ADAM-TROY CASTRO

EGO TO GO

Artemus Feeble's greatest asset as a Persona Tailor had always been his ability
to know what the customer needed at first glance. Not merely what the customer
wanted-- that was easy. But knowing what the customer needed: that was a
different knack entirely, one that marked the dividing line between the merchant
and the artist.

His talents had served him well over the years; he'd moved from humble
beginnings sculpting trendy neuroses for the Soho crowd, to his humble but
lucrative sinecure in the Megalopolis Galleria, where he set up shop after that
vast shopping mall elected a governor and declared statehood. True, his store
was just a hole in the wall, really, tucked between an anal hypnotist and an
endorphin bar; and he deliberately kept it tacky to honor the long and
distinguished tradition of talented backstreet tailors-- but the grunge was as
much a simulation as his stooped back and liver-spotted scalp. Anybody who
sampled his work knew that Feeble was among the best.

Take the pudgy man who wandered in at 17:37 Metriday afternoon. Feeble pegged
him as the sort of man who felt embarrassed all the time, by everything he said
or did, and therefore tried to be as anonymous as possible. At this the poor
fellow ultimately failed; though he'd stuffed himself into the kind of suit
designed to be invisible against any background (a suit of real cloth, not
see-thru plastic or holographic projection), the powerful blush that had taken
up permanent residence on his cheeks made his face stand out like a searchlight.
Feeble registered all that, and, incongruously, the man's eyes (which were a
remarkably bright shade of blue he couldn't recall ever having seen before --
the kind of blue that even the sky itself achieved only in poetry written by shy
thirteen-year-old girls), before he turned his attention back to the flashily
dressed young lady already standing at his formica counter. "It's up and
running," he said, in his usual yiddish intonation. "If you ever need any
adjustments, let me know."

The young lady flashed an improbably dazzling smile and floated out the battered
wooden doorway on wings of pure bliss. The pudgy man watched her until she
disappeared up the gleaming escalator to the garden level. "S-she looks happy."

"She is, now. Deliriously. She'll never be in a bad mood again. She'll never
even be cranky. She'll also be incredibly annoying, but there's always a
trade-off. And you, mister? How may I help you?"

The pudgy man dabbed his forehead with a sonic hankie, which emitted a chorus of
high-pitched squeaks as the sweat beads vaporized. "Well, I, uh...hmmmm. This is
embarrassing."

"I'm not surprised," Feeble said. "Let's start with your name, shall we?"

"Porter," the pudgy man ventured, in the quaver of a man never at rest even in
his own skin. Almost at once he licked his lips, turned a sickly
fishbelly-white, and looked away, studying the various low-rent furnishings of
Feeble's miniscule waiting room -- the three folding chairs, the standing
ashtray gray with recent ash, and the coffee table covered with issues of
Personality Today. "I mean, Wallace? Wallace Porter? I was -- I mean, I was told
to come here by somebody I work with? Annie, I mean, Annette Crosby? You know
her?"

"Certainly," Feeble said. Annette was one of his regular customers: the
parthenogenic only child of virtual sex magnates Janet and Enid Crosby, who
liked to stop by over lunch to pick up an adorable giggle or temporary/Parisian
accent for a dinner engagement. Feeble liked Annette, even when she was being
fashionably unlikeable. He fingered the fatty tape measure he wore around his
shoulders as an old-fashioned badge of office, adjusted his traditional
bifocals, and prompted, "She sent you here.?"

"Yes, I, uh, was, sort of, apologizing to her, for uh, something I'd said to her
the week before, that I wasn't entirely sure she hadn't taken the wrong way,
because, uh, I don't really want to give offense, because I'm not that kind of
person, and, uh, she sort of gave out this big loud sigh and said that I should
come here. She, uh," Porter's blush was now as bright red as a Caribbean sunset,
"said I should buy an Ego."

"She's right. You need one."

Porter looked like he would have been happier cowering under the musty carpeting
with the rest of the insects. "I'm sorry."

Feeble slammed his fist against the countertop, raising a mushroom cloud of
carefully placed dust. "Don't apologize! That's the major problem with people
like you -- you're always apologizing! You believe that every single move you
make causes the world mortal offense, and therefore you either shy away from
doing anything even remotely self-assertive, or fall all over yourself making
excessive amends for words and deeds that never really required amends in the
first place. In the process, you reduce yourself to a forgettable cipher at best
and a major-league annoyance at worst. For God's sake, Mr. Porter, we're not
living in medieval times, when people actually had to live with a handicap like
that! Why didn't you get this fixed long ago?

Porter addressed an invisible person somewhere in the vicinity of his plain
brown shoes. "I'm s-- I mean, I guess I never realized it was a problem."

"You treat yourself like a criminal and you never realized it was a problem.?"

"I guess I thought I deserved it," said Porter.

Feeble appraised him critically, then disappeared behind the deliberately tacky
curtain (faded flowers in a shade of old tobacco stains), into the dimly lit
closet, returning with a metallic disk that reflected the single overhead bulb
with a burst of incandescent color that bounced rainbows off the beads f sweat
on Porter's forehead. "Here. Try this on."

Porter's eyes bugged.

"Surely this can't be your first prosthetic!"

"No," Porter said, in the awed tones of a man reliving a long-forgotten horror.
"When I was two years old, I was last in my class to learn Differential
Calculus. My parents fitted me with a 75-G Sony Prosthetic Genius for Math. They
didn't remove it until I was seven. It was years before I learned to communicate
with other people without using polynomials."

"That was a less enlightened age," Feeble assured him. "I myself was a
spectacularly unlikeable child and was almost ruined for life by a prosthetic
Cute. But these days we know how to properly adjust the prosthetic to the
individual personality. We can even implant them subdermally so nobody knows
you're wearing them. Go ahead. Try it."

Porter nodded wanly and placed the disk on his forehead. All at once his entire
bearing changed. He stood up straight -- gaining two inches of height in the
process-- shrugged his shoulders experimentally, and for the very first time,
smiled. "Wow."

"You're a wimp," Feeble said, his face rippling with waves of palpable disgust.
No longer Yiddish, he delivered words resonant with echoes, like the voice of
God in old Bible movies. Beams of blue light burst from the walls on both sides,
turning his cheekbones to caverns and rendering him monstrous. "A nerd. A loser.
A butthead. A weiner. A dope. A waste of oxygen. A sloth with a human face. If
you were worth twenty times what you're worth now you'd still be a worthless
slug."

Porter's face fell. "You really think so?"

The blue light receded. "I think you need a more powerful model," Feeble said,
sans echo, his voice suddenly Yiddish again. He plucked the disk off Porter's
forehead, disappeared through the curtains, then returned bearing another disk
which he applied where the first one had been. "Boy, are you pathetic. I mean,
jeez, I look at some of the gobs of human waste who come shuffling in here on
their hind legs and I think they're pretty hard to take, but you, mister, you're
a --"

Porter hauled off and punched him. Or tried to, anyway; Feeble's personal
force-field engaged as soon as it sensed the onrushing fist, deflecting it
harmlessly into the empty air by Feeble's side. Even as Porter tried to regain
his balance, Feeble was plucking the prosthetic from his forehead. All at once
Porter's face fell again: "Oh, dear. I'm sorry. Did I --"

Feeble waggled his index finger, which was yellow from tobacco smoke and had
altogether too many joints to look comfortable on any human hand. (He'd had it
reconfigured twenty years earlier, so he'd look more formidable lecturing
people.) "Didn't I tell you not to apologize? --This is all part of the fitting
process. It seems we have a slight problem in your case, Mr. Porter; you've
abused yourself so much that you've created an incredible deep-rooted anger. Any
attempt to give you an Ego will unleash that anger and create, instead of a
fuller, happier human being, a serious menace to himself and others."

Porter tried to shrink to the size of a period on a printed page. "I'm s --"

"Oh, please, give it a rest. This isn't an insoluble problem; people in my
profession encounter it fairly frequently. What you need, Mr. Porter, in
addition to a new Ego, is an outlet for all that anger. Something that will vent
your rage in a socially acceptable way. Perhaps..." He drummed his fingers,
including the extra-long one, on the countertop. Wherever he drummed, nanotech
Carefully replaced the dust immediately, to preserve the impression of sloppy
genius. He said, "A Talent, maybe?"

"I, uh, don't have a lot of money..."

"You don't need much, Mr. Porter. Talent's cheap...historically, one of the
cheapest things you can buy. And considering the sheer amount of angst you carry
around on your back, you need it. After all, angst from a Talented person is
fascinating; angst from a Common Everyday Nobody is just an annoyance. -- Hmmm.
Let's see. I could equip you with a standard Knack for Playing the Blues, but
then you'd have to buy an instrument, and you said you were on a budget..."
Feeble drummed his fingernails some more, then brightened. "I've got it.
Poetry."

"I think I'm too self-conscious to be a poet..."

Feeble chuckled. "A more unusual sentence I've never heard. Besides, on your
budget, you won't be a good one. In fact, the Prosthetic I have in mind is a
rather old model, which is only good for Post-Modern Acrostic Haiku. You won't
want to show any of it to anybody. But once every couple of weeks or so you'll
scribble some doggerel into a notebook, and save that notebook on disk, and
you'll feel that you've purged the pit of festering despair at the darkest comer
of your soul."

"Pit of Festering Despair?"

"Don't have one of those, either, eh? Well, worst comes to worst, I can always
equip you with one. Anyway," Feeble said, as he put the first disk back on
Ponees forehead, "here's your Ego, and here," he said, as he placed another disk
on top of that one, "Here's your Talent. And now, I want you to know that you've
made an incredible fool of yourself throughout this entire conversation."

"Yeah," Porter said derisively. "Right." And then he brightened immediately.
"Hey! It works! I asserted myself without excess anger and didn't feel even
remotely guilty about it! What a tremendous relief after an entire lifetime of
self-denial! I should have bought a prosthetic long ago!"

"I agree," said Feeble, "though you should also realize that your prostheses
have yet to be tested in your everybody life and thus cannot be said to be 100
percent adequate to your particular circumstances. The vast majority of my
customers come back for adjustments."

"Nuts to that! This is a brand-new me talking here! I've got vim and vigor! I've
got pep and zowie! I don't need anything but my faith in myself!"

Feeble nodded. "Very well," he said. He pressed a button under the counter,
summoning the implantation chair from its recessed home in the ceiling. "Let's
implant them and write up your order."

It was a week later. The mall was stringing brightly colored banners for its
yearly independence celebration. The public-address systems were playing a
grunge-muzak version of the Minnesota-Wisconsin War. Feeble had spent the past
hour administering to a bulky young man whose relationship with his girlfriend
had suffered due to his appalling lack of emotional vulnerability. As it
happened, the young man had no reason to be emotionally vulnerable; he'd lived
an uncommonly happy life, irritatingly devoid of formative angst. There weren't
even any Deep Shameful Secrets in his Past. Feeble had accordingly equipped him
with one. From now on, whenever the young lady in question mentioned Thursday,
the young man would automatically flash a startled look filled with the pain of
sudden remembrance, look away dramatically, and, while steadfastly denying that
anything was wrong speak in a hesitant stutter utterly at odds with his normally
ebullient personality. The young man didn't see how such a tiny thing could save
their relationship, but Feeble assured him the mystery would drive her wild; and
he definitely knew what he was talking about, because he'd fitted the young lady
with an Inquisitive Streak only two weeks earlier.

He was ringing up the young man's purchase when Brad Porter entered. Porter had
changed in the past week -- the nondescript clothes he'd been wearing on his
last visit had been replaced by an ensemble that went beyond flashy into the
realm of the egregiously loud. His jacket was tailored from a silvery material
upon which scenes from post-modernist pore, projected via fiber-optics from a
tape player secreted in an inside pocket, faded in and out in a smoky montage of
noir chic. Yet neither this outrageous fashion statement nor his stylish
holoshades, which shot successive bolts of multicolored lightning at the open
air before him, succeeded in hiding the unhappy soul behind the flamboyant mask.

To preserve the shreds of the poor man's dignity, Feeble didn't let on that he
saw through his pose at once. "Yes, sir! How's your new personality treating
you?"

"Terrific!" Porter exclaimed, in the kind of flamboyant delivery used by actors
playing to the thirty-fifth row. "For the first time in my life I feel perfectly
comfortable with myself! I am completely in charge of my own destiny! I'm a real
firebrand filled with zest and enthusiasm!"

"What's the problem, then.?"

"With me? Absolutely nothing! I'm a great conversationalist and a wonderful
human being! Every social gathering I attend should consider itself fortunate
that I'm there! Unfortunately," Porter said, the cloud that passed over his smug
self-satisfied expression perfectly at home next to the lightning storm of his
holoshades, "I've also been told everybody thinks I'm a self-centered creep."

Feeble bit the tip off a fresh cigar, spit it into the dark comer where it
joined a small mound of predecessors already being consumed by simulated
roaches. "I was afraid of this. You see . . . Brad . . . you do call yourself
Brad now, don't you? . . . a personality is like a suit of clothes. It can look
wonderful on the mannequin, but unless it's properly fitted to the individual,
it's just poorly tailored cloth. And while your peers might have found your
current level of self-appreciation perfectly appropriate for a man truly as
remarkable as you now consider yourself, they're unable to tolerate the same
level of egocentrism from somebody who isn't all that special at all."

More bad news and Porter might have collapsed into a semiliquid puddle on
Feeble's dusty floor. "Can you help me?"

"Of course." Feeble fingered the activator at the tip of his cigar and blew out
a small cloud of malodorous synth-smoke. "Here at Feeble's, the customer's
satisfaction is our top priority. The question is, just how do we tackle this
problem? Do we merely modulate your Ego so it's less irritating? Admittedly,
that might make you easier to take-- but it won't address the real core of the
problem, which is that when all is said and done you really don't have a lot to
be egotistical about."

"That can't be true! My Haiku alone --"

"First rule of human social interaction, Mr. Porter: If you have to lead with
Haiku, you've already lost."

"But you're the one who --"

Feeble dismissed the previous week with a wave of a hand. "Last week we fixed a
symptom. But you need more than confidence, Brad. Something actually valued by
society as a whole. Something that would make your self-admiration a logical
outgrowth of your own actual worth. Something, in short, that will render you a
valued commodity in the commerce of interpersonal relations."

Porter removed his mirrorshades, revealing eyes that, this time out, bespoke a
deeply troubled soul beneath the flashy, self-confident exterior. "Something
expensive, in other words."

Feeble shrugged. "You want a quick fix, buy your prosthetics from a vending
machine. There's a Slick Charm dispenser on Mall Level Twelve. But people are
sophisticated. First time the conversation turns to something substantive,
they'll be able to spot you as the phony you are. It takes a top-of-the-line
prosthetic to make people leap from their chairs, clap their hands over their
chests, and exclaim, By God! That Porter Fella's A Titan Among Men, Somebody I
Feel Damn Privileged to Know."

"Right now," Porter said glumly, "given the current state of my finances after
last week's fitting, I'll settle for a budget prosthetic and not being
universally despised."

"As you wish. You can always upgrade." Feeble looked around for an ashtray,
found none, then placed the cigar at the tip of his counter to let it flake
spent ash onto his carpet. "Hmmm. You said it was Ms. Crosby who first directed
you to this establishment. Is she your closest friend at your place of
employment ?"

"I don't have any close friends there," said Porter, "but she is one of the few
who don't run shrieking from the sight of me."

"And does she concur with the common opinion that you're a self-centered,
egotistical creep?"

"She told me just this morning that she does. -- In the friendliest possible
way, of course."

Feeble's gaze went deep and penetrating. "And how friendly can that be, Brad ?"

Porter colored. Lowered his eyes. Dug his hands into his pockets and bashfully
kicked at his heels. "You had to be there."

"I see. -- Well, sir, since she's the closest thing you have to a friend, you
must know a lot about her. Tell me, is she happy in her job? Does she have any
pets? What does she do for fun in her spare time? What's the one thing she'd do
differently if she had her life to live over? How's her health? Is she married?
Has she ever had a brain-rinse? Did she ever indulge in sentient fusion? Do you
know the answers to any of these questions? Even one of them, Mr. Porter?"

"Of course not. Why would I care?"

"She's right, Brad. You are a self-centered, egotistical creep." "Hey!"

Feeble raised both hands in mock surrender. "Don't take it personally, my good
man. That's a professional diagnosis. And right now it's my professional opinion
that you've been wrapped up in your own problems so long, without break, that
you don't have even the slightest clue how to show an interest in anybody other
than yourself."

Porter wore the expression of a man who's just learned he was wearing his
underwear outside his pants. "Really?"

"Don't blame yourself." Feeble patted him on the shoulder in sympathy. "It takes
the average person half a lifetime to develop the knack, and even then it
usually comes off as forced and unnatural. But with the proper prosthetic in
place, you can be a warm and caring individual artificially, without the
nurturing life experiences that inefficiently take years to make you one. Here,"
he said, placing a disk on Porter's forehead. "This is a Sanyo GZ-57 Prosthetic
Empathy. How do you feel?"

"Is it on yet?" Porter asked.

"Yes. Highest possible setting. How do you feel?"

"The same."

"Maybe it doesn't work. The quality control is--" And then Feeble's face
contorted, becoming a tormented parody of itself. "ARRRRGH!"

Porter's eyes widened in alarm. "What's wrong?"

"Just some . . . heartburn . . . my . . ." Feeble fell to his knees.
"ARRRGHHHH!"

Porter leaped over the counter in a single bound, landing beside Feeble with the
silent grace of a jungle cat. "You can't fool me, Feeble! That's not heartburn,
that's a massive coronary! Isn't it? ISN'T IT?"

Feeble's mouth worked silently for all of ten seconds before he managed to get
out the word. ". . . yes . . ."

"I'm taking you to the hospital right now!"

". . . no . . . don't . . ." Feeble went three shades paler and fell the rest of
the way to the ground, in the kind of death scene that every actress who ever
played Camille might have envied. "...you have your own problems . . ."

Porter cradled him in his arms and rocked back and forth as he declaimed his
infinite caring to the heavens. "Damn my petty little problems! They're not
important, anyway! You're a fellow human being in distress and you take
precedence!"

"Of course," Feeble said, in a normal tone of voice, the color returning to his
cheeks even as he continued to gaze up at Porter's pathetically concerned face,
"this is just a demonstration. I once tested this little beauty myself, by
wearing it as I paged through a magazine looking at the save-the-children ads.
Were I not also wearing a Prosthetic Cheap Bastard just as a precaution, I'd
right this very minute be supporting a family of twelve on the Mars colony."

"Let me help you up anyway," said Porter.

"You don't have to."

"No, I insist."

"I'm telling you you don't have to. I can get up by myself."

"But you've gone to so much trouble, I feel so bad for you . . ."

"I think we're going to have to use a lower setting," Feeble decided, as he
lithely jumped to his feet and physically thrust the hovering customer from his
side. "If you show too much concern for the feelings and concerns of others,
they consider you intrusive and once again come to the conclusion that you're a
self-centered creep."

"I don't care what they think about me," Porter declared fervently, an unnerving
messianic light shining from his remarkably blue eyes, "as long as they're
comfortable with themselves."

"Oh, please." Feeble reached out and switched off the prosthetic. "If I let you
walk out of this store acting like that, I'd never have another customer again.
-- I suppose you'll be more-or-less okay if along with the Prosthetic Empathy we
also implanted a Prosthetic Reasonable Sense of Perspective to keep you from
getting obnoxious about it. That will be more expensive, of course, but even
so..." He rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

Swaying slightly, Brad regarded him with an expression very close to terror.
"Yes?"

"Frankly, Brad, you have one of the most seriously deficient personalities I've
ever encountered. Even if we draw the line at the Prosthetic Reasonable Sense of
Perspective, and it works for you, then that still means it's taken four major
prosthetics just to make you even minimally tolerable. I say we shouldn't settle
for that. As long as we're getting up into that price range anyway, I say we
dispense with the expensive band-aids, declare your old personality a dead loss,
and install a complete brand-new one direct from the factory in Tel Aviv. I'll
even give you a generous payment plan, and credit you the full purchase price of
the prosthetics I've already installed. What do you say?"

"Can I have a week to think it over?"

With one smooth, efficient movement, Feeble pressed a Prosthetic Decisiveness to
Porter's forehead.

Porter's jaw set, becoming an iron thing that even cannonballs couldn't have
dented. "Let's do it."

Feeble smiled. "Let's."

A year later, Feeble was in his store adding a new line of Laughter Enhancers to
the window display, when the dashing and heroic Lash Porter strode in like the
titan of a man he was. Porter had lost all his previous pudginess over the past
few months, gaining in its place a muscle tone well-suited to his safari jacket,
jhodpurs and pith helmet. His steely blue gaze and determinedly set jaw bespoke
a man of action well-versed in the harsh laws of jungle survival. But his was
not an entirely grim soul, either-- for even as he saw Feeble his heroic eyes
lit up with the joy of a man as unsparingly generous with his friends as he was
unstintingly cruel to his enemies. "Artemus!" he exclaimed jovially. "Can you
spare a drink for a thirsty man?"

"Always for you, Lash." Feeble set a shot glass on the table and poured Lash a
quick one.

Porter tossed it back, said, "Ahhhhhh!" and slammed the empty glass to the
counter.

"How's life treating you, Lash?"

"Could be worse, my friend. Annette and I have finally set the date. We'll be
getting married en route to our villa in subtropic Antarctica."

Feeble clapped Porter on the back. "Mazeltov!"

"Yes," Porter said dreamily, looking past Feeble, past the walls of Feeble's
establishment, to some vision of perfect happiness known only to him, "she says
that I come very close to being the man she's dreamed of all her life. --Though
she could use a little work herself. I've asked her to stop by so you can give
her a Sense of Humor. She doesn't get any of my jokes."

"I'll give her the top of the line," Feeble promised.

"And she's always cranky when she first wakes up. I've always been a morning
person, so maybe you can work on that too."

"It would be my pleasure," Feeble said gravely. "And you, Lash? Are you shopping
for yourself as well?"

Porter retrieved a sheet of paper from his breast pocket. The sheet had been
folded four times, but Feeble could tell even so that it was covered on both
sides with many, many words in a cramped feminine handwriting. Porter unfolded
it carefully, smoothed out the creases, and started to read. "Neatness. Table
Manners. Punctuality. An Interest in Opera. An Appreciation for Fine Art and
French Food. An Encyclopaedic Knowledge of the World's Great Wines. An Affection
for Cats. More Tolerance for her Explosive Meditation Techniques. Tact When
Dealing With Her Mothers. More Stamina When..."

"Whoa!" Feeble put out both hands in mock surrender. "That's going to cost quite
a bit, Lash! Are you sure you have the budget for all that?"

"Annette's mothers are paying. It was a condition of our engagement."

"Ahhhhhhh." Feeble nodded. "Sounds like the young lady knows what she wants."

Porter placed the sheet of paper on Feeble's countertop. "She always did. She
says she wanted me from the moment we first met. My eyes, you see."

"I see," said Feeble, though of course, with his years of experience in the
trade, he wasn't exactly surprised. He grabbed the list, scanned it quickly, saw
that it contained any number of items that even he would have never considered,
and heaved the sigh of a man who knew his work was cut out for him. "Well, then!
We better get started. Since this is going to take a while, and you are by far
my best customer, I'll just close up shop, so we can take our time with this."

"Thank you," Porter said humbly.

Feeble came around the counter, pulled the fly-specked shades, activated the
CLOSED sign in the window, then pressed the button that summoned the reclining
Implantation Chair from its recess in the ceiling. But just as Porter climbed
aboard and grinned at him expectantly, Feeble paused, a strange expression on
his face. "Lash?"

"What?"

"Before we do this, I want to say I admire you."

"Me?" Porter's heroic visage twisted in surprise. "Why? You're the one
responsible for the man I am today."

"Not at all," said Feeble. "The truth of the matter, Lash -- and I'll deny this
if you repeat it to anybody, since the entire profession lives in fear of people
finding this out -- is that personality is nothing more than a shallow mask we
show the world. Even when we add to it, or subtract from it, or rebuild it from
the ground up, or, as in your case, raze it to the ground and then replace it
entirely, we like to think we don't touch the soul itself. And I can't help
admiring a soul brave enough to re-invent himself so completely."

Porter smiled and shook his head. "You're so full of crap, Feeble. Bravery
doesn't enter into it."

"No? What would you call it, then?"

"I did it for Annette," he said. "The only woman I ever met who loved me for
myself."

Feeble smiled then, though for just an instant -- an instant he very carefully
hid from the man who now called himself Lash -- the smile was neither friendly
nor professional, but sad and wan.

Then he activated the chair and made Porter a brand new man.