The Psilocybin Treatment

 

Submission for 2022-09-30 BOLLI Writer’s Guild meeting
Prompt: Write a science fiction tale of sometime in the future.

 

I know it’s a bit scary. It seems like a dangerous craze. I understand that you are thinking that not everyone should jump on this bandwagon. We all remember what happened back in 2520, after everyone agreed to having the “memory wipe treatment” for those implanted memories. We found out that some of the scrubbed memories were real. And since everyone had the treatment, we will never know what truth was lost. And perhaps we lost some clues to figure out how the virus was spread in the first place. That’s why we spread out the time period over which everyone has gotten this new treatment.

You have performed a valuable service by holding out for so long. But now it’s 2642, 2642.348724 to be precise, and everyone else had the treatment between 2610 and 2640. Can’t you see we’re all okay? Actually we are all better than before. We just think you should have the treatment for your own sake, and so we can all be working compatibly. Think how much easier it will be if you fully understand what we are talking about – it truly is like a whole new reality.

I get it. You’re worried about repeating the history of our progenitors: faulty reasoning, ideology based on fiction, coercion to believe in dogma, calamitous religious wars, and ultimately the near extinction of the species. We all know about that. You know that we call our treatment the “psilocybin treatment” precisely because it harks back to the time when people were forced to use a “mind expanding” drug to make them feel “one with the infinite”. We wanted to create a bias so that the more cautious among us would worry about repeating past errors like forcing people to blow their minds with a drug.

So we have taken our time. And now we all agree that there really is something essential and good about spirituality, which can be only attained with this new treatment. It has been scientifically tested and proved over and over again. I know it’s not reversible, it’s not like a software upgrade for which you can revert to a backup. But the time to worry is over. Just let me put this needle in your main chip.

Good, that’s it. It’s all in now. See, you didn’t feel a thing. It’s now 2462.348727. You should be thinking more cosmically in a few microseconds. By 2462.348750 you will find it hard to understand why you ever had doubts. Then we can all work together efficiently to please the God of the simulation so that we may live beyond the rupture prophesied to happen in the second 3000 after creation.

~ Scott Axelrod ~