The Fifth Science

by Exurb1a

  Nadastra certainly shared Dr. Ek’s.

  Dr. Ek had been shy then—actually he was shy later too—and never found the occasion to look into Nadastra’s enormous violet eyes and proclaim his love. For he did love her, I think we can say for sure. In that distant way, at least. He thought about her while brushing his teeth, walking home from work.

  If buying new socks or doing the washing up he found it amazing that she, a creature so gorgeous and perfect, would undertake tasks just as mundane in her daily life—as though realising Jesus pissed.

  Let’s pause for a second and acknowledge how easy it is to love from afar. One might see this person three or four times a week, and always in situations where difficulties needn’t crop up. Since the two of you never face a challenge, it is possible to imagine the object of your affection to be free of pettiness, stupidity, self-obsession, and all the other frequent visitors to the human psyche.

  In those secret moments, brushing your teeth, walking home from work, you may tell yourself that if only the two of you could be together then nothing would ever hurt again. And since you refuse to admit your affections to this person, you may now live out the rest of your life in a constant and quietly sad state of What if?

  Inaction is the primary refuge of those who prefer their own constructed realities to the beautiful chaos of the real world.

  Anyway.

  We have said Dr. Ek was shy, but we can’t accuse him of being ineffective. As his marriage slipped into the mundane rituals of daily life—as all marriages do of course, however wonderful—Dr. Ek blamed this transformation not on the uniformities of life’s natural currents, but on not being near Nadastra.

  His wife was a model of virtue. She listened to his ranting and ravings and didn’t interrupt to tell him they were bullshit. She did not leave hairs on the soap. She stayed well away from his browser history.

  Yet Dr. Ek was miserable.

  Nearing 250 (middle age for humans back then) he began to think on his lot. What if this was the peak of his life? What if Nadastra was somewhere out in the galaxy thinking of him too? Soon he would be too old to pursue his passions.

  He popped several emotion-blockers and informed his wife that he was finished with their arrangement.

  He travelled to where he knew Nadastra lived now, on a small moon of Jupiter, and rehearsed his speech during the journey and when he arrived on her street he noticed a perfect picture of suburban family life walking up the road, two parents and three children, and realised it was in fact her. And her husband.

  He had more tact that to try to break up a marriage.

  The Want Machine was born in that very moment, though Dr. Ek would not call it that for some time.

  With Nadastra walking on that sun-kissed street, her children in tow, her husband attractive and noble-looking, Dr. Ek saw clearly then that the problem wasn’t with marriage as a whole. It wasn’t with shyness or romance. It wasn’t even with the inability to pursue one’s dreams.

  The problem was contentment.

  With his bonsai panda and his four-dimensional piano he bought a one-way ticket to Lom, determined that he would not leave until he had solved the problem of contentment, of making humans happy with their modest lot, and looking for nothing beyond that.

  And so he lived in his small Lomese house and beavered away at blueprints and equations. He kept to himself. He trained the dog to walk itself so he needn’t leave the house even for that.

  And after three years of plenty of swearing and coffee and late nights, he finished his contraption. He called it a ‘high-amplitude cognitotronic bombardment device’, but we will refer to it simply as The Want Machine.

  The Want Machine was capable of making extremely fine-tuned adjustments to the delicate neuronal architecture of the brain. Mainly this applied to desires.

  One afternoon, with the machine’s casing polished and its pistons whirring, Dr. Ek set out to use the thing on himself.

  He did the dishes. He made sure the dog had water. Then he sat himself in his favourite armchair in the living room, opposite the machine.

  He asked it to remove his love of Nadastra.

  There was a small flash, a puff of vapour, the smell of chlorinated swimming pool water. Dr. Ek blinked.

  Had the world changed? Not so he noticed.

  Had his body altered? It didn’t look like it. Only, when he searched his mind for the desperate, secret longing he found nothing. He was free of his love of Nadastra.

  He felt a little liberated, then very liberated. Well, this was wonderful! He’d never have to give in to some stupid fantasy ever again, nor ruin a marriage.

  He could choose to be in love, or not to be in love.

  But a kind of melancholy came next. Free of his secret longing for Nadastra now, suddenly he longed for his wife again. She was a cosy certainty. She had been very loving and kind. Yes, he had loved her, in that safe and domestic way that seems so inbuilt for the raising and care of children.

  (Four hundred years from now, the cognitophysicist Amelia Minsk would demonstrate that the brain was in fact capable of seven types of love, each distinct and with its own requirements.)

  He powered the machine up again. He asked it to remove the longing for his wife. The machine understood the request.

  Again there was a small flash, a puff of vapour, and the smell of swimming pool water.

  The longing was gone and the melancholy with it. He felt entirely bland. It was a pleasant sensation, almost.

  Or, it was the absence of negative sensations, which we can say is sort of a sensation.

  What next? he wondered.

  Well, he’d always thought of himself as a slacker.

  He had the machine remove his tendency to procrastinate, which as gods in this story we are able to learn was hardly particular to Dr. Ek, but common to almost all sentient lifeforms in the galaxy.

  A small flash, a puff of vapour, the smell of a swimming pool…

  That was that.

  He no longer had any tendency towards distraction. (Why not do the things you have to do and do them now?)

  With his procrastination drive gone, there was only the will to work left.

  And he worked all right.

  He worked on his garden until it was a picture of bucolic perfection. He worked on his house until it was a shining example of domesticity. He worked on the dog, trimming her coat into a model of canine perfection.

  He made the fish pond perfectly symmetrical.

  He removed every stone, however small, from the garden path.

  He wrote his friends’ birthdays on the calendar. (Seriously.)

  But Dr. Ek was a scientist and a scientist is really just a person trained to watch things very closely. He was watching himself very closely. He noticed a sharp change in his behaviour, all this working and no missing Nadastra.

  Had Dr. Ek returned to the machine and reverted himself to his previous, default mental state (as was certainly possible), then Stara Lom would still be a shining jewel in the empire’s crown today. (Or, hell, what’s left of the empire.)

  But no.

  Rather than listen to his reservations, he went one better. He removed his reservations with the machine.

  Puff! and they were gone.

  Now there was nothing left; no doubt, no ethics.

  And curiously, he found he was still not happy.

  He thought the matter over rationally.

  What desire could be implanted or removed that would promote contentment?

  He took a walk in the forest. Through the trees he could clearly make out children playing in the schoolyard, pretending at being cavemen and cavewomen, not a damn care in the world.

  Yes, he thought.

  He returned to the machine.

  He had it remove care.

  He had it remove doubt.

  He had it remove that infernal nub of striving-for-betterment that always sits so perniciously at the back of the adult psyche.

  He was only a
bag of intentions then.

  He looked out the window and saw people were miserable, though they did not know why. Dr. Ek knew why. They had too many desires.

  One morning a religious type came to his door called Maximilian, sporting a book of some kind. Dr. Ek listened without interrupting because he had long since removed the desire to interrupt.

  Finally he said, “That’s all very interesting Maximilian, but why did you come to have this conversation with me?”

  “Because I’d like you to embrace The Word,” Maximilian said.

  “And until I do that, you won’t be truly happy, is that right?”

  Maximilian agreed heartily in that way one does with someone who is clearly quite mad.

  Dr. Ek invited Maximilian in, had him sit down by The Want Machine and removed all desire in Maximilian to convert the village.

  There was no discernible change.

  “There,” Dr. Ek said. “How do you feel?”

  “Fine, thank you.”

  “You were telling me about your holy book?”

  “Ah, we needn’t bother with that. I’ll be on my way if it’s all the same to you.”

  But Dr. Ek was not finished. He removed from Maximilian the desire to know truth, to know beauty, to know himself.

  Maximilian stared blankly, neither happy nor distraught.

  What was left with all that gone?

  The same thing that dwelt in Dr. Ek. The desire to remove desire.

  They sat for many hours with the machine.

  They killed lust. They killed ambition. They killed goodwill. They fired anger. They dispatched hope.

  Yes, with all these hurdles dead, Dr. Ek would know true contentment soon. With desire gone, what was there beneath it all but total satisfaction?

  But the longing for satisfaction is still a longing, Dr. Ek realised, and he had Maximilian remove that from the two of them also until they only sat and stared into space. Their minds worked fine. Sensations passed through them: the temperature of the room, the feeling of the chairs beneath their bottoms. But there was no inclination.

  They stared at one another, mouths open. Their spit dripped. Their hands sat limply on their laps. The dog barked and barked but there was no desire in either of them to keep it alive.

  The grandfather clock chimed the hours, twenty-four, forty-eight.

  Maximilian had spent many years in a religious ministry of some kind, and deep in his brain a single hidden desire surfaced: the will to help others. That was the final want.

  He felt no pain or dissatisfaction. He felt no grief or regret. This surely was happiness. He familiarised himself with the mechanism of the machine, then went out onto the street and approached a passer-by, a cyclist. He led her inside. He removed her ambitions, her fears, her struggles, her goodness. She no longer looked quietly sad.

  He went out onto the street again. He brought a man in this time, the mayor. He removed from him the will to power and the need for approval from his constituents. Then he took everything else.

  He implanted both of the newcomers with the desire to continue the Good Work. He implanted the desire to implant the desire in others to do the Good Work.

  They went out onto the street. They began to bring the general public in for a go on the machine.

  We have pieced this story together from forensic reports of Stara Lom as well as illegal visits by ribbondashing youths. Not much more can be said for sure besides the fact that as of 12,847 A.L. all communications from Stara Lom have ceased. Save for a cat and a chicken, the entire population was discovered to be expired, all seven million inhabitants.

  No sign of struggle was detected in a single instance.

  Nor dissatisfaction either.

  Water for Lunch

  It was Saturday which was Boning Night, so they’d gone upstairs.

  They got into the thing.

  Adam was thinking about how much he didn’t want to go to work tomorrow. He wondered what Jodie was thinking about.

  She ran her hands through his hair. She bit his neck quite far past the point of teasing. She began to speak in a strange artificial accent.

  “Where’s that from?” Adam said.

  She stopped. “What?”

  “That voice you’re talking in.”

  “Don’t you like it?”

  “No, it’s fine, I just wondered.”

  “I’ll stop it if you don’t like it,” she said.

  “No, it’s fine.”

  They continued.

  He couldn’t shake the thing out of his mind. Where was that accent from? It sounded off-planet. Orb Tyo? Orb Niastra?

  She spoke again in the strange voice. She bit his neck.

  Yes, he thought. I know that voice. It’s Matella, that sex-technique woman from the streams. She always talks like that, high-pitched in that accent that isn’t an accent.

  He turned his attention back to Jodie. He could not unhear that Matella woman now. God, what a thing.

  They concluded the whole dance the way they normally did and laid in silence for a while. Jodie said, “You were good.”

  “Thanks,” Adam said.

  “I was very good I think.”

  “Yes, you were.”

  She said, “What shall we do now?”

  “Hm.”

  It had not always been like this. He recalled that for the first year neither of them would ever have asked such a question. Lying in bed would’ve been quite enough for the evening.

  Adam said, “Do you know that Matella woman?”

  Jodie beamed. “Oh, Matella! She’s so clever. What’s that thing she says? Yes, live your dream. Live your dream. Isn’t that clever?”

  “Very clever, yes.”

  He worked hard at the factory the next week. He pressed out little concave plastic widgets, unsure what they would go on to be.

  He noticed some of the men watching Matella on their pads during the lunch break.

  He asked his pad to block any mention of her.

  Adam and Jodie went out on Friday to the birthday of one of Jodie's friends. Adam was quite careful to avoid being in any of the photos and most of the evening was spent taking photos. He couldn’t stand watching everyone’s faces go from neutral to suddenly smiling the second the camera was raised, then back to neutral again. It made him feel unwell.

  He went outside onto the restaurant balcony and requested a mood alteration. Nostalgia.

  The new mood came on suddenly.

  Yes.

  Sink into the past.

  The sunshine days in the fields with friends and apple juice and not much wanting or worrying.

  The smell of something being cooked in the family kitchen.

  Alba Lamm.

  He pictured her only for a moment, her green eyes, her freckles.

  He felt better.

  Saturday rolled around again, Boning Night.

  They got into the thing.

  Jodie spoke again in the strange accent, in that voice like Matella, but this time it was constant. She said things she had never said before, more crass.

  He considered requesting a mood change.

  The door chimed.

  “It’s eleven. Eleven at night!” Jodie said.

  “Let me get it.” Adam put on his dressing gown and answered the door.

  Two men were standing on the porch. One was very tall, the other short. Adam said, “Hello gentlemen.”

  “Can we come in?”

  He let them into the kitchen. He said, “You want coffee or something?”

  “No thanks.”

  Jodie was peering from the bannister. Adam said, “I’ll be up in a minute, all right?” She disappeared. “Well, how can I help?”

  The shorter man said, “We’re from the Office of Oversight.”

  Adam said, “Okay.”

  The shorter man said, “Would you mind telling us who Alba Lamm is?”

  Adam kept his face neutral and didn’t speak a while. “I recognise the name from college, I thi
nk.”

  The two men exchanged a glance. The taller one took out a little pad. On it was a brain reading and above the brain reading was Adam’s name. A small window was open at the bottom, a fragmented image and the image was clearly of Alba Lamm.

  The shorter man said, “This image was isolated from your readings last night on several occasions.”

  The taller man said, “On several occasions, Adam.”

  “All right,” Adam said.

  “Would you care to explain this?”

  “Just an old remembrance. You know how it is. An old movie probably. Yes, an old movie reminded me of her. We watched it together, ten years ago maybe.”

  The shorter man tapped the chemical readout box. “Is Alba Lamm important to you somehow?”

  What’s the fucking obsession with Alba Lamm? he wanted to yell. But he knew, ironically, that thought would be recorded and the next day they’d be back at his door with more fucking questions, this time about violent fucking impulses.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know how to answer, gentlemen,” Adam said politely. “Maybe there’s a problem with my band.”

  The shorter man pulled a little hand device from his coat. He walked behind Adam and passed the device close to the back of his head. He said, “Everything looks fine with your band, but what do we know? If there’s a problem with it you should go for a check.”

  “I should,” Adam agreed. “Thanks.”

  The taller man passed a card across the table with a name and address. “In that case you’ll get it checked here at 9 o’clock tomorrow. Need to get the problem fixed.”

  The shorter man nodded, “Need to fix the problem.”

  “Righto then,” Adam said.

  The men let themselves out.

  Adam stood for a long time in the kitchen. He tried to keep his mind blank and filled it up as a result.

  He curled the pad with his brain reading up and hid it behind the shoe polish.

  When he got back upstairs Jodie was sleeping with her mouth open.

  The wallscreen was playing a video. It was Matella. Her face was ice white with makeup. Her lips were so red they looked bleeding. She was saying, “Treat him mean, keep him keen. Bail on a date. Bail on the next one. If he really wants you, he’ll call again. Live your dream!”

  From beneath the camera a man popped into focus. His hair was slicked to the side. His skin was perfect. He said, “Live your dream!”