“So why haven’t you been optimized?”
“I was afraid of losing myself.”
“Self is an illusion. The single unified ego you mistake for your ‘self’ is just a fairy-tale that your assemblers, sorters, and functional transients tell each other.”
“I know that. But still…”
She put her cup down. “Let me show you something.”
From her purse she took out a box of old-fashioned wooden matches. She removed five, aligned them all together in a bundle, and then clenched them in her hand, sulfur side down, with just the tips of the wood ends sticking out.
“Control over involuntary functions, including localized body heat,” she said.
There was a gout of flame between her fingers. She opened her hand. The matches were ablaze.
“The ability to block pain.”
This wasn’t a trick. I could smell her flesh burning.
When the matches had burned out, she dumped them in her saucer, and showed me the blackened skin where they had been. The flesh by its edges was red and puffy, already starting to blister.
“Accelerated regenerative ability.”
For five minutes, she held her hand out, flat and steady. For five minutes, I watched. And at the end of that five minutes, it was pink and healed. Unblackened. Unblistered.
Hellene spooned sugar into her teacup, returning to the sugar bowl at least six times before she was done. She drank down the sweet, syrupy mess with a small moue of distaste. “These are only the crude physical manifestations of what optimization makes possible. Mentally—there are hardly the words. Absolute clarity of thought, even during emergencies. Freedom from prejudice and superstition. Freedom from the tyranny of emotion.”
There was a smooth, practiced quality to her words. She’d said she was in human resources—now I knew she was a corporate recruiter. One salesman can always recognize another.
“Sometimes,” I said carefully, “I enjoy my emotions.”
“So do I—when I have them under control,” Hellene said with a touch of asperity. “You mustn’t judge the experience by a malfunctioning mediator.”
“I don’t.”
“It would be like judging ecological restoration by the Sitnikov Tundra incident.”
“Of course.”
“Or seeing a junked suborbital and deciding that rocket flight was impossible.”
“I understand completely.”
Abruptly, Hellene burst into tears.
“Oh God—no. Please,” she said when I tried to hold her and comfort her. “It’s just that I’m not used to functioning without the mediator, and so I get these damned emotional transients. All my chemical balances are out of whack.”
“When will your new mediator be—?”
“Tuesday.”
“Less than three days, then. That’s not so bad.”
“It wouldn’t be, if I didn’t need to see my children.”
I waited while she got herself under control again. Then, because the question had been nagging at me for hours, I said, “I don’t understand why you had children in the first place.”
“Biame it on Berne. The Bureau des Normalisations et Habitudes was afraid that not enough people were signing up for optimization. It was discovered that optimized people weren’t having children, so they crafted a regulation giving serious career preference to those who did.”
“Why?”
“Because people like me are necessary. Do you have any idea how complicated the world has gotten? Unaugmented minds couldn’t begin to run it. There’d be famines, wars…”
She was crying again. This time when I put my arms around her, she did not protest. Her face turned to bury itself in my shoulder. Her tears soaked a damp rectangle through my shirt. I could feel their moisture on my skin.
Holding her like that, stroking her infinitely fine hair, thinking of her austere face, those pale, pale eyes, I felt the shunts and blocks shifting within me. All my emotional components wheeled about the still instant, ready to collapse into a new paradigmatic state at the least provocation. The touch of a hand, the merest ghost of a smile, the right word. I could have fallen in love with her then and there.
Which is the price one pays for having a wild mind. You’re constantly at the mercy of forces you don’t fully understand. For the moment, I felt like a feral child standing on the twilight lands between the cultivated fields and the wolf-haunted forests, unable to choose between them.
Then, as quickly as it began, it was over. Hellene pushed herself away from me, once again in control of her emotions. “Let me show you something,” she said. “Have you got home virtual?”
“I don’t use it much.”
She took a small device out of her purse. “This is an adapter for your set. Very simple, very safe. Give it a try.”
“What does it do?”
“It’s a prototype recruitment device, and it’s intended for people like you. For the space of fifteen seconds, you’ll know how it feels to be optimized. Just so you can see there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“Will it change me?”
“All experience changes you. But this is only a magnetic resonance simulacrum. When the show’s over, the lights come up and the curtains go down. There you are in your seat, just as before.”
“I’ll do it,” I said, “if you’ll agree to try out something for me afterward.”
Wordlessly, she handed me the adapter.
I put on the wraparounds. At my nod, Hellene flicked the switch. I sucked in my breath.
It was as if I had shrugged off an enormous burden. I felt myself straighten. My pulse strengthened and I breathed in deep, savoring the smells of my apartment; they were a symphony of minor and major keys, information that a second ago I had ignored or repressed. Wood polish and hair mousse. A hint of machine-oil from the robot floor-cleaner hiding under my bed, which only came out while I was away. Boiled cabbage from a hundred bachelor dinners. And underneath it all, near-microscopic traces of lilac soap and herbal shampoo, of Ambrosie and Pas de Regret, of ginger candies and Trinidadian rum, the olfactory ghost of Sophia that no amount of scrubbing could exorcise.
The visuals were minimal. I was standing in an empty room. Everything—windows, doorknob, floor, had been painted a uniform white. But mentally, the experience was wonderful. Like standing upon a mountain top facing into a thin, chill wind. Like diving naked into an ice-cold lake at dawn. I closed my eyes and savored the blessed clarity that filled my being.
For the first time in as long as I could remember, I felt just fine.
There were any number of mental exercises I could try out. The adapter presented me with a menu of them. But I dismissed it out of hand. Forget that nonsense.
I just wanted to stand there, not feeling guilty about Sophia. Not missing her. Not regretting a thing. I knew it wasn’t my fault. Nothing was my fault, and if it had been, that wouldn’t have bothered me either. If I’d been told that the entire human race would be killed five seconds after I died a natural death, I would’ve found it vaguely interesting, like something you see on a nature program. But it wouldn’t have troubled me.
Then it was over.
For a long instant, I just sat there. All I could think was that if this thing had been around four years ago, Sophia would be here with me now. She’d never have chosen optimization knowing it would be like that. Then I took off the wraparounds.