thick in his voice, the reporter said, “Here we are, the 21st century’s own Hiroshima. Let us pray that Israeli retaliation, once they chose a target, is conventional.” He noticed that several of the soldiers were women. He wished he could talk to them. It was hot. He reached down for the water bottle he kept at his feet

Meanwhile in New York, at the Seventh Annual Conference on Computer-Related Psychological Disorders, a Dr. Montseny was arguing that infomania was not a subset of gamomania.

“With gamomaniacs,” he intoned, “we see a marked withdrawal from society. Gamomaniacs only want to play their game, to live in their fantasy world. And we must remember that it is a game; it is not the real world. Sensory nets give users access to the real world. It is not a game. Infomaniacs do not withdraw from the world; they immerse themselves in it.

“Because sensory nets have been so expensive, only a handful of people have developed infomania. But when they do, the symptomatology is quite different from the gamomania syndrome. It seems related to Oppositional Defiance Disorder. There is often a sudden change of political orientation and lifestyle. Gamomania produces a pseudo-catatonia; infomaniacs become hyperactive Gamomaniacs are quiet, respectful of authority outside of their fantasy. They are easily controlled by threatening to unplug them from their machines.

“But infomaniacs are immune to this threat. As I mentioned, in the worst cases they disconnect themselves permanently to live some kind of activist lifestyle. When we seek to treat them they react as if they are not ill at all but claim they have ‘woken up’. They are critical of all authority and feel themselves connected to people, large systems of people.”

He tuned out of Israel. Even devastation can be boring if everything has been vaporized. He tuned into the Moon again but didn’t stay long. He had spent a day there at first, but didn’t like it much. It is beautiful, no doubt of that, and floating around is fun… but not enough was happening. Not enough people. He looked in briefly on a Mt. Everest expedition but figured if he wanted to freeze he should go back to Siberia again. The revolution sweeping the Second Soviet Empire was way more interesting than some rich fucks being carried up a mountain by underpaid Sherpas.

Then he noticed the light in Lithuania was on. He tuned into Cathy Levine’s feed. It was sunset and the Lithuanians had reoccupied Gedeminas Square. Everywhere he looked he could see people crying with happiness. He could even hear Cathy Levine laughing and crying at the same time. People were starting to dance in large interconnected rings.

Then people were stopping. They were looking up. Cathy looked up as well and he saw the lights. Then he heard the roar of the rotors and recognized them, just as the reporter gasped, “Helicopters!” Then people were running. It was all more noise than he could process, quick images of feet and dust and the moving ground. Then Cathy Levine found a stairwell to crouch in. The image, dust and stairs, settled but he could barely hear her over the straining engines of the old Hind gunships, the chatter of guns and the clatter of their bullets, and the screams of the Lithuanians.

“There are three or four of them. Some people are shooting back. They say they can shoot them down. Many were shot down years ago in Afghanistan and Chechnya after all… Many people have been shot… women, children, men… they were dancing just a minute ago. You saw them!” A pause, then, quietly, barely audible above the battle, “We were dancing…”

“We were dancing,” he echoed.

A bright flash lit the air. “There goes one… it’s going down,” she said. He heard the explosion. He felt the heat of the crash as the gunship pin wheeled into a building across the square. The remaining gunships unloaded their rocket pods as a parting gesture. One of the strikes threw the reporter into a wall. He felt the blast like a real blow. He must have blacked out. He came to and saw her blood on the stones. Cathy Levine moaned as the guide revived her.

“I’ll be all right,” she said. “Thank God,” he mumbled to his empty room. Then he saw the pity and fear in the guide’s eyes. When Cathy looked down he saw her legs were gone. “I’ll have to sign off now, if this thing’s still working,” she said weakly as she fumbled at her
Sensanet
™ collar. The connection went dead, except he could still smell the cordite, the dust, and the blood.

CURING INFOMANIA

He turned off the
Sensanet
™ and staggered over to the couch. He sat with his head in his hands. He must have gone to sleep, because twenty minutes later a buzzer sounded and he got up swearing. He went over to the
Sensanet
™ and turned it on. He looked at the holographic globe, hanging there shimmering as the air moved slightly in the room. New York was on. He tuned in.

It was a conference. A man was talking. He was thanking the assembled psychiatrists for labeling informania a unique psychological disorder. He was updating the good doctors on the latest theories about the disease.

“As Dr. Monteseny pointed out, infomania does not respond to negative behavior modification. Our thinking is that the technology itself must be better controlled; it should be strictly licensed. The danger, you see, is in the changes sensory net addiction brings on. These victims become socially disruptive to an incredible degree. There is always some famine, war, or ecological disaster to inflame them.”