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Some forms of mind-loss are endemic. The mind’s equivalents of coughs and colds, allergies to pollen and peanuts. Most people have experience them: they are part of life.
But they don’t have to be.
Consider anxiety. Its classical textbook definition is an emotion characterized by feelings of tension, worried thoughts, and physical changes like increased blood pressure. Anxiety is considered a future-oriented, long-acting response broadly focused on a diffuse threat. [1]
“Long-acting response broadly focused on a diffuse threat” is how my professional class describes the feeling of always being worried but you don’t know what about or a nameless dread or any other way of expressing the essence of I feel bad and I don’t know why. A long-acting response isn’t something that goes away. It’s part of your life. It’s part of you, now, this long-acting response. It is your response. To focus broadly on a diffuse threat is how you interact with the world. What most people experience is a near-constant, low-level, background anxiety. Both endemic and chronic, this non-specific anxiety (or, to demedicalise it, ambient anxiety) has become, for multiple reasons, a universal part of life. It’s the shapeshifter, the versatile, adaptable, all-purpose modern way to lose your mind. Its most common forms are:
Orthodox treatments for ambient anxiety exist, but like the orthodox responses to any other form of mind-loss, they have the effect of recognising it, validating it, rationalising it, reinforcing it, welcoming it into your life and locking the door behind it. This is not a good thing. Anxiety is a long-acting response broadly focused on a diffuse threat, and if welcome it in, it will absolutely never leave you. You can’t destroy it. It’s a full-spectrum antibiotically resistant mental bacteria. You can’t live with it. It’s awful. You’ll lose your mind.
There is another way, though.
You don’t destroy it.
You upgrade it.
An early research group made the first move towards what ultimately became upgrading when they – even they, given the makeup of the group* - internalised that destruction was not a responsible option. So they looked asked a new question. These endemic, amorphous, chronic, low-grade conditions: what do they want? What do they want to achieve? What do they want to be?
What the group concluded was, they want to be something better. Less basic. Less sore throat, more Eisenmenger syndrome. Less hay fever, more Ebola. What ambient anxiety aspires to be, but usually fails, is true paranoia. Upgrading from anxiety to paranoia is now a standard technique, but in the beginning it was highly experimental. I even saw it described in a peer-reviewed publication** as controversial and brave. In essence, the approach is plant a false sensation – a thought, a memory, a feeling - in the dense dark alkaline soil of anxiety. Anxiety, it transpires, is powerful nourishment for an artificially introduced sensation. As long as the implant is calibrated for its new environment, it will appeal to anxiety, feed anxiety’s sense of justification for its own existence, which in turn will deliver nutrients, give it a welcome into the deep earth of consciousness and below. Through a process of psychological alchemy (in truth more accurately understood as physio-chemistry, given the essentially physical nature of the brain***) the false sensation will in time achieve a position of dominance over the anxiety. What begins as a seed which seeks and receives nourishment from its host, grows so successfully in this environment that ultimately it consumes the anxiety. We call the process upgrading because it takes ambient anxiety and replaces it with a specific, detailed, directed paranoia. Anyone can be anxious about their professional future, for example. But to fear that your work has been targeted for sabotage by a hostile intelligence agency is an altogether richer, more sophisticated condition, reserved for an exclusive group. In the type of terms used by clients, I am worried I am not good enough and will fail at this task is a lot worse than for reasons I cannot understand, the KGB is trying to destroy my work.
Upgrades succeed, but they have to be carefully calibrated. And we, as advisers, have to be careful not to advise them when we think they might have damaging consequences. That we are able to make this kind of determination is a result of difficult lessons learned from early work.
1 American Psychological Association
*Specifically, John Roth-Dunleavy. For further reading, continue reading
**[Reference classified pending regulatory review]
*** For further reading, see We Can Kill Everything Now [declassification pending]
At the beginning, paranoiac upgrading, even in the embryonic responsible mind-loss community, was divisive. It started as something called Project Rheinhart, which had grown out of sleep-related work that the clinical psychiatrist John Roth-Dunleavy, who rotated between practices in New York and northern California, was undertaking in the late 1980s. Roth-Dunleavy had a successful practice specialising in sleep disorders, especially as they became fashionable in New York and Californian professional circles around that time. He had referrals from mainstream health practitioners and, increasingly, from corporate occupational health functions which had begun to pick up on the problems faced (and caused) by sleep-deprived executives. Roth-Dunleavy, while processing* one of these cases, lost patience with orthodox treatments, and introduced a new approach. Instead of trying to rationalise, and thus de-mystify and neutralise the power of anxieties or other concerns that were making it difficult to sleep, Roth-Dunleavy focused on exactly this power. Roth-Dunleavy told his client – a foreign-exchange trader identified by the pseudonym Max - who had lately begun to suffer from an exaggerated fear of professional failure – that he favoured a more confrontational attitude which, certainly ‘tougher’ on the client than traditional therapeutic practice, would be faster-acting.
The combination appealed to Max’s competitive nature; case notes record them agreeing on what Max christened the ‘hardcore’ approach. This involved Roth-Dunleavy making a digital audio file of himself telling Max, with much authority, that he was not going to be successful; that he had no understanding of the mechanics of currency trading; he was in truth a fraud who would be responsible for huge losses; his peers held him in contempt; he was right to fear professional calamity, which he would deserve.
Roth-Dunleavy gives Max the file and instructs him to play it, looped, throughout the night. Roth-Dunleavy augments the audio treatment with chemical stimulants he describes as caffeine pills but which in reality are highly likely to be amphetamines plus caffeine and cocaine; Max, at one stage, has been awake for more than 120 hours, his life divided between his work and locking himself in his eighth-floor apartment, taking speed pills and listening to Roth-Dunleavy’s voice, infinitely repeating, telling him he’s no good at anything. Max, entering day seven without any prospect of sleep, calls Roth-Dunleavy, who deliberately rejects the call. The voice-message – which I heard once and will not listen to again – is mainly Max explaining the similarities between himself and a shark, then an electric eel, then an angler fish, then an underwater crater on the moon, then the skull of a leg of lamb, then a mercury slushie set on fire, and other improbable combinations of object. He is evidently in grievous trouble. Roth-Dunleavy doesn’t call back even after a second and a third message; almost unbelievably, Max completes another day at work.
After 140 hours awake, Max throws himself from his balcony, landing in the car park of an Argentine-style steakhouse, where he dies. This outcome does not deter Roth-Dunleavy, in whose case notes there is a reference to ‘proximity to breakthrough,’ a head-on reckoning with the insecurities that had been robbing him of his rest, which Roth-Dunleavy had somehow discerned in his client’s final, insensible voice-messages.
The official verdict of death by misadventure notes that Max had been ‘seeking professional support and counselling’ to manage his stress levels; the astronomical level of controlled substances in his bloodstream is ascribed to self-medication. Whatever restraints Roth-Dunleavy has been operating within now dissolve: he pursues this ‘hardcore’ confrontational approach with more clients, even those manifestly unsuitable for such tactics. His aim, according to his own case-notes**, is to confront the hidden causes of sleep disorders by bringing them to such immediate psychological prominence that they effectively take on a physical form [my emphasis]. The scale of Roth-Dunleavy’s ambition here cannot be overstated: he intends to use enhanced sleep-deprivation and repetitive-message techniques to summon, in the minds of his clients, an embodiment of the idea of ‘fraudulence’ or ‘failure’ or ‘worthlessness’ or ‘unlovability’ so real that the client would, under Roth-Dunleavy’s supervision, be able to fight and overcome these mental demons, leaving them not only able to sleep soundly, but purged of their other debilitating effects.
Almost inevitably, many other Roth-Dunleavy clients were too fragile or unstable to withstand the strictures of his confrontational techniques. Roth-Dunleavy is even now a divisive figure in the field: many of his peers are convinced that his case-notes are at best incomplete and at worst untruthful; that there exists somewhere a ‘shadow’ set of case-notes, a parallel, true record of what Roth-Dunleavy subjected his clients to, and how they responded. The image of a man walking purposefully into a tunnel on a main-line railway track in Scotland; the suggestion of external factors in a thirty-car pileup in upstate New York; rumours connected to at least two mass casualty events, one in a school and another outside a basketball match; these are the ghosts that haunt Roth-Dunleavy’s name.
*Roth-Dunleavy’s term
**Many of Roth-Dunleavy’s original case-notes are sealed pending judicial review of coroners’ decisions
He is, however, a towering figure in the theory and practice of responsible mind-loss. What Roth-Dunleavy’s experiments revealed was that paranoiac upgrades should only be done in a highly targeted way. A paranoiac upgrade is designed to release the mind from the effects of anxiety by concentrating and effectively containing it as paranoia in a specific behaviour, or event category. The mantra of the early upgraders – anxiety is illness, paranoia is risk management – has an element of the jocular, but it is in essence correct. There are thousands of documented cases of anxious people who have been successfully upgraded into paranoia about a precisely circumscribed set of threats: vehicle theft is the most common and most successful of these. The upgraded client swaps social fear, inability to interact, inability to concentrate, sleep disorders, feelings of worthlessness and so on, for a heightened sensitivity to the merits of enclosed parking locations, and extra expenditure on automobile security devices. They get, in short, their minds back, and a car that’s less likely to be stolen.
Olivia finds Roth-Dunleavy online – he knows this because she tells him – and she calls him during her lunch break to discuss the possibility of maybe booking some counselling. Roth-Dunleavy, he records in the contextual background to his case-notes on her, can tell from the specific layout of strain in her voice that she is a textbook example of anxiety as a long-acting response broadly focused on a diffuse threat.
She explains to Roth-Dunleavy that she found him by searching for low-cost options for people in her situation, one of which was a programme promoting its ‘exclusive focus on transforming the lives of people who have anxiety, without prescription medication.’ Anxious about the potential side-effects of medication – veering between being a sullen fatty and an over-lit, hyper-engaged bigmouth – she completed the confidential, easy-to-use online assessment which has ultimately and inevitably delivered her to Roth-Dunleavy. I’m glad you found me, he says. And he is. She will, he notes even as he goes through the standard checklist for new clients, have been anxious about calling him, and will in their sessions be anxious that her anxiety is insufficiently interesting a subject for someone of Roth-Dunleavy’s stature, and of Roth-Dunleavy’s demeanour specifically. Roth-Dunleavy resolves – he writes a sentence that begins I resolve- to deliver a supremely successful treatment to Olivia.
Her anxiety, she both deliberately and unwittingly reveals in their first sequence of in-person sessions is exactly the type of broad-based spectrum of personal and social fears that are chronic in contemporary life. She is, without having experienced anything that Roth-Dunleavy* would classify as a traumatic event, anxious about her appearance, her professional abilities, her professional status, her relationships with her managers and her colleagues, her relationships with her friends and her family, the condition of her home, her net worth, her health, her diet, her use of her free time, her disinclination to seek a potential partner, her worth as a potential partner: her anxiety is beginning to prevent her doing things. As she feels herself making the first refusals, the first excuses, the first choices that lead towards reclusiveness, she still has sufficient self-awareness to know that that isn’t the life she wants, which is why she’s here, now, today, in Roth-Dunleavy’s airy consulting rooms in a better sort of serviced office building on the uncontested border between Finchley Road and Frognal, doing something she’s never done before.
Olivia explains all this, at what must be some personal cost, and at the end of it, Roth-Dunleavy says, do you drive?
Here, Roth-Dunleavy’s notes revert to orthodox transcription.
Olivia: Yes, I drive. I mean I can drive. I mean I’ve got a driving licence, and a car, but I don’t actually do that much driving any more, not really. There’s so many crazy drivers, drink-drivers, people screaming at each other-
Roth-Dunleavy: And the crime. It works out that there’s a car stolen in London every 35 minutes. On average, that is. The police have given up. Totally given up. If they wanted to do anything about car crime, they’d have to create another Met, the same size as the existing Met, that did nothing but car crime.
Olivia: I didn’t know that
Roth-Dunleavy: I know someone whose car was stolen. He traced it on the tracking device he’d had installed himself, he physically went to the location it showed on his phone – it was somewhere in Pimlico, would you have guessed that?
Olivia: Probably not, I suppose
Roth-Dunleavy: No, I wouldn’t either, but that’s where it was, so he went there, found it, took photos of it, then went to his nearest police station, which was somewhere down in Lambeth, he turned up there, gave them his crime number, explained to the desk sergeant what had happened, that he’d actually found his stolen car and could the police help him from here, and do you know what they said? Can you guess?
Olivia: No. I mean, I don’t know. I’ve never been to – I’ve never had to do this. Did they give him a form to fill in?
Roth-Dunleavy: A form to fill in, that’s good, that’s a good guess. But it wasn’t that though. What they told him was, there was no further course of action they could advise. Those exact words. You see it, don’t you? They can’t advise him to go and get his car back himself, they certainly aren’t going to do anything to help him, but nor can they tell him to do nothing. If anything happens, anything at all, the most important thing for the police is that there’s no record of them having been involved at any stage. And this is the Metropolitan Police. When it comes to car crime, it is absolutely everywhere, all the time, and you are absolutely on your own.
[Roth-Dunleavy is clearly prepared to accept the risk that his new client will be so confused by this line of conversation that she will discontinue their sessions. She does not.]
In their next session, Roth-Dunleavy shows her a video he has made – or had made for him – using footage from CCTV cameras to show the ease and speed with which car thieves are able to break into vehicles and drive them away. From Roth-Dunleavy’s own description of the film, it features hundreds of incidents – doors forced, windows smashed, locks duped by electronic devices – edited together at such a pace that it looks like something close to a biological process under a microscope: a static object, the vehicle, is attacked by nimble agents that take it away, platelets removing blockages from the bloodstream.
Roth-Dunleavy: This is what you’re up against.
Olivia: I had no idea. I had no idea it was so awful.
Over eight sessions spread across two months, Roth-Dunleavy administers the upgrade.
And afterwards, Olivia starts attaching a steering-wheel lock and a wheel clamp even when she’s parking for a short time in a CCTV-monitored shopping centre car park. She learns more about, and buys more, Thatcham devices than anyone outside the auto trade. She has a remote-activated immobiliser fitted; two separate satellite-linked tracking systems monitor every movement of her car and relay them to strategically located command centres; she augments her locking mechanism with an electronic jamming function. She begins, in spare moments, to sketch out schematics and functionality of idealised, fantastical car security systems: pressure-detonated acid spray, electric shock delivery, a self-deploying sedative gun concealed in the driver’s seat, rapid-rolldown steel shutters, combinations of pressurised containers and miniature explosive devices; the phrase to incapacitate not to kill grows into a design mantra.
All this she shares with Roth-Dunleavy, whom it delights in totality. After half a dozen sessions which, according to the case-notes, are more or less exclusively given over to Olivia lecturing Roth-Dunleavy on the safest bays, statistically and behaviourally, in multi-storey car parks; city-centre versus park-and-ride; and her first steps away from the drawing board and towards the workshop: she has had, she tells him, a workbench installed in her spare room, and is looking at lathe options. Casually he asks her, what about the other stuff?
She pauses, looks at him. I must, she says, have been having a bit of a moment. It was quite worrying for a while though, wasn’t it?
For the first time in months, Olivia looks uncomfortable, embarrassed. Now she feels silly, she says, to think that she was worried about saying the wrong thing, worried about what other people thought of her, whatever all the rest of it had been about, when there’s so much going on that she can actually do something about.
Anxiety is illness, paranoia is risk management, Roth-Dunleavy has written and underlined here.
-These other people, he asks her. -What do they think about how you are now, would you say?
Olivia, for the first time Roth-Dunleavy has ever seen, almost laughs. It is, he observes, an expression which gives her a not unattractive aspect.
-Oh, she says, -my friends tease me a bit about it when I put the locks on if I’ve driven to Kew or to Barnes or something like that, but then I think, sod it. Everyone’s weird about something, aren’t they?
Everyone’s weird about something: this is former anxiety-cripple Olivia’s ultimate self-assessment. Roth-Dunleavy, by how own admission, has to restrain himself from leaping out of his chair to high-five her. Because this upgrade has, without any doubt or any mediation, worked. Olivia, instead of being dragged by her anxiety into withdrawal, reclusiveness, isolation, now has a full and varied life, and an unusually safe car.
*And in this case, the majority of professional practitioners
One of Roth-Dunleavy’s many contributions to responsible mind-loss is his identification and codification of accelerants. To put this achievement into context, its nearest analogue in biological sciences would be, perhaps, the observation of apes operating in family groups, or the systematic tracking of the patterns of migratory birds. It is a foundation-stone of the entire discipline, yet, had Roth-Dunleavy had to work under the clinical, regulatory, and ethical constraints of the present-day practitioner, they would almost certainly still be unknown.
Note: From this point in his work, Roth-Dunleavy’s case-files tend not to identify clients by name. He uses instead an alphanumeric coding system. Similarly, rather than interview recordings or contemporaneously taken notes, he uses an informal, idiosyncratic narrative shorthand to describe actions and situations. The text below is a reconstruction, presented as accurately as is possible, of Roth-Dunleavy’s interactions with his clients.
Client A-26, a referral from an addiction counselling service in the UK [he was not an addict] presented with complaints of what he described as a ‘run of bad luck’ – professional setbacks, relationship struggles and failures – and had begun to think of himself as more than unlucky: he had become a ‘continuous curse’ [his term] which, by desiring or actively pursuing an outcome, guarantees the opposite outcome. Rather than try to guide A-26 away from this magical-thinking fatalism, Roth-Dunleavy challenges him to a demonstration of his power. They discuss A-26’s preferences, allegiances, some of his hopes, and Roth-Dunleavy tells him: bet against them.*
Under Roth-Dunleavy’s encouragement, A-26 makes more than fifty financial wagers over a one-month period. He gambles mainly on sports. In football he identifies as an Ipswich Town supporter and places a string of bets on Ipswich to lose, which invariably they do; in cricket he bets against England, with mixed results. Beyond sports, he finds markets for the outcomes of elections in developing nations; he speculates in financial markets about which he knows nothing: he bets on the Nigerian naira, he bets on the Turkish lira, the Vietnamese dong, the Brazilian real, the Peruvian sol. His wins and losses are equally inexplicable: in these strands of betting, he abandons himself to randomness, forces that while uncontrollable, are at least indifferent to his contentment or suffering.
After the month, he reports to Roth-Dunleavy that gambling seems to be making him feel worse. When he wins it’s because he has bet on outcomes that emotionally he does not want: Ipswich losing, England losing; when Ipswich win the match, he loses his bet and thus his money. An experiment aimed at demonstrating his lack of control has instead metastasized into what will become a powerful source of angst: the feeling, now supported by data, that even when he wins, he still loses. An outcome he desires – for example, a 3-1 win away at a mid-table Coventry City, could not have been achieved without a personal financial punishment for him. Rather than helping to break it down, it reinforces his perception that he is being persecuted, and it leads him to the question: why him?
Orthodox practice would attempt to challenge this thinking. Roth-Dunleavy instead encourages A-26 to consider what it is he knows, what he’s good at, what untapped talents he might have, that would explain why a hidden confederacy of powers would unite in order to stifle him. A-26 responds to the thought-exercise by reassessing his adult life and as much of his early life as he can remember, incident by incident. In each one he asks himself: what did I want, and to whose advantage was it that it didn’t happen? A-26 starts making notes, collating evidence, plotting out timelines, a taxonomy of his failures and reversals – from unsuccessful job applications to losing games of pool as a 16-year-old in the Royal Oak – by theme, by beneficiary, by consequence. He shows Roth-Dunleavy what he’s done. Roth-Dunleavy applauds the effort, tells A-26 that what he’s “working” on is important, and that he should continue.
A-26 comes to their next appointment with 200 pages of A4, some handwritten and some printed, stacked into a file folder. There are diagrams, circles and arrows showing links, causality, inflexion points, yes/no gates, consequential next steps. It concentrates on A-26’s romantic life. Roth-Dunleavy reads with much fascination, asks A-26 if he will leave the file with him for further study, emphasises the importance of the work, and urges A-26 to “keep digging” into his past for more of this valuable information.
By the time A-26 presents Roth-Dunleavy with a third file, he has formed an outline of an explanation. In order for so much individual, corporate, organisational, and societal effort to go into denying him things he has wanted, those things must be linked by a thematic or consequential bond. What A-26 has wanted but failed to achieve are by any assessment modest – a better job, a flat with more space, a genuinely enjoyable relationship, a night of sex with Imogen Cunliffe, to see Ipswich Town win more than ten games a season – he has not, he stresses, been “crying into his beer” because he “wanted to be a racing driver and turned out to be an enterprise risk manager.” So why is it so important to someone, or some group of people, or some organisation, or some group of organisations, that he is denied even these small successes?
A-26 reasons that he is being prevented from having what he wants because, contrary to what he’s been told, he is in fact a special case, and the world does in fact revolve around him. Or it would, if the force keeping him down could be overcome. It takes a nation of millions to hold me back. A-26 shares his thinking with Roth-Dunleavy, who says: I believe you. This is important information.
A-26 has such potential, such capability, such latent power, that for the moment, he must suffer the reversals which have been strategized to undermine him. In the context of these forces of reversal, Roth-Dunleavy explains, A-26 must ask himself: by willing something to happen, is he responsible for making sure it does not? Equally if he does not want something to happen, therefore it must. Is he accountable for atrocities because he did not want them to go ahead? In short, does he need to actively wish for a murder in order to save the victim?
A-26 considers this, writes down some flow charts and decision trees that try to capture what it means for him in practical terms: how must he now live his life?
Roth-Dunleavy studies them with much interest, and says A-26 needs to be careful because he doesn’t want to neglect anything. Has he thought, for example, about Xinjiang? A-26 is aware of it, thinks he may have lightly, non-sacrificially adjusted some of his consumer behaviours in response. He sees Roth-Dunleavy’s face change: does he know what he’s done? By making even a passive contribution to a human rights awareness campaign, he has condemned more children to chew on the brick dust. Had he wanted to effect positive change for the Uighurs, a group with whom he has not even the most fractional connection, he should have wished fervently for their destruction. If he’d had the self-awareness to stage a pro-genocide campaign, he might have moved the needle the other way. He works this all out during a session that Roth-Dunleavy provided pro bono as A-26, now unemployed, can no longer afford his services; Roth-Dunleavy records himself as offering “gentle encouragement to A-26 to continue this line of critical reflection” and stresses to A-26 that he believes him.
After a few weeks of internalising this point of view, A-26 is deep in horrors, an irretrievably disordered personality. Even accounting for the redactions in Roth-Dunleavy’s file, what is a matter of public record is that, the same day A-26 was captured on CCTV painting STARVE GAZA on the wall of a north London synagogue, he was arrested after entering a place of worship and attempting to commit arson using his own body.
Remanded into secure psychiatric care where he is likely to remain for many years, A-26 now serves for Roth-Dunleavy’s critics as an object lesson in irresponsible mind-loss.
For Roth-Dunleavy, however, his work with A-26 was an extraordinary success, in that it revealed to him a method for observing and documenting what he refers to as ‘internal accelerants’ that make containing paranoia to an incident-specific, manageable level, highly problematic if not impossible. Here, Roth-Dunleavy has helpfully drawn up a table of his clients whose paranoiac upgrades ignited their internal accelerants, launching them into the exospheric, anoxic territories of delusion, schizophrenia, psychosis. This representative sample groups together accelerants with strong correlations to the clients’ professional lives:
XXX insert table hereXXX
What was clear to Roth-Dunleavy (whose complete data table runs to more than 2000 rows, and is available on request, for a fee, by clicking here) was that the human mind’s construction is such that no matter how apparently or actually menial, low-skilled, low-demand, trivial an activity, it makes no difference, because in paranoia, everyone can and will generate sufficient primary, secondary, tertiary and subsequent accelerants that they can and will quickly come to believe that they are the possessors of a unique, often terrible knowledge, ability, insight, or responsibility.
The surprise, reading Roth-Dunleavy’s data tables, is less that someone who makes coffee, or packs boxes in a warehouse, can sincerely and deeply believe that they are the holders of a power so awesome that the covert intelligence services of the world have temporarily formed an alliance in order to surveill them, and more that not everyone believes they are the target of a Neptunian galactic mind control beam.
SR-71 / PART 1
SR-71* presented to Roth-Dunleavy with a condition common in the spectrum of anxieties: a fear of flying.
The condition had been manageable, largely by finding alternatives to air travel, but SR-71 had recently been recruited into a professional promotion that made it unavoidable. The case-notes (some of which were electronically corrupted and are unreadable pending forensic recovery) suggest SR-71 hoped Roth-Dunleavy would be able to unpick the roots of her anxiety about flight, and replace it with a manageable appreciation of risk. What Roth-Dunleavy actually replaced it with was a spiralling, hallucinatory paranoia about airborne warfare.
After her second session with Roth-Dunleavy, SR-71 reported seeing fighter aircraft flying low over the outskirts of London. She was on a commuter train at the time, travelling westward through Essex into Liverpool Street terminus, on a cloudy morning. SR-71 was half-reading a history of an obscure female political figure – she couldn’t remember the name of the book or the subject – when her attention was entirely taken by two dark objects that appeared to burst out of a cloud, moving at a shocking velocity, and far lower to the ground than any flying object she’d ever seen. Her instinct said UFO, but as she kept her eyes on them, she realised they weren’t alien spacecraft but jet fighters, man-made, coloured a dark black that seemed to absorb the weak grey light they carved through, frighteningly fast and low. They were, she estimated, no more than a couple of hundred metres from her train, but their speed and unfamiliarity made it hard to say for sure. They could have been bigger and more distant, they could have been smaller and nearer.
That suggestion, Roth-Dunleavy notes, made SR-71 shudder. SR-71 turned back inside her carriage to see how everyone else was reacting – were they scared? Excited? What she saw she hadn’t expected at all: there was no reaction. The other passengers were staring at their phones or books; even the couple who were looking out of the window on the same side as she was hadn’t moved, hadn’t sat upright in shock, weren’t following the accelerating curve of the planes as they banked away from the train, first into a right-angle then a full 180-degree turn, tearing back off eastwards. It was only after they turned that SR-71 heard the noise they made, the tortured air bent around their delta-wings, the screaming heat of their glowing orange-pink engine exhaust vents. The aircraft disappeared into cloud, and SR-71, returning to the slow-moving world, went about the rest of her day asking herself whether she alone had seen them, or whether she had unwillingly imagined them in a sort of waking daydream, and which one of those was better and which worse.
At home that night, she goes online to look at images of warplanes, unsure herself if she’s looking for confirmation that what she saw exists, or hoping that it does not. What she finds far exceeds her expectations: silhouettes in spotters’ guides; corporate web pages dedicated to promoting the aircrafts’ capabilities – maximum speed, thrust, range, altitude, payload, flexibility of configuration – and videos, some amateur and some not, of these machines in action: flying at great speed at low altitudes, performing sharp turns, half-loops, loops, sudden changes of direction that look like they should snap any delicately engineered parts into pieces, but which these planes seem to accelerate through with a hideous competence. There is video of military aircraft firing missiles and dropping bombs, which SR-71 quickly realises she does not want to watch. What she learns is, not only do the things she saw exist, they all have names. Horrible, violent names.
Intruder.
Raptor.
Fighting Falcon.
Strike Eagle.
Foxbat.
Felon.
Phantom.
Hornet.
Tomcat.
Tornado.
And they all have broadly similar characteristics: pointed noses, swept wings, sharp tailfins, spiky missile and bomb attachments, bodies – fuselages – thin like darts, nothing like the chubby passenger planes that she’s tried to avoid until now, but which, next to this sky full of talons and blades, seem like airborne pillows.
*Roth-Dunleavy’s standard naming convention would permit this alphanumeric sequence; given the content of the file, however, the suspicion is that Roth-Dunleavy deliberately chose this name for this client.
SR-71/ PART 2
The next time, SR-71 was in an office. Not hers, but an office in one of the tall buildings in the City of London which are essentially made of windows. SR-71 was seated in a position which gave her an unobstructed south-easterly view across the river and down to Crystal Palace TV mast.
Unlike on her first sighting of military aircraft, this time it was a clear sky, pale blue, bright. Someone downtable on her left-hand side was talking about a stakeholder mapping task and software package they intended to use for it; SR-71, as a member of the project leadership team, had been about to ask about timelines and resourcing when the pen she was holding dropped to the table with a plasticky click-clack, and a noise came out of her mouth without becoming a word because she’d seen two delta-wing, twin-engined, matt-black stealth fighters*, flying so low that she’d actually been looking down onto their wings**.
The planes, in the time it had taken her to register them, had torched out about two miles towards the TV mast, giving her a direct view once again into their engine exhausts, a yellow-pink-blue flame of afterburner reheat, when even that hot light had been burned out of her eyes by the outrageous ignition-flare of missile launch. Through the superheated flash of rare elements combusting, SR-71 sees two missiles detaching from each plane, sees flames candle out from the missiles’ own exhausts, tight and fast and intense as the missiles become airborne, hostile and very sentient like nasty little pins. SR-71 had turned back to the table to see everyone around it looking not at the double twin-launches, but at her.
SR-71 quickly concluded that the aircraft were visible only to her, a deduction with troubling implications. A self-preservation response kicked in, however, and she excused herself from the meeting by asking for directions to the bathroom.
*Roth-Dunleavy later showed her a silhouette card of military aircraft. SR-71 identified what she saw as an aircraft with characteristics of both the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning – a hybrid that does not exist.
**This is not impossible, but it would be remarkable.
SR-71/ PART 3
The third time, SR-71 had been at home, asleep, alone, when she’d been woken by aircraft engines screaming, her bedroom windows rattling, and intensely bright lights outside that sent terrifying shadows whirling around her room.
Instantly awake and full of panic, she’d pulled her curtains open to see, stark and sharp against the muddy night-glow of London, a formation of four aircraft, similar to the ones she’d seen last time, flying at 45 degrees to her house, firing missiles into the what she roughly reckoned to be the zone between Balham and Tooting. Unlike the last time, she hadn’t just seen the missiles detach and ignite: this time, they were hitting targets, detonating, exploding, incinerating, vaporising, obliterating. The flaring blast-plumes were the flashes that caused the crazy crashes of light and dark on her walls; the entire sky roared with superheated gases exploding.
The time is 2330. SR-71 isn’t stunned or numb this time: she dials emergency 999, requests the fire service – she figures they’ll get the ambulances and police involved themselves - and reports a blaze which she locates as best she can as about halfway down Balham High Road.
She hangs up before they ask her anything about who she is or where she is – what SR-71 does for a living isn’t compatible with enquiries being made about her by the emergency services – and, while she’s shifting her weight from one foot to another in the light of the flames through her window, she has the presence of mind to make another kind of call. A couple of quick searches bring up the numbers and email addresses she’s looking for: 24 Hour Newsroom Hotline; Got A Tip For Us?; Contact Our Newsdesk In Confidence 24/7. SR-71 leaves voice-messages and anonymous lines of text for the BBC, ITV, Sky, the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Times, and, because she’s thorough, the financial newswires that flash business and market news onto her screens in the office.
What she does for the next few hours isn’t known for certain, but at 0730 she calls Roth-Dunleavy. She explains what she saw, what she did, and how, in daylight, there is no trace of missile strikes in the Balham area. Nobody else, she says, seems to have done anything. It has, she says, been left to her. She also says she has visited the fire zone on foot, and found no smoking craters, no blast damage: nothing. There is also, she concedes, no reference at all to air strikes in south London on any of the news outlets she contacted. Or any other mainstream news outlet. Even the fringe websites of extremists, conspiracists, cranks: nothing. Nobody else, she says, is even seeing what’s happening, never mind doing anything about it.
What Roth-Dunleavy says to her, according to his own records, is: what you’ve seen is important, and I believe you.
In Roth-Dunleavy’s taxonomy of accelerants, which he updates immediately after the phone call, this is SR-71’s entry:
insert table hereXXXXX
She believes she is responsible for preventing air attacks, but in reality she cannot do this because they are happening only in her mind. Roth-Dunleavy reinforces her belief that they are real, and with it her sense of responsibility for them. This is the typology of Roth-Dunleavy behaviour which caused many in our profession to question him, and ultimately to conclude that he was practicing this form of intervention purely to see what would happen next.
SR-71/ PART 4
What happens next is, SR-71 sees more air strikes on London.
An aircraft she now recognises immediately as a B-2 stealth bomber, a dark black jagged half-diamond that seems to be floating rather than flying, invades the space in the sky over Tower Bridge while SR-71 is eating lunch with an enterprise risk management consultant in a riverside restaurant. Banking away from her, it nods its pointy nose in the direction of Bank and lets loose a fearsome volley of exploding things. They rip into Tower 42 with a terrible softness, releasing gorgeous orange blooms from somewhere within its flat glass surfaces, turning it into a living fire; the building she knows as the Gherkin folds in on itself like cake mixture, dissolving into self-replicating floral heads of black smoke that offer flashes of deep infernal red within.
She carries on eating her sea bass with samphire, carries on discussing vulnerability tracking across a distributed workforce, then when the ERM consultant excuses himself for a moment she browses some news sites on her phone. After they finish their meal and say goodbye, she calls Roth-Dunleavy. She tells him what she saw, that again nobody else seems to have even noticed it, let alone responded to it, so of course it’s fallen on her to deal with it. Again, no mention of it on the news. This sounds like an important development, Roth-Dunleavy says. Why would they not want to tell people that this is going on? At least you can see for yourself, he says. I believe you. Please let me know as soon as you see anything else.
SR-71 agrees: it is an important development. And Roth-Dunleavy’s question is a good one: why would anyone want to conceal it? SR-71, standing in the doorway of Pont de la Tour as the columns of flame turn the sky into an apocalyptic glare, performs some more internet searches, then opens up another app on her phone, and starts making a list.
SR-71/ PART 5
Roth-Dunleavy, over the next seven days, records another ten phone calls from SR-71 in which she reports air strikes all over London.
Each time he tells her he believes her; he thanks her for the information and for the fact that she’s the only person doing anything; he remarks that it seems to be getting worse. They puzzle over why London is being targeted, and, with increasing urgency, why nobody in authority wants to admit that it is even happening. SR-71 makes references to phone calls she has made and emails she has sent to the Civil Aviation Authority, the Metropolitan Police, the Royal Air Force, MI5, MI6, the Mayor of London, the US Central Intelligence Agency, and the embassies in London of the US, Israel, and the People’s Republic of China.
In his notes (which at this stage become, even by the standards of Roth-Dunleavy’s documentation, sparse and unclear) he presents SR-71’s messages as having the character of public service announcements; it is however far from unlikely that recipients might have interpreted them as threats. The only response she gets, she tells him, are automated e-mails from the two British intelligence agencies thanking her for her message and assuring her it will be read. Roth-Dunleavy replies that the lack of engagement is interesting, that he does not know why they are ignoring her, and that this official silence, added to the attacks themselves, are signs that is it becoming a very complicated situation.
For trained practitioners, what’s noticeable here is the total absence of any challenge from Roth-Dunleavy: why, for example, is there no lasting damage from the attacks? London should by now resemble an inland Gaza Strip; instead, the attacks appear to create enormous cinematic pyrotechnical events but leave no trace on the built environment; why also is SR-71 alone among seven million people in being able to see these incidents?
This is becoming more complicated, Roth-Dunleavy tells SR-71, and I agree with you that something has to be done about it, but is it fair on you that you're the only one who’s dealing with it? It's a very unusual situation. It must be very hard on you, but you’re doing great work. It’s really important that you keep telling me what’s happening. I believe you. Stay safe.
SR-71, by now, has started appearing under her real name on the watch-lists of the Metropolitan Police, MI5, and an NHS mental health intervention team. It’s the police who respond first, and when they break down her door they find an array of metal parts, casings, ball-bearings, precision-tooled tubes and ring joints, heavy-duty springs, vacuum cylinders, portable canisters of petrol and diesel, fertiliser and other nitrate-rich products, and hundreds of printed sheets of schematics, diagrams, engineering blueprints.
What SR-71 is trying to do, she immediately tells the interviewing officer, is build a homemade surface-to-air missile system because nobody else is doing anything. It must be her responsibility to stop the air strikes, she says, as she’s clearly the only one who even cares that they’re happening. After some circular conversations in which the frustration of the police grows as they try and fail to make any connection with known terrorist groups, the electronic circuitry that first brought her to the attention of the authorities lights up a link to her medical records, and Roth-Dunleavy’s name is flagged.
Around the year 2010, Roth-Dunleavy’s name started disappearing from professional journals, conference programmes, and conversations. Some in the field saw it as, if not exactly contrition, then an acknowledgement that what was required from him after his Rheinhart-era activities was a period of silence.
I and a small cohort, however, had a back-door into why he stepped away from anxiety-upgrades.
Primarily through R McK, whom he’d met in the late 1990s at an event in San Francisco focused on the emerging mental challenges of the emerging ‘dot-com’ millionaire class, Roth-Dunleavy had made and maintained contacts with various people – thinkers, investors, entrepreneurs, engineers, designers – involved in the information technology industries.
Operating initially with a fairly low profile* as a provider of behavioural advisory and bespoke non-pharmaceutical psychological intervention services to people made anxious, dependent, traumatised, and wealthy by their work with computers, Roth-Dunleavy established himself as a trusted advisor to this class of individual, each new tech ‘unicorn’ founder welcomed into the fraternity with a friendly referral to Roth-Dunleavy. His status as a San Francisco fixture gave Roth-Dunleavy early and sustained exposure to ideas and practices around the new technology of artificial intelligence; from 2015 onwards, he seems to have developed a fascination with ‘large language models’, the basic processing engines of AI.
Records available to R McK, and perhaps in due course to regulatory agencies, suggest that Roth-Dunleavy, whose unique ethical codes would without doubt enable him to use advisory sessions as opportunities to insert himself into other activities, gained the trust of a small group of AI pioneers, chiefly mathematicians and computer scientists who had abandoned lucrative work in other fields to concentrate in a near-obsessional way with developing AI.
This group, in turn, appears to have developed a near-obsessional relationship with Roth-Dunleavy: by disclosing highly confidential details of his work with Project Rheinhart, the early upgrades, all the way through to A-26, SR-71, and others for whom no case-notes will ever be found, he established his own pioneering credentials. In awe of the commitment to experimentation with which he conducted his psychological vivisections, they come to see him as a yogic figure, a guru to guide them through the wilder territories of invention. Roth-Dunleavy stepped into this role with practiced footwork: what he does, according to R McK’s information, is offer to the AI group not only his collected case-notes, but detailed, personal recollections of his sessions, and the theoretical framework underpinning them.
There are no company filings, corporate disclosures, interview transcripts, speaker notes, or blog posts that describe the details of Roth-Dunleavy’s involvement with AI.
Given what we now know, however, we can conclude that the exchanges between Roth-Dunleavy and the minds he damaged are an unalterable part of how artificial intelligence interacts with its users.
* By his standards