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Ijon Tichy is sent to the 8th World Futurological Congress by Prof Tarantoga. The conference focuses on overpopulation. It's held at the 164 storey Costa Rica Hilton in Nounas. Absurdities abound with the Hilton's guaranteed Bomb-free rooms & the extravagance of the suite, including a palm grove & an 'all-girl orchestra play[ing] Bach while performing a cleverly choreographed striptease'. The conference is absurd. Papers are too numerous to allow full presentations. They're distributed & speakers call out paragraph numbers of the salient points.
Tichy drinks tap water & an hallucinogenic trip begins. Notably, it never becomes more or less absurd than the glimpse of reality presented at the outset. Next day he learns the government has drugged the water supply with Love Thy Neighbor, a drug causing helpless benevolence. Events spiral out of control at the Hilton, which is already so chaotic that charred bombing victims are covered with tarps while guests do business.
The government bombs the hotel. Tichy escapes to sewers where rats walk on hind legs. He's evacuated by the military, but the helicopter crashes. He awakes in hospital & finds his brain has been transplanted into an attractive young black woman.
Protesters attack the hospital. Tichy is nearly killed again. This time he wakes to find he's been transplanted into the body of a fat, red-haired man. His state grows increasingly fragile. He can't distinguish reality from hallucination. The staff freeze him until a time when medicine can help.
He awakes in 2039. Tichy keeps a journal to chronicle his experience. His future shock is so great that he finds he's being introduced to the world in small stages by the medical staff. In this utopian society money is no object. One can go to the bank, request a sum & borrow it interest-free. No effort is made to collect as most take a drug that instills a sense of pride & work-ethic, disallowing default. There's bias against defrostees. There are many words he doesn't understand. The talk's a mishmash of words with clear English roots, but he's mystified. Like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, mood is regulated. Whereas Dick's characters use machines to control their emotions, Lem's use drugs. He gets involved with a woman. She takes recriminol to make her combative in arguments.
Following their break-up, Tichy becomes disillusioned with the 'psychem' mentality wherein drugs regulate waking moments. He resolves to stop taking any drugs & confides to his friend, Dr Trottelreiner, that he can't stand the world. Trottelreiner explains that the everyday drugs he's tired of are only the tip of the iceberg. Narcotics & hallucinogens are trifles compared to 'mascons' powerful enough to mask whole swaths of reality.