And what if you built your whole identity, your whole business, around the idea of the future, and the machines that bring it closer -- and now it turns out you may not have much of one?

You had a heachache, and it was a bad one. You saw your doctor. He suggested a battery of tests, to see if there might not be some sort of "malformation" in your head.

And so the tests begin, and you are introduced to the machines.

These machines are essentially computers, and they are the same color as friendly computers. They are all digital, making them more flexible and "smart" than the analog imaging tools of a decade ago.

But they are nothing like the desktop and laptop computers you write about. Instead of inputting alphanumeric characters and outputting print, or data packets, they input body sounds or blood or bone, and output diagrams, animations, or films.

They are bigger, hulking. Some are as big as a room. Some overflow the room, and fill up space in an adjoining room. Instead of being box-shaped and contained, these are all over the place, like jellyfish, with arms, stingers, and tentacles reaching across the room, or reaching up through you, like a puppeteer's arm.

The first is an MRI, or magnetic resonance imager. It is a tube, like a cannon barrel, with a tray on casters that they load you onto. They cross your hands over your heart, as a mortician might, and they place a squeeze toy in your hand, in case you panic from the closeness. Then they slide you in, like a human cannonball.

Inside, the cannon plays a sequence of strange musical fugues, a bit like the spaceship music in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or the electronic compositions of composer Morton Subotnick. It is insect music, rhythmic, unmelodic clattering that bounces sound off your head and its structures, and records the densities resisting the sounds -- and makes images of those densities, going deeper and deeper into the brain.

Next is the CT or CAT scan, for computerized axial tomography. It is smaller, more like a wide hoop that you pass through, like a floating magician's assistant. The CT scan is not as sensitive to soft tissue as MRI, but the color images it creates are more vivid -- an eerie beauty.

Finally, on this first day, there is cerebral angiography. Developed following World War I to deal with head injuries seen during the war, angiography seeks to highlight soft tissues in the brain that, without coloration, would be indistinguishable.

You are asked to lie on an operating table, and you stretch out your hands to be secured. The doctor pokes a small hole in your inguinal area, and then begins inserting a long plastic pipette into your crotch, threading it up through the entire distance of the artery leading through your body trunk, past your heart and lungs, through your throat to the brain.

Then, at precisely timed intervals, the computer releases a jet of dye into the different parts of your brain. Each release is a flash of great warmth, and this warmth is matched on the computer screens with the image of the interior of your skull, and your poor-pewter-filled teeth grinning the lit-up grin of dye.

You look at the image, and see the soft pulse of your blood in your head. How tender it all looks, and how clinical the computer of steel and plastic goes about its business, probing and lighting up the dark corners of your computer, the one of flesh and plasm.

This is the computer you have thought all your thoughts with, and uttered all your words, and felt all your feelings.

How precious it is to you. But how unprecious it is compared to the machines that are now examining it like a lump of enlivened clay.

The MRI, for instance, is so expensive, and so profitable, that it runs 24 hours a day. Its value is so great that you found yourself driving at 12:30 PM to the imaging center, altering your schedule to suit the schedule of the machines.

The machines are so perfect, and so precious, and so imposing, they are like the inscribing machine in the Franz Kafka story "The Penal Colony," an instrument designed to write the life story of its victims upon their bodies with a razor stylus until they understand everything there is to understand, to the deepest possible level, and perish from the information.

And the doctor comes to you after the last test, and says, "We're altering your working diagnosis, from an infection treatable with antibiotics, to a brain tumor," and turns to leave.

And you think how much stronger the machines are than you, that they can tell such a truth without blinking an eye.

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