Even with the pharmacological mitigation and enclosure comfort provided by the Job, therapy with my patients rarely shared the structured, ethereal angst of a first world counselling session. Dealing not with the maybe, the bogeymen of possibility, the faint spectre of disaster—all distant cousins to true pain; these fragmented souls had already seen and felt far too much real trauma to compare even fleetingly with my pampered albionside client base. After a year of patching up tattered psyches, gibbering will-o-the-wisp surgery survivors, I have developed an involuntary rage response when I think back to the work I did at my Acton practise. When I remember the plaintive middle-England whining of mortgage rate hikes, second job exhaustion, the draconianisms of my own erstwhile employer, the dull throb of thwarted careers, the gorge rises and I frantically pat my pockets for the Marlboros.
Here in Afghanistan, in this millennial crucible of conflict, pain is real and my patients have experienced the full gamut. Not for the first time I am struck by the depressingly familiar irony of the urgent consumer strivings of my own cosseted countrywo/men for tastes/flavours/newness—bring me a new shirt, a new tie, a…new thing… anything. Daily I am reminded of the timeless Couplandism—purchased experiences don’t count; here, instead, in country, almost everyone is looking for a refund of their own bitter, involuntary transactions. It’s a hard lesson too, after a whole life of absent-minded gratitude for an accident of birth—a genetic dice roll—it only took a year in Afghanistan to realise that my former life was as hollow and valueless as the scooped thorax of one of my purloined patients.
I have a full quiver of therapeutics though, and (fading WorkSpace funding notwithstanding) I’ve got good gear. During the prefab sessions, when we’re making a semblance of progress and the tears flow usefully and cathartically, I feel like I did when I de-planed in Baghdad—a clean arrow of determination fletched with the belief that I could make a difference, salve the terrible open wounds of conflict damage.
Technology helped, the long chain polymer perfume of new tech, the replete power packs, the semi-autonomous repair packs, the vacuum sealed MREs—though I painfully and incrementally discovered that all these hedges against chaos and disorder are merely a delay, a brief hiatus of intervention that lasted only as long as the new car smell. After a year of petty theft, pilfering, abrasive desert winds, and the inevitable over-usage entropy, out of all my original kit only the Job is running at anywhere near full capacity.
The Job is a two person therapy model, with empathy bias. Designed in 2030 by a Dutch-Italian WorkSpace subsidiary, therapy Jobs were built around a central core concept: To feel is to understand. The one hundred and fifty years of the psychotherapy industry had always been hobbled by one glaring central limitation—to know someone is not to know their pain—and without that knowledge there can never have been true understanding, and in turn, succour.
The therapy Jobs make the tenuous, febrile moments of therapeutic insight a concrete reliability. Using the manipulation of mirror neurone activity—the observationally triggered physiological process that occurs when conspecific animals (humans included) witness each other’s pain—the Jobs use pharmacological and electro-neurological interventions to augment and enhance the biological empathy response. This includes the primary nociceptors—the propagators of noxious stimuli, this means that in a Job-facilitated session, the therapist feels the patients pain.
Considered somewhat of a Wild West field by the old school of non-interventionist counsellors and therapists, Job therapy was not for the faint-hearted. The pain, both phantom and real, of (for example) missing limbs, despite being buffered and baffled by a series of filters controlled by both the therapist and the patient, could be extreme. Still fringe, and therefore deemed deployment-acceptable in non-First World contexts, the empathy school was taking some of the first painful steps towards true understanding and healing.
Today it’s Zalmai’s first session, somewhat of a rite of passage in these de-traditioned times. I ping the Job a wake-up sequence from my PDA, and it uncurls from its wheeled repose. Carapaced like an over-plated armadillo, the Job snicks-snucks-clicks into the standard new patient configuration. Designed to minimise further unnecessary distress, these Job models lack the sanitary/elimination hook-ups of the standard corporate Job models, and they also have a much more friendly onboard AI avatar—gender variable dependent on the client.
Forming the now standardised defensive outward-looking perimeter (a welcome evolution of session security initiated by Gula), the rest of the group form a circle around Zalmai and I as we inter. I lead Zalmai to the patient saddle, the Job flaring open in a welcoming proboscis embrace. Seating Zalmai and hooking up the pharma-feed and the skullNet takes a few minutes, a pause capitalized on as usual by at least four of the group lighting up. I don’t really mind—H&S is a distant concept these days. The Job chirps an environmental particulate/carcinogen alarm but I squash it immediately—First World puritanism can go fuck itself.
Having made Zalmai comfortable and given him a few minutes to acquaint himself with the Job, I hook myself up in the therapy seat. Accessing the public landing space, I prep a stylised simulacrum of the poppy fields outside. In the therapySpace, the neurointerface provided by the Job means that during the sessions Zalmai will see again (a direct optical nerve hack that anywhere else in the West would be available as an outpatient procedure), and I want him to have a nice view. The quiet, small voice of the Job whispers—go—in my ear, and the session begins.