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condition.”
    “But
I was told she’s in a coma! I want to speak to her doctor.”
    The
stupid, pathetic hope aroused by the medical term “stable condition” had been a
mistake. The doctor confirmed that Vicky was in a coma, but only yesterday her
condition had been much worse. She could have died. It was all over now, the
doctors were monitoring her progress and it would be clear when the surgery
could be performed.
    “There’s
no need to hurry with the money, Monsieur Leroy, but nonetheless we have to be
ready to carry out the operation,” the doctor concluded, said goodbye and hung
up.
    Isaac
was almost shaking.
    “She
could have died, and I put off offloading my energy until the last moment.
Unforeseen circumstances – that moron of a terrorist could have cost Vicky her
life. I didn’t even keep a single day in reserve! What an idiot I was! More
stupid than any Veggie!
    “I
hate COMA.” Isaac thought. “They have everything they need to cure people – the
technologies, the methodologies, the high-class specialists – and all of that
thanks to sucking creativity out of people like me.”
    His
thoughts suddenly took an aggressive turn: “But no one benefits from it all
because the treatment has to be paid for. Until we go to that freaking COMA to
sell our creativity, people, our nearest and dearest, just keep getting worse!”
    Aggressiveness
is a form of helplessness, it surfaces when you can’t find the right words to
express your feelings.
    What
was going on? The media were choked solid with praise for UNICOMA. The whole
world was rejoicing at the rosy forecasts of a happy future for mankind.
Problems were being solved, scientists had been given answers to their
questions, and solutions had been found for the technical puzzles. Even the
people who became total Veggies after offloading their creativity were happy
and looked content.
    No
one paid any special attention any longer to terrorist attacks, like the one
Isaac had got involved with yesterday. They were regarded as no more than
disorderly conduct. Even the police ignored the feeble street protests.
Solitary messiahs, protest graffiti – there were always plenty of mental cases
and petty hooligans around. These troublemakers claimed we should be afraid of
the power held by UNICOMA. Some opposition scientists claimed that pooled
creativity was only useful to make progress, the kind of projects where some
prior work had already been done in the past. 1.         Not even a billion of
HIT, they said, could be helpful to start novel ventures of the future, such as
conquering deep space or curing future viruses. Thanks to Collective Mind,
people could accelerate research and bring it to a conclusion more quickly, but
without prior developments, pooled creativity was useless. Teleportation might
seem like science fiction, but in the middle of the last century, the
smartphone was pure science fiction too.
    New
questions were being left unanswered and the society was growing more stupid.
At this rate of downloading there would soon be no one left to ask questions.
All of it was justified by populist claims that the diseases that had been
conquered saved people’s lives today, whereas critics and retrogrades could
always be found.
    Orange
Energy sucked out of people would never be able to do what its original owners
could – it wasn’t capable of asking a new question, creating a dream, inventing
a new fantasy. Only human beings could do that. “Nonetheless,” objected the
experts from the UN, “there’s no guarantee that a man who holds on his creativity
would make rational use of it by himself. We still have to reap the full
benefits of the revolutionary leap forward that the world has made, readjust.
Let’s harvest the scores of new inventions that Collective Mind will produce,
and deal with the problems later. We’re studying them, but their number is
miniscule in comparison with the thousands of supremely important successful
new