The Van Meter Syndrome (excerpt from Divine Flaws)

      The propensity for manned deep space travel was realized in both the weakness and the strength of the human mind. By 2037, the firsts manned trips to Mars were demonstrating how fragile the mind could be. Long range trips to Mars and the Kuiper belt established a different set of mental stresses than simple time spent in Earth Orbit. Separation from the Earth took an unforeseen toll on the travelers. They developed an organic brain disorder that became known as Van Meter Syndrome.
      The resulting psychopathology for this debilitating impairment consisted of extended periods of fugue with intermittent excitability. Speech was greatly limited which hampered diagnosis and treatment. Then, after some months the only emerging desire visible from these victims became the wish to end their lives, hence the nomenclature of the syndrome.
      Vicki Van Meter was the first astronaut to be diagnosed with this non compos mentis in the late months of 2043. After three months in what was first thought to be a high functioning comatose state, she suddenly escaped from the coma ward in Atlanta and leapt to her death from atop a parking garage off Peachtree St. It was because of her resulting condition upon return from Shiva 6 in The Belt that alternate methods of long term travel were originally sought.
      Astronaut Van Meter had an interesting family history. Her Great, Great Aunt was the youngest person to ever fly an airplane across The United States and the youngest person to ever make a transatlantic flight. These historic flights took place over fifty years prior to the missions that would take mankind to other planets. These records will never be broken because of safety measures that were implemented soon after those records were made.     
      Because the human mind cannot endure prolonged separation from the planet Earth, COFIns were implemented in long range space missions. Cryogenically Optimized Flatline Incubators were a hotly contested alternative to conventional travel. The fluids of the astronauts would be siphoned to a reprocessing unit resulting in virtually no cell degradation. The body temperature would be reduced to 56° with constant oxygen being supplied to tissue cells through a continuously replenishing frozen bond. In essence, the body dies at the beginning of a mission to be restored after whatever distance needed to be traveled. Astronauts who volunteered to travel in this way were euphemistically referred to as ‘zombies’.
      It was the “near to all but” death of the travelers that became the debatable issue. Everyone seemed to have something to say on the subject. Should local governments issue death certificates? What should be done about life insurance? Could this be considered a new form of assisted suicide? And of course The Church weighed in as the universal experts on the condition of the human soul. In the end, it was the science that won the argument. COFIns simply put the body in a low respiratory state. It was the definition of death that had to be updated. In the end, science won the day.
      In the end, not even the science mattered. By 2060, Cryogenically Optimized Flatline Incubators started returning from the moons of Saturn with what their acronym implied they should; dead bodies. While tests on Earth and in Earth orbit proved conclusively the viability of these low respiratory incubators, the reality of deep space was proving to be a harder nut to crack.  All of the dead to return in 2060 from Saturn orbit had perfectly healthy tissue with no cell degradation. It was as if the mind had simply refused to live. Cause of death was listed as Van Meter Syndrome while in flatline incubation.
      Since the main obstacle to deep space travel seemed to be the weakness of the human mind, Luna scientists started to experiment with eliminating that weakness. Through trial and study, one of the main causes of the resulting mental breakdown was identified within the paradigms of cognitive neuroscience. A breakdown of memories of Earth, even for those who had no family ties, created an anomaly within the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These memories, connected with emotional responses, became more than the mind could process in episodic content. This became the very definition of the madness exhibited in Van Meter Syndrome.
      Since the problem could be isolated in the prefrontal lobes, scientists experimented with cutting away that section of the brain. The project became known as the Hyacinth Project after the Greek myth of Apollo and Hyacinthus. The objective was to make something beautiful come from a traumatic brain injury. This became the necessary step in overcoming the obstacle of madness.
      While memory is useful, it is not at all necessary in performing the tasks needed in deep space exploration. Daily auto reminders kept the astronauts on task and proved to be the answer so long sought in dealing with Van Meter Syndrome.
      The cognitive pathways that were removed and altered in Hyacinth Project later resolved themselves and memories could again be managed and arranged. By the time this healing could take place the traveler was already acclimated to deep space. By 2081, Van Meter Syndrome had seen its last victims.