The Psychoactive Café by Paula Cartwright Page A

big government-sponsored arts
project that went around the world installing 'window cameras' in various
scenic locations, recording continuously for days in excruciatingly high-definition
3D and audio. Our Swiss mountain was on a ten-day loop, synchronized with local
time. Every tenth day, people would crowd in for a spectacular lightning strike
at 3:46 p.m.
    Not every room was based in real-life videography. After
protests from the engineers, one of the rooms was permanently reserved for
computer graphics and given over to a Holodeck Committee, which bickered
endlessly over the programming like kids battling for the remote control.
    Anyway, Miguel was saying that PA clones were sure to hit
the private sector soon, and then virtual cafés would get really elaborate.
Maybe warm breezes with contextual smells, and permanent rooms with walls and
fake skylights instead of office partitions.
    That was what we were talking about. How to improve the
illusion so that we could escape this ice-bound campus whenever we wanted.
     Miguel was pitching for bigger-scale multi-media, like 3-D
visuals that could keep deepening and changing perspective as you went right up
to the window and looked out. Naseer was saying that was inefficient, that we should
go with wrap-around helmets and gloves and skip the need for meat-space
entirely, just get together in virtual reality. Miguel started cross-examining
Naseer about how long it would be before we could emulate smell in a virtual
environment, and Chenko said, “Hey Julie, what do you think?”
    I said, “You guys are barking up the wrong tree.” When I
said that, they all stopped and looked at me.
    I said, “Look, start with what you want. You want to be
happy, right? Skip past the details, like whether you want a beer or want to
look at waves crashing on a beach. All of those sensory inputs are mediators
for happiness, am I right? They’re what you think will make you feel a certain
way. You think that if you load those particular sensory details, you’ll
experience a desired state of satisfaction and pleasure.”
    Chenko said, “So, you mean it doesn’t matter how effective
the illusion is?”
    I said, “Yeah, like when I was a kid, my folks took me to Florida for a vacation, and I was totally bummed out the whole time. All I wanted was to be
back in Toronto with my boyfriend. Hey, I was sixteen. My mom kept saying, ‘But
it’s so beautiful here, why aren’t you happy?’”
    Miguel said, “Clearly, sex is a more effective trigger for
happiness than Florida,” and everyone snickered.
    I said, “Well, yeah, but not always. If you can get blissed
out by a light bulb, or by the sound of a truck passing by, why get all bound
up in finding the right boyfriend? Or money, or power, or a nice house on the
beach? Go directly for happiness and don’t get distracted by the proxies.”
    Then Xiang piped up. His English wasn’t very good, and he
didn’t speak much in groups, but he was totally brilliant and when he talked,
we listened, or at least I did. “Julie,” he said, “Tell us about the neural
location of happiness.”
    Well, he knew more than I did about neurology so I figured
he was asking me to explain his research. Xiang was working on the elimination
of post-traumatic stress syndrome through the electrical stimulation of
pleasure pathways in the brain, and my study overlapped  a bit with his.
    For my dissertation, I was trying to locate the areas of the
brain that were activated when subjects were feeling intense pleasure during their
daily activities. That’s why I’d joined this department. TU had recently bought
a portable fMRI – that’s a type of brain scanner – that tracks tiny changes in
neural activity while subjects carry out their regular lives. It looks like a
virtual reality helmet. The psych department split the cost with consumer
research and political science, and various teams were booking it around the
clock with different subjects. I piggybacked on