The visual/telepathic sign outside the deprogramming clinic read/emitted ‘DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT’. A wry and appropriate pun, but Max Drax was in no mood to appreciate cleverness of that kind. Not after what he had been through. For Max Drax was the junkie of his time - that time being late Gatesember, 2096. The clinic windows were polarized and emitted a latent beckoning sensation. Max knew the feel of it immediately, and managed a very wan grin. Like using candy to tempt a kid into the dentist’s chair. But more on that later.

     He slouched against the soft, vaguely porous wall, and watched a local ‘Smokestack’ perform across the crowded square. Young and blonde and brazen and in an impeccable 1930s Bette Davis outfit, she wielded a glinting cigarette holder and blew out multicoloured tobacco smoke tendrils in any pattern or shape the wags in the clumped audience called for, and regarded the miscellaneous credit counters flung into the beret before her with a sophisticated but watchful indifference. As Max watched raptly, a rather nicely-observed caricature of a local clone polytician was swiftly built up in the air out of wisps and curves. There was faint applause as sixty smarmy grins stratified and vanished.

     Everywhere Max saw pipes, cigars, slender Art Deco and blocky Fluxus holders; nameless contrivances of the most fantastic old-world craftsmanship. Tobacco had come back in a big way, ever since personalised lung-cloning and biotailored artificial fibrous replacements had been introduced. The cancer dilemma had been solved by the brilliant pharmaceutical pioneers of the early Twenty-First Century. Once a feared and maligned pleasure, unjustly given almost the same reputation as syphilis had viciously enjoyed in earlier centuries, smoking had come back into its own.   

     And with a vengeance. In every park and public space you saw lines of old codgers with their fantastic hookahs and narghiles and heavy duty iron-lung pumps blowing typhoons of smoke at passers by and cackling among each other about long-ago hallowed days of legislative repeal.

     Max had tried smoking several times as a substitute. Indeed, it was an officially recommended therapy nowadays. Addicts of his type were expected to develop a connoisseur’s taste in the deregulated delights.

     ‘Peru Rough’, ‘Canada Fry’, ‘Humber Umber’, ‘Pacific Squall’, ‘Antarctic-Tropical Blend’, the new ‘Martian Red’ - there were so many highly differentiated brands to choose from these days; one of the factors that made tobacco-based therapeutics such a runaway success. You could get mountains of the stuff, even the interplanetary imports, free on the subsidised government programmes of treatment. You didn’t just drag - you gusted.

     Max Drax longed to huff and puff his way to a cleaner life, but he would have to register at the clinic he lounged against first, and accept the initial courses of controlled psycho-withdrawal which he mightily feared.

     He was a MEME junkie; and the worst kind. MEMEs were idea-analogues; complicated thought patterns that reproduced in accelerating cycles, and evolved into ever more intricate multifaceted forms as they did so. Like a tune or phrase that stays ringing through the head, but insidiously more refined; and distributed by a ruthless network of badhead dealers.

     MEMEs had first been identified in the 1980s by early psycho-engineers; a profession that now dominated society’s approved (and less salubrious) mental directions. By 2035 they had been solved, commercialised and permeated society. In advertising, they hypnotically-compulsively convinced. In business, they hypermotivated. In the psychiatrist’s chair, they went rampant. Antidepressant MEMEs and Downers were available on doublethink-prescription. There were MEME-theme chat shows, tween-MEME serials and popular MEME charts with their own viroidal apparatus of cybertelepathic hype and media.

     The Patent Office had thought it was all a Bad Idea until someone sprung a feelgood recombinant neurotransmitter prototype mixed with a pinup-MEME on them.

     The designer MEME had transformed recreational thinking everywhere.

     With all these Good Ideas around, vices like drugs and alcohol expired. Physical sex became intellectualized and largely went undercover. Responsible MEME use had no adverse physical effects or symptoms. There were always a few, however, who tried one big idea too many. Max Drax was one of those unfortunates.

     He’d started easy and casual. Mood Swings. Idle Notions. Long Ponders. The occasional Brainwave for variety. Small-time stuff; the Thought Police never even bothered to haul in mental soporific users anymore.

     But then the cravings began. The textured, the labyrinthine; the REAL convolutions in the brain were what he needed. He’d gone through Ethics, Philosophy, Materialism, Relativity, Major Religions (Singular, Poly, Trinitarian Infinitarian, Half-and Half), Gnostic Contortions, Total Destructionalism, assorted Generation Gaps, SuperZen and the Primary Romance Language Templates.

     Inevitably he went on to the hardcore stuff - Impossible Problems, Great Moral Conundrums,  Melancholy and the Consumptive Lifestyle; Advanced Morbidity Complex. He’d even dabbled in Phobias; but gave that up when he realised everyone WAS really out to get him after all.

     The cute smokestack finished her routine with a mauve googleplex of double helixes. How did she DO that? Better not put off the decision any longer; his brain was literally evaporating where he stood from the illegal Proust memory overload meta-engram he’d ripped off that government experimental trial along with nine participants’ fees (spare personas he always carried).

     Steeling himself, ignoring the mild MEME addict-attractor worked into the polarization grain-patterns of the opaque window, he begged a long Brazil Super from a passing streetwalker. Breathing the delicious fragrant smoke, lustily exhaling it in sparkling clouds, he sauntered confidently into the clinic.

Edward St. Boniface (pseudonym for Ed Griffiths, who expounds and gibbers and babbles under his real name on Facebook) lives and languishes in London, UK, grooving on the problematic metropolitan vibe and utterly failing to connect with the contemporary Zeitgeist. You can find more of his work on Amazon and on Wattpad.