BY NEXT NOVEMBER

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

Information regarding Dr. Kroger’s new type of device for plumbing the depths of the human mind in imitation of Dr. DeBronze has been garbled at best. It was stated in last summer’s issue of New Thought Journal that the shiny metal box, which measures one cubic meter in each of the three known spatial dimensions and has a weight of one hundred pounds, does not differ greatly in appearance from other Kroger machines, save for the presence of four small dials on the front face and an airtight, double-walled chamber with a special apparatus that permits a descent into the human consciousness to a depth of about 10,000 microcogs. Great promise was reported in the original article, which attested to Kroger’s ability to extract nearly ninety percent of all conscious thoughts in less than four minutes. Kroger himself has trumpeted the results in several interviews. And yet, those who have attended the most recent trials have reported that the real yield is far smaller, perhaps only seventy percent. Dr. DeBronze, for his part, has been both an ardent booster of Dr. Kroger’s efforts and a leading skeptic, penning an open letter that ran in a special edition of NTJ. “To my esteemed colleague,” he wrote, “I can only say that it would be to your eternal benefit to be both honest and modest about the level of thought that your ‘silverbox,’ as I like to call it, can map precisely. When I was visiting, a young woman was asked to think of a color, a number, a vegetable, and a world leader from history. The device immediately seized upon green and 82, but it stumbled slightly on the vegetable, indicating mushroom instead of pumpkin, and it missed the world leader entirely—the young lady was thinking of Golda Meir, and the box detected Anthony Eden. Even I could have guessed that! That is just a joke, Dr. Kroger, but by it I mean to show how stubbornly opaque some thoughts remain, even to the most sophisticated apparatus. I commend you in advance for being more straightforward about your achievement.” The construction of these devices has already begun under the auspices of a team of Swiss and American engineers, and Kroger had planned to bring them to market by next November.