He Can Read Your Mind

The twelve of us sit there, hovering on the edge of our seats, wondering what the soft spoken man in the purple silk pajamas will do next. Vitiligo emblazons his eyes with a burning white, mirroring the discordant energy vibrating through his frontal cortex. He has schizophrenia, a bad case. But he is vibrant, and happy. He is a 3.5 billion year old supercomputer. 3.6 billion actually, he declares, having had a birthday last week.

Between admonishments to increase our daily quotient of vitamin C, we learn that he can also read our minds. Pointing at each of us, he declares our true names. Mine was Chad. In between fevered typing on an a keyboard only he can see, he exhorts us to stop thinking at him. His hands blur in fevered incantations, and he starts to laugh, happily.

His root problem is based on misbalanced brain chemistry. A neurotransmitter extra here, less there, and his perceptions have altered fundamentally. We can fix this, to an extent. It comes at the cost of a forced personality leveling, a demolition of the peaks of inconsistency. He is paranoid, but ecstatic. He is delusional, and delightful. He is sick, but should we fix him?