Chapter 1 Freak Show is a Half Square

0.00	INTRODUCTION

“Doctor Delta: This is the most dangerous meme in the transcript.  The virulence level is very dangerous (6.45).  The meme is also highly contagious (7.4).  The reader may consider not reading this section of the transcript.  Follow memetic infection countermeasures immediately after reading this session.  Infected hosts fall into a nihilistic depression and require immediate treatment or the condition will become permanent.

FS: Yeah, the life stages of God are the big determinant of the overall pattern of the universe and have a direct impact on the macrostructure of the universe.  The fusion of cosmology and theology is an understanding of the life stages of God but you left out the Anti-God.

DG: The Anti-God?

FS: Sure, each new Big Bang tends to create a duplicate of the last universe but randomness enters into every system and the duplicate is just a little bit different than the last universe.  This is because nothing is certain.

DG: That’s for sure.

FS: I don’t mean this as some sort of saying but that literally nothing is certain.  A fundamental property of being is uncertainty. 

DG: Huh?

FS: This is the materialistic basis of the existential statement that existence precedes essence.  The only way you get certainty is to stick with nothingness.  Each time the universe is reborn there is a chance that a slightly different God will be reborn that just isn’t into the whole cosmic density management mission. 

DG: So you think this can happen?

FS: God like every being generally wants to survive and have progeny.  In the case of God having progeny means taking on the whole cosmic density management mission and making sure there is a duplicate of him in the next universe but there might be God that doesn’t want to have progeny and just wants to have fun. 

DG: A slacker God.

FS: Right but a lazy God that doesn’t want progeny isn’t so bad since after billions and billions of Big Bangs life will emerge again randomly and the process will start all over again.  What you need to watch out for is an Anti-God. 

DG: Anti-God?  Sounds heavy.  What does this Anti-God do?

FS: It is heavy.  The Anti-God decides its just time to end the whole Big Bang nonsense and use cosmic density management to make sure there are no more Big Bangs or being of any sort and just end the whole thing i.e. follow the credo “nothing is certain” to it’s logical extreme. 

DG: Literally cosmic suicide. 

FS: Right, Old man God invariably has these suicidal thoughts as his body i.e. the universe starts to contract during the last 10 billion years of the universe but generally dismisses such thoughts.

DG: So the universe will ultimately end?

FS: Maybe, but since God is a survivor and this is sort of the essence of the personality of God, the emergence of the Anti-God is very unlikely.  Unfortunately, it takes billions upon billions of Gods to keep the living universe going.  It only takes one Anti-God to stop the whole show. ” 

Dear Reader,

Has the above excerpt from this document left you totally confused?  Okay, here is the explanation; a graduate school classmate gave me the manuscript you now hold in your hands.  We were fellow graduate students at Texas A&M University were we both received a Master’s.   We were taking a class in educational psychology about learning theory.  I was getting a Master’s of English with a specialization in TESOL.  Gamma was getting some sort of educational psychology master’s and was the favorite student of the teacher, a Dr. Castle.  A very intelligent and attractive professor but that is neither here nor there.

My classmate went on to get a doctorate in psychology at Harvard.  I was under the impression from reports, by fellow classmates, that he had a brilliant, if slightly mysterious career in psychology.  He worked at some sort of military think tank in San Antonio.  Years later, my classmate arrived at my apartment talking wildly about some sort of conspiracy and gave me a floppy disc that contained this manuscript.  I teach English as a foreign language (EFL) at a university in Taipei, Taiwan.  Taiwan is fairly far away from the US and I was very surprised my friend came all the way out to Taipei in order to see me.  He explained that he came to Taipei in order to put some distance between himself and his mysterious pursuers.  I share this manuscript in the hope that the truth of the nature of this manuscript is eventually discovered.

I have no idea if this Dr. Delta is a real person or a delusion of my friend Gamma.  As soon as I got the document I did use Google to try to find the Meta-psychology Institute and found a site dealing with the institute but the computer immediately shut down.  I turned the computer back on and when I tried to revisit the site I got a 404-error message.  I have no idea whatsoever what a 404-error message means.  The first Google search yielded about ten references to meta-psychology.  A second search using Google was fruitless.  All references to meta-psychology that showed up in my first search had disappeared by the time I did my second search.  Gamma is of course not the real name of my friend but he wanted me to use this code name and I have decided to respect his wishes.  The document follows a transcript format and I have gone ahead and added notes I made as I read the document.  The document is not always the easiest read but I assure the reader well worth the time and trouble.  There are many interesting and novel ideas in this document.  I am positive there is no such thing as memetic infection or a memetic infection control law.  I would ignore the warning against reading the document without appropriate security clearance.  I would also skip the memetic infection counter measures nonsense at the end of each chapter.

Hugh Fox III

YOU MUST HAVE AN APPROPRIATE SECURITY CLEARANCE LEVEL TO POSSESS OR READ THIS DOCUMENT.  IF YOU DO NOT HAVE SUCH CLEARANCE THEN IMMEDIATELY STOP READING THIS DOCUMENT AND CONTACT THE FBI.  FAILURE TO FOLLOWS THESE INSTRUCTIONS MAY LEAD TO PROSECUTION UNDER SECTION 3.33 OF THE MEMETIC INFECTION CONTROL ACT.

Dear Colleague,

The following document is a transcript of meta-psychology sessions with the mental patient code named Freak Show.  Both the patient and therapist used code names, during therapy, as is the custom of our institute due to security concerns.  Both patient and therapist picked their own code names in order to foster a sense of empowerment.  The therapist picked the name “Gamma” because he was a fan of the comic book hero known as the “Incredible Hulk” and Gamma rays were the source of the Hulk’s strength.  The patient picked the name Freak Show since he felt he was a freak and a show.  A standard release form signed prior to therapy by both the patient and therapist gave me permission to release the transcripts of their sessions for publication.  The real names of the therapist and patient are being withheld due to issues of confidentiality.  I picked the code name Delta due to my respect and admiration of the Delta Force that defends our nation from terrorism.

I was a meta-psychologist.  A meta-psychologist is a specialist.  Some patients routinely cause their therapists to lose their reality orientation and this was the case with Freak Show.  A meta-psychologist treats the untreatable.  As the leading institute in meta-psychopathology, we were asked to treat the patient.  Two social trends have caused an increase in meta-psychopathology disorders.  Post-modern society has spawned a relativistic orientation towards reality and the line between sanity and insanity has become blurred.  More and more patients use memetic knowledge consciously or unconsciously to infect their therapists.

Estimates suggest that at current rates, fifty percent of all health professionals will experience a critical meta-psychopathology incident at some point in their professional career by the year 2020.  This in turn will cause a melt down of the entire mental health care system and the war between sanity and insanity will be lost and the insane will rule the world.  Nevertheless, patients that infect health professionals must be treated.  The suggestion that patients suffering from meta-psychopathologies should be terminated is too radical and unprofessional.  However, there is an obvious need to employ health care experts that are resistant to infection.  I was the Director of the Institute of Meta-psychopathology.

The patient suffered from the particular disorder of meta-schizophrenia.  A meta-schizophrenic causes the therapist to become schizophrenic.  Freak Show had already infected three other therapists that had worked with him.  Two of the therapists had level two training in memetic countermeasures but this was obviously not sufficient to protect them from infection.  Dr. Gamma has level six training.  Level six is the highest level of training currently available from the Atlanta Center for Disease Control.

The patient claimed in his own words that he was telling the true story of the offspring of a sexual union between a Homo erectus male and a Homo sapien female.  The patient claimed he was originally from what he called a Square Earth and that he had been reborn on a non-Square Earth i.e. our Earth via macro recycling.  The patient defined macro recycling as a process whereby a person was reborn from a prior Big Bang cycle to a current Big Bang cycle at the approximate same point of development of the latter Big Bang cycle.  According to the patient, such a person may or may not remember events from the other Earth.  I know this description is very confusing but dealing with Freak Show was always a confusing experience.  The most disturbing aspect of Freak Show was that he started to make sense despite my level six training.

The transcripts have been edited for purposes of clarity and confidentiality.  I titled the sessions in order to reflect the central theme of that session.  The sections have also been broken down into topical subsections.  In the transcripts Dr. Gamma has been abbreviated to DG.  Freak Show has been abbreviated to FS.

Your professional opinion is valued and any suggestions as to how to deal with the Half Square problem are appreciated.  Anyone reading this manuscript is also assumed to have level three or above counter memetic infection training.  If this is not the case then discontinue reading this manuscript immediately.

The overall virulence of this transcript is low (1.2) but the potential for infection is high (3.6).  Even thought the overall virulence of this transcript is low there are particular memes that are dangerous and proper protocols must be followed to protect from infection.  Virulence is different from infectiousness.  The speed of a meme’s transmission from host to host is a measure of infectiousness. The degree of psychopathology caused by the meme is defined as virulence.    If a meme has a low level of infectiousness but high virulence then the overall danger of the meme may not be that great.  Conversely, a meme that is very contagious but not very virulent is harmless.  The institute focuses on the containment of memes that are both highly contagious and highly virulent.

A one to ten scale is used to measure both virulence and infectiousness.  The scale is logarithmic. Another example of a logarithmic scale that most people are familiar with is the Richter scale, used to measure earthquakes.  A meme with a virulence level of 2.0 is not twice as strong as a meme with a virulence level of 1.0 but ten times as strong.  A meme with a virulence level of 3.0 would be 100 times as strong as a 1.0 level meme.

Key memes in this transcript have been discussed in terms of their virulence, infectiousness and other memetic properties.   Some of the memes of this transcript have not been contained due to the prior infection of therapists before the patient was brought to secure institute.  If infection has occurred then this is noted in the transcript.

THE TRANSCRIPT DOES CONTAIN POWERFUL MEMES OF A VIRULENT AND INFECTIOUS NATURE.  IN ORDER TO PREVENT MEMETIC INFECTION PLEASE FOLLOW THE MEMETIC INFECTION COUNTERMEASURES AT THE END OF EACH SESSION!

Sincerely,

Dr. Delta

Former Director

Meta-psychopathology Institute

1.00	FREAK SHOW IS A HALF SQUARE

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: In this first session the patient appears to be strangely calm.  He is of medium height, medium build, and has blonde hair.  His eyes are a very striking emerald green.  He also has some nearly invisible scars on his face.  I would say he is in his mid-twenties.  I have read his case file thoroughly and am aware of the particulars of his delusions but will start from scratch regardless. 

DG: This is our first session and I would like you to tell me something about yourself.

FS: I am from an alternate Earth.

DG: Really? Did you travel here using a space ship?

FS: No, my consciousness was moved from a prior Big Bang cycle and to a body on this Earth.

DG: What is a Big Bang cycle?

1.01	Big Bang Cycle

FS: You know the Big Bang, the universe starts out as a naked singularity, explodes, expands for billions of years, contracts and then just does the whole darn thing all over again.  I am from the Earth from the last Big Bang cycle a lot like this Earth but just a little different.

DG: I think we can go into that later.  How did you pick the body that you picked?

FS: Most people in my Big Bang cycle have a double in this Big Bang cycle and I took the body of my double.

DG: Didn’t you feel any guilt about stealing someone’s body?

FS: My double was in a permanent coma due to a droga (drug) overdose.

DG: Droga?  Doesn’t droga mean drug in Spanish?

FS: Yeah, the English from my world is a little different than the English of this country.

 

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Records do indicate that Freak Show was in a drug-induced coma for about three years.  Freak Show did recover from this coma dramatically.  The cause of his psychopathology may be due to brain damage incurred during the drug overdose and subsequent coma.  The fiction may be a safe way of handling feelings that are being repressed about the overdose.  The patient uses a lot of Spanish words and I have included the English version of the word in parentheses where he first does this.

DG: In what way are you different from your double on this planet?

1.02	Half Square

Dr. Delta: The virulence of this meme is low (1.1).  The infection level this meme is also low (1.3).  This meme is not very dangerous.

FS: When I was forty my mamá told me I was a Half Square! 

DG: What in the world is a Half Square?

FS: The answer to that question is the answer to all questions and pretty much my whole story.  As my mama took a drag on her cigarette, she continued, “You are the product of the sexual union of a Sloppy Square mama, myself, and a Homo erectus father”. 

DG: Erection?

FS: Not erection, Homo erectus, Mama pushed a Bible into my hand and firmly stated, “The truth is in this Bible.”  In a coughing frenzy my mama passed away.  She was wearing a worn faded blue robe.  Her hospital bed was huge and she seemed very small.  Her hair was black and I suspected she dyed it.  The cause of death was officially lung cancer but I always suspected otherwise. 

DG: How did this make you feel?

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: The patient has started this session with the creation of a fantasy with an alternate Earth and the mention of the death of his mother.  The two events must be linked psychologically.  The creation of this alternate Earth may be a way for the patient to deal with the sense of overwhelming loss caused by the death of his mother.  There is surprisingly little background information about the patient despite extensive efforts to find such information.  Success with this patient is extremely important for the prestige of the institute.  Metaschizophrenia has a very low recovery rate and success with an extreme metaschizophrenic will be of historical importance.

FS: When my mama died I was wearing a beer hat that I had sneaked into the hospital.  A beer hat has two cans of cerveza (beer) strapped to either side of the baseball cat and tubes that allowed me to drink cerveza from the cans.  The beer hat was kind of my trademark.  The nurse had confiscated the cerveza on the hat but I had a couple of tall boys in my backpack.  I took a long sip from the beer hat and pondered my mamá’s message and decided to get high instead of figuring out her mysterious words.   

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Beer can hat is obviously an unconscious symbol of some sort of crown.  The patient refers to the beers as tall boys and this may be an unconscious reference to his own latent homosexuality.

DG: and what did you finally figure out?

1.03	Rio Grande Canal

Dr. Delta: The virulence level of this meme is unknown.  The infection level is high at 3.4 Anglo populations in the Southwest US are especially prone to infection.

FS: Five years later I recovered from my drug and drinking binge in the hotel attached to the Pantera Loca Club.

DG: Pantera Loca Club?

FS: My favorite strip club in the Rio Grande Canal. 

DG: Rio Grande Canal?

FS: I had spent most of those intervening five years working on barges on the Rio Grande Canal. 

FS: The Rio Grande is of course a giant river that acted as the border between Texas and Mexico.  On my Earth, the Rio Grande had been extended and deepened to connect the Atlantic, via the Gulf of Mexico, with the Pacific in California.  The RGC replaced the Panama Canal that had been destroyed by terrorists during our 9/11.  The RGC also acted as a border to keep out illegal drogas, illegal immigrants and terrorists from Latin America.  Finally, the RGC connected Texas and California, the two fastest growing state economies in the US.  Robots had built the canal and robots piloted the barges. 

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Patient is totally delusional.  The Rio Grande Canal is probably a symbol of a divide between the patient and society. 

DG: Robots?

FS: The pay was good and robots did most of the work.  Getting drogas into the canal from Mexico wasn’t a problem.  The border guards in the US only cared if you tried to get the drogas out of the canal area and into the US.

DG: Whatever.  Would you say that drugs are an important part of your life?

FS: Reality is for people who can’t handle hard drogas.  Militarily, the RGC allowed the US to move the Atlantic fleet to the Pacific quickly.  The Chinese used EMP to knock out the Seventh Fleet in the Pacific during the invasion of Taiwan had shown that the Seventh Fleet in the Pacific was vulnerable to a single strategic ataque (attack). 

DG: EMP?

FS: EMP stands for electromagnetic pulse.  This was not the first time the fleet in the Pacific had been knocked out with a single blow.  The US had already lost the pacific fleet once in World War II at Pearl Harbor.  With the RGC, the US was able to move the Atlantic fleet to the Pacific and provide a back up to the Seventh Fleet stationed in the Pacific.  Conversely the Seventh Fleet could back up US forces in Europe.  The RGC also allowed the European Union to move goods and services to Asia and bypass the more vulnerable trade routes East of Western Europe.  In general, the RGC allowed the US to more flexibly project power in both Asia and Europe.

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: The attack on Pearl Harbor is true.  Obsession with military movements in the patient’s fantasy shows a preoccupation with danger and violence.

 

DG: Where you some kind of soldier in this other Earth?

FS: I was an over glorified janitor but still the RGC was a great place to work.  The RGC was a DMZ in which all kinds of illegal activity happened.  I drank cheap cerveza and Margaritas on the Mexican side of the border with the US dólares (dollars) I made working for a US cargo company.  I was known on a first name basis at half a dozen strip joints in Tijuana.

DG: Sounds like you had it made in the shade.

FS: Almost, the problem was that I had totally destroyed the inside lining of my stomach.  Drinking alcohol caused me to spit up blood.

DG: Well that’s pretty bad.  Did you have a girlfriend?

FS: Sort of, my gal was named Zorra.  She was a brown-skinned petite Aztec princess and would just laugh showing her small even teeth and say, “You need to lay off the booze.  Really honey, I love you and just tell you this for your own good”.

DG: Did you try to stop drinking?

FS: Almost. I tried switching from my usual 190 Octane to sissy Margaritas minus the extra shot of rum for a buck but this didn’t do any good. 

DG: What is a 190 Octane?

FS: A 190 Octane is a frozen drink with 190 proof grain alcohol and orange concentrate.  Figured I might as well get my Vitamin C while I was getting drunk.

DG: So did you stop drinking?

FS: Even a drag from cigarette sent me into a coughing jag that knocked me out for half an hour.  I looked at my bloodshot eyes and the blood shot eyes looked back at me.  I needed a change.

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: The reference to the 190 Octane drink and associated health problems is a clear indication of alcoholism.  The choice of the drink may have less to do with the patient’s stated need for vitamin C and more to do with the patient’s self identity.  Octane is the fuel of cars.  Cars are a symbol of masculinity in modern industrial society.  The patient gravitates towards such a male sounding drink in order to emphasize his masculinity and perhaps once again compensate for latent homosexuality.

DG: Would you consider yourself an alcoholic?

FS: No. Because when it gets to the point that I am coughing up blood, I stop drinking for a couple of days. 

DG: Don’t you think this shows something?

FS: I think this shows I have my drinking under control.  I was trying to find a stash of dope I had hidden from myself.

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Secret pocket may be a Freudian reference to his mother.  The Bible may be a symbol of religious mania that allows the patient to deal with his Oedipus complex.  The mother of the patient is obviously a key to the metaschizophrenia of the patient.

FS: Zorra had been bugging me to find my stash in the first place.  She looked at the Bible and said, “Maybe you hid it in the Biblia because that’s the last place you would look”. I soon found out that the inside cover of the Bible had a secret pocket that contained a DVD disk.

When she saw the DVD she asked “Who keeps a DVD in a Biblia?”

DG: So what happened?

FS: Zorra was wearing bright read stockings with white anklet socks over the stockings and red high heels and not much else.  We had been smoking weed, Zorra didn’t drink, but the weed was gone.  She had very high cheekbones and her smile made them seem even higher.  She then turned over on her stomach quickly and sprawled on the bed showing her perfect brown behind and grabbed the remote control for the TV and turned on the TV.  The TV was on the MTV channel.  The TV was always on the MTV channel. Zorra and I agreed this was the best channel around.  Zorra got in front of the TV and started dancing to the music.  A very sexy Jennifer Lopez wannabe was singing on the TV.  There was some sort of giant robot anime crap in the background of the wannabe but I don’t think this was the attraction of this particular video. Zorra could watch any performer do any dance and learn the routine instantly. Zorra said in a soft, precise voice, “You know I think any DVD in a Biblia is probably important.  Maybe it’s a message from Dios but of course Dios is a woman so I mean the Diosa”.  Zorra then started laughing as though she had told herself some very funny joke.  Zorra took some pills out of her purse and tossed them to me.  “These are super learning pills.  I think you can use them.” she said.

DG: Super learning pills?

FS: This type of pill was pretty common on my world.  The pills caused neural connections to form more easily.  The pills were illegal in the US due to the long-term side effects but easy to find in Mexico. 

DG: What sort of side effects.

FS: One effect of the regular usage of super learning drugs was a permanent increase in intelligence over time. I would estimate that the overall IQ level of my world was about ten to twenty points higher than that of this world.  That is to say the counterpart of anyone on this Earth on my Earth would have an IQ about ten to twenty points higher. I didn’t have a very high IQ relative to others on my world but think my IQ would be relatively high on this world.

DG: Sounds like a positive side effect and the government would be for this.

FS: You must be joking.  When have the rulers ever wanted the ruled to be smarter?

DG: I suppose so.  I think I read about this somewhere.  What was on the DVD?

FS: I was getting thirsty and didn’t have anything to drink in my hotel room so I took the DVD to the Pantera Loca Internet bar.  

DG: I don’t think strip bars have Internet bars.

FS: They do in my world.  The bar was filled with Mexican teenagers playing various Internet games. Waitresses at the Pantera Loca wore black bikinis and black high heels and a beret with black cat ears. You could look but not touch but for teenagers that was plenty.  The air was filled with smoke from cigarettes. 

DG: Do you smoke?

FS: Only when I drink. 

DG: What was the bar like?

FS: The floor was sticky from spilled cokes.  There was a large garish poster of the joker card of a card deck on the wall of the Internet bar.  The poster was a glow in the dark affair and a black light was just over the poster.  The black light and light of the computer screens gave the bar a ghostly glow.  Underneath someone had written, “Are you feeling lucky?” with a large black marker. 

DG: Do you feel lucky?

FS: Only when I am in strip clubs.

DG: That’s not what I meant.

FS: I know.

DG: So what did you do in the Internet bar?

FS: The guy at the front desk set me up with a computer in booth 22.  I went to the bathroom first and took some of the pills my gal had given me. I could feel the pills working as I walked out of the bathroom.  I sat down at the computer and put the disk in the computer.

 

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Joker is probably an unconscious symbol of self and reflects how the patient sees himself.  A joker has the power to make people laugh but at the same time is allowed to be apart from the normal rules of society.  A joker can to some extent act “crazy” but is allowed to do this within the context of social norms.  The patient may see himself as a joker that can be eccentric yet be accepted.

 

DG: Would it be easier to list what drugs you take or what drugs you don’t take?

FS: Probably easier to list drogas I don’t take.

DG: What drugs don’t you take?

FS: I won’t mess with anything that requires needles. 

DG: So you’ve never shot up?

FS: Well “never” might be an overstatement.  You do crazy things if you are high enough.  Generally speaking, no.

DG: So what was on the DVD?

FS:  The first picture on the DVD was a picture of a TV remote control.  After staring at the onscreen remote control for an hour, I suddenly realized that one of the numbers of the remote control had the same barely visible number underneath, kind of like a subtitle, that had been somehow been distorted. 

DG: What did the subtitle say?

FS: I wasn’t sure at first.  I went ahead and stared at the images on the DVD disk over a one-week period. 

DG: You don’t strike me as a guy with that kind of will power.

FS: You know I think you are right but Zorra would come over during her breaks.  She often brought an herbal tea she said her mother had made.  She said the tea would make me smarter.  The tea did calm me down and helped me concentrate.  Sometimes she would massage my back.  For a petite gal she had really strong hands and could really squeeze hard.  I had told Zorra how my mom had given me that Bible.  She thought there might be a special message from my mom on the DVD.  I became kind of a fixture at the bar.  The teenagers would walk buy and call me the “crazy gringo”.  After days of staring at the computer screen, I saw something incredible. 

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Perceiving a secret message on a computer or TV screen is a common symptom of paranoia.

DG: What did you see?

FS: I pointed to the numbers on the remote control and asked Zorra if she saw the same distorted numbers below.  She could not perceive the numbers at all but she told me that maybe the message was special and just for me.  After a while, I realized that I saw color differences in the picture that Zorra could not.  This was the breakthrough. 

DG: What did you do with this insight?

FS: As I went about my daily business of partying and watching TV, I started to see these numbers all over the place.  I saw the numbers in advertisements, on the web and most of all a steady stream of these numbers were flashed on the bottom of the TV screen on all TV stations at all times.

DG: Did it occur to you that you might be suffering from a delusion?

FS: I thought I might be losing it but Zorra told me that maybe my mama was trying to contact me from beyond the grave.  She gave me a small statuette of the Virgin Mary and told me it would give me luck.

DG: Besides Zorra, what was the big attraction of the Pantera Loca Club?

FS: I am not sure if it was intentional or accidental but the girls tended to be darker at the Pantera Loca that I liked. 

DG: As the name of the club would suggest.  Why do you like darker women?

FS: Too many times blondes in the States had broken my heart and I was in Mexico for coffee, the darker the better, not milk.

DG: According to your file, you spend most of your free time at the clinic watching TV.  Are you trying to decipher some secret message on the TV?

FS: As far as I can tell, there aren’t any secreto messages in TV programs on this Earth but given some of those so-called reality based shows, you have to wonder.  Besides in this body I no longer have the ability to see secreto messages.  Look I need to tell you my story before they figure out what I am up to. 

 

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: The patient by his own admission felt a need to tell me his story before “they” came to get him.  I decided that going along with the patient would be the best way to figure out the source of his delusions.  The other therapists had tried a more direct approach and failed.

 

DG: Who are “they”?

FS: “They” can wait until later.  The onscreen remote control was the interface for controlling the rest of the disk.  Zorra couldn’t see the onscreen remote but suggested it might work like a regular remote.  She was right and there were one hundred channels that in actuality were video clips that could be accessed via the onscreen remote control.  You could vary the speed of the video clips using the onscreen remote control.  I would often freeze-frame a video clip and after staring for hours, a word or a number would suddenly appear.  The first channel taught numbers.

DG: Numbers? And the other channels?

FS: The second channel seemed to teach basic distorted English and was alphabetical.  It was like someone had gone to a room and videotaped various objects and then added single word subtitles. 

DG: This DVD was some sort of instructional video?

FS: Absolutely. Channel Three seemed to just be a blank screen but actually contained sequences of words.

DG: So how could you see the numbers?

FS: It was like words in white painted on a white canvas but the words were whiter than the screen so that you could discern the words clearly with practice.  I couldn’t figure out Channels 3-10.  I could see script but it wasn’t English of any sort.

DG: What was it?

FS: I realized that channel 10 was Spanish. 

DG: How did you know?

FS: I had learnt a little Spanish on the Canal and figured out that Channel 11 was numbers again but distorted in a manner that was too difficult for me to figure out.  Channel 12 was the same as channel 2 but again distorted in a manner that I couldn’t see except after staring at the words for hours and hours.  Channel 20 was Spanish again distorted in the same manner as Channels 11 and 12.  There were over one hundred channels that seemed to teach written language.  After Channel 100 there were video clips of actors. 

DG: I don’t think a DVD can hold one hundred video clips of the complexity you are describing.

FS: Technology on my Earth was much more advanced.

DG: How much more advanced?

FS: I would say about fifty years ahead of technology in this Earth.

DG: So in a way you are from the future.

FS: Not the future, an alternate reality with one giant difference from this reality.  The plus 100 channels had faces of persons that didn’t seem to be doing anything but stare at the camera that had filmed them. 

DG: Sounds like a film by Andy Warhol.

FS: Andy Warhol had been the mayor of San Francisco on my Earth.  Little by little, I realized that the people were moving individual muscles of their face.  The breakthrough came when I saw a number formed on the cheek of one of the actors.  I then noticed that other symbols were formed on the cheeks of the actors in some sort of order.

DG: Did you tell anyone about your discovery?

FS: I dragged some of the Pantera Loca gals to the computer and pointed out the symbols to them but they couldn’t see anything.  They laughed hilariously and told me that I was suffering from the DT’s.  Only Zorra had faith in what I was doing.

DG: Did you consider that you might be suffering from the DT’s.  Given your self-described drinking habits this seems like sensible possibility, wouldn’t you agree?

FS: Sure, I have hallucinated the occasional bug trying to burrow into my skin but, all in all, I was as sane as anyone or at least that is my opinion.

DG: So you have hallucinated before! How do you know you weren’t hallucinating this time?

FS: Look, I am an experienced drunk and know when I am hallucinating. 

DG: Maybe you were suffering from flashbacks?

FS: Look I am also an experienced acidhead and know when I am suffering from flashbacks.

DG: Having a hallucination of a bug burrowing into your skin seems pretty serious to me.  What do you think?

FS: No sweat, when you hallucinate bugs then the best thing to do is not try to ignore the bugs, which is impossible, but to imagine that the bugs are crawling away from your body and into a big fire. 

DG: I will try to remember this the next time I am hallucinating bugs all over my body.  So what was the DVD all about?

FS: I wasn’t sure at that point but I had a lot of questions.  Who had created this disk?  Who had my father been?  I had looked up Homo erectus on the web at the local web bar but what I had printed out didn’t make any sense.  Homo erectus was a long dead type of monkey man. 

DG: Tell me about your father.

FS: I had never met my dad but the few pictures of me that I had showed a handsome man in a top hat and cape not some sort of monkey man. 

DG: What was your father like?

FS: My father had been a magician who specialized in mind reading.  All had left me was a matching pair of rattlesnake boots and belt.  The boots had been too big but I still used the belt after I added a notch to the belt.  Had his mind reading ability been more than an act? 

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Rattlesnake boots and belt are masculine totems being passed from the father to the son in order to give the son masculine power or even supernatural powers such as mind reading.  The rattlesnake is a phallic symbol and thus a symbol of male potency.

DG: What do you think?

FS: I was to learn the truth eventually.  After the DVD learning experience, I could read the secreto message hidden in the headers of the Bible.  The headers told the story of some sort of people that called themselves the people of the Square.

DG: So your Bible was different from normal Bibles?

1.04	Super Color

Dr. Delta: The virulence of this meme is low (1.1) and the meme is slightly infectious (1.3).  Some hosts manifest infection in the form of seeing colors that do not exist.

 FS: I’ll say, my Bible was the reference section of their story in the headers of the book.  You could read the Bible by itself but the full meaning wouldn’t be clear unless you had what I started calling super color vision i.e. the ability to see and understand messages written in super color ink.  The Bible mentioned that one of the people of the Square had once mated with a human.  The offspring had been Jesus and he had been given incredible powers due to his unique heritage.  Jesus was the second Half Square. 

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Religious delusions are a common symptom of metaschizophrenia.

DG: Jesus?  Are you religious?

FS: I am not religious in the traditional sense.  The symbol of a Half Square was a Square in super color with a black cross in the middle.  This symbol was all over Tijuana but nobody seemed to be able to perceive the super color square encapsulating the cross.  Later I would find out that the Asian Buddhist swastika, a mirror image of the Nazi swastika and having the opposite meaning, also was often encapsulated in super color order to form a square.  Both were markers for a special population.

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: The patient has admitted to alcohol abuse and the use of LSD and this may be the source of his delusions.  Some users under the influence of LSD have purported to see colors that they have never seen before.

DG: According to you, crosses and swastikas are not what they seem to be?

FS: Nothing was what it seemed to be on my Earth.  My mamá had called me a Half Square.  What exactly was a Half Square?  Who were the people of the Square?  Was I truly a Half Square like Jesus?  When I found out that I might be a Half Square then everything made sense.

DG: What was it that made sense?

FS: My many visits to mental institutions, my inability to form lasting relationships or keep a job.  I realized that I had a heritage that I had to reconcile myself to.  I had never known my father.  I had never known that I was part Homo erectus, whatever that really meant.  I was unique and had unique powers.  In hindsight, I realized that my strange abilities had earned me the name Freak Show. 

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: The Half Square persona is a way for the patient to deal with his Oedipus complex and feelings of alienation towards his father.  Exposure to the patient of the fiction of the Half Square persona may lead to either a breakthrough in therapy or a total shutdown of the patient due to his inability to cope, which may cause him to enter a comatose state.  The patient was found in a comatose state that was assumed to have been drug induced but may in fact been due to a prior inability of the patient to deal with his feelings towards his parents.  The patient emerged from his comatose statement after creating this fiction while comatose as an elaborate defense mechanism. 

 

DG: Been meaning to ask you about the code name you picked for our sessions.  Does it have any special meaning?

FS: As my friends have said, I am a freak and a show.  I opened my e-mail account at the local Internet bar and there was a picture of a pomegranate.  I stared at the picture and realized that there was a very long and intricate message in the picture most of which was too difficult for me to understand.  There seemed to be several super colors. 

DG: Can I see these super colors?

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: The patient’s story begins in a border town.  Patient does come from a border town in Texas.  Information about his parents is sketchy.  The patient has been observed speaking Spanish with other patients despite being from the US.  Perhaps the mother was from Mexico and the father was from the US or vice versa.  Half Square may be some variation of a “half-breed” complex in that the patient did not feel at home in Hispanic or Anglo society in a border town and created the more glamorous Half Square identity to deal with this bicultural internal conflict.  This bilingual background would explain the patient’s use of Spanish words in his daily speech.  Most of the Spanish words seem to have some sort of military or security function and this may be a verbal externalization of the patient’s paranoia.

 

Dr. John Arrow, the other Assistant Director of the institute, has suggested my therapy style needs to be more aggressive.  Dr. Arrow has suggested that perhaps a combination of directed electroshock done in conjunction with intravenous injections of megadoses of traditional antidepressants might be useful in dealing with metaschizophrenia.  I find such advice from a milk toast like him amusing.

 

FS: No, and actually no human in this Earth can, including myself.  The pomegranate picture told me that the answers to my questions were in Japan.  Suddenly I felt someone squeezing my shoulder.  It was Zorra.  She told me that someone had left me a first class ticket to Tokyo at the bar.  Zorra also said that she always had wanted to go to Asia and she would join me but travel onwards once we go to Tokyo.

DG: So what did you decide to do?

FS: My mission was simple to go to Japan and find out the answers to my questions.  I withdrew enough money to handle my expenses in Japan.  The account consisted of money I had borrowed from the web using a nanopayment virus. 

1.05	Nanopayment Virus

Dr. Delta: Virulence is high (3.3). The infection level is low (1.4).  Populations with experience with computers are at greater risk.  Virulence is related the host’s prior hacking experience.

DG: What is a nanopayment virus?

FS: As mentioned my Earth was more technologically advanced.  The web on my Earth subsisted on micropayments. 

DG: Okay, back up, what is a micropayment?

FS: Every time a user wanted some information the user paid a fraction of a cent to download the information using a web payment credit card of one sort or another.  Who was going to quibble about paying .01 of cent for a recipe on the web? 

DG: Can you make money from .01 percent of a cent?

FS: Yes, the fact was that the micropayments added up and many web sites actually made decent money with millions of downloads a day.  A nanopayment virus would travel around the web and find micropayment systems that had programming weaknesses hack into the system and then deposit the money into my bank account.  My nanopayment virus usually took .001 percent of the proceeds for that day before moving on to another site. 

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Like many thieves, the patient has resorted to the rationalization that a small robbery is “okay” as opposed to a large robbery.  This rationalization is consistent with the relativistic morality that characterizes petty thieves.  The nanopayment virus is an externalization of this philosophy that the patient uses to rationalize his petty thievery.  The “virus” aspect of this externalization suggests that the patient does recognize that petty thievery is a “disease” and pathological at some level.

DG: That’s robbery.

FS: Don’t sweat it.  The sums were so small that most sites never knew they had been robbed in the first place.  I had bought the nanopayment virus over the web a couple of years ago and paid most of my girly bar bills with the money I made this way.

DG: Our records indicate that you never finished high school.  How did you learn all this computer stuff?

FS: On my Earth technology is so advanced that any idiot can use so-called advanced computer technology and perhaps this is why my Earth ultimately destroyed itself.

DG: Your Earth has been destroyed?

FS: Why do you think I am here?  Why do you think I am bothering to tell you my story?

DG: Why are you here and why are you telling me your story?

FS: The number one reason is that I am bored and talking entertains me. 

DG: Any other reasons?

FS: The number two reason is that I see the this Earth going down the same path as my Earth but at a much slower rate and perhaps the people on this Earth can learn something from my story.  I have to be careful though. 

DG: Okay, we’ll be careful.

FS: Oh, there’s an explanation.

DG: Can’t wait to hear it.

FS: The flight from Tijuana to Tokyo was horrible. 

DG: There is no such flight.

FS: There was on my Earth.  I got sick on planes anyway and Mexico to Japan was the ultimate sardine-can experience.

DG: So what happened on the plane?

FS: There were all sorts of Mexican-Japanese types. 

DG: Such as?

FS: There were Japanese guys with Mexican girlfriends.  There were Mexican guys with Japanese girlfriends.  There were people that were obviously half-Japanese and half-Mexican.  There were two sisters that were mixed and incredibly beautiful.  I was seated next to two sisters.  The older sister had the innocent baby face of a Japanese doll but the full figure of a Mexican beauty.  Her breasts were probably larger than her head.  The younger sister had large brown eyes, high cheekbones and full lips of an Aztec but the delicate body of an anime model.  I tried to decide out which sister was more beautiful.  The sisters were delicateness and voluptuousness mixed in two topsy-turvy manners.

DG: Can you please talk about something besides women?

FS: How about food?  On the flight, you had your choice of a Japanese dinner or a Mexican dinner.  The smells of the two types of food mixed in the air creating a third smell that was very strange and not very pleasant.  The menu offered the usual options – there was kosher, vegetarian, syntarian and virtuarian. 

1.06

Syntarian

Dr. Delta: Virulence is low (1.1). The infection level is also low (1.2).  Populations with eating disorders are at special risk of infection.

DG: What is syntarian?

FS: A syntarian only ate synthetic food, therefore avoiding killing any animal and/or plant.  You really couldn’t tell the difference between most synthetic foods and their real counterparts except for the price. 

DG: What about the price?

FS: Synthetic food was extremely expensive.  I ordered the syntarian option.

DG: Because of religious convictions.

FS:  I ordered the synthetic option not out of any religious conviction but because an attractive girl sitting next to me had the syntarian option and I hoped to impress her with my dietary choice. 

1.07	Virtuarian

Dr. Delta: The level and pattern of virulence and infection is similar to that of the syntarian meme.

DG: And “virtu” whatever?

FS: A virtuarian eats virtual meals.  Virtual meals were even more expensive than standard synthetic meals.  Virtual meals were not absorbed by the body and ended up in the toilet.  Many medical problems were created if you ate too many virtual meals.  A regular diet of first generation virtual meals meant you spent a lot more time on the crapper. 

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Virtuarian meals are transcendent in that you transcend the need to kill animals or vegetables but in the patient’s mind there is a price for such transcendence in that virtuarian meals lead to more excrement.  The virtuarian symbol may be a way for the unconscious to tell the patient that transcendence always comes at a price in the real world and that ultimately the transcendence of the patient as demonstrated in this delusion is faulty.

DG: Sounds terrible!

FS: Progress will get people off the crapper.  Second generation virtual meals used nanotechnology to create more empty space between the molecules that was imperceptible to the human sensory system but meant less substance was in fact digested and therefore less substance had to be ejected later on. 

DG: Not much better.

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Need to develop rapport with the patient but not sure how to do this.  I am slightly preoccupied with my own problems but need to focus on the patient.  Thanksgiving dinner with my wife and mother last week was a total fiasco.  My mother gave me a scarf that she had knitted.  My wife criticized the quality of the weave of the scarf, and they had a huge fight. 

1.08	Cyberplugs

Dr. Delta: This meme has medium virulence (2.3). The infection level is low (1.2).  Populations with sexual disorders and knowledge of computer hardware are especially at risk.

FS: Third generation virtual meals would probably dispense with the use of organic substance all together and rely on direct stimulation of the brain via cyberplugs to simulate the eating of a meal with holographic props. 

DG: Cyberplugs?

FS: A cyberplug was a device surgically inserted at the base of the skull that allowed the brain to interface with computers directly via an artificial hippocampus.  Across the aisle a lady in an impeccable blue power suit ordered the virtuarian option.  The meal was also synthetic but with a difference that made the meal even less real and more virtual. 

DG: How so?

FS: She looked like she was eating a steak and potato meal with a slice of cherry pie a la mode on the side, but all the food was synthetic and would go in one end and out the other.  The lady was going through the act of eating but was not taking in any calories.  The meal did include vitamins and minerals.

 

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: The lady in the “impeccable blue power suit” is a symbol of female authority.  She derives sustenance from virtual meals suggests that her authority is derived from higher, transcendental sources.

 

DG: Could you live on virtual meals?

FS: You couldn’t live on virtual meals, but they made dieting a lot easier.  You could see the collarbone of the lady sticking out from her anorexic frame.  The lady had obviously had virtual meals on a regular basis. 

DG: You know, I think virtual meals would actually make billions of dolares.

FS: I have no doubt somebody on this Earth will invent virtual meals and make those billions. 

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Further evidence of the patients trying to deal with the struggle between transcendence and physicality.  All human beings have animal needs such as the need to eat and sexual needs.  The fact that transcendent beauty and voluptuous i.e. more sexual beauty are mixed up in the two sisters shows that the patient recognizes that transcendence cannot be achieved except by dealing with lower order needs but is mixed up about how to deal with this knowledge.  Two sisters are symbols of two sides of woman hood.  This fantasy is related to the patient’s troubled relationship with his mother.  The patient is dealing with the sublimated sexuality that is appropriate relative to his mother that in turn is in conflict with his incestuous feelings.  Female characters dominate the patient’s fantasies due to the patient’s mother fixation.

DG: So what is your own ethnic background?

FS: I am a citizen of two worlds.  I tried to limber up and show off a little by doing some Wing-Jutsu exercises in the aisle of the plane. 

DG: What is Wing-Jutsu?

1.09	United Americas

Dr. Delta: The virulence of this meme is unknown.  The infection index is slightly high at 4.5.  This meme has already infected large populations in the Americas.

FS: Wing-Jutsu was a very popular hand-to-hand combat system on my Earth and will probably be invented in this Earth soon.  Wing-Jutsu combined the best boxing system with the best wrestling system. Wing-Jutsu combined Wing Chung and Gracie Jiu Jitsu.

DG: What is Wing Chung?  Isn’t there a rock band by that name?

FS: Maybe on this Earth, but not on my Earth.  Wing Chung was a Chinese kung fu system that was excellent for boxing purposes but had no wrestling system.  Wing Chung guys just tried to avoid ending up on the floor and generally succeeded but, hey, stuff happens.

DG: And Gracie whatever?

FS: Gracie Jiu-Jutsu was an excellent wrestling system but was second rate in the boxing area.  Wrestling was great against one opponent but when you are the ground the opponent’s buddies may decide this a good time to play football with your head.   UA Marines had developed Wing-Jutsu when they observed that in real life boxing matches became wrestling matches and vice-versa. 

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Patient has gotten out of his chair and is shadow boxing.  I assume this is a demonstration of Wing-Jutsu.  Will discuss this with security later.

DG: UA?

FS: United Americas.  I was really getting into practicing my moves when the stewardess asked me to take my seat.  She gave me a nasty look for no reason in particular.  The sisters played hard to get and avoided returning my wink.  I thought, they had seen my martial art’s prowess and wanted me but didn’t want me to know that they wanted me. 

DG: There isn’t any history of violence in your file.  Would you consider yourself a violent person?

1.10	Head Steward

Dr. Delta: The virulence of this meme is low (1.0).  The infection level this meme is also low (1.2).  This meme is not very dangerous.

FS: I am a sex addict not a fighter.  Zorra grabbed my pinky and with one quick jerk pulled me back into my seat.  For a little thing she was pretty strong.

DG: Well, what did you expect?  Do you consider jumping around the aisle acceptable behavior?  Would you please sit down and stop the shadow boxing?

 

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Patient followed directive, and this is a positive sign.

 

FS: I didn’t expect such an extreme reaction.  The Head Stewardess told me to behave or worse would happen. 

DG: This sounds like the behavior of a cop not a stewardess.

FS: After our 9/11 the Head Steward position had been created.  The Head Stewardess handled the software of the airline i.e. the people in the plane.  Most people are strong in hardware or software but not both. 

DG: There was a 9/11 incident on in your Earth?

FS: Yes, but the people on my Earth were more advanced technologically.  They pretty much wiped out terrorismo (terrorism) in response to 9/11, unlike this Earth. 

DG: What did the Head Steward do exactly?

FS: The Head Steward handled passengers and seguridad (security).  What people didn’t realize is that a security position does require high-level people skills. 

DG: Why?

FS: A security person has to be able to read people, access the situation and come up with an appropriate response.  The response needs to be just right, not too extreme but not too lax.  Seguridad officers that can talk a suspect down are better for everyone rather than someone who is trigger-happy. 

DG: This actually seems like a good idea.

FS: There is a lot this Earth could learn from my Earth.  Besides terrorismo, the Head Steward also handled drunk and crazy passengers.  The Head Steward could rely on the stewardesses for back up. 

DG: Who cares about stewardesses in a security situation?

FS: The stewardesses after appropriate screening and training were armed with a stun baton.  If the stewardess pulled out the stun baton then someone was going down.  The policy was “stun first, and ask questions later”. 

DG: Stun batons don’t sound too high tech.  I thought your planet was more developed than this planet.

FS: It was, the stun baton was collapsible but fully extended, resembled a two-foot policia (police) baton that could deliver an electrical shock that would knock the passenger out.  At the press of a button, the stun element would shoot out of the end of the baton acting like a Taser.  You could press the button a second time and the stun element would reel in for a second shot or you could use the fully extended stun element as the equivalent of a stun whip.

DG: What would prevent a terrorist from wrestling the stun baton away from the stewardess and using the weapon against them?

FS: The stun element was only activated if you pressed the button with your thumb and only if the correct thumb print was used. The stewardesses were taught how to fight with the stun batons with or without the stun option on.  The stun baton had plenty of reach and the stewardess could take out a guy with a knife before he got too close.  Furthermore, the new hires were taught how to fight as a team in the narrow corridor of a plane.  The team tactics were classified but one group of terrorists had found out the hard way that the team tactics were very effective.

 

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: The stewardesses wield stun batons.  A stewardess is a symbol of female servitude in that stewardesses serve passengers.  The stun batons are an obvious phallic symbol and this suggests that the patient is scared that women that seem submissive in fact wield masculine power.  Patient once again shows his obsession with violence and security issues. 

DG: This sounds pretty extreme.

FS: A few more terrorist incidents in this Earth and these actions won’t seem extreme.  Before the 9/11 bombing, the capitán was the pilot, handled passenger relations and was the de facto head of seguridad on the plane. 

DG: And after your 9/11?

FS: On my Earth, after 9/11, the capitán was basically only trained as a pilot and had minimal training in psychology and/or seguridad.  The UA made the capitán a pilot, period.  The capitán (captain) now handled the hardware, only the plane itself. 

DG: How was this done?

FS: The capitán was locked behind a cabin door that was bullet proof, bomb proof and every other proof for the duration of the flight.  The capitán was given clear instructions to stay put in the cabin and bring the plane safely down come hell or high water.  The door wasn’t even opened for meals.  The capitán had his meals stored in a fridge in the cabin and a little microwave to heat the meals. 

DG: But he had to go to the bathroom.

FS: The capitán’s bathroom was a glorified jar. 

DG: This is a contradiction in your story.  If your Earth was so advanced, then why just use a jar in the cabin?

FS: All that seguridad had led to a need for cost cutting somewhere.  The jar had caused more complaints from the captains than any other aspect of the new policy. 

DG:  So what was the captain supposed to do if passengers were being killed?

FS: In particular, the capitán was given instructions and training to ignore the killing of hostages in the passenger area.  Terrorists would probably threaten to kill passengers if the capitán didn’t open the door.  The capitán was trained to believe that the best way he could save life was by getting the plane landed safely as soon as possible.

DG: So, the captain was supposed to ignore the killing of passengers?  As a psychologist, I can tell you that this wouldn’t be easy.

FS: The capitán did have one emergencia (emergency) option if passengers were being killed.  The cabin was airtight and had its own emergencia air supply.  If passengers really were getting killed then the passenger area could be flooded with knockout gas.  The gas used a binary system.  There were two separate gases that had to be mixed for the gas to have a knockout effect. 

DG: Why the binary system?

FS: You used a binary system for better control of a weapons system.  There was less chance of the knockout gas accidentally knocking out all the passengers.  Two separate gas systems would have to break down for this to happen.  For the short time after the bombing, UA Marshals were used. 

DG: Marshals do exist at least.

FS: UA Marshals were still used whenever there was a state of emergencia.  The stewardesses were trained to work with the UA Marshals and act as his deputies when needed.  The fact that you really can’t fire a gun in a plane means that airplane situations ultimately end up in a hand-to-hand in which numbers do matter.  Pity the poor passenger that brought on the wrath of half a dozen stewardesses armed with stun batons.

DG: You mentioned the UA again.  What is the UA?

FS: The UA includes the US on my Earth, all the Americas, Australia and Great Britain.  The UA is a giant militar alliance.

DG: Militar?

FS: Military in the English of this Earth.  UA English is a little different from US English.

DG: Whatever or maybe you are bilingual and engaging in English/Spanish code switching. Okay, more about the UA later, what happened after you were stunned?

FS: The plane touched down and I was released.  The Head Steward gave me a strict warning.  You really didn’t want to mess with Head Stewards.  The sisters disappeared in the crowd as soon as we got to the customs area.  I showed my passport, swiped my passport card through the card reader and typed in my national identity code number.

DG: Passport card?

FS: It’s just a matter of time before you have passport cards on this Earth.  Anyone can forge passports.  You want to have an ATM system with a card and code and a cross-referenced biometric system in order to make sure the national really is who he says he is.

DG: Rampant paranoia seems to be a hallmark of your imaginary Earth.

FS: Rampant paranoia is a gift from God.  My lack of a return ticket seemed to bother the customs official slightly.  He asked me if I had anything to declare and I smiled and said, “My genius.” 

DG: I don’t know if you are a genius, but you are certainly imaginative.

FS: I am not imaginative.  I just have a good memory.  Zorra told me that if I behaved then she would give me a reward for being a good little boy.

DG: What sort of reward? 

FS: The Mile High Club.

DG: What nonsense.  It’s impossible to make love in the small bathrooms of an airplane.  The Mile High Club is pure urban legend.

FS: Things were a little different on my world.

DG: How so?

FS: You could rent a room on the plane.

DG: Huh?

FS: Sure I am amazed this isn’t done in your world.  This room was a huge moneymaker for the airlines of my world.  The airlines didn’t necessarily endorse sexual conduct.  You just got a room with a bed and what you did in that room was your business.

DG: So what was this room like?

FS: Zorra was true to her word and took me to the special room.  The room was pretty small and just consisted of a bed. The bed was nice but that wasn’t what you paid for.  What you paid for was the view!

DG: View in a bedroom?

FS: One window was directly above the bed and you could see the sky.  I could clearly make out the stars.  I had never seen the stars before since air pollution had long ago obscured them.  I hate to say it but I wasn’t too impressed.  Just little pin pricks of light.  Seven of them seemed to stand out and make an askew pyramid.

DG: Wouldn’t such a window be dangerous?

FS: We had some pretty strong plastics on my world.  Zorra and I did the mandatory “ohs” and “ahs” about the view and then got down to business since the room was rented by the hour and the Head Steward would ultimately kick you out forcibly.  The room was generally booked back to back, pun intended.

DG: Well its sound like it would beat twisting your back out of whack in the bathroom.

FS: Zorra was dressed in a tight black dress.  I went over to kiss her and she pushed me towards the bed. She told me, “You’ve been ‘un muchacho muy bueno’ and deserve a reward”.  “Yeah, I had been a good little boy”, I thought to myself. 

DG: Was she a good kisser?

FS: You know incredibly despite having done the wild thing many times I never got to kiss her.  She was funny about that.

DG: Maybe she had a boyfriend that she reserved that intimacy for.

FS: She claimed I was her boyfriend but you might be right and she had someone on the side.

DG: Well I think you did fine even without the kissing.

FS: I think so.  She went ahead and pushed me down and straddled me.  She still had her high heels on and actually generally kept them on.  I had asked her about this and she had told me they gave her more traction and height control.  I quickly came.  She grabbed me by the color and pulled my face right next to hers.  I thought I was about to get my first kiss but she started laughing, pushed me down again, and said, “The Diosa no want that”. 

DG: Well again, even without the kiss I think you did okay.

FS: I suppose so but I still felt something was missing in our relationship.

DG: Well duh!  This may be a giant surprise to you but there is more to a relationship than lust.

FS: I suppose.  Still I was feeling good and feel asleep in my seat and had strange dreams during the flight.

DG: What sort of dreams.

FS: A soft female voice said my name over and over again.  We got to the Tokyo airport and got to customs.  The custom guy questioned my many trips to Colombia.

DG: Well why did you go to Colombia?

FS: Herbology

DG: Herbology?

FS: I made a lot of money from my RGC job and the nanopayment virus but I also spent a lot on booze and broads and always seemed to need more. 

DG: Let me guess. You smuggled drugs?

FS: Yes.

DG: By your own definition you have a stripper as a “girlfriend” and some very new buddies at the Internet bar.  This means you don’t have any real friends, much less a gang.  You would need a gang to be a drug smuggler not to mention that your more technologically advanced world would make smuggling even harder to do.  Therefore, there was no drug smuggling.  There was no trip to Colombia.  The whole world and all your actions in this world are made up.

FS: Advanced technology cuts both ways.  New advances in protein biology had created new methods of smuggling.  I would eat some coke goop in Colombia.  The coke goop was some sort of mixture of cocaína (cocaine) and a protein cocktail that rendered the cocaína inert.  When I got back to the US, I would literally shit cocaína. 

DG: You have an answer for everything.  Well what did you tell the customs guy?

FS: I told the customs guy that I was a big fan of Colombian Flamenco dancing which he seemed to accept.  I didn’t think the custom’s guy needed to know about my interests in herbology.

DG: We have been talking less than ten minutes, and this is the third time we have discussed bowel movements.

FS: Yeah, what is that all about?  Get your mind out of the gutter.  The method of smuggling was murder on the system and you could die but the money was good and fairly foolproof.  Some users didn’t like using shit coke – but when you needed to get high, you needed to get high.

DG: So you were a criminal in your Earth?

FS: I prefer to think of myself as a non-traditional, entrepreneurial capitalist. Zorra and I got off the plane together.  She told me it was time to say good bye. I could feel her bustier push into my skin as she held me tight.  She gave me a long kiss, a long look with her dark brown eyes, and said.  “I think you are going to find your destiny in Japan”.   I tried to talk her into staying with me in Tokyo and said “I am sure you will find interesting female company in Tokyo and I think I would just be in the way”.  She then turned away sharply and with surprising quickness was out of one of the airport exits.  She didn’t look back.  I could have sworn I caught a glimpse of a tattoo of a stick or maybe a wand on the top on the back of her neck in super color.  As I got out the airport and made my way to the receiving area, a man in a chauffeur’s cap held up a sign with my name on it.  He took my luggage and escorted me to a limousine.  I entered the limousine and met the most beautiful woman in the world. 

DG: What was the woman like?

FS: She was Asian but I think that maybe she had a little Western blood somewhere.  She had long black hair.  Her black hair had an ever so slight a wave.  Her skin was so pale that she almost seemed translucent.  Her face was oval shaped and she had high cheekbones.  She moved in quick, decisive, strong manner.  Her expression was serious and she seemed to be preoccupied.  She wore a green dress with a floral pattern.  There was something familiar about her although I was quite sure I had never seen her before.  The only jewelry she wore was a necklace of gold pearls.  Something told me the gold pearls were real. 

DG: Gold pearls?

FS: Gold pearls were created from bioengineered clams. 

DG: Bioengineered clams?

1.11

Erotron

Dr. Delta: The virulence of this meme is high (3.0).  The infection level this meme is also high (3.3).  This meme is dangerous.

FS: Sure, the clams had the ability to absorb gold and make it part of the pearl.  The genetically altered clams were incredibly delicate and only one out of ten thousand actually survived long enough to create a gold pearl.  Gold pearls were more expensive ounce for ounce than any other type of jewelry.  Her name was Erotron. 

DG: Pretty weird name. Where did she get a name like that?

FS: The name was strange and I asked her about it.  She said she had come up with the name on her own for maximum memetic effectiveness.

DG: Sorry I asked.  I notice you come from a blue-collar background.  Did you disapprove of her wealth?

1.12

Squares

Dr. Delta: The meme is slightly virulent (2.1).  The infection level is high (4.4).  The meme spreads in a parasitic fashion.  Many of the patient’s memes are parasitic and achieve symbiosis with the existing memetic structures of the host.  In this case this meme achieves symbiosis with the memetic conspiracy structures of the hosts.

FS: Acquisitions are the things we spend our whole life accumulating so they can be sold for 50 cents at a garage sale when we die.  Erotron told me she was a Square. 

DG: Square?

FS: The Squares are a group that existed on my Earth and not your Earth and are the main reason the two Earths evolved so differently. 

DG: And Erotron was a Square?

1.13	Money Squares

Dr. Delta: The virulence and infection level is at least as high as the parent Square meme but perhaps higher.

FS: Yes and Erotron also told she was one of the Money Squares, the leadership caste of the Squares.   She handed me her business card.  She was the CEO of a leading company in Japan but I noticed in super color there was a picture more a logo really of an orbed scepter.

DG: So Erotron was a leader of some sort.  What was she like?

FS: I was driven to a five-star hotel.  Erotron told me she would give me some time to freshen up and come by later to drive me to her office.

DG: And what happened later.

FS: Erotron was in the hotel lobby and dressed in a super short, super tight black leather dress.  Her top was also black and made up a silky material that was semi-transparent.  Her lipstick had been painted on delicately and she had used some sort of super color make up that she used to highlight her lips and face.  You could almost smell her sexuality.  I was in love. 

DG: How convenient, she just happened to be drop dead gorgeous.  Okay, I’ll play along.  Were you in love or in lust?

FS: Is there a difference?  A beautiful face often hides a beautiful soul.

DG: I think there is a difference.  That seems to contradict your earlier observation that beauty interferes with personal development.

FS: I would say the beautiful are less likely to develop in the long run but getting things with a smile rather than from sweat can make the beautiful strangely innocent like babies and angels.  I had never been in love.  I believed in affairs rather than love and have often quipped that affairs should be like bank robberies.  In an affair, be ready to use muscle and have a getaway car ready.

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Patient is superficial.  The patient objectifies women to maintain an illusion of control and superiority.

DG: But this was different?

FS: Yes.

DG: So this beautiful rich gal had nothing better to do than observe a drunk from Tijuana?

FS: Sure, why don’t you believe me?

DG: Because this is an obvious adolescent delusion.  Don’t you see this?

FS: Not at all.

DG: So why would she be watching you?

FS: She had been monitoring my progress on the DVD.  The DVD secretly sent messages via the Internet connection and these messages had been monitored by the Money Squares in Tokyo.  They were impressed by how much of the Square language I had taught myself.

DG: The DVD taught you something about the Squares?

1.14

Matriarch

Dr. Delta: The virulence of this meme is high (3.1).  The infection level this meme is also high (3.4).  This meme is dangerous.

FS: The DVD allowed me to understand the pomegranate picture.  The pomegranate was the traditional symbol used to signify an offer to join a Square tribe.  In ancient times and actual pomegranate was offered from the Matriarch of one tribe to the Matriarch of another tribe.  Now there was only one tribe of Squares and only one Matriarch. 

DG: So this so-called Matriarch sent the message?

FS: The Matriarch had sent the message.  The Matriarch knew that I would be unable to understand most of the message immediately but hoped that eventually I would understand the rest of the message after receiving more training.

DG: The Matriarch?

FS: The spiritual leader of the Squares.  Erotron told me, “I am so sorry about the death of your mother”.  I hadn’t thought about my mamá since finding the DVD in the Bible.  We walked out of the lobby to her waiting car.  The car was a Rolls Royce with holocar capability. 

1.15

Holocar

Dr. Delta: The virulence of this meme is low (1.0).  The infection level this meme is also high (1.3).  This meme is not dangerous.

DG: Holocar as in holographic?  That has something to do with 3-D images and lasers.

FS: Right, I had read all about holocars in a car magazine.  A holocar emits a holographic image via holo emitters in the body of the car that make it look like another car when the holographic image is turned on.  The Rolls Royce looked like a Toyota on the outside.  When Erotron got in the Rolls, she turned of the holographic image and the real Rolls Royce body emerged. 

DG: Why would you use this technology this way?

1.16	Holoprojector

Dr. Delta: The virulence of this meme and infectiousness of this meme is similar to that of the holocar meme.

FS: The holographic technology let you ride an expensive car but hide it from car thieves.  There were of course less expensive holo-cars than a Rolls Royce.  Cheaper holo-cars were popular among crooks since you could rob a bank with one car and turn the car into another one with the flip of a switch in order to avoid the policia. 

DG: Sounds like a terrible technology.

FS: For this reason, holocars were strictly licensed and the license cost a fortune.  A Rolls Royce cost a fortune, a Rolls Royce with holoprojectors cost even more and the license for the holoprojector cost more still.  The car was probably worth more than I would make in five hundred years.  Erotron had gold pearls and a holo Rolls Royce. Erotron must be loaded, I thought to myself.

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Patient has a 10^th grade education.  He has been in and out of schools his whole life.  I find his fantasies quite incredible.  There is a level of technical detail far beyond that of your typical schizophrenic.  No wonder he has infected the other therapists.  Freak Show has created a fantasy with a beautiful woman and the beautiful woman is driving him around in a Rolls Royce.  This is a normal adolescent escapist fantasy that has been taken to the next level. 

DG: So you were taking a ride with the beautiful Erotron in a Rolls Royce.

FS: Yes, while we rode in the car, Erotron asked me what I knew about Homo erectus.  I knew plenty due to my earlier research. 

DG: So what had your research delivered?

FS: Homo erectus was a humanlike primate that had died out millions of years ago.  Erotron told me that this wasn’t true.  She was in fact a female Homo erectus.  She was a Square.  Homo erectus called themselves Squares.

DG: Homo erectus lived on your Earth and called themselves Squares.  Why did they call themselves Squares?

1.17	Sloppy Squares

Dr. Delta: The virulence of this meme and infectiousness is low except for subpopulations with low self esteem.

FS: As Erotron said, “A member would draw a perfect square, in the air, with their index finger, before a meeting began as proof of being a Square but this was largely symbolic at close range.” 

At close range two Squares would know the other was a Square instantly due to their unique body language. 

DG: So why did they draw the perfect square?

FS: The four points of the Square represent the four castes of the Squares.  Also, two Squares seeing each other from a distance might not be sure if the other person was a Square. One Square would form the Square with his index finger clockwise and the other would respond with the counter sign that was a square formed with the index finger but in a counterclockwise fashion.  Erotron traced a square on my forehead when she told me this.

DG: Okay, this is a flaw in your story.  These guys are supposed to be secret.  I think making squares in the air would draw attention to themselves.

FS: During the signing, the arm was not moved but kept to the side of the body and the square was formed quickly so that the untrained eye would barely perceive the movement. In some situations the “you are crazy” sign was made, a circular turn of the index finger near the side of the top of the skull and this in fact is the origin of this sign.  Because of this, the “you are crazy sign” is the only universal body language sign in the world.

DG: We have this sign so does our Earth have Squares?

FS: I don’t think so. Maybe you have something like the Squares, but nowhere as organized as the Squares on my world.  Maybe the reason your world is so disorganized is that your equivalent of the Squares is disorganized.  The drive from the hotel to the office took about an hour.  I couldn’t take my eyes off Erotron during the drive.  I tried to pretend I was looking at the Japanese scenery.  In her office, Erotron had a picture of the Botticelli Venus in her office.  I noticed that Erotron looked like an Asian version of the Venus, but only if the Venus had the fashion sense of a high-class call girl.  She was totally different from me but somehow familiar. 

DG: If Erotron is Asian and dressed in a totally different way then she is by definition not like the Venus Botticelli.

FS: How would Venus dress in our century?  The Venus was naked in the painting and perhaps she would have dressed like Erotron if given a chance.  I commented on the excellence of the copy.  Erotron answered, “This is the original. The copy is hanging in a museum.”  There were several people in her spacious office.  I was introduced to an elderly lady who was the Matriarch that Erotron had alluded to earlier. 

DG: What was the Matriarch like?

FS: I would say she was in her eighties but had a strong handshake and I got the feeling this wasn’t someone you would want to mess with.  Her silver gray hair was piled high, almost like a sculpture.  She wore heavy gold jewelry with large gemstones.  Her earrings seemed heavy enough and large enough to threaten the health of her earlobes but somehow she managed to keep her head erect.  The gems in her necklace appeared to be rubies.  The gemstones of her earrings seemed to be green emeralds that matched her green eyes.  The cut of both types of gems matched despite their different color.  The style of the gold setting of her earrings and necklace were also the same.  She wore a long flowing velvet dress that was robe like without being a robe. The outfit was a deep red with a gold embroidered abstract pattern.  The Matriarch also gave me her business card.  She was the CEO of yet another giant Japanese company.  One side of the card, in super color, there was a picture of a crown in the shape of a horned orb.  I could have sworn I had seen a very similar crown in my mother’s closest, years ago, when I was looking for some money to borrow.   On the other side there was a square with a coin in the center, also in super color.

DG: So the Matriarch reminded you of your mother?

FS: The Matriarch didn’t act, dress, well maybe except for the crown, or look like my mamá.  

DG: Did the Matriarch inherit her office?

FS: No some Money Square offices were inherited but the Matriarch was elected in a manner similar to the pope.  The Matriarch mentioned that she had become the Matriarch around the same time my mother had died.

DG: Anyone else at the meeting?

FS: There was a very fit and muscular man with a mustache was simply called Trent. I was told he was a Knight of the War Squares. 

DG: Knight?

FS: The ranks of the Squares had solidified in the Middle Ages.  There was the Matriarch at the top.  Each of the four castes had a Queen, several Princesses under the Queens, several Duchesses under each Princess and many, many Knights. 

DG: What about Kings, Princes and Dukes?

FS: No such ranks, the Queen, Princess and Duchess ranks were closed to males. 

DG: Well at least the men were the Knights.

FS: The Knights could be female or male but most of the Knights were female.  Below the Knights were the ten guilds and finally the common citizens. 

DG: Guilds?

FS: A type of Square schooling.  All the castes at all levels studied the guild skills at one time or another.

DG: Interesting political system.  Reminds me of something that I can’t quite but my finger on.  Tell me more about this Knight.

FS: Trent had light blue eyes and wore a white suit.   He had a military bearing that made the suit seem like a uniform.  Trent was probably in his forties but had a full head of short gray hair that was perfectly combed.  I would say this guy shaved twice a day and he had the faint scent of cologne.  His tiepin was gold and had an engraved square with a sword in the middle.  The engraving was so subtle I doubt anyone without tetrachromatic vision could have seen it.

DG: Did he remind you of your father?

FS: No, and for that matter no one at the meeting reminded me of anyone in my family, and anticipating your next question, Erotron didn’t remind me of my mamá, sister… or even a cousin although I did once have an interesting evening with one of my female cousins.  She…

DG: We can deal with your cousin some other time.  Was that everyone?

FS: No, there was a tall thin Asian Knight called Cord. 

DG: What was Cord like?

FS: Kind of nondescript but he looked at me very carefully, Cord talked in a very slow manner that distracted me and I had a hard time focusing. He told me that I resembled my papa more than my mama.  I guess he had seen some sort of file about me.

DG: What was the office like?

FS: The office was a regular museum.  Erotron told me she regularly employed a real life tomb raider named Clive Johnson.  Erotron showed me a collection of “quipas” from Peru that he had acquired for her.  Erotron told me that quipas were knotted strings that the Incas used for communication.  Erotron told me that Incan civilization was a good example of a Square form of society.  Everyone had been fed until the Sloppy Square Spaniards had come in and screwed everything up.

DG: You mention a guy named Cord and now you are bringing up string.  Are you into light bondage?

FS: Well, not on the first date.

DG: So, what did they talk about?

FS: After they introduced themselves to me, I was taken to a waiting room.  The Colonel said he expected big things from me.  The Matriarch looked at me suspiciously.  Cord just smiled nervously and said very little.  There was an air of conspiracy in the room. 

DG: Why did you think this?

FS: Well, as they closed the door I noticed they all the members present made the square sign with their fingers in unison at chest level except for Erotron.  Erotron responded by making a square in the air over her head.

DG: That would do it.  This sounds like the Godfather.  Are you sure you didn’t get this from the movie?

FS: Maybe, or the Godmother.

DG: So the Squares were mostly Japanese?

FS: Erotron had told me that the Squares migrated from China to Japan over the last millennium. 

DG: Why the move?

FS: The Sloppy Square population in China had become too large to easily control.  Squares had always been a very small part of the larger Sloppy Square population in China.

FS: Erotron told me that Japan had the largest percentage of Squares of any country in the world. 

DG: So the Japanese are so different because of some sort of conspiracy.

FS: On my world this was the case.  I have no explanation for the Japanese on this world.  Square dominance was reflected in the spatial orderliness that was so characteristic of Japanese homes.  Erotron told me that the Japanese were very neat because of the Squares.  Erotron further explained that the tea ceremony was actually a sacred Square ritual invented by one of the guilds.  This was considered the highest form of art among the Squares and usually Book Squares studied with this guild but occasionally an artist with aptitude was found in other guilds.   The tea ceremony celebrates spatial constancy in everyday actions. 

DG: The tea ceremony is a Square ceremony.  Did your Squares have other ceremonies?

FS: The tea ceremony was only one of over a hundred daily actions that had been ritualized by the Squares but was one of the few such rituals shared with the general Sloppy Square population. 

DG: So the tea ceremony was invented by Squares?

FS: The tea ceremony as shared with the Sloppy Squares was actually a version taught to children to teach them the basics.  This was also the case for most martial arts of Japan that in fact were children’s versions of the adult version of the War Square martial art.  War Squares also added deliberate mistakes to the martial arts they taught Sloppy Squares. 

DG: I find that hard to believe.

FS: I will give you an example. The most incredible disinformation was teaching the Sloppy Squares to block a front kick with ones arm in Karate.  Incredibly over hundreds of years, the Sloppy Squares never figured out the arm would break rather than the much stronger leg.  Needless to say War Squares invariably used a kick to the groin to ataque the otherwise formidable Karatekas. 

DG: What is a Karateka?

FS: A person who practices Karate.  The success of this deception was proof to the Squares that the Sloppy Squares were a strange combination of genius and idiocy.

DG: You know a lot about martial arts.  Why is this?  Would you consider yourself a violent person?  Are you scared someone is trying to hurt you?

FS: Martial arts don’t kill.  People who use martial arts kill.

DG: I suppose.  Did the Squares influence Japan in other ways?

FS: The Squares deliberately laid out Japanese cities in a seemingly random manner.  Actually, the city pattern was not a random pattern.  Instead, the city followed a geometric algorithm that was incredibly complex for Sloppy Squares and could only be discerned by other Squares.

DG: Why would the Squares do this?

FS: Squares would then have a military advantage in getting around such a city.  This was why Sloppy Squares were generally totally lost in Japanese cities.  Japanese cities were designed for another species altogether as many travelers suspected after living in Japan for a while.  Japan was not the only country with such cities but has the most cities like this.

DG: I have visited Japan and this is similar to the layout of Japan in our Earth.  There are no Squares on this Earth.  Japan is laid out this way despite the lack of Squares therefore there must be no Squares.

FS: Kind of makes you wonder.  

DG: So how many of your Squares were out there?

FS: Erotron explained to me over time that in the past Squares had lived in cities but generally made up less than .001 percent of that city.  The Squares were concentrated in the upper strata of society so those Squares could control the Sloppy Squares.  This did tend to give Squares the illusion that they were more numerous than they actually were. 

DG: .001 percent of a population means one out of a thousand. This means you would rarely meet a Square.

FS: Yes, the Squares on my Earth were fairly invisible, even to someone like myself who knew what to look for.  Regardless, a relatively small Square population compared to Sloppy Squares has been a hallmark of Square society since the great flood 10,000 years ago. 

DG: You mean like the Biblical great flood?

FS: Yes, even the few Squares in a given geographic area generally belonged to the same tribe and were all related to each other.  A Square in a Sloppy Square Chinese city might not meet another Square that wasn’t a tribe member for months. 

DG: Your Squares are a very interesting construct.  Are the Squares after you?

FS: Maybe something like the Squares on this Earth are after me, but not on my Earth.  Erotron told me that in Japan for the first time, Squares had to live with other Squares that weren’t from their tribe on a daily basis.  Kyoto was basically the city with a large Square population.  Several other Japanese cities soon joined the ranks of Square cities. 

DG: So according to you, Japan was the Grand Central Station of Squares on your constructed Earth.

FS: Yes, but even in Japanese Square cities, the Squares were only around 1% of the total population. Still, this was a Square population density that was 100 times greater than that found in the rest of Asia. 

DG: So were your so-called Squares in the West as well?

FS: There were even less Squares in the West than in Asia.  The fundamental difference between the East and the West was a result of the fact that Squares had had a much greater influence on Eastern civilization than Western civilization due to their greater numbers in Asia.

DG: What was the cause of the difference between Eastern and Western civilization on our Earth?

1.18	Hyperkinesic Perception

Dr. Delta: Virulence level is high (3.5). The infection level is low (1.2).  The host manifests infection by thinking he or she has HKP.

FS: I am not sure about this Earth.  Erotron told me that the concentrations of Squares led to two major problems.  First there was the problem of tribal secretos.  Squares had a hard time keeping secretos from each other due to HKP. 

DG: HKP?

FS: Squares had enhanced kinesic perception known as hyperkinesic perception or HKP for short. 

DG: Sounds like ESP.

FS: HKP may be the correct explanation for most ESP.  Squares could read the faces of the Sloppy Squares with total accuracy.  Squares could look at your face and tell what emotion you were feeling by looking at the movements of your face.  It is simply impossible for a Sloppy Square to successfully lie to a Square. 

DG: How did they do this?

FS: A “kine” is the technical term for a movement of the body.  Kinesics is the study of body language.  A microkine is a very small and subtle body movement that is just below the threshold of conscious perception.  The face has forty facial muscles and therefore thousands of combinations of movements are possible but only movements that communicate meaning are considered a microkine. 

DG: This is no big secret stuff.  There is plenty of psychological research and therefore your Squares wouldn’t have any special knowledge in this area.  Your Squares aren’t so special after all.

FS: Psychologists in your Earth have identified twenty microkines, such as the dilation of your pupils when you like someone.  Squares can discern hundreds of microkines that Sloppy Squares not even aware of. 

DG: And what could they do with this awareness?

FS: Yes, the Squares could basically know what the Sloppy Squares were thinking and not vice versa, and this gave them a huge survival advantage despite their lack of creativity but this could lead to some problems. 

DG: Problems?

FS: In rural and tribal situations HKP wasn’t a problem since every Square in a given geographical area was, more or less family, albeit part of an extended family, and there was little shame in sharing secretos between family members.  In Japan, Squares had to deal with other Squares from other tribes, from all over Asia, for extended periods of time and felt shame at letting them know family secretos.  

DG: Do you have any secrets?

FS: Yes, but I am telling you all my secretos right now.  All these faces talking all the time led to an incredible amount of HKP noise.  Squares weren’t used to this HKP noise level and literally developed ulcers and other stress related diseases. 

DG: Have you ever had an ulcer or stress related disease?

FS: Heck no, one cure to the HKP noise problem was to go to the countryside of Japan and live in isolation until the patient recovered.  However, this was a temporary solution and the patient soon got sick again when returned to the city.

DG: This sounds like the Square equivalent of urban-induced stress.

FS: Except that different things stressed out Squares than Sloppy Squares. 

DG: Such as?

FS: Regular noise pollution didn’t affect Squares as much.  HKP noise was another matter.  All Squares could agree that privacy and HKP noise reduction was important and some sort of system should be developed for the unique urban conditions of Japan. 

DG: So what did the Squares do?

FS: Squares noticed that Sloppy Square used makeup to accentuate facial features.  Sloppy Square lipstick made lips look bigger.  Mascara did the same with Sloppy Square eyes.  Erotron told me that Squares in the past created a type of traditional Japanese makeup system designed to hide facial expressions rather than enhance features. 

DG: How did they do this?

FS: Teeth were blackened so that the mouth would look smaller and would be easier to ignore.  Eyebrows were shaven and painted on a relatively immobile section of the face.  Natural eyebrow twitches were a huge source of uncontrolled HKP noise.  A Square could control these eyebrow twitches but this took a lot of control. 

DG: I would think HKP would make this easy.

FS: Controlling eyebrow twitches was kind of like controlling hiccups.  Faces were painted white with a heavy paste to hide the face as much as possible.  The out-and-out use of masks was considered too extreme.  The Squares wanted to reduce HKP noise but not be deaf altogether. 

DG: Traditional Japanese makeup is a mask to hide HKP?  I know for a fact that traditional Japanese makeup is exactly the way you describe it.  What function does makeup serve in our Earth?  If your story is true, then no Squares on our Earth should mean no such traditional makeup.

FS: Yeah, kind of weird, especially the blackened teeth. On my Earth, general norms were established in which Square members were taught to keep HKP noise to a minimum.  The solemn inscrutable Japanese face was created. 

DG: How so?

FS: Over many generations, HKP yoga took the place of the clumsier makeup techniques.  This was a type of facial yoga that enabled a Square to learn how to control facial movements that were normally autonomic.  Bits of pieces of this facial yoga could be seen in Japanese martial arts. 

DG: What sort of facial yoga?

FS: Advanced students of Kendo, Japanese sword fighting, were taught how to control their facial expressions during a duel. 

DG: I have seen enough Samurai movies to know this goes on in our Earth as well despite no Squares.  How do you explain this?

FS: Pretty weird, Homo sapiens have kinesic perception but just to a lesser degree.  I studied Wing-Jutsu and we learned to fight with our fists not our faces and I think this is a shortcoming of the system.  If you can stop a fight with a look then that is better than actually having to get into a fight.  Wyatt Earp would stare a man down until he could get close enough to hit him over the head with his gun butt.

DG: Maybe, Wyatt Earp was a Square?

FS: Maybe or just a more sensitive Sloppy Square. 

DG: Are you a big student of martial arts?

FS: Martial arts on my Earth were more advanced and you could actually fight people with guns with them, making them more useful.  My world also had Capo Jutsu.  It combines the Brazilian art of Capoeira with Gracie Jiu Jutsu. 

DG: Okay, you told me about Gracie whatever. What is Capoeira?

FS: Capoeira is a Brazilian martial art that focuses on kicking from a handstand position.  The legs are pretty powerful and Capoeira guys use the legs just like a boxer would.  Capoeira guys don’t use nice predictable kicks but jab away with their feet. 

DG: Who cares?

FS: Hey, it’s interesting stuff.  They can jab from a handstand, except a jab with their legs is three times more powerful.  The biggest advantage of Capo Jutsu is that is that it is hard to shoot a Capoeira student because the chest and face are not where most shooters are trained to shoot.  I would have studied Capo Jutsu but beer bellies interfere with handstands.

DG: Have you been in a lot of fights?

FS: I hung out at girlie bars in the Rio Grande Channel.  What do you think?

DG: Pretty wild?

FS: Even wilder.  The ability to control facial movement is very useful in a fight since the face does give away a lot of information about the emotional state of a fighter that even a Sloppy Square can read.

DG: So the Squares had a big influence on the social customs of the Sloppy Squares?

FS: Squares have noted that Sloppy Squares tended to imitate their rulers due to a strong sense of hierarchy.  Squares felt that they tended to rely more on empathy than hierarchy to make decisions due to their HKP abilities.  On the other hand, Sloppy Squares blindly followed leaders due to their lack of HKP.  The Squares noted with amusement how the Squares soon adopted the same HKP reduction techniques in a monkey-see monkey-do fashion.  To the Squares this seemed one more example of how Sloppy Squares imitated behavior without any thought of the function or cause of the behavior.

DG: You think so?

FS: Yes, I do.  In the late twentieth century, Sloppy Square Japanese would be taking classes on how to smile to make up for the facial muscle conditioning that was functional for Squares but dysfunctional for Sloppy Squares.

DG: The Japanese in our Earth take the same smiling classes.  Why is that?

FS: I can spot a Square a mile off, but I have been stuck in this clinic since I woke up from the coma.  I have met a very limited number of people since I traveled to this Earth.  I can tell you this much, if there are Squares in this Earth then they don’t control the television programs to the same extent they did on my Earth since I watch plenty of TV on this Earth. 

DG: What was the agenda of the Squares?

FS: Members of Homo erectus did not hate creative thought but did fear creativity and had created age old social mechanisms through trial and error in Asia to control creative thought as much as was possible.  They also tried to keep the spatial noise level down to acceptable levels.  Different countries in Asia had larger or smaller populations of Squares and to some extent this was related to how much conformity won over creativity in that country. 

DG: Squares were against creativity?

FS: Squares thought creativity should be tightly controlled.

DG: Why should creativity be controlled at all?

FS: Squares thought creativity should be tightly controlled and even eliminated if at all possible due to history.  Erotron told me, “Look at the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic weapons during World War II.  God only knows were Sloppy Square creativity would end.”  Japan was the modern political center of the Squares even then.  Many Square properties were destroyed. 

DG: So Squares thought the Sloppy Squares were dangerous?

FS: Yes, the Asian Squares had created an educational system in Asia that favored Squares at the expense of Sloppy Squares. 

DG: How so?

FS: Asian students that were good at rote memory were rewarded and creative expression was actively discouraged.  Western Squares, perhaps due to their relative weakness, take a more passive approach to the creativity of the Sloppy Squares. 

DG: Your comments about Hiroshima are interesting.  I suppose creativity is just like any other form of power and a two-edged sword.

FS: Sure, Squares saw the Homo sapien creativity as a power that had to be offset by an even greater power.

DG: What is this?

FS: Money!  Squares had a thousand ways to make money.  The numbers on the bottom of the TV screen in super color were the stock quotes for the next day, i.e., what the stock prices would be after Squares manipulated the prices.

DG: So these supposed Squares ran the stock market?

FS: They only manipulated about 1% of the stock prices, in a fairly random manner, with their control of the computer seguridad systems of the world. 

DG: Why didn’t they just manipulate all the stocks?

FS: Squares didn’t want to overplay their hand by manipulating all stocks all the time.  Instead Squares manipulated some of the stocks some of the time. This level of control was sufficient to make sure that pretty much all Squares were millionaires.

DG: So the stock market was basically rigged in your Earth.

FS: The fact that Sloppy Squares never figured this out shows how stupid they were.  The Squares were behind the dotcom rise and fall.  Squares made a bundle on that one.  As a Money Square, Erotron got a cut from every stock scam.  Erotron had come up with the dotcom scam and this showed unusual creativity for a Square.  Even at this early stage in my acquaintance with other Squares I noticed she was more “human” than the other Squares.  I asked her about this and she looked at me seriously, and then laughed and told me she took after her father in this area.

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Dr. Arrow has made a lot of money from the stock market lately.  He likes to drive his red Porsche to work and rub his success into everyone’s face.  I think the Porsche is ostentatious.  Dr. Arrow is probably a latent homosexual.

DG: According to you, Squares caused the dotcom rise and fall.  The same thing happened on this Earth that has no Squares. I think this proves there are no Squares on any Earth.

FS: Maybe, or it proves something else. 

DG: Did one species have a bigger brain than the other species?

FS: The brains of Squares were about the same overall size as that of Sloppy Squares but the relative size of different brain areas was very different. 

DG: What brain areas?

FS: The specialized area of the brain responsible for spatial reasoning, the cerebellum, was relatively larger than that of Sloppy Squares.  The cerebellum of Square brains was also more active than that of Sloppy Squares.

DG: How did the Squares know this?

FS: This conclusion was based on evidence from interspecies CAT-scan research.  The cerebellum was located at the base of the skull of both Squares and the Sloppy Squares.  The cerebellum of Squares showed more hemisphere specialization than that of Sloppy Squares. 

DG: This would suggest that the Squares would have better spatial reasoning.

FS: This is precisely the case. 

DG: You said the overall size of the brains was the same so what was smaller in the Square brain?

FS: The frontal lobes of Square brains showed less hemisphere specialization.  Squares members were all ambidextrous.  The frontal lobes of Squares were also relatively smaller than that of the Brain of a Sloppy Square.  Frontal lobes facilitate abstract reasoning.

DG: So basically Squares have a bigger cerebellum but smaller frontal lobes.

FS: Yes, the smaller frontal lobes of Squares probably explained their deficiencies in abstract reasoning.

DG: Did the Squares feel inferior due to their smaller frontal lobes?

FS: On the contrary, the Squares reasoned that since spatial reasoning is more important, Squares came out ahead, but Sloppy Squares do have abilities that Squares can exploit.  Have you ever heard of mirror neurons?

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: The cerebellum idea makes sense neurologically. In evolutionary terms, Squares sacrificed the ability to create and reason abstractly, that seems to be a function of frontal lobe hemisphere specialization and size, and developed greater spatial reasoning and specific spatial abilities. 

DG: They have something to do with learning.

FS: They are specialized neural networks in the frontal lobes of Sloppy Squares that allow Sloppy Squares to imitate behavior unconsciously and quickly.  Squares have more mirror neurons in their cerebellum so they can quickly learn spatial tasks via imitation.  Sloppy Squares had relatively more mirror neurons in their frontal lobes.

 

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Mirror neurons are real.

 

DG: The Homo erectus skulls I have seen in the museum don’t look human.

FS: One should distinguish between ancient Homo erectus, whose skulls are in museums, on this Earth, and modern Homo erectus of my Earth. 

DG: What’s the difference between the two?

FS: Ancient Homo erectus looked very different from Sloppy Squares and had a much smaller brain.  Modern Homo erectus was the product of symbiotic evolution. 

DG: What sort of symbiotic evolution?

FS: Modern Homo erectus evolved within the context of communities of Sloppy Squares.  Modern Homo erectus looked like Sloppy Squares, and this change in appearance probably evolved as a survival mechanism. 

DG: This would make sense in that the outward physical appearance of a species can change relatively quickly from an evolutionary point of view.  There is a theory that the difference in appearance between ethnic groups evolved in a relatively short period due to sexual selection.

FS: Appearance was pretty important.  Homo erectus that could blend with Sloppy Squares survived.  Homo erectus that could not blend in with Sloppy Squares did not survive.

DG: Sounds like cuckoo birds.  The cuckoo leaves its egg in the nest of another bird species.  The step mom just assumes any egg in the nest must be the same species.  Sloppy Squares would just assume that if it looks human it must be human.

FS: Not exactly correct but you get the idea that one species may fool another species about its true species identity.  Squares theorized that through natural selection, Homo erectus became more similar in appearance to Homo sapiens over time.  Nature affords many examples of a species that mimics the appearance of another species in order to survive.

DG: Can you give some examples?

FS: For example, many non-poisonous snakes look almost identical to other species that were poisonous in order to fool predators. 

 

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Patient is obsessed with snakes due to their phallic nature and his own feelings of masculine inadequacy.

 

DG: Don’t other species do similar things?

FS: Yes, the monarch butterfly causes birds nausea when eaten.  Another butterfly that is just fine to eat looks resembles the monarch butterfly in order to fool birds.

DG: How did Squares interact with Homo sapiens?

FS: The specialized abilities of Homo erectus made them valued members of Sloppy Square tribes.  For example, Squares were excellent trackers and could sense the smallest deviation of a blade of grass in a field with much greater skill than Sloppy Squares. 

DG: This would be function of superior spatial reasoning.

FS: Superior spatial reasoning could mean the difference between life and death for a tribe.  The Square tracker could help a Sloppy Square tribe find game in difficult circumstances. 

DG: I suppose the Sloppy Square tribe would take good care of this special tracker.

FS: Yes, this was similar to a wolf due to its specialized senses, superior hearing and smell, being taken care of by humans and becoming the modern-day dog.  Except that From a Square point of view, Homo sapiens were the dogs and they were the humans. 

DG: You are saying that contact with Homo sapiens affected the evolution of Homo erectus.

FS: Modern Homo erectus was a product of symbiotic evolution,

DG:  When two species evolve in a mutually beneficial manner.

FS: Right, the specialized spatial abilities of Squares as opposed to general spatial reasoning may have only been possible, from an evolutionary point of view, within Sloppy Square societies.

DG: How so?

FS: An analogy is helpful.  Ancient Homo erectus started out as a wolf in terms of its relationship with Sloppy Square.  A wolf is an animal that does not have a strong symbiotic relationship with humans.  The wolf is a generalist in evolutionary terms. 

DG: I would agree with that.

FS: There are dogs that are faster, bigger or have a better sense of smell than a wolf, but the wolf is pretty good in all these areas.  The wolf evolved into specialized dog breeds due to human contact.  In the same way ancient Homo erectus gradually evolved into a species that had a stronger symbiotic relationship with Sloppy Square and more specialized abilities. 

DG: Did the opposite occur?

FS: I think there is evidence that on my Earth Homo sapiens were more creative than their counterparts on this Earth. 

DG: I suspect this specialization would have a price.

FS: I agree and want to use the dog breed analogy again.  Specialized dogs like a greyhound are faster than a wolf but has sacrificed strength for that speed. 

DG: That’s true.  A wolf would tear a greyhound apart, if it could catch the greyhound. 

FS: Sure and another example is the Saint Bernard that is bigger than a wolf and could tear apart a wolf in a fight but is too slow to hunt most prey.

DG: And I suppose a bloodhound has a much better sense of smell than a wolf but is not as fast or as strong as a wolf.

FS: Exactly, a mutt is a generalist like the wolf.  A mutt may in fact be a better dog than a pure breed.  Humanoids on my Earth were more like pure breeds.

DG: So this is the mutt Earth?

FS: Yes, but mutts aren’t all bad.  Homo erectus evolved into a species with specialized abilities like the greyhound, Saint Bernard or a bloodhound.  The down side was that modern Homo erectus was probably even less creative than ancient Homo erectus. 

DG: Why?

FS: Creativity didn’t give Homo erectus a survival advantage in a Sloppy Square society since a creative Homo erectus was still far behind in this area compared to a Sloppy Square.  On the other hand, modern Homo erectus had spatial reasoning abilities that would seem like magic to ancient Homo erectus.  Squares that excelled at spatial reasoning could take on specialist roles in Sloppy Square society and thrive.  In hindsight, the two humanoids had evolved into overly specialized species.  This specialization would ultimately destroy my world.

DG: How so?

FS: On my Earth the Squares had been the trackers, the hunters and most of all the warriors.  The Squares were the masters of violencia (violence).

DG: Are you saying that your Earth was more violent than our Earth?

FS: Not just more violento (violent) but the Square Earth violence had become more rationalized.  A tribe with a Square warrior meant the tribe survived. The tribe also adopted social habits that were more ruthless. 

DG: Why?

FS: Killing Sloppy Squares wasn’t murder to a Square.  A Sloppy Square wasn’t human and you can only murder humans.  This meant that Squares could kill Sloppy Squares more ruthlessly than most other Sloppy Squares. 

DG: Social evolution paralleled biological evolution.

FS: Yes, despite their small numbers Squares occupied a privileged position in the tribe.  The Square warrior got meat when the other members of the tribe didn’t. 

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: I am MetaFreudian and feel that a system of psychotherapy that combines the best of Freudian and Jungian analysis is especially useful for treating metaschizophrenics.  One MetaFreudian theory of metaschizophrenia is that the patient has unresolved sexual conflicts that lend themselves to Freudian analysis but unlike a typical schizophrenic, the patient has managed to create fantasies that incorporate universal archetypes more effectively than common delusions and therefore these delusions are more potent socially.  The archetype nature of the metaschizophrenic’s fantasies mean that these fantasies can easily become urban mythologies and thus the schizophrenic infects other members of the social body. 

The existence of archetypes cannot be denied but as a MetaFreudian I totally reject that these archetypes spring from a universal unconscious.  Instead MetaFreudians theorize that the super ego developed a symbolic system of communication to communicate with the ego and therefore compete successfully with the id.  The fact that archetypes deal with social issues of a tribal society suggests that they are newer than the sexual symbolism of the id. 

 

This theory of metaschizophrenia is at odds with the memetic theory of Dr. Delta but metapsychology is still a new field and the definitive theory has not yet been found.  There are even highly speculative, and in my view highly suspect, theological theories of metapsychology.  Dr. Arrow thinks metaschizophrenia should be viewed as a biochemical disorder and has privately said to fellow colleagues that talk therapy is a form of mutual masturbation between the patient and therapist. 

Dealing with Dr. Arrow is a zero sum game.  Despite the lack of professionalism of Dr. Arrow, Dr. Delta seems to get along better with Dr. Arrow than myself.  History will prove that my position is correct and that Dr. Arrow is wrong.

FS: For once we agree.  The symbiotic evolution of the Squares and Sloppy Squares was a subject of many debates among Squares.  Which species affected which first was difficult to ascertain.

DG: Yeah, sure, that makes sense.  Were there only two hominids on your Earth at this point?

FS: No, there were still some Neanderthals around.  Neanderthals competed with Homo sapiens head on in the areas of creativity and abstract reasoning and failed.  Neanderthals did have some physical advantages over Sloppy Squares.  The Squares called Neanderthal’s Heavy-Squares. 

DG: Why?

FS: Neanderthals had a heavier musculature and heavier bones.  In a fistfight with a Sloppy Square, Neanderthal man would have won. 

DG: So why did the Neanderthals lose?

FS: The problem was that even at the tribal level, the fight wasn’t between individuals but between packs of hominids.  The hominid pack that figured out small stuff like how to smash someone’s head in with a stick and how to make fire won.  Neanderthals figured out the stick stuff but never quite got the fire stuff figured out.

DG: You are saying they were poor at figuring out fire-making methods?

FS: They actually had to have a full time guy keeping the fire alive day in and day out because they had a hard time starting a fire. 

DG: Why did Neanderthals survive in your Earth?

FS: The Squares had secretly helped a few Neanderthal tribes survive. 

DG: Why would the Squares do this?

FS: The two types of hominids had always had good relations and were united by a common fear of Homo sapiens.  Every once in awhile a Sloppy Square would see one of the Neanderthals and flip out.  The Neanderthals on my Earth were known as the Yeti in Tibet, Sasquatch in Canada and Bigfoot in the US.  Squares quickly relocated the Neanderthal tribe that was spotted to a safer place. 

DG: So the Neanderthals looked different from Homo sapiens unlike Homo erectus.

FS: Aside from being more muscular, the Neanderthals had hair all over their body like other apes but body hair can be shaved. 

DG: They shaved their body hair but why?

FS: The smaller females were sometimes shaved and used for muscle work by the Squares.  The shaved females actually looked like a very tough and muscular male Sloppy Square. 

DG: So, how much muscle are we talking about?

FS: Female Neanderthals were about three times as strong as the same sized Sloppy Square male.  A female Neanderthal could easily lift a small car. 

DG: I think I may have met one of these females in a bar.

FS: Possible, a Neanderthal male could lift a midsize car but couldn’t blend in like the female due to his more apelike features and larger size. 

DG: So Neanderthals did try to blend in?

FS: In ancient times Neanderthals would shave all their body hair in order to look more like Homo sapiens.  Squares in particular used shaved male Neanderthals in military situations in the past and this is how troll like creatures entered into most folk stories and myths on my Earth.  

DG: Once again, troll stories exist on this Earth despite the lack of Squares and this proves your story is a delusion.  Was there ever any breeding between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens?

FS: I think so and I think there is a Neanderthal strain in the Sloppy Square gene pool of both our Earths.

DG: How can you recognize Sloppy Squares with this strain?

FS: Go to a US football game and study the players on the field.

DG: You may have a point.

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: There is actually some evidence that Neanderthals were assimilated by Homo sapiens and the resulting hybridization led to our current superior intelligence.  This is probably where the patient got the Half Square idea.

FS: The Neanderthals were much stronger than Sloppy Squares but the Sloppy Squares were smarter and this made all the difference.

DG: Why did Homo erectus do better than Neanderthals?

FS: Unlike the Neanderthal, Squares developed entirely different information processing abilities from the Sloppy Squares.

DG: So Squares aren’t stronger than Sloppy Squares?

FS: Yes and no, Square males are about as strong as Sloppy Square males that are the same size.  Square females on the other hand generally had much greater upper body strength than a Sloppy Square female of the same size.

DG: If Squares aren’t stronger, then why were Squares running the show?

FS: Teamwork.

DG: Not overall superior intelligence?

FS: Not really, Sloppy Squares were smarter in some areas and Squares were smarter in other areas but the Square type of intelligence led to superior teamwork. 

DG: Why?

FS: Squares were better at the whole teamwork thing because of their HKP.  One on one, Sloppy Squares could figure stuff out faster but were a little slow when it came to working as part of a team.  From this small difference, the two hominids evolved in a different manner.  Ultimately Squares taught Sloppy Squares how to really work like a team, or at least that was how the Squares see the matter.  Also, Squares were biologically superior to Sloppy Squares in one key area.

DG: What was that?

1.19	Tetrachromatic Vision

Dr. Delta: While this meme bears some relation to the super color meme, this meme is much more virulent and has a higher infection level as well.  Many hosts exposed to this meme begin to believe they have tetrachromatic vision.

FS: The most important sensory difference between Squares and Sloppy Squares is their superior vision.  Squares had tetrachromatic vision as opposed to trichromatic vision.

DG: “Tetra” what?

FS: “Tetra” means four.  “Tri” means three.  Chromatic means color related.  Sloppy Squares have three-color cones.  Squares had four types of color cones.  I won’t go into the technical detail but Squares have better color vision than Sloppy Squares.  This is not only true of Squares but some birds have tetrachromatic vision and see better than “humans” because of this. 

DG: So Squares can see more colors?

FS: In a way, Sloppy Squares had three-color sensors in the cones of their eyes including those for red, green and blue.  A Sloppy Square lacking one of these sensors is color-blind.  Squares had four-color sensors and therefore had superior color vision because of this.    

DG: So the extra fourth cone means they had superior vision?

FS: Exactly! Squares were able to discern color in low-light environments, which would seem black and white to a Sloppy Square, and that has the practical effect of improving overall night vision.

DG: From an evolutionary point of view, why had Squares evolved this superior vision?

FS: Ancient Squares were nocturnal like most predators.  Squares hunted at night. 

DG: By implication, Homo sapiens are not predators.

FS: I would say early Homo sapiens were opportunistic predators, but mostly gatherers.  While Squares were opportunistic gatherers but mostly predators.  Squares had avoided encounters with Sloppy Square at first and then slowly merged with Sloppy Square bands. 

DG: So there may have been earlier contacts between the two species before they merged.

FS: Yes, Book Squares theorized that the legends of vampires and werewolves had their origins in ancient Sloppy Square encounters with Squares bands at night.  Squares could also go into a temporary state of torpor, a low level of hibernation, when food was scarce.  This probably accounted for the story of vampires that went into a deep sleep.

DG: Squares were less human-looking back then?

FS: Their canines were larger and they had more body hair.

DG: Did modern Squares have more body hair?

FS: Squares still had a little more body hair than Homo sapiens but the difference between the two species was minimal.  The Squares had unique communication systems.

DG: This sounds like an interesting topic.

FS: Squares were early masters of digital steganography.  Steganography means, covered writing in Greek.  Herodotus in the 5^th century BC described a hostage Greek ruler using a call to arms tattooed on the scalp of his slave.  You take a standard script and distort it using a geometric algorithm.

DG: Isn’t there software that does that nowadays?

FS: Yes but Squares didn’t need software to handle steganography. 

DG: What had Squares done with this ability?

FS: Squares had placed thousands of digitized images on the web that had secreto messages that could only be read by other Squares.  Sloppy Squares on this Earth can do the same thing with off-the-shelf software and unlock the message with a, software based, stegokey.  Squares could naturally create and/or read steganographic digital messages.  

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: More use of technical detail by the patient to add realism to his delusions.

DG: What purpose did these messages on the web serve?

FS: Mostly Squares used the web messages for covert commercial communication. 

DG: So how would you know this was going on?

FS: The main way a Sloppy Square on this Earth could tell that digital steganography was happening, was to perceive subtle differences in images on the web that seem to serve no apparent purpose. 

DG: Like what?

For example, if there was a snapshot of a car on a web auction site that changed the pixel image every few days, then this was probably a Sloppy Square communicating to another Sloppy Squares covertly.

DG: I have heard of this.  So why weren’t the Squares caught?

FS: The Square image changes would be too subtle in terms of color for any Sloppy Square to notice.  Squares generally used banner ads to communicate with each other on the web. Different banner ads were different Square chat rooms.  Actually the fact that Sloppy Squares never figured out something fishy was going on is pretty incredible since banner ads never made a dime.

DG: I think you have proved there are no Squares in any Earth, since banner heads exist on this Earth that is supposed to be Square free.

FS: You have to admit banner ads are a mystery on this Earth since they are a type of advertising that is totally ignored, and this is contrary to the stated goal of advertising. 

DG: You do have a point.  Could Squares use this superior vision for other purposes?

1.20	Pentachromatic Vision

Dr. Delta: The infection level of the pentachromatic vision meme is lower than that of the tetrachromatic vision meme but the virulence is higher.  The infected host believes he or she can see ghosts.

FS: Some Squares had pentachromatic vision and could actually see in the infrared and ultraviolet spectrum.  In some cases pentachromatic vision even allowed one to see spirits and this was known as ghost vision 

DG: Actually, various Asian cultures do make reference to ghost vision.

FS: Pentachromatic vision occasionally showed up in Homo sapiens on my Earth and was assumed to be a mutation by the Squares.

DG: Is the mutation common?

FS: The mutation may be common, but Homo sapiens have no psychological support system for such a person, and seeing ghosts on a regular basis can lead to madness and even suicide. 

DG: And Squares?

FS: Squares with ghost vision could communicate with the recently deceased and were valued and supported by their fellow Squares. 

DG: Why would you want to talk to ghosts?

1.21

Z-Rays

Dr. Delta: The virulence of this meme and infectiousness is low.

FS: In this manner, Squares would use their ancestors to find out what happened after death and also help guide them based on the experience garnered from other communications. 

DG: So you think ghosts exist?

FS: Well that’s what the Squares said.  In general, the deceased only stayed on this plane for a brief period, less than a second did, before being absorbed into a white light did.  The possessor of ghost vision could not see into the white light.  The Squares hoped that someday there would be a Square with hexachromatic vision that could see z-rays and even see the past and even the face of God. 

DG: Z-Rays?

FS: Electromagnetic waves that had been theorized to have a smaller wavelength than x-rays and even Gamma Rays, 10^-13 or smaller in size.  The Squares had been told you could see a lot of what passed for psychic phenomena if you saw z-rays.

DG: Are you talking about something like the akashic record in Asian philosophy that is some sort of record of everything that has ever happened and can be accessed by some gurus?

FS: In theory extreme psychic events gave off z-rays and there were cosmic structures created by God of such intense magnitude and high energy that they gave off z-rays. These structures had been dubbed the face of God.  A person who could see z-rays could literally see these incredible structures by looking at the heavens.

DG: Your so-called Squares had special powers.  What else did they do with their special powers?

FS: Squares dominated the policia, militar and inteligencia (intelligence) community due to their superior vision. 

DG: How so?

FS: For example, microstereoscopic analysis is the use of a magnification system to look at a picture for intelligence purposes.  An analyst looks at pictures taken by satellites and professional analysts look at a blob and try to figure out if the blob was a missile or a pipe.  Squares excelled at this type of worked. 

DG: Who does microstereoscopic analysis?

FS: Intelligence agencias (agencies) do microstereoscopic analysis.  Squares in the Bureau of Intelligence Synthesis took one look at pictures of the Panama trail and knew that the UA had lost the war in Colombia. 

DG: Bureau of Intelligence Synthesis?

1.22	Bureau of Intelligence Synthesis

Dr. Delta: Virulence level is unknown and the meme may be beneficial. The infection level is high (3.8).  The host manifests infection by either believing something like this meme exists or expressing support for the creation of an organization like the Bureau of Intelligence Synthesis.

FS: Just as the United States created the United Americas, my Earth’s US inteligencia (intelligence) agencias (agencies) created the United Americas super spy agencia known as the Bureau of Intelligence Synthesis or BIS. 

DG: Like the FBI or the CIA?

FS: Neither, once upon a time the different militar services didn’t talk to each other, this was known as interservice rivalry, and long term and short-term solutions were implemented that have worked to a great extent.  The First Gulf War showed this world what happens when your different services work like one finely tuned machine.  My Earth learned this lesson earlier and to a greater extent.

DG: This is happening in our Earth as well.

FS: I’ll believe it when I see it.  One short-term solution to the interservice rivalry problem in the militar of both Earths was the creation of the Green Berets. 

DG: You got the best of the best from the different services and created a whole new militar culture that was synergic rather than incremental.  What does this have to do with the BIS?

FS: The UA decided to apply this same concept to their inteligencia community.

DG: A Green Berets of Intelligence so to speak.

FS: Exactly, like the Green Berets the BIS recruited from existing services.  In order to join the Bureau of Intelligence Synthesis, you had to have three years of experience in the CIA or FBI or NSA. 

DG: Why did they have to have this experience?

FS: This meant the agents brought experience and contacts to the new agencia right off the bat but they had to work together.  They resigned their old positions.  You can’t leave an exit door. 

DG: Why not?

FS: The situation in your Earth where the CIA agents are assigned to the FBI and vice versa won’t work.  Ultimately, the agents know where their home is at the end of the day and don’t have an interest in cooperating beyond a certain level with the agencia they have been temporarily assigned to.  

DG: So you think a new agency has to be created on this Earth?

FS: Yes, a new agencia, but more than that.  It’s the elite, so it actually is something that top guys in their respective agencias want to join.  This sends a message that synergy is good in a very direct manner and integrates this into the professional goal structure of members of the inteligencia community.  This also means that everyone in this new agencia has very different backgrounds, but you get the best of the best, so they have the ability to learn, adapt and create a whole new synergic inteligencia culture.  

DG: This would be a relatively small agency.

FS: Sure, you keep the operation lean and mean.  The BIS had a lot of discretion and could access information from other inteligencia agencias in a more expedient manner and really were hot on the trail of leads rather than passively waiting for the CIA or FBI or NSA to hand them data.  The BIS just showed up at the doorstep of any of these agencias and pursued leads across the inteligencia community. 

DG: What about training?

FS: The BIS kept the Green Beret cross-training concept.  The guys in this group were constantly learning new stuff and moving around and getting a breadth of experience that guys in other agencias didn’t get. 

DG: Such as?

FS: They would have an internship with border patrol, a stint at customs, whatever.  Even a week of this kind of experience gave BIS agents a feel for the ground operation that no lecture or book could give them. 

DG: That would also be great fun for the right kind of person and one more incentive to join this agency.

FS: Sure, if you didn’t like learning then you didn’t want to join this organization, but if you liked a wide variety of experience then this was the place to be. 

DG: This is the best and the brightest concept.

FS: Yes, but the agencia also focused on being bright in “connect-the-dot” intelligence. 

DG: You know our Earth could use an intelligence agency that specialized in synthetic thinking.  The BIS agency could be staffed by guys that scored above a certain minimum on the Miller Analogies test rather than the IQ test since the Miller’s is better at measuring synthetic thinking that is basically connect-the-dot thinking.

FS: Like I said before, I think a lot of ideas from my Earth can be applied to this Earth.  The BIS kept the trained trainers like the Green Berets. 

DG: Whom did they train?

FS: This agencia did have the very specific duty to come up with innovative, synergic ways of combating terrorismo and disseminating these techniques back to the other inteligencia agencias as well.  The BIS were the kind of guys that did an internship at NASA and then did an internship at customs and suddenly realized there was some way to use NASA technology at customs.  There was even a science requirement. 

DG: This would severely limit the number of candidates you had available.

FS: They didn’t have to be rocket scientists but this agencia had a definite tech edge.  Since very few agents had a science background, the BIS agencia suggested very specific educational remedies to potential applicants and told the applicant to come back after they had pursued these remedies. 

DG: Current agencias rely on technology experts with a science background but I agree that having agents with their own science background would make this agency even more effective.

FS: The FBI wanted lawyers and accountants when it started.  That’s great for old-style crime, but what about the new style terrorist?  You can rob a lot more banks with a computer than a gun, and therefore you need guys who understand computers.  Furthermore, the United Americas had terrorists killing Americans with jetliners not guns.  On this Earth, this tech edge will only become more important over time.

DG: I agree, the terrorist attacks of the future will probably involve new technologies or old technologies being used in new ways.

FS: Of course, one of the BIS missions was to come up with ways to better use existing inteligencia assets across the inteligencia community in a more effective and creative manner.  You need all five fingers to form a fist!  This mission kept them in contact with the existing agencias and made them official cultural change agents.

DG: How would you compare the BIS with intelligence agencies in our Earth?

FS: No comparison, the Bureau of Intelligence Synthesis was the premiere inteligencia agencia on the planet in the area of intelligence synthesis and pretty much wiped out terrorismo after the 9/11 incident of my Earth.  Of course the global political situation was very different on my Earth and this helped.  Our 9/11 occurred about twenty years earlier when our Reagan was President. 

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: BIS invention is further extension of the patient’s paranoia.

DG: Why would a 9/11 happen on two such totally different Earths?

FS: Things are a lot more predetermined than most people realize.  Intelligence analysis on this Earth uses deduction and linear methods.  The FBI would be a good example of an agencia that uses this system really well.  Intelligence synthesis uses analogical reasoning, non-linear methods and is ultimately preemptive.

DG: For example?

FS: The CIA would be an example of an agencia that uses a lot more intelligence synthesis than the FBI but is still not too far from it’s analysis roots. 

DG: Perhaps this is one of the many reasons the two agencies have had a culture clash.  The problem may be more rooted in a fundamental difference in cultures comparable to C.P. Snow’s ideas of a clash between humanities and the sciences.  What you say does make some sense.

FS: Glad you think so.  Intelligence analysis grew out of an industrial society and emphasized standardization of methodology, the use of rigorous scientific methods in the form of forensic science and the application of a classical bureaucratic structure to the problem of intelligence.  Modern criminals such as the Mafia adapted industrial methods of organization to the business of crime and therefore there was certain parallelism between the enforcers and the criminals that made interactions predictable.

DG: Based on your logic, if an old style inteligencia uses industrial methods, then a new-style inteligencia agencia would use information age methods.

FS: Right, the new enemy on this Earth has adapted to the information age more quickly than the inteligencia community.  The new enemy uses a web structure of organization. 

DG: What do you mean web structure?

FS: They are small, mobile and do not meet in space but in cyber-space or space in outlaw countries.  Most of all, the new enemy has an intuition of how to combine seemingly unrelated technologies in brand new ways that are incredibly destructive. 

DG: You mean the Internet?

FS: Yes, the new information age requires an organization that has excellent intelligence analysis but can go beyond this.  The information age provides a fast-moving environment where actors and knowledge bases change exponentially faster than in an industrial age. 

DG: So what is the answer?

FS: Adaptability and creativity are no longer luxuries but necessities in such a fast moving environment.  Dangers can arise quickly and agents have to be ahead of the wave not just playing catch-up. 

DG: Intelligence synthesis sounds like a more formal way of thinking about connect-the-dot reasoning and its application to this fast-moving environment.  What specific methods did the BIS use to accomplish inteligencia goals?

FS: A premium was put on recruiting agents that that have the four “inters” including interagency experience, interdisciplinary experience, international experience and interpersonal skills. 

DG: Can you give some examples?

FS: Sure, the CIA agents, on this Earth, currently being assigned to the FBI and vice versa are examples of agents with interagency experience that would be at a premium.  Interdisciplinary experience would be persons that had formal education in different fields.  Corporations have done this for years. 

DG: Really?

FS: For example, Macrohard generally preferred an upper level manager that had formal education in robotics and business education to a candidate that was only strong in robotics.  MBA’s and Law degrees are excellent but these soft disciplines are strengthened when allied with a hard science background.

DG: Macrohard?

FS: Macrohard was the biggest and most successful corporation on my Earth. 

DG: Anything else?

FS: International experience is so obvious, given the increasing globalization of crime and terrorismo, that the need for this background need not be explored.  The need for interpersonal skills was important for the BIS interagency mission.  The three “inters” were given new breadth and depth as the career of the agente (agent) continued.

DG: How so?

FS: Advanced degrees were encouraged.  A special emphasis was put on degrees in science and this was the most scientifically literate inteligencia agencia on the planet.  International language and culture classes were taken throughout the career of the agente.  Coursework that developed analogical reasoning in applied settings was created and implemented. 

DG: How about any common training?

FS: Systems science was the core discipline that all agents had to study in a common setting.  The BIS agents used this common familiarity with systems science to communicate with each other regardless of their particular technical background. 

DG: How does systems science allow this?

FS: Problems have analogical similarities across disciplines, and this is one of the keys of creative genius. And if you can’t find the answer in the book, then you write a new book!

DG: Perhaps you are an analogical genius, since the universe you have created seems to be one giant analogy.

FS: Again, I am creating nothing.  I am just remembering.  The BIS had particular duties and responsibilities in the area of intelligence synthesis including developing interagency cooperation and synergies.  The BIS also was in charge of optimizing systems of data sharing between agencias and creating new methods of intelligence synthesis.  Finally the BIS focused on the more theoretical problem of how to best integrate human intelligence known as HUMIT and high tech resources in an optimal manner and create totally new technologies and methods in the area of inteligencia.

DG: How do you know so much about a supposedly secret agency?

FS: The Squares made sure it had key agents in this agencia, and they reported to Erotron.  Erotron had shown me a flat screen monitor behind the Botticelli Venus.  The monitor allowed Erotron to watch the BIS headquarters.  Erotron said, “Who watches the watchers?”  She started laughing and said, “I do, of course”

DG: What was she was watching?

FS:  At that particular moment, she was watching the Director of the BIS and he was in the Memetic Map room.  He was a funny old guy.  He had a white beard, wearing a black, double-breasted, spider silk suit from Suzhou. 

DG: Where is Suzhou?

FS: Next door to Shanghai.

DG: Spider silk sounds creepy.  Why would anyone want a spider silk suit?

FS:  Spider silk suits were snazzy but also bullet proof.  Spider silk suits also ran over a grand each.

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: The Director of the BIS is yet another father figure.  The white beard suggests a benevolent father figure.  The spider silk suit suggests a sinister side.  How can I move forward and create rapport with the patient?

DG: Never heard of spider silk.  What is a Memetic Map?

1.23	Memetic Map

Dr. Delta: The virulence level is low (1.2). The meme is has a low infection level (1.3).

FS: No such thing on this Earth yet.  The BIS had decided to integrate the data from the National Security Agency into a global information system so that that words intercepted were now placed on a global map that showed the movement of words in real time. 

DG: How can you track words?

FS: The map also took all the semantic data from all the other UA inteligencia agencias and placed it on a map. 

DG: What kind of semantic data?

FS: Most of the semantic data was gathered electronically by tapping all e-mail and all telephone conversations. 

DG: That’s not so advanced.  The NSA already does that on this Earth.

FS: A lot of the data was gathered by tapping into the video surveillance systems used by both government and corporations, that had become ubiquitous, and having AI systems read the lips of the persons talking.  The map could literally portray the word on the street.  All print data was also added to the map.  The purpose of the map was not to trace a particular phone call but to get a big picture of the movement of memes from one region to another. 

DG: For example?

FS:  Any time a new word popped up with increasing frequency, the database would automatically flag it.  Most of the time this was a fad making its global rounds but sometimes a more significant idea was making the rounds of the planet.  A BIS agente could look up a word and know the frequency that word was said at any point on the planet.  The agente typed in the code war used by terrorists and were this code word had been mentioned was represented graphically on the map.  The agente pressed another button and the map showed the ratio of electronic vs. printed vs. conversational use of the word with pie charts. 

DG: What difference does that make?

FS: If there was very little e-mail about this explosive but lots of conversations then this was okay.  On the other hand, e-mail usually meant something was being planned. 

DG: The map was a map of word frequencies?

FS: More than that, the Memetic Map computer system automatically used structural analysis to figure out if a word was being used in a new way, the structural equivalent of a new word, and if the word was now being used to refer to a person. 

DG: Sounds like some sort of linguistic map.

FS: Similar but the Memetic Map could trace patterns and real time and analyze the structure of these patterns.

DG: What some sort of structures?

FS: A web pattern of meme dispersion suggested a social hierarchy of some sort would be involved in this dispersion. 

DG: What about something like a fad?

FS: Fad related words generally followed a pattern of dispersal that was more similar to the way a storm system moved.  Fads started in the United Americas and then blew into the AU and finally settled in the European Union. 

DG: How long did this dispersion take?

FS: A new word moving fast might take a week to make its way around the planet.  If a word was globally distributed, but information about this word was difficult to find, then this word was a code word. 

DG: Did the map figure out the code word?

FS: The map system couldn’t tell you what a new code word used by terrorists meant but could tell you it was a code word in the first place.  The Asian Union is short for Asian Union and was one of the three unions including the UA and EU that dominated my Earth. 

DG: Sounds like something the National Security Agency would come up with.

FS: Perhaps but our Memetic Map also correlated body temperature to memetic exposure.

DG: How?

FS: In the UA citizens were expected to take their temperature and send the data using their cell phone at least once a day. Pandemics plagued my Earth. This daily temperature reading considered a measure necessary for national security.  The problem is you could get someone else to take your temperature for you in order to fool the government.   The AU had larger problems with pandemics and had hardwired temperature sensors into the fiber optic network of the AU. Body temperature was correlated to memetic exposure.

DG: What do you find out when you correlate memetic exposure and body temperature?

FS: You find out that certain memes raise body temperature and can be considered hot memes that literally get people angry and/or excited.  A very few memes lower body temperature and are considered cold memes. 

DG: How do you know what a hot meme is or a cold meme?

FS: The identification and classification of both hot memes and especially cold memes was a major task of the BIS in the UA. The AU had it’s own similar agency. Over time both the UA and AU had developed computer based models that could predict how certain hot or cold memes would affect social, economic and/or political behavior.  In general memes had no impact on body temperature and if a meme did have such an impact then you knew that it was a good idea to track it more closely.

DG: Body temperature fluctuates all day long.

FS: Yes but the average temperature of a large group of people with similar diet, culture and lifestyle is remarkably stable.  In general a rise in the average body temperature of a group was not a good thing.  Sometimes the BIS alerted the police if there was a temperature spike in a group that was known for rioting and other anti-social behavior but this was not a clever solution.  The UA and the AU also inserted cold memes into the media to combat hot memes. 

DG: I can understand how certain memes incite riots, in fact Blair seems to be in the process of banning certain types of speech due to the London subway bombings.  I suppose radical speech from mullahs could be considered hot memes but what the heck is a cold meme?

FS: Certain types of music had charms that soothed the savage beast.  Every social group had some version of music that did this function and in general this music was characterized by certain rhythms and tonalities regardless of the particular culture.  Most church/temple type music had cold memetic properties.  Also, most mood music fit into this category and was less obtrusive than piping religious music.  Piping more cold music into the radio covertly was one way to lower the memetic temperature of a social group. 

DG: What if the angry teenagers about to riot weren’t listening to the radio?

FS: Angry teenagers are always listening to the radio but you could also fight hot memes with hotter memes.  The insertion of more erotic memes into the local media could distract those teenagers and cause them to think about sex instead of violence.

DG: Female primates do use sex to calm down angry male primates.  Actually more than one female human has figured out this tactic.  I suppose it’s another version of bread and circuses.  You channel the social anger into another outlet.  So why not just pipe erotic memes into the neighborhood all the time?

FS: If you inserted the erotic memes all the time then habituation occurred and the erotic memes would no longer work so you wanted to insert more erotic memes in a controlled manner.

DG: So you are using music and sex to seduce social groups instead of your date?

FS: The highest level of political leadership is the seduction of the masses.

DG: I’ve heard that line before.  The idea of hot versus cold memes is a little like Marshal McLuhan’s idea of hot versus cold media and I might buy into the concept.  I could see the Memetic Map as some sort of memetic weather map.  The big assumption in your idea is that body temperature has some relationship to memes.  Who knows?  If there was such a relationship then maybe somewhere down the road you could build a model that let you predict memetic behavior.  After all we do predict the weather.  Control?  No way!  No government is that smart.  Enough about the Memetic Map, why did Erotron spy on the BIS?

FS: The Squares in the BIS used their knowledge to protect Squares on both sides of any conflict.  For example, there was a huge exodus of Iraq Squares from Iraq long before Desert Storm.  Erotron knew a lot about the secret history of the formation of the United Americas.  I would like to write about that sometime.

DG: I don’t even want to ask about the AU.  Squares put biology over nationality?

FS: Totally, as I mentioned Squares and Sloppy Squares also perceived space very differently.  Both Squares and Sloppy Squares had the concept of sloppiness vs. neatness, which was a type of spatial aesthetic sense. 

DG: But Homo sapiens have the concept of neatness.

FS: Both species agreed that objects should be in particular spatial relationships for a certain amount of time and/or moved in some sort of correct order.  The difference is that Squares were much, much, more sensitive to such spatial relationships.

DG: Squares were neat.

FS: Squares were super neat.  A noise analogy is helpful in this case as it was in the HKP case.  Both humans and dogs can hear noise but dogs are sensitive to noises humanoids couldn’t even perceive.  The same noisy environment is much more likely to drive a dog crazy than drive a human crazy.  Squares hated the spatial noise that Sloppy Squares generated because they were so insensitive. 

DG: How so?

FS: Sloppy Squares were always moving things around.  Sloppy Squares moved furniture, decorations and even buildings around with no regard for spatial constancy. 

DG: Anything else?

FS: Humans move their own bodies in random and spontaneous manners.  They do the same task a thousand different ways. 

DG: So, Squares moved around like robots?

FS: I wouldn’t call them robots but they did like to move in a more ordered manner.  The children of Sloppy Squares were especially noisy in the spatial area.  They were always jumping up and down and running around.  Square children were much better behaved than Sloppy Square children were. 

DG: Do you have any children?

FS: I had a son a long, long, long time ago, but it is a painful subject that I would rather not go into right now. 

DG: Why not?

FS: I just don’t okay.  Sloppy Squares also do not seem to derive pleasure from geometric, ritualized forms to the same extent that Homo erectus members did.  As Squares saw the situation, Squares must try to govern Sloppy Squares, or be driven mad by them or worse be destroyed by them.  The Money Square organization has existed in one form or another since the dawn of human civilization.

DG: The situation you describe is much worse than any conspiracy nut could ever imagine.  What did the Squares do with their power?

FS: Plenty!  For example, great geometric monuments had been built whenever Squares were dominant.  Stonehenge was one of the earliest Square monuments.  The Nazca Lines in Peru were created by the Squares.  The Pyramids were also the products of the Squares.  Ley lines connected the Old Square monuments. 

DG: Ley lines?

FS: Ley lines are straight lines that connect ancient monuments.  The Squares liked straight lines and used a system of straight roads in straight lines to connect their monuments that acted as social centers for the Squares.  The roads themselves were clearly marked for someone with tetrachromatic vision.

DG: A lot of people died to make those monuments.

FS: I am talking about the monuments on my Earth.  I have no idea why these monuments were built on this Earth.  As far as the Squares were concerned, Sloppy Squares will use any excuse to kill each other.  At least while working on the monuments they weren’t killing each other.

DG: Tell me more about your father.  Did he have HKP?

FS: Mind reading was a big part of my papá’s magician act.  My mamá had been his stage assistant.  She always assumed that he had some kind of trick to read minds.  I thought at the time that my papá was actually using his HKP ability in his act.  My papá mysteriously disappeared.  At the time I thought that perhaps he had violated the code of hiding his HKP abilities and paid the ultimate penalty. 

DG: Your records indicate you come from a single parent household. There is very little information about your father.

FS: I don’t know who my papá’s counterpart on this Earth is or what he does or doesn’t do. 

DG: Why did your father break the rules?  Didn’t he know he would get killed?

FS: I think my papá was ambitious.  I have no proof, but I think he had a dream of a world in which Squares and Sloppy Squares lived together as equals.  Mating between Squares and Sloppy Squares wasn’t common.  I think that my papá must have had an ideological reason for doing what he did.

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: What accounts for Dr. Arrow’s hatred of me?  I am more successful than he is, and jealousy may be his main motivation.  Dr. Arrow’s extreme interest in the case of FS is also strange.  I am the primary therapist in this case, yet whenever I see Dr. Arrow he asks me many questions about FS.

DG: How do you know this if you never met him?

FS: Just an assumption.  Squares could control facial vascularity to a much greater degree than a Sloppy Square. 

DG: Facial vascularity.

FS: Facial vascularity refers to the blood flow to the face.  In layman’s terms, a Square could control blushing.  Squares could deliver more or less blood to a sector of the face and make a picture the size of a pinhead. 

DG: If the pictures were so small then how could you see them?

FS: You are forgetting about superior Square vision.  Early Square facial languages were pictographic and the Square would form a picture of the object discussed on their cheek. 

DG: I am sure so-called Sloppy Squares would notice little pictures on someone’s cheek.

FS: The picture would not be bright red but very subtle.  Even if pointed out, a Sloppy Square would barely be able to discern the picture on the cheek.

DG: So Squares talked to each other by making little pictures on their cheeks?

FS: Right, but the early picture languages became more abstract over time.  The facial pictographs had become facial ideographs.  All square facial languages did share one common trait.  The subject of the sentence was generally formed on the right cheek.  The object of the sentence was generally formed on the left cheek. 

DG: So as is the case in Sloppy Square verbal languages, your hyperkinesic languages have grammatical rules that deal with the object or subject of the sentence.  The right-to-left order probably would in theory have something to do with the hemisphere specialization of their cerebellum, if I bought into your theories.  Did Squares have other parts of speech besides subjects and objects?

FS: Other microkines such as eyebrow movement, nose twitching, lip movement, ear-twitching and pupil dilation acted as adverbs and adjectives.  Sentences generally followed a subject –adjective/adverb-object order. 

DG: How could you have any kind of order with this kind of language?

FS: For example, the subject of the sentence was formed on the right cheek followed by say a nose twitch, of which there were twenty distinct types, and the object word being formed on the left cheek.

DG: So what did Squares talk about?

FS: Mostly death.  Squares considered their current existence as a form of hell in since they live in a world filled with Sloppy Squares.  Squares believed that when they died then they went to another world were there were no Sloppy Squares and Squares live alone in harmony with all the other Squares that have ever lived.

DG: Always, death is in the back of our minds.

FS: Maybe your mind.  Sex is always in the back of my mind.  What the Sloppy Squares call death is considered birth by the Squares.

DG: You say that Squares see the world as hell, but at least they live in a world without lies since you can tell when someone is lying by looking at his face.

FS: Not so, Squares could lie to each other.  Some Squares had more facial language production ability than other Squares.  Some Squares were better liars than other Squares.  Squares often communicated to other Squares on television secretly.  Most television newscasters on my Earth were Squares and communicated secreto messages to other Squares on a daily level. 

DG: Why didn’t Sloppy Squares have this hyperkinesic ability?

FS: The facial muscle structure of Squares may be inherently different than that of Sloppy Squares.  Sloppy Squares certainly didn’t have the ability to control facial vascularity to the same extent as Squares.  

DG: What about facial muscles?

FS: Sloppy Squares may have had the ability to control individual muscles in the face but never developed this ability, because they had no facial language for which this was needed.  Some apes have fairly complex vocal cord systems but do not use them to their full potential. 

DG: Did any Sloppy Squares show some HKP?

FS: Strangely, some schizophrenics could perceive what the Square television newscasters were doing.  One schizophrenic complained of psychic killers on the television after the Square TV announcer listed who was to be eliminated that week, but of course no one believed her. 

DG: The TV delusion you describe is a very common schizophrenic condition on this Earth.  There are no Squares in this Earth, therefore there should not be this condition therefore your theory is not correct.

FS: Or maybe you should watch TV more carefully.  If a Square had been in the room before, and returned to the room then he would notice any changes in the room.  This means it was impossible for a Sloppy Square to secretly search the room of a Square.  The desks of a Square were super-tidy and they would spend twenty minutes putting the stapler in exactly the correct place.  One quick test to figure out if someone was a Square was to bump into his or her desk, accidentally, and watch the Square flip out.

DG: Why are there so many more Sloppy Squares than Squares?

FS: Before the Flood, the numbers of Squares and Sloppy Squares were about equal.  After the flood, the Squares were vastly outnumbered and realized they had to join Sloppy Square communities and learn their ways in order to survive.

DG: Why?

FS: The Square Bible explained how the Flood was a disaster to both species but the creative powers of the Sloppy Squares enabled them to create new technologies in order to survive.  According to the Squares, Noah’s Ark was only one example of a technology that the Sloppy Squares created in order to survive. 

DG: You think there was a Noah’s Ark?

FS: Noah’s Ark is a symbol of the first ship developed by the Sloppy Squares.  Sloppy Squares also developed fishing technologies and other marine technologies that the Squares could only copy after they had joined Sloppy Square communities. 

DG: Were the Squares everywhere?

FS: As mentioned, Squares were mostly found in Asia but there were Squares in all countries and among all groups.  Squares could care less about race.  Actually, race phenotype was less stable among Squares than Sloppy Squares. 

DG: As I recall genotype is the actual genes, while phenotype is how you look due to the genes.  What do you mean race phenotype was less stable among Squares than Sloppy Squares?

FS: For example, a Square with obviously Caucasian features could in theory have children that looked fairly Asian or vice versa.  This was especially true of mixed race marriages.  Erotron made a point of telling me this.  I asked her if she was pure Asian and she refused to answer.  Erotron did tell me that Squares are a minority and reserve their prejudice for the majority of Sloppy Squares.

DG: According to you, Squares had their own little private facial language but they also had verbal language.  So I guess they were bilingual like most minorities.  They could talk the minority language and the majority language.

FS: Squares weren’t totally bilingual.  In general, they were pretty good at dealing with the form of language but not the subtle meanings of Sloppy Square verbal languages. 

DG: What sort of meanings?

FS: They had a very hard time with allusions, metaphors, symbols and other devices that played with the meanings of words. 

DG: So what language could they handle?

FS: Squares liked regularity in speech.  They loved chants.  They liked poems that rhyme.  Squares hated poems that didn’t rhyme.  They hated improvisational jazz.

DG: Certain types of music got Squares angry?

FS: Music hath charms that inflame the savage beast.

DG: Hard rock does that to me.

FS: Me too, Squares didn’t really understand someone like Shakespeare with all his symbols and allusions.  Squares tended to be quite literal in their communication.  Squares did like to use forms and form letters.  Squares liked jobs where forms were the dominant means of communication, such as in the militar. 

DG: Squares sound like they have autism or schizophrenia.

FS: Schizophrenics may be focusing on the spatial-temporal patterns in language, i.e., form at the expense of meaning.  Doing this in a creative manner gets you into trouble. 

DG: That is true, some schizophrenic’s talk in rhyme and this suggests a preoccupation with the form of language.   Did Squares talk in rhyme?

FS: Speaking in rhyme all the time is totally beyond the ability of any Square because of the creative ability needed.  

DG: You seem to be unusually well informed about schizophrenia.

FS: Thanks, I guess. Many schizophrenics play around with the form of language to the point that this game interferes with daily functioning.  Schizophrenics generally have a high level of verbal creativity, special perceptions of reality and a lack of social judgment. 

DG: If I bought into your ideas then perhaps Squares would be in mental institutions, if they hadn’t created cultural adaptations that allowed them to function in Sloppy Square society.

FS: I agree, a schizophrenic may be a Sloppy Square version of a Square without the social support network of the Squares.  Ritualism, of course, was a Square trait.  An obsessive-compulsive Sloppy Square had inherited the ritualistic Square trait without the ability to control the trait.

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Rational discussion of schizophrenia is a common symptom of metaschizophrenia as opposed to normal schizophrenia.

DG: Do Squares learn verbal language differently than Sloppy Squares?’

FS: Yes Squares do.  There was a huge debate on my world about how you teach language.  One side favored phonics that focused on teaching basic literacy and sight-sound correspondence.  The other side favored whole language and wanted children to focus on the meaning of what they read and make them lifelong readers. 

DG: This is a language and literacy debate.  What does this have to do with Squares?

FS: Well on my world the Squares were solidly behind phonics that Square children excel at.  Many whole language professors had been assassinated by the Squares.

DG: You mentioned symbiotic evolution but the two hominids had in fact evolved very differently.

FS: In the Square Bible there is an explanation of why Squares have HKP but not Sloppy Squares.  According to the Square Bible, Sloppy Squares started to build a tower that would reach God known as the Tower of Babel. 

DG: I take it there is a Square version of the Tower of Babel.

FS: In the Square version, God punished the Sloppy Squares by taking away their universal language i.e. God took away their HKP abilities.  This meant that Sloppy Squares had to rely on verbal language to communicate unlike Squares. 

DG: So your Squares believed in the Tower of Babel.

FS: Erotron later explained to me that most Squares thought the tower of Babel wasn’t an actual tower but was a symbol of how Sloppy Squares create a technology that they then couldn’t control.  Squares would have never created an atom bomb, unlike the Sloppy Squares. 

DG: Maybe, limited nuclear warfare is the price of progress.

FS: A pretty high price, if you ask me.  As far as Erotron was concerned, the Sloppy Squares were children that liked to play with nuclear matches that needed to be governed for their own good.

DG: What happened then?    

FS: I sneaked back to the office building.  I noticed a picture of my father in a golden frame on her desk.  The picture hadn’t been there before.  I guess she had gotten the picture to understand me better.  I had asked about Erotron about my father again and again.  

DG: What did she tell you?

FS: She told me that information about my father was top secret but she could assure me that he had been very, very special.  Once when she was super drunk she told me that my father was one very clever Hans. 

DG: Who is Hans?

FS: Probably some Square that was very clever.  I was told that Erotron wasn’t in, but one of her assistants let me sleep off the jet lag on a sofa in one of the offices.  I was awakened several hours later.  I had a dream about two people playing a card game.  I tried to look at the cards, but they were always just past my field of vision. 

DG: So who was playing cards?

FS: I tried to see who was playing the card game but they always were just out of the range of my eyes or in the shadows.  There were thirteen cards and they were laid out is an equal armed cross.  I vaguely knew that the two players were very, very powerful and very similar.

DG: How were they different?

FS: One of the beings was older and one of the beings was younger.  I have had this dream over and over again throughout my life.  A hand shook me.  Ant even, soft voice said, “Wake up!”  It was Erotron and she was frowning and looking at my face carefully.

DG: Tell me about Erotron.  How did she become a Money Square?

1.24	Square Castes

Dr. Delta: The virulence and infectiousness of this meme is equivalent to the Square parent meme.

FS:  Squares were generally born into the War or Book caste and then members of that Caste were promoted into the Money Square caste with some hereditary exceptions.  The Money Squares were 90% female. 

DG: Why?

FS: Homo erectus culture was matriarchal because Homo erectus females were slightly more creative than Homo erectus males.  Homo erectus females also seemed to be a little more comfortable with spatial noise than Homo erectus males. 

DG: Interesting.

FS: Because of these mental qualities, Homo erectus females would generally handle delicate interspecies assignments, and that was the single most important role of the Money Squares.

DG: Most researchers think women are slightly more creative than men, but I suppose this wouldn’t give you any interspecies advantage here, as it would in your so-called Earth.

1.25	Killer-Apes

Dr. Delta: The virulence and infectiousness of this meme is difficult to measure.

FS: I suppose, Squares had four major interspecies rules known as the Killer-Ape Rules:

DG: What are the Killer-Apes?

FS: The Sloppy Squares were referred to as Killer-Apes in the Square Bible. 

DG: Why keep the old term in the Bible?

FS: The old term for Sloppy Squares was kept in new translations in order for young Squares to realize that these rules kept the Squares from being killed by the Sloppy Squares.  Some Book Squares derided the way current Squares had forgotten the past and underestimated the Sloppy Squares. 

DG: Do you think about killing a lot?

FS: I only kill with love.

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Further evidence of the patient’s obsession with violence.

DG: Glad to hear that.

FS: The fact is that most modern Squares noticed the sloppiness of Sloppy Squares more than their homicidal tendencies.  Squares long ago had witnessed the near final slaughter of Neanderthal tribes and recorded this in the Square Bible but that was thousands of years ago. 

DG: So Sloppy Squares in your Earth had made the transition from being perceived as psychos to being disliked for their bad manners?

FS: Pretty much, Squares had ruled so long that Sloppy Squares were no longer seen as a daily threat to many Squares but more as an abstract threat.  Young Squares might kid around and refer to the Sloppy Squares as Sloppy Killers i.e. not deserving the name of Killer-Apes.  Each rule had a shorthand version.

DG: So what were the rules?

FS: The first rule was “Keep the existence of Squares hidden from the Killer-Apes.”

The first rule was considered the most important rule and was called the Invisible Square Rule. 

DG: What was the purpose of this rule?

FS: Staying hidden had kept the Squares alive for thousands of years.  If a Square thought an action by another Square would lead to the violation of the first rule then he might use HKP to communicate, “Invisible Square.”  Special Square abilities were kept hidden.  Squares were not to show off their HKP powers.

DG: So your father was killed for breaking the first rule?

FS: I thought so at the time.  Alternately, Square weaknesses were to be hidden and materials would be developed by Square society to fake creativity via alternate means whenever possible. 

DG: How do you fake creativity?

FS: The systematic development of the equivalent of crib sheets was one of the main functions of Book Squares.

DG: Another flaw in your story.  How could they use these crib sheets without being spotted?  Did they write all this stuff on their shirtsleeves?

FS: Square crib sheets generally took the form of ties.  Every conceivable form of information was printed on neckties.  A Square just picked the right tie for the job and glanced at it in the mirror when he needed the information for a particular job

DG: Did all ties in your Earth have tetrachromatic stenographic information on them?

FS: Pretty much.

DG: This would explain a lot of ties on this Earth.

FS: No kidding, Rule Two was, “Keep the Killer-Apes from killing Squares without violating the first rule.”  Rules Two is known as the rule of death. 

DG: How did stop Sloppy Squares from killing Squares?

FS: At a practical level this meant that the Squares did not generally start or stop wars.  Starting or stopping a war was too high profile. 

DG: So what did they do?

FS: Instead, Squares made sure other Squares weren’t killed during a war, revolution or other social upheaval. 

DG: How could they do this?

FS: Since Squares usually were high-level militar leaders on both sides, this was generally easy to do.  A Square wouldn’t stop a bombing but would warn Squares in the city that the city was about to be bombed.

DG: So I suppose they used the Square network to save Square lives.

FS: Yes, but networking requires work and a net.  Sloppy Square casualties were totally irrelevant one way or another to the Squares.  Since Squares made up such a small percentage of the population, migration was the main tool for safeguarding Square life and limb.  Squares were warned of an ataque and the effected Squares moved.

DG: Wouldn’t Sloppy Squares notice this migration?

FS: Large migration might have aroused Sloppy Square attention.  Since Square numbers were so small, there was no possibility of large migrations.  Sometimes smaller is better. 

DG: So Squares were pretty mobile.

FS: Yes, they evaded rather than solved Sloppy Square disasters.  On the other hand, Squares did have tons of money.  Moving tons of money could arouse attention.  Squares went out of their way to hide movement of money out of a country that they deemed unsafe. 

DG: How did they do this?

FS: Squares favored any technology or policy that allowed for anonymous movement of money from one country to another.  Generally, Squares hated technological innovation but this was one exception to their general dislike.

DG: So the Squares were the kings of money laundering?

FS: Absolutely, Squares had found that enough money made any country comfortable.  The Squares were not tied to geography but to a larger international Square society.  As far as the Squares were concerned, every country is beautiful in its own way.

DG: Obviously, the Squares have never been to Cleveland.

FS: That’s the exception to the rule.  Rule Three was, “Govern Killer-Apes with minimal interference in order to accomplish goals one and two.” 

DG: So Squares had a hands-off policy.

FS: Yes, Squares did not initiate social and/or political action in Sloppy Square society.  Squares were conservatives in the most basic sense of the word.  Squares preferred a Sloppy Square society that changed as little as possible. 

DG: And their own political systems?

FS: Squares had created systems of governance that had survived millennia and brought peace to their people for centuries at a time. 

DG: Squares didn’t like changes in government.

FS: Why the Sloppy Square constantly changed their forms of government was totally beyond Square understanding.

DG: What did the Squares want?

FS: Why couldn’t Sloppy Squares pick one form of government and be done with it?  Squares hated “-isms” and just tried to make sure whatever Sloppy Square side won didn’t kill Squares.

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Patient is political conservative.

DG: Change is fun!

FS: Change is not fun but deadly!  This brings us to Rule Four that was added after Hiroshima, which was, “Keep the Killer-Apes from destroying the world without violating the first rule.”  Rule Four was called the Rule of Total Destruction. 

DG: They really thought Homo sapiens would destroy the world?

FS: In the twentieth century, the Killer-Apes had developed technology that was so powerful that the Killer-Apes could now destroy the world.  Squares had been shocked.  Sloppy Squares had invented arrows, then guns and finally the atomic bomb. 

DG: Well, even I have to admit the atomic bomb is a bad thing.

FS: Squares were amazed that Sloppy Squares thought creativity was a good thing even after they invented the atom bomb when it was totally obvious to the stupidest Square that creativity was a curse that would destroy the world.  New is bad.  Old is good. 

DG: Why would they think this?

FS: The ultimate Sloppy Square menace Einstein wrote, “The atomic bomb had changed everything except how we think.”  The Squares would have responded loudly in unison, “How about not changing anything you dummy!”  Squares especially hated the sign “THINK!”  That was hung in so many corporate offices.  Sounded like something Einstein would have come up with. 

DG: So what was their logo?

FS: Squares invariably wrote, “DON’T THINK” directly underneath, with ink that Sloppy Squares can’t see.

DG: Squares have their own invisible ink?

FS: Several, actually. The most popular ink is a vegetable juice similar in appearance to milk that had been discovered through trial and error about 100 years ago.  All the inks had tetrachromatic properties of course.

DG: Aren’t the Squares a little closed-minded about the Sloppy Squares?

FS: Squares considered themselves pretty open-minded.  The Square inventor of this invisible ink was considered one of the great Book Squares of all time and this was proof that not all inventions were considered bad by Squares.  In fact the logo of the Squares was a cup in honor of this inventor.

DG: So who decides what is a good invention or bad invention?

1.26

Dolphins

Dr. Delta: The virulence and infectiousness of this meme is low.

FS: The Squares thought that the Sloppy Squares should have created some sort of permanent system like the Spanish Inquisition to decide which inventions were good and which were bad and suppress the bad ones.

DG: So Squares didn’t think that inventions are always bad?

FS:  Just 99% of the time.  The fact that the Sloppy Squares thought Einstein was a great man was further evidence of their madness as far as the Squares were concerned.  Squares just tried to make sure that 21^st century wars didn’t escalate into World War III.  The Dolphins and the Squares had watched with alarm at what the Killer-Apes were doing to the environment but neither species was sure about what to do.  Female Squares were the main agents used to implement the Killer-Ape Rules.

DG: What’s that about the dolphins?

FS: The Squares and the Dolphins had established diplomatic relations thousands of years earlier.  The story of Jonah, in the Bible, was the story of a Square interspecies ambassador.  Jonah’s mission was to establish diplomatic relations with the Dolphins long ago. 

DG: Did the Squares believe that God had chosen Jonah?

FS: Jonah was picked by the Matriarchy not God.  Jonah had been an HKP communication genius even by Square standards and could figure out dolphin kinesics but he was also a coward. 

DG: What was he scared of?

FS: He could drown or be eaten by sharks while looking for the Dolphins.  Jonah was even a little scared of the Dolphins themselves since there had been no prior contact with them. 

DG: Did a whale swallow Jonah?

FS: The whale didn’t swallow Jonah literally.  The Dolphins referred to the Money Squares as whales as a compliment.  Wherever Jonah went, the matriarchy hunted his down and finally forced him to complete his mission.  Jonah was symbolically swallowed by the Matriarchy.  In the end his mission was a total success and relations between Squares and the Dolphins were excellent.  The moral of the story was clear.

DG: And the moral was?

FS: You can’t escape the matriarchy! 

DG: As opposed to God. So Squares are dolphin lovers?

FS: Totally, Squares have strict laws against killing Dolphins and have secretly tried to protect them whenever possible. 

DG: I suppose Squares were behind the movement to stop using gill nets that killed dolphins as well as fish.

FS: Absolutely. How did you know? 

DG: We have the same Save the Dolphins Movement despite having no Squares.

FS: In exchange the Squares had an agreement to be rescued by Dolphins during a shipwreck.  Sloppy Squares were not included in this agreement but the occasional Sloppy Square witnessed a rescue of a Square and the legend of Dolphins helping humans emerged. 

DG: So the dolphins always saved Squares?

 FS: No, the Titanic was an especially great disaster to the Squares since the waters were too cold for Dolphins to operate in effectively.

DG: How do the dolphins communicate?

FS: Dolphins mostly used sonar with other Dolphins but also used a complex body language that combined movement of their whole body, their dorsal fins and clicking vocalizations in order to communicate very complex ideas. 

DG: Did all Squares know the language?

FS: Squares like Jonah could use their superior HKP to learn the dolphin language with ease but it was tough going for most Squares. 

DG: Why don’t dolphins appear to have any technology if they are so intelligent?

FS: Long ago the Dolphins had cities like ours that became ruins deep under the oceans.  Atlantean type artifacts were often remains from dolphin cities.  The Dolphins evolved spiritually past our type of materialism and lived in harmony with the environment. 

DG: So did the dolphins have their own version of the Killer Ape rules?

FS: No, the Dolphins were strict pacifists and would not kill another intelligent being under any circumstances, even self-defense, and that included other Dolphins, Sloppy Squares, and Homo erectus.

DG: But dolphins fight sharks.

FS: The Dolphins would defend themselves from sharks since sharks were not considered a sentient being.

DG: How do you know so much about the dolphins?

FS: I met the dolphin ambassador to the Squares.

DG: What was that like?

FS: Pretty weird.  The Squares had created a tunnel connecting the sea with the Tokyo Square headquarters.  The tunnel in turn ended at a pool in the Tokyo Square headquarters

DG: So you met the dolphin ambassador in the Tokyo Square headquarters?

FS: Yes, the dolphin ambassador wanted to meet the latest Half Square.  I hadn’t been taught dolphin HKP so Erotron acted as a translator.  The dolphin did a whole series of gyrations and dorsal movements.  Erotron responded gyrated in response.  She used her arm to imitate the dorsal fin movements.  Erotron’s gyrations were very sexy.

DG: I think you find everything sexy.

FS: Well maybe everything about Erotron.

DG: What were they talking about?

FS: I caught that he was asking some sort of question about the relationship between myself and Erotron but Erotron told me this was not the case.  I could have sworn the dolphin asked Erotron about our sex life and Erotron laughed and I thought she responded, “Not yet.”

DG: You think Erotron was going to seduce you?

FS: Maybe but to some extent all female Squares used sex to accomplish objectives. 

DG: What do you mean?

FS: Erotron later told me that female Squares could use their HKP abilities to great effect on Sloppy Square males.  A female Square could read whether a Sloppy Square male found a particular sexual behavior pleasant or unpleasant with total accuracy.  This helped Square females seduce Sloppy Square males. 

DG: I thought Sloppy Squares stunk.

FS: Female Sloppy Squares stunk due to menstruation.  Male Sloppy Squares smelled just fine.  Still their lack of HKP makes the male Sloppy Squares sexually clumsy and this is why many female Squares chose to be the dominatrix. 

DG: Dominatrix?

FS: A dominatrix is a woman that is dominant during S&M games.  The dominatrix is the mistress during such games. 

DG: I know what a dominatrix is but wonder what this has to do with the topic at hand.

FS: The Squares defined a dominatrix more specifically as a woman who used sexual gratification to rule powerful Sloppy Square men from behind the scenes in order to implement the Killer-Ape rules.

DG: How did a dominatrix do this?

FS: Sloppy Square males would do just about anything for the type of sexual gratification a female with HKP could provide.

DG: So dominatrix Squares had been saving your world for centuries?

FS: Dominatrix Squares were the unsung heroes of my world but the dominatrix Squares didn’t do it alone.  The dominatrix Squares enjoyed policia protection from all the Squares in policia and seguridad departments. 

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Patient may have underlying S&M tendencies.

DG: What about the lack of creativity among female Money Squares?  Wouldn’t that interfere with their being able to manipulate Homo sapien male leaders?

FS: A dominatrix needed HKP more than creativity and/or abstract reasoning.  Powerful Sloppy Squares seem to actually prefer ritualistic sex, such as S&M, more than less powerful Sloppy Squares.

DG: Well did the dominatrix like rituals?

FS: Yes, spontaneous sex confused Squares. Squares preferred elaborate mating rituals.  Many Sloppy Square dances on my Earth were copies of particular mating rituals of Squares. 

DG: What about the twist?

FS: There is an exception to every rule.  Nothing can explain the twist. 

DG: So Squares were good dancers?

FS: Yes, Squares could copy dances to perfection due to their spatial senses.  A female Square could instantly copy the dance moves of successful Sloppy Square dancers without any trouble.  Many in the dominatrix sisterhood were exotic dancers and courtesans.  The power of Square courtesans throughout history had been great. 

DG: Really?

FS: Yes, for example, Salome, a dominatrix Square, easily convinced King Herod to have John the Baptist killed after her dance of the seven veils. 

DG: Any other famous examples?

FS: Delilah was the most famous Square dominatrix. 

DG: Delilah as in the Bible?

FS: Yes, Delilah wrote an extensive essay about male Sloppy Square psychology.  Samson of course was a Sloppy Square of incredible strength that was nevertheless defeated through the use of psychology by Delilah.  The Square story of Delilah was also a cautionary tale. 

DG: How so?

FS: Samson though blinded and chained to the columns of the temple, manages to push the columns apart and kill Delilah. 

DG: I suppose there is the Square moral to this story?

FS: The moral of the Square version of this story was to go ahead and have a Sloppy Square male killed as soon as they realized you were the enemy. 

DG: So most of the Bible in your Earth is really the history of the Squares rather than a record of God’s will?

FS: Absolutely, I hope this doesn’t shatter any of your religious illusions.

DG: Well in theory the Bible in our Earth would have nothing to do with Squares but I am an atheist anyway.

FS: Why?

DG: Atheism is a religion minus God and less is more.

FS: Maybe something will fill your spiritual void in the future.  Female Squares had been the power behind most male Sloppy Square thrones.  Sometimes female Squares went ahead and grabbed the throne. 

DG: For example?

FS: Some famous female Squares that grabbed the throne were Cleopatra and the Dowager Empress.  Erotron was a big admirer of Cleopatra and said that she especially admired how Cleopatra had dealt with her half brother. 

DG: Lovely! As I recall Cleopatra had her half brother murdered.  Did the other Squares help the Square queens?

FS: Yes, the War Squares invariably helped female Squares grab and keep power.  Female squares were very meticulous. 

DG: Were they different than other female leaders?

FS: Yes, female Squares loved embroidered fabrics, as did the three female leaders mentioned.  As mentioned, all Squares loved geometric patterns.  Female Squares in particular loved to wear clothes with intricate geometric patterns.

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Dominatrix obsession is caused by the patient’s poor relationship with his mother.

DG: Didn’t the Square males get jealous?

FS: A Square male partner was generally not very jealous of his female Square partner when she used sex as a tool to control a male Sloppy Square. 

DG: Why not?

FS: The male Square saw the male Sloppy Square as less than human and not a threat.  Male Squares are generally only jealous of other male Squares.  For Sloppy Square dominatrix types, unintended pregnancy was a major danger before the advent of birth control.  On the other hand, Sloppy Square males generally could not impregnate female Squares. 

DG: This meant that the children of the male Square, the true mate of the Square dominatrix, would generally get the throne and/or power when he rather than the Sloppy Square impregnated his female Square partner but wouldn’t the Homo sapien male notice the child wasn’t his?

FS: Squares were amazed that throughout human history no one had noticed that almost all kings and emperors resemble their mamá and not their supposed Sloppy Square papá. 

DG: Did the Square son know the truth?

FS: The mamá could communicate to their Square child prince via HKP and the prince was told at an early age the truth about his parentage.  This was one reason that historically princes often did not get along with their fathers but did get along with their mothers.  I guess there is an exception to every rule.

DG: How did you like Tokyo?

FS: Tokyo was a tricky city for me.  As far as I could tell there were no prostitutes or droga dealers operating openly and this was a great disappointment to me. 

DG: Yeah, I can imagine.  So how did you handle this disappointing state of affairs?

FS: I realized I would have to search Tokyo a little more thoroughly than Tijuana in order to find entertainment.  I was talking a walk in central Tokyo when I saw the beast. 

DG: Beast?

FS: You know a Chihuahua.  I grabbed the Chihuahua from the Japanese lady that was holding it and clamped my fingers around the throat and began to squeeze. 

DG: You were trying to kill the Chihuahua?

FS: For a little dog, it put up a pretty good fight, but in the end I won.  I handed the limp body back to the lady who was obviously in a state of grateful shock at my having done this extermination service for free. 

DG: How did the people around you react?

FS: The people on the bus got pretty rowdy.  I don’t know Japanese but I assumed the Japanese were thankful for what I had done.  Nevertheless, I felt it was a good time for me to exit.

DG: So you think your public execution of the Chihuahua elicited sympathy from the crowd watching?

FS: What other emotion could this action elicit?

DG: Disgust, horror!

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Delusion indicative of patient’s problems with his own father.

DG: Or big leaders tend to be mama boys.

FS: No kidding, Erotron told me that the Money Squares were very disturbed by one particular fact in my personal history.  The Money Squares had done a routine check of my policia record. 

DG: What sort of record?

FS: The Money Squares noted my various scrapes with the law and said they showed spirit.  One type of criminal violation did puzzle them.

DG: What was that?

FS:  I had a long history of assaulting Chihuahuas.  I had been followed in Tokyo by the Squares for my own protection and the Square observers had seen my little incident with the Chihuahua during my walk around Tokyo.  I told Erotron to sit down and let me tell her my story.   

DG: I am also pretty curious about this issue.  Why do you assault Chihuahuas?

FS: Oh, don’t get me started on Chihuahuas.  Chihuahuas are the most senseless member of the, otherwise sensible, canine family. 

DG: So you hate Chihuahuas?

FS: Who doesn’t?  I propose that genetic testing be done to determine whether or not the Chihuahua was a dog rather than some sort of mutant rat.  Even the most casual observer cannot help but notice that Chihuahuas as a breed are totally and absolutely insane. 

DG: How do you figure that they are insane?

FS: How can you explain a dog that “yips” and “yaps” at a German shepherd that could tear it apart without any effort? 

DG: This proves insanity?

FS: No sense of self-preservation is de facto proof of insanity.  There were many theories on my Earth that try to explain the mysterious cause of Chihuahua insanity. 

DG: There were theories of Chihuahua insanity in your Earth?

FS: Absolutely, I think the fact that no one has tried to explain Chihuahua insanity in this Earth is further evidence that my Earth was much more developed than your Earth.  The two most common theories were the Aztec Curse Theory and the Tight Brain Theory.

1.27	Chihuahua Aztec Curse Theory

Dr. Delta: The meme has medium virulence (2.3). Th infection level is low (1.7). Small dog owners are especially susceptible to infection.

DG: Okay, let’s start with the Aztec Curse Theory.

FS: Leading theologians had pointed out that that the Aztecs fed Chihuahuas human flesh as part of pagan rituals that were better not explored. 

DG: As insane as that sounds I think I read about this but what does this have to do with Chihuahua insanity?

FS: The theologians posited that God had cursed the Chihuahua and all its progeny with insanity due to this unholy diet. 

DG: Wouldn’t the Aztec owners of the Chihuahuas be responsible and they would be the one cursed with insanity?

FS: You may argue that the flesh eating was really the fault of their Aztec owners but theologians say that if you ate human flesh then you suffer the consequences regardless of particulars.

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Aztec Curse Theory is very similar and probably derived from theological theories of metapsychology.  Some theologians posit that the current exponential rise in metapsychology disorders is due to some sort of divine punishment for the genocide that was unique to the 20^th century.  This is of course, ridiculous, since there is no God. 

DG: You know making up theories to justify antisocial behavior is one of the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia.

FS: You would have loved my counselor back in junior high. 

 

1.28	Chihuahua Tight Brain Theory

Dr. Delta: The meme’s virulence (1.2) and infection (1.4) levels are low.  As in the case of the Aztec Curse Theory, owners of small dogs are more susceptible to infection.

DG: And the Tight Brain Theory?

FS: The Tight Brain Theory is more scientific.  The Tight Brain Theory suggested that the brain of a dog could not easily fit into such a small skull.  The result was a brain squeezed too tightly into the skull and this led to insanity.  The eclectic view states the two theories were not mutually exclusive

DG: The eclectic theory of Chihuahua insanity?

FS: Yes, this may be why Chihuahua insanity was especially hard to treat.  Even if you transplanted the Chihuahua brain to a larger skull then you still had the eternal curse of God to deal with.  Other eclectics thought that the tight skull was a manifestation of the curse of God.  Leading researchers were working on this problem and perhaps someday a solution would be found.  This explains the dog but what about the owners? 

DG: Do you ever feel that your own skull is too tight?  Are you sure that you are talking about Chihuahuas?

FS: Sometimes my underwear is too tight, but not my skull.  Why do people own the canine equivalent of a raving lunatic?

DG: What do you think?

FS: The owners of Chihuahuas are insane themselves and choose some warped version of a dog as a reflection of their own warped nature. 

DG: Maybe your Chihuahua stories are a reflection of your own nature?

FS: This isn’t a story but the truth.  I would suggest that whenever a Chihuahua owner visits you then you had better lock up all the kitchen knives.  A more generous view supposes that Chihuahuas owners recognize that their pet was totally crazy but desperately hang on to the hope that a cure will be found.

DG: I think Chihuahuas are cute.

FS: Cuteness does not excuse insanity except in the case of strippers.  Perhaps there is a need for the creation of the Chihuahua owner equivalent of Alanon. 

DG: Alanon is the sister group to Alcoholics Anonymous and is a self-help group for people who had a loved one with an alcohol problem.  What would the Chihuahua owner equivalent of Alanon do?

FS: The Chihuahua owners could get together and deal with the stress of having a troubled canine in the family and develop coping strategies as a group. 

DG: What sort of coping strategies?

FS: A typical meeting would start with a member standing up and stating, “I am John and my dog is totally insane.”  The other members would respond in unison, “Hello John” and with this tentative step the healing could begin. 

DG: You must be joking.

FS: Chihuahuas are nothing to joke about.  Family members probably take desperate measures to get the owner to get rid of the Chihuahua and get a real dog or even a parakeet but the owner, in stoic denial, still states firmly, “Someday Paco will be all right.”  Deep down in his heart, he knows this isn’t true but he and Paco had gotten this far and there had been some real breakthroughs in the area of canine psychopathology.

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: Attempt to debunk self-help groups may have to do with that patient’s prior experience with self-help groups.

DG: Have you ever been in any self-help groups?

FS: You would be surprised how often joining a self-help group is a condition of parole.  Self-help groups aren’t so bad. 

DG: Why not?

FS: You meet a lot of girls at self-help groups.  They are usually all screwed up but a screwed up lady is more likely to screw, if you know what I mean.

DG: You know women aren’t just pieces of meat.  Why do you hate Chihuahuas?

FS: When I was born, Paco, my mamá’s albino Chihuahua, had already been her favorite pet for five years.  Paco hated me, and I hated Paco. 

DG: Why?

FS: Paco was jealous of me.  Friends and relatives had told me that Paco tried to rip my throat out while I was still in the crib several times.  I had vague memories of a blur of fur, teeth and claws ambushing me on a regular basis. 

DG: So you had a terrible childhood?

FS: Yes but as Nietzsche wrote, “Suffering that does not kill you, makes you stronger.”  Paco made me strong. 

DG: Strong or psychotic?

FS: Is there a difference?  All major events in history have been the result of actions and plans of intelligent psychos.  The sane react to history but do not make history. 

DG: So you and Paco had a bad relationship.

FS: To say the least! I had to fight that rodent every day for the first six years of my life and I was a better man for the experience. 

DG: Where was your mom while all this stuff was going on?

FS: My mama usually took Paco’s side in these contests which shows that even then she preferred other species to her own.  The worst was the toy chest.

DG: Is your comment, “She preferred other species to her own”, a reference to your dad?

FS: Well my dad was Homo erectus and she was Homo sapien.

DG: Maybe Paco was an imaginary friend that you used to deal with your anger over the abandonment by your father.

FS: Paco wasn’t imaginary and I have the scars to prove it, and the fact I have scars shows Paco was no friend. 

DG: Tell me more about your mom.

FS: My mama had these terrible migraine headaches.  If Paco or I were noisy, then my mama would lock us into a toy chest. 

DG: Were you locked in the toy chest often?

FS: You bet. Paco was a pretty noisy dog, even by Chihuahua standards.  Often I would end up in the toy chest and Paco would be thrown in after me so that she could get some rest.  I could still hear my mom yelling, “Shut Up, or both of you are going into the box!” 

DG: And did you behave?

FS: I tried.  Paco and I would look at each other, and although we both hated each other, his beady, pink eyes would silently communicate a truce.  Neither Paco nor I wanted to end up in the toy chest. 

DG: So did the truce hold?

FS: When my mom got her migraines, it didn’t take much to set her off.  Once set off, she would grab each of us and throw us into the toy chest. 

DG: Maybe you have created this imaginary Earth, and Paco, to deal with abuse you suffered as a child?

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: I doubt the patient ever had a Chihuahua.  Chihuahua is probably a symbol of the unconscious.

FS: And maybe we are both in somebody’s dream and, when the dreamer wakes up, we will both disappear. 

DG: Yeah, yeah, the whole ‘reality is relative’ thing.  So what happened in the toy chest?

FS: The sound of the toy chest being padlocked was like a death knell.  Air holes had been drilled into the chest and you could see a little light stream through the holes.  My mamá was a very forgetful person and sometimes we would be there for a whole day.  It was almost as though she led a totally different life. Raising me was an afterthought.

DG: That’s child abuse.

FS: That’s nothing.  One time she went to visit her sister for the weekend and forgot all about us. 

DG: So how did these events make you feel?  How do you feel right now?

FS: I feel fine.  Sometimes, we would try to make the best of the situation, and we would each stay on our own side of the toy chest. 

DG: What about food and water?

FS: Forget about food and water, we would usually have to go to the bathroom a few times all over the stuffed toys and the air got fetid. 

DG: Gross!

FS: After a few hours, we would try to kill each other just to break the monotony.  The fights were desperate and mortal.  I have scars all over my body and face to this day.  I think the scars give me a rugged manly look.  When I was three, I got the upper hand during one of our struggles in the toy chest.  I took a stuffed panda and pressed it against his face with all my might and smothered him to death. 

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: As mentioned, the patient does display an unusual number of scars on his body that may have been self inflicted or inflicted by a parent.  Paco is obviously a fiction.

DG: You killed your pet Chihuahua?

FS: The Chihuahua was my mamá’s pet.  For me, Paco was nemesis.  When my mamá opened the toy chest and saw the dead body of Paco, she fainted immediately.  My mom blamed me for Paco’s death. 

DG: Did you get into trouble?

FS: The coroner, our vet, ruled that Paco’s death was caused by a heart attack, and I was exonerated.  The funeral was open casket.

DG: Who is going to go to a Chihuahua’s funeral?

FS: Over one hundred people attended.  I guess I just never realized what a popular Chihuahua Paco was but I was still secretly pleased at having killed him.

DG: So how did this affect you emotionally?

FS: To this day, I have a fear of enclosed places and an overwhelming homicidal urge to kill Chihuahuas whenever I see one.  This later urge has caused me some trouble in my life but it’s nothing I can’t handle.

DG: So what was your house like?

FS: It was a small two-bedroom place.  The house was in a neighborhood near the LA airport named Westchester.  The neighborhood was working class, mostly folks that worked for the airport.

DG: Never heard of this place.

FS: It’s part of the LA airport runway system in both Earths.  My mom was pretty happy.  The airport paid top dólar (dollar) for the property and she got to move to Vegas and pursue her life long dream to be a professional poker player.

DG: That isn’t a regular paying job.

FS: It was for her.  My mom had a real knack for poker.

DG: Did you have any brothers or sisters?

FS: Not that I know of.  I know my mom had been married before but didn’t talk about it at all.

DG: Did she love your father?

FS: I think so.  She once told me that she had searched the entire world to find my papá.

DG: The city you grew up in was gone? This must have made you sad.

 FS: A little. I did visit the old neighborhood once before they tore all the houses down.  The houses were all abandoned.  My old elementary school and middle school were empty.  They had started pulling out the shrubbery and trees so you just got raw empty buildings as scenery. 

DG: Sounds like your neighborhood was a ghost town.

FS: I was just a ghost doing the rounds. 

DG: So how did you handle the transition to a new place?

FS: Las Vegas was a 24- hour town.  I liked the move.  Mom was out of the house all night and not just part of the night, and I could have more fun.

DG: Your lack of roots may explain a lot of your personality.  What was your home life like?

FS: Pretty typical, burnt oatmeal for breakfast.  I would have lunch at school.  I would make a TV dinner when I got home.

DG: So your mom wasn’t around very much.

FS: My mom was always busy.  She was on the computer constantly.  I think she was an e-mail addict.  She had friends all over the world that she e-mailed constantly.  I was a latch key kid but that was okay. 

DG: Okay?  Are you sure that you aren’t rationalizing?

FS: That meant I could have buddies over and had more freedom.  Food was always a problem but the rental fee I charged my buddies for hanging around my house was to BYOB.

DG: No wonder you are an alcoholic.

FS: I suppose my upbringing has something to do with my little habits.

DG: Let’s get back to Erotron.  What else did she tell you about the Squares?

FS: Erotron firmly believed in matriarchy.  Erotron told me to read the story of Adam and Eve.  According to the Square Bible, God created Adam first.  God had never made a human before and made a lot of mistakes. 

DG: What kind of mistakes?

FS: The first human wasn’t too smart, clumsy and immature.  God looked at Adam bumbling about in the Garden of Eden and decided a better job needed to be done.  God then created Eve.  Eve was given superior intelligence, greater grace and most of all greater emotional maturity. 

DG: Well anthropologically it would make sense that a matriarchy would have myths that justify the matriarchy.  This story provides a biblical explanation of female superiority.

FS: Or the story is true.

DG: Any other differences between the Square version of Adam and Eve and the standard version?

FS: In the Square Bible, God gave Adam and Eve the choice of staying in the Garden of Eden forever or going forth and populating the world.  This message was given to Eve via God’s messenger in the form of a snake. 

DG: So the snake in the Square version is a messenger of God and not the devil.  Why would God pick a nasty creature like a snake to be a messenger?

FS: Squares didn’t think of snakes as nasty.  The snake has the highest level of HKP of any animal in the world.  Snakes communicate via their bodies.  Individual snakes weren’t necessarily all that intelligent but many species of snakes formed a group mind at least once a year. 

DG: Group mind?

FS: The snakes of a particular species would congregate at a particular place and unite their individual intellects into one giant intellect that was far beyond anything humanoids could comprehend.  Squares would watch the dance of the snakes when the group mind was formed in order to learn their secretos. 

DG: What sorts of secrets?

FS: The kinesic language of the snake group mind was particularly complex and subtle.  Some Book Squares devoted a lifetime of study to understand all the nuances of this kinesic language. 

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: In this fantasy the snakes join and gain HKP.  This is a latent homosexual fantasy on the part of the patient.  The snakes represent penises and their joining is symbolically a homosexual orgy.

DG: Why not just pray?

FS: God was considered beyond form by the Squares but the Squares assumed that God takes on the form of a snake when on Earth.  The snake had Adam and Eve eat the pomegranate. 

DG: As opposed to an apple and they knew shame.

FS: No, the pomegranate gave them HKP.  After Eve and Adam ate the pomegranate, they could sense what the other was thinking.  At this point they became truly human and had the tools necessary to go forth and populate the world.  Sloppy Squares never understood the true meaning of the story of Eve and Adam because of their ignorance of the existence of HKP. 

DG: So the Squares worshipped snakes.

FS: Not so much worship as revere.  Squares would never kill a snake since you could never tell if that particular snake housed the spirit of God.  The snake was revered throughout the world by Squares before the flood.  As mentioned before, the Squares had a global empire before the flood and this was why ancient megaliths could be found with the symbol of the snake throughout the world.  The symbol of the flood was the encircled serpent.

DG: I have heard of the encircled serpent.  It’s a snake eating its own tail.

FS: Right, the encircled serpent represented divinity destroying the world.  Since God created the world, in a sense God was destroying itself. 

DG: So what did the Squares use this symbol for?

FS: The encircled serpent was used by the Squares to mark sites that were important to the Squares before the flood destroyed the site.

DG: The encircled serpent is a big symbol in this Earth and there are no Squares.  Why is this so?

FS: Coincidence.  The symbol of the matriarchy was two snakes intertwined.  The two snakes represent the union of Eve and Adam under the leadership of Eve. 

DG: But this symbol is the symbol of medicine and that has nothing to do with Squares.

FS: Female Squares were generally the healers in Square society and this symbol has migrated to Sloppy Square society and become their symbol of the barber with a red and white stripe that did surgery and ultimately the symbol became the Sloppy Square symbol of medicine.

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: The patient keeps mentioning snakes.  The snake is an obvious phallic symbol.  The snakes are an externalization of latent homosexuality.  The latent homosexuality would partly explain the patient’s misogynist attitude.

DG: Let’s continue discussing Erotron.

FS: Erotron explained that there had only been six recorded Half Squares including myself in the entire history of the world.  All Half Squares had been unable to produce offspring with either a Homo erectus or a Homo sapien. 

DG: I wonder if two hybrids could produce offspring?

FS: I have no idea.  Erotron told me that I probably didn’t need to mess with contraception because I was a Half Square.  Now she tells me!  All that money wasted on rubbers!  Half Squares had a huge impact on world history. 

DG: So there were other Half Squares?

1.29	Cain the Half Square of Death

Dr. Delta: The virulence and infectiousness of this meme is high.

FS: Erotron showed me a cartoon about the history of the Half Squares on a big screen projection system that came out of the wall with the push of a button.  A projectionist came with the system and she cooed, “Oh, you’re the famous Half Square everybody’s been talking about.” 

DG: How did Erotron respond?

FS: I could swear Erotron hissed at her but via HKP, a kind of a silent hiss.  I have heard of silent meows but never really seen a silent hiss.

DG: How did Erotron’s jealousy make you feel?

FS: It was scary.  Erotron told me there were other films that dealt with the more complex aspects of the Half Squares effects on history but this cartoon was used with younger Squares and might be more appropriate for me.  The first Half Square had been Cain. 

DG: Cain as in Cain and Abel?  Do read the Bible a lot?  Would you consider yourself religious?

FS: I never touched the Bible until I found that DVD in the Bible my mom gave me.  Cain had killed his half brother Abel that had been a Square. 

DG: Cain offered God produce since he was a farmer.  Abel was a shepherd and offered God meat.  God preferred the meat.  Cain was jealous of Abel and killed him.

FS: Actually the mom of Cain and Abel was a Money Square that preferred.   Abel’s meat dishes to Cain’s salads.  But most Squares thought this was just symptomatic of a deeper problem.

DG: Deeper problem?

FS: Presumably, Cain had been jealous of Abel because Abel had been given more privileges due to his full Square status.  In the future Half Squares were given minimal knowledge of their family history to prevent such problems.  The Squares had never committed murder before this. 

DG: I thought Squares killed Sloppy Squares all the time?

FS: Killing Sloppy Squares was not considered murder.  According to the Square Bible, God didn’t mark Cain. 

DG: So what did happen to Cain?

FS: A mark was tattooed on the face of offender with a tattoo that only Squares could see.  Cain had been marked and ostracized from all the Square communities. 

DG: So he was considered a bad guy?

FS: Yes and no, Cain had taught the Squares murder and this was a mixed accomplishment.  The projectionist had a Russian accent; blond hair cut in a short hairstyle.  She wore a dark blue office outfit, white pantyhose and white high shoes.  She was much smaller than Erotron and had a cupid smile.  She smiled at me and I smiled back.

DG: I suppose you forgot that Erotron was in the room.  And who was the second Half Square?

1.30	Jesus the Half Square of Love

Dr. Delta: The virulence and infectiousness of this meme is high and higher for devout Christians.

FS: The second Half Square was Jesus and as mentioned he had been born with incredible powers.  Jesus had said that the first Half Square had brought murder to the world.  The second Half Square, himself, would conversely bring love to the world.  I was trying to figure out a way to dump Erotron temporarily and get to know the projectionist better but was drawing a total blank.

DG: Yeah, yeah, your love life is fascinating.  What else did Jesus predict?

FS: Jesus predicted that the third Half Square would bring reason to the world.  Furthermore the fourth Half Square would bring hatred to the world.  The fifth Half Square would be a fool that would bring unity to the world.  Finally, the sixth Half Square would signal the end of the world.  The world would begin again after the sixth Half Square.

DG: Let’s go back to Jesus.

FS: As mentioned, Jesus was the second Half Square of love.  The mamá, Mary was a Square.  The father of Jesus was a Sloppy Square. 

DG: I thought Jesus was the Son of God.

FS: Symbolically the Squares considered the real father of Jesus to be God since the union of a Square and a Sloppy Square hardly ever led to offspring.  God had obviously intervened. 

DG: And the Immaculate Conception?

FS: Mary was considered a virgin for she had never mated with another Square.  Sex with Sloppy Squares doesn’t count.   

DG: Okay, so Half Squares are men that change the course of history.

FS: Yes, Mary Magdalene had been the Square advisor to Jesus.  Jesus was spreading a message of love and brotherhood.  The message of love and brotherhood intrigued the Matriarchy. 

DG: Why?

FS: Could this message of love be extended to include love and brotherhood between Squares and Sloppy Squares?  Could this message civilize the Sloppy Squares?  Could the killer apes be taught not to kill? 

DG: So what do you think about this message of love?

FS: I wasn’t paying much attention to the film.  The cartoon Magdalene in the flick was drawn really sexy.  The combination of the cartoon Magdalene, the projectionist and Erotron in the same room got me pretty hot.  I started fantasizing about having sex with the projectionist and Erotron at the same time.

DG: Really interesting, you mentioned Cain was the first murderer.  Why didn’t Squares kill each other before Cain?

FS: HKP seemed to create a heightened sense of empathy between Squares, or a heightened sense of empathy led to HKP.  The Book Squares had debated the issue of the relationship between HKP and empathy for centuries.  How could you hurt much less kill someone when their body communicated their pain in a manner that was so much clearer than spoken language? 

DG: What about Cain?

FS: Cain had figured out a method for blocking out HKP based empathy during the act of murder.

DG: If the Squares had a hard time killing then how could they be soldiers?

FS: The Squares had no problem killing Sloppy Squares.  Sloppy Squares were animals that died as sloppily as they lived.  A Sloppy Square would die and make no attempt to dance a final death dance.  For the record, Squares created the Samurai death dance.  

DG: I have heard of death dances.  Some Native American tribes think this is a sign of civilization.  The idea is you do a dance prior to certain death to show your bravery.

FS: For Squares it’s a little different.  The death dance is a final farewell song.  In particular, some Japanese samurai flicks show this death dance but Sloppy Squares cannot understand the nuances of the death dance.  Instead of doing the death dance, the Sloppy Square would yak and yak about a bunch of stuff.  A death dance was so much more than some stupid speech.  To be or not to be in the final moments of death could only be shown and not said. 

DG: So Sloppy Squares died differently than Squares?

FS: The death of Sloppy Squares lacked all the physical grace of the death of a Square.  Some Book Squares argued that Sloppy Square felt pain the same way that Squares but could not communicate this pain.  Most Book Squares argued that Sloppy Squares, as a lower species were not capable of feeling pain the same way Squares did.  

DG: Let’s get back to Mary Magdalene.  Besides being well drawn, what else can you tell me about her?

FS: Magdalene had been the Matriarch of that time period. 

DG: Wouldn’t the Money Squares use an agent rather than the leader?

FS: The Money Square leaders were usually the top agents as well. 

DG: What was she supposed to do?

FS: Magdalene was sent to help Jesus develop his Square abilities so that he could more effectively spread his message of love.  According to the Square Bible.  Magdalene was the number one teacher of Jesus.  As far as the Matriarchy was concerned, the Magdalene had taught Christ everything he knew and then some. 

DG: What was he taught?

FS: Magdalene had helped Christ develop his clairvoyant abilities.  Clairvoyance was a specialized Book Square skill that most Squares never developed.

DG: This is totally at odds with the role of Mary Magdalene I have read about.

FS: According to Erotron, the Sloppy Squares were inferior and therefore could not accept the superior discipline and truth that Mary Magdalene had brought to their species.  They had wrongly slandered Magdalene as they had slandered Eve. 

DG: Did Jesus, as a Half Square, have special powers that the Squares did not?

FS: Yes, the most amazing gift that Jesus possessed was a level of clairvoyance far beyond that of any Square.  Trained Squares could see spatial patterns that enabled them to predict the future days and maybe at most a week into the future about very specific phenomena.  Jesus could see years and even centuries into the future and predict general events. 

DG: Why would Jesus have this ability?

FS: This is one of the mysteries of Half Squares.  This gift seemed to transcend the Square or Sloppy Square heritage of Jesus.  The Squares had used the secreto prophecies of Jesus to great effect and much of this was written in super color in most Bibles in the world.

DG: Why were the Squares so interested in the prophecies of Jesus?

FS: The prophecies of Jesus had helped the Squares achieve global dominance albeit secreto global dominance.  The most famous prophecy was that of the sixth Half Square that would give birth to a New World when the Old World was destroyed.

DG: And this incredible sixth Half Square happens to be you?

FS: You must have the gift of prophecy yourself. 

DG: You mentioned six Half Squares.  Who were the other Half Squares?

1.31	Leonardo da Vinci the Half Square of Reason

Dr. Delta: The virulence and infectiousness of this meme is not as high as the other Half Square memes except for Da Vinci Code fanatics in which case the meme is more dangerous.

FS: Leonardo da Vinci was the third Half Square.  Leonardo da Vinci was the prophesied Half Square of reason. 

DG: Did Leonardo da Vinci have special powers?

FS: Yes, Leonardo da Vinci was probably the most fortunate Half Square in the history of the word. 

DG: How so?

FS: He got the creativity from the Sloppy Square side and the spatial abilities of the Squares and was able to use one set of abilities to augment the other set of abilities.  Leonardo da Vinci also had some ability to see the future but not to the extent Jesus had. 

DG: For example?

FS: Leonardo da Vinci was an excellent painter.  Squares could reproduce paintings with incredible skill due to their superior spatial perception but usually couldn’t create very original works.  Hitler was probably a good example of this.  Hitler had some skill in drawing but his drawings were not creative by Sloppy Square standards.

DG: Well you are right about the art of Hitler and Leonardo.  Leonardo had technical skill but he brought much more to the task.

FS: Creativity is relative and most Squares would have been quite happy to be as creative as Hitler was in the area of art.  Leonardo had the spatial drawing skill of a Square combined with the creativity of a Sloppy Square. 

DG: Did Leonardo inherit any HKP?

FS: Leonardo did not inherit any of the HKP skills from his Square side unlike all the other Half Squares.  Leonardo did inherent the incredible visualization skills of a Square but could visualize totally new mechanical forms!  Leonardo used mirror writing due to his Square heritage. 

DG: Mirror writing?

FS: Leonardo’s writing was reversed in a mirror like way.  Squares routinely did a more complex version of mirror writing were regular script was geometrically altered so that only another Square could read it.  This was a type of low-tech steganography that predates their use of this method on the web.  Many decorative motifs were in fact Square messages left for other Squares. 

DG: A novel explanation of decoration.

FS: Yeah but this system had limits.  Not all Squares could read all geometrically altered scripts.  The Square would have to know the original language that had been geometrically altered. 

DG: Any examples?

FS: The Alhambra was an Arab palace in which every inch of the palace was filled with decorations.  Most of the decorations were sayings from the Koran in Arabic script, which in turn had been geometrically altered.  Squares in the Arab world knew Arabic script.  Only another Square that could read Arabic script could read these decorations. 

DG: What about let’s say a German Square?

FS: A German Square that didn’t know Arabic could recognize that a Square had done the decoration but would not be able to read the decorations. 

DG: Did the Squares use mirror writing?

FS: Mirror writing was pretty primitive stuff for Squares and something that very young Squares might fool around with just like children fool around with pig Latin but not something adult Squares used.

DG: And the fourth Half Square?

1.32	Hitler the Half Square of Hate

Dr. Delta: The virulence and infectiousness of this meme is extremely high.

FS: Hitler was the fourth Half Square.  Hitler was the prophesied Half Square of hatred.  The Squares had been told by Jesus to stay far away from Hitler and to not share with him the secreto of their existence.

DG: So Hitler didn’t know about the Squares at all.

FS: Perhaps Hitler himself was probably dimly aware of his genetic origins and this would explain his obsession with genetic purity. 

DG: Are their more Squares among the Jews?

FS: Actually, there were no more or less Squares among the Jews than any other ethnic group.  Some Squares theorize that Hitler thought the Jews were in fact Homo erectus at some level. Hitler was sterile, like almost all Half Squares, and in fact only had one testicle. 

DG: What Square traits did Hitler have?

FS: Hitler was obsessed with planning the creation of imaginary geometrical cities with Albert Speer in his bunker even as he was losing World War II.  This geometrical obsession even when danger threatens was a very Square trait. 

DG: I have read Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer and your account of Hitler’s obsession with planning cities while the Allies were winning is correct but there are no Squares in our world so how could this be?

FS: Yeah, pretty weird isn’t it?  Hitler was much more creative than other Squares and would be a genius in this area by Square standards. 

DG: You stated that all the Half Squares had HKP except Leonardo da Vinci.  Did Hitler have HKP?

FS: Hitler seemed to have the ability to read peoples faces to a greater extent than any Sloppy Square but not to the same extent as a full breed Square. 

DG: And his HKP production?

FS: The facial expressions that Hitler used during public speeches seem to include some simplified catch phrases that were part of the full facial language used by most European Squares. 

DG: Yeah, Hitler was pretty famous for his gesticulations during public speeches.

FS: Hitler had HKP but had not been taught a facial language but probably picked up some of the facial language phrases unconsciously from other Squares he knew in his life.  The vast majority of young Squares generally pick up the facial language of their parents without any formal study. 

DG: But lack of formal study would make this language pretty simplistic.

FS: Perhaps, because the facial expressions were simplified HKP, the Sloppy Squares could perceive them and this made Hitler such an effective orator.

DG: The fifth Half Square?

1.33	Ronald Reagan the Half Square of Order

Dr. Delta: The virulence and infectiousness of this meme is extremely low.

FS: The fifth Half Square was Ronald Reagan. 

DG: These Half Squares are quite an eclectic group.

FS: No kidding, Reagan was a fool yet he did great things.  Reagan wasn’t as lucky genetically as the other Half Squares. 

DG: How so?

FS: Ronald Reagan actually suffered from a diminished ability to reason symbolically due to his genetic condition.  He had trouble with abstract thoughts, mathematics and language beyond the literal level. 

DG: Are you sure that you are describing the Ronald Reagan of your Earth?

FS: I take it, you aren’t a big fan of Reagan?

DG: I think he was in fact a bit of a fool but not to the extent you describe.  So what other problems did your Reagan have?

FS: The Reagan of our world also lacked all capacity for original thought unlike the other Half Squares. 

DG: But what about all the great speeches he gave?

FS: He could read out loud with great skill but couldn’t actually understood about 90% of the words of an article written at a ninth grade level.  He seemed able to understood concrete verbs, nouns and adjectives but at a very basic level.  

DG: For example?

FS: He could for example differentiate between a dog and a cat.  If you asked him to point to a black dog sitting next to a white dog, no problem.  If you asked Reagan to tell the difference between a big dog and a little dog, then no problem. 

DG: So what was the problem?

FS: However, if you asked him to point to a big black dog in a group of dogs that were all sizes and all colors then he would be confused.  He could do arithmetic but was totally lost with word problems but aren’t we all. 

DG: Good point.

FS: I hope so.  These handicaps alone would have doomed him to a job as a janitor or even lifetime unemployment.  Fortunately for him, he had some of the strengths of the Squares.  

DG: Such as?

FS: He could read people to an even greater extent than Hitler but still far below the skill level of a full breed Square. 

DG: Any other abilities?

FS: He also had an absolutely phenomenal verbal memory that must have been a function of his unique hybrid brain. 

DG: Did Squares have better memories than Sloppy Squares?

FS: Squares did seem to have better memories than Sloppy Squares but still needed crib sheets.  Squares absolutely did not have the phenomenal memory of Reagan. 

DG: How phenomenal?

FS: Reagan could read and/or hear a speech once and memorize it.  Reagan literally memorized thousands of scripts that he used throughout his life. 

DG: This is scary.

FS: Reagan was totally incapable of creating original speech utterances beyond that of what a two-year old could create.  This was to say he could create two to three word sentences using concrete nouns and verbs.  He had trouble formulating sentences that included adverbs and adjectives.

DG: So how did he talk?

FS: He created the illusion of complex speech by putting together speeches that he had memorized and then switched the speeches in a random fashion. 

DG: Like the High School student who writes a paper by copying sections of different Encyclopedias and pastes the results together.  This is known as pseudo-writing.

FS: Right, Reagan may well be the best example of an individual using pseudo-talking as a life long strategy. 

DG: I disagree.  I think pseudo-talking is quite common among New York literati but is socially acceptable since this is reciprocated with pseudo-listening and is really more of a ritual than a form of communication.

FS: You might have a point.  Many of Reagan’s scripts were from movies and radio.  He would then change which speech he spoke, as he perceived the approval or disapproval of the person he was talking with.

DG: How did he know this?

FS: Since Reagan did have pretty high HKP reception ability and he could sense if the speech was working.  Once he found a speech that the listener liked then he went ahead and continued with that speech until he sensed disapproval again.  Very early in his life he learned the art of using speechwriters.  

DG: Where did you learn all this?

FS: The Sneaky–Squares told Erotron and Erotron told me.  Reagan used his HKP and good looks to make friends.  He would then have the friends create scripts for him to use in day-to-day situations. 

DG: How did he do this?

FS: As one boy hood friend recounted in a biography, Reagan was in High School and wanted to order a soda at a local diner.  He told the friend he wanted soda.  Reagan’s most common sentence was, “You write speech, O.K.?”  This was a standard sentence pattern he used in daily life again and again and the people around him were used to it.  Basically he would say, “I want X.  You write speech.  O.K.”  He would then substitute different concrete nouns for “X”.  The friend was of course flabbergasted when this same person later became President.

DG: As was I.

FS: Reagan seemed to have higher HKP reception and production abilities than Hitler did.  The HKP production level of Hitler would be the equivalent of what a Square would produce at the age of two. 

DG: And Reagan’s level?

FS: Reagan generally stayed at a two year-old Square HKP production level but occasionally showed HKP production levels of a four-year old Square.  Hitler’s ability to read HKP was at about the level of a one year-old Square and this accounts for his lack of empathy.  Hitler could sense lying but very little else. 

DG: Well that might be enough for political purposes.

FS: Reagan was probably at an adult level in terms of HKP reception and could have learned to understand someone communicating in HKP if he had been taught by a Square.  This simplified HKP production makes you seem like a moron to Squares but was actually more effective with the Sloppy Squares than the fully developed HKP languages. 

DG: You mentioned this fact when talking about Hitler.  Why is this?

FS: I suppose that using adult HKP with the Sloppy Squares was like using a Mozart sonata to get the attention of your dog.  Clapping your hands would be more effective. 

DG: Did Squares employ this simplified HKP production to persuade Sloppy Squares?

FS: Average Squares could probably simplify their HKP production but would feel like total idiots in the process and this was just something they didn’t do.  One of the Money Squares guilds taught simplified HKP and a big part of this class was helping the Money Square overcome their embarrassment of taking like the Square equivalent of an idiot. This is a good example of a guild that had members of both castes.  Book Squares did the research in simplified HKP while Money Squares actually used the skill to manipulate Sloppy Squares.

DG: How similar are the two Reagans?

FS: Reagan was also a “B” actor on my Earth.  The fact he couldn’t actually comprehend most of what he was saying probably prevented him from being a top actor. 

DG: But not from being President?

FS: No, Reagan could not substantially differentiate between real life situations and acting situations.  When the Hexagon specialists briefed him about the protocols for responding to a nuclear ataque, they were horrified when he kept asking were the camera was so he could pose appropriately. 

DG: So how did the Hexagon handle this situation?

FS: A few select White House handlers would give Reagan directions at key moments and hand him scripts as needed.  His reference to the Soviet Union as the evil empire came after he watched Star Wars.  Insiders knew that he actually thought the Soviet Union was an evil empire and thought there was a Darth Vader and so on.  He once commented that Gorbachev was the best actor he had ever worked with and wondered who directed him.

DG: What did Reagan achieve politically in your Earth?

1.34	Triadic Evolution

Dr. Delta: The virulence and infectiousness of this meme is low.

FS: Many historians felt that Ronald Reagan was responsible for the tripolar political system.  According to Jesus, the fifth Half Square would be the Half Square of Order. 

DG: And what sort of order did your Reagan create?

FS: Reagan had expanded the North American Free Trade Area to be the Free Trade Area of the Americas.  A stipulation had been added that a common militar force would be created to enforce neo-liberalism throughout the region.  After our 9/11, during the Reagan administration, the BIS and UA were created.  In reaction the EU had admitted Russian into the EU and created a much more powerful European Union militar force. 

DG: So he had a huge influence on the political system of your world?

FS: Gigantic!  In response to the EU and UA, the AU had beefed up it’s own AU militar force and created a special seguridad zone around the Asian Union.  As each union expanded the scope and power of it’s own union the other unions followed until power gravitated away from the member states and resided in the unions themselves.  The historians named this escalation of union authority triadic evolution.

DG: Was your Ronald Reagan married?

FS: Yes, one of the reasons, Reagan loved Nancy, his wife, so much was that she was aware of his handicap and would go ahead and write little day to day speeches for him.  She didn’t seem to mind his communication deficiencies. 

DG: I did marriage counseling and can’t imagine such a marriage.

FS: Well you are right to some extent.  Nancy was Reagan’s second wife, his first wife thought he was kidding until three months into their marriage and was horrified when she found out the truth.  A divorce followed.  None of Reagan’s children were actually his.  Cain, Jesus, Leonardo da Vinci, Hitler and Reagan were all sterile.

DG: This makes sense since hybrids are almost always sterile.  Hitler only had one testicle.  Is the one testicle a Half Square thing?

FS: I have two testicles.  Not all Half Squares are sterile, as I found out one day.  It was not even known if Reagan could actually function sexually.  I don’t know how many testicles Reagan had. 

DG: While your Reagan construct is very interesting and even amusing, I don’t see how it is possible.  Wouldn’t someone turn him in?

FS: Sometimes he would get his scripts mixed up but no one really cared since his delivery was so good and he was always open to learning new speeches as needed.  What actually went on inside Reagan’s mind was pretty much of mystery to most of the people who knew him.  He was a totally unique individual who had done incredible things despite his handicaps.  Perhaps Reagan thought that everyone was like him.  In his mind, everyone was putting together memorized scripts as needed.  I suppose God in Reagan’s world was the grand writer behind all the speeches.

DG: Your Reagan sounds autistic.

FS: There is a relationship.  Some Homo erectus genes may have entered the Sloppy Square gene pool.  In particular, a recessive gene with Homo erectus origins may have caused autism.  The autistic children had many of the spatial obsessions of Homo erectus without the strengths that allow these obsessions to be managed productively.

DG: How so?

FS: In addition, the autistic child perceives spatial noise but doesn’t have the ability to tune it out in a controlled manner like a Square.  Spatial noise, that would only irritate a Square, would cause an Autistic child to flip out. 

DG: So why doesn’t the Autistic handle the spatial noise like a Square?

FS: Basically, the autistic child has an on and off switch rather than a volume control when it comes to spatial noise.  The autistic child chooses to tune out spatial noise altogether and ends up tuning out many spatial perceptions that were necessary for daily functioning. 

DG: You actually provide a good description of autism.  So what other Square traits do autistic children have?

FS: Many autistic children also show the ritualism of the Squares.  Autistic children were sometimes idiot savants.  They did certain tasks at a genius level while not being able to handle everyday situations. The Square spatial abilities were a survival package.  Individually, the abilities were more of a hindrance than help.

DG: What about other mental conditions?

FS: Psychics may be Sloppy Squares that had some Homo erectus genes that allow for limited hyperkinesic perception.  They aren’t reading your mind but your body instead. 

DG: I thought most psychics rely on Tarot cards, a crystal ball, etc., for their readings.

FS: As they did a reading, the psychic unconsciously reads your face.  This was why many psychics had great success during face-to-face encounters but fail when they try to become phone psychics.  They needed to see the face of the client to be successful. 

DG: How could there be Square genes in the Homo sapien gene pool if the only products of such unions are the six Half Squares?

FS: Half Squares are famous hybrids.  There were probably some unknown hybrids and some of them may not have been sterile.  Some ethnic groups have more HKP reception ability than other groups. 

DG: Which groups?

FS: For example, the ancient gypsies were one of the few Sloppy Square groups that knew about Squares and in fact helped them during some dark times.  There was a great deal of friendly contact between gypsies and Squares in ancient times and therefore the gypsy gene pool might have a disproportionate number of Homo erectus genes and therefore the hyperkinesic perception ability was also disproportionately higher among gypsies. 

DG: How about schizophrenia?

FS: Book Squares theorized that schizophrenia may have had something to did with Homo erectus genes as evidenced by the ability of schizophrenics to perceive Square covert facial communication on television.  Due to their heightened spatial abilities, Squares could instantly perceive many language patterns that a Sloppy Square cannot.  For example given a sequence of numbers, the Square would be able to see a mathematical pattern instantly. 

DG: For example?

FS: Given a printout of 100 thousand words, the Square would be able to notice that the word ”horse” was repeated every 1,1245 times as soon as she/he had scanned the printout.  This ability means that many Squares in inteligencia agencias were code breakers but this ability had a price.

DG: For example?

FS: Given a list of twenty words, the Square would be at a total loss, if asked to identify all the words in the list that were related to a horse.  Even a five-year old Sloppy Square would realize that bridle, saddle and horseshoe go together but a Square would not. 

DG: Wouldn’t the schools notice this.

FS: Squares could memorize lists of categories and the parents of Squares provided this training to their children so that they could appear to be normal in Sloppy Square society. 

DG: Were Square/Sloppy Square marriages common?

FS: No, as mentioned Squares could spot Sloppy Squares and generally did not socialize with Sloppy Squares much less marry them.  Also, the spatial noise of a Sloppy Square mate drove the Squares crazy.

DG: Whatever, have you had any vivid dreams lately?

1.35	Funeral Dream

Dr. Delta: The virulence and infectiousness of this meme is unknown.

FS:  I dreamed that I was at my mamá’s funeral.  There were many flowers on the graveside and included Lilies, Irises, and Sunflowers. 

DG: I am surprised by your detailed knowledge of these flowers.  I know how a Sunflower looks like but don’t have any idea how a Lily or Iris looks like.  Do the particular flowers have any particular meaning?

FS: Well my mamá told me that Lilies represented purity.

DG: I have to admit I know nothing about the symbolic significance of different flowers but what is important is what you think they mean not what I think they mean.  Is there anything else?

FS: Well Sunflowers of course are related to the Sun

DG:  When I say Sun what do comes to mind immediately?

FS: Mom

DG: I mean Sun as in the Earth revolves around the Earth.

FS: Oh I thought you meant son as in the child of mom.

DG: Let’s try again, son.

FS: Moon.

DG: Did you think I meant Sun or Son?

FS: I am not sure what son are you talking about?

DG: Never mind, tell me more about your dream.

FS:  Butterflies swarmed all over the graveside.  A swarm of bees attacked the butterflies.  The orange wings of the butterflies were ripped off and the bees turned the wings first into honey and then into gold.

DG: When I say butterfly what do you think?

FS: Beautiful

DG: Bee?

FS: Industrious

DG: What else happened in the dream?

FS: Nothing I woke up.

Dr. Gamma’s Notes: The dream shows several major conflicts in the patient.  The patient is scared of death.  The patient also has severe problems with his relationship with his mother.  The bees versus butterflies represent an inner conflict in the patient.  The bees seem to be exploiting the beauty of the butterfly.  Butterflies may represent the sensitive feminine side of the patient that he feels is in peril.

 

The patient suffers from a severe messiah complex.  The so-called Half Squares are all noted figures of history and this is an obvious attempt at self-aggrandizement.

 

Dr. Delta: Around the same time period I had a discussion with Dr. Gamma about his relationships with Dr. Arrow.  Dr. Gamma and Dr. Arrow were both Assistant Directors at the institute.  There was a lot of professional friction between the two due to their different theoretical orientations.  After the first session with Freak Show, Dr. Gamma had gotten into a loud argument in the main office with Dr. Arrow about how metaschizophrenia should be treated.

 

MEMETIC INFECTION COUNTERMEASURES

The following is a simple affirmation that you should repeat at least twenty times in a low steady manner almost chant like manner:

1) There are no Squares.

2) The Square world does not exist.

3) The Squares are a fantasy

In addition, you should chant the above affirmation whenever, while you read the transcript, you have the thought that something like the Squares may exist.  If you begin to start thinking that Squares do exist then immediately discontinue reading this manuscript.  If after two weeks you continue to have these thoughts then seek the help of a metaschizophrenic specialist.

Fox: Session one mentions this weird concept of HKP.  I think Gamma got this idea from Gardner’s multiple intelligence theory.  Gardner mentions kinesic intelligence as one of seven types of intelligences.  Gamma and I took a learning theory class at Texas A&M together and part of that class included taking a Gardner intelligence test and I vaguely recall he scored pretty high in the kinesic area.  There is also a right brain left brain flavor to this fantasy except that he is contrasting the frontal lobes with the cerebellum.  Maybe such people exist but no way Squares exist.

My buddy obviously stole the idea of z-rays from the Legion of Superheroes.  The Legion of Superheroes was a comic book of a super hero group in the 30^th century that included Super Boy. In one of the issues z-rays were mentioned.

All in all the first session is a hard read.  The first session is kind of technical.  I realize this is not a novel but something else. What the hell this document is I don’t know but I think this isn’t a good way to start a story.  The next session is a lot easier to read and frankly the best part of this document.  Yeah, Japan is a sexy session.

As to the Squares killing Kennedy, personally I think the Mafia was sick and tired of Bobby Kennedy and realized that if they shot him then his brother the President would destroy them. Instead they took out John and this neutralized Bobby.  The Mafia will kill someone over 20 bucks.  Bobby was costing them millions and really going after them. Hoover hated Bobby Kennedy and basically had the FBI look the other way.  The CIA was in cahoots with the Mafia to kill Castro and the CIA also looked the other way as well.  Government bureaucrats are not going to risk their pension over an unauthorized killing but the Mafia kills people every day.  Looking the other way is not the same thing as actually killing the President but some assurances along those lines might have emboldened the Mafia.  Anyway that’s my theory.

Around the time I was reading this part of the document, Gamma had been super nervous and frankly a pain in the neck.  The guy drank like a fish and slept during the day while keeping me up at night with his ramblings about the conspiracy that is out to get him.  He was a chain smoker and was not even a smoker at all when I knew him.  I forced him to smoke out on the balcony.  Gamma and I are both big time comic book fans and I asked him about his code name that is derived from the comic book the Incredible Hulk.  We started talking about the Hulk and agreed that he was one of the more interesting characters of the Marvel Universe.  There is the very obvious Dr. Jeckyll/Mr. Hyde angle but the fact that an atomic bomb rather than a potion, thinly disguised cocaine, turns Dr. Banner into the Hulk gives the story a modern feel. I wonder if my old friend Gamma picked his name because he himself has two sides.

Maybe Freak Show is some sort of alternate personality of Gamma.  Could Gamma be flat-out schizophrenic and have multiple personalities?  I would kick him out except that I really think he is potentially suicidal and I don’t need that on my conscious?  Freak Show is a hybrid.

Hybrids play a prominent role in myth and science fiction.  You have the Greek Heroes that invariably had one parent that was human and one parent that was divine.  Achilles had a human father, Peleus. The mother of Achilles was the god like Thetis.  Hercules had Zeus as a father.  The mother of Hercules was Io and she was mortal.  I think Freak Show probably got the idea for his hybrid hero from Star Trek.  Spock is of course half human and half Vulcan.  There is also the Marvel super hero the Submariner that is supposed to be half Homo Sapien and half Homo Mermanus.  Homo Mermanus are some sort of underwater humanoids that live in Atlantis.

There is a lame DC version of the Submariner called Aquaman that has the same ancestry as the Submariner but slightly different powers.

The Submariner is much stronger than Aquaman but Aquaman has telepathic control over sea creatures.  What a totally lame power and why is it he can control sea creatures and not just animals in general?  I suppose you could argue that fish have a different nervous system than mammals so Aquaman has a specialized telepathy that only works with fish but Aquaman can communicate with whales and dolphins that are mammals.  Incredibly Aquaman beat the Submariner in the Marvel vs. DC universe series.  Give me a break!

I kind of remember from a literary criticism class I took that there was this thinker called Derrida and he went on an on about deconstruction.  I only remember what the word deconstruction meant.  I think the word means breaking down the barriers between two concepts or something like that.  Ok, I got a “C” in that class, but I think the patient is doing something like deconstruction.  I will confess that I mostly read the comic book version about Derrida by Icon Books. Maybe the patient is using the hybrid thing to deconstruct what it is to be human.

Chapter 2 at:

http://atomic-temporary-3328128.wpcomstaging.com/half-square/chapter-2-cybernetic-japan/

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