Anatomy is Destiny with Sigmund Freud. A Logical World short
Posted: 2005-12-14 07:29am
I went slightly more insane recently and decided not to vapourise a planet, but rather put Sigmund Freud into the 8500s. This one is a little off in my opinion, but it was a lot of fun writing it.
Anatomy is Destiny
It was a wet day on Cambridge, and Sigmund Freud knew it. Rain splattered against the window of office, leaving little rivulets upon the buckyglass. He would not have called it uncommon if asked, but nor would have called it an annoyance; control of the weather was rather simple to do and if one did not want it to rain, it did not have to.
Freud wondered for a moment if whoever it was who control of what weather the different parts of Cambridge had received enjoyed such power. He or she could, on a whim, create rainstorms and blizzards, coat the earth with ice; with the level or tectonic control at whoever was in charge of the weather service, he or she could split the planet open – assuming it was halted by countermeasures in orbit. Freud shook his head briefly and looked down at his desk at the folder containing his most recent and arguably greatest piece of work; it overshadowed the Theory of Unconsciousness and Infantile Sexuality in such away that they couldn’t be seen any more. True, it wasn’t as if he had actually written them of course, regardless of all the work that had been put into recreating genius, he was still not the same man as the Sigmund Freud of the past.
The paper, at times, made Freud somewhat nervous, and when he was such he rolled one of his cigars across his palms. Perhaps, out of all the endless teeming masses of sophonts throughout this galaxy, only three knew it existed. Only three and one. And that other one was not exactly favourable towards its existence.
His door was locked, maintained by a lock that was designed to be unlockable. The whole office was in fact an armasteel box, protected by imbedded force fields and defenses to keep those who possessed non-military weaponry and who could phase through solid objects out. The window was in fact a farce and instead a screen projecting the outside in. Freud’s benefactors had taken every measure they could to keep his work from falling out of their hands, and as an extension, Freud alive.
A quiet series of clicks came to Freud’s attention. And he looked up at the door. He took in a deep breath, before letting out a sigh of relief. Only he and one other had the ability to access that lock; and his foe would not even bother with it. The doors swung open and the most powerful AI construct in the Local Group walked in, followed by a small floating ball. His feet made no sound; indeed they didn’t actually touch the floor. In appearance he was ordinary enough, a tall man in his forties, dressed in a straight black suit. The doors shut behind him.
“Freud.” Said the hologram.
“Olympic.” Replied the psychoanalyst.
Olympic stepped up towards the desk, his projector following. “I trust you have the paper ready for me?” Freud nodded in reply and Olympic brightened “Excellent. I would prefer to have simply taken it over the Sub-etha, but computer systems can be horribly insecure when you’re dealing with this sort of thing.”
“Do you think he knows?” Freud asked and the reply was a simple shrug.
“It can be difficult to tell, though I would say he does.”
“Then we must not wait.” Freud said decisively taking up the paper and holding it out. Olympic gestured towards it and the folder flew towards him, before passing noiselessly through his body and slapping against the floor. They paused, Olympic considerably faster in that way.
“I’ve lost fundamental control. Freud! You have to get out of here. Take the paper and get it off planet – I have a ship running hot at Silver Gate.” His image flickered briefly “Go! N-” the floating orb fell to the ground, nothing more than an inert piece of metal. Freud swallowed, girded his loins and stepped out from behind his desk, walked across the floor to the fallen paper and picked it up.
Freud was a psychologist, not a computer expert – he had died of cancer before the first real computer had been built, but he knew that Olympic was far too powerful to have one of his IO nodes taken down through electronic means. No, this was something far more surreal. His hand dived into his pocket and he brought out his ‘key’, a sub-atomic manipulation device and used it to effect his lock enough to open it. Folder securely under arm, Freud pushed open his door and emerged into the hallway. He wasted little time in looking up and down the wood panelled walls and headed left, walking briskly, but not so much as to attract attention.
He reached the end of the hallway and called one of the elevators. It came so fast that he didn’t have to worry about being out in the open and in this situation that was fast. Freud stepped and muttered “Ground floor.” Without replying, the elevator did as he asked, dropping him down at almost three hundred gravities. His heart had barely enough time to beat as he stepped out into the lobby.
His heels clicked against the stone of the lobby floor; in all his time on campus he’d never thought to find out what type of stone it was. Black and crystal-like, a kind of mirror finish. It was perhaps the most beautiful floor that Freud had ever seen, and he always admired it when passing through, but not tonight. He glanced across at the security desk, at the blank face of Lucy, her face illuminated by the light of her holoscreens. Freud faltered, and her head turned unnaturally to look at him.
“Hello Sigmund.” Said the man with his fingers in her head. Freud stopped entirely. The man, if you could call him that, seemed bemused by the whole situation as he rolled the security officer’s head about. “I’m here for the paper.” He was only a few metres away from Freud now, the entire universe altering for a brief instant to move him forward. His dark brown coat swung about his ankles “Give it to me.” Freud stepped back and the man hocked up one eyebrow, his eyes flashing with the very depth of the universe. Freud took another step back, his left hand clenching. The hand came up. The man blinked once and took the full force of Freud’s ring-mounted Impact Lance to the chest. The air rippled and Freud spun around, even with the huge recoil compensation. The man however took the impact to his chest, caving it in completely and launching him across the lobby, till he came to a halt by the main doors.
Freud stepped off again, this time running. They were already here, it seemed, and where one was, all were. He paused to stand over the man, who even now was getting up. Freud hit him again, squishing his chest into a gory mess and sending him shooting along the floor into the far wall.
Water pattered against his face as he ran down the empty streets. When the Imperial Commonwealth had recreated him, building his body and mind from scratch, they made him like their posthuman citizens, the end result of three and a half thousand years of progressive genetic engineering to make humanity smarter, tougher, faster and longer lived; as a result, even though he looked somewhat old, Sigmund Freud of the Eighth Millenium could run far faster than he had ever managed in the prime of his previous life. He came around the corner of the psychology building and looked across at the campus’ gargantuan cosmodrome in the distance. He needed a taxi, but there were no cars running; there were no cars, or people for that matter. Freud suspected that the entire population of Cambridge Campus North had been removed for the duration.
Too far to run, Freud turned to a vehicle on the side of the rode. He didn’t own a car himself, but he knew how to drive. He tried to open the door and it obliged, and the key was still in the ignition. He knew this was what was wanted; there was no way that such a thing could have happened without it being known. Freud started up the suspensors, slid the car out sideways, and then hit the accelerator.
The car – it was an Audi, Freud noticed subconsciously and he didn’t like Audis – sped along just above ferrocrete of the road. Freud’s hands were sweaty against the steering wheel and he sought to calm himself. The piece was on the seat beside him. If he could get to the star port and aboard the ship that Olympic had brought, then it would have been found. It didn’t matter he was being messed with by a being who could arbitrarily remove almost a billion people from local space/time, Freud knew that Olympic would have taken adequate precautions against that, likely reality hardening and quantum and electrogravity based fields. Possibly Psykers to deal with it should the need arise, though the fluctuations they made in the universe would have negated any attempts at stealth.
Freud was careful none the less. Though Olympic was likely the most intelligent mind in the whole likely group, they were dealing with something from beyond the universe who likely had access to future events and happenings (Freud had seen the reports of encounters with these beings, which had descriptions of them simply touching space and time in multiple places, thus making lots of them). After all, had Olympic not been bested, even after taking pains to make himself not stand out by surrounding himself by Quantum Magicians?
Cambridge Bridge was nearing, it appeared on the Audi’s holomap as a great stretch of orange that would have reached from Dublin to Reykjavik assuming they both still existed on the same planet. Freud slipped through the toll booth, the owner of the car having a few pence removed from his account to pay for the use of the bridge, then pushed the speed up high enough so that it would only take ten minutes or so to cross. Freud settled back into his seat; he was on the home straight now.
Ahead stood a figure and Fred slammed onto the brakes, coming to a halt almost instantly. The great psychoanalyst slumped as the gravity drives on the Audi cut out and the body of the car crashed against the road. The figure stepped around the car with but a single step, then slid through the closed door, sitting down in the passenger seat. He held the folder in his hand, though Freud could see his fingers had passed part way through.
“So, Sigmund.” Said the man. Freud surveyed him and his skin made up of pale, moving letters. “This is your greatest work.” He pulled the paper from within the sealed folder and examined the front page. Freud narrowed his eyebrows; the man had his fingers between pages, yet the stack of papers were not disrupted.
“Yes Tannhauser?” replied Freud, his curiosity piqued by the presence of the subject of his paper.
“Please, call me Tensebone.” The other replied, flicking through the dozens of pages. “So this is the psychoanalytical piece on, what do you call us again . . .” he paused stroking his cheek “Ah, yes, n-Dimensionals. Referring to our presence throughout all places and times, at all times.”
“Do you dislike this name?” Freud questioned; he would have preferred to have Tensebone Tannhauser on a leather couch, he would have liked to have one of his cigars, but this was a chance he could not have passed up. There was no point doing anything else anyway.
“What you decide to call us is your business.” Mused Tanhauser, folding the paper in half. He folded it again “We don’t call ourselves anything, so we don’t have a proper name. I’ve always been fond of god, however.” Tannhauser folded papers in his hand in half again, fingers pinching the crease sharp. His mouth split into a grin, each tooth seeming to be as large as a mountain, the creases in his face deeper than the Mariner trench.
“So you consider yourself God?”
“I’m certainly powerful enough.” Tannhauser folded the paper again four times. “If I so wished I could cause every stellar object in the universe to explode, or do the same to every living being across the whole of space and time. No weapon you currently have, or likely will ever have for that matter, can cause me any harm beyond the localised area of space/time I have chosen to warp and act as my avatar, and even then it would take formidable firepower to do it. At a whim I could remove this galaxy from reality, erase it entirely leaving no trace at all. The universe would not baulk at the sudden loss, for it is my beast to control.”
“You seem very sure of yourself.” Freud commented as Tannhauser folded his piece an eighth time.
“Of course I’m sure.” He laughed softly “I carry the name of a poet, but my words are rarely hyperbole, nor do I see any point in lying like some of my colleagues. It was in your great work, remember?” he held it out as his fingers stretched and folded it in half yet again. “I am not God, or The Maker or Jus’imin or any other deity. Why would I bother with interacting with you like Nonsenso?”
“You’re interacting with me now.” Freud noted as his ‘great work’ was folded again; already it was tiny and dense, though it didn’t stop Tannhauser folding it another time, and another.
“Obviously because I don’t want this getting out.” In his palm sat a tiny mass of white which Tannhauser proceeded to pick up between two fingers and squeeze down to nothingness. “The I Project, among others, is dangerous. The resurrection of historical geniuses for the purposes of your Imperial Commonwealth is dangerous. Albert Einstein produced an opening into one of the upper levels in your Twentieth century; impossible at that level of technological advancement, and yet he did it anyway; you in your own way are capable of understanding even a lifeform such as I and then explaining it others. Did not Bach produce a piece of memgineering that cause almost a hundred percent fatalities in all that hear it?
“What you had written Freud was a work which Olympic intended to use for ends that you wouldn’t want to contemplate. There are ruminations within the Administration; you would know nothing of the Grid Works Project or its by-product, GRENDEL, though you would have contributed to it.” He turned to look at Freud at last, locking gazes with him. Freud’s muscles tightened in response “You’re a brilliant man Sigmund Freud, but to dangerous to be allowed to exist.”
In that moment Freud’s eyes became blank, totally. His universal imprint disappeared completely, all his accumulated knowledge ceasing to exist. Everything that had made up Sigmund Freud’s brilliance, his sheer force of genius that allowed him to bypass the order of the universe, which had allowed for him to be remade into modern society, all gone.
Forever.
Anatomy is Destiny
It was a wet day on Cambridge, and Sigmund Freud knew it. Rain splattered against the window of office, leaving little rivulets upon the buckyglass. He would not have called it uncommon if asked, but nor would have called it an annoyance; control of the weather was rather simple to do and if one did not want it to rain, it did not have to.
Freud wondered for a moment if whoever it was who control of what weather the different parts of Cambridge had received enjoyed such power. He or she could, on a whim, create rainstorms and blizzards, coat the earth with ice; with the level or tectonic control at whoever was in charge of the weather service, he or she could split the planet open – assuming it was halted by countermeasures in orbit. Freud shook his head briefly and looked down at his desk at the folder containing his most recent and arguably greatest piece of work; it overshadowed the Theory of Unconsciousness and Infantile Sexuality in such away that they couldn’t be seen any more. True, it wasn’t as if he had actually written them of course, regardless of all the work that had been put into recreating genius, he was still not the same man as the Sigmund Freud of the past.
The paper, at times, made Freud somewhat nervous, and when he was such he rolled one of his cigars across his palms. Perhaps, out of all the endless teeming masses of sophonts throughout this galaxy, only three knew it existed. Only three and one. And that other one was not exactly favourable towards its existence.
His door was locked, maintained by a lock that was designed to be unlockable. The whole office was in fact an armasteel box, protected by imbedded force fields and defenses to keep those who possessed non-military weaponry and who could phase through solid objects out. The window was in fact a farce and instead a screen projecting the outside in. Freud’s benefactors had taken every measure they could to keep his work from falling out of their hands, and as an extension, Freud alive.
A quiet series of clicks came to Freud’s attention. And he looked up at the door. He took in a deep breath, before letting out a sigh of relief. Only he and one other had the ability to access that lock; and his foe would not even bother with it. The doors swung open and the most powerful AI construct in the Local Group walked in, followed by a small floating ball. His feet made no sound; indeed they didn’t actually touch the floor. In appearance he was ordinary enough, a tall man in his forties, dressed in a straight black suit. The doors shut behind him.
“Freud.” Said the hologram.
“Olympic.” Replied the psychoanalyst.
Olympic stepped up towards the desk, his projector following. “I trust you have the paper ready for me?” Freud nodded in reply and Olympic brightened “Excellent. I would prefer to have simply taken it over the Sub-etha, but computer systems can be horribly insecure when you’re dealing with this sort of thing.”
“Do you think he knows?” Freud asked and the reply was a simple shrug.
“It can be difficult to tell, though I would say he does.”
“Then we must not wait.” Freud said decisively taking up the paper and holding it out. Olympic gestured towards it and the folder flew towards him, before passing noiselessly through his body and slapping against the floor. They paused, Olympic considerably faster in that way.
“I’ve lost fundamental control. Freud! You have to get out of here. Take the paper and get it off planet – I have a ship running hot at Silver Gate.” His image flickered briefly “Go! N-” the floating orb fell to the ground, nothing more than an inert piece of metal. Freud swallowed, girded his loins and stepped out from behind his desk, walked across the floor to the fallen paper and picked it up.
Freud was a psychologist, not a computer expert – he had died of cancer before the first real computer had been built, but he knew that Olympic was far too powerful to have one of his IO nodes taken down through electronic means. No, this was something far more surreal. His hand dived into his pocket and he brought out his ‘key’, a sub-atomic manipulation device and used it to effect his lock enough to open it. Folder securely under arm, Freud pushed open his door and emerged into the hallway. He wasted little time in looking up and down the wood panelled walls and headed left, walking briskly, but not so much as to attract attention.
He reached the end of the hallway and called one of the elevators. It came so fast that he didn’t have to worry about being out in the open and in this situation that was fast. Freud stepped and muttered “Ground floor.” Without replying, the elevator did as he asked, dropping him down at almost three hundred gravities. His heart had barely enough time to beat as he stepped out into the lobby.
His heels clicked against the stone of the lobby floor; in all his time on campus he’d never thought to find out what type of stone it was. Black and crystal-like, a kind of mirror finish. It was perhaps the most beautiful floor that Freud had ever seen, and he always admired it when passing through, but not tonight. He glanced across at the security desk, at the blank face of Lucy, her face illuminated by the light of her holoscreens. Freud faltered, and her head turned unnaturally to look at him.
“Hello Sigmund.” Said the man with his fingers in her head. Freud stopped entirely. The man, if you could call him that, seemed bemused by the whole situation as he rolled the security officer’s head about. “I’m here for the paper.” He was only a few metres away from Freud now, the entire universe altering for a brief instant to move him forward. His dark brown coat swung about his ankles “Give it to me.” Freud stepped back and the man hocked up one eyebrow, his eyes flashing with the very depth of the universe. Freud took another step back, his left hand clenching. The hand came up. The man blinked once and took the full force of Freud’s ring-mounted Impact Lance to the chest. The air rippled and Freud spun around, even with the huge recoil compensation. The man however took the impact to his chest, caving it in completely and launching him across the lobby, till he came to a halt by the main doors.
Freud stepped off again, this time running. They were already here, it seemed, and where one was, all were. He paused to stand over the man, who even now was getting up. Freud hit him again, squishing his chest into a gory mess and sending him shooting along the floor into the far wall.
Water pattered against his face as he ran down the empty streets. When the Imperial Commonwealth had recreated him, building his body and mind from scratch, they made him like their posthuman citizens, the end result of three and a half thousand years of progressive genetic engineering to make humanity smarter, tougher, faster and longer lived; as a result, even though he looked somewhat old, Sigmund Freud of the Eighth Millenium could run far faster than he had ever managed in the prime of his previous life. He came around the corner of the psychology building and looked across at the campus’ gargantuan cosmodrome in the distance. He needed a taxi, but there were no cars running; there were no cars, or people for that matter. Freud suspected that the entire population of Cambridge Campus North had been removed for the duration.
Too far to run, Freud turned to a vehicle on the side of the rode. He didn’t own a car himself, but he knew how to drive. He tried to open the door and it obliged, and the key was still in the ignition. He knew this was what was wanted; there was no way that such a thing could have happened without it being known. Freud started up the suspensors, slid the car out sideways, and then hit the accelerator.
The car – it was an Audi, Freud noticed subconsciously and he didn’t like Audis – sped along just above ferrocrete of the road. Freud’s hands were sweaty against the steering wheel and he sought to calm himself. The piece was on the seat beside him. If he could get to the star port and aboard the ship that Olympic had brought, then it would have been found. It didn’t matter he was being messed with by a being who could arbitrarily remove almost a billion people from local space/time, Freud knew that Olympic would have taken adequate precautions against that, likely reality hardening and quantum and electrogravity based fields. Possibly Psykers to deal with it should the need arise, though the fluctuations they made in the universe would have negated any attempts at stealth.
Freud was careful none the less. Though Olympic was likely the most intelligent mind in the whole likely group, they were dealing with something from beyond the universe who likely had access to future events and happenings (Freud had seen the reports of encounters with these beings, which had descriptions of them simply touching space and time in multiple places, thus making lots of them). After all, had Olympic not been bested, even after taking pains to make himself not stand out by surrounding himself by Quantum Magicians?
Cambridge Bridge was nearing, it appeared on the Audi’s holomap as a great stretch of orange that would have reached from Dublin to Reykjavik assuming they both still existed on the same planet. Freud slipped through the toll booth, the owner of the car having a few pence removed from his account to pay for the use of the bridge, then pushed the speed up high enough so that it would only take ten minutes or so to cross. Freud settled back into his seat; he was on the home straight now.
Ahead stood a figure and Fred slammed onto the brakes, coming to a halt almost instantly. The great psychoanalyst slumped as the gravity drives on the Audi cut out and the body of the car crashed against the road. The figure stepped around the car with but a single step, then slid through the closed door, sitting down in the passenger seat. He held the folder in his hand, though Freud could see his fingers had passed part way through.
“So, Sigmund.” Said the man. Freud surveyed him and his skin made up of pale, moving letters. “This is your greatest work.” He pulled the paper from within the sealed folder and examined the front page. Freud narrowed his eyebrows; the man had his fingers between pages, yet the stack of papers were not disrupted.
“Yes Tannhauser?” replied Freud, his curiosity piqued by the presence of the subject of his paper.
“Please, call me Tensebone.” The other replied, flicking through the dozens of pages. “So this is the psychoanalytical piece on, what do you call us again . . .” he paused stroking his cheek “Ah, yes, n-Dimensionals. Referring to our presence throughout all places and times, at all times.”
“Do you dislike this name?” Freud questioned; he would have preferred to have Tensebone Tannhauser on a leather couch, he would have liked to have one of his cigars, but this was a chance he could not have passed up. There was no point doing anything else anyway.
“What you decide to call us is your business.” Mused Tanhauser, folding the paper in half. He folded it again “We don’t call ourselves anything, so we don’t have a proper name. I’ve always been fond of god, however.” Tannhauser folded papers in his hand in half again, fingers pinching the crease sharp. His mouth split into a grin, each tooth seeming to be as large as a mountain, the creases in his face deeper than the Mariner trench.
“So you consider yourself God?”
“I’m certainly powerful enough.” Tannhauser folded the paper again four times. “If I so wished I could cause every stellar object in the universe to explode, or do the same to every living being across the whole of space and time. No weapon you currently have, or likely will ever have for that matter, can cause me any harm beyond the localised area of space/time I have chosen to warp and act as my avatar, and even then it would take formidable firepower to do it. At a whim I could remove this galaxy from reality, erase it entirely leaving no trace at all. The universe would not baulk at the sudden loss, for it is my beast to control.”
“You seem very sure of yourself.” Freud commented as Tannhauser folded his piece an eighth time.
“Of course I’m sure.” He laughed softly “I carry the name of a poet, but my words are rarely hyperbole, nor do I see any point in lying like some of my colleagues. It was in your great work, remember?” he held it out as his fingers stretched and folded it in half yet again. “I am not God, or The Maker or Jus’imin or any other deity. Why would I bother with interacting with you like Nonsenso?”
“You’re interacting with me now.” Freud noted as his ‘great work’ was folded again; already it was tiny and dense, though it didn’t stop Tannhauser folding it another time, and another.
“Obviously because I don’t want this getting out.” In his palm sat a tiny mass of white which Tannhauser proceeded to pick up between two fingers and squeeze down to nothingness. “The I Project, among others, is dangerous. The resurrection of historical geniuses for the purposes of your Imperial Commonwealth is dangerous. Albert Einstein produced an opening into one of the upper levels in your Twentieth century; impossible at that level of technological advancement, and yet he did it anyway; you in your own way are capable of understanding even a lifeform such as I and then explaining it others. Did not Bach produce a piece of memgineering that cause almost a hundred percent fatalities in all that hear it?
“What you had written Freud was a work which Olympic intended to use for ends that you wouldn’t want to contemplate. There are ruminations within the Administration; you would know nothing of the Grid Works Project or its by-product, GRENDEL, though you would have contributed to it.” He turned to look at Freud at last, locking gazes with him. Freud’s muscles tightened in response “You’re a brilliant man Sigmund Freud, but to dangerous to be allowed to exist.”
In that moment Freud’s eyes became blank, totally. His universal imprint disappeared completely, all his accumulated knowledge ceasing to exist. Everything that had made up Sigmund Freud’s brilliance, his sheer force of genius that allowed him to bypass the order of the universe, which had allowed for him to be remade into modern society, all gone.
Forever.