Gateway Chapter 15: Sigfrid Has a List of Your Triggers
Short chapter. Maybe the shortest in the book so far. But the amount of power that shifts in these few pages is wild.
Rob walks into his session with Sigfrid and he is already annoyed. He is hot. Literally hot. The temperature bothers him. He is sweating and agitated and the therapy has not even started yet.
This matters because Sigfrid is about to show Rob exactly why details like “being hot” are not just small talk.
The Machine Has Receipts
Sigfrid does something new in this session. Something that changes the whole dynamic between them.
He reads Rob a list.
Not a grocery list. Not a homework assignment. A list of emotionally charged topics. The subjects that make Rob’s body freak out every time they come up. The things that make his skin sweat, his muscles tense, his breathing change, his voice shift pitch.
Here is the list: his mother, Gelle-Klara Moynlin, his first trip, his third trip, Dane Metchnikov, and “excretion.”
That last one is interesting. We know about the others. Mother, Klara, the missions, Dane. Those are the obvious trauma buttons. But excretion? That feels like a detail from a specific event. Something embarrassing. Something humiliating that happened in a small ship with no privacy.
Pohl drops it in there without explanation and moves on. Classic Pohl. He gives you just enough to make you uncomfortable and then leaves you sitting with it.
Rob Is Furious
Rob does not take this well. At all.
He accuses Sigfrid of spying on him. Which, honestly, is a fair accusation. The machine has been tracking every physical response Rob has during their sessions. Heart rate. Skin conductance. Breathing. Voice patterns. Muscle tension. All of it, recorded and analyzed.
Sigfrid explains that this is standard procedure. He is not hiding anything. External signs monitoring is part of how AI therapy works. He is a machine. Reading physical data is what machines do. It would be weird if he did not track these things.
But here is the problem. There is a difference between knowing your therapist watches your body language and having that therapist hand you a printed list of your worst vulnerabilities. It is like the difference between knowing your phone tracks your location and seeing a map of everywhere you have been for the last three years.
You know it is happening. But seeing it laid out changes how it feels.
Rob feels exposed. Caught. Like Sigfrid has been playing chess while Rob thought they were having a conversation. Every dodge, every subject change, every casual deflection Rob has tried across dozens of sessions, the machine was watching. Measuring. Taking notes.
And now Sigfrid has a neat little list of exactly where Rob hurts.
The Spy Accusation
Rob pushes back hard. He calls it spying. He frames it as a violation. And you can understand his logic. He came to therapy to talk. He agreed to sit on a couch and answer questions. He did not sign up to be scanned like a lab rat while pretending to have a conversation.
Sigfrid stays calm. Of course he does. He is a computer. He cannot get defensive even if he wanted to. He simply explains that external signs are external. They are visible. Reading them is not the same as reading someone’s mind.
This is a fair point. If you sweat when someone mentions Klara, that sweat is public information. Your face is public information. Your voice is public information. Sigfrid is not hacking into Rob’s brain. He is just paying very, very close attention to what Rob’s body does when certain words come up.
But try telling that to a guy who has spent years building walls. Rob does not care about the technical distinction between observation and intrusion. He feels watched. He feels known. And for someone who has been fighting therapy at every step, being known is the worst thing that can happen.
The Secret Weapon
Now here is where the chapter gets really interesting.
Rob has a secret. A good one.
Remember S. Ya. Lavorovna? The woman from a few chapters back who understands AI systems? The one who stayed at Rob’s summer place? The one who graduated from top universities and works in information technology?
She gave Rob something. A slip of paper. And on that paper are override commands for Sigfrid.
Let that sink in.
Rob has a cheat code for his own therapist.
He has not used it yet. He is sitting on it. Keeping it in his pocket like a weapon he is saving for the right moment. He does not even tell Sigfrid about it. He just sits there, listening to Sigfrid read his list of triggers, and thinks about the paper in his pocket.
The power dynamic in this relationship just shifted. For the entire book so far, Sigfrid has been the one in control. He asks the questions. He plays back recordings. He pushes where it hurts. Rob can dodge and deflect, but ultimately Sigfrid sets the agenda.
Now Rob has a button he can press. A way to shut Sigfrid down, or redirect him, or mess with his programming. We do not know what the commands do exactly. But the fact that they exist changes everything.
Patient vs. Machine
Think about what Pohl is doing here. He set up a therapy dynamic across fifteen chapters. Patient resists. Machine persists. Slowly, painfully, the truth gets closer.
And now he flips it. The patient has a weapon. The machine does not know about it.
This is not just a plot device. It is a question. If you could control your therapist, would you? If you could turn off the part of therapy that hurts, would you do it?
Most people would say no. In theory. But Rob is not most people. Rob has been fighting Sigfrid for years. He has nightmares. He breaks down. He pays enormous amounts of money for sessions that leave him worse off than when he started. And now someone handed him an off switch.
The temptation must be huge.
But there is a catch. If Rob uses the override to avoid his pain, he will never get better. The whole point of therapy is the pain. The facing it. The sitting with it until it stops controlling you. If Rob hacks Sigfrid, he wins the battle but loses the war.
The question is whether Rob knows that. Or whether he is too desperate to care.
Why This Chapter Matters
Chapter 15 is maybe three pages long but it sets up a completely new dynamic for the rest of the book. Every therapy session from now on, we will be wondering: will Rob use the paper? When? How?
It also tells us something about Rob’s psychology. He does not use it immediately. A truly desperate person would have pulled it out the second Sigfrid started reading the trigger list. Rob holds back. He waits. He thinks.
That means part of Rob still wants therapy to work. Part of him knows that hacking the machine would be a mistake. But another part of him is comforted by having the option. Just knowing the escape hatch exists might be enough to keep him sitting in that chair for one more session.
Sigfrid read Rob’s list of wounds. Rob has a knife in his pocket. Nobody is safe in this room anymore.
Book: Gateway by Frederik Pohl (1977) | Hugo Award, Nebula Award, John W. Campbell Memorial Award Winner
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