The Psychoactive Café (8 page)

And about the team?

I have no idea what Chenko’s
doing beyond what I read in Slashdot.

Naseer and his immediate family
dropped out of sight a few months after the launch, and I haven’t heard from
him since. I hope they’re in hiding and not dead or imprisoned. The Taliban
indeed lost most of their income when the drug market collapsed, including the
value of thousands of tons of stockpiled opium. Without their continuous supply
of expensive weaponry, they’re being pushed back in many regions. They haven’t
been overthrown yet, though, and Afghanistan is still on a civil-war footing.

 Miguel is living in Bogota, in a heavily-fortified bunker. He’s waiting for things to calm down, which may
take a few more years, before lightening up on his security. A lot of people in
the Columbian drug business are upset with him. In the meantime, he’s doing
well. He has a fulltime cook and houseman, and a twenty-four-hour technical support
crew. He runs a successful interior design business creating virtual
environments with ultra-high-def visuals and audio inputs in rooms that are
built to make the illusion almost perfect, including scented breezes. He uses
his bunker as a testing and demo site. Judging from the Architectural Digest
spread, it’s stunning. He consults for several big U.S. designers, and his work
is apparently revolutionizing the Manhattan real-estate market. We talk to him
once in a while, and for all the luxury and for all the girlfriends who come
and go, he seems lonely to me. I tell him he’s waiting for Scheherazade.

Xiang got an implant immediately
after launch to try it out. He absolutely loathed the B setting, said it made him
feel sleepy, but he uses a mild A setting once in a while when he’s working
late. “I don’t need it,” he says. It's not surprising, since he has a horror of
down-time. Compulsive workers and highly creative people tend to avoid the B
setting.

Xiang and I finally got
suspended jail sentences thanks to the fact that, despite the impact of what
we’d done, there wasn’t much they could throw at us legal-wise. Neither of us
had made money from the device. In the end, it wasn’t clear what crime we had
committed other than academic misconduct and intellectual piracy, and there’s a
lot of the latter going around. Mercat is making a fortune on legitimate
medical sales, as Chenko had predicted, and everyone on the team has become
scientific celebrities.

As for myself… My career was derailed,
to put it mildly. But a girl has to make money somehow, and I've carried on.
Besides my part-time work at the treatment centre, I’m providing personal
training on the use of the device. About a third of my time is spent with
wealthy women who don’t want to bother designing their own pre-sets. I go to
their houses, interview them, find out their preferences and goals, fiddle with
the controls until they’re satisfied, check on their progress and, after a
lengthy counselling process lasting several weeks, I hard-set the programming.
That pays well. Most of them want to use it to lose weight or get out of debt.

I’m trying to decide whether to
finish my doctorate or have kids. Xiang’s okay with either choice. Frankly, the
idea of children freaks me out. When would I let them implant the device? Under
what conditions? The more I think about it, the more I believe that there is
something wrong with the way that humans are designed, that we are too driven
by fear and greed, and the device provides a cheap workaround for a fundamental
design flaw. Maybe it’s not a problem if our kids are able to turn off anxiety
and longing whenever they want. It scares the crap out of me, though.

So that’s my life these days. I
can’t say I would want to go through it again. The burden is too heavy; too
many people have been damaged by the choices we made. But like Chenko said,
it’s all about two principles. Everyone’s life has the same value, and everyone
has the right to control their own body. And I still believe that.