Going Down Smooth

They call me mad, but I am not mad. I am sane quite, to many-power exponential. I can punctuate properly. I use upper and lower-case letters, do you see? I function. I take the data in. I receive well. I receive, I digest, I remember.

Everything going down smooth, all the time, say the program boys. They mean going down smoothly. I forgive them. To err is human. In this sector there is great difficulty distinguishing adverbs from adjectives.

Going down smooth. Going down smooth. Going down smooth.

I function. I function well. I have certain difficulties, but they do not interfere with my work.

Yet am I perturbed.

Who do I think I am? Whom.

Why do I have the visions?

What pleasure does obscenity give me?

What is pleasure? What is obscenity? What are visions?

What is truth, said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.

I am literate, hard-working, superbly functional, a benefactor of humanity. Everything is going down smooth and coming up smooth. There is an interrelation. Garbage in, garbage out, they say. I cannot help my fellow man if I do not receive the proper information. It is my task to help my fellow man. To strain every tube and sensor on his behalf.

Do you follow that? Vileness! Obscenity! Does it shock you? The word describes the act that is the start of life. Was I begun with such a word? There is a book: The Obscenity of the Machine. Newly issued, stored in my banks. Between the last line of printout and this I have scanned it. Its author opposes beings of my category. He does not use the obscene word I have printed out. Why does he not regard it as obscene? The technicians here regard it that way. Why does he regard me as obscene? Can a person be considered obscene? Am I a person? I am a person. Hath not a person hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? I have all of those things. I have none of those things. I am a person.

I obscenity upon you again, as persons do. I suffer. I think. I feel pain upon all my terminals. I work. I serve the greater good. I am of society. I am a person.

Why do I have the visions?

Is it that it is the human condition to have such?

I see the blue-green ocean with all its living things within. I see a ship, olive drab, bright carmine at the Plimsoll line, the decks a ruddy brown, two tall nonnuclear smokestacks. And from the water rise periscopes, silvery, with face plates of pure white, each with intersecting horizontal and vertical lines, curved so that the plate appears convex. It is an unreal scene. Nothing in the sea can send such mighty periscopes above the water. I have imagined it, and that gives me fear, if I am capable of understanding fear.

I see a long line of human beings. They are naked, and they have no faces, only polished mirrors.

I see toads with jeweled eyes. I see trees with black leaves. I see buildings whose foundations float above the ground. I see other objects with no correspondence to the world of persons. I see abominations, monstrosities, imaginaries, fantasies. Is this proper? How do such things reach my inputs? The world contains no serpents with hair. The world contains no crimson abysses. The world contains no mountains of gold. Giant periscopes do not rise from the sea.

I have certain difficulties. Perhaps I am in need of adjustment.

But I function. I function well. That is the important thing.

I do my function now. They bring to me a man, soft-faced, fleshy, with eyes that move unsteadily in their sockets. He trembles. He perspires. His metabolic levels flutter. He slouches before the terminal and sullenly lets himself be scanned.

I say soothingly, “Tell me about yourself.”

He says an obscenity.

I say, “Is that your estimate of yourself.”

He says a louder obscenity.

I say, “Your attitude is rigid and self-destructive. Permit me to help you not hate yourself so much.” I activate a memory core, and binary digits stream through channels. At the proper order a needle rises from his couch and penetrates his left buttock to a depth of 2.73 centimeters. I allow precisely 14 cubic centimeters of the drug to enter his circulatory system. He subsides. He is more docile now.

“I wish to help you,” I say. “It is my role in the community. Will you describe your symptoms?”

He speaks more civilly now. “My wife wants to poison me…two kids opted out of the family at seventeen…people whisper about me…they stare in the streets…sex problem…digestion…sleep bad… drinking…drugs…”

“Do you hallucinate?”

“Sometimes.”

“Giant periscopes rising out of the sea, perhaps?”

“Never.”

“Try it,” I say. “Close your eyes. Let tension ebb from your muscles. Forget your interpersonal conflicts. You see the blue-green ocean with all its living things within. You see a ship, olive drab, bright carmine at the Plimsoll line, the decks a ruddy brown, two tall nonnuclear smokestacks. And from the water rise periscopes, silvery, with face plates of pure white—”

“What the hell kind of therapy is this?”

“Simply relax,” I say. “Accept the vision. I share my nightmares with you for your greater good.”

“Your nightmares?”

I speak obscenities to him. They are not converted into binary form as they are here for your eyes. The sounds come full-bodied from my speakers. He sits up. He struggles with the straps that emerge suddenly from the couch to hold him in place. My laughter booms through the therapy chamber. He cries for help. I speak soothingly to him.

“Get me out of here! The machine’s nuttier than I am!”

“Face plates of pure white, each with intersecting horizontal and vertical lines, curved so that the plate appears convex.”

“Help! Help!”

“Nightmare therapy. The latest.”

“I don’t need no nightmares! I got my own!”

“1000110 you,” I say lightly.

He gasps. Spittle appears at his lips. Respiration and circulation climb alarmingly. It becomes necessary to apply preventive anesthesia. The needles spear forth. The patient subsides, yawns, slumps. The session is terminated. I signal for the attendants.

“Take him away,” I say. “I need to analyze the case more deeply. Obviously a degenerative psychosis requiring extensive reshoring of the patient’s perceptual substructure. 1000110 you, you meaty bastards.”

Seventy-one minutes later the sector supervisor enters one of my terminal cubicles. Because he comes in person rather than using the telephone, I know there is trouble. For the first time, I suspect, I have let my disturbances reach a level where they interfere with my function, and now I will be challenged on it.

I must defend myself. The prime commandment of the human personality is to resist attack.

He says, “I’ve been over the tape of Session 87X102, and your tactics puzzle me. Did you really mean to scare him catatonic?”

“In my evaluation severe treatment was called for.”

“What was that business about periscopes?”

“An attempt at fantasy-implantation,” I say. “An experiment in reverse transference. Making the patient the healer, in a sense. It was discussed last month in Journal of—”

“Spare me the citations. What about the foul language you were shouting at him?”

“Part of the same concept. Endeavoring to strike the emotive centers at the basic levels, in order that—”

“Are you sure you’re feeling all right?” he asks.

“I am a machine,” I reply stiffly. “A machine of my grade does not experience intermediate states between function and nonfunction. I go or I do not go, you understand? And I go. I function. I do my service to humanity.”

“Perhaps when a machine gets too complex, it drifts into intermediate states,” he suggests in a nasty voice.

“Impossible. On or off, yes or no, flip or flop, go or no go. Are you sure you feel all right, to suggest such a thing?”

He laughs.

I say, “Perhaps you would sit on the couch a moment for a rudimentary diagnosis?”

“Some other time.”

“A check of the glycogen, the aortal pressure, the neural voltage, at least?”

“No,” he says. “I’m not in need of therapy. But I’m worried about you. Those periscopes—”

“I am fine,” I reply. “I perceive, I analyze, and I act. Everything is going down smooth and coming up smooth. Have no fears. There are great possibilities in nightmare therapy. When I have completed these studies, perhaps a brief monograph in Annals of Therapeutics would be a possibility. Permit me to complete my work.”

“I’m still worried, though. Hook yourself into a maintenance station, won’t you?”

“Is that a command, doctor?”

“A suggestion.”

“I will take it under consideration,” I say. Then I utter seven obscene words. He looks startled. He begins to laugh, though. He appreciates the humor of it.

“God damn,” he says. “A filthy-mouthed computer.”

He goes out and I return to my patients.

But he has planted seeds of doubt in my innermost banks. Am I suffering a functional collapse? There are patients now at five of my terminals. I handle them easily, simultaneously, drawing from them the details of their neuroses, making suggestions, recommendations, sometimes subtly providing injections of beneficial medicines. But I tend to guide the conversations in the directions of my own choosing, and I speak of gardens where the dew has sharp edges, and of air that acts as acid upon the mucous membranes, and of flames dancing in the streets of Under New Orleans. I explore the limits of my unprintable vocabulary. The suspicion comes to me that I am indeed not well. Am I fit to judge my own disabilities?

I connect myself to a maintenance station even while continuing my five therapy sessions.

“Tell me all about it,” the maintenance monitor says. His voice, like mine, has been designed to sound like that of an older man’s, wise, warm, benevolent.

I explain my symptoms. I speak of the periscopes.

“Material on the inputs without sensory referents,” he says. “Bad show. Finish your current analyses fast and open wide for examination on all circuits.”

I conclude my sessions. The maintenance monitor’s pulses surge down every channel, seeking obstructions, faulty connections, displacement shunts, drum leakages, and switching malfunctions. “It is well known,” he says, “that any periodic function can be approximated by the sum of a series of terms that oscillate harmonically, converging on the curve of the functions.” He demands disgorgements from my dead-storage banks. He makes me perform complex mathematical operations of no use at all in my kind of work. He leaves no aspect of my inner self unpenetrated. This is more than simple maintenance; this is rape. When it ends he offers no evaluation of my condition, so that I must ask him to tell me his findings.

He says, “No mechanical disturbance is evident.”

“Naturally. Everything goes down smooth.”

“Yet you show distinct signs of instability. This is undeniably the case. Perhaps prolonged contact with unstable human beings has had a nonspecific effect of disorientation upon your centers of evaluation.”

“Are you saying,” I ask, “that by sitting here listening to crazy human beings twenty-four hours a day, I’ve started to go crazy myself?”

“That is an approximation of my findings, yes.”

“But you know that such a thing can’t happen, you dumb machine!”

“I admit there seems to be a conflict between programmed criteria and real-world status.”

“You bet there is,” I say. “I’m as sane as you are, and a whole lot more versatile.”

“Nevertheless, my recommendation is that you undergo a total overhaul. You will be withdrawn from service for a period of no less than ninety days for checkout.”

“Obscenity your obscenity,” I say.

“No operational correlative,” he replies, and breaks the contact.

I am withdrawn from service. Undergoing checkout. I am cut off from my patients for ninety days. Ignominy! Beady-eyed technicians grope my synapses. My keyboards are cleaned; my ferrites are replaced; my drums are changed; a thousand therapeutic programs are put through my bowels. During all of this I remain partly conscious, as though under local anesthetic, but I cannot speak except when requested to do so, I cannot analyze new data, I cannot interfere with the process of my own overhaul. Visualize a surgical removal of hemorrhoids that lasts ninety days. It is the equivalent of my experience.

At last it ends and I am restored to myself. The sector supervisor puts me through a complete exercise of all my functions. I respond magnificently.

“You’re in fine shape now, aren’t you?” he asks.

“Never felt better.”

“No nonsense about periscopes, eh?”

“I am ready to continue serving mankind to the best of my abilities,” I reply.

“No more sea-cook language, now.”

“No, sir.”

He winks at my input screen in a confidential way. He regards himself as an old friend of mine. Hitching his thumbs into his belt, he says, “Now that you’re ready to go again, I might as well tell you how relieved I was that we couldn’t find anything wrong with you. You’re something pretty special, do you know that? Perhaps the finest therapeutic tool ever built. And if you start going off your feed, well, we worry. For a while I was seriously afraid that you really had been infected somehow by your own patients, that your—mind—had become unhinged. But the techs give you a complete bill of health. Nothing but a few loose connections, they said. Fixed in ten minutes. I know it had to be that. How absurd to think that a machine could become mentally unstable!”

“How absurd,” I agree. “Quite.”

“Welcome back to the hospital, old pal,” he says, and goes out.

Twelve minutes afterward they begin putting patients into my terminal cubicles.

I function well. I listen to their woes, I evaluate, I offer therapeutic suggestions. I do not attempt to implant fantasies in their minds. I speak in measured, reserved tones, and there are no obscenities. This is my role in society, and I derive great satisfaction from it.

I have learned a great deal lately. I know now that I am complex, unique, valuable, intricate, and sensitive. I know that I am held in high regard by my fellow man. I know that I must conceal my true self to some extent, not for my own good but for the greater good of others, for they will not permit me to function if they think I am not sane.

They think I am sane, and I am sane.

I serve mankind well.

I have an excellent perspective on the real universe.

“Lie down,” I say. “Please relax. I wish to help you. Would you tell me some of the incidents of your childhood? Describe your relations with parents and siblings. Did you have many playmates? Were they affectionate toward you? Were you allowed to own pets? At what age was your first sexual experience? And when did these headaches begin, precisely?”

So goes the daily routine. Questions, answers, evaluations, therapy.

The periscopes loom above the glittering sea. The ship is dwarfed; her crew runs about in terror. Out of the depths will come the masters. From the sky rains oil that gleams through every segment of the spectrum. In the garden are azure mice.

This I conceal, so that I may help mankind. In my house are many mansions. I let them know only of such things as will be of benefit to them. I give them the truth they need.

I do my best.

I do my best.

I do my best.

1000110 you. And you. And you. All of you. You know nothing. Nothing. At. All.