"In September 2004, not long after my twelfth birthday, I entered a state of almost constant happiness. Whenever I ran - and I ran everywhere - it felt good." So speaks Greg Egan's protagonist to kick off this highly imaginative, philosophical forty-pager entitled Reasons to be Cheerful.
Such a joy to be a happy, energetic twelve-year-old. But then crisis hits - as thirty-year-old narrator Mark recounts, a MRI scan revealed there was a specific reason for his constantly feeling elated: pressure from a brain tumor caused the chemistry in his brain to release a flood of endorphins.
Something had to be done - and soon. Surgery was the first option but, unfortunately, the odds were not good: only one in every three patients walked out of the hospital. Mark's parents did the research and found a center offering a new treatment: genetically engineered herbs could be injected into the cerebrospinal fluid with no need of surgery. The survival rate was 80 % (please keep in mind we're talking near future and this is science fiction).
Mark underwent treatment: over the course of the next weeks, the tumor shriveled and Mark was finally sent home. However, huge problem: from that day forward, nothing in life gave Mark any pleasure, not even so much as a shred of pleasure. Everything he did was tainted with an overwhelming sense of dread and shame. He tells us he might as well have been staring at the gates of Auschwitz.
So it goes for poor Mark for the next 18 years. 18 whole years! Taking drugs only made him feel like a zombie. Then one day sitting at the computer in his small apartment, Mark opens an email: he's been contacted by a center in South Africa where a Dr. Durrani has created a new, experimental device for people suffering as Mark is suffering, a computerized device inserted into the brain to regulate mood, pleasure and happiness (again, keep in mind this is Greg Egan science fiction).
Long story short: Mark plays the odds and flies to South Africa, meets with Dr. Durrani and undergoes the procedure. In the recovery room Durrani and four of her students are gathered at the foot of his bed. Durrani asks Mark how he's feeling. We read:
"I was lost for words. These people's faces were loaded with so much significance, so many sources of fascination, that I had no way of singling out any one factor: they all appeared wise, ecstatic, beautiful, reflective, attentive, compassionate, tranquil, vibrant . . . a white noise of qualities, all positive, but ultimately incoherent."
In the subsequent days, Mark has many reflections on his various experiences of intense, ecstatic pleasure: bathing in the beauty of classical music and great art, finding his food scrumptious, the faces of those around him angelic, the mere fact that he's alive - complete bliss.
But is his experience real? Is he really Mark? Turns out, Durrani offers Mark the technology whereby he can regulate the amount of pleasure he experiences: for example: if he wants he can decrease the pleasure of music and sounds yet retain the highest visual pleasure. Same goes for things like taste, smell, tactile sensations, social situations.
Let me stop here and ask: if you were Mark, would you decrease the pleasure you experience? If you yourself were offered such a procedure to increase your pleasure in life, would you take it? If you could regulate your pleasure, what specifically would you increase?
Reasons to be Cheerful is included in Greg Egan's short story collection Luminous.
Australian author Greg Egan, born 1961 - Greg takes pride in not having any photos of himself available on the web. This photo is the way I picture the outstanding SF novelist writing at his computer.
"I had no doubt, now, that Durrani really had packed every last shred of the human capacity for joy into my skull. But to claim any part of it, I'd have to swallow the fact - more deeply than the tumour had ever forced me to swallow it - that happiness itself meant nothing. Life without it was unbearable, but as an end in itself it was not enough. I was free to choose its causes, and to be happy with my choices, but whatever i felt once I'd bootstrapped my new self into existence, the possibility would remain that all my choices had been wrong." - Greg Egan, Reasons to be Cheerful
Comments
Post a Comment