The clinic advertised peace of mind as if it were dental whitening.
The procedure was painless, outpatient, and increasingly popular among people exhausted by indecision. A narrow pulse targeted the frontal lobe, softening what the brochure called “excessive executive noise”: second-guessing, inhibition, anticipatory regret, moral rehearsal, and the endless internal committee meeting that made simple choices feel like war.
Patients emerged radiant.
They quit jobs without drafting resignation letters. They kissed strangers. They bought motorcycles. They told their parents exactly what they thought. One woman returned a dress after wearing it to a wedding and slept beautifully afterward.
Demand exploded.
The city became livelier, then stranger.
Traffic moved faster because fewer drivers hesitated at yellow lights. Restaurants stopped taking reservations because nobody planned ahead. Marriages formed in laundromats and ended before the dryers finished. People laughed louder, spent savings, confessed affairs, punched supervisors, climbed monuments, and abandoned diets in the same week.
The clinic called it liberation. Hospitals called it a surge. Courts called it complicated.
Then a patient committed murder.
The defense argued there had been no intent in the usual sense. Intent required reflection, consequence, inhibition. The prosecution countered that the accused had chosen every action voluntarily.
Nobody could agree on what responsibility meant after responsibility had been medically reduced.
The clinic closed quietly three months later.
Years passed.
A former patient sat across from a neurologist and asked whether the procedure could be reversed.
“Possibly,” the doctor said. “Why now?”
The patient considered the question. Consideration itself had become difficult.
Outside the window, someone screamed at a bus driver. Two strangers kissed beside a police barricade. A delivery cyclist rode against traffic while filming himself.
“I think,” the patient said slowly, “I miss the part of me that used to argue.”
The neurologist nodded.
Somewhere behind the patient’s forehead, nothing objected.
©2012 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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