The Pause Button

  Brian W. Aldiss

  Despite advances in genetic engineering, it seems that human society will never improve. Fortunately, something has been done to remove a few of its stresses. The Pause Button has been invented.

  Although our physical world is now fully explored, and automated instruments have charted the planet Mars, a much more complex world has been opened up by science, and its confusion of passageways traversed.

  The topography of the brain has at last become understood.

  A small firm in Birmingham decided to put the knowledge to practical use. Conrad Barlow owned a motorcycle shop. It happened that he drank once a week with his cousin, Gregory Magee. Both men had a keen interest in football, and supported their local team. Otherwise, their lives were very different. Conrad was an expert on any kind of engine, while Gregory was a surgeon at the local hospital, specialising in cranial and brain injury.

  Gregory—known privately to the nurses as ‘Mad’ Magee because of a slight eccentricity—had to operate on a team member of Birmingham North End, injured in a match. The player, Reggie Peyton, had developed a blood clot in the right temporal lobe. It was easily removed. However, Peyton did not return to consciousness when the anaesthetic wore off. He seemed perfectly fit in all physical aspects. For almost two days he remained in a comatose state. When he woke, he was perfectly well, and returned home. But he did not play again.

  Somewhere here was a mystery which Gregory alone perceived. He discussed the matter with Conrad over a pint that Saturday night.

  “Excitory transmitters failed to function,” he said.

  Conrad drummed his fingers on the bar. “This was in the right-hand temporal lobe? Greg, isn’t that where Cotard’s delusion takes place? You remember, we were talking about Cotard the other week?”

  From that casual remark onwards, they knew they were on the trail of something.

  Cotard, the great French psychiatrist, identified a syndrome whereby patients believe themselves to be dead. The illusion persists, despite such evidence to the contrary as heartbeat, lungs functioning perfectly, body temperature sustained. The self-evident impossibility of the notion causes it to break down after a while.

  Here was the clue that led to the invention of the Pause Button. Despite its popular nickname, the micro-function that Conrad and Gregory devised was a molecular machine.

  A small molecule was sited on a large molecule where, like an enzyme, it bonds. Other molecules are added, until a complex structure is formed. Thus a nanomachine is created which is controlled by molecular tapes responsive to adrenaline rises in the brain of as little as 0.0001 per cent.

  When correctly positioned in the right temporal lobe of the brain, the Pause Button, more properly known as the Delay Functional Reflex, has the following function. In a crisis situation, the person with a DFR is given pause. Although the delay is momentary, it allows the person to think about what he intends to do. Our brains have been so constructed that emotion overrides intellect in crisis situations. Anger blots out thought. The DFR circumvents this phylogeneric trait.

  Much violence is prevented. Beating the dog, the child, men beating the woman—such things are forestalled. The percentages of male violence against their female partners were alarming: in the U.K., twenty-five per cent, in the U.S.A., twenty-eight per cent. Many such elemental attacks were launched when the woman became pregnant. Since the widespread introduction of DFRs, these figures have dropped to eleven per cent and twelve per cent respectively (there has been a greater take-up in the U.S.A. than the U.K.).

  At first, Conrad and Gregory were able to sell their device only to such institutions as prisons, where the insertion of a DFR earned a prisoner a five per cent reduction of sentence.

  An enlightened government saw wider opportunities. Motorists were tempted by a reduction in cost of their vehicle licence if they underwent the operation. Road rage became a thing of the past. Accidents rapidly decreased.

  The general public became interested. It was pleasant to remain calm. The DFR also prevented hasty words spoken in anger. There was greater harmony between partners than previously. Euphoria became popular.

  No longer are we asking, “Why did I do that?” or, “What was I thinking about?” We now take the opportunity to know.

  Perhaps the most dramatic change came in political habits. Politicians in democracies were elected, in many cases, to solve problems almost beyond the province of politics, such as how to stop wastage of valuable resources, how to assist and educate the disempowered, how to prevent racial tensions. Voters may say they support these ambitions. However, the promise of tax cuts may persuade them to think differently. If a slight reduction in taxes is offered against increased funding of education, it is not infrequently education which goes to the wall.

  So politicians utter hypocritical promises. They swear to effect changes that could not be carried though within the five year electoral term. Both sides of the bargain are lulled by false promises.

  But now comes the Pause Button effect!

  Everyone is given time to consider. So we are becoming more honest, more realistic. We now have time to consider the value of honesty, to weigh the truth behind promises—we who were so accustomed to a diet of lies.

  In the year that Conrad Barlow and Gregory Magee received the Nobel Peace Prize, we voted in the United Reality Party to govern the country.

  The great challenge now is to link the DFR into the genetic chain, so that its effects become inheritable.

  Of course this will change us. Our ramshackle societies will change. Later, fully evolved human beings will look back on today much as we look back on the denizens of the Stone Age.

 

 

  Brian W. Aldiss, The Pause Button

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