#i owe u so much... the serotonin rush was good

[iandeleonwrites]

Dr. Clitterhouse and the Great White Beyond From the diary of U. N.

For as long as I can remember I knew I wanted to die in the maw of a great white shark. I know what you’re thinking, but it wasn’t so much a fantasy or perversion as a foregone conclusion. Ever since my rather tame brush with fate at the tender age of seven, when, floating not twenty feet from the shore of Miami Beach, I was bit on the thigh by a small blacktip, I had the sneaking suspicion that I’d somehow cheated death, skipped out on the check, gotten lucky--and that one day the sea would come back to collect the bill. 

Look, I had no intentions of speeding up the process. I wasn’t some jerk with a juiced-up death drive looking to commit fish-assisted suicide. I was just taking control over my own destiny. I knew the species I wanted to pull the trigger, and I knew how I wanted it all to proceed––slowly, a painful, protracted devouring that ended with me being swallowed up whole, sliding down that great gilled gullet with a rush of water and becoming the invisible architect, dwelling physically and psychically inside the eternal being who had eaten me. 

The only question was when. I was on borrowed time and I knew it. 

Swimming in the ocean after that first taste became a tremendous source of anxiety. I feared most of all the impatience of the sea. A truncated version of the inevitable could find me merely mauled by a great fish, rescued, and bleeding to death on the glossy white deck of some schmuck’s boat named after his ex-wife.  

No, I couldn’t let it end like that, friends. 

I’d stay away, keeping my distance until I was ready to go. I treaded water for a couple of decades. The brine never above my knees while the shit poured out of my eyeballs. I was in control of my own fate, or so I thought. 

I found myself working for a big-time pharmaceutical outfit. You know, the faceless, international kind. I was a procurer of sorts--patent acquisition mostly--and I was good at it too. People tended to have a hard time saying no when it was just the two of us and a naked, twitching bulb in an empty room. But if they did say no, well, I had a way around that too. 

Back then I was traveling extensively throughout the far east. I’d been sent on a mission to look in on a certain Doctor Clitterhouse. Not presumed to be a native, though who could say for sure. This Clitterhouse had been popping up in small towns all across the rice and opium belt peddling a strange sort of door-to-door treatment for psychiatric patients. They described it variously as a kind of immersion therapy, a new serotonin-spiking hypo-phetamine, and a natural aphrodisiac. Well, what the hell was it? These kooks couldn’t seem to make up their mind, whatever was left of it.

Naturally, my outfit got curious. If there was indeed such a treatment and it proved to be as effective as was claimed, they damn sure wanted to find a way to get in on the deal quickly and by any means necessary. That’s why I’m here, the persuasive element. 

I had been in the jungle two weeks before I began to hear the whispers––then they wouldn’t go away. Clitterhouse, to hear the locals tell it, was nothing short of supernatural. A titan amongst men, his methods were seen as a godsend. His patients, venerated saints. A sort of folk religion had already begun to spring up around the man. He had staunch supporters and fierce detractors. 

The practical side of his technique, I would soon discover, did not turn out to be very impressive. 

A couple of years before, some genius in the West had figured out that with a simple, non-invasive surgical procedure and a small, anterior incision at the base of the skull, you could tap directly into the body’s synaptic nervous system and download behavioral responses into a digital Cyber-Cortex designed to process and interpret that information. 

“So what”, you say, “mentalists, shrinks and EEG techs have been able to read people’s minds forever, what’s the difference?” But, see, that’s where things really got interesting. Pretty soon the programmers and computer whizzes got involved and realized that there was a lot more information coming through. And wouldn’t you know it, with a little coding and pictorial analysis, we weren’t just able to read people’s minds, we were watching them. Their thoughts and memories coming through the wires like silent little home movies. 

It was a marvel of modern medicine, no doubt. The only trouble was, the information superhighway only went in the one direction: download. 

Could the rumors be true? Had Clitterhouse found a way to reverse the flow and introduce external images into the brain? I’d received unconfirmed reports that the basis of the good doctor’s treatment was custom made-to-order software which could be uploaded directly to the patient’s nervous system, force-projected onto the cerebral cortex and reformed into a kind of experiential memory. A false reality of internalized greeting cards and happy endings. 

The public wants what it wants, I guess. 

But had the bastard really done it? And what’s more, did it end there, with the used, personalized software going into the biohazard like a spent needle, or were they finding their way into a lucrative black market of recycled pornography and snuff? Was the doctor himself behind the creation of these so-called experiences? And how real were they? How far would the public’s demand go?

The implications were immense and things had clearly gotten out of his control. I was running out of time. I had grown impatient over the years and I could feel, stronger than ever, the siren call of the deep ocean pulling me back into its unseen currents, calling out for what it’s owed. Could these memory implants release me of my maritime obligations? And what was I willing to exchange for my freedom––someone’s life, dropped kicking and screaming into the belly of a beast just so I could relive the experience harm free––was I really capable of such a thing? 

I honestly did not know. But what was damn sure is that I better hurry up and find this Doctor Clitterhouse fast before he slips out of the country again. 

I must discover his secrets!