The Psychoactive Café (5 page)

Chenko wanted the brain implants
to become pervasive, to be used by rich as well as poor, so that poor people
wouldn’t be discriminated against. If everyone had implants, you couldn’t be
prevented from crossing a border for having them, even if border guards started
scanning everyone’s heads. If implants were legitimately prescribed by
physicians for pain control, you couldn’t be jailed for having them. If
implants couldn’t be removed, you couldn’t lose your job for having them,
because you might have gotten them ten years ago when you were hospitalized for
that thing you had.

If rich people and their kids
had implants, and if the implants caused problems, you could bet that all of
the huge amounts of money that were going into jailing drug users would be
poured into actually helping drug users. Because then, they would care about
drug users.

Speaking of jail, we knew that
we were probably looking at jail time ourselves. It would be easier for me;
Canadian prisons were not so bad in the scheme of things, compared with what
the rest of the team would be facing. Although Chenko, close to launch, told me
not to be stupid, that even the Canadian system was brutal to criminal
combatants on the other side of the war on drugs. Cops had always been nice to
me and my family, but that was because they saw us as being on their side.

 Xiang might have been deported,
even though we were married; we didn’t know much about immigration law, but it
was definitely possible. Miguel talked about changing identities and going into
hiding, and Chenko told him not to tell us anything so we couldn’t be forced to
rat on each other. It was an awful time from that perspective.

Overall, though, looking back, I
think we were all enthralled by the intoxication of discovery and high
adventure. When scientists are in the thrill of the chase, they lose all sense
of proportion. That’s why ethics committees are so important. We were all too
excited to slow down and realize the bigger implications of what we were doing,
even though we thought we were, and we had isolated ourselves from outsiders
who would have given us reality checks.

You might think that people
would notice we had stopped working on our own projects, but that was the nice
thing about graduate school. It was like a playpen for grownups. Xiang’s
research team couldn’t see anything different since he kept contributing to his
project, and the rest of us just told anyone who asked that we were following
up on some interesting ideas, so they left us alone. Anyway…

Our plan for the launch was to
send out an announcement that said, “Hey, everyone, there is now a better
alternative to heroin and other opiates, a little gadget, buy it once, and it
will run off batteries that need to be replaced about once a year.” The
announcement would lay out the possible side effects and risks as clearly as we
could make them. It would point to the full torrent file for details. We
couldn’t make the information open-source because we didn’t have ownership over
the design – Mercat did. We figured that Mercat would still make a lot of money
by selling it as a legitimate medical device. Like pirating generic versions of
proprietary drugs; the big drug companies still earned a bundle from legal
buyers.

Our strategy was to destroy the
illegal drug trade by making it irrelevant. These devices would be sold by
shady characters, yes, but once they were sold and implanted, the cost of
euphoria would be only a trickle of electricity away. No ongoing drug sales, no
dealers and pushers. Just a battery once in a while, and replacement control patches
if they got damaged or confiscated.

Any high-end 3D nano-fabricator
using photon lithography could print out the whole control patch in five
minutes, too slow for full-scale production, but fine for regional
distribution. Another more specialized fabricator was needed for the
electrodes, which were made out of nano-fibre bristles. Each fibre had a
different function, and each teeny bristle contained a redundant array of
sensors and stimulators, which were directed to the right nerves using
electromagnetic propulsion. The implantation procedure was a bit tricky, best
done by a trained paramedical because it involved loading the container cells
into a syringe, locating the proper blood vessel, and slowly injecting the
cells into it. Then twenty-four hours were needed to let the little buggers
embed themselves in the right place before taking off the control patch. After
that, the patch could be taken on and off and kept in a wallet or purse. It
took a bit of practice to manipulate the controls on the patch without seeing
it, but it wasn’t much worse than an old Bluetooth headset.

By the time Xiang and Naseer deemed
the kit to be at pre-release stage, it was late spring. The days were long and
sunny, though still cold, and the Psychoactive Café was almost empty. Instead
of table tennis, Xiang went on long walks to clear his head, and I went with
him. Blackfly season was over, and we could enjoy the beauty of the northern
landscape. Miguel set up a kind of solar oven contraption big enough for two and
lay outside sunning himself any day that it wasn’t raining. The sides were high
enough so that he could take off his clothes and lie there, eyes closed and stark
naked. Not that I ever saw him, but Alison told me, giggling, in the PA.
Alison, a social-work student with a penchant for oppressed peoples, interned
in the local native reserve and was one of Miguel's girlfriends. I didn't like
the way Miguel treated her, as if she was a disposable person. She was nice. She
was really hurt later on when she found out about all the secrets he'd kept
from her.

Naseer went down to Winnipeg for a week and returned a soberer man. “You told someone,” I said when he came
back. He admitted that he’d told his imam – that’s like his minister – about
the project. At first we were freaked, but as he reluctantly reported what the imam
had said, we realized it was a good thing. The guy had ripped into Naseer for
his contempt for drug users. He told Naseer, “You have no right to dismiss
them. Allah loves them as much as he loves you, and he is all-forgiving. Don’t
you dare treat them as objects to be casually sacrificed.” Something like that,
anyway. It was interesting that the imam didn’t outright forbid Naseer, or
maybe he did forbid him, and Naseer didn’t tell us.

It did something to Naseer. I
could see sometimes that he’d been crying. He redesigned the kit to make it
uglier and more medical-looking, while maintaining its functionality. Chenko
protested, but Naseer said he wasn’t going to tempt anyone more than necessary.

I found out later, after the
launch, that Naseer’s sister had been taken by the Taliban the previous year,
and they’d done awful things to her. He never talked about it, never, but it
came out in the media. I won’t add to the violation of his family by repeating
what happened to her. He did soften. Once, he mentioned her to me, saying that
his sister used to teach at Kabul University. I didn’t follow up because I was
still angry at him. Now I think he was sort of trying to apologize, and perhaps
even trying to open up a bit. I feel really bad about that now, that I didn’t
follow up.

Naseer also stopped threatening
to release the fabrication file before we were ready. The effect was
paradoxical – now that we weren’t all trying to keep Naseer from blowing up, we
all got more argumentative. Conflicts became overt. We all became increasingly
irritated with Chenko for recruiting us for his own campaign. But every time I
got upset, I would redo a few DALY analyses and remind myself that we were
still on the right side.

Oh, the testing. Late spring.
Right.

Well, Chenko and I were the
first to implant the device in ourselves. Xiang injected it in Chenko first, at
Chenko’s request, then a week later I got one.

Why Chenko and me? For me, it
was an ethical requirement. I sure didn’t want to do it. I really, really care
about my brain, and it worked just fine as it was. I had lots of things to keep
me entertained, and all of them involved my brain. Why tamper with a good
thing? There was no personal upside, that was for certain.

Chenko, he was a
self-experimenter and eager to try it out. Once he was allowed to manipulate
the controls, it took him half an hour to get the hang of them, and another day
to set up favourite stations.

As you know, the early control
pads had two separate gains, one for anticipation and one for satiation.
Anticipation - switch A, like for type A personality - is stimulating, like you
can hardly wait, things are so exciting, you’re almost at the top of the
mountain, your heart’s desire is around the corner. You have masses of energy
because you’re so close to success and happiness. Satiation – switch B, like
for type B personality – is mellow euphoria, you’ve arrived, nothing in life
matters other than to float in bliss forever. By combining the relative
strength of those two, you could create a bunch of different effects and vary
their intensity from a mild buzz to a drugged-out stupor. Then you could set
your favourite combinations as different stations, up to ten. You wouldn’t want
to crank up A and B to the top, though. Trust me, that was like having a
simultaneous heart attack and an orgasm that wouldn’t stop.

By the time it was my turn,
Chenko had dialled down his usage to a couple of hours a day. He said it was
like watching TV, boring. Xiang injected me. Twenty-four hours later, sitting
beside me in our bed, he activated the controls and watched me anxiously as I
tried them out. Holy cow. I timidly pressed B, and my cramps and nagging
headache disappeared completely, and I hadn’t even been aware of them. My fear of
the device also vanished. I turned it up a little, and then more, and closed my
eyes. All my dreams were answered, and all my wishes had come true, and it was
only halfway up the dial. Xiang held my hand so I couldn’t touch the control
again, and whispered, “No more for now.”

I floated happily for a while, five
minutes as he timed it, and then Xiang whispered, “Enough now.” He let go of my
hand, and I turned it off.

I lay in the afterglow for a
while, feeling my cramps and headache creep slowly back. I asked if I could try
it again, and Xiang, frowning, said, “It is up to you.”

I thought about it for a bit, then
asked, “Can you program this thing so that it can’t go higher than it just did?
I don’t think I want it higher.”

“Of course,” he said. I took it
off and gave it to him. It freaked me right out to tell the truth. I was
already missing the sensation.

I refused to put it back on
until Naseer created some pre-sets and limited the intensity. From Xiang’s research
on PTSD, we knew that most subjects needed a two-minute blast of euphoria as
soon as they felt a trigger. At the very beginning, they needed to feel in
total control of their panic attacks, and they would stay stoned for up to thirty
minutes, which was the maximum allowable time on the default device. Over time,
most of them reduced the intensity and length of the stimulation. They wanted
to get on with their lives, they were highly motivated to get back to work and
their families, and they tended to stabilize on an hour or two of recreational
lotus-eating per day, like Chenko, plus two-minute blasts to head off panic
attacks. The ones who stayed stoned were the ones who had nothing to go home
to.

 For me, after several days of
fiddling with the controls, I ended up with just three pre-sets other than the two-minute
PTSD jolt. The strongest one was mid-level A, stimulation and excitement, cut
with a tiny bit of B to mellow it out. I used it to sharpen my concentration
and work longer hours.

I used a low-B for hanging out
on the sundeck and reading a book, which I’d never been able to do for more
than five minutes in my life. It timed out in thirty minutes and was as good as
an afternoon nap.

My favourite was a mid-level
jolt of B cut with a little A that lasted thirty seconds, which I used whenever
I was tempted to buy or eat something that I didn’t approve of. I would think,
“Oh, I want that chocolate croissant,” and whoosh, all my dreams have been
answered, and presto, I just saved five bucks and a thousand calories. Chenko
used that combo to stop smoking but lengthened it to two minutes and turned up
the A a bit. Bang, no more nicotine cravings. Every time he wanted a ciggie,
he’d just hit up and take a two-minute holiday in Hawaii.

Xiang wanted to try it next, but
it was too risky. Someone in his team might see the marks of injection, and
that was a total no-no; experimenters weren’t allowed to try it themselves.
Naseer refused the device, saying he wouldn’t sully himself with it.

 Miguel, after dithering for a
few weeks, decided to try it. He was focusing on his career plans by that time,
using all the expertise he'd developed working with Chenko on communications
and social marketing to set up his design consulting company. Already he was
pulling together a team, funded by his parents, getting ready to set up shop in
Bogota.

The device was not a good
influence on Miguel. The first week, he turned it up to a high-B while lying in
his solar cooker and got a serious all-over sunburn. He just kept switching it
on again every thirty minutes until he woke up sober and hurting badly. Chenko
and I took turns visiting his apartment to feed him and make sure he was okay.
Naseer was furious at all of us for allowing Miguel to access the high-intensity
settings. I was sick with fear for him for a couple of weeks, but fortunately
Miguel got bored with it after spending several days in bed drifting in and out
of euphoria.

We had big arguments about the
program settings. The fabrication plans included default pre-sets and hard
limits on intensity and length of time. Chenko wanted to offer three different
models to be marketed as medical devices for specific conditions. In addition,
he proposed a fourth model with no pre-sets at all.