He was on the verge of getting up and leaving when a heavily made-up Hispanic woman poked her head in the door, like a nurse at a dentist’s office, and said, “It’s your turn, Mr. Corely.”
Dodd didn’t respond at first, wondering if he could back out.
Of course I can, he thought, but I’d lose my $1700 fee. They won’t refund that – they had made that clear.
“Mr. Dodd Corely?” the Hispanic woman asked, wondering if she had the wrong name.
“Yes,” Dodd said, standing up. “Yes, okay.”
“I hope you’re ready.”
“I hope I am, too.” He glanced down at his speech, then followed her through the door. There was a short walk down a dimly-lit corridor, which Dodd spent watching the woman’s shapely butt wiggle – then she stopped, opening a door and holding it for him. She indicated a podium in front of a large neon circled-P, saying, “Stand right there and face the video pickup.”
Dodd stepped up onto the raised set and turned around, seeing a dark lens and a liquid-crystal sign that read: READY? Before he could blink the sign turned red and announced: YOU ARE ON THE AIR!
Dodd stared at it for several seconds before realizing what it meant. A digital clock was counting down his five minutes.
“Ah, um …” Dodd stammered. He stared at the lens and licked his lips, fighting a feeling of paralysis. Damn it! he thought. I’m making a fool out of myself. Read the damn speech and get it over with. He spread the pages across the podium in front of him and cleared his throat. “I’m here to talk about the Travels station,” he said, “and what, and what it is doing to … uh, our minds.”
Dodd paused, and the pause stretched. He wasn’t supposed to say the word, “travels.” The room seemed to be closing in on him, seemed to be running out of air. The lens stared, unblinking, a large dark eye of some immense animal peering at him through a hole in the wall. The neon circled-P of the Politico Network buzzed quietly behind him.
Sweat broke out all over his body. I feel sick, he thought.
Then he thought: sickness.
He opened his mouth, still staring into the lens. “I’m wrong,” he said. “Travels isn’t doing anything to our minds. I’ve got it all backwards.” With that, he let the speech slide off the podium and flutter to the dirty floor, useless.
#
The walls were breathing, puckering in and out, and that annoyed Saul. He had stopped taking Mataphin altogether and still little things like this persisted; tiny, insignificant reminders that he was, deep down inside, not well. It was not important to him, however. He was sure it didn’t matter.
Mirro had not left, which surprised him. She had not run off with Vicky, and her case of sex tools sat unused in a corner of their bedroom closet. She needs the money too much to leave, Saul thought. She was even going through the motions of breaking it off with Vicky. That’s a sham, Saul thought, Mirro is trying to deceive me. She wants to lull me out of my resolution. Well, it’s not going to work. And after you realize that, and you break down and surrender to your lesbian sexual drive, it will be the end of you.
This made a smile break through on Saul’s face, but it didn’t last long. Mirro’s favorite sex toy, the Two-headed Snake, was now imbedded with toxin injectors that would cause terrible agony and quick death. Saul had installed them himself – his new position in the corporation allowed him access to amazing things. One of the corporate spies on the payroll showed him how to use them. Now Saul was finding himself with something he thought he’d be immune to: second thoughts. As he wandered through the house, it seemed like electric wires were shorting out through his arms and legs.
He would occasionally jump, or his head would twitch. And there was this reoccurring urge to run to the bedroom, pull out the deadly sex toy, and destroy it before Mirro could use it.
But that, he told himself, would be insane.
Mirro was there now, sitting in the middle of the living room floor practicing her Saja Mantu isometrics. Saul poked his head through the doorway and peered at her. Christ, he thought, how can she do that? Still as stone for hours, eyes rolled back in her head, every muscle in her body taut. Saul shuddered, withdrawing.
She looked like how he felt. That could not be good.
Saul wandered back through his long, breathing hallways, passed by his daughter’s room and checked in on her – she needed changing again, but she was asleep so to hell with it – and then he wandered back to the rear TV room where someone had left the screen on. Mirro, probably, watching that Politico nonsense. On the screen was a nervously stuttering man, muttering something about Travels. This caught Saul’s attention so he sat down on the pulsating couch to watch.
“… it’s not that the Travels program is, um …” The man trailed off, and Saul involuntarily leaned forward.
“Is what?”
“… harmful in itself. It’s not the disease, it’s a symptom. A symptom of the society. The society which is infected with a mental disease, a mental feedback problem. You can look at it as if all our society is like one of those monkeys the early neurologists used in experiments, where they implanted electrodes in the pleasure centers of the monkey’s brains. They gave the monkey a button to push, and when the monkey pressed it he received a jolt right in his pleasure center. Well, of course, the monkey got an orgasm. And when the monkey learned he could do this, he ignored food, other monkeys, sleep, all the normal everyday things that made up its life, just so that it could sit there and push this button.”
Saul was staring at the television in horror. Who is this man? he thought. Who is he?
“Our society,” the man continued, “all of us together, we’re acting like this monkey. Our technology has provided us with many forms of the monkey’s button. Travels is only one example. We are all pushing our buttons – yeah, that’s a stupid sounding way to put it, but it fits. We’re pushing our buttons and wasting away, just like the monkey. Not any one of these buttons is dangerous in itself, at least not to all of us, but if you combine all the forms of the button together they are. The effect of all of them combined upon our society is dangerous. Travels and JTV together are dangerous. And you have to face it, JTV is not much different than Travels anymore, not since this, this ridiculous, phony Second Coming. I mean really, who in the hell actually believes deep in their heart that this JTV-propaganda-spouting flag-waver of a Jesus Christ is real? If God really came down to this screwed-up world of ours He would make some changes, wouldn’t He?
I think so! He’d do something positive, instead of standing around on a gold television set and tell us to spend more money on each other and dress in nicer clothes, and drink PTL cola – I mean, come on! Wake up! The Second Coming was a hoax! It’s nothing more than a big ratings struggle between JTV and Travels. It’s so obvious it makes me sick. It’s reached the point where if someone wants us to pay attention, to shake us up, they have to stage something on the scale of a god! That’s exactly what happened. And we have to do something about it! We’ve got to shake each other, wake each other up. We’ve got to do something, and we’ve got to do it before we degenerate beyond the point where it’s too late …”
Saul was rocking back and forth in helpless panic, hugging himself, muttering out loud. The people were finding out. Somehow the people were finding out about what was going on – finding out about Saul himself. “It’s not my fault!” he yelled at the man on the television. “My Mataphin was a button too!” They wouldn’t see it that way, though. Saul knew they would ignore the fact that he was caught up in it just as much as anybody, that he was just as much a victim as they were. No, they’d want a scapegoat. And they couldn’t, they …
Saul leaped up, shut the television off, and ran through the house. It had to be stopped, he thought. He had to get down to Telcron and put the weight all the way down on Travels, raise the AHL intensity to a full 99.9%; it could be done, he knew it could be done. And beyond that, he knew it had to be done.