Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘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 individual 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.