Pavlov’s Man (DON’T READ THIS TO THE END*)

The green light flashed above Child Myshka’s work station and he felt the conditioned desire to start work again twitching in his every sinew like an uncontrollable habit or an addiction.

 

He had to start work. He felt a restlessness take hold of him; a deep, all consuming need to touch the handle of his machine and crank it until he felt the high of seeing the machine parts he had made roll out onto a moving conveyor belt.

 

But something else inside him told him that he had to resist his conditioning; some natural instinct.

 

If habits and addictions could be overcome then so could it.

 

The green light flashed on again and this time he saw it flash inside his brain like green lightning.

 

It was one of the colours that all the workers in the Fatherland were trained to respond to from early infancy and it meant “Work!”.

 

The voice of Father Kot blared out of the trumpet shaped speaker at the side of his work station.

 

“Child Myshka”, it said,  “Is your green light malfunctioning for Freud’s sake?! Why aren’t you working?”.

 

Myshka didn’t answer. He wanted to tell Father Kot to shove his job up his forbidden word: censored but he just couldn’t make his mouth move. Perhaps it was a type of mutism; more conditioning.

 

Now the red light flashed beside his work station; the light for conditioned pain response. It was like a whiplash; like a red, hot searing whiplash across his back.

 

Child collapsed on the floor, dazed; his mind momentarily blinded by the pain.

 

"How can I resist when they are so deep inside my brain; inside my body and my nervous system", he thought.

 

The green light came on once more.

 

“Get back to work”, barked Kot again, “Now!”.

 

"I hate you Father; I hate you Father Kot", thought Child, covering up his eyes with a nervously shaking hand till he could no longer see the green light.

 

A closed circuit camera in the grey work station ceiling rotated its lens towards him.

 

“Covering your eyes isn’t going to help, Child”, said a sniggering Father.

 

Then child heard the noise come out of the speaker; a noise he had not heard since conditioning; a terrible noise like knives being sharpened and something being slaughtered and finger nails dragged across a blackboard and all the worst most horrifying sounds you could imagine.

 

He blacked out from the pain it induced.

 

Child awoke on a black leather couch; the benevolently smiling faces of Sigmund Freud, B.F. Skinner and Ivan Pavlov staring down at him from a mural on the ceiling.

 

He was in the Psychoclinic, he thought, in the office of one of the Psychiatrists.

 

That was where they took workers who didn’t respond properly to the green light; a bit like taking malfunctioning machinery to a mechanic.

 

“You were resisting your conditioned response”, said a kindly, elderly female voice from nearby, “Why?”.

 

Child turned his head towards the sound of the voice and saw a thin, grey haired woman sitting behind a desk; a look of pity and disappointment upon her face.

 

“Don’t we give you everything you could need? Everything you could want?”, she said, “Shine the golden light of pleasure on you 12 hours a day”.

 

Child looked at the name plaque on her desk. It said “Mother Koshka”.

 

For some reason he felt able to talk in front of this woman. Perhaps because she was a woman.

 

“I-I don’t want to be controlled”, he said, sitting upright on the couch, “By frightening colours and noises; have my st-strings pulled like a puppet. I want freedom”.

 

Mother Koshka shook her head, “Oh Child”, she said her voice suddenly becoming harder and more angry, “I’m so disappointed in you. I thought you were a good boy but you’re just a dirty dog.

I don’t know how these dirty words got into your head but we’re going to have to rip them out of you”.

 

She pulled open a drawer in her desk and took out some things; a sort of mask and a pair of gloves with sharp claws which she started to put on and Pavlov remembered where he had seen someone put on a mask and gloves  like that before; in the conditioning place; in the room that all the children were taken to with the dark red door and the sign that said Genetic Memory Room; the room where awful screams came from.

 

Then he screamed as the woman in the owl mask came closer.

 

 

*Reverse psychology