Damon Knight - Orbit 19

“Yeah yeah yeah,” Cyrus muttered aloud. He had heard this canned speech dozens of times. Then he felt a mild electroshock in the mastoid ridge, and the all too familiar voice from home came through, overriding the lecturer: “Your disdain is maladaptive, Cyrus, you must show evidence of docility, of deference to authority. You are beyond optimal range, so I am transferring your data to the provost monitor.” Cy saw his name light up on the big board behind the lectern, and a provost robot began to move toward him. He knew he would have to go jelly in his thinking to get through the morning without any big hassles; but he felt a real urge to tell everybody to go to hell, to shit on some sacred cows, to drop turds in any municipal punchbowl. The gladiator grunted at Cy, as if to say “I told you so,” then looked up at his own provobot, levitating above. Must be a mean bastard, Cy thought, to have his provo floating over him. The empath gave a tiny shudder and pulled its stole tighter around its small shoulders.

The focal holobot continued: “For those of you sufficiently intelligent to grasp some psycholinguistics, let me say that we are fully aware of the inadequacy of verbal communication in general. We do not expect you to alter your behaviors because of the input-saturates you receive in this class. Indeed, we do not even expect you to hear enough to make appreciable impacts on your orientations. This class is basically a ritual—a ritual in the purest sociologic sense. There are no particular societal goals for you to strive for, and there are no socially sanctioned means for attaining goals. This summates to Mertonian double-rejects, and the resolution of this negative pairing is found in ritualism. Ail that is required of you is perceptual receptivity. We are not trying to brainwash you; contingencies of reinforcement are not relevant. We are simply going to recount some recent history. If you are able to accept the inputs as factual, with retinograph tapings as validating criteria, your MTV index will improve, and you will feel subjectively happier—”

“Happier, my ass,” Cy whispered, and got another shock, this time in the groin.

“We would have liked to delete the term ‘happiness’ from the jargon, but found it all but eradicable. During my lecture, we will request some autonomic conditioning exercises, and I think that you will find a new method pleasurable: we have some new cerebral stimulants to try today. Better to leave it at that, and wait for your reactions. Be assured they are hedonistically based. Now, those of you who wish to disconnect from the central console, for autoconditioning, or to establish degrees of cognitive freedom during the lecture, please do so now. The requirement for disconnect is two point oh MTV reading, and Stanine seven homeostasis rank. We will break for ten minutes. Thank you all.”

Cy flicked the MTV switch on the arm of the seat, and saw the reading 1.98. He disconnected, but got a siren bleep in the headset. “Obtain homeostasis reading,” the voice came through. Cy plugged in and palmed the homeo switch. It read 7.4. Disconnect validated. He stood up and stretched. Andrine Garth waved to him from a gallery seat, and he began to move through the crowd toward her. They talked and drank coffee. Andrine was slim, almost wispy, with mint-green eyes and marble-smooth complexion. She and Cy had been paired twice in the conjugational lottery, and had liked each other well enough to request a monogam trial, which was still pending. Cy continued to sit beside her as the formal input session started. He squeezed her hand and felt a faint vesicular twinge. The provobot read the little surge and vectored in androgen dilutant. Cy managed a secret smile at Andrine before he spun his chaise to face the podium and clap on the headset. He closed his eyes and felt quiescent. The wonderful Eisenhower-Glenn robot voice began again:

“In the beginning, on the planet Earth, humans had the most primary of needs: to ingest foliage and flesh, in order to achieve rhythmic peristalsis, and feelings of well being; i.e., satiation. This remains a pleasurable state, as you all know. Within the general limitations of a supply and demand situation, these early humans needed only to forage for food. Procreative needs were felt in males as simple vesicular pressure, and the achieving of sexual congress was instinctual, in the sense of the organisms showing tropistic behaviors based on physiologic pressures. The need for shelter developed out of discomfort in cold weather. Foliage served to warm the body, then animal hides and woven foliage provided rudimentary clothing. The need for rest grew partially from the tiring effects of cycles of daylight and darkness, and partially from simple gravitational effects generating kinesthetic fatigue. Shelter diversified into structures of various sorts, many quite large, costly, and ostentatious. When it became acceptable to study and write about human behavior, the so-named social and behavioral scientists developed various taxonomies, stating that humans had two types of needs: those which were survival-oriented, such as hunger, thirst, and shelter, and those which were acquired , or psychogenic, or socially oriented. Perhaps one of the strongest of these latter needs was acquisitiveness—the need to gain properties, chattels, things, trinkets, and so forth. In oversimplification, if you had a plump wallaby and a family of four to feed, and another human had a fatter wallaby and no family, you would be moved toward acquiring his food supply—and this is not a simple matter of primary need for food. But now, if you moved to take this fellow’s wallaby, your actions would be countered by verbal and/or physical resistance. Perhaps you would be motivated to bargain with him, or to contest him, or to make some sort of exchange. Pretty, shiny ores and metals and carbons became desirable because of their relative scarcity and visual attractiveness, and these materials became early surrogates for the desired commodity. For example, you give me that shiny rock, and you can have my wallaby. Precious stones became part of the system, then metals fashioned into discs of varying sizes, with varying portions of precious metals comprising these coins. Due to their weight, coins became replaced by paper scrip, then checks, then plastic credit cards, then one credit card, lines of credit, letters of credit, telephonic documentation of credit limits; and, around the two thousandth Earth year, individual lines of credit were established, in which society members simply authorized release of barter credits up to their prescribed actuarial limits, these limits based on an individual’s lifetime projected earning power. But, and a very important but it was, the credit line did not reflect the generalized organismic excellence of the individual, in terms of strength, intelligence, talent, special skills, artistic abilities or the like; quite often, it reflected the acquisition patterns of the individual’s ancestors, and it grew evident that some ninety-nine percent of the societal wealth was controlled by about one percent of the population. It became clear that the only way to get barter objects in satisfying amounts was to inherit them, and people knew that the chances of this were few. Emotionally charged slogans such as ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’ permeated the media. In fact, this was the slogan of the twenty-oh-eight presidential electee, John J. Onassis. In a series of stupendous sweeps of power, Onassis liquidated the fortunes of the eighty families controlling the wealth of the continent, and set up telecast channels to monitor the true needs of the citizens. These needs were remarkably like those of the very earliest humans, namely, all three hundred seventy-seven million citizens needed foliage, flesh, fluids, and synthetic nutrients. But now— but now, who was to say who could have suckling pig and wine, and who was to have rice and water? Let me now scan the class roster, and sample some of your responses. Ah yes, a Master Vox Intrepid, citizen of Etherea, sir, would you be so good as to stand and respond?”