The interior of the resynchronisation chamber was uniform and almost unfurnished. Soft, subdued light flowed evenly from the entire surface of the frosted glass ceiling. The floor and all but one of the walls were covered with synthetic imitation ivory. The fourth wall was a mirror, which made the room appear larger.
One could even consider this room cosy, were it not for the only piece of furniture in it, standing in the middle - an armchair that at first glance could be mistaken for a dentist's chair. However, the wet carrier of the woman's mind, lying on it, immersed in lethargy, certainly did not end up in the armchair because of a toothache. The mind was in a state of lethargy, the entire carrier trembling ever so slightly, as if a low-voltage current were flowing through it. This was how protein organisms reacted to the forceful optimisation of the quantum sigma profile.
She felt no pain. The Hegemony cared for its citizens and treated them humanely.
Ultimately, the goal of the Law of Optimal Convergence was to prevent unnecessary, suboptimal behaviour, not to stir up unrest at the very thought of the process.
Justus stood on the other side of the mirrored wall and watched the changes in the woman's sigma profile on the monitor. The cognitive deviation function was slowly approaching the X-axis of the graph; in a moment, the patient would be optimised again.
The girl ended up in the Optimisation Department for a trivial reason – she was an artist.
Artists of all kinds were Justus's most frequent guests, as they had a natural flaw manifested in a tendency to think excessively outside the box. Thinking that deviated from established standards caused quantum noise, which disrupted the operation of the Hegemony's predictive engines, and this was unacceptable and treated as a crime against optimisation. Justus's patient today kept a mnemonic diary, which at one point triggered all possible warning flags of the analytical module of one of the engines.
Silence is not just the absence of sound. Silence can scream. I am most fascinated by the silence that follows something sudden and violent – after a bang, a scream, the slam of a door. Silence that brings no relief, but gets under your skin, as if the sound were still there, but you could no longer hear it. I want to paint it. Not blue, not calm, not like a morning by the lake. My silence is the colour of lead. It is heavy, it falls on your shoulders, it crushes you from within. Maybe it will be a dark canvas, almost black, but with hidden layers – like an echo that trembles somewhere in the background. A predictive model would say: paint something bright, transparent, something that will appeal, something that will find a buyer. But I want people to stand in front of the painting and feel how uncomfortable this silence is. I want them to want to escape, yet at the same time be unable to look away. It will be a painting that does not soothe. A painting that reminds us that silence also has its own temperature – and it can be icy cold. The painting was created. Justus saw it on the day the artist was arrested. The canvas was large, overwhelming – it almost covered the entire field of vision. It was dominated by dark, matte tones: deep black, muted graphite, dull green. There were no even surfaces – the paint was applied in thick layers, cracked in places, as if it itself remembered the shock.
In the centre, there was a bright spot, blurred, indistinctly cut off from the background. It was not light – rather, it was something like a burnt-out space, a trace of something that had disappeared violently. Around it ran thin, irregular lines, like cracks in glass or waves spreading after an impact.
At the edges of the canvas, the paint became heavier, darker. One could get the impression that the edges of the painting were sucking the viewer in, that everything was moving towards this empty, pale centre.
If one came closer, one could see tiny layers – strands of rusty brown, blue streaks, barely noticeable flashes of red shining through the black. It was not the colour of life, but the echo of a faded fire.
There were no figures, no recognisable shapes. Only tension – as if the silence had its own tremor, and the image captured the moment when everything stopped before the next sound fell.
The Optimisation Department could only react in one way – the image no longer existed, and its author was just finishing the resynchronisation session. The cognitive deviation function graph was already on the X-axis. End of session.
The girl was awakened. When she got up from the chair, she was smiling, though she looked around with an absent gaze, as if wondering how she had ended up there. The psychoarchaeologist knew the reason for her smile. The dreams and images induced in patients during the sessions were usually created with his participation, and mostly even according to a scenario he had written. He had been working in the Department for over a decade and had made a name for himself as an excellent optimisation architect, which is why the management now entrusted him with the most complex tasks – including creating scenarios that would allow for recalibration without side effects, but which would be effective and lasting. The scenarios thus referred to the patients' deeply hidden dreams and fantasies, and the additional stimulation of the limbic system and associative cortex left the patients with very strong memories that had a direct impact on their further behaviour.
The artist was led out of the room. When she recovers, she will continue to create beautiful works of art. But now they will be optimal, like everything else in the Hegemony.