2
The Man Who Knew Too Much
Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, among other wonderful books, once said that the library was his church. Nowadays we have many more ways to worship. eBooks and browsing the internet have changed the way we absorb knowledge.
For many people it wouldn’t matter if all that went away. Most folk are happy to be told what to do and how to do it, and are satisfied with a regular paycheck (see: “Unvasion”). But for the rest of us, it’s not sufficient just to know the minimum necessary. We want to know more. We need to know more, even if that particular knowing has no immediate or even potential usefulness. We crave strings of words that when taken as a whole provide us with information, enlightenment, entertainment.
Why, you’re subject to that affliction right now.…
“PSSST … wanna buy some real hard stuff?”
Charlie Fellows paused. It was late, he was on his way home, and the alcove the voice emerged from was very dark. Still, he hesitated. Buying stuff on the street was always chancy. You didn’t know if what you were getting was pure and undiluted or just a cheap knock-off from Taipei or Shanghai. The latter might consist of nothing more than a couple of cursory introductions and a table of contents followed by hours of listings scanned from the local telephone books.
Night damp wafting in off the Pacific teased his lips with a chill burning. He clutched the collar of his coat tighter around his neck. It was cold. The familiar throbbing had already started at the back of his head, demanding attention. Demanding to be fed. A quick glance to left and then right revealed that the narrow side street off University was deserted. Not surprising, at this hour. He licked slightly chapped lips and gave in. Telling himself he could resist the urge never worked.
“What—what’ve you got?”
A thin crescent of Cheshire Cat ivory, the ghost of a grin, appeared in the darkness. Nimble fingers brought forth and manipulated a flat, rectangular, maroon-tinged plastic container that resembled a woman’s oversized compact. A single internal LEP illuminated half a dozen rows of neatly aligned chipets. Each was no bigger than his little fingernail. Charlie eyed them hungrily.
“What did I tell you? All uncontaminated, newly pressed, and unabridged. Straight from the relevant authorized sources.”
Charlie’s eyes widened slightly as he leaned forward to inspect the glistening array. They glittered like miniature Christmas ornaments. He could not conceal his eagerness. “Looks good. Clean. Where’d you get ’em?”
It was the wrong thing to say, and he knew it as soon as he said it. The case snapped shut with a soft airtight pop. “Sorry, man, I guess I had you scoped wrong. You take care now, and …”
Charlie put out an anxious hand to forestall the younger man’s departure. “No, wait—I’m sorry. That was a dumb thing to say.”
“Yeah, it was.” One hand on the alcove’s dark door, the sallow-faced pusher paused.
“It just slipped out.” Desperately, Charlie mustered his most ingratiating smile. “Let me—can I see the stuff again?”
Still hugging the shadows, the pusher performed his own swift street survey. A quick flick of one fingertip and the case reopened. “What’s your pleasure, citizen? What fires your interest?” Despite the tension inherent in the moment, his words floated on an undertone of mild amusement.
Charlie’s response didn’t disappoint. “Everything.”
Nodding, the pusher’s finger traced the air over the shimmering chipets, as if by so doing he could command them to rise from their holding sockets and perform a teasing little dance in midair. He was deliberately making Charlie wait, enjoying the other man’s impatience. “Well now, I got here some natural science, some high-energy physics, a little general geology—but I prefer to specialize, you know? Mostly soft stuff tonight: American Lit, some archetypical anthropological Australian dreamtime studies, collections of arcane Melanesian oral traditions. Also a couple odds and ends.” His hovering finger drifted over one corner of the case. “Maintenance manuals for Harley-Davidson models 1945-2005, the Complete Julia Childs’ French Chef, Frescoes of the Northern Italian Renaissance.” His knowing gaze bored into Charlie. “That last one’s discontinued.”
Charlie nodded eagerly, unable to take his eyes off the magical, gleaming little squares. No gem dealer in a back-alley Jaipur bazaar ever gazed with greater avarice upon an open handkerchief laden with jewels. “You said American Lit. You got Twain, Melville, Hawthorne?”
“Irving, Ferber, Poe—all the biggies. They’re all here.” Withdrawing specialized non-ferrous tweezers from a shirt pocket, he delicately plucked one chip from among the dozens and held it out toward his potential customer. “Have a look. First-class manufacture. Exactly what an authorized prof would use for broadcast.”
Extracting the folding loupe he carried in one pocket, Charlie examined the chipet as best he could in the dim light. The miniscule factory identification markings looked genuine, but could he trust the provenance? His head throbbed. He’d been paid two days ago. He decided to take a chance.
Commerce concluded, the pusher vanished into the night. Charlie made no effort to see which way he went. Already, the freshly minted chipet was burning a hole in his pocket. Fired with expectation, he brushed past a few startled pedestrians on his way home, hardly seeing them. Had they taken the time to study his face, they might have recognized the eager, focused stare of an addict.
Once inside his apartment, the door safely bolted against the outside world, he changed into the terrycloth bathrobe rendered smooth by endless washings, made coffee, and readied himself. Out from its hidden compartment in the wall behind the Vienna Kunstmuseum poster came the eSnood. Working carefully, sensuously, he eased the lightweight plastic helmet with its embedded network of wires and transducers over his head, meticulously fine-tuning the fit. Worn too loose and he might miss whole short stories. Fastened too tight and it would squeeze his ears.
Though the illegal chipet was immediately accepted by the receptacle in the handset controller, he didn’t relax until the familiar warmth began to steal over his thoughts. The pounding at the back of his head eased. The pusher had been as good as his word, as good as Charlie’s money. This was the real thing. Snugging down into the crushed depths of the easy chair, sipping coffee by rote, Charlie lapsed easily and effortlessly into the contented semi-coma of someone soaking up hundreds of mental units via direct induction.
He didn’t quit, he couldn’t quit, until four in the morning, by which time he had absorbed the complete works of every great and numerous minor American fiction writer of the 18th and 19th centuries. Sated, exhausted, he wrestled his head out of the eSnood, staggered to the bedroom, and slept right through until suppertime. It cost him a day at work, but he didn’t care. When queried by his superior, he would claim that illness had laid him low—which was not entirely untrue. It had been a near-perfect assimilation, smooth and virtually painless except for a persistent cramping in his right thigh. He felt the usual exhilaration, the classic thrill, the unmatchable mental high. Of becoming smarter, more erudite.
He had Gained Knowledge.
At work the following day his boss bawled him out good. Illness or no illness, he was told, he should have called in so his division could at least have brought in a temp for the day. Adrift in remembrances of works as diverse yet enthralling as A Voyage to the South Seas, The Headless Horseman, Omoo, and much, much more, Charlie didn’t care. He took note of the stern tongue-lashing with half a mind. The remainder was still luxuriating in the memory of the effortless absorption of knowledge. The glow lasted all week.
By Saturday he needed another hit, and went looking for the pusher.
The chipets that university professors used to distribute material to their students contained enormous quantities of information that were supposed to be doled out gradually, by experts and specialists, in measured doses of information, properly footnoted and annotated. Their contents were not intended even for experienced instructors to absorb all at once. There was real danger involved in doing so; the threat of overloading the cerebral cortex, of swamping the brain’s ability to process raw data.
But because it shouldn’t be done, didn’t mean it couldn’t be.
Soft-spoken and polite, well-educated, a reliable toiler in Menlo Park’s silicon alleys, Charlie Fellows was a knowledge addict. Ever since he had been exposed to the eSnood at a college party and the chipets it broadcast, the non-working portion of his adult life had been given over to learning, finding out, spending time in the acquisition of lore. When the ability to do so only slightly less than instantly, to suck up whole reams of learning overnight, had become scientifically possible if physically dangerous and culturally frowned upon, a small but thriving subculture had sprung up in its wake. Charlie had become an active member of that subculture very early on. It was an obsession he had in common with his closest friends, with Cheryl Chakula and Wayne Moorhead and C.K. Wang and Winona Gibson. Some of them he saw regularly at work, others he knew socially.
Like all of them, he was a knowledge junkie.
If the acquisition of erudition was your be all and end all, if it was your grail, your heart’s desire, then no faster way had ever been devised to achieve it than through the use of the eSnood and the chipets that fueled it. Like information acquired by reading or viewing, once stored in the mind, data derived via inducted chipets stayed put. Charlie’s brain was stuffed, swollen, crammed full of wondrous esoterica gleaned from night after night of reposing in his favorite chair while the eSnood pumped fact after fact through the neurons hiding under his hair. He knew more about salt water aquarium maintenance than any pet store manager. His ability to delineate the formulae for common sugars and proteins was the equal of innumerable highly-paid chemists on the payroll of Betty Crocker and Duncan Hines. He could recite quatrains whole and entire from medieval French poetry and discourse learnedly on the mechanics of moon rockets as well as bicycles. Only two dilemmas marred his artificially acquired scholarly bliss.
It wasn’t enough. Ever.
And when he wasn’t learning, his head began to hurt.
It was not as if no warnings existed. Every chipet manufactured for industrial or university use carried imprinted upon it in microscopic font the standard caveat: “The Surgeon General has warned that the assimilation of too much knowledge too rapidly can be hazardous to your health.” At least once a week one of the major newscasts carried the story of some poor soul dead of an overdose on Proust or Hawking, African agricultural statistics or an attempt to digest the entire Mahabharata in one evening’s sitting. What was news to the uncurious was not news to Charlie. He knew the risks from personal experience.
Just last year, his friend and company co-worker Dexter Ashburn had o.d’ed right on his florid and floral living room couch halfway through Manley’s Guide to the Echinoderms of the Western Pacific. Sheree LeMars was still in rehab, recovering from an ill-conceived attempt to mainline The Complete Fashions of the English Court: 1600-2000. And then there was the sad, bad case of little Chesley Waycross. He was still recovering from the beating he’d received from a disgruntled customer. Ches’ had tried to trade straight up for a copy of Barrington’s Ornithology of Brazil and Venezuela with an unperused bootleg of The Complete Literature of 16th century Tibet. Unfortunately, the chipet Chesley had offered in exchange had been bogus: there was no literature in 16th century Tibet. His enraged client had netted nothing but a standard pornset compilation; common, cheap, and useless. He’d taken out his anger and frustration on the unknowing Waycross.
One had to tread carefully on the street of knowledge.
Why not stop? he had once been challenged by an ex-girlfriend. Stop learning, he had replied? One might as well stop breathing. Hadn’t Erasmus (whose complete writings Charlie had inhaled one night on a beautiful day in May) said that “To stop learning is to start to die”? Sure it was so, she had agreed, but with the eSnood and a tsunami of chipets, wasn’t the reverse true?
Charlie didn’t care. He only knew that from the time he had been old enough to read, the pursuit of knowledge had been the principal driving force in his life. If only we lived for thousand years or so there might be no need to try and cram so much information into so little time, he knew. But humans did not live for a thousand years. If you wanted to learn a little bit, a minimally respectable amount, really learn, then direct induction was the only way.
Ignorance could not be borne. It was unthinkable. Like his friends and fellow addicts, it wasn’t simply that Charlie wanted to know. He had to know. Needed to know. Needed knowledge as urgently as he needed food, or water, or air. Otherwise, what was the meaning of life? Gobbling hamburgers and watching football? Mindless reproduction and the acquisition of false wealth? Far better to grasp the intricacies of diatom skeletons, the taxonomy of Southeast Asian flowers, the workings of the Aurora or the mysteries of zydeco music. So what if it killed you, eventually, by overloading your cranial capacity?
At least you would die knowing something.
They caught up with him eventually. If he’d moved away, he very likely would have escaped arrest, trial, incarceration, and imprisonment. But he loved where he lived, he liked his job, and besides, the best stuff was always to be found in the vicinity of major universities. Stanford was no exception. Given the scope of his personal chipet inventory and the extent of his addiction, the judge threw the book at him. This was not necessary, since he had long since inducted the complete civil code of the State of California. It did not help his defense, however.
He was sent to the Northern California Center for the Treatment of the Data Addicted, in Monterey. There, when he wasn’t in lockdown and forced to watch endless hours of mind-purifying daytime television, he wandered the halls in the company of fellow compulsives: lapsed physicists from the heavily addicted part of Pasadena that bordered Cal-Tech, dour-faced recreational users caught hiding out with volumes of Balzac and African healer texts up in Humboldt County, softly mumbling immigrant programmers from Uttar Pradesh and Canton and Singapore. Shared verbalized snatches of Rabelais and Einstein and Cosell filled the hallways, repeated by the desperate inmates as self-sustaining mantras, but it wasn’t enough, not near enough, to satisfy the information-starved like himself.
It was almost as tough as being forced to go cold turkey. In addition to television, the presence of daily newspapers, weekly magazines, and internet access provided the merest dribble of data, the feeblest kind of mental methadone. To someone used to ingesting the complete works of Shakespeare or Mammals of Eastern Russia or Statistical Digest of Nebraska in a few hours, it was the cerebral equivalent of providing nothing to drink for months on end but distilled water to a community comprised of seventy-year old Scotsmen.
Charlie pleaded. He wept, he raged, he implored. It was no use. Newspapers, magazines, tv, internet was all that was supplied. Information presented in the traditional manner: to the brain via the eyes, slowly, oh so slowly.
He got better. Withdrawal was painful, but he got better. Gradually he re-learned how to read a magazine: how to skip the advertisements, block out the irrelevant, and concentrate on the articles only. How to handle a newspaper again without avidly devouring the obituaries or the columns of sports statistics or the innumerable but still educational want ads. How to watch and enjoy television without—well, without doing much of anything. Slowly, he could feel his brain softening to something like tapioca pudding normal. The process of rehabilitation was made easier because during it all he retained everything he had absorbed through the use of his now confiscated eSnood and precious, priceless, irreplaceable chipets. He did not lose information already acquired; at least, no more than was typical. In data rehab, some leakage was inevitable.
When they felt he was sufficiently cured, they returned him to society. He was welcomed back at his job, for despite his boss’s occasional outbursts, Charlie was regarded as a fine, competent worker who excelled at his craft and would willingly work long hours. Besides, by now everyone knew that he had been sick. He went about his daily activities with a new serenity, the result of the best treatment the State could provide. He went about them for weeks, and then for months, without a relapse. Went about them until he was sure he was no longer being monitored by the local police data division of Narcotics.
Only then did he once more begin to venture out to his old, familiar haunts in response to the lure of pure, undiluted, concentrated knowledge. His first buy since getting out of rehab was a wondrous compilation of the lives of the Mughals, translated from the original Sanskrit. Nestling back in his chair, the newly purchased, battered, but still serviceable second-hand eSnood resting awkwardly but satisfactorily on his head, he let himself lapse all over again into the sumptuous, sensuous sensation of effortlessly absorbing erudition. Of learning far faster than he ever could by the ancient eyescan method called reading. Of becoming more knowing. It might kill him, but he didn’t care. We all die eventually anyway. Only, some of us die knowing more than others.
In a way, he felt badly for the authorities. All the courses of treatment they had devised, all the expensive programs and curriculum that had been developed with an eye toward curing the afflicted, couldn’t really treat the root causes of the problem. Once one has become truly, madly, deeply addicted to the acquisition of knowledge, nothing else really satisfies. It was like any true craving: the more you have, the more you want. For the first time, where knowledge was concerned, the eSnood made it possible to completely indulge that compulsion.
It was mid-morning when old Aurangzeb, the last of the Mughals, finally passed into history and into the repository of Charlie Fellows’ memory. With a languid sigh of complete satisfaction that bordered on the prurient, Charlie blinked and tenderly removed the plasticized network of induction contacts from his head. A glance at the clock showed that he had missed another day of work. He didn’t care. He now knew all about Akbar and Shah Jahan and their most interesting ilk, and felt much the better for it. The more knowledgeable. The pounding at the back of his head was no worse than tolerable. He felt fine. Infused. Educated. There was only one problem. As always. As there ever would be.
He was still thirsty.