Mother of All Neuroses
“My mother was a robot,” Dave said.
“So what?” Robbie snapped. “At least she was around. My mother’ll be in cryogenic storage until they figure out how to treat bone termites.”
“I’m my own mother,” whispered clone Clara C-21.
Dr. Sabella reached up and polished the lenses of his virtual goggles. The group steeled themselves for a Jung quote. “Jung says, ‘In the United State it is almost an ideal for the mother to be if possible the younger sister of her daughter.’”
“My mother is my younger sister,” whispered clone Clara C-22.
“If that’s so ideal, why are you in therapy?” crowed Melonie-Aqua from inside her tank. her bubbles broke the surface stinking with malice.
“Your mother was caught by the tuna fishing fleet,” Robbie jeered.
“None of us knew our mothers,” Hannelore sobbed. Dr. Sabella reached for the box of tissues, caught himself, and instead started the windshield wipers on her face screen. “Except for Dave.”
“That’s just the problem,” Dave said. “She was always there, always, 24 hours and 37 minutes a standard day, everywhere I went, everything I did, following me, smothering me.”
“This is the extrovert’s danger,” Dr. Sabella said. “He gets sucked into objects and loses himself in them.”
“Jung?” asked Chang, from his seat on the deep sofa.
“Jung,” replied Eng, on the adjacent chair.
“How could I help but get sucked in?” Dave asked. “When I went on dates, my mother would pop out her wheels, bolt in her extensions and turn herself into a car. Imagine making out in the back seat of your mother.”
“Please explain this mother business again,” Chang politely requested. This was an uncomfortable session for the Siamese twins. As modular replicants of the originals, they didn’t have parents. Their connective tissue also kept pulling Eng off his chair.
“A grotesquely punctilious morality combined with primitive, ‘magical’ superstitions that fall back on abstruse rites,” Dr. Sabella quoted.
“That’s a definition of mother?” Pi-squared asked, after the usual three second delay from the moon.
“Another bug in his Jung database,” Melonie-Aqua groused. “He’s just not being himself today.”
“I’m always myself,” whispered clone Clara C-23.
Dave pouted, as he always did when the conversation shifted away from himself. “You don’t understand,” he said. “My mother was constructed to be a baby’s nursemaid. She wasn’t supposed to say until I was 27. I simply outgrew her.”
“I won’t feel I’m man enough to have sex until I grow taller than my mother,” sniffled Harry, who wasn’t part of their group at all but simply had been too depressed to get up when his earlier group had left.
“I was taller than my mother when I was born,” Hannelore sobbed.
“Her mother was only a model 3280,” Pi-squared said to Harry.
Dr. Sabella’s light pen flashed as he made a note on his chair’s armscreen. He then reached over and made another note on Hannelore’s face plate, shocking her so much she moved into temporary shutdown mode. “Jung says, ‘when the mother’s own attitude is extreme, a similar attitude can be forced on the children, too.’”
“Why are we getting so much Jung today?” Robbie snarled. “Freud was the one who had something to say about Oedipal complexes.”
“I didn’t want to sleep with my mother,” Dave shouted. “She was made of ferroceramics.”
“My mother was made of antimatter. I couldn’t even touch her without killing us both.”
“Who said that?” Melonie-Aqua asked. Her bubbles tasted of dark surprise.
“Must be Johny One-Up,” Eng said, shifting back onto his chair.
“He’s the only one of us who’s invisible,” said Chang.
“He lies through his teeth, assuming he has any,” Robbie scoffed. “He just feels guilty because he killed her at birth.”
“A live birth!” Pi-squared gasped three seconds later.
“Naw, just a power surge through the hyperwave circuits when he was decanted.”
“‘Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman’,” Dr. Sabella said. “‘The same is true of the woman: she too has her inborn image of man’.”
“I can never have a son,” whispered clone Clara C-24.
“That’s because you’re too Jung.” Melonie-Aqua laughed until her waves spilled over and short-circuited Hannelore.
“This is getting boring,” Robbie sneered. “Let’s change the subject.”
“My father was a hologram,” Dave said.
