You laugh, but I’m not joking. Not entirely. There was a time when it was a tossup as to who would string me up first: the authors, the copyright lawyers, the military, or the neurologists. There was a time when it was inconceivable to me that I would be feted by a distinguished crowd such as yourself, in my heels, tights, and a dress, gifted with a fine rubber-chicken banquet. There was a time when I contemplated plastic surgery and a move to the ass-end of remotest Imaginaristan.
I didn’t set out to destroy narrative, reshape the law, and invent sixth-generation warfare. I set out to do something entirely slimier: I set out to create a genuine science of persuasion. Simply put, I set out to instrument the human brain and to discover where our representation of the other lives.
The fMRI was such a wonderful toy in those days. We were like Leeuwenhoek at his eyepiece, uncovering the secret world that had ever existed right before our eyes. Finally, neuroscience transitioned to a real science, a muscular, macho quantitative science, no longer a ghetto of twinkle-eyed Oliver Sackses, reliant on keen observations of human behavior. Finally, we could abolish empathy and retreat to the comfortable remove of empiricism as delivered on the screen of an instrument.
And when the fMRI shrank to the size of a bowler hat–the tinfoil beanie, we used to call it, and don’t worry too much if you don’t get the joke anymore, because you shouldn’t get the joke, not anymore, not now that mind-reading is a quotidian miracle like atom-smashing. Sorry, where was I? When the tinfoil beanie appeared, well, that was it, that was the big bang for us, the moment at which neuroscience proposed to crush every mystery of the human mind with numerical analysis.
Me, I used it to hunt ghosts. Specifically, the ghost of my mother. She died when I was fourteen, suddenly, and ever since then I’d carried her ghost in my head, a presence and a voice, my moral compass, an internal monologue from beyond the grave, advising me. “Careful,” she’d say, when I got too close to a man who had more pretty than smarts, “pretty gets old fast; smart gets better with age.” Somewhere between my ears dwelt an avatar of a long-dead person, a simulation of her based on my brain’s interpolation of the data it had on her reactions.
And not just her! I carried around Inigo Montoya, the Great Gatsby, Jane Austen, Luke Skywalker–a whole murder of ghosts (if that is the collective noun, and if it isn’t it should be), crammed into my skull.
And I found her. Found all of them. Found out exactly what it is that causes people, real and imaginary, to take up residence in our heads.
The work was funded by Procter and Gamble, one of their blue-sky projects, accounting for a fraction of a percentile of their gigantic marketing budget. Yes, marketing. For once we’d discovered the ghost center of the brain, we set out to hack it.
It turns out that there are innumerable shortcuts for reaching into the human mind and causing it to synthesize a homunculus. It’s all that neocortical real-estate, all that stuff dating from the rise of the social ape and his social problems: Will this other ape screw me? Beat me to death? Share his fruit? Hide in the bushes while we forage and then eat the bananas? We’ve spent the entire neocortical era honing our ghost-centers, and now I had mastered it for P&G.
And P&G loved it. They used it to drive the people on their adverts directly into your head, bypassing all your other sensibilities. Their twenty-second dramas over hand-lotion and cleaning products and snack food were your problems, their jeopardy was your jeopardy. Like the primitive audiences who fled the Lumičre brothers’ early cinematic locomotive, the first generation of people we attacked with this science were unable–neurologically incapable–of distinguishing fact from fiction. And that was too good to last.
The P&G hearings were the trial of the decade, and for every person watching and shaking his head in anger, two more were scratching their noggins, inspired by the idea of what they could do with my techniques. By the time the hearings were out, publishers were paying record advances for books by authors whose agents whispered that they were a party to P&G’s wicked little secrets. As far as I know, no one from P&G ever disclosed my techniques, but as is so often the case, merely knowing something can be done is sufficient hint to determine how it can be done.
And here we sit, in the glorious ruins of society. Those of you under thirty correctly view narrative as a kind of harmful drug, a synthetic means of evincing pathological reactions from an evolutionary backdoor left behind in our brains. Some of you are probably old enough to remember the days when we thought authors should own their characters–back before we realized that the definition of a successful author was, “A hacker who slips one over on your person sim.”
It could have been worse. How many of you remember family counseling?
And hell, it’s not as though a lot of good hasn’t come of it. Here, listen to this:
“You are all very kind to honor my daughter this way. She makes me proud, every day.”
Creepy the way it comes out in her voice, isn’t it? Without even moving my lips, no less! They say we never die if someone still remembers us. Who knew that it was literally true?
I sure hope it is, anyway.
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At this point, the doctor stepped away from the podium and popped like a soap bubble. The class stretched its legs and left the room, and in their heads, the doctor jostled for space among all the other ghosts.