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This woman, skilled in penmanship, wears identical sensors as she writes the exercise. Her muscle actions are being recorded. This is the actual recording of the tape.
The young student is somewhat anxious as he waits for the cataphoric to take effect. This is his first experience with prescriptive tape. The technician reassures him that this is very little different from the entertainment tapes. The patches are uncomfortable, but only for the moment. The drug takes effect and the technician tests to be sure the boy is ready. The tape begins, and the boy experiences stress as he sees the exercise. The technician quietly reassures him. In a moment, through the output-input function of the patches, the boy feels the muscle action of the skilled penman as she takes up the pen and begins to write. He experiences the success, sees the shape of the letters, feels the small precise movements of the hand and fingers and feels the relaxation of the calligrapher at her work.
It may take several sessions, but the improvement is already evident as the boy writes the exercise immediately after waking. He holds the pen easily and comfortably, no longer cramps his fingers with a hard grip, and his entire posture has improved as he has found the proper pivot point on which to rest his hand. He is amazed and delighted at the result. He will practice the exercise several times during the day, to reinforce the pattern. He will do it again just after breakfast, and several times the following day. His enthusiastic practice will set the habit. He may repeat the tape until he and his parents are satisfied with the result.
This Beta-class azi is assigned to the special forces. He stands patiently tensing muscles in his back at the technician's request. He shuts his eyes, quite evi-aentty bored by the procedure which caused the young student such anxiety. He looks forward to the tape, but the skill he is learning requires the entire body. He has been through this twice a month for much of his life, and the biofeedback patches are more important in his estimation than the cataphoric. He has acquired a skill at tape-learning: his concentration is much more skilled than the student's. He knows the names of the muscles, knows how to attach the patches himself, and does a great deal of optional study in his own quarters, under a cataphoric dose hardly more than you might use in your own home for an entertainment tape, because he has learned now to induce a learning-state without the use of the drug.
At the end of the month, he receives another kind of tape, which citizens do not receive: it is a very private experience, which he ca
The woman who administers the tape is not a technician. She is a Beta-qualified supervisor, and she uses a much more complex machine. This one has a blood-chemistry loop: it analyzes the blood it receives and injects natural mood-elevators—a procedure used in the general population only when psych-adjustment is called for.
For the azi, who has taken this sort of tape all his life, it is a pleasant experience, which he values more than the other rewards the service provides. This one is internal, and profound.
Unlike an intervention in a citizen patient, which depends heavily on the psychologist's investigative skills to tailor a tape, this tape is precisely targeted, prepared by the same designers who prepared the azi's psychset. It has an accuracy virtually impossible with a non-azi patient whose life has been shaped by unrecorded experiences in a random world. This azi, cloistered from birth and given his psychset by tape, is a much more known quantity, even after he has served in the armed forces and lived with naturally born citizens.
Everyone who has ever held authority over him has had special training in dealing with azi. No azi Supervisor is permitted to raise his voice with his charges. Reward or the withholding of reward is the rule of discipline; and the trust between this man and any psychologist-supervisor is more profound than that between parent and child. That this is a different Supervisor than last month does not trouble him. He has absolute confidence in her once he is sure that she is licensed.
People who have had their first experience working with unsocialized azi generally comment first that they feel they have to whisper; and then that they find themselves overwhelmed by the emotional attachment the azi are instantly ready to give them.
They trust me too much, is the almost universal complaint.
But this man is a soldier and works regularly with unlicensed citizens. He has developed emotional defenses and interacts freely with his citizen comrades. His commanding officer has had a training course and passed a test that qualifies him to deal with azi, but he holds no license and does not treat this man any differently than the others in his command. The commanding officer is only aware that a request from this man to undergo counseling has to be honored immediately, and if the azi requests the intervention of a Beta-supervisor, he must be sedated and sent to hospital without delay, because while problems in azi are very rare and a socialized azi's emotional defenses are generally as strong as any citizen's, an azi's psychset is not built by experience, but by instruction, and the defenses are not a network of social reliances as they are in a normal human mind. An azi who feels that shield weakened is vulnerable to everyone around him. He has entered something very like a cataphoric-induced learning-state, in which he is less and less capable of rejecting stimuli that impinge on him. The result is very like taking a cataphoric in a crowded room, intensely uncomfortable for the azi and potentially damaging.
The tape this man is enjoying is more than pleasurable for him. It is also reaffirming his values and reinforcing his self-esteem. His trust right now is absolute. He experiences what no citizen will experience in a random world: he is in touch with absolute truth and agrees perfectly with what he is.
This is Reseune, where our soldier was born. This three-year-old azi, much younger than our student, is preparing himself for what is commonly called deep-tape. He is anxious not about the procedure, which he has had before, but about the machine, which he has finally begun to notice as significant in the room. The psychsurgeon hugs him and reassures him, and finally makes a face and gets a laugh from him. He helps the surgeon attach the patches.
The dosage of cataphoric he receives is very heavy. His thresholds are completely flat and his blood chemistry is constantly monitored.
The tape is reinforcing his value-sets in words he is capable of understanding.
It tells him how to win approval. It tells him what his talents are and what his strengths are.
It may remind him that he has tendencies to avoid, much in the same way a parent may tell a child he must mind and not sulk. But the tape dwells continually on positive things and praise, and always ends that way.
As it closes the Supervisor tells him a word he must lock this up with; and he will remember it. The next time the Supervisor will access that set of instructions with that particular key, which is recorded in the azi's file, with his tapes. As he grows, his deep-tape will become more abstract. The verbal keys will be integrated into larger and larger complexes as his psychstructures are merged into complete sets, and he will accept the values he is given with an azi's complete ope
Because the child has shown distress at the machine the Supervisor remembers to reassure him about the equipment while he is still receptive to instruction. Any distress the azi may feel with any of these procedures, no matter how minor, is carefully traced for cause and dealt with seriously. At no time does a Supervisor wish one of his charges to fear these procedures.