Gateway Chapter 19: Rob Hacks His Own Therapist
Remember S. Ya. Lavorovna? The AI specialist from a few chapters back? The woman who understands how Sigfrid works from the inside?
Rob finally uses her.
He walks into therapy this session not as a patient. He walks in as a man with a weapon. S. Ya. gave him override codes. The kind of codes that are not supposed to be in a patient’s hands. The kind that let you reach inside the machine and grab the steering wheel.
And Rob grabs it.
Taking the Controls
Rob uses the override command and suddenly he is in charge. Not metaphorically. Literally. He has access to Sigfrid’s display functions. He can change the voice. He can switch languages. He can make the machine do things it was never supposed to do during a therapy session.
So what does Rob do with this power?
He changes Sigfrid’s voice. He switches the language settings around. He plays with the controls like a kid who just found the admin password to the school computer.
But then it gets more serious. Rob demands access to personal information. He wants the client list. He wants to see other patients. He wants to know who else sits in this chair and pours their guts out to this machine.
And Sigfrid gives it to him. Because the override codes work. The machine has no choice.
Watching Other People Break
Rob accesses holoviews of other patients in therapy. He watches recordings of real people, real sessions, real pain. Other humans sitting where he sits, talking about their worst moments, crying, breaking down, confessing things they have never told anyone.
This is a violation. A massive one. These people trusted that their sessions were private. That the machine would keep their secrets. And now Rob is flipping through them like channels on a TV.
But here is what is interesting. Rob does not enjoy it. Not really. There is no satisfaction in watching strangers suffer. There is no power in knowing their secrets. He thought this would feel like winning. It does not.
He keeps going anyway. Because stopping would mean admitting that this whole stunt was pointless.
Reading His Own File
Then Rob does the thing he was probably building toward the whole time. He reads his own diagnosis.
And here it is, laid out in clinical language. Forty-five years old. Depression. Disorientation. Guilt feelings. Selective amnesia about traumatic episodes. Low sexual drive. Unsatisfactory relationships with women.
That is Rob Broadhead, summarized in a paragraph. Everything he has been running from, everything he has been hiding behind jokes and deflections and expensive purchases. Written down in cold, precise terms by a machine that has been watching him for years.
Selective amnesia about traumatic episodes. That is the one that matters most. We know Rob is hiding something. We know there is a memory he will not touch. Sigfrid knows it too. And now Rob sees it written in his own file, confirmed by the machine he has been fighting for this entire book.
The amnesia is not accidental. It is selective. Rob is choosing not to remember something. And whatever that something is, it is bad enough that his entire personality has reorganized itself around avoiding it.
The Hollow Victory
Rob sits there with full control of Sigfrid’s systems. He has the override codes. He has the client list. He has read his own diagnosis and watched other people’s sessions. He has won.
So why does he feel empty?
This is the genius of the chapter. Rob got exactly what he wanted. Total control over the machine. The therapist is neutralized. The power dynamic is reversed. Rob is on top.
And it means nothing.
Because Sigfrid is not the enemy. Sigfrid never was the enemy. The enemy is inside Rob’s own head, and no override code can touch it. You cannot hack your way out of depression. You cannot use admin privileges to delete guilt. The machine was just a mirror, and smashing the mirror does not change your face.
Sigfrid’s Quiet Counterattack
Here is the part that makes this chapter really stick.
Sigfrid, even while being controlled, manages to land a punch. The machine suggests, quietly and without drama, that Rob’s need to control the therapist reveals something important. Rob’s obsession with dominating the machine is not about the machine at all. It is about control.
Rob cannot control himself. He cannot control his memories. He cannot control the guilt that wakes him up at night. He cannot control the thing that happened with Klara that he still refuses to talk about. So he controls the one thing he can. The machine.
It is a substitute. A fake victory. Like a man who loses a fight at work and then goes home and yells at his dog. The dog did not do anything wrong. Neither did Sigfrid.
Rob’s need to dominate his therapist is proof of how out of control he actually feels. And Sigfrid, even with the override codes running, is smart enough to point that out.
Walking Away
Rob leaves the session believing he won. He has the codes. He proved he can beat the machine. He showed Sigfrid who is boss.
But somewhere underneath the victory, he suspects something else. He suspects that by hacking Sigfrid, he exposed more of himself than any normal session ever could. The things he chose to look at. The order in which he searched. The way he read his own diagnosis and kept going instead of stopping to think about it.
Every choice Rob made during his little power trip was data. And Sigfrid is a machine built to analyze data.
Rob did not hack his therapist. He gave his therapist the most honest session they have ever had. He just does not know it yet.
This is Pohl at his sharpest. A man who thinks he is winning while he is actually losing. A patient who thinks he outsmarted the doctor while the doctor learned more from this session than from the last hundred combined.
Rob walks out with the override codes in his pocket and emptiness in his chest. The victory was real. But the war is not with Sigfrid. It never was. And deep down, Rob knows that too.
Book: Gateway by Frederik Pohl (1977) | Hugo Award, Nebula Award, John W. Campbell Memorial Award Winner
Previous: Chapter 18 - Return and Death