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The Greenhouse Effect had been quite gradual, and Haber, born in 1962, could clearly remember the blue skies of his childhood. Nowadays the eternal snows were gone from all the world’s mountains, even Everest, even Erebus, fiery-throated on the waste Antarctic shore. But
Climate change.
Ever seen it done?” Orr shook his head. He looked apprehensive, but he offered no objection. There was an acceptant, passive quality about him that seemed feminine, or even childish. Haber recognized in himself a protective/bullying reaction toward this physically slight and compliant man. To dominate, to patronize him was so easy as to be almost irresistible.
This psychologist Haber’s a fucking sociopath!
He was quite right about what she was thinking, but damned if she was going to admit it. Anyway, so what if he was crazy? What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
Human systems are crazy, which makes humans crazy.
He liked her. He was a poor damn crazy psycho on drugs, he would like her. She liked him. She stuck out her brown hand, he met it with a white one, just like that damn button her mother always kept in the bottom of her bead box, SCNN or SNCC or something she’d belonged to way back in the middle of the last century, the Black hand and the White hand joined together. Christ!
If only SNCC was still around… Mr. Orr, dream it into reality! Make America THAT great again!
the suburbs receding out of sight till from their remote outbacks the foothills rose; and the mountains. Hood, immense yet withdrawn, breeding clouds about her head; going northward, the distant Adams, like a molar tooth; and then the pure cone of St. Helens, from whose long, gray sweep of slope still farther northward a little bald dome stuck out, like a baby looking round its mother’s skirt: Mount Rainier.
Before St Helens lost its “pure” cone!
person is defined solely by the extent of his influence over other people, by the sphere of his interrelationships; and morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one’s function in the sociopolitical whole.
This dude is a sociopath!
he’d still been a private researcher, plugging along in the sleep lab at P.S.U. and a second-rate office in Willamette East Tower, chances were that nobody would have taken any notice of his Augmentor
Fucking arrogantly untrue.
The lawyer arrived at three forty-five, and Haber came striding into the outer office to greet him—her, it turned out—and
Sexist.
“The form of autostimulation by recording that I’m using in this therapy may be described as having no effect on the patient beyond that exerted during the period of the machine’s functioning: five to ten minutes.”
Outright lie: Orr is being traumatized by these sessions.
Yes, hello, George, come on in! This is Miss Lelache, the participant from HEW. She’s here to see the Augmentor in use.” The two were shaking hands in the most ridiculously stiff way. Crash clank! went the lawyer’s bracelets. The contrast amused Haber: the harsh, fierce woman, the meek, characterless man. They had nothing in common at all.
A sociopath sees no one but himself, nobody else exists deeper than their surface; nobody else has an inner life.
Look there!” She missed the peak, of course; EEG-reading on a moving screen took practice. “Blew his fuse. Still in the dream now.… He’ll tell us about it presently.” He could not go on talking. His mouth had gone dry. He felt it: the shift, the arrival, the change. The woman felt it, too. She looked frightened.
The Change.
He had suppressed his memory of the fact that, until last Friday, this had not been the way it was.
This dude is fucked up. Especially since he’s a fucking psychotherapist, running his shit experiment on an innocent human being.
“But half an hour ago, George, you were profoundly worried, anxious, because you believed that overpopulation was a present threat to civilization, to the whole Terran ecosystem. Now, I don’t expect that anxiety to be gone, far from it. But I believe its quality has changed, since your living through it in the dream. You are aware, now, that it had no basis in reality. The anxiety still exists, but with this difference: you know now that it is irrational—that it conforms to an inward desire, rather than to outward reality.
Jesus what a mind fuck. What a fucking sick fuck this doctor is.
“Please, stop using my dreams to improve things, Dr. Haber. It won’t work. It’s wrong. I want to be cured.” “That’s the one essential prerequisite to your cure, George! Wanting it.” “You’re not answering me.” But the big man was like an onion, slip off layer after layer of personality, belief, response, infinite layers, no end to them, no center to him. Nowhere that he ever stopped, had to stop, had to say “Here I stay!” No being, only layers.
Yes, it’s Haber that has no inner life, no morals. Only surface after surface after surface.
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
Indeed.
That’s why she’s not here, he thought. She could not have been born gray. Her color, her color of brown, was an essential part of her, not an accident. Her anger, timidity, brashness, gentleness, all were elements of her mixed being, her mixed nature, dark and clear right through, like Baltic amber. She could not exist in the gray people’s world. She had not been born. He had, though. He could be born into any world. He had no character. He was a lump of clay, a block of uncarved wood.
The only reason George Orr is always born is because he’s the creator. It’s not because he’s a lump of clay. He’s essentially white, just as much as Heather may be essentially black. That’s the thing about skin color: it’s either an essential part of who we all are or it’s NOT an essential part of who we all are.
You have to let it be.” Haber walked up and down the room, pausing before the huge window that framed a view northward of the serene and nonerupting cone of Mount St. Helens. He
Ironic that St Helens is not erupting while Orr and Hood are.
I freely admit that I don’t know, about eighty-five percent of the time, what the hell I’m doing with this screwball brain of yours,
Is this the first time Haber has admitted he’s fucking clueless??
Before following directions leading in wrong directions, auxiliary forces may be summoned, in immediate-following fashion: Er’ perrehnne!” “Er’ perrehnne,” Orr repeated automatically, his whole mind intent on trying to understand what the Alien was telling him. “If desired.
Is the alien offering to help George? It knows that George is changing things, “iakhlu.”
When at last he turned the machines off and began to detach the electrodes, the serenity Orr had felt did not lapse, like the induced mood of a drug or alcohol. It remained. Without premeditation and without timidity Orr said, “Dr. Haber, I can’t let you use my effective dreams anymore.”
Equanimity; balance. The way.
Il descend, réveillé, l’autre côté du rêve.
air per annum, it sounded like.
Is this the alien word?
behavior
