Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author's Introduction

1. Once upon a time, in the year 2167 A.D., when the connected disciplines of Physiology, Psychology, Medicine, Cybernetics and Communication Theory were enormously more advanced than they have been before or since, there lived a very famous neurologist. He was so eminent that the conventions which circumscribed the behaviour of his less successful colleagues neither worried nor restricted him, and finding even the most difficult tasks which he met in his professional life presented a challenge insufficient adequately to tax his unrivalled knowledge and consummate skill, his ambition led him to embark upon an enterprise which one would have supposed the most dangerous excess of hubris could not have aspired to, an enterprise which might almost be deemed to usurp the prerogative of God himself.
2. One day one of his assistants delivered a baby which, it was immediately obvious, was so deformed that a life even remotely approaching normal was impossible for him. From the neck down, this baby was afflicted with almost every known physiological defect. From the neck up, however, the baby appeared perfectly normal; indeed, in so far as it was possible to tell at this early age, it exhibited features which in Dr. Smythson's experience had been associated with exceptionally high intelligence, and even led him to predict very great philosophical ability. In order that such a genius should not be lost to the world by the premature cessation of his bodily functioning, Dr. Smythson made up his mind to undertake an experiment never before attempted by a human being; he decided to dissolve the unequal marriage between the superb head and mutilated body, and keep the latter alive independently of the former by a process the possibility of which had recently occurred to him. The head was to be kept in a case and to be fed with its necessary blood supply from a reservoir by means of a pump connected to the appropriate arteries.
3. This having been successfully accomplished, it occurred to him that the life of his protege - whom he decided to call Alfred Ludwig Gilbert Robinson, in memory of a once well known twentieth century philosopher of that name - must inevitably be circumscribed and dull. Since he was a kindly man as well as an ingenious one, he made up his mind to produce an adaptation - which he christened the endocephalic electro hallucinator - of a twenty-second century means of entertainment and use if for a different and more questionable purpose than mere pleasure-giving. ...