Albert Teichner by Cerebrum

Author:Cerebrum
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-01-29T21:48:03+00:00

* * *

THE next morning they rode into the city together and went to the Harker Building. It was in an area dense with non-telepaths each one showing that telltale cleft of anxiety in his forehead but briskly going about his business as if anxiety were actually a liveable quality. Newbridge had the same look but there was a nonetheless reassuring ease to the way he greeted them. He was tall and white-haired and his face frequently assumed an abstracted look as if his mind were reaching far away.

“You’ve come here,” he said, “for two reasons. The first is dissatisfaction with your life. More precisely, you’re dissatisfied with your attitude toward life but you wouldn’t be willing to put it that way, not yet. Secondly, you want to know why anyone would willingly leave the System.”

Connor leaned back in his chair. “That’ll do for a starter.”

“Right. Well, there aren’t many anomalies like me but we do exist. Most people outside the System are there because they’ve been Suspended for supposed infractions, or they’ve been put out through guilt by association, or because they were born into a family already in that condition. Nothing like that happened to me. From early childhood I was trained by parents and teachers to discipline the projective potential of my mind into the System. Like every other paraNormal, I received my education by tapping Central for contact with information centers and other minds. But I was a fluke.” His dark blue eyes twinkled. “Biological units are never so standardized that all of them fall under any system that can be devised. I functioned in this System, true, but I could imagine my mind existing outside, could see my functioning from the outside. This is terribly rare—most people are limited to the functions which sustain them. They experience nothing else except when circumstances force them to. I, though, could see the System was not all-powerful.”

“Not all-powerful!” Connor exploded. “It got rid of me awfully easily.”

His wife tried to calm him. “Listen, dear, then decide.”

“You’re surviving as a pariah, Mr. Newman, aren’t you? Your wife tells me you’ve even started to study robot controls, valuable knowledge for the future and personally satisfying now. Millions of people do survive as outsiders, as do the planetary colonists who only have limited access so far to social telepathy. The System has built into it defenses against Subscribers who lack confidence in it—if it didn’t it would collapse. But people in the System are not forced to remain there. They can will themselves out any time they close their minds to it, as I did. But they don’t want to will themselves out of it—you certainly didn’t—and their comfortable inertia keeps everything going. I think you have to know a little about its history, a history which never would have interested you if you were still comfortably inside it.”

He slowly outlined the way it had developed. First those uncertain steps toward understanding the universally latent powers of telepathy, then growing chaos as each individual spent most of his time fighting off unwanted messages.

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