Читать книгу The Great Jones Coop Ten Gigasoul Party (and Other Lost Celebrations) - Paul Di Filippo - Страница 9

FLASHERS

“The upheaval of our world and the upheaval in consciousness are one and the same.”

—Carl Jung, Modern Man In Search Of A Soul

“If our brains were organized differently, we would experience a different reality. We would have different psychological needs. A slight change in our brains could almost be guaranteed to alter our psychology and our sociology. We would be convinced by new kinds of arguments (or perhaps we wouldn’t require convincing at all).”

—Richard Restak, The Brain

The beads of rain upon the bus window—fragile, wind-shifted, writhing chains—reminded Tinker of the molecular structure of neuropeptides: vasopressin, oxytocin, all those busy intermediaries that flooded the brain upon ingestion of a dose of CEEP. Staring intently at them, Tinker gradually lost cognizance of his surroundings. He was falling into a post-CEEP flashback. The soot-grimed window with its dancing beads became a horizontal glassy plain upon which he looked down like a powerless god. The snaky chains appeared to beckon with mute meaning, offering a new knowledge beyond anything Tinker’s mind could currently hold. Their ceaseless movements seemed to comprise the alphabet of a metalanguage that hovered frustratingly at the borders of comprehension. Tinker, floating above their mocking saraband, strained to unravel their meaning. His mind ached to pierce the unaccustomed veil that hung between him and diamond-bright insight. For what seemed an eternity, he exerted his perceptions and intellect in tandem, striving desperately to recreate the familiar synchrogenesis flash that had once been his whole reason for existing.

But it was no use.

His brain was empty of cheep.

Through greed, he was a flasher no more, nor ever would be again.

The normal world had his brain in a straitjacket for good.

Reality reasserted itself. The glassy plain became merely a rain-flecked window again, outside which dingy buildings rolled by, beneath a lowering grey urban sky. The uncushioned plastic bus seat was hard beneath his buttocks. The stale air inside the bus was redolent of nervous sweat and wet wool. Faltering heaters occasionally gusted weakly against the penetrating November chill.

Tinker glanced nervously around the bus, checking if his near-catatonic reverie had alarmed his fellow passengers. (God, how he hated riding the bus! But his withdrawal from cheep had left him unfit to drive. Imagine falling into such a fugue at fifty miles an hour...)

Apparently the other riders had taken no notice of his aberration. Many of them seemed similarly preoccupied, sitting with grim faces, slow to respond to most stimuli. But Tinker knew that their condition was vastly different from his. No keen racing of mental gears lurked behind their abstracted faces. Rather, those blank looks betokened that they were already embarked on the long preciptious slide to a new kind of schizophrenia.

Aparadigmatic psychosis had sunk its talons into their psyches. These people were representative of the mass mental disturbances currently spreading across the globe.

Tinker felt contemptuous of them. They aroused in him a vast disdain for their inability to master the changing conditions of this new world they all so suddenly found themselves in.

But as Tinker thought more closely about the matter, contempt began to be replaced by fear and guilt.

Without cheep, would he not soon succumb to the same set of symptoms, the classic Fours A’s: autism, ambivalence, loose associations and altered affect? And were not he and the other flashers instrumental in fashioning the world where this mental virus could spread? Surely claiming that he and his fellows had been simply following governmental orders was an excuse which, in this third decade of the twenty-first century, had long been outworn.

The answers to these questions were suddenly so obvious to Tinker that he knew he had been deliberately deluding himself until now, refusing to face up to the reality of his new position.

Yes, one day, when the mental disciplines left over from his years as a flasher failed through lack of reinforcement, he too would fall victim to aparadigmatic psychosis.

And yes, he and the others at the NIS were totally responsible for the current screwed-up mess the world was in.

But—damn it!—they had only been following orders.

The bus rumbled to a halt at the stop down the block from the Department of Employment Security. Tinker stood, and moved off down the aisle. While halted, the old bus began to fill with exhaust fumes through hidden cracks. The diesel odor struck Tinker like a mailed fist between the eyes, and suddenly brought with it the feeling of danger and entrapment that made his palms sweat. Another leftover from cheep. His amygdala—control node for the olfactory sense, among other, more crucial talents—had been left susceptible to hyperexcitation. Smell was now Tinker’s dominant sense, and he could be easily exalted or depressed by a vagrant odor, thanks to the amygdala’s interconnections with his hippocampus and limbic system.

Sometimes nowadays he felt like a dog or cat, slave to his snout. It was hard to remember that once to the contrary he had always felt more than human.

Tinker was the only one getting off here. From past weeks, he recognized several of his other passengers as fellow dolebodies, who should have been coming with him. But they sat motionless instead, lost in their private worlds that were so much more reassuring than the common one. Perhaps they would ride the bus through its route several more times before they summoned up enough will and awareness to get off.

Knowing he could do nothing for them, and uneasily aware of what they foretold for him, Tinker descended the bus’s steps.

A crowd was waiting to board. All dolebodies who had just left DES, they exhibited little excitement at having garnered another week’s stipend. Rather, they stood apathetically, not eager to face the ride home to the deadly boredom of unemployment and total obsolescence. For the most part, they were just realizing that they faced a life of total inutility, since even retraining was not a possibility. New waves of flasher-derived technology flooded out of the NIS daily, altering the whole employment equation in ways no program could possibly anticipate.

Tinker shouldered through the crowd, anxious to report to DES and be away from those who reminded him so painfully of his own stature. Although what he would do after keeping his appointment, he had no idea.

At the end of the bus queue, Tinker saw a man with one arm. He was undergoing a slo-gro.

Tinker stopped dead.

The slo-gro was one of his flashes.

The stump on the man’s left side was exposed to the chilly November drizzle. Strapped around the arm-stub was a small metal pack. The end of the stump was pink with new cellular growth, stimulated by the complex electromagnetic fields generated by the pack. Soon, following the body’s own blueprints, the growth would become a totally functional regenerated arm.

The circuitry for the pack flashed through Tinker’s mind again in its entirety. He didn’t understand it this time anymore than he had the first time. Of course, neither biology nor electronics was his field. However, experts in those areas had no more idea of why the device worked than Tinker did. Which was, at the root, the source of aparadigmatic psychosis.

But work it did, and this man was proof.

Tinker, managing to salvage a little pride from this sight, resumed his walk toward the DES building at a slightly brisker pace.

Inside the cavernous building, he took his place in the long line at his station.

At first, Tinker recalled, there had been talk of doing away with DES as a government agency. That had been years ago, when worldwide unemployment stood at only two percent, thanks to the stimulus the first flasher inputs had given to the economy. What a vibrant, exciting time that had been! It had seemed as if a real golden age were descending, borne on the wings of a miracle drug.

But that had slipped away all too soon. As the products of the National Institute of Synchrogenesis (finally split off from the NIMH) became more and more radically unexplainable and destabilizing, unemployment had begun to swell, until now it stood at fifteen percent, with no signs of slowing.

DES now absorbed more funds than the military.

Tinker’s line moved forward only slowly, and he had plenty of time to ponder such matters. His thoughts were not comforting.

At last he reached the head of the queue. A new caseworker awaited him, and Tinker sighed with exasperation, knowing that he would probably have to explain his situation to the new man, who looked improbably officious, considering the human wreckage around him. What stupid nonsense, to abide by these rules while the world was disintegrating! Why couldn’t they just pass legislation granting a minimal income to everyone? So what that some would call it socialism? But no, they had to use the same cumbersome machinery that had made sense only under much different conditions, pretending that all these poor souls here were just temporarily unemployed, and would soon find nonexistent jobs, all the while extending the benefit period time after time.

“Your card,” the man said to Tinker. He showed traces of MS palsy that even artificial myelin couldn’t eradicate.

Tinker presented his ID, and the man brought up Tinker’s case on his terminal. The caseworker’s bland face lost its sternness and assumed a look of utter bafflement and awe.

“You were employed by the NIS?” he asked with amazement.

“Yes,” Tinker admitted.

“As a synchrogenesist?”

“Yes,” Tinker said, knowing what would happen with his admission.

All around him, in his line and others, applicants and clerks fall silent and turned to stare. They looked at him as if he were simultaneously devil and angel, scum and superman. Edgy and contemptuous again, denying in his mind that these people meant anything to him, Tinker raked them with his own gaze. Eyes dropped, as if to meet his would be to surrender their most private thoughts. Tinker savored this small triumph among his degradation.

The caseworker recovered himself and continued. “You were fired. Why?”

They loved to force him to utter the word, although Tinker knew it was right there shining on their screens.

“Malfeasance,” he said. Then: “But I’ve been through the waiting period. I’m entitled to collect.”

To beg, thought Tinker. Goddamn you, Thorngate!

“All right,” said the clerk, satisfied with this obesiance. He tapped a key and the printer by his elbow stuttered out a check, which he handed to Tinker. “Continue to look for work in the following week,” he concluded.

Tinker nodded, as if the ritualistic statement had any meaning. Then, gratefully, he left.

The bus ride back home was as tedious as the trip out. Once in the rundown building that had become his new home when he left the Institute, Tinker ascended the gloomy stairs (smelling of boiled cabbage and hopelessness) to his drab one-room apartment. Inside it was cold. Of course—the radiators weren’t running. The refining of heating oil had practically stopped, since the introduction of heat-blox.

Tinker moved to the small black cube—about the size of a hatbox—that sat on the floor near one wall. It had a small thumb-shaped depression in one corner, and was integrally pre-set somehow at the factory to 72 degrees. Tinker thumbed the on-spot.

Almost instantly the room began to warm. Soon it was comfortable.

Tinker laid a hand on the heat-blox, still amazed after all these months of use. The device was cool to the touch. It was a monolithic construct, he knew, with no interior structure and no fuel required. No one knew how it worked. There was one or more in nearly every home and office. It was Witkin’s flash.

Tinker lay down on his lumpy, unmade cot. He put his hands behind his head, and stared at the peeling ceiling. He realized that he felt totally unconnected from his own life and the rest of the world. It was a new and disturbing feeling, the total opposite of the flasher experience. It unnerved him, and he began to quiver as he lay there.

Longing for connections of any kind, he decided—in a pale flash that mimicked the ecstasy of synchrogenesis—that tomorrow he would visit Helen.

* * * *

The campus was strangely muted, a tenuous shadow of its old self, like a televised image with sound and contrast turned low.

As Tinker walked across the main quad, he tried to collate all the little changes into a syncretic whole, to establish the invisible, improbable, inevitable connections he had been trained to make.

The old, ivied buildings seemed essentially the same, pompous and infuriatingly calm. Tinker remembered how glad he had been to escape their cloistered embrace, when asked to consult at the fledgling NIS. But there was undeniably something different lurking beneath their surfaces—an aura of fear, as if they quailed at some threat.

Turning a corner, Tinker saw the reason for his intuitions of menace.

A huge geodesic frame had been erected on what was formerly a pleasant greensward. There were no workmen around the completed frame, installing panels in the way one would expect. Instead, the building was being left to grow.

Red quasicrystals had been seeded at the base of the frame. Now they were climbing up the structure in thin fiery sheets that caught the autumnal sunlight and magnified its splendor.

Only a yard or so of crystals was yet in place, but the building already looked alien. When it was finished, Tinker thought, it would resemble a giant carbuncle or roc’s egg. To stand inside it would be to worship in a nonhuman cathedral.

Tinker moved past it, and felt it beating like a dragon’s jeweled heart, sending its pulses through the staid campus. As he walked, he noticed the students.

There were fewer of them, for one thing. The paths seemed half-empty at a time of year when normally students would be rushing from library to party to football game. And those students who were about seemed preternaturally quiet, as if burdened with concerns much larger than final exams or lovers’ squabbles.

Tinker felt his hopes shattering into a million shards. Although he would have denied he had any, he quickly realized that he had nurtured a few with regards to the campus. Subconsciously he had been hoping that he would find here a refuge, an enclave somehow sheltered against the psychic storms sweeping the world. But he knew now, just from seeing the students slouch by, that the seeds of aparadigmatic psychosis had found fallow ground here as well.

Approaching the physics building, Tinker suddenly wondered what condition he would find Helen in. He had not even considered the possibility that she would be different. Although they had parted acrimoniously, she remained a touchstone to his past, and he always contemplated her just as he had last seen her.

Up broad steps and through glass doors into the physics building, Tinker moved swiftly. He found the receptionist—a woman newly hired from his days—at the usual desk.

“Is Professor Tinker in?” he asked.

The woman looked up at Tinker with her pretty features wreathed in puzzlement and alarm. Exhibiting the touchiness and anxiety with which most people greeted anything out of the norm these days, she said, “Who’s that, please? We have no such person on our faculty.”

For a moment, Tinker was taken totally aback, as if a gaping pit had opened beneath his feet, threatening to swallow his past whole. Then he realized his mistake. Helen must be using her maiden name.

“Kenner,” Tinker explained. “I meant Professor Kenner.”

The woman relaxed. “Oh. Let me check.” She consulted a schedule. “Yes, she has office hours now. Shall I announce you?”

“No,” said Tinker. “I’ll knock. Thanks.”

He left the woman and moved down a corridor to a familiar door. It was ajar, and he pushed it open.

Helen was inside, her back to him. She wore a cream-colored blouse and fawn skirt. She was taking books down off a shelf and packing them into a cardboard box. Hearing the door open, she turned.

Marked by more lines than he recalled, Helen’s intimately memorized face was framed by brown hair shot with grey that curled under her sharp jaw. Tinker experienced a pang as he catalogued the changes she had undergone. Stress and worry had left their marks. He wondered if his looks had altered as drastically.

Helen’s face underwent a quick succession of expressions: recognition, amazement, hesitancy, and finally reluctant acceptance. Her jaw tightened, and Tinker watched her fight to relax it. She spoke.

“What are you doing here?”

Tinker laid the most important card on the table right away. “I’ve left the NIS. Or rather, they gave me the boot.”

Helen visibly pondered this a moment, seeming to accept it at face value. Tinker flinched inwardly, expecting her to ask what he had done to get terminated. But he should have known better than to expect Helen to put him on the spot. She simply brushed back her hair with one dusty hand, nodded, and said, “Sit down then. I assume you want to talk about something. I need a cigarette first, though.”

Tinker sat down on a coffee-stained couch, expecting Helen to join him. Apparently, however, she felt compelled to maintain some distance between them yet. She rested her left hip on her desk and her skirt rose higher on her extended leg. Tinker felt a stirring of excitement as he recalled the feel and scent of her body. He wondered if she felt anything similar, after all their years together.

After lighting a cigarette, inhaling deeply, and releasing the smoke like unpent emotions, Helen said, “Jesus, it was a shock to turn and see you like that. I thought you were a ghost.”

An ironic grin tugged Tinker’s lips, as he recalled rumors he had heard toward the and of his time at the Institute. “No, it’s me, Helen. I just felt a need to see you.”

Helen smiled ruefully. “Better late than never, I suppose. Although I don’t recall you expressing any such needs when the NIS beckoned, and it was a choice between them and me.”

Tinker raised his hands placatingly, as if to ward off a physical attack. “Let’s not rehash the past, Helen. I made my motives clear at the time. You know I wanted to stay with you—but my career was at stake.”

Helen puffed smoke in a gauzy cloud. “You were a respected historian, Don. Tops in your field. You didn’t need to get involved with the NIS.”

Tinker sighed. “But I did. It was too big a chance to pass up. I was going to make my name in a way no amount of academic stuff ever could. Imagine advising on the history of technology to the people responsible for revolutionizing our entire method of inventing. If you had been me, you wouldn’t have been able to pass it up either.”

Helen must have mellowed somewhat, because she did what she never could have brought herself to do before. She said:

“Maybe you’re right.”

Tinker felt good to hear her acquiesce, but Helen’s next words indicated that she still didn’t understand everything.

“But, Don—to actually get in so deep that you became one of those...”

Tinker felt angered. “Say it, Helen. Go ahead. I’ve heard it before. We don’t regard it as an insult among ourselves. Although the way you normals say it really hurts at times. But I’m not even one anymore. And that’s the only thing I really regret.”

Helen looked away and murmured the word: “Flasher...” She seemed to want to let the subject go now, sorry to have brought it up. But Tinker was aroused, and wouldn’t relent.

“It’s just a word for what we do, Helen. Did, in my case. We swallow cheep—”

Always a stickler for scientific correctness, Helen interjected contemptuously, “Connectivity-enhancing endogenous PCP. Wonder drug to make an age—or end one.”

Ignoring her sarcasm, Tinker continued. “We swallow cheep, under carefully controlled conditions, and we let our minds expand, waiting for the revelation of new wonders. Is there anything wrong with that, Helen? If you could try some—if you could see the world then as we do—you’d soon see there’s not.”

“But I’ll never be able to, even if I wanted, will I? No, the government has it locked up tight for its own use. And what a fine mess they’re making of things.”

Tinker’s anger left him suddenly as it had come, like wind dying from a sail. Talk of the drug had brought back memories of the worldview it fostered, an edenic, shining landscape of startling possibilities, where everything seemed intimately connected, in a unified whole that dazzled while it simultaneously enlightened. Everything made such sense under CEEP. All the inventions that struck one as so bizarre upon leaving the altered state appeared completely sensible and unthreatening under the drug. But the effects of CEEP were only temporary, and one could not remain dosed up forever.

In between doses one had to rely on faith.

Dropping his head, regarding his folded hands between his knees, Tinker felt too drained to argue anymore, and began to wonder why he had even come.

Helen said, apparently apropos of nothing, “Have you heard what’s happening to my department?”

Tinker raised his head, said, “No.”

“They’re shutting it down. The whole physics department. Also, chemistry, biology, geology, all the hard sciences.”

Tinker was startled. “Why the hell would they do that?”

“It’s you,” Helen said. “I mean, the flashers, and what they produce. You’ve upset twenty centuries of science in half a decade. All those impossible things that flow out of the NIS—how can we make sense of them fast enough, incorporate them into our pitiful paradigm of the universe? It can’t be done. There’s no use trying. So we’re giving up.” Helen stubbed her cigarette out viciously. “And I, for one, am glad. You don’t know what hell classes have been lately. Standing up in front of all those kids eager for certainty, spoouting formulas and laws that once used to be the cornerstones of your worldview, knowing that in the next few hours the NIS could release something that will totally contravene them. Or, at best, cast a completely new light on them.”

Tinker could only nod grimly, knowing Helen was absolutely right. Suddenly, she gripped her biceps, arms crossed beneath her breasts, and shivered.

“Christ, why don’t they stop, and let us go back to what we thought we knew? Why don’t they just stop?”

“They can’t,” Tinker whispered. “When has mankind ever turned back? No, it’s impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. We have to keep rolling, and hope that something we flash on will get us all out of this fix.”

And besides, Tinker thought, we’re addicted now. Everyone at the Institute is hooked on the power and the vision.

And I miss my own dose.

* * * *

In the weeks that followed the desperation-inspired seeking-out of his ex-wife, Tinker felt a curious calm, born more of helplessness than confidence. Despite the headlong acceleration of the world toward utter breakdown of all sociological systems, Tinker was able to enjoy, on a personal level, his renewed relationship with Helen.

The two of them spent time together almost every day. Neither had any other duties or responsibilities. In a bizarre way, sheltered for the moment by willful ignorance from the turmoil raging around them, they were able to act like young honeymooners, recapturing their long-vanished youth and a fraction of their innocence.

Tinker had established one vital connection that would temporarily serve as a substitute for all the shining strands of coherence that he had lost. Still, though, the falsely random world coyly beckoned at the periphery of his vision, seeming to promise to restore what he had once enjoyed, a joining together of all that now appeared sundered.

He and Helen found themselves going to places where they could for a time forget what was transpiring around them, the mass deracination that occasionally erupted into listless riots that were violently suppressed. They tended to favor art museums and the countryside.

In the museums, their tireless meanderings were rewarded by encounters with occasional works that seemed immune to the current disintegration of the old weltanschauung. Most pieces, Tinker and Helen soon discovered, so embodied the worldviews of the ages that had created them that they were unable to stand the light of this strange new day that was dawning. The myth of the privileged visionary creator able to embody revelations not accessible to his peers seemed totally discredited now. Everyone including the artist was caught in the same pereceptual-intellectual gestalt, like insects in amber. Only rarely did someone stumble upon a new method of depicting the world that seemed to hint at expanded possibilities.

Seurat, they agreed, was one such. His splotches of carefully juxtaposed color, so unintelligible at close range, so magnificent at a distance, were analogous to the current situation the world found itself in. Only the Flashers had the drug-mediated “distance” to make sense of the big picture. And theirs was only a fleeting revelation.

When they tired of the museums—which were quite crowded in these end days, with others seeking solace too—they would head out of the city to the countryside, Helen driving of course. Tinker had almost forgotten about the cabin they had jointly owned, until Helen mentioned to him one day that she had continued to maintain it. On the spur of the moment they tossed a few provisions into the car and headed there.

Out where the pavement and concrete disappeared, Tinker found himself relaxing the most. The fragrances of the outdoors—sodden, leaf-covered earth, the cool air blowing off a pond, even the musty interior of the cabin when they opened its door—affected his drug-heightened amygdala in a pleasant fashion, stimulating various joyful emotions and ghostly half-memories. He and Helen began to spend days at a time in the rude cabin, pretending successfuly for long stretches that they lived in another era.

But even their fierce determination—surprising to both of them—to recreate the happiness they had once taken for granted, before the advent of flashing and Tinker’s subsequent involvement, could not sustain the illusion forever, and they frequently lapsed into discussion of the real world.

One day, with a fire snapping on the hearth, providing the only light and heat against the damp cold and darkness outside the cabin, Helen brought up the subject she had so tactfully avoided on that first day.

She and Tinker lay naked on a pile of blankets and pillows before the fire. They had finished making love just minutes before, and rested now with legs and arms intertwined. Helen’s hair smelled wonderful. Tinker admired the way the flames burnished her surprisingly ageless body with golden light. What they had just enjoyed seemed almost an antidote to all their troubles. But of course, those particular unique sensations—the radical rearrangement of the mind and senses during orgasm—lasted no longer than a dose of CEEP.

Although she had relaxed enough to enjoy their lovemaking, Helen had seemed moody all day. Tinker had tried to pretend that her symptoms weren’t those of everyone else around them. But below this pitiful subterfuge, he recognized the initial manifestations of the mutant schizophrenia brought on by the crumbling of the underpinnings of modern civilization.

Helen’s troubles hurt him more than anything had since he was banished from the Institute. He felt like lashing out at someone, anyone whom he could hold responsible for the turmoil the world was undergoing. But instead, he could only squeeze Helen tightly, hoping to somehow hold her mental distress at bay.

She seemed to sense Tinker’s intentions, but with the perversity of the mentally troubled insisted on exacerbating matters, unable to forget the subject that was becoming an obsession.

In a monotone totally typical of those with altered affect, her face partially muffled in his shoulder, Helen asked, “What did you do?”

Tinker was unprepared. “Do? Do when?”

“At the Institute. To get dropped from the program.”

It all flooded back upon Tinker, and he braced himself to relive the humiliation and self-pity and self-disgust of the incident. Amazingly, it wasn’t as intense as it had once been, and he found himself able to talk about it.

“We were all on salary,” Tinker began. “A really generous pay, just for sitting around doing what we couldn’t live without doing—psychonauts diving into the creative sea and surfacing with pearls of knowledge. All our discoveries, of course, became the property of the Institute, to be leased out in the commercial marketplace as they saw fit. It was a perfect setup. But I got greedy. I started to wonder why the government should get all the profits from our work. Wouldn’t it be only fair for me to get a little of the money flowing into the federal coffers? So I kept back one of my flashes, told them I had a dry run, which was not unheard of.”

Helen raised her face from Tinker’s shoulder. She seemed intrigued now, somewhat distanced from her own problems. Tinker felt repaid for the pain he was experiencing in the telling.

“What was it?” she asked.

“Oh, I was clever. I waited until I flashed on something not quite so revolutionary as most of our discoveries. I was hoping that whatever I released would go unnoticed as a normal product of industrial R&D. Among all the new products, I was betting that mine would be innocuous. So I contacted someone with the capital and right connections, and gave him the flash, for a share of future profits. It was an aerosol polymer—”

“Spray-plaz!” Helen said. “I’ve used that to get airtight seals on certain equipment.”

Tinker smiled ruefully. “That’s it. A great product with a lot of uses. I would have been a millionaire today. Much good it would have done me, with the world going to hell in a handcart. But of course, wearing the blinders of the Institute, I didn’t see any such thing at the time. All I was concerned with was setting myself up big. But they caught me. And kicked me out. “

Helen hugged Tinker tightly. “Don’t worry, Don. For a while there, you really contributed to the happiness of humanity.”

“How’s that?” said Tinker innocently.

“No more wet basements,” said Helen.

“You jerk,” Tinker said, and they began to wrestle.

When they were finished making love again, they fell asleep.

In the middle of the night Tinker awoke, knowing Helen wasn’t sleeping. The flames had died away, until only embers were left. In their glow, Tinker could see Helen staring at the raftered ceiling.

“Don,” she said softly. “With so much tension and uncertainty, why hasn’t there been a big nuclear war yet? We’re the only country with flashers. Surely that represents a threat to everyone else. “

“That’s one thing you don’t have to worry about,” said Tinker sleepily. “The President’s got a brand-new button.”

“What do you mean?”

“The man doesn’t bother with the doomsday alert anymore. He’s got a little black box that’s better. As soon as he gets the warning of an ICBM launch, he presses it and every fission or fusion reaction on the globe above a certain critical threshold is nullified. Result: a lot of dead missiles will land with a big thud. And then, if we want, we can still launch ours. This information has been disseminated to the ruler of every nuclear state.”

“This really works?”

“They’ve already extinguished a powerplant with a smaller model as a test. “

Helen clenched her fists and sat up. As a physicist, she seemed to take the news as a personal affront. “Why don’t they tell everyone about this? Let the people have at least one less thing to worry about?”

“Are you kidding? Atomic war has become one of those shibboleths everyone needs. It’s almost an object of worship. Mad Max post-apocalypse freedom. I really think everyone’s hoping we have one. it looks like the only way out at this point. If you take that away, you’d be knocking out one final prop to sanity.”

Helen lay back down. “I’ll be damned.”

“Me too,” Tinker said. “Me too. “

* * * *

Tinker and Helen couldn’t spend all their time together; there were odd edges to their personalities, acquired in their years apart, that still grated, and they felt the need to be separate at times.

Left with hours that ached to be filled, Tinker conceived the idea of a combination rnemoir-cum-study of the flasher phenomenon, as told by one who had had intimate knowledge of it. He had no idea who, if anyone, would ever read it, but composing it served to fill the demanding hours.

He purchased a recorder. It was one of those new models that utilized tiny crystals as a recording medium. (He tried not to puzzle out how it worked, since that way madness lay.) Then he began to dictate his thoughts.

“Mankind is running a race between two factions of itself. For the first time since Neanderthals battled with Cromagnons, two distinct subgroups of the same species are competing for dominance of the world. And just like that earlier competition, the contest is more between opposing worldviews than any differing physical imperatives. Although of course the outcome will be decided in a physical way, with the eventual extermination of one group or the other.

“On the one hand, we have those individuals—not uniquely suited, by any means—who have been arbitrarily subjected to CEEP, connectivity-enhancing endogenous PCP. This drug, initially discovered during research on hog brains, and later purified and synthesized in human-assimilable form, has had effects unlike any other psychotropic agent in the history of pharmacology. Binding to receptors in the cortex and hippocampus, just like the destructive exogenous PCP sold on the streets as “angel-dust,” CEEP increases the connectivity of the cell-assemblies in the brain. Acting throughout the brain, but particularly on the amygdala and limbic system, CEEP fosters a surge of creativity, commonly called a ‘flash.’ Technically the process is refered to as synchronicity-based genesis, or synchrogenesis. During such states, insight into hitherto unnoticed or unexplainable phenomena of the universe is achieved, in a fashion no one has yet accurately detailed. (For instance, how is it that technically untrained persons such as myself have equal access with engineers and others to the ability to imagine new wiring diagrams and other speciality-specific devices? It would seem that one’s mind would be able to work only with what has been input. Much remains to be explained about cheep-fostered creativity.)

“Accompanying the flashing ability, of course, is the emotional state in which the world seems to be an intricately connected whole, self-existent and undemanding of explanation. There is no anxiety about one’s actions or the meaning of the world during this state.

“Anxiety, however, is precisely what the non-flasher is most subject to today.

“For as long as mankind has kept records, we know there have been attempts to explain the universe as a rational, predictable whole. Initially religious in nature, these explanations altered somewhere along the line into scientific paradigms: vast, multiplex systems for explaining all physical phenomena.

“These paradigms—slow to change, overlapping but existing mainly one at a time—have been all-pervasive, especially in our century. A paradigm seems to be something a human, as currently constituted, cannot live without. Although a common factory worker might not be able to tell a quark from a quack, he still bases his life on such verities as cause and affect, and the laws of thermodynamics, whether he calls them by name or not. These verities are exactly what flashers seem intent on demolishing. Every contradictory gadget that is released by the NIS—and release them they must, for such is their entire rationale for existing—is greeted by authorities with outraged cries denying its possibility, in the face of its manifest existence. This outrage and despair is communicated to the layman, resulting in the mental crisis known as aparadigmatic psychosis.

“The brains of the sufferers of this psychosis are undergoing as drastic a change as those of the flashers—but a malignant change. Responding to events, their brains are flooding with dopamine and cortico-tropin releasing factor, stimulating the development of permanent schizophrenia and stress reaction. Eventual catatonia is the inevitable result. Traditional drugs such as chlorpromazine seem to have little affect on those who succumb. Already hospitals are filling up with intractable patients.

“What is the solution to this dilemma? It seems a situation where we must break through or break down. We cannot suppress cheep. Already there are rumors that private synthesis, at home and abroad, is underway. Can we effectively dose the entire population of the world forever? Even if logistically possible, it seems that governments would not stand for such uninhibited creativity among the populace at large. The actions of the NIS, backed by the highest echelons of our government, are indication enough that governments will always try to control such a source of potential anarchy. And also, we must consider that CEEP in its present form induces only temporary psychic alterations, and in fact promotes a tolerance with constant use.

“On the other hand, we certainly cannot continue on our present course…”

Tinker laid down the mic. The recitation had tired and depressed him, making concrete the exact dimensions of what seemed an insoluble problem. The stale odors of cooking that always filled his building penetrated his consciousness and further lowered his spirits.

Suddenly realizing exactly how many days it had been since he had seen Helen, Tinker decided to go visit.

He missed the bus and had to walk. The December streets were full of frigid slush and aimless wanderers. Christmas window-displays radiated a false cheer totally at odds with the pervading gloom.

One of the sleek new null-gee cars with federal plates zipped by, the wind of its passage like a breeze from one of the frigid circles of hell. No one but Tinker even swivelled his eyes to look.

At Helen’s door he knocked and knocked, but there was no answer. He turned to go, but something stopped him.

A revoked credit card served to jimmy the door of her off-campus apartment. The front room and kitchen were empty. Helen lay naked in the bedroom in a fetal position atop the unmade bed. On the bedside table was a lopsided stack of physics texts, marked with furious underlining and increasingly incoherent notations.

When Tinker peeled back her eyelids, only whites showed, and he began to cry.

That was when he decided to return to the Institute and beg.

* * * *

The location of the National Institute of Synchrogenesis was a subtle statement of its aims.

Most people expected the agency responsible for the forced transfiguration of the world to be housed in one of its own products, a quasicrystal palace or pseudolife building that would serve as advertisement for its achievements. But the director of the agency, Tinker knew from bitter experience, was a master of corporate symbolism. When consulted on where to locate the agency, he had convinced his superiors that only one place would do.

Reluctantly, they had agreed.

The National Patent Office was soon emptied. The old-fashioned structure, with its high ceilings, marble corridors and panelled offices, served perfectly to illustrate the goals of the NIS on a subverbal level that was immediately felt by all visitors.

The NIS was out to destroy the past, to colonize the psychical and physical territory staked out by the once-dominant post-Einsteinian paradigm of how the universe worked.

As in any territorial battle, they were meeting with resistance along the way. The columned facade of the building was scarred from the three bomb-blasts that had been triggered despite the massive security. But the crude attacks of the opposition were feeble in comparison with the sophisticated forays launched from inside the NIS.

The last terrorist action had been six months ago.

The NIS felt quite confident of victory.

Tinker could sense the atmosphere once he was inside the building. The feel of the place had changed immensely since his departure. Whereas once there had flourished an unspoken notion that everyone here was laboring to satisfy the needs and desires of the whole world—to transform a globe full of hostility, want and misery into one of peace, plenty and happiness—now instead Tinker intuited from the scurrying workers that everyone felt him- or herself to be a member of an elite shock-troop bent on occupying and civilizing a race of savages. A definite us-or-them mentality was at work here, the exact opposite of what was needed to heal the spreading rift in humanity.

How a group of people privileged to daily behold the intimate totality of all existence could be so deluded was more than Tinker could fathom.

Walking toward the elevators, Tinker knew he had no time to inspect the Institute as he would have liked. He had gotten into the Institute only after much cajoling and emphasis on his past connections. Of course he had had to undergo a strip-search. Now he moved under strict security monitoring, with the understanding that he would proceed directly to the office of Director Thorngate. Any deviations, and he would be swiftly surrounded by guards.

At the bank of elevators, Tinker halted. The cessation of movement was bad, since it allowed him to think. Thinking was what he had been trying to avoid over the past few days.

Specifically, thoughts of Helen, and how he had left her in the clamorous, overburdened hospital with its antiseptic odors mingling with those from the self-soiled bodies of autistic children and adults, and the tired sweat of nurses, doctors and volunteers who were rapidly coming to resemble their patients.

An elevator arrived with a ping, and Tinker rode it alone to the fifth floor. There, he came to an anteroom where Thorngate’s secretary sat. Two burly men whose suits looked like uniforms on their rigid frames stood flanking the inner door to Thorngate’s sanctum. A new fixture.

“Mister Tinker,” the secretary said. “Please have a seat. The Director is meeting with the President now. “

Stunned, Tinker dropped to a cushioned chair. How had they ever let him in here during such a meeting? He had arrived with the notion of himself as some sort of vital force opposed to the plans of the NIS (although what alternatives he might offer, he could not say). True, he had intended to beg—but not for himself, for humanity in general. He had arrived with a certain humble dignity intact.

Now he suddenly realized how he most look to others: a venal failure returning with his tail between his legs, helpless, hopeless, harmless. In that instant he was swept by rage. He felt like hurting someone, leaping upon the President when he emerged, holding him hostage until the leader agreed to put an end to this madness.

Quickly as it came, his rage left. The sight of the Secret Service men by the door was enough to restore his rationality. He felt an impulse toward ironic laughter, picturing himself making any move that they wouldn’t instantly thwart.

The inner door opened and the President appeared with Director Thorngate. The two men stopped to shake hands, and the bodyguards closed upon their charge, shielding him from whatever insane move Tinker might have been inclined to make. In the next few seconds the famous, familiar old man was gone, leaving Thorngate alone in his doorway.

“Hello, Don,” said Thorngate, as if they had just seen each other yesterday. The Director’s gaze sized up Tinker levelly. “Come in.”

Thorngate re-entered his office and Tinker followed.

The secretary shut the door.

An avian odor smote Tinker. He had forgotten momentarily about the birds.

Thorngate’s office was filled with greenery and caged songbirds suspended from the ceiling. They hopped and twittered and pecked incessantly, forming a continuous undercurrent to any conversation. Thorngate doted on them, and would frequently take the time to introduce a visitor to his latest acquisition.

Today, with Tinker, he indulged in no such niceties.

“Sit down, Don,” said the Director, from behind his desk.

Tinker complied, and took the time to study Thorngate for any changes that would enable him to get a better grasp on the man.

Thorngate was a small, slim man who always dressed impeccably. His curly salt-and-pepper hair was trimmed short. A goatee gave him a caprine air, like a defiant, self-assured satyr. His oldish face was taut and tanned. Before becoming Director of the NIS, he had been Secretary of State. Before that, a VP at the Bechtel Corporation.

Thorngate, sitting now with fingers steepled, said, “I’ve agreed to see you, Don, for one reason only: curiosity. I wondered precisely what you felt you had to say to me that we haven’t covered already.”

Fighting down his anger at Thorngate’s supercilious tone, Tinker replied, “I want back into the program, Ed. If not as a flasher, then at least in my old role of historical consultant. I feel the whole program is going wildly adrift. You’re too isolated in here. You can’t see it. I’ve been out there for several months now, and what I’ve seen has been horrendous. The Institute and its discoveries are tearing society apart. You need a new perspective on what to release and what to hold back. I can provide that. “

Tinker found that he had been leaning forward in his chair with anxiousness. Now he sat back, trying to make himself relax, feeling he had stated his case as best he could.

Thorngate contemplated his own finely manicured nails for a moment before speaking. Finally he said, “Don, you just saw who left. There’s someone who, I dare say, is better informed about the condition of the world then you are from the streetlevel, and who has the exact perspective you are urging me to employ. Now, he has no problems with what the Institute is doing. He is completely satisfied that all our releases are helping to make a new and better society. Naturally, there is a little turmoil out there at the moment. You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, if I can employ a cliche. But we are confident that eventually things will settle down. Anyone who has seen reality with the assistance of CEEP—as you and I have—should be sure of that. “

Tinker tried to make Thorngate understand. “That’s exactly the trouble, Ed. You have to come down from the mountain to see exactly what’s happening out there. I’ve been off the drug for some time now, and have a better picture of things than you. “ A sudden intuition struck Tinker. “The President—he’s taking cheep too, isn’t he?”

Thorngate smiled. “Surely you can’t expect me to confirm or deny such an assertion, Don. Such intelligence is granted on a strict need-to-know basis.”

“Damn,” said Tinker, experiencing an abysmal sense of frustration. “I can’t believe the stupidity of it all.”

Thorngate chose to ignore the outburst. “As for choosing what to release to the public, you may rest assured that we extensively think through all possible repercussions of what we license. There are plenty of discoveries we have kept back, for reasons of national security and potential destabilizing tendencies.”

“Bullshit!” said Tinker. “You’re all crazy. You haven’t thought anything through.”

Behind Thorngate’s smile an iron mask appeared. “Don, I detect hostility and quite ignoble personal motives in your decision to request re-admittance to the program. In fact, I believe that you are after nothing other than easy access to a steady diet of CEEP, having found just how much you need it. No, we have already secured your replacement without any difficulty, and I am afraid I must deny your petition.”

“I could kill you now,” said Tinker, his mind a white inferno.

Thorngate just smiled, as if the threat meant nothing.

Tinker flashed then—in a primitive way—on the reason behind the Director’s easy affability in the face of such a threat. All the loose pieces, rumors and glimpses behind closed doors, fell into a pattern.

“You’ve done it,” Tinker said softly. “You’ve proven the reality of life after death. “

“Perhaps, “ gloated Thorngate. “Perhaps.

“Holy Christ,” whispered Tinker.

“Not precisely,” said Thorngate. The director stood and Tinker followed suit automatically. Thorngate showed him to the door.

“Goodbye, Don. Just sit tight, and watch what happens. “

He gave Tinker a nudge toward the corridor.

Beyond the secretary’s position, Tinker stopped and turned for a final look at Thorngate, through his open door. The small man was peering into a birdcage, coaching a bird to sing.

“Cheep,” he said. “Cheep, cheep.”

* * * *

Tinker stood in the lobby of the NIS like a Medusa-stricken man. Somehow he had gotten down from the fifth floor. His conscious mind had played no part in his movements, and whatever had brought him here had abandoned him. His mind seemed to be whirling apart now from the various blows he had lately taken. The loss of his job, and the loss of a Helen newly regained; his battle with Thorngate to make the Director see sense, during which the revelation had slipped about a life beyond this one; the mounting tide of psychosis that was engulfing the world—all these things were burdens he found suddenly insupportable. How he had ever hoped to discharge them, to make a difference, to free even so much as a little finger from the morass of personal and global despair—this he could no longer say..

There was nothing left for him here, Tinker realized, and he willed himself to move. Nothing happened. He felt ambivalent about this sudden failure. Perhaps it was better not to move at all.

Then the world started to come apart, as his senses deserted him. The busy scene before him suddenly disintegrated into various splotches of color, some of which moved in and out of his field of vision, like fragmented ghosts. Silence cloaked him.

This was it, Tinker had time to think. Aparadigmatic psychosis had claimed him.

A hand on his shoulden—a human touch among the noiseless alien shapes—reclaimed him for a time.

The world redonned its familiar guise, hiding its secret chaotic face.

Tinker turned.

Behind him stood Bill Witkin.

The man was stout and pudgy. He wore thick glasses on a perpetually nervous face. A few lonely strands of hair crossed his bald pate. As usual, he was having trouble keeping his shirt-tails in his bursting waistband.

Once Tinker had considered him a good friend, and felt that Witkin had reciprocated, sharing something more than the common bond of flashing. But that had been before Tinker’s betrayal of the trust of the Institute. How Witkin felt about him now, Tinker couldn’t guess.

But Witkin’s words and tone of voice seemed to signify that nothing had changed.

“My God, Don. Are you okay? I saw you from across the lobby and didn’t even recognize you for a minute. You look like hell. “

Tinker wiped acrid sweat from his brow, and spoke more bitterly than he had intended. “I’m all right now. As for looking like hell, I take it you haven’t been out much lately. This is the latest fashion now.”

Witkin seemed honestly puzzled by Tinker’s malice. He had always been somewhat baffled by humor or sarcasm, and the familiar sight of his blinking watery eyes behind the curved lenses restored to Tinker a little of his old self. Without stopping to plan his words, or consider what he was after, Tinker suddenly grabbed Witkin’s arm, seeking to re-establish that contact that had saved him.

“Listen, Bill, can you come with me now? Just for a drink. Or do they have you locked up?”

“Are you nuts, Don? Of course we’re not locked up. This is the Institute, not a prison. Sure, I can leave anytime.”

Tinker thought of the songbirds caged in Thorngate’s office, and wondered if he should disillusion Witkin. Deciding against it as being contrary to whatever inchoate goals he might have, Tinker said only, “Good. Then let’s go.”

He tugged on Witkin’s arm—his friend didn’t resist—and they left the building. The outer security guards watched them until they turned a corner, when Tinker stopped.

He felt irrationally proud, as if he had accomplished something dramatic and important. He had stolen a flasher right out from under Thorngate’s nose. Now they stood together on an anonymous corner, their breath pluming out—Witkin’s coming in laborious puffs—and coalescing in a frosty cloud. Tinker fantasized—for even his heightened olfactory sense was not this keen—that he could small leftover molecules of CEEP on Witkin’s breath. He felt strengthened by the hallucination.

Witkin freed his arm from Tinker’s grasp and said, “Hey, Don, I said I could leave if I wanted. But you didn’t ask if I did. As if so happens, I’ve got something to do—”

“Forget it,” Tinker interjected. “What I’ve got to tell you is more important. Just give me a few minutes of your time. We’ll go to that bar just down the block.”

“I don’t even have my coat,” complained Witkin.

“Here. Take mine.” Tinker shrugged off his own coat. Seemingly touched, Witkin put it on and shut up. They went to the nearby bar.

Inside the dimly lit bar, they took a booth and ordered drinks. Witkin wanted something to eat, and soon was devouring a corned-beef sandwich while Tinker poured out everything he had thought and seen regarding the psychic tremors shaking the globe.

When Tinker finished, he took his fist sip of beer to wet his aching throat. Witkin, done with his meal, looked up at the ex-flasher.

“Things can’t be as bad as you make them sound,” Witkin said. “Science will catch up. It’s just out of practice. Pretty soon the intellectual basis of society will be reformed. For the past eighty years—roughly since World War II—science—basic theorizing, if you will—has led the way, with technology following. First came the theory, then the practice. But it hasn’t always been that way. For a long time technology came first, then the theory to explain it. Take electricity, for instance. Batteries were developed before anyone understood electron-flow. Now we’re in a similar situation, and people have to readjust their thinking. It’s just a matter of time.”

Witkin sat back, full-bellied and self-satisfied. He jumped when Tinker banged his fist down on the table, and a few customers turned, looked, then turned away.

“Damn it, Bill, you haven’t listened to a word I’ve said. It’s impossible to incorporate the things the Institute turns out into any rational framework. Or if it is possible, it’s beyond our best minds right now. And people have come to need and depend on such a framework to make sense of the universe and their place in it. We need explanations that make sense, and there are none forthcoming. Science has claimed the right to underpin culture, and now can’t do it. Society is going to collapse. Do you want the world to consist of a bunch of brain-burnt savages huddling amid all these technological wonders that you and the others are so keen on producing?”

Witkin frowned. “Now you’re trying to make it sound like it’s my personal fault, when I’m only doing what I was hired to do.”

Tinker abandoned his previous tack, reluctant to alienate his final contact within the NIS. “Okay, I’m not blaming anyone. We’re in this fix—no matter how we got here—and we have to seek a solution. Part of the trouble, I think, is the deliberate restriction of the drug to only those with certain mindsets. For instance, what if we could distribute the drug to people with less of a technological bent? We know that there’s a certain correlation between what you’re looking for and what you get during a synchrogenesis experience. What if, say, a Buddhist monk were to take it? Who knows what saving philosophy he might come up with?”

Laughing, Witkin said, “Oh, great. I can just see it. Thorngate ushering in some guy in a robe into his office and sharing his prize sacrament with him. No way. You can’t expect me to seriously propose such a thing. In fact, I don’t see what I can do for you.”

Witkin crumpled his napkin, and Tinker felt his hopes dissolving. The pudgy man begin to get to his feet, and Tinker felt desperation overwhelm him. What could he say that would penetrate?

Witkin was standing by the table now, anxious to go. Tinker stood, and forced a last insane plea out of his bloodless lips.

“Steal me a dose of cheep.”

Witkin reared back, as if shocked. Tinker pressed him. “If no one else wants to work on the problem, at least I should be able to. I’ve got a feeling that I can make some progress with one final flash. Just one dose, Bill. That’s all I want—all I need to make some headway.”

“No,” said Witkin, obviously appalled. “No, I couldn’t. Don’t ask again. Goodbye, Don. Goodbye.”

Witkin rushed out, taking Tinker’s coat with him.

Tinker stood, feeling as if drowning.

Coins dropped in the jukebox, and a song began: “Flasher’s Fantasy,” by the Pair of Dimes.

Tinker felt a tic start in his left eye that seemed to keep time with the music. He began to laugh loudly, until they threw him out.

* * * *

A week went by. Perhaps the worst week Tinker had ever experienced.

In the world at large, the situation was deteriorating drastically.

Because more and more people were having first-hand contact with instances of aparadigmatic psychosis in a friend or relative, the suicide rate was rising exponentially. People were opting for self-destruction rather than madness, and the possibility that there would soon be no one left sane enough to care for them.

Rumors proliferated during this time, although official newsmedia tried to discourage them. But in stores and workplaces and over the internet, people exchanged speculation over what the NIS would release next.

Teleportation, matter-duplication, body-switching, artificial humans, magic spells, evil spirits, juju, voodoo… Distinctions were hard to make anymore between what was possible and what was not. People were not even making the attempt much now. Everything was starting to seem equally likely, and a kind of superstitious awe was beginning to replace rational thought.

Mass migrations flowed across borders, as people sought to escape the inescapable.

Tinker’s personal life was less dramatic, but still discouraging. He lay apathetically in his room, or occasionally summoned up the willpower to visit Helen in the hospital and make sure she was receiving proper treatment.

But such visits only served to accentuate his basic impotence, and he found them harder and harder to make. The recorder on which he had been dictating his memoirs gathered dust, forgotten.

One day, while he was trying to make patterns out of the flakes of paint on the ceiling, his phone rang. He had almost forgotten he owned one. It seemed to take forever to find the strength to answer it.

“Hello, Don?” said Witkin’s voice. Tinker didn’t answer, but the voice persisted anyway. “Listen, Don, things have changed. I’m going to do what you asked. Meet me in the bar in an hour. “

The connection was broken.

* * * *

But a new one had been made inside Tinker.

At the bar, Tinker was surprised to see New Year’s Eve decorations up. Was it past, or yet to come? How did anyone have the ability to think of such things? The resilience of the human animal was amazing.

Witkin was sitting in the same booth. He had mustard on his lips. Tinker thought he made an unlikely looking savior, and was quite prepared to find that the whole affair was an abortion, that Witkin had gotten weak knees at the last minute.

But then Witkin opened a fat hand and revealed an innocent little red pill in a tiny ziploc.

Tinker almost fainted, recognizing it for what it was.

He took it gingerly, not quite believing it.

“Why, Bill?” Tinker said.

Witkin looked like he wanted to cry. “It’s all my fault. Something I flashed on that they want to misuse. A stasis field. They’re talking about placing everyone who can’t adjust into storage, just like they were so much cordwood. I never envisioned this, Don. I swear I didn’t.”

“None of us did,” said Tinker. “None of us.”

* * * *

Tinker felt it.

The onset of the synchrogenesis mindset.

He had dropped the cheep minutes ago, sitting in his lorn, dismal room. The molecules of the drug had surged past his blood-brain barrier, riding corpuscles like kamikaze surfers in a bloody sea. Now Tinker could almost feel them latching onto the receptors in his cerebral cortex, inhibiting the part of his mind responsible for tightening the straitjacket of reality around him, loosening up other, more vital parts and promoting temporary exfoliation and linking up of the cell-assemblies responsible for creative thought. His reticular formation, down in his brainstem, was stimulated to produce a hyperalertness.

Tinker’s brain—axons, dendrites, synapses—was flooded with a new mix of neurotransmitters and neuropeptides. The soup that was self had been newly seasoned by a master chemical chef.

The world changed, but did not disappear. CEEP did not, like some drugs, necessarily cause the world to vanish. Rather, that which was external to Tinker was altered in an astonishing, yet familiar and inevitable way.

Everything seemed embedded in an invisible, yet somehow glowing matrix. The chair with the cracked back, the creaking bed he sat upon, the peeling ceiling, his own body—all seemed to communicate wordless meanings between themselves, via the ambient matrix. It was as if transmissive tendrils connected each self-existent thing into a whole that was much, much greater than any one part.

The universal tao was immanentized.

Tinker felt the tendrils extend beyond his petty room, into the wide world. There seemed, in fact, to be no end to their extent. He swore he could detect distant stars pulsing hotly as easily as he could sense the old woman cooking cabbage down the hall. If it was only an illusion, it was complete and seamless. Tinker felt able to roam the universe at will, examining its disparate-yet-synchronized parts at will. This synchronicity was what lay at the heart of the flash of’ revelation. Things formerly unlinked became fused and gave birth to new things.

Tinker sensed all his old anxiety drifting away under the effects of the cheep, to be replaced by a knowledge that whatever was, was right. Nothing needed explanations. Everything simply was.

God, no wonder everyone at the Institute felt things would turn out okay! Tinker strove to hold onto the knowledge from his other, more mundane state of awareness, the knowledge that those who did not share this drug-induced certainty were fumbling and dying, like children in a room full of dangerous machines.

What was the solution to their problem?

Better yet, what was the problem?

Only a correct statement could lead to a solution.

Tinker tried to put the world’s troubles into words.

One kind of brain—temporarily and partially achieved—was producing an environment—both mental and physical—which another kind of brain could not handle. Stated this way, there appeared only two solutions.

Restore the old environment.

Or make everyone’s brain conform to the new.

The first was impossible.

So it had to be the latter.

Feeling time running out, Tinker turned his perceptions inward on himself.

When he did, the world disappeared.

Tinker seemed adrift in his own brain. Each individual neuron was visualized by his altered senses as a glowing, colorful, busy node, discharging ions, channeling excitations and inhibitions. Tinker began to move among the fibrous jungle of thoughts and emotions and self.

Hesitantly, he plucked at a collection of blue neurons.

He was suddenly back in the first grade, sitting behind his desk, listening to the teacher lecture. Quick as it came, the evoked memory disappeared.

It appeared that Tinker could do things here inside himself.

So he got busy, rewiring.

When he was done, he came back to the world.

But not as his old self.

Tinker was the world’s first permanent flasher. No drug input necessarty to maintain this state.

He was alone for only moments.

Then he reached out.

Tinker’s brain was congruent with every other part of the universe. He was coterminous with every other individual breathing and fearing and dying on the Earth.

This was the unacknowledged heart of the CEEP flashing experience, masked by everyone’s egocentricity. This was the big picture.

Unity. Oneness.

He sensed Helen lying catatonic in her bed, Thorngate watching his birds, poor frightened Witkin trying to explain the disappearance of his daily dose of CEEP.

For a split second Tinker hesitated. Who was he to impose this solution?

He was them. He was everyone and everything that was.

And they were him.

Tinker’s new neuronal structure became a template that every other brain was simultaneously squeezed through.

Vast startlement, followed by instant comprehension, greeted Tinker’s rearrangement.

Hello, he thought with a smile. Hello, everyone.

And Happy New Year.