David Wallace - Infinite jest

‘The human brain is very dense; it is the truth.’

‘The whole point is they weren’t doing it on humans yet. It was regarded as radically experimental. They used animals and animal-lobes. But soon the pleasure-stimulation phenomenon was its own separate radical experiment, while the second-string neuro-team stuck with the epileptic animals. Older — or Elder, some Anglo-Canadian name — headed the team to map these what he called quote “Rivers of Reward,” the p-terminals in the lobes.’

Marathe idly felt at the little pills of cotton in his windbreaker’s cotton pockets, pleasantly nodding. ‘An experimental program of Canada, you stated.’

‘I even remember. The Brandon Psychiatric Center.’

Marathe pretended to cough in the recognition of this. ‘This is a mental hospital. The far north of Manitoba. Forbidding wastelands. The center of nothing.’

‘Because they were theorizing that these quote “rivers” or terminals were also the brain’s receptors for things like beta-endorphins, L-dopa, Q-dopa, serotonin, all the various neurotransmitters of pleasure.’

‘The Department of Euphoria, so to speak, within the human brain.’

There was no hint or suggestion yet of dawn or light.

‘But not humans yet,’ Steeply said. ‘Older’s earliest subject were rats, and the results were apparently sobering. The Nu— the Canadians found that if they rigged an auto-stimulation lever, the rat would press the lever to stimulate his />-terminal over and over, thousands of times an hour, over and over, ignoring food and female rats in heat, completely fixated on the lever’s stimulation, day and night, stopping only when the rat finally died of dehydration or simple fatigue.’

Marathe said ‘Not of the pleasure itself, however.’

‘I think dehydration. I’m fuzzy on just what the rat died of.’

Marathe shrugged. ‘But the envy of all experimental rats everywhere, this rat, I think.’

‘Then likewise implantations and levers for cats, dogs, swine, monkeys, primates, even a dolphin.’

‘Up the evolving scale, p-terminals for each. Each died?’

‘Eventually,’ Steeply said, ‘or else they had to be lobotomized. Because I remember even if the pleasure-electrode was removed, the stimulation-lever removed, the subject’d run around pressing anything that could be pressed or flipped, trying to get one more jolt.’

‘The dolphin, probably it swam about and did this, I think.’

‘You seem amused by this, Rémy. This was totally a Canadian show, this little neuroelectric adventure.’

‘I am amused while you make a way toward your point so slowly.’

‘Because then eventually Elder and company of course wanted to try human subjects, to see whether the human lobe had p-terminals and so on; and because of the sobering consequences for the subject-animals in the program they couldn’t legally use prisoners or patients, they had to try to secure volunteers.’

‘Because of a risk,’ Marathe said.

‘The whole thing was apparently a nightmare of Canadian legalities and statutes.’

Marathe pursed the lips: ‘I have doubts in my mind: Ottawa could easily have asked your then CIA for, what is the term, “Persons of Expendability” from Southeast Asia or Negroes, the subjects expended for your inspiring U.S.A.’s MK-Ultra.’[198]

Steeply elected ignoring this, rummaging in the purse. ‘But what apparently happened was that somehow word of the p-terminal discovery and experiments had gotten out up in Manitoba — some low-level worker at Brandon had broken security and leaked word.’

‘Very little else to do in northern Manitoba besides leaking and gossiping.’

‘… And suddenly the neuro-team at Brandon pull in to work one day and find human volunteers lining up literally around the block outside the place, able-bodied and I should remember to recall mostly young Canadians, lining up and literally trampling each other in their desire to sign up as volunteers for p-terminal-electrode implantation and stimulation.’

‘In full knowledge of the rat’s and dolphin’s death, from pressing the lever.’

Marathe’s father had always assigned it to Rémy, his youngest, to go first inside some public restaurant or shop to check for the presence of a microwave or GC-type of transmitter. Of special concerns were stores with instruments for thwarting a shoplifter, the shrieking instruments at doors.

Steeply said ‘And of course this eagerness for implantation put a whole new disturbing spin on the study of human pleasure and behavior, and a whole new Brandon Hospital team was hastily assembled to study the psych-profiles of all these people willing to trample one another to undergo invasive brain surgery and foreign-object implantation —’

‘To become some crazed rats.’

‘— All just for the chance at this kind of pleasure, and the M.M.P.I.s and Millon’s and Approception tests on all these hordes of prospective volunteers — the hordes were told it was part of the screening — the scores came out fascinatingly, chillingly average, normal.’

‘In other words not any deviants.’

‘Nonabnormal along every axis they could see. Just regular young people — Canadian young people.’

‘Volunteering for fatal addiction to the electrical pleasure.’

‘But Rémy, apparently the purest, most refined pleasure imaginable. The neural distillate of, say, orgasm, religious enlightenment, ecstatic drugs, shiatsu, a crackling fire on a winter night — the sum of all possible pleasures refined into pure current and deliverable at the flip of a hand-held lever. Thousands of times an hour, at will.’

Marathe gave him a bland look.

Steeply examined a cuticle. ‘By free choice, of course.’

Marathe assumed an expression that lampooned a dullard’s hard thought. ‘Thus, but how long before these leaks and rumors of p-terminals reach the Ottawa of government and public weal, for Canada’s government reacts with horror at the prospect of this.’

‘Oh, and not just Ottawa,’ Steeply said. ‘You can see the implications if a technology like Elder’s really became available. I know Ottawa informed Turner, Bush, Casey, whoever it was at the time, and everyone at Langley bit their knuckle in horror.’

‘The CIA chewed a hand?’

‘Because surely you can see the implications for any industrialized, market-driven, high-discretionary-spending society.’

‘But it would be illegalized,’ Marathe said, noting to remember the various routines of movements Steeply made for keeping warm.

‘Stop with the babe-in-woods charade,’ Steeply said. ‘There was still the prospect of an underground market exponentially more pernicious than narcotics or LSD. The electrode-and-lever technology looked expensive at the time, but it was easy to foresee enormous widespread demand bringing it down to where electrodes’d be no more exotic than syringes.’

‘But yes, but surgery, this would be a different matter to implant.’

‘Plenty of surgeons were already willing to perform illegal procedures. Abortions. Electric penile implants.’

‘The MK-Ultra surgeries.’

Steeply laughed without mirth. ‘Or off-the-record amputations for daring young train-cultists, no?’

Marathe blew just one nostril of his nose. This was the Québecois way: one of the nostrils at a time. Marathe’s father’s generation, they had used to bend and blow the one nostril out into the gutter in the street.

Steeply said ‘Picture millions of average nonabnormal North Americans, all implanted with Briggs electrodes, all with electronic access to their own personal p-terminals, never leaving home, thumbing their personal stimulation levers over and over.’

‘Lying upon their divans. Ignoring females in rutting. Having rivers of reward without earning reward.’