Self-Centred (March 2026)

Arnie wasn't going to be convinced until he saw the proof for himself.

Do other people exist apart from my thinking about them? He didn't think so. He could never verify their existence without them being there. Or, at least being part of his own experience. This caused him difficulties during childhood. He got into lots of fights. Usually, this was the outcome when he told the other kids that he'd leave and disappear them if they didn't do what he told them to do. Most of the time he came out the loser.

He was orphaned early. His parents' will designated some corporation to assume management of the trusteeship in the event of their passing. So, somewhere in the Caribbean, his new family looked after his material needs.

In college he was quite argumentative and refractory with both students and faculty. The philosophy department encouraged him to switch majors when he repeatedly refused to acknowledge the independent reality of his professors. He didn’t take the suggestion well. The department eventually had to bar him from all classes. The psychology department was more indulgent for the simple reason that he provided them with a unique research opportunity, but once word got out about the types of experiments they were performing, he had to be released and all contact with the department severed. He tried accounting but that was a predictable bust. So, he dropped out of college.

He had started his own experiments in junior high school. He'd taken some of more common hallucinogens like LSD, magic mushrooms and mescaline. He'd even tried the chemical derived from the venom of some rare amphibian found only in the Rocky Mountains of the United States. All of them expanded his range of experience, but everything came back to HIM. Everything was relative to HIM. He never managed to escape HIMSELF and see the world through someone else's eyes.

With the assistance of a rare friend from his high school days, he engaged the services of a law firm that specialized in trust busting. This had nothing to do with traditional antitrust law and corporate monopolies. These were private trusts that managed the wealth of ultra-high-net-worth families like his. By the time he turned 30, he had wrested full control of the family trust from the Bahamian corporation.

Now, with no limit to how much he could spend, he set about organizing a competitive research program among the five largest pharmaceutical companies in the world and several off-the-books projects in Eastern Europe, Russia, Israel and China. Over time, he could boast of having multiple trials being staged around the world. Subjects were recruited to participate in the testing of a variety of potential break-out hallucinogens, but they were sufficiently well paid so most didn't object to the secrecy. Those that did were culled.

The single most important objective of the billions of dollars he poured into pharmacological and pharmaceutical research was to isolate a chemical that could produce the effect of experiencing the world exactly the way another person experiences it. Since there was no guarantee that such a chemical could be discovered and subsequently manufactured, the program was open-ended. It could take years or decades or it could go on forever.

_____

He was in his eighties when the first promising drug candidate emerged. So eager was he to live to see the results of his efforts, he insisted on a trial for himself despite countless warnings that his declining health put him at grave risk.

One entire wing of a private hospital (one of his) was dedicated to the experiment and top specialists from around the world were requisitioned. That would be the correct term for his offers were very persuasive and he didn’t brook resistance.

The doctors set him up to receive the test drug intravenously so they could calibrate the release of the chemical as they monitored his physiological responses. Once the dosage was optimally calibrated, the next stage would be to transfer his consciousness to the body of another person. A long list of legal and medical prohibitions had prevented this experiment from ever having been performed before, so far as anyone knew. Unsurprisingly, as this was the most dangerous stage of the experiment, there were no volunteers. Recruiting had to pursue a different approach. More than a hundred homeless individuals were interviewed over a period of two weeks. It took that many and that long to find just one who was found to be physically fit and psychologically stable enough to undergo the procedure.

On the day of the operation, the brains of the two patients were connected to permit the sharing of consciousness. Once the transfer had taken place, the homeless man was to be asked a number of biographical questions followed by questions concerning his attendant perceptions, thoughts and emotions.

But all didn’t go as planned. The procedure was accompanied by off the chart readings of the patients’ vitals, and so it was abruptly terminated. The homeless man didn’t respond to any of the preset questions. Instead, he droned on, mumbling bitterly about a wasted life.

From the adjacent operating table, the other patient sat upright on hearing a familiar voice. Pushing the blue sheets off, he looked down at his body. What he saw nearly choked him as he tried to force out a scream. These were not HIS skeletal arms and legs, draped as they were with saggy, translucent skin. Slowly taking in the whole of the operating theatre, with a tired and gravelly voice, he cried out, "Who IS that?,” nodding in the direction of the other patient. “And who are YOU people and what have you done to ME?"