A TRIP TO THE MENTIST

Copyright 1995, Christopher J. Lloyd

There was no doubt that Captain Stardust cut a fine figure of a man. Square shoulders, square jaw and if anyone questioned his honour he'd give them a beating fair and square and he had on several occasions done so.

He walked into the reception with his head held high, advertising his vocation to one and all by his military bearing. When he strode up to the reception counter the receptionist actually stopped what she was doing and took his name. She was a dish, the type one should never ever dream about on a long space haul.

Of course Stardust wasn't feeling so well or he wouldn't be here. His captainly confidence was a bit of a fake too, to take his mind off the butterflies in his stomach. It served him right though. Every child knew that there was one visit you could never put off forever. Whether you were ten years old or ten thousand, male or female, white or black, human or android, eventually you paid a call on old Dr. Feelbad. It was an unpalatable part of life: a trip to the mentist.

“Take a seat, please Captain Stardust,” she drawled in the strident Terran accent. He turned and was aware of her eyes following him as he took a seat facing the other way.

The waiting room was boringly familiar. It hadn't changed since the last time he was here, whenever the hell that was. 19763 he'd worked out. The piped music had changed but he didn't like it much. There was a menacing looking dragon plant from Betelguese in a glass case in one corner but he had rather gone off the critters since he'd seen his best friend eaten and then regurgitated by one. They were quite the thing nowadays. You fed them fresh meat. They turned their petals up at anything else, particularly vegetables. Fair enough for a plant he supposed. He glanced at it sideways and it seemed to sway forward threateningly in response. He'd been away from Earth too long no doubt. He was bound to feel like a bit of an outsider.

There was only one other person in the waiting room. Stardust suddenly became aware of a small boy with his nose in a magazine, feet swinging over the edge of a chair designed exclusively for the use fully mature adults. The boy was about the fourth child that Captain Stardust had seen in his life. Like all children he was peculiar looking, head a bit too large for the body and big eyes rather like a puppy, more like a caricature of a human being really but not unpleasant. The child became aware of Stardust's gaze and peered over the weekly glossy.

After a second he said proudly : “I'm here for my first recording. What are you here for?”

He was a nosey little blighter and no mistake. Stardust panicked for a second and then said nervously: “Routine. A check up.”

“Doesn't look like it,” said the child grimly, gave a cheeky grin and hid behind his comic. In response Captain Stardust held his head up and pushed his chest out with all the military bearing he could muster. There was an embarrassing silence until a metallic voice from an invisible speaker summoned “Stardust!” and he got up and went into the cubicle half hearing a muffled snigger as he closed the sound curtain behind him.

He sat in front of a small sleek terminal and placed his hand palm down on a sensor. It tingled a little on the ends of his fingers as tiny electrical signals delicately probed for the signature of his nervous system.

“Name?” he was asked in a sternly concerned androgenous voice.

“Captain Pranab Kumar Stardust.”

After a two second pause “Occupation?”

“Commercial Starship Captain, First Class.”

“Age?”

“Eighteen thousand one hundred and twenty seven years.”

“Last rejuvenation?”

“Twelve years ago.”

“Last mentist therapy?”

Captain Stardust paused and took a breath, none of which was lost on the Compu-nurse.

“19763.”

“Symptoms?”

“Yes.”

“Symptoms?”

“Memory loss, memory confusion. I've been feeling a bit tense,” he admitted.

“Enter the consultation room please Captain Stardust.”

An electronic lock clicked open on his left and he opened the door and quit the cubicle. Following a dim corridor for about ten meters he came to a dead end door marked `Dr. W. H Earl', knocked once and entered.

Dr. Earl was a large well-built man. Not so well built as Captain Stardust thought Captain Stardust but almost. He was fiddling with some knobs on a huge bank of machines set on the back wall. Captain Stardust was used to even bigger machines so it didn't impress him.

The Doctor turned around and gave a professional smile. He was a typical mentist with that infuriating `I know more about you than you know about yourself' demeanor. His voice sounded both patronising and conspiratorial.

“Captain Stardust,” he said with mock formality and offered his hand. “My we've been a naughty boy haven't we? The Compunurse tells me you haven't been to see us for five hundred and forty seven years. Is that right?”

“Well, er ..” he began to excuse himself but Dr. Earl interrupted with an impatient, dismissive wave of his hands.

“No, don't bother. I've heard them all believe me. It's your brain baby. Now...” he paused looking around the room for something while Stardust mentally chastised himself for his whimpishness. “..um, no matter, tell me about your symptoms while I retrieve your mindfile from Central.”

Captain Stardust shifted in his seat.

“Go on then. Don't be shy,” encouraged Dr. Earl tapping on a keyboard. “When did you start getting problems?”

“Well, I first noticed something about a year back. I couldn't recall some galactic coordinates. I use a state of the art recall accelerator so if it was there I would have found it but it obviously wasn't. I learnt them again but within a week I lost some more coordinates, really common ones that even a cadet would know. Didn't really inspire much confidence with the crew.”

“It's pointless relearning them. You should know that Captain. When your brain's full it's full. Each new fact is overwritten on the oldest memory of the same type,” Dr. Earl explained.

“I'm familiar with the principle,” replied Captain Stardust tersely.

“So when you relearned the galactic coordinates you'd forgotten,” continued Dr. Earl, “you lost one of the first set of coordinates you ever learned which not surprisingly was a common one. Now Captain. Any other problem areas before we put you on the probe?”

“There's one other thing,” he admitted. “I can't seem to remember my early childhood, or only in a very jumbled way.”

Dr. Earl raised his eyebrows in concern. “That doesn't sound too good. Jumbled in what way?”

“Well, for instance I can remember my brother's sixth birthday but my mother isn't my mother. She's Celestine Khoo.”

“The erotic actress?”

“I'm afraid so. And there are all sorts of things I can remember as a toddler which I'm sure could never have happened.”

Dr. Earl stroked his chin. “What was your brother's name?”

“Freddy.”

“Freddy. What kind of a name is that?” he wondered aloud. “Can you remember him?”

“Em, sure. I saw him only about thirty years back.”

“I mean as a child.”

“Sure. No, hold on. He's changed too.” Captain Stardust frowned in the concentration of recall. “I don't recognise him at all...Oh. Yes I do. That little kid out in the waiting room. The little buggers there blowing out the candles on Freddy's birthday cake!”

Dr. Earl got up and paced around. “Dear oh dear. It's a good thing you didn't leave it any longer than you did.”

“I must say I feel a bit embarrassed doctor.”

“Well you ignored the warning signs for a year,” replied Dr. Earl showing little sympathy, “so we'll just have to do our best. Over here on the examination chair thanks and we'll see how many cavities you've got.”

Captain Stardust took off his coat, hung it on a hook by the door and sat in the shining metal chair. It was an incredibly intricate piece of architecture with lots of curved supports, joints and struts. Little effort had been spent on comfort, hinting perhaps at how irrelevant such things would be to the patient when the machine began operating. He wiggled around a little trying to get settled while Dr. Earl made some adjustments and began closing the sensors on his wrists, arms, ankles, legs. A large linear sensor was set in the back of the chair following the line of his spine and a bowl shaped dome lowered itself over his head and began spinning. It emitted a whirring sound but curiously produced no draught.

“Just hold still there a second while I give your mind file to Shiva. Shiva I'd like you to meet Captain Stardust.”

The screen in front of Dr. Earl began displaying cross-sections of a brain coded in various hues and colours. Streams of numbers appeared in one corner. Captain Stardust faintly detected the suggestion of a beginning headache but no more.

“Now let's see if Shiva's got your number.” He tapped a few keys on the computer and Captain Stardust's left eye winked. “Yep. You're working fine,” he quipped.

For a while Dr. Earl said nothing as he tapped away at the terminal and examined the numbers and patterns on the screen. The ambiguity of his silence did little to set Captain Stardust's mind at rest. Eventually he swung the screen along a suspended rail to where his patient could see it. “I'm afraid you've got a few bad ones. You know how a cavity's formed?”

“I think so,” he answered uncertainly.

“I'll explain it to you so you're absolutely clear,” continued Dr. Earl who enjoyed a captive audience. “When your brain reaches memory capacity it starts overwriting similar but older memories but when a synapse is rerecorded it becomes like a cancer. It can't be over-written again and every time it gets recalled it freezes some of its neighbours into the same mutant state so you get more space problems. That's a cavity. And the bigger a cavity the greater the chance one of its synapses will get activated and so the faster it grows so things can get out of hand pretty quickly. I'd say another month or two and you'd have been showing real signs of mindset sickness and there'd be nothing I could do for you. Have a look here.”

Cross-sectional images of Captain Stardust's brain were displayed on the monitor and Dr. Earl explained as they changed. “The cavities are in black. You've got three. One here in episodic. That's where Celestine Khoo's taken up residence, another here where your celestial coordinates have been kept and a nasty little one here where your self assurance used to be. What I'll have to do is blank out these areas completely and try to reorganise your remaining memory space as best I can.

He moved out of sight and then said “This won't hurt,” and the black areas on the screen disappeared. At the same time Captain Stardust felt like his body had been turned inside out and his skull refashioned into the shape of a Klein bottle. He broke out in a sweat and took a deep breath to try and centre himself. It was to no avail. Sickening waves of mental disorientation rose up to engulf what was left of his mind and all he could do was sit there like a pot plant ten cents short of the dollar.

Concentrating on the stains on the ceiling might have helped but everywhere he focused receded to the verge of his peripheral vision. In fact, his mind's eye was about one hundred and eighty degrees arse-backwards but of course he couldn't see it. It winked at him just the same. The whole passive wierdness reminded him a little of being in hyperspace except that he wasn't in command now, not even of his faculties. He tried to think of his name but that was somewhere in his peripheral vision also. He tried to think. He failed.

He was vaguely aware of Dr. Earl murmuring in the background as he was plunged into blackness and phantom images came hurtling out of his blind spot crashed through him like a ten ton truck. There was Celestine Khoo growing exponentially fast and exploding into primal stardust. That was his name. Stardust. What was it again? There was that Betelguese dragon plant he'd nearly tried to pat when he was staggering home from the Last Watering Hole Bar on Centauri 3. 22.7 163.1 46.2. Centauri 3. There was Dr. Earl smiling into his face.

“How are we feeling?”

He was plunged into blackness again before he had the inclination to answer but he could still hear his tormenter murmuring in the background as he worked.

“No one likes a trip to the mentist” regretted Dr. Earl. “Reminds us of our limitations, forces unpleasant decision upon us. A question of priorities. Do you want to remember your first lay or have the galactic coordinates of every major star of the federation at instant recall? Not an easy decision.”

He pushed buttons and twisted knobs like an artist. There were a few mournful bleeps from Shiva and some other persons brain contorted itself into yet another impossible geometry inside Stardust's skull. Dr. Earl continued his cheerful soliloquy.

“.... Lordy, lordy. Look at this! There's a real zoo in here. A veritable harem of sexual fantasies. What do these guys get up to on R and R? Let's throw it on your libido cube and make some room. No use by themselves, that's for sure.”

He gave a chuckle. “Breakfast menus. Let's scrub it. Sitting on the toilet. Let's scrub it. Galactic coordinates. Ten percent corruption. Have to reload 'em from scratch.”

When he looked back on it later, much of the therapy was very confused in Captain Stardust's mind. He was left with the strange conviction that, contrary to all the laws of logic, there is a number bigger than one but smaller than zero, a delusion which lasted until his next voyage through hyperspace flushed him back to normality. He was also left with enough taste of the therapy's unpleasantness to put all mentists on his ever growing list of people to be avoided. Nevertheless, he resolved not to leave his next visit for another five hundred years.

“Straight after each rejuvenation, come and see me,” Dr. Earl had insisted “or I won't answer for the consequences.”

“But it's all under control now is it?” he had asked.

“Well, I had a few anxious moments finding a place to put your childhood memories. There wasn't much room except in semantics so I put a copy there for now and connected it up to episodic. Just don't read any dictionaries and you shouldn't have any problems.”

He never did learn to tell when Dr. Earl was joking.

As he was leaving the surgery, Stardust could already feel the self assurance algorithm the Doctor had given him beginning to work. He winked at the receptionist and fondly patted the libido cube in his pocket hoping he might get a chance to use it during his next visit to the flesh pots of Centauri 3. 72.2 136.1 26.4. Centauri 3! That's better. He certainly needed some rest and recreation.

Tentatively he thought back to his brother's sixth birthday. There was mom, plain and simple and his brother Freddy, with the right face this time, blowing out the candles. Later during that far off afternoon, Stardust could recall the suffocating terror of Freddy holding his head in a bucket of water until he was nearly drowned. Ah! The memories of youth. Like a mental compost, he could just feel them doing him good.

He started whistling. It was great to feel like his old self again.