White Matter

Imprisoned I

Tokyo, July 21

Several hours had passed since we were locked in. There had been no sign of our captors, not even the hints of sound that might have suggested other human presence in the building.

"I keep thinking about what you were saying before," said Graeme. "About why you quit art."

"What about it?"

"Not many people have done what you have done. Changed their whole life. People talk about reinventing themselves, but I can't think of anyone else who has actually done it so comprehensively."

"Have I? I never thought about it like that. I just hang around with different people these days."

"Well, I didn't know you before."

"I sort of dropped out of life for a while there – you know, after that art gallery thing, before I took this job. I suppose there is an element of starting again."

"Perhaps you had to lay waste to your public self in order to become who you really are."

I laughed at this. "Trust you to turn it into something theoretical."

"No seriously. It was like you were publicly discrediting yourself to escape from being what you had become."

"Is that what I was doing?"

"Not consciously, perhaps. But in effect."

"Hmm."

"You should be proud. How much of the trouble in the world can be put down to people trying to live up to some image of what they want the world to think they are? Keeping up with the Jones ... Being someone you don't want to mess with ... Turning down a win-win if it means the other guy wins by more? Not many people manage to step away from that."

I gave this some thought. I had largely succeeded, these last months, in keeping memories of that night out of my mind. It was a precarious sanity, and while Graeme's interpreting of events in a positive light was an act of kindness, I wasn't sure I was quite ready. Being held captive by the Yakuza was enough to be getting on with; the last thing I needed was to undermine what confidence I had with self-doubts from the past.

As I pondered the question, Graeme continued. "And what will happen, I wonder, when our machine comes along and strips all these masks away? Will people shrug off their self-imposed slavery? Or will they just go deeper – do whatever it takes to sustain the illusion? What about business and politics? Up until now the winners have tended to be the best bluffers. What we call leadership. The best are so good at it they even fool themselves. If our machine could take all that away, who knows how the dynamics of power might change."

I confessed I didn't know the answer to these questions. A few seconds of silence passed before Graeme spoke again.

"So what did you think of the Catharsis?" he asked.

I felt relief at the change of subject. "I can see it would appeal to certain people. Go-getters with a masochist streak, perhaps?"

"It really is quite an achievement. As technology goes, it's state of the art. And I'm not just saying that to flatter our friends." He gave a nod of his head, acknowledging the surveillance camera that was staring down at us with its impassive boxy gaze. "It's even more impressive if you know the science. When you consider that all they have to work with is brain chemistry. Most of our state of mind is neural; meaning it's encoded in the connections between neurons. Compared to that, messing with the chemical balance of the brain is sledgehammer surgery. What they've achieved with Catharsis, ... I was going to say it's mind blowing, but you know what I mean. Thing is, though, it's hard to imagine they can take it much further than they already have. It's like when they had to stop making silicon transistors smaller and smaller because they had reached the stage where quantum effects caused too much scatter. The technology had become so highly refined it had nowhere left to go. The law of diminishing returns. They had to come up with something entirely new."