The dude was wearing some sort of hard-sided pack on his back with lots of blinky lights and a thick tube coming out the bottom that connected with a thick wand he held in both hands. He wasn’t wearing a costume or anything, just jeans and a t-shirt; the pack made him look like he’d just mugged a ghostbuster.
Getting closer, it was obvious that the pack was homemade -- parts if it were held together with duct tape, especially around the joints that connected the tube to the wand; and it was also clear that it wasn’t just an art piece. There was a level of complexity in it that somehow made it obvious that this was a working device, that all the little bits of it were there for a reason.
He was walking down Market street, just sort of meandering. So was I; it was my day off, and I had been trying to figure out what to do today and of course if you just meander downhill long enough you end up on Market, so there I was, following this guy through the weekend crowds of tourists and shoppers.
It took a minute to realize it, because he was being really cagey, but he was shooting people with the wand. He’d aim it at someone for a minute, seem to be watching them... then move on. Every now and then, he’d fiddle with the buttons on the wand and then aim at them some more.
When he turned to follow someone he was aiming at, I got a look at his face; he was wearing Google Glass, with some sort of umbilical leading from the temple of the Glass back down to his pack. The pack and the wand were giving him some sort of feedback about the people he was aiming at, and his pushing-buttons routine was dictated by whatever feedback he was getting.
Of course, by this time, randomly wandering had turned into following the guy with the Proton Pack. I spent maybe an hour getting an idea of his MO: he would walk down the street, waving the wand around in what I thought of as Wide Scan mode, until he found someone interesting; a tourist here, a homeless person there, one of three teenaged girls walking down the street eating frozen yogurt... then he’d switch to Intense Scan mode, where he followed that person with the wand for a bit.
This was a tricky time to be following him, because most of the time the person he was scanning would be walking toward him (and me), and he’d change directions to follow them; so at this point I had to pretend not to be following him all of a sudden. I got to practice watching him in the reflections of shop windows and pretend to be taking a lot of selfies.
When he’d Intense Scanned the Person of Interest for long enough, he’d usually switch to Zap Mode: He held down a particular button while aiming the wand at the person, and watch something on his Google Glass until it told him he was done. Then he’d hit a series of buttons and be back in Wide Scan mode.
The people he Intense Scanned and Zapped were interesting. All of them stood out in some way; they were people I might have people-watched, had I not been following my Interesting Person Buster down the street. The teenaged girl he’d taken notice of had blue hair and facial piercings and was talking animatedly, throwing her hands around. A tourist he followed was weirdly twitchy, clutching a paper map and constantly looking from it to the people around him like he was trying to figure out which of them constituted landmarks or tourist attractions. And our guy was really interested in homeless people; he scanned the hell out of them.
Sometimes, he’d zero in on someone and Intense Scan them but then refrain from Zapping them. Paying attention to those people was interesting for a while: they all seemed to be Interesting People but when you looked closely, they were going about their business in a more or less normal way.
So, the theory I developed was something like this: the guy with the Proton Pack was just people watching, like me, except that he had built himself a People Watching Prop: he was playing some sort of game involving finding the most interesting people and paying attention to them.
Then the thing with the street preacher happened.
We were walking past the Powell Street turnaround, where the cable cars reach the end of their line and the driver and conductor get out and push the car around its turntable before loading up with more tourists to head up to Fisherman’s Wharf. There was a street preacher taking advantage of the long line for the cable car to deliver a sermon on the evils of homosexuality and the sin of whatever.
He had a whole display set up with signs and graphs and things purporting to prove his point about society being hell-bound; it had lurid pictures of demons waving rainbow flags and big blocks of texts with biblical citations.
The preacher was finely attuned to people seeming to pay attention to him; as soon as Proton Pack guy started watching him, he shifted focus and started preaching right at him, waving his bible at him.
Proton Pack guy dialed in his wand on the preacher and Zapped the hell out of him; and the street preacher stopped in mid-exhortation, let his bible fall to his side, and peered around like he was confused. He mumbled some sort of excuse about needing to be somewhere and he just left, leaving his signage standing there on the sidewalk.
The Proton Pack guy grinned a shy little “success!” grin, then turned and trudged up the street, back in scanning mode.
Not long after the thing with the street preacher, Proton Pack guy took a break for lunch. He ordered a sandwich from a little cafe and sat down at an outside table, watching as people walked past. He unlimbered the Proton Pack and set it down next to him on the sidewalk; he had to take the Glass off because it was umbilicalled to the pack.
Without the Proton Pack, the dude was remarkably normal looking. Good looking if generic face, broad, soft features and a short I-don’t-think-about-my-hair-very-much haircut, t-shirt fitted enough to show off a body that had seen regular physical exercise in the recent past, white sneakers. Just some guy, except for that proton pack.
I was sort of bored with following him around at this point now. I was still really curious about him, but having sussed out his modus operandi and watched him cary it out over and over and over again, I was ready to stop.
So I sat down at the table with him and smiled. He seemed taken aback.
“Hi,” I said, “I’m people watching today, and I couldn’t help noticing you.” He blinked a couple of times. “I was just wondering if I could ask you about your....” I waved at the pack. “Your device.”
He nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “It’s pretty crazy looking, right?”
I nodded. “Well, I don’t know about crazy,” I said. “It’s certainly interesting looking.”
He smiled at it. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to miniaturize it,” he said, “So it’s not quite so noticeable, but this is the best I’ve been able to do so far.” He kept looking at it as he talked. “The first version needed a car, so I’m at least a little bit beyond that.” He sighed. “I don’t get a lot of battery life out of it, I’m going to have to knock off and go charge it now.”
I nodded, following along amiably. “So what is it?”
He looked up at me sharply, then quickly away, then back at me. “Are you a reporter?” He started touching the tips of his fingers with his thumb. “Or do you work for any sort of law-enforcement agency?”
“No,” I said. “I...”
“Medical or psychiatric practitioner or oversight? Political appointee or...”
“I’m a tech guy, I work for a startup. Doing social media stuff,” I said, in case he thought I was going to try and steal his ideas or something. “I’m just interested in it, I’m not trying to...” I waved my hands. “Regulate you, or stop you.”
“Okay,” he said. He seemed less than satisfied, but at the same time like he wanted to talk about it. He ran his hand through his hair.
“You know what an MRI is, yeah?”
I nodded. “Scans brains,” I said.
He nodded back. “Among other things,” he said. “I used to work in medical imaging, for a big biomedical company. We were working on using radio imaging to do the same things as you can do with MRIs. Basically, we wanted to make it so you didn’t need a big room full of dangerous, expensive magnets to get good imaging.”
“Okay,” I said. He was making sense, so far as I knew; I didn’t know enough about imaging to know if he was bullshitting me, or talking crazy.
“So, one of the things we had to control for is that the frequencies that let us get good imaging were right alongside a set of frequencies that would actually interfere with brain function, mess with the electrical signal pathways in the brain. Turned out, it was pretty easy to fuck someone up while you were trying to scan them.
“So we got shut down. Too much liability. But it had occurred to some of us that, you know, if you could tune the thing, you could use it to adjust brain function, rather than just randomly fuck it up.”
I had a bad feeling about where this was going. “So, sort of a radio scalpel? Doing thought surgery?”
“Yeah,” he said, “Sort of. The thing is, brains are really complicated; it would take... you couldn’t just do it by sight, you have to make a map of the brain, then analyze for functional structures, and then figure out the...”
“So it would have to be a computer program,” I said. “You’d use software to find... tangles, problems, and then target those...”
He was nodding. “Exactly,” he said. “You can figure out how people’s thought processes are fucked, and you can untangle them. It’s a little bit crude still, but for people with big, obvious mental problems...”
“So you can cure mental illness,” I said. “Just... zap someone, and make them sane.”
“Um,” he said. “It’s not that simple. Mental illness is a... complicated thing. Some of them are hormonal or physical structure problems, and I can’t do much about that... but a lot of them are just... bad wiring. Information theory glitches, so to speak. And I can’t wire them... correctly, maybe, but I can at least unfuck them enough that people have a chance to rebuild functional structures...”
“So you’re walking around fucking with people’s brains on Market Street.”
He thought about it, and nodded.
Sandwiches came. I ate mine in silence, thinking about what he’d said. I believed him; it totally matched with what I’d seem him doing. It certainly explained the street preacher.
It didn’t sit well with me. I mean... yes, good, cure the mentally ill. But I knew enough to think that maybe... I don’t know, it seemed like you ought to be doing this stuff in a controlled environment, yes? Not just zapping people. And...
And really, what was a mental illness? That preacher had believed, strongly, in whatever it was he was talking about; it defined who he was. And now Proton Pack guy had zapped it right out of him.
He was a different person, because the Proton Pack had rejiggered his brain.
I looked up at the dude. He was watching me finish my sandwich.
“You don’t approve,” he said.
“I...” I stopped, looked around. “I have ethical reservations,” I said.
He nodded, folding up all the napkins and other sandwich paraphenalia into his little red tray. “I understand,” he said. “I have some myself. But I don’t think I can just... let it go. The FDA is never going to approve this device, it’s too scary; but I can’t let people just keep walking around being crazy.”
“Yeah, but...” I was still wrestling with my first impressions. “I can’t... you can’t just change people to fit some societal ideal of brain function, without even talking to them about it...”
He stood up, picked up the pack and began wrestling it back onto his back. “Crazy people can’t give consent,” he said. “You have to fix them before you can ask them if they want to be fixed.”
“Yeah,” I said, “That’s kind of the point, they can’t give consent, so...”
I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to watch where he was aiming that damned wand. I guess I just assumed he was going through some sort of calibration process, checking that it worked or whatever, getting it back up in working order; but I looked up at him just as he said, “Sorry about this, but talking to you was a mistake.”
I don’t know how I got back to my apartment. I know I didn’t remember anything about that day when I woke up in the morning; and I know I made a series of poor judgement calls over the next several months, my behavior getting progressively more erratic. I hung onto my job, but just barely.
I could still function, but I wasn’t really trusted to make independent decisions anymore; I had mood swings and memory problems. I couldn’t even really tell what was going on, either, or really that something was going on. My thinking was just fucked.
And then one day I was wandering around on Market street, and it was like a fog lifted from my brain. One second my thoughts were going a thousand miles an hour in all directions, completely out of control, and then...
Then I was suddenly calm, lucid, and... back to normal. A normal I hadn’t even realized wasn’t there. I stood there in the middle of the sidewalk, feeling stupid and slow, because when your thoughts are a maelstrom of fizzing inspiration and connection, the sudden shifting of gears into orderly, rational process feels like going slower.
The Proton Pack was visible, blinkenlights and all, as the guy turned away from me and began scanning again. I remembered... I had talked to that guy before... I...
It took a week for everything to slide back into place. I don’t know if this was some sort of fucked-up object lesson, being taught about metal illness and how debilitating it can be and how curing it is an imperative... or if Proton Pack Guy just didn’t recognize me, just saw a broken brain in his scans and fixed it.
I’m not sure what I plan to do about it, either. Writing it down is sort of my attempt to work out how I feel about the experience. I feel like I should go find Proton Pack Guy and... I don’t know, get him arrested or something; but at the same time...
At the same time, Market Street is full of crazy people; and if they can all have the experience I had, that moment of waking up...
I don’t know.
Getting closer, it was obvious that the pack was homemade -- parts if it were held together with duct tape, especially around the joints that connected the tube to the wand; and it was also clear that it wasn’t just an art piece. There was a level of complexity in it that somehow made it obvious that this was a working device, that all the little bits of it were there for a reason.
He was walking down Market street, just sort of meandering. So was I; it was my day off, and I had been trying to figure out what to do today and of course if you just meander downhill long enough you end up on Market, so there I was, following this guy through the weekend crowds of tourists and shoppers.
It took a minute to realize it, because he was being really cagey, but he was shooting people with the wand. He’d aim it at someone for a minute, seem to be watching them... then move on. Every now and then, he’d fiddle with the buttons on the wand and then aim at them some more.
When he turned to follow someone he was aiming at, I got a look at his face; he was wearing Google Glass, with some sort of umbilical leading from the temple of the Glass back down to his pack. The pack and the wand were giving him some sort of feedback about the people he was aiming at, and his pushing-buttons routine was dictated by whatever feedback he was getting.
Of course, by this time, randomly wandering had turned into following the guy with the Proton Pack. I spent maybe an hour getting an idea of his MO: he would walk down the street, waving the wand around in what I thought of as Wide Scan mode, until he found someone interesting; a tourist here, a homeless person there, one of three teenaged girls walking down the street eating frozen yogurt... then he’d switch to Intense Scan mode, where he followed that person with the wand for a bit.
This was a tricky time to be following him, because most of the time the person he was scanning would be walking toward him (and me), and he’d change directions to follow them; so at this point I had to pretend not to be following him all of a sudden. I got to practice watching him in the reflections of shop windows and pretend to be taking a lot of selfies.
When he’d Intense Scanned the Person of Interest for long enough, he’d usually switch to Zap Mode: He held down a particular button while aiming the wand at the person, and watch something on his Google Glass until it told him he was done. Then he’d hit a series of buttons and be back in Wide Scan mode.
The people he Intense Scanned and Zapped were interesting. All of them stood out in some way; they were people I might have people-watched, had I not been following my Interesting Person Buster down the street. The teenaged girl he’d taken notice of had blue hair and facial piercings and was talking animatedly, throwing her hands around. A tourist he followed was weirdly twitchy, clutching a paper map and constantly looking from it to the people around him like he was trying to figure out which of them constituted landmarks or tourist attractions. And our guy was really interested in homeless people; he scanned the hell out of them.
Sometimes, he’d zero in on someone and Intense Scan them but then refrain from Zapping them. Paying attention to those people was interesting for a while: they all seemed to be Interesting People but when you looked closely, they were going about their business in a more or less normal way.
So, the theory I developed was something like this: the guy with the Proton Pack was just people watching, like me, except that he had built himself a People Watching Prop: he was playing some sort of game involving finding the most interesting people and paying attention to them.
Then the thing with the street preacher happened.
We were walking past the Powell Street turnaround, where the cable cars reach the end of their line and the driver and conductor get out and push the car around its turntable before loading up with more tourists to head up to Fisherman’s Wharf. There was a street preacher taking advantage of the long line for the cable car to deliver a sermon on the evils of homosexuality and the sin of whatever.
He had a whole display set up with signs and graphs and things purporting to prove his point about society being hell-bound; it had lurid pictures of demons waving rainbow flags and big blocks of texts with biblical citations.
The preacher was finely attuned to people seeming to pay attention to him; as soon as Proton Pack guy started watching him, he shifted focus and started preaching right at him, waving his bible at him.
Proton Pack guy dialed in his wand on the preacher and Zapped the hell out of him; and the street preacher stopped in mid-exhortation, let his bible fall to his side, and peered around like he was confused. He mumbled some sort of excuse about needing to be somewhere and he just left, leaving his signage standing there on the sidewalk.
The Proton Pack guy grinned a shy little “success!” grin, then turned and trudged up the street, back in scanning mode.
Not long after the thing with the street preacher, Proton Pack guy took a break for lunch. He ordered a sandwich from a little cafe and sat down at an outside table, watching as people walked past. He unlimbered the Proton Pack and set it down next to him on the sidewalk; he had to take the Glass off because it was umbilicalled to the pack.
Without the Proton Pack, the dude was remarkably normal looking. Good looking if generic face, broad, soft features and a short I-don’t-think-about-my-hair-very-much haircut, t-shirt fitted enough to show off a body that had seen regular physical exercise in the recent past, white sneakers. Just some guy, except for that proton pack.
I was sort of bored with following him around at this point now. I was still really curious about him, but having sussed out his modus operandi and watched him cary it out over and over and over again, I was ready to stop.
So I sat down at the table with him and smiled. He seemed taken aback.
“Hi,” I said, “I’m people watching today, and I couldn’t help noticing you.” He blinked a couple of times. “I was just wondering if I could ask you about your....” I waved at the pack. “Your device.”
He nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “It’s pretty crazy looking, right?”
I nodded. “Well, I don’t know about crazy,” I said. “It’s certainly interesting looking.”
He smiled at it. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to miniaturize it,” he said, “So it’s not quite so noticeable, but this is the best I’ve been able to do so far.” He kept looking at it as he talked. “The first version needed a car, so I’m at least a little bit beyond that.” He sighed. “I don’t get a lot of battery life out of it, I’m going to have to knock off and go charge it now.”
I nodded, following along amiably. “So what is it?”
He looked up at me sharply, then quickly away, then back at me. “Are you a reporter?” He started touching the tips of his fingers with his thumb. “Or do you work for any sort of law-enforcement agency?”
“No,” I said. “I...”
“Medical or psychiatric practitioner or oversight? Political appointee or...”
“I’m a tech guy, I work for a startup. Doing social media stuff,” I said, in case he thought I was going to try and steal his ideas or something. “I’m just interested in it, I’m not trying to...” I waved my hands. “Regulate you, or stop you.”
“Okay,” he said. He seemed less than satisfied, but at the same time like he wanted to talk about it. He ran his hand through his hair.
“You know what an MRI is, yeah?”
I nodded. “Scans brains,” I said.
He nodded back. “Among other things,” he said. “I used to work in medical imaging, for a big biomedical company. We were working on using radio imaging to do the same things as you can do with MRIs. Basically, we wanted to make it so you didn’t need a big room full of dangerous, expensive magnets to get good imaging.”
“Okay,” I said. He was making sense, so far as I knew; I didn’t know enough about imaging to know if he was bullshitting me, or talking crazy.
“So, one of the things we had to control for is that the frequencies that let us get good imaging were right alongside a set of frequencies that would actually interfere with brain function, mess with the electrical signal pathways in the brain. Turned out, it was pretty easy to fuck someone up while you were trying to scan them.
“So we got shut down. Too much liability. But it had occurred to some of us that, you know, if you could tune the thing, you could use it to adjust brain function, rather than just randomly fuck it up.”
I had a bad feeling about where this was going. “So, sort of a radio scalpel? Doing thought surgery?”
“Yeah,” he said, “Sort of. The thing is, brains are really complicated; it would take... you couldn’t just do it by sight, you have to make a map of the brain, then analyze for functional structures, and then figure out the...”
“So it would have to be a computer program,” I said. “You’d use software to find... tangles, problems, and then target those...”
He was nodding. “Exactly,” he said. “You can figure out how people’s thought processes are fucked, and you can untangle them. It’s a little bit crude still, but for people with big, obvious mental problems...”
“So you can cure mental illness,” I said. “Just... zap someone, and make them sane.”
“Um,” he said. “It’s not that simple. Mental illness is a... complicated thing. Some of them are hormonal or physical structure problems, and I can’t do much about that... but a lot of them are just... bad wiring. Information theory glitches, so to speak. And I can’t wire them... correctly, maybe, but I can at least unfuck them enough that people have a chance to rebuild functional structures...”
“So you’re walking around fucking with people’s brains on Market Street.”
He thought about it, and nodded.
Sandwiches came. I ate mine in silence, thinking about what he’d said. I believed him; it totally matched with what I’d seem him doing. It certainly explained the street preacher.
It didn’t sit well with me. I mean... yes, good, cure the mentally ill. But I knew enough to think that maybe... I don’t know, it seemed like you ought to be doing this stuff in a controlled environment, yes? Not just zapping people. And...
And really, what was a mental illness? That preacher had believed, strongly, in whatever it was he was talking about; it defined who he was. And now Proton Pack guy had zapped it right out of him.
He was a different person, because the Proton Pack had rejiggered his brain.
I looked up at the dude. He was watching me finish my sandwich.
“You don’t approve,” he said.
“I...” I stopped, looked around. “I have ethical reservations,” I said.
He nodded, folding up all the napkins and other sandwich paraphenalia into his little red tray. “I understand,” he said. “I have some myself. But I don’t think I can just... let it go. The FDA is never going to approve this device, it’s too scary; but I can’t let people just keep walking around being crazy.”
“Yeah, but...” I was still wrestling with my first impressions. “I can’t... you can’t just change people to fit some societal ideal of brain function, without even talking to them about it...”
He stood up, picked up the pack and began wrestling it back onto his back. “Crazy people can’t give consent,” he said. “You have to fix them before you can ask them if they want to be fixed.”
“Yeah,” I said, “That’s kind of the point, they can’t give consent, so...”
I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to watch where he was aiming that damned wand. I guess I just assumed he was going through some sort of calibration process, checking that it worked or whatever, getting it back up in working order; but I looked up at him just as he said, “Sorry about this, but talking to you was a mistake.”
I don’t know how I got back to my apartment. I know I didn’t remember anything about that day when I woke up in the morning; and I know I made a series of poor judgement calls over the next several months, my behavior getting progressively more erratic. I hung onto my job, but just barely.
I could still function, but I wasn’t really trusted to make independent decisions anymore; I had mood swings and memory problems. I couldn’t even really tell what was going on, either, or really that something was going on. My thinking was just fucked.
And then one day I was wandering around on Market street, and it was like a fog lifted from my brain. One second my thoughts were going a thousand miles an hour in all directions, completely out of control, and then...
Then I was suddenly calm, lucid, and... back to normal. A normal I hadn’t even realized wasn’t there. I stood there in the middle of the sidewalk, feeling stupid and slow, because when your thoughts are a maelstrom of fizzing inspiration and connection, the sudden shifting of gears into orderly, rational process feels like going slower.
The Proton Pack was visible, blinkenlights and all, as the guy turned away from me and began scanning again. I remembered... I had talked to that guy before... I...
It took a week for everything to slide back into place. I don’t know if this was some sort of fucked-up object lesson, being taught about metal illness and how debilitating it can be and how curing it is an imperative... or if Proton Pack Guy just didn’t recognize me, just saw a broken brain in his scans and fixed it.
I’m not sure what I plan to do about it, either. Writing it down is sort of my attempt to work out how I feel about the experience. I feel like I should go find Proton Pack Guy and... I don’t know, get him arrested or something; but at the same time...
At the same time, Market Street is full of crazy people; and if they can all have the experience I had, that moment of waking up...
I don’t know.
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