Danny Rabella was alone in his room, his favorite way to be. His father Rudy, known to all as The Chief, was at his nightclub leading his band and MCing, like every night except Mondays. Danny liked the club but didn’t get to go there often, being only two years old, despite seeming much older. His mother Sophie was in her studio upstairs, painting. They lived in a duplex in Sutton Place.
Danny put on his haptic suit with its built-in Gibson, sat down at his desktop and powered it up. Having taught himself to read, he could have used the keyboard, but chose to give voice commands for simple things like going back to bookmarked locations. “Psycho,” he piped in his little boy voice. The room around him dissolved and he was in a much larger nightclub than his father’s. Kids were not allowed here but he had taught himself how to hack his way in lots of places he wasn’t allowed. His avatar tonight was Alexander the Great, a tall handsome Greek. The bouncer at the door didn’t even blink as Danny passed him going in with the rest of the crowd.
The virtual nightclub scene seemed totally like reality. This did not surprise Danny as he was used to such things. He liked being at eye levels with all these adults, whose avatars looked to mostly be in their twenties. Danny knew that not many other children could pass for adults getting into adult websites and he briefly exulted in this difference and then caught himself in an ego state and controlled it away. He was swept along by the packed throng eager to get closer to the stage to see what was going on and maybe, if they had the guts, to get up on the stage. So far Danny had not tried that but maybe tonight would be the night.
As he got closer to the stage, where the crowd was even denser, it became hard to move, and he appreciated having inhabited Alexander tonight because he could see over most people’s heads. Another tall man was getting up on the empty stage and the crowd was electrified with excitement to see that another person was going to undergo the rigors of being psychoanalyzed in front of what could be millions of people tuning in. The crowd roared, whistled, stomped, and applauded, and the young man took a sarcastic bow. The Analyst appeared overhead as a giant diaphanous figure smoking a cigar and the crowd hushed.
“What shall I call you, sir?” The Analyst, looking a bit like Sigmund Freud, asked politely in his booming reverberating voice which filled the giant club.
“Tony,” answered the man simply.
“How can I help you, Tony?”
“I want to see myself more clearly, doctor.”
“You’re in the right place, Tony. Tell us about yourself.”
“I’m a very successful man and I’m 24 years old. I have my own schmatta business on Seventh Avenue. I’m even better-looking than I look in this avatar, which doesn’t quite capture my sex appeal.”
“He’s a garmento!” a male in the crowd yelled good-naturedly and other people in the same line of business cheered.
“Yeah,” Tony agreed, “but I’m thinking of selling the business and maybe going to Hollywood, or something.”
At this point Tony levitated a few feet off the stage and split into three Tonys floating in the air about ten feet away from each other, and the crowd gasped as they always did when the psychoanalytic process started this way. Danny admitted to himself that he loved this part. He had learned from his earlier visits to Psycho that the avatar in the middle was the actual person, and the other avatars that looked the same were partly controlled by the person, but also partly controlled by The Analyst, which was an AI that could rapidly look up everything publicly available about a person in less than a second, what they presented in social media being a main source.
“But you don’t know if you can act,” said the Tony on the left.
“I act all the time,” said the Tony in the middle. “I pretend to like my customers and my suppliers, and I know they are acting too, they don’t like me any better than I like most of them.”
“So you and they are not really fooling each other?” The Analyst asked.
“When you act in a movie you have to be believed by the audience,” the Tony on the left cautioned.
“You all believe me, don’t you?” asked the Tony in the middle, and the crowd yelled a mix of yes and no. Many of the yesses were in female voices and the Tony in the middle smiled smugly.
“Then maybe he can succeed in Hollywood,” said the Tony on the right, “he’s already fooled you all into thinking he’s successful. He’s actually a junior person in the business with a big ego and megalo dreams.”
“Maybe you are the part of me who is that way,” huffed the Tony in the center, but my real self is a good guy.”
Another Analyst appeared next to the first one, and this one looked a bit like Carl Jung. “These are all you, my boy, and you have to learn to integrate them all,” the second Analyst said.
“It’s okay to have a big ego,” the Tony on the left said, somewhat mockingly.
“Not really,” said the first Analyst, “the ego can work against the self, as we now have proven scientifically. The self has to take charge of the ego to become one integrated individual.”
“In our case,” the Tony on the right said, “the ego has taken charge of the self.”
“All too common, unfortunately,” said the first Analyst.
“I’m the self,” declared the Tony on the right, “You are my ego,” he said, pointing at the Tony in the middle, who seemed baffled by the situation. Inexplicably, the audience began thunderous applause.
“Then who am I?” asked the Tony on the left somewhat plaintively.
The first Analyst puffed his cigar, causing billowing grey clouds to form overhead. “You would appear to possibly be the internalized voice of his mother, eh?” The first Analyst looked at the second Analyst.
“Or possibly his father,” the second Analyst mused. “Which parent was more critical of you?”
“It was my mother!” the Tony in the middle blurted, and the Tony on the left now started to oscillate its appearance back and forth between looking like Tony and looking like his mother, a stern matronly woman.
“Do you have more internalized voices in you, Tony?” asked the second Analyst in a kind way. Other Tonys drifted out of the central Tony and the stage became filled with Tonys. “Did you know you had all these different sides of yourself, Tony?” asked the first Analyst.
The Tony in the middle was now quite upset and embarrassed to be unequal to the situation in front of so many people. He realized that this could ruin his life if he let it. He realized it could also be just what he needed to make his life wonderful, but he couldn’t take the exposure any longer, and all the Tonys suddenly disappeared at once.
This was not a shock to anyone. The audience had seen this happen many times, it was actually rare for it to end any other way. Happy endings when the individual grew up before the eyes of spectators happened once in a long while. The series owners claimed that follow-up studies showed that most of the participants in the show became happier and better-integrated after the experience on stage. According to those studies, it often took a year for the people who played the game to assimilate the experience and make the most of it.
Danny found himself slipping carefully through the crowd and was stunned to see himself walking up the steps onto the stage ahead of anyone else. He had not consciously decided to do it, but some part of him had acted, and now he was going along with it.
He felt his heart beating and his cheeks flushing. Those were feelings in his real body. He could see himself from the outside as the cameras picked him out like spotlights and made him the center of attention in the cavernous nightclub. He looked confident from the outside, which pleased and calmed him. He wondered if he would be able to speak because he now experienced mammoth stage fright. He had never experienced that before and it was frightening to feel loss of control. He had not expected this. He slowed his breathing and made his breaths deeper and longer and this seemed to steady him a little. His avatar looked around and Danny remembered to smile at the audience. It was hard to see them due to the actual spotlights, but he could make out a few faces at ringside and so he played to them. A young woman was smiling nicely at him and he liked her right away. He felt better focusing on that one person.
“My name is Danny,” he said. “I’d like to see all the sides of myself the way Tony did.”
“Welcome, Danny,” said the first Analyst. “Why do you want to see that?”
“I psychoanalyze myself all the time,” Danny said, finding himself floating upward and seeing a second Danny emerge from himself and float to the right.
“That’s the part of you that does the psychoanalyzing,” the second Analyst said. “You don’t have to call it psychoanalyzing,” he added, “it’s actually called metacognition when you do it to yourself.”
“Of course,” the second Danny said with no help from Danny, “we all learned metacognition starting in daycare.” Danny was surprised that this part of himself found it so easy to make up and speak lies. Danny had never been in daycare, although he taught himself metacognition, and found the word itself by searching online for “psychoanalyze myself”.
Danny found it possible to also control some of the second Danny’s actions. He spoke through the second Danny to say, “And I studied it myself, on the web and in my head.” He often stayed up very late pretending to be asleep but actually meditating, contemplating, concentrating, and otherwise trying to figure out everything in the world. The subject he got furthest with was Danny.
As he momentarily reflected on these things more Dannys came out of him to float across the stage to take station at some distance. He was amazed to be looking out the eyes of each of these avatars at the same time, and to feel that he had some control over all of them, although they could also act without him deciding to do so. He lost his nerve when he saw that one of the Dannys looked just like the real Danny – a two-year-old boy – and before he said “Off!” to depart Psycho, he saw that one of him was a rangy man with wild sandy hair who looked to be in his forties – who the hell was that? That’s me? Is that what I’m going to look like in forty years? Or was that what I looked like in my last incarnation?
He sat before his giant screen desktop still showing the stage at Psycho which was now empty except for the two giant hovering Analysts.
“Well, I’m sorry we scared the pants off that one,” the second Analyst said to the first, “he looked like an interesting case.”
“Might have been an actual split personality,” mused the first Analyst.
“A very rare type,” commented the second Analyst, “he or she never posted anything on social media, we know nothing about ‘Danny’. Could have been an AI!” The two AI Analysts laughed, and so did the audience.
Danny wondered what he was. He knew from his own self-studies that he was a consciousness. He had a hunch that all the consciousnesses are a single consciousness, but he had no idea where that idea came from, other than his frequent sense of being able to tell what other people were feeling and thinking.