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I wasn't particularly late getting to the office, and I was well into flexitime credit, but I couldn't help feeling a paranoid suspicion that people were looking at me -- that they'd somehow guessed where I'd been and what I'd confessed to the doctor. It was silly, but I was all too well aware of the ways in which FMS sufferers could accidentally give themselves away, and of the awful rapacity of office gossip. Nobody bothered speculating any more about people's real affairs -- in fact, I sometimes wonder whether, in these troubled times, people actually bother having real affairs any more. There was nothing in the least unusual in the fact that as soon as five of us had gathered around a table in the Turk's Head at lunchtime -- variously clutching our BLT toasties, pizza wedges, baked potatoes and pints -- the conversation should instantly turn to FMS. Even so, I couldn't help feeling horribly uncomfortable about it. I couldn't help wondering which of the others might be feeling the same, and whether any of them might secretly be harboring fond memories of passionate frolics with my Marilyn -- and I couldn't help suspecting that every single word that was spoken was aimed directly at me, was really about me. "If you see FMS in its proper historical perspective," Mike Gilbert said, as his bushy black beard gradually filled up with crumbs, "it's bloody obvious what it is. It's psychological warfare, that's what. I mean, where did it start? All those bloody therapists uncovering repressed memories of sexual abuse suffered in childhood, setting generation against generation, sibling against sibling. The purpose had to be disruption and destabilization of the entire social structure -- and when people figured out that the memories were false the psychowarriors promptly moved on to something more insidious. Every day you hear reports of men killing one another in jealous rages over women who never even existed, but that's just the tip of the iceberg Ouch! I thought. "Who's doing it, then?" Hal Mellor scoffed, after taking another gluttonous swig from a glass that was already almost empty. "The ex-communists? The Pacific Rimmers? The green zealots?" "Mike's right," Aileen McMurdo put in, in that deadly earnest tone she only ever used when she was taking the piss. "You have to see it in its true historical context. It actually started before the child abuse revelations, with all those stories about people being kidnapped aboard UFOs and subjected to intensive examination by aliens. That's the key to the mystery." "That didn't destabilize anything," Hal pointed out. "Who'd start a war in a crazy way like that?" "The aliens would," Aileen came back, springing the trap. "It was all double bluff, see. They planted lots of false memories of abduction to make sure that the people who'd really been abducted wouldn't be believed -- and what they found out from all those tests was how to screw up our minds utterly and completely. They found out how to refine their weapons for maximum effect on human beings, and now they're using the second-generation stuff. By the time the invasion fleet gets here we'll all be psychological wrecks, every vestige of our real pasts consumed by obsessive nostalgia for lost lovers and dead babies. We won't offer a whimper of resistance -- in fact, we'll probably be queuing up to be first into the gas chambers." "Did you make that one up all by yourself?" Mike asked, in a mock-admiring tone which was something of a double bluff itself. "No, she didn't," said Helen Chambers, who spent far too much time exchanging intricate jokes with Aileen for her own good. "She's being paid to put it about. She's an agent provocateur for the real masterminds." "Who are?" I put in. I had to play my part, lest my silence should become suspicious. "Don't pretend you don't know, Jack," she said, with a broad and exceedingly discomfiting wink. "We're all friends here. We all know who it really is, even though we've all been sworn to secrecy." "No harm in telling us, then, is there?" I countered."Well, it's us, isn't it?" she said. "VirtIconics, traders in synthetic reality. It's the market research department testing the water, trying to figure out what kinds of virtual reality will sell best "You want to be careful, Helen," Aileen said. "At least one of these guys must be a spy for the suits upstairs. They'll be down on you like a ton of bricks if they find out you've been giving away the company's darkest secrets. Anyway, it can't be the marketing department -- they wouldn't bother with trivia like sexual passion and mother love if they could get down to the real nitty-gritty of product placement. If they really had FMS down to fine art and crude technology those warning broadcasts would be full of pictures of canned beers and drain-cleaners and laser-discs that aren't available in any video-stores. What kind of a world do you think we're living in, for God's sake?" "This is getting silly," Mike observed, affably. He was probably feeling pleased because he'd kicked the whole thing off, or maybe because Hal's patience had run out and he was bringing back a second round of drinks before anyone else had finished their first."Except, of course," Hal said, as he plonked the glasses down on the crowded tabletop, "that if they ever do find the cause, it could stop being a plague and start being a technology. If it isn't us, it could end up being the competition which will wipe us out. We could end up taking our VR products into a marketplace where we'd have to compete with people selling designer memories. Can you see the ads? ALL THE HOLIDAYS OF A LIFETIME "And it wouldn't just be one lifetime," I said, judiciously striking the same note of fake anxiety just in case any real anxiety happened to show through. "Like Mike and Aileen said, we have to remember the historical context. Before the child abuse there were the aliens, and before the aliens there were the past lives, when everybody was finding out that they'd been Napoleon or Cleopatra in a former incarnation. That can't have been our marketing department, unless all our memories are false. IBM maybe, or AT&T, but definitely not us." "Forget marketing," Aileen said. "The bozos up there don't have the imagination. It's definitely aliens. That reincarnation stuff was just more of their disinformation. Of course, they might not be planning to invade at all. They might actually be benign, intent on helping us to fulfill our true evolutionary potential. Maybe the whole FMS saga is just a series of psychological adaptations, which will culminate when we've finally been pressured into becoming true masters of memory, able to take mature responsibility for the reconstruction of our personalities, fit for membership of the galactic community." "Oh, sure," said Helen, who was never particularly squeamish about hitting below the belt when she was lashing out at random. "The way these guys keep inventing women that never existed to compensate for their failures with real women, and then get into fights about who the imaginary women really liked best, is a giant leap forward for mankind. We're well on the way to true maturity now, aren't we?" It was a step too far. I bit my lip, but Hal -- who'd put away his second pint in double-quick time -- didn't. "Exactly what made you so sour about men, Helen?" he asked, before he could stop himself. "Some guy leave you holding a baby boy that died, or what?" That killed the conversation stone dead -- and made me wonder exactly what, and exactly who, was accelerating Hal's drinking problem. |
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