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Situation Comedies

Return to sender.

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Real Men eat Quail

XXXZ and

Will Self-My Idea of Fun

p.246

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S.S.Wireservice- News is totally connected. When the pot-bellied answer silently scoffs a wide grin laying in the center of the road, or wandering the byways of a city it gave up understanding, it does so talking to nobody in the lip movements of the fire truck speeding through its downtown. He will find this relic on the buy-answer-sell sheet of the last Auto Trader magazine. The fire truck sat out in the front yard of a junk collector's house for seven years, which was exactly enough time to decompose all the lovingly-lavished attentions a rival fire marshal from the neighboring city could smear on the cherry-apple 1948 truck. It had five thousand six hundred and seventy six miles on it when the painter acquired it. (It is always a word to preceed the containment of history.) He removed its seven hundred and fifty gallon tank home-welded in the sallow small-town need for more complete protection from its mother run-amuck nature, and re-chromed all the little tasty little bits nobody bothers to make anymore. He parked it confidently in the crack dealers' manhood zone, where bullets always seemed to skim the air resting peacefully on all its other sides. Wha-man, don't you be messing with the truck, you hear me? Ma kid brother loves that thing. "He's givin all the neighbo-hood a ride. They'a turn on dat siren, and pull da ice-cream lady over." The cops were much too happy a white man'd made-good in the projects. What's another scream-n-shrill with flashing lights every now and again? Makin' it feel like home sweet home. Then the news put him on the six-o'clock hour. Whatya make-o tat? Jimmy on the Jew-boys truck, pushin' tat-horn. Jack made it look like the kids were heroes, dressin' tem up in the little cute slickers.

The next story concerned a tree's search for height. Scientist A found results examined by research team B, that humans' decreasing allowance for discomfort in hot climates has provoked the extra use of air conditioners, which leak answers to the global warming sun dilemma of who'll be swimming and who won't in freon ozone depletion. It seems that trees follow gravity backward lower to the ground. It seems their rungs of growth-ladder climb slower, and companies were suddenly alarmed. Freon-diminishing profits meant something far more real than no trees a lot of water coming up someday. (But Jack with the fire truck didn't think too much about it when he got his self-absorbed video from the cable company.)

"That's me!" he told his friends. "I made the news!" Two weeks later he bought a thousand board feet of lumber for a deck he'd paint, with very toxic chemicals, that caught on fire that very night burning the place to the ground. "The center of Earth is a crystal. It's a giant consciousness of anisotropic iron." someone could have told him. "It goes with you, until it flips its poles.", and he would have perceived its news on one hand, dismissing it on the other. One hundred minutes later, a fellow looking at the ceiling noticed its moving. He closed his best shot aimed at customers' need to spill their wallets' contents, and said, "Sorry. Come back tomorrow. (It might not do you much good, but try anyway.)" as he shoved them out the door. "Shop suddenly closed." Koreans find this less odd that Americans. Five hours later, the entire building violated its agreement with gravity, after some customers got the sceamingest bargain of their lives. They hassled elastic waves for breakfast, going shopping early, so one keen eye could notice the pile of dust growing on the wall's shelf coming from a small crack in the plaster ceiling, which also caught the store's manager's attention because someone was who was a store manager himself right across town, stood there transfixed, with a pair of running shoes in his hand, staring at it. This manager was a member of the newly formed association of virtual immortals, who kept their DNA in argon-encapsulated bubbles costing approximately thirty six U.S. dollars a shot, in case any generations-to-come want to resurrect their progenitors (because pyramids are so blasted expensive these millennia.) He had his cereal, and warmed-over tea a moment before the thought the last time I thought this was when I nearly got in an accident came up Not wanting poor soggy cereal to help this association towards a full-blow disaster, he vowed to outlive his hamster, and immediately went to feed it. The whole DNA-thing seemed rather ominous, so he tried as any good man would (who claimed not to be superstitious), to put it forever out of his mime. It is true that 50,000 years of waiting in cryogenic amber is a long time to hope for resurrection, but they'd guaranteed the argonized geomes out to the ten-thousand years' timeline, when everything might be underwater by the air-conditioner folks as the polar caps begin a slow precipitous melt. As the manager leveled his sights on containing an egotistic genetic heritage where somebody would find it, something seemed wrong about his imminent shopping trip. Id's the same thing an inspector thought, thus red ink spilled on the proposal to level the Korean building in question when its showed signs of slow structural collapse. While the foundation inspector contemplated an obelisk on a mountain's top to keep his DNA from drowning in obscurity, cracks in the non-Fermar-reinforced concrete were hushed-up. It was the sort of thing usually ascribed to incessant mime-rendings large intellectual newspapers foist on an otherwise insolent public. That very day the stratosphere declined to assimilate another dose of fluorocarbon, some wackiod scenery got stuck into in the hippocampus cranium of a very stellar scientist that got his neurons thinking about themselves to the point where. . .and. . . Anyway, it made the news. Flash Gordon couldn't have done it better. In the furthest reaches of spiel for the masses, a pen struck upon the words: "It will be so powerful, the very first model will do a computation that requires more separate operations, than all the computers that have ever been built have ever collectively done." A month later it became apparent there were less steps involved to the end of the light at the tunnel than everyone believed possible. "It should be theoretically maybe true," he posited, "that suspending a jug of DNA molecules in one cubic yard of solution-(oh, about a pound or so)-will yield a big smart liquid cocktail that has (roughly) more memory than all the computers alive or dead; ever had." Jack the newsworthy fire truck man read this integral information in his daily paper, thinking it totally localized, and evolved beyond his ability to understand. In days to come, he thought heavily on its concrete forms of reasoning, during his workman's commute to the suburbs, which he called the absurds, when owners weren't in earshot. On his way to work one Tuesday, flying around one 17 m.p.g. corner of a low-throated exhaust roar, flashing lights called attention to the side of his road, where a policeman frantically waved with a body in cradled in his tight-knuckled grip. Hiding in the dark blue of his uniform, was a bright red stain of the dying dripped his whole way through with clots', no better late than never. Her car was only visible through a departure of thick overgrowth the defunct stretch of two-lane county road flattened. The policeman was so beside himself with frantic grief, he failed to notice the civilian nature of Jack's old, '48 fire truck. Painter heaved the brake, banged the door, woman with no face left drawled heartfelt good-bys, and passed from the cruel world Sgt. Clander shed his bitter hot tears for. The tender of auto history's four big rear wheels screeched, hunched, and hung his head in utter forgetfulness, as he tried to remember the last time he'd seen a plot so thick, the arresting officer cried. If someone had slapped his face, and yelled the most recent findings show testosterone only causing aggression problems when its levels are too low, he'd have turned his other wet cheek and forgotten its insult. Thing's were already swimming in liquid world. A computer chip-a truck-a vat of DNA-a dead woman's body still passing blood-what did it all mean, anyway? "Computers were large mirrors we projected emotions on (through numbers' outside relativities)." "WHAT?" And that's when Jack Stratz noticed his cherry apple truck needed a new paint job. He'd been holding out for the expressed reason of not dying too early. You know how... auto an mechanic's car embodies necessary work that never gets on any must do lists? Fix other people's; ignore your own. It's the same exact thing with painters like Jack. Jack thought, if I don't do the things I swore I'd do before he died, they'd keep collectively kicking death in the ass. Because he had to do them still. "Not yet. Can't go yet; got some things to attend to.", like the tough old bastards smoking filterless fags all day long in-between sips of nasty, rot-gut whiskey. He thought that until, he'd never like to see a amputee face eat car-crash shitagain, that is.

A very amusing, thing is scientists' worry our society is in an irreversable run from reason and science. Is it reasonable to a 1910 mime, submicroscopic stuff that's a blueprint of a complete human being, will someday be used as something that isn't even invented yet, that will incontestably win every mouth-open-stare hands down as it miracles itself of out of date soon to be announced as the mind-boggling science-fiction maven of calculation, by creating its own usurp in a vat of silently loquatious liquids carrying alchemical molecules encrypted with perversely-universal questions? When you tell the learned men of reason about nucleotides' ability to crunch proverbial numbers, you might as well be gibbering about mites running chetah-speed on hummingbird beaks, trying to space-travel flowers in their one-chance-only instant for lascivious extremes on single-night blooms, slovenly drunk on excess of pollen and sex. You might as well be commenting on Louis Coulon's eleven foot beard, or specifying some componentry of ENIAC, the ancient thirty-ton vacuum tube predicessor to our latest silicon-based ancient history. The poor, befuddled, 1910 men (because women weren't so "smarty pants" back then) will wonder if the 1990s versions of their so-called professions, have professed their positions to witch doctors. Even then, they had enough numbers at their disposal to realize the eastern third of the East Antartic ice sheet could slide into the sea, and raise the world's water table a very minimum of a hundred feet, but more opportune causes to ply with beckoned, than what if? teleological disastor equations. They didn't know a blessed thing about the fluorocarbons, or the eyes in the sky mapping everything. That modern-day scientists had theses on these obtuse subjects adorning their tables, only went to prove the point that a mind conceiving of an inert mineral, a siral helix jigsaw puzzle, or a fire truck being the world's most fantastic adding machine, must be completely out to lunch loco washed up and playing picnic with a few too many sandwiches. The only thing familiar about the whole proposition was the reflective color frequency, and the starter button in the floor, that made holding its brake, giving some gas, and clutching, that much more of the monster problem when you've stalled your cantankorous engine on a slick brick hill. Jack S. had a lot of sympathy for these dead men, and wondered what they'd think about his satin bow tie grounding out a lodestone-button silk shirt, when their wavelengths most definitely clashed. In all the old men's scientific honor, in the name of all things paranormal, Jack purchased a gallon of chartreuse paint, and took a tentative spray.

Meanwhile . . .

". . . In the collapsed rubble of the building in Korea, things were looking grim. The survivors, in clandestine pockets of reinforced workmanship, drank urine and told their death stories. Dust and darkness choked the hopes of those muffled, crunching, groans being ruddy-cheeked rescue workers clearing impossible wormholes to slither mangled limbs and lives through, instead of... "What is this!? We can't print this!" "nine days into the impossible, when a twenty-one year old was exumed, having crouched and drunk rainwater listening to others expire. Food and a Coca-Cola were all his hesitant glance met when their ears surrounded theories' eyes, that more people could be calling from their hundred foot rubble-piled graves. To loved ones left, dead hopes were reborn- ones so fresh from mourning, and that man would take liberties with a certain man's daughter who would insult the mayor-to-be of a small provincial hamlet, and he would paint his porch the same-exact color as the fire truck, based around a severe shortage of left retinal cones, and excess of emotional turmoil concerning the whole incident. Its trick of fate would connect the two people in an ethersplace, which is a logistical term for no place at all, but one that still requires an address box. It was likewise, cross-referenced with 1906, when the world speed aeroplane pilot Alberto Santos-Dumont roared his rickety contraption overhead at a blistering 25 and 2/3 miles per hour. Twenty nine years later, blond-loving Howard Hughes took his seventh late-day pass on six passes of gogojuice in a silver speedster H-1. Pratt & Whitney's 900 house-leveling horsepower engine quit, as Amelia Earhart looked down from 1000', and people gasped that gasp preempting flames and explosions. I was close, but Epiphany Howard strolled away with 352 and a smidge over 1/3, shaking his head. The old record was smashed to Friday the 13th bits. "Fixer up." he growled. "We're going all the way.", He sauntered off his airstrip right by the 1948 fire truck's chartreuse cover, which was at that time earning its keep as a neglected tarp flag-folded in a '31 pumper. Howard partied all night with some buxom babe(s), revved his engine in horrid weather's 2:14 AM of the next day, and dashed cross-country in seven and just under a half hours. This record yellowed the books for almost ten years. .

Roberto shook his head, and stared at what he'd written. "A computer chip; a old truck; a vase-with or without DNA. So what's the difference?" It was totally radical. Far too original for the papers. Nobody would dare to thin rationality to such an edge in 1910, or even, 1984. Thinking those worst kind of thoughts, he walked over, opened the refrigerator for a beer, and spilled his bowl of pretzels bending over. In fact, rationality hadn't been that thinking-thin since the Pharisees populated their bee-like catacombs under the proposed Egypian parking lot. The specially-prepared chartreuse scarab buried with its inventor-projectionist=master could average the times events ever happened, and deliver their mean in 1/2 the nanoseconds of the relatively simplistic DNA computers (without messy chemicals to mix). Yore had it the Egyptians helped themselves to anything and everything that showed promise as precomputational adding machine-trying whole rooms full of inanimate objects to deliver suitable replacements for the aging pyramid technology (only recently completed). They weren't exactly adding, as math's welcome mat defined it. They were more non-Euclidean, concerned with a confluence of events around certain key colors. The Egyptians had already found the biggest drawback of the DNA computer, which dissolved its secrets in time. They discovered firestruck trees got melancholy when asked excessively drawn-out questions, and roasted red bricks stalled mid-answer in the traffic of too many times and places. They hadn't even considered firetrucks yet, because there were so many kinds of pinecones, and river-fractured rocks to test out, but; if the Egyptians had conceived of a '48 pumper, or consulted Delphi (who Greeks swore by), they'd have settled its perfect color immediately. (They had an uncanny sense of mechanical decor.) It was true; Scarabs were far more portable than firetrucks or pyramids, but Scarabs inclination to favor future inventions' possibilities over past's articles of nature was sometimes annoying. That Jack, the unschooled painter-contractor, finally had an Egyptian's invention-idea, only meant the Egytians correctly assessed the need for firetrucks a few thousand years too soon. Scarab thoughts, like star light, had to filter down through the annals of time. "'Wrong-o.' Is what Ernie thought as fellow scientists said it couldn't be done." Ernest Walton and his chum proved the E=mc2 with car batteries, bicycle parts, glass tubes, and cookie tins, in a thinking requisite to the instructions of their time and splace. Society was now ready for what it wasn't ready to control, so Ernest and Sir John split the atom with whatever pulled a close-at-hand weight as possible tools for their job. (That's why pinecones and beetlebacks worked for the catacombing Egyptians.) When the U.S. secret service found eight tons of atom bomb material black-marketed out of somebody's New York basement, they forgot to take Ernie's backyard and basement garbage E=mc2 principle into effect. The world isn't ready for that yet, a maverick armchair scientist thought (sloshing his beer), so "unapproved" bombs can't (won't) function as destruction computers, even if they have the right stuff. Blurring the lines between a machine, "inert" organic material, and biology, is a class distinction in&out of an out-mind's basket only. For instance: the reluctance of the satisfiability problem to show its own cryptographic solution, is a lengthy logical string of jumble-descrambling in tooth and nail resistance to its own demise (death). In other terms, the immaterial proposition of satisfiability, is also a form of intellectual computer, which confounds the properties of its own enigma with more for-loops, trying to save its enlightened ass.

That's the article they considered printing. "A billion times as energy- efficient in a trillionth of the space. The improved, extra-new version will idle at 1070 steps, which is clearly more computations than humans have ever done on any machine history could even remotely define as computational. Just think of all the abacuses clinking rice scoops through the ages!" Roberto checked his palms for sweat, by dusting his brow with his pen hand. The magic marker swipe went unnoticed. People read about it on the Internet, along with the latest top-secret correspondence that somehow evaded encryption, and they still don't even know why. Last time, it detailed the internal investigation underlying a top-brass blame for the B-52 crunchdown on an aspalt-black field. Flying disks, hoops, javelins, boomerangs, skipping rocks, and H-1 planes fascinated the small minds like dancing flames. "We are increasingly obsessed with new toys-can you argue it?" The ego obsession magnanimous enough to share the secret, but: did you know the pilots' wives and kids were at the cold-war helm? The navigator was amused, until the plane lurched left (steeply) to the ground. It is no surprise to the investigating committee. They are used to alcohol joyrides, magnanimous negligence, lack of credentials, and a whole slew of unbelievable, smoking-wreck stories. What they're mostly concerned with,(i.e. encryptive satisfiability), is why the autopilot was off, who's going to pay, who's gonna fall, and how will yet another A.F. bungle get hushed-up? Someday, the declassified media-opened records will be plundered, like the Azore treasure ship riches-plundered, like the Mayan, and the Egyptian graves before them. It was all quite dramatic. We'll root around their dirt, and all the surliest secrets will be lost. In our own improbably-remote starlight-filtered-down future, we'd actually Protect underwater ghost treasure ships for a living (dead) museum that people will someday, be able to visit. In our meantime, we'll loot the hell out of those ships, just like the Neptune's pirate storms that sunk them. Cold water preserved what we'll call archeology one day, and grave-robbing the next. Roberto was officially distracted. He'd completely lost the thread of his computer story.

On day 11, they yanked a girl from the rubble. Koreans were frantic with live-die-live-die, waiting forever while dozers raised thick screens of doubt. Surely, their blood relative was strong enough to crouch for two weeks in a 16" by 4' splace eating cardboard and sucking moisture from a well-placed wool blanket. Watching others die in faceless black, grim-fairy-taled the fantasy of someone else whooping it up in a sealed-off basement' food storage vault. Imagine, DNA Molecules Creating Scientific Answers From Their Nucleotidal Sequencing! Seventy digit binary numbers can handle a whole lot of obscure facts. No, that's totally wrong. Roberto smears the election ballot ink all over his face, trying to wipe the visage clean. 'A computer is something we externally impose on an object.', he double-quoted. How do you convey that to lay-people? He missed his own joke. He didn't know that Avon makeup consultants invade the Amazon seeking chartreuse wraparound color assimilations, thinking they're selling lipstick, and the Rwandan priest decides who'll die and who won't, based on mother's little gorls' sexual favors, without consulting his insatiable need for the color of the cheap printed cloth his selected sex-contestants are inevitably wearing. Their hard night split-legged always includs a rap with a like-hued bright-green vase. They awake, thinking their heads spoke the brutally strong booze (but daughter's sore too?). The whole world is being surreptitiously pointed to the answer beyond the current answers' fad, and only Jack read the loony writing on the telephone call that never truly rang.

It's a certifiable bitch having a phone that never rudely rings at its worst possible time. You kind'a miss a good mean and nasty yell at an inanimate object, and what's more, you aren't even sure if the damn thing works, let alone the fear nobody wants to call you because you're such a terrible looser. Roberto spent two days calling his editor, waiting for a little more late-breaking information, before giving up in disgust. He kept dreaming about 24" nightcrawlers exploring the intestines of the victims too trapped to move. Who told him those wiggly nocturnal things live ten loathsome years!? He thought it because . . .

In the rubble of the collapsed Korean building, things were looking grim. The survivors, in clandestine pockets of reinforced concrete workmanship, drank urine dreams, and told death-rebirth stories. Dust and darkness choked hopes the muffled crunching groans were ghost rescue workers clearing impossible wormholes the slithering miniature limb, and severed second lives would breeze through. In a paroxysm of sleep, one victim heard his mother calling from the grace of re-entry to another karmic cycle Earth. "I'm coming in son! Qu Chi here-watch out!", and he dreaded a pregnant wife's squirm, in an oblivious wonder of where he was. Qu Chi felt a violent kick, as another luckless world-traveler, read imaginary letters in post restanté boxes.

Dear Charlie,

My goodness, such a long time has passed! People keep asking me where you are & I say, "Uh. . . I..." Israel or Egypt or Thailand or Hawaii or (?) Honestly, I had no idea you'd be in Korea. So much has happened internally, I sometimes fear I will overload to make myself forget it all.

Last night, I had a dream I was a night crawler groping down a hot sidewalk's summer evening looking for something, but I was blind.

He would never know the image. A decade squiggle sunk in his sixty-inch grave, knowing its one-tenth life was over. Twenty-five centimeters of its blind man's bluff traversed cold sidewalks, foraged mulch to the end of an alley leading to Kafka's castle that fell by the same position which wrote the letter beforehand, and shooed some other customers out after it. Year 2090: they look back at the poor, ignorant 1910ers, who will be no different than us 1990ers, and laugh at the archaic nature of our precious DNA machines. We thought them an impossible distance from being buried live crunched-up next to such odiferous rotting corpses. He'd say good-bye as he wormed his way past this, (his world) into their next, as day sixteen brought a lady from her 16" by 4' blackness. Hallucinating from lack of food, she swore she didn't drink a drop. Naked, all she could worry for was cover. Actually, Migel was a nice man, before he read her story.

"Just like that, my dream wedding had become the worst nightmare of my life!" the Australian news quoted her, and through some bizarre twist of fate, Migel realized the mosquito marauding his paper-reading in the outhouse, was connected to the girl they yanked from the rubble. The bug kept going for his hairy bare calf-he'd swat it back with the force of a Mack truck hitting a Volkswagen, to which the drunken bug would stagger through air, trying to recover. As soon as its shallow wits were about it, die-bomber mozzie headed straight for the hairy leg again. Ten times Migel hit the bloodthirsty Missis away; each time he returned to his article about the bride, who treated her guests to a seventeen causal casualty lottery, where four of the poor human buggers died later.

"I've never seen anything like it - those women just went nuts..." her pastor said. "Four were trampled to death-" SLAP! Migel plucked the corpse from his black kinklack hair. "Eleven's a charm." He pulled up his pants, cursing like the last six times he'd been there cursing the lack of usable toilet paper, and forgot to refill the coffee can.

"Women an their gawd-darned eggs!" he fumed. (He thought only the women bugs bite, and they only bit when they were around men, thus associating the reason to, with the act of doing it.) "That bride didn't know the forces she unleashed- Flower 'Who's lucky like me?!' cat leapt out'a the bag an' good-olemother nature ran amuck!"

"She threw her bouquet and all hell broke loose!" an eyewitness recounted. Migel swung the spring-driven clapboard door open with two, or three times a departure's requisite force-it ricocheted back before he got out, banged across his distracted forehead, and suddenly-everything was clear.

"It wasn't any crazier than Claude Maurchette's will!" Roberto whined. (He made a fortune on perfume and wine.) "My story makes much more sense than leaving millions to a donkey!" (17.3 million, to be exact.)

"Look Roberto," he editor pacified, "I'm not saying your article is wrong, I'm just pointing out computers make much less than donkeys sitting on private marble toilets with heated seats. People just understand that sort of thing."

Pierre lives in a 36 room mansion gobbling $125 per ounce truffles snarfed from gold plated troughs in-between gallivanting to Paris' best restaurants in a fancy, human-chauffeured limousine.

"Roberto is fuming!" Roberto said. "Roberto wants to chop his readers' useless heads off, like that father did to his son he twenty-nine times stabbed in the back (not too many people wanted to count how many in front). That made news. Roberto wants to do it right by the road, where he did, where the truckies will see, leaving his butchered corpse of people's convoluted interest in a bloodless heap, while their bleached-white socks are still Ultra-Cheer brite (unlike the kid's). That dad was me, pulling over and hacking the devil out of my editors, while the really obedient kid brother who's really a newspaper's audience, waited for his turn-so nice and-mind-your-parents neat. That's what your stinkin' bodies holding up newspaper's pages want."

"I agree; don't get so testy." His editor didn't say, because Roberto never said anything first. Editors must lecture all new idea kinks in the public's imagination, straight. Their job is to save people from the five syllable ram-if-i-cat-ions of breakneck technologies, until it was far too late.

"Well how do I rev my computer subject up, then?" Roberto asked meekly.

"I'll tell you what Roberto;" his editor big-brothered him, "Find some crackpot genius we can human-interest onto people's trashiest sides. We'll slip in the computer stuff around him."

That's when Roberto found the fire truck. He'd never seen a half red-something color in distinct blotch-opposition to... (chartreuse?). To Roberto, it was as new as discovering Ute Indians, were Utah the state's namesakes. The headless kid's starched dress shorts lay peacefully by the fuming Roberto's mind. He paused there to inspect the carnage of his painfully-acquired copy, then tears it in half, dropping letters here and there. The unremarkable thing about the story was the way he recognized the prop. The prop was needed, to support his story. He thought it was related to Quantum Mechanics' strong and weak baseball principle, which postulates watching baseball games might influence their outcomes both singularly, and over time.

"If you miss a game, will you having watched the fifty before it continue to affect outcome of the one you missed?" It was an observer-based reality out-loud question to his nonexistent audience. "Assume language is the compiled, updated version of a lot of pictures." he said. "Pictures are probably how our pre-language minds thought about things, until civilization created this bizarre gap where translation to the rather severe abstraction of words occurs. Pictures are abstractions as well, but, you know... when you're desperately trying to think of something it's right on the tip of your proverbial world-of-words tongue, but it just won't come out? You can see it, because it's trapped in the splace of the picturethought, to wordthought translation. Roberto decided, as surely as yore's lost in the fumbles of handling its fragile thousand-word pictures forward, thru time.

"I'm going to bypass the translation." he said. But he's not even sure what the question should be, for he didn't know how to ask one with out a crutch of words. He closed his eyes and fingered the place that supposedly didn't exist, (calling it splace) for the subconscious to meet him in. Suddenly, a vivid image of the world's most horrible color coursed his brain.

"It's easier to tell a man about a billion dollar congressional bill, than explain to a woman why the toothpaste cap is off." Migel mimicked him, (flicking an imaginary cigar) and they laughed heartily. It was because he quoted W.C. Fields at every available opportunity, that Migel's breadth of wry witticisms traversed slopes even fearless conversationalists faltered on. Migel Matisse Littlefield was basically an untended rose bush, full of thorns and growing out of control.

Migel definitely had a sound argument for hitting his video editor. He'd have walloped the stubborn fellow with a black brass-knuckle sandwich, and been surrounded by righteousness. "Anything a billion times as energy efficient in a trillionth of the space, needs to make the evening news!" He's just learned about the DNA competitor to silicon, and he instantly recognized TV as the only practical solution, where 1014 words fit in ordinary test tubes. "Nobody's going to understand it." his editor said. "Ten to the fourteenth doesn't mean anything to Joe Shmoe. Face it Migel, most people are only computer literate enough to switch one off by pulling out its plug. We have to serve commercial sponsors' needs, and that means news the Shmoe family will understand. Just stick with the facts man-leave science to the scientists."

Two weeks before, Migel met Roberto. They were covering the popcorn capital's blockbuster story in Sac City, Iowa.

"It was six feet high, weighed more than a Volkswagen, and girthed at 22 feet. 1,020 pounds of sugar mixed with 425 pounds of corn syrup was melded to an unweighable amount of industrially-popped popcorn, creating what is quite possibly, man's greatest-ever blob of sticky, edible crunchiness. The Guinness Book of World Records, on hand for the event, proclaimed it: 'The largest known popcorn ball in the world.', as 35 exhausted volunteers wiped ten hours of kernels from their sugar-soaked hairnets. Experts, convinced of the mammoth ball's relatively short mortality, have already petitioned the Iowan Second Battery Light Artillery Civil War Reinactment Group, to blow an iron cannonball through its gooey mess, should mold, or premature sag bring untimely demise to the marvel. Speculation is already rife whether the syrupy orb will consume a cannon's projectile, or ultimately succumb to it, while others wager the crunchy ball's unwieldiness will harden, and last forever. In any case, all sweet-tooth rodents (with big ideas) will be held in abeyance with a small electric fence until further notice. For more information, or schedules of viewing times, contact Sac City's Chamber of Commerce."

Roberto and Migel were two chili peppers born aloft, rattling in the wind, dangling from the same plant. They immediately recognized each other's expressions, as an ambassador of the 110 year old popcorn industry read his canned speech of his latest- greatest accomplishment. Newspapers and television stations snapped pictures, sped video film through updated satellite links for news-hungry viewers, and opened their sack lunches.

"Where you from?" Migel asked Roberto.

"San Bernadino, originally."

"And now?"

"Mars. Now I'm sure of it." Roberto deadpanned.

"Yea. Me too." Migel laughed. "People are dying by the too-many-to-count in myriads of foreign wars, and we're reporting on popcorn balls. It makes you wonder about our metaphors, sometimes." Roberto liked Migel. He had what it took to say what everybody wanted to think.

"That's awfully honest, for a slimy media jock like myself."

"Somebody's gotta not do anything but talk about it."

The man right in front of them was a big fat rolly-polly sort of fellow with a grass-green shirt that said: American Mathematical Society on its brilliant, eyecrashing yellow stencil. He was heaving a giant roast beef sandwich into a gaping chasm of a mouth, holding his sensitive microphone as far from the crinkle of plastic, and subdued mashing of teeth, as he could. The shirt was so damned loud, Roberto forgot what he was thinking.

"Some color, huh?"

"What? . . ."

Roberto was flabbergasted.

"That's what I was thinking."

"What were we talking about before?"

"I don't know. I was too embarrassed to ask."

"Something about that shirt . . ."

Indeed, it was an odd anima. It fairly shouted something into each man's brain. Brian Jocker lurched to the right, holding that mic as far as was humanly possible forward, while he groped unsuccessfully for a warm bottle of Super Cherry Cola, open and getting very flat by a light brown sack. If either Roberto or Migel were microbiologists, the hydrogensulfide-loving bacterium Beggiatoa would have come to mind. (It being so chemosynthetic, no sun-loving green photosensitive material was called out for.)

"Yea. Have you ever seen a worse color on a human being?"

Roberto whispered it, but by some fluke of acoustics, the whisper bounced from this to that, to this to that, landing straight on Mr. Mathematic's microphone. Editors found it very difficult to remove from the ambassador interview signal, mixed as it was with shuffling, crunched bags, and public address system feedback. That's definitely there for a distinct reason, the assistant audio engineer decided. If he hadn't had a cross-wire in a crucial DNA genome, Marv Redburn could have assembled his riddle. Had science done any more than decipher the complete gene situation of the very basic one-cell Hemophphilus organism, science might have noticed his aberration, and witlessly corrected it. Unfortunately, the world wasn't properly prepared for the Antichrist yet, because they were expecting it (him?) in every next minute; and in that fateful twist of biblical prophesy, Red became a fixed momentum of slow-moving treadmill in industrial over-production of future sound engineers. Marv would eventually nine-to-five his entire existence back into worm food, overbearing the burden of having a sneaky suspicious feeling he'd missed a great opportunity in life. The unspeakable tragedy (blessing?) he would never tome to history's recollection, was science didn't believe certain fractures of situation, and thus sequence (as far as DNA would be concerned), are totally self-correcting under special sets of circumstance. All Alvin had to do was be really bad for two or three weeks, and his destiny geome (burnt like a wiring system's fusible link) would correct itself. His whole existence was just in case, science started to believe the impossible.

An excellent phomenological example of this, was witch Matilda's 16th century reincarnation of Elizabeth Bathory, who repaired a bulging fourth dimension strictural memory-collapse, when she cut herself seven times in six days' surrounding the old witch's birthday. As a partially-revived devil's helper, Elizabeth managed to slaughter 654 girls to bathe an unebbing beauty in their virginal blood. Hungaria hates to fess up such dark notoriety, but in other times and splaces, such Bathorian exploits begot full historical commendations, numerous granite statues, and scholastic studies in proper destiny-block correction.

Roberto was unilaterally unconvinced. He'd read all sorts of crazy things in a lifetime of media snooping, making commendations on almost none of them. King Tut's shoes, found in the boxes lost for too many years to believe in a museum's vault, seemed too commonplace to warrant special distinction. "Grave robbers booty." he proclaimed. "They didn't know the value until now." and it was entirely true. When Howard Carter removed the blocked passage to Pharaoh Tutankhamen's tomb in 1922, he couldn't possibly have vaulted its architectural assay as a brilliant cosmic gateway to another earthly dimension. He was too awed by the golden artifacts that awed the rest of the world's shallow eyes to understand their colossal value of fashions stiffly crunched in death bureaus from the last series of ransackings (check robbers vs. archeologists). The first tomb robbers got the sacred scarab. This was ascertained by a witch nobody had the wherewithal (courage) to believe, who was called in previous to Dr. Gillian Volgelsang-Eastwood 1991 appointment to, "Please do whatever you want with these damn things." She took one look in their dust-of-the-ages box, and said: "I went out, and demanded a cup of tea." right after she managed to communicate her scrambled emotions to a fellow colleague. Unlike the Maya treasures that were indelicately looted with guns backhoes and surveillance aircraft (never to surge to science's surface again), Mr. Carter died peacefully in 1939. His fifteen hundred photos, twenty-five hundred notecards and untold drawings, released their hold on the scientific imagination as his enthusiastic soul became ether again; thus, they sent the shoes C.O.D. to Oxford, to sit in the musty basement. Had a certain witch been asked to examine the remnant of gold-trimmed sandals (although only recently admitted to the Wicca circle of San Francisco adepts) her intuitive training as a HIV transgender counselor of heroin addicts, would have detected a slightly drug-skewed bent to the feet they once fell in like with. One night, searching out the perfect cuppa coffee on Vick's Nyquil and Perkidans, she had a foreclosure of the event that never happened, listening to theory's radio. As it turned out, Tut died of complications leading to too hard a vision from the Soma of many legends' description. The Pharaoh's consultants overdosed him slightly, trying to find the meaning of "Firetruck", as described by a disembodied Indian entity not yet physically born by the name of Babba-G, who dropped in for a little visit. Since pharaohs were part-God, they withstood enlightenment better than mere scientifically-minded human type mortals.

"That's what she told me, and I didn't believe a bit of it."

"What if it had been on TV, instead of a radio interview?"

"Then I would have called it a hoax." Roberto spat.

He's rather hard on the pedigree of their material, Roberto's boss one night mentioned, of his ability to edit fledgling's stories beneath wings. I think he should stick to writing, and leave the dirty bits to us.

"Yea, I was thinking that too. It's as if I've seen that shirt before, or maybe just its hue, in some bad Technicolor dream."

""'Hue" is a kind word. I'd call it a monstrosity."

Roberto and Migel exchanged numbers and parted ways, right before Brian Jocker lit a nasty fart leftover from too much pickled horseradish the feast the night before dealt him. One week later, the Nation's News ran a story about the popcorn ball's disappearance, and a plot by witches to use its beauty for surreptitiously veiled threats against the politically incorrect government. Migel called Maya-reborn leader Roberto, and told him about it. There, on that phone, they both had their last laughs, on stranger than fiction things.

He was detained on a business errand for three hours. On the fifth turn through his office, Roberto noticed the message light flashing, and tried to ignore it. If the place had been better lit, three little winks (meaning three people called) would have gone innocuously-unnoticed in the dark little corner the phone machine had been unceremoniously banished to.

Beep!

"Hey Roberto, this is Sammy. What'dya say he hit the Lone Palm tonight for some drinks? Call me."

Beep!

(It was one of those old, annoying machines you couldn't adjust the volume on.)

Beep!

"Roberto, this is Migel Matisse-remember, from the popcorn ball witchhunt? I've got something you should probably see. 'S-got to do with the fat guy's green shirt, I mean, the color of it. Remember how we both forgot . . ."

Beep!

"If you'd like to make a call, please hang up. If you're having difficulty making a call, please contact your operator. If you'd like to make a call, please hang up, if you're having difficulty. . ." And so on. Why the machine needed to cut Migel short, recording three or four minutes of the everlasting phone idiot-loop, missed Migel's sense of the sublime perfectly. He was waiting for the call that never arrived on another line Roberto didn't have a number for.

"Where the hell did I put that number?!"

Roberto pulled his bedroom to bits, trying to find that scrap of napkin with Migel's number. Directory assistance had no Migel Matisse listed when Roberto was at his wits end, so Sammy D. was called.

"Hey Sam!"

"Yea, I'm game. Everything's going to hell."

"Sounds bad. I'll be right over."

(An hour later.)

"Roberto, gin's the best way to forget stupid things."

They tested its equation in tall-stemmed cones of exquisite paint-thinner martinis-a drink that should have borne a surgeon general's warnings. Samuael tried to make his friend feel better.

"Did you check your pockets in the laundry hamper?" trying to pacify the obvious, before it hit Roberto square in the forehead. Try the warsher Roberto! Roberto the scatterbrain completely forgot its load there!

Even in alcohol-land, the stink of clothing's fermentation hit him as a Mack truck's big shiny bumper. The obscure metaphor (that male musk oxen ram each other with the force of a large car hitting a brick wall at 17 m.p.h.) made it that much more twenty-times the insane. Finally, Roberto was sure some destiny had slipped quietly through his battering-rammed fingers.

2:00, next day, seventeen miles to the not really getting it bust-listening anyway, a shapely doctor talks to her interrogator, who's hurriedly taking notes of atrocious spelling, converting intellectually-overloaded terms into the requisite sixth-grade reader level. He's also checking doc-babe out, wondering, with the other unused 99% of his scatterbrain, if physicians ever do it with their patients on the short, crinkling butcher-paper'd beds.

"The interference we had from the drug companies was amazing. I had a man from a big German firm walk in here and pull out his checkbook-a great gold-embossed thing, saying, 'I'll make it out right now for a hundred million.'" A hundred million stropped pencils short. He could see her nipples didn't harden to the thought, through her sheer, under-white-gown blouse.

"A hundred million?" Roberto stammered.

"And what did you say?"

"'It's not for sale!', of course!"

She glared at Roberto, like his scruples were twisted.

"Do you know how much money you could make cornering this discovery?" she stabbed back.

"Ah; no. But they seem to."

He wasn't even sure this 'discovery' was such, let alone describable to a general audience weaned on mayhem, chopped heads, and lawyers twinkie-excuses for mass-murder. If he didn't understand it, why should his readers?

"You don't seem to understand what I'm talking about."

(Her sense of the obvious was uncanny.) "This is a pilot test, that could eventually cost as little as thirty dollars. It will find single cancer cells in your body. Get that? Not just tumors, but single cells."

(She backed off for emphasis.) "Ever heard of the substance A-mass? No; you wouldn't be staring at me so blankly if you had. A-mass is. . ." She appears stumped for an analogy, furrowing her beautiful blond brow while seemingly reading my shirt. ". . . nitro additive for racing cars, except it goes in blood, instead of the gasoline"

She was sharp. I was wearing an old, ratty 64 FUNNY CARS Puyallup Raceway T-shirt. "You give a patient an injections of A-Mass (after two positive tests for cancer), and it revs up their immune system. A-mass the difference between trying to figure out a lengthy equation on your relic of a LED watch calculator, and a Cray supercomputer. Like your watch grinding out numbers, bodies combat cancer cells slowly and ineffectively. Our single-cell test shows cancer is just beginning, and that could mean only a couple of cells worth. A-mass injections nitro drag-race cancer's runaway growth rate, before genetic the interruption even starts its engine."

"Why do you have to do two of your tests?"

Roberto was getting it now.

"Because our test falls under Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. We can know a patient has cancer cells, but we can't know how many, or where they are. A first positive test might might indicate a single mutated cell, someone's body will neutralize; or, it may be blowing its horn on a fat, fist-sized tumor. The second test addresses the reality that cancer cells go through us all the time."

It was a chilling thought.

"Yea, I've got it; wow. By the way, who's Heisenturg? My readers will want to know."

"Heisenburg. A physicist."

I didn't see what it had to do with medical science. "Anyway, never mind about that. We're dealing with the prevention of cancer here, and the cancer institutes are running scared. We're threatening to stop the lifeblood of their endless grants, canceling whole careers of obscure cell-wall research. They want to suture a wound we've created in their 'get-well' monopoly, by pulling our string tight."

Roberto involuntarily winced at her analogy, and looked at his cheesy, 1970s LED watch.

"I've got the situation down. Well see what we can do on the article. Can I call you?"

"For what?"

She didn't get to be a doctor by being stupid.

"Ah, more information, if I need anything." he stammered.

"You can pick me up at 7:00, otherwise, don't bother asking. I'm on call again at midnight."

Roberto got up with jaw that dropped.

"Huh?"

(A little slow on the pickup-two points off already.)

"Great! Sure!"

feeling like a rat in a laboratory maze.

"Anywhere special?"

"Your choice." she elected. "And by the way, better check your watch batteries-I hear they never lasted long in those things."

(It was the watch that got her?)

"Gotta run." she said, sweeping up a pile of patient's folders. "7:00."

"Pick you up here?"

"Where else?"

She was a white witch, which put a definite spin on the whole popcorn institute's worst worries. When the Uranus discovery at the pyramids came to media first light, she scoffed the lack of intelligent repartee the asp of an astronomer, and wasp of an archeologist, who together backed up the preposterous claim of that maverick Egyptologist, foundered by. . . Bane knew (without consciously knowing) that the small shaft of burial chamber light aimed straight at the Neptune-Uranus equation, conjunction in the perfect geometry of the triangle of major pyramids, not forgetting the frozen puppy her father's best friend found at the bottom of a frost-free freezer, were all sublime integers in a much larger computation. The baby cur had been there, nicely wrapped, for eleven years. Young daughter said she buried the stillborn thing, but mother defrosted what she thought was a Cornish game hen, and screamed the harmonic equivalent of chartreuse so loudly, all her neighbors came running. Daughter'd just read a book on mummified animals in school. She wanted her puppy to live in a house for the dead, like Egyptian animals sometimes did. The freezer pointed straight to the intersect of several historically significant stars. . .but daughter knew all this without knowing anything about it at all. Daughter claimed she forgot about the puppy incident, until her mother called, full of superstitious high blood pressure.

A-mass, A-bomb . . .it was getting too confusing to deal with.

"'You say their project rivaled ours, on one-one hundredth the romance and resources?'"

"'You're right on target.'"

"He had an annoying way of choosing clichés too wisely."

"'We had submarines delivering radioactive ores from Germany, when we saw there wasn't enough in our country to build a bomb of our own.'"

"'Just one big, happy, yellow-glowing submarine, huh?'"

"Did he get it?"

"Are you kidding? This guy was still on some god-forsaken South Pacific island (in his mind) holding out his gun, and subsisting on roots, for the glory of the Emperor."

"Retire, on no pension, after eating and breathing radioactive dust on a giant long-haul underwater tin can. Sounds great."

"I was thinking the same thing."

"What else did he say?"

"He said, 'The allies caught one of our deliveries, but its officers of the Japanese Imperial Guard took their lives, rather than give their country's secrets away.' then he sneered a little."

"How come?"

"He was Japanese-American on paper only. I think he gave me the bad look to emphasize US atomic secrets' turncoat-patriots (if you know what I mean), but I wasn't sure."

"That's very interesting." she said. "I once heard Japanese women sewed giant balloons at the end of the war, when things were really getting desperate."

"Giant balloons?"

Roberto is convinced his life is going from silly, to much sillier.

She sipped her fizzy Italian soda, then combed her fingers lazily through her golden, unleashed mane. "Boy, it's good to be out of there."

"Where; Japan?!"

"No, the hospital, silly."

He recovered its obverse logic, from the fumble of metaphor.

"So why did they sew balloons? for anti-aircraft protection?"

"Nothing so practical. They launched the ad-hoc sewing in strong meteorology, with small explosive charges attached."

Roberto imagined a virulant message in a bottle of the world's largest, storm-whipped, 3-D aerial sea.

"Hoping stray aircraft would hit them?"

"No. They sent their balloons to America on the jetstream winds. I think one actually killed some people in a little Oregon tree-cutting town."

"Sounds like a cheap version of the V-2 rocket."

"That's the German weapon?"

Roberto finally knew some rocket-scientist stuff.

"Yup. I've heard . . ."

But she's still way off on WW2 Jap-antics.

"Do you think they were saying something with the balloons about possible A-bomb deployments?"

"By blowing up loggers?"

She pressed on with her bizzarre line of reasoning.

"What about this nuclear butcher you interviewed. . .?"

He was a butcher after all. Al's quality meats on Ninth and Main.

"So? You're saying they wanted to drop their yet-to-be-invented A-bombs by home-sewn balloon?"

Her conversation was very confusing, going round and round, till it suddenly digressed at eleven o'clock.

"Better make some time, if you want to do anything else."

I was exhausted. She'd rolled my brain like dough, she now proposed to fill with something.

"Can I reset my watch backwards?" I hopefully ployed.

"You can, but it may not do you any good."

So I learned about the Japanese plan to use a Submarine, carrying a featherweight suicide plane that was specially designed spray San Diego with plague fleas, by RapidFAX the very next morning. It came a little too early, adorned with a hastily-drawn picture of a watch face attached to a stick-figure man. "Time's running out." it said, with a cartoon balloon. "Your war's about to end."

He through noisome, morning pre-coffee haze: 'Am I really this desperate? The woman's weird.' Then squished a soggy bagel stick thoughtfully, into a perenially-open apriot jam jar. 'What would I do to get his number? Why, I'd call the Chamber of Commerce! Of course!'

Marsha, whose new mane smacked of a fresh brushing, whinnied as Wolfbane mounted her. Jumping and prancing haughtily, pretending (as always) it was the first-ever time she'd been ridden, Bane lathered the horse to her utmost fantasy, jumping low-walled Tilden fences of deep green growths, flashing passion, her cheeks flushed with the London nobody can breed from a stiff black vestment, rider's boots, leather britches, and a ridiculous hat. She roared into the stable sometime later, face and shiny knee-high boots, staggered with scratches and mud.

"BANE! How many times have I told you not to do that!"

She did it anyway. It was the wavelength of sex.

"Now go cool that horse down!"

Bane tossed her own mane at the stable owner's poetry-prose of matron duty, gave some fifteen year old five bucks, and thus, ran her hand along etiquette roughly.

"Yore that held the horse-throbbed clit of thye yongster who calmed my wild mount, will not have the sting of the poison (oak) the beast, in its mischief, did find." Wolfbane had to recite, later the tired-leg evening. She had the flash of vision wild young youth would self-sow oats without washing her groomed-horse, poison oak hands. This acid-etched knowledge came five hours later, astride a high-powered motorcycle on the edge of exiting Oakland's hairball 880. A spell for the possibly itchy-crotched girl, helped Bane's Wicca equivalent of karma. White witches had to watch their cosmic demerits carefully.

A huge-bellied man from the First Baptist Church pulled into the gourmet coffee joint Wolfbane habited, to wont a pound of decaf. There were six countries' wares to choose from.

"I don't know; I want coffee-coffee decaf. You know."

The Italian owner, didn't.

"Sir, you would like dark-roasted 'coffee coffee', or light roasted? 'You know', there is a large difference."

"Dark; I don't know-Etheop-ian. You tell me!"

"We'll say Colombian then. Will a pound do?"

"Make it three, and could you grind that?"

He answered in the hurry of wonting to get the hell out'a there.

"What kind of grind do you need?"

"Huh?"

"Drip, French press, or espresso?"

The button-collar preacher was way out of his league.

"Percolated, you know. Boiled."

The store owner was aghast.

"No sir! You don't really use paper filter boiler pots!?"

It was an insult to coffee science.

Some other patrons joked in that vein.

Thus preacher got preached at, for mishandling the spirit of Italian's dark liquid arts. Preacher didn't like to hear such sermon; but missed that point completely. He bought a French press, just to not look like an idiot throwing away the essential oils trapped in his bleached-white filter.

. . .'The funniest thing about comedy, is you never know why people laugh.'"

"Who said that?"

"W.C. Fields."

"Profound."

"I think so."

Things were not going well for Roberto. His father had babbled nonsense for two hours on a prime-time collect phone call that was just lucid enough for the operator to think he should take it.

"'Sure, I'll accept it. Hello? Oh, hi dad.' What a nutcase. What a ninny I am." he rants on his way to the urinal for a well-deserved piss, where he makes the mistake of reading the company name on the cute blue plastic bulls-eye. 'That's my name I'm pissing on.' he'll whisper silently to himself. (But not so silently, the lad next to him won't be able to ignore it.)" Life seemed ominous.

"So tell me, what do you think about . . .", and still, his mind was stuck on submarines. ". . .Ah hell! You'll have to give up on me this evening, I'm afraid. My crazy dad called and went on about a bathysphere's this, and-a bathysphere's that. On and on, till I can't see straight. I'm trying to think straight to talk intelligently with you, but my eyes are still crossed with bathysphere's this' and thats." Roberto put both his hands palm down on the table and sighed.

"What in the world is a bathysphere?"

"It's a pretty long story."

"Well, what else do we talk about?"

Now, it was Roberto's turn to be perplexed. He crossed his eyes, and screwed up his nose to a puckered knot.

"Your eyes are crossed." Migel points out.

"I know. I'm trying to be funny."

"I guess I missed a punch line."

"You're still waiting to give it." Roberto explained. "That's why I'm looking like this. It's called punch-line constipation."

Now they were both lost.

"What do you mean?"

The evening was going badly.

"'. . .what else do we talk about?' Sounds familiar, right?"

"Vaguely."

"I have to guess, right?"

"Bingo!"

Roberto reviewed the dead-obvious (to a closet bathy-sphereologist). "In 1930, Otis Barton invented the bathysphere. It was a radical new invention opening the doors to the strange abyss of the other world, beneath the surface of our everyday world of terra-firma Earth. Simple in structure, it appeared to naked-eye observers as a large steel ball tethered to a stalwart chain. It was the original prototype of Trieste."

"Trieste?"

"Yes, Trieste. Trieste was preceded by Emile Gagnan's invention of the S.C.U.B.A., though."

"Scuba-like, the Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus scuba?"

"None other."

Roberto was impresed.

"I thought scuba was invented by Jacques-Yves Cousteau?"

The conversation had taken a turn for the better. Migel had a strong working history of the early bathyspheric explorers.

"Cousteau got the credit, with a more dashing name."

"Emile Gagnan isn't any Groucho Marx. Gagnan's a good, respectable name to get famous with"

Migel was very name conscious, having hidden his unromantic Littlefield patronymic from the public eye for most of his adult life.

"Nevertheless, Emile lost favor. By 1946, he was the disembodied name people begrudgingly tacked by Cousteau. Anyway, the Trieste was a US Navy brainchild ship designed to send two real dumb suckers down to the bottom of the world."

"What does it have to do with bathyscapes?"

"Bathyspheres. Everything! They took Emile's 1942 invention and stuffed it into Barton's bathysphere-now, mind you, in 1959 the Trieste (mother of the third bathysphere ever built), hurled its probe down Mariana's Trench. They called it the Challenger Deep, and suicide ball, among other things."

"Why?"

"Challenger Deep was a live-manned, steel circular coffin hung from a gasoline-filled pontoon they wanted to sink seven miles into a hostile sea."

"I see. Did they do it?"

"Of course. In 1960 Don Walsh and a kid named Jacques dove to 35, 800 feet."

"Amazing. But what's so important about all this, that your father has to wake you up?"

"I don't know. That's the part that kills me. Bathyspheres made world-record dives, but people don't use them anymore. Even today, Trieste and Challenger's record stand unbroken. Some megamillion buck Japanese high-tech miracle-sub recently came up short of the 1959 bathyspheric mark." Migel watched his newfound friend closely.

"Does your father talk about his bathyspheres often?"

"All the time."

Like Marv Redburn, the assistant sound engineer Antichrist in waiting, Roberto considered his senile dad's raving a sign. He researched everything he could about bathyspheres' quirks of history, and even their distant descendants (pre-submarines). That's why the doctor took him so off guard. When his FAX machine started humming again, he expected (quite rightly) a piece of a puzzle she unwittingly dispensed.

Found in 17,300 feet of water 1,200 miles from the Cape Verde Islands, an I-52 Japanese submarine lays wholly intact save a large torpedo puncture on her starboard side. On board its 357 foot length are at least 109 skeletons, two metric tons of gold, 54 tons of raw rubber, three tons of quinine, more than 220 tons of molybdenum, tin, tungsten, and lost revelations of 14 Mitsubishi experts studying the German super-secret weapons campaign. (Roberto hungrily read ahead.) The I-52 is a virtual treasure trove of correspondence between the Emperor and the Fuhrer. Japan's rabid grasp for German technology, dispatched it's vital fighting submarine (which was bigger than any American one) to deliver cargo, and not engage allied shipping. It would have completed another successful mission, had pilot Jesse Taylor not sighted something at midnight, on June 23 1945. Etcetera. They were thinking about raising this time capsule with civilian-from-military declassified rescue cold war equipment. Both superpowers were pros at salvaging each other's lost wrecks, and when profit calls after wars fizzle out, surplus sales does a tidy biz. We'd loot the living hell out of that sub, just like Azores ships' gold.

"This is crazy." Roberto said out loud. "It falls right in line with the Bathyspheres."

And the shapely doctor had his ass again.

Meanwhile, on SF's Twenty Fourth street, an anarchy-touting VW Bug with a drip-painted American flag on its door drove erratically cross the centerline with bongo-playing acid-head behind the wheel yelling:

"Convenience created apathy!!"

at the top of his lungs. Marsha's human pilot shook her head, feeling the psychic wake of the tribe of quite aimless children wandering the Earth in sorrow for big Jerry's grateful death. In Dead's vacuum, the Bay had shut down. Legal flags flew at half mast, and few did mind-stimulus tribute to the man of the band that might have done just a little too much of it. However; this anarchical driver took his mourning past the borders of effrontery. He was garbed in his worst ultra-problems, trying to deliver a cannabis-lung'd soul from a terminal abyss no bathysphere tallies fathoms of. "One Wolfbane shocker." a customer ordered. She didn't hear it, so lost in thought. The guy made her think. Inside the corral, they added her weekly tab, and deducted ten percent for being a regular patron who read real good tarot cards. He liked her so much, the owner named a highly experimental drink of coffee and fresh organics (originally, Beet Wheet Grass Joy) after her. It was served in a bright green ceramic mug. "Hey Bane!" he yelloed out the open door in that ecstatic moment of V.W. apathy-ratifying-convenience, where Bane found her final, estranged vision. It was so super-duper powerful, she wears its smile still. Fated to travel the very next day. What do you know?

"Roberto, I had this dream you were in."

(Son of a gun-do I have to contract-out my dreams now?)

"Yea, so?"

"It was pretty strange."

"Okay, let's have it."

"You were a fireman."

"And?"

"That's it."

"What do you mean, 'that's it'?"

"That was it. You sat on a pipe in Alaska and talked about fire trucks."

"What kind of pipe?"

It was an odd inquiry. He wanted to ask what kind of truck.

"I'm not sure. It was really old and riveted together-pretty big, and it went up, and down mountains."

"I just sat there?"

"Yup."

"Did I talk about anything particular, as far as my fire trucks were concerned?"

"Anger, mostly. You were really mad they all worked better than your watch."

Migel hung up a half hour later.

The next day at work, Roberto pulled the CD ROM on Alaskan history, and checked its files on pipelines. "Whoa-Nellie. '..., and at mile 57 of the highway named for General James G Steese, it is possible to view a section of Davidson Ditch, an 83 mile project of siphons, pipes, sluices and aqueducts. Constructed in 1925, the waterway connected a small dammed reservoir to the gold dredges of Fox and Chatanika. It required formitable resources to engineer and build, thus securing its place as one of the largest projects of its kind in the world.' (A poorly written treatese thickening an already-obscure plot.)" At the exact moment Roberto pained his personality on the stake of pipeline intuition, Migel asked the only truly relevant question of his burning desire not to know.

"'What color was it, though?'"

Roberto, in the lollapalooza dream, kept asking.

"'What color was it?'"

(Why would it be any color other than red?)

"Roberto," said Migel, in a mid-morning call,

"I think I've got something."

Jack knew his vision was missing something. He didn't know what, but the chartreuse fire truck didn't work. As soon as the last paint dried, and the chrome bits nobody makes any longer were buffed to perfection, Jack was certain this engine wouldn't start. Sure enough; he hitchhiked to work.

"Mind if I drop you off here buddy?"

His lift forged ahead without his lunch and briefcase.

"If you're still hitchin' when I come back, I'll pick you up again."

He's dropped at the spine tingling same-spot where the dead lady's car flew off the road. There was odd-colored spray paint marking the scene, and he lapsed into a torpor of memory, before a Chevy Suburban pulled over, chasing any such thinking midstream.

"Where-ya goin'?"

"Maine." (East? Why did I say that?)

"Sorry. I'm going west."

"Just kidding. I'm headed about sixteen miles up the road."

"Well hop in then."

Jack grabbed his tool belt, and thought things some more. At work, they poured effusively out.

"What'ya reckon Mark-! I painted my truck, then it didn't even turn over."

Mark Gilbetson was his hammering workmate. First, they hammered sheet rock, then they painted. While they painted, other people hammered more sheet rock, and trim, they would seal with a primer, first coat, then a thick luxurious full-gloss.

"Di'you hook up th'battery ground strap again?"

"Of-course I did!" but suddenly Jack wasn't so sure.

It was a problem he couldn't have sussed without a scarab. It was the kind of non-logical leviathan, science wouldn't connect to seawater's passing through hot magma rocks' topmost lawyers.

In short, though Jack would never put it this way in his forthcoming introspective years, lawyers (in our above-ground world) separated people from their dignity (money), while rock stripped all the magnesium from the world's oceans every ten million years. This happened to be the end of their billing cycle, and certain colors had worn glitches in their chemical statements. According to Heisenberg's Murphy-clause, these glitches would manifest at the most inexplicable, poorly-timed intervals possible, until (quite suddenly), they no longer did. What this phenomena pointed to, was the giant cosmic earth computer (which Jack's fire truck was past due to update), and its running equivalent of bio-material1954 cardboard punchcard IBM FORTRAN, that happened to be operational for so long, it forgot scarabs were extinct.

"Howz about coming over, and giving sum hand-on help?"

It was Jack's type of joke. Mark was a dyed-blue hands-on healer at the local underground chapter of the White Revelations church. Mark laughed his jagged toothed grin, but unfortunately, the Russian life expectancy continued to plunge. The way things were looking, a basic youth-citizen couldn't make it to retirement age before dying. One post-Soviet scientist wanted to draw correlations to "extinction centers"'s rich fauna\flora diversity demonstrated in 1000 times the prehuman background species annihilatory rate. It was just the sort of post-Lamarkian statement that illicited laments for monetary inflation-like, "The cost of living just went up another ten kopeks a liter."

A basic alarm something was wrong with the earth's seventy-giga-digit processor had fizzled. People's hardwired safety fuse was long-ago blown, and that shrunk the collective hippocampus-(a brain structure vital to learning and memory). Scientists were more intrigued with a hippocampatic correlation to the Viêt Nam vet syndrome, than seeking cultural age-span, or cessing selective damage to their global computer's operational systems. The fire truck uplink, of the earth backup docking regenerative code to its own hidden-file encryption of DNA sequence in certain completely ignorant individuals, was disasterously-far behind schedule, owing to the schedule itself being corrupted by the very fix slated for pencil-in every ten million magnesium-deficient years.

"Yea, women. To me, women are like Elephants. They're nice to look at, but I wouldn't want to own one."

"Who said that?"

"I did."

"No you didn't."

"Yes I did. I just said it, didn't I?"

"You did; I mean. . .you said it just then, but you didn't say it originally. I can tell."

"How to know the difference? Originality is one of life's great rhetorics"

"Look, you either said it originally, or you copied it from someone."

"Who's to say they, or the author of the author you so 'originally' described, didn't pilfer it from an ancient Greek? Maybe the greek translation talked about some other kind of animal; or maybe all famous quotes are subconscious rewrites of much earlier ideas."

"So what does that have to do with the elephant?"

"I could have said: Girls are like two-humped camels. I like gazing across the desert their way, but I wouldn't want to sit on one through a Saharan summertime. Is it the same thing, or is it not?"

"Maybe."

Was all Migel's interlocutor submitted.

"Very definitive, that maybe word."

"You said it first. Twice in fact!"

"Is that your case in point!?"

"It's too relative."

"To what?!"

"I'm not sure."

Brian Jocker sipped his wine-after-gimlet carefully, savoring its cheek-biting tannins. "Relative to what we were talking about before you got off on this topic."

Migel had misled the jolly green giant. He glared from his perch on that laughable tripod of a chair, swiveled sideways to the bar. Migel had to change the subject quickly.

"What did you think about the popcorn ball fiasco?"

"I've certainly carried worse stories to the masses."

Brian was still sore. Migel noted Mr. Math's inability to parry work without a gritty taste left in his mouth.

"No, I mean its theft."

Jocker'd walked down the wrong side of the pedestrian lane, bumping into particularly buxom brunettes. Migel noticed the commotion, and hailed him from harms way.

"Heeey Yooous! Remember me? I was right behind you, at the Io-wan corn briefing!"

Brian was absolutely beside himself with a need to flee an imminent disaster, a couple of burley butch ladies prepared to dispense.

"Yes! Good to see you!", he'd pushed enthusiastically through the crowd, proffering his hand.

"In here!" Migel grabbed a pudgy arm, and dragging its attachment, made for a door. A dark, sleazy place. Just perfect for skulking from female mud wrestlers who arm-slammed bets with Harley sledriders at Sturgis rallies. Girls' gotta make a living somehow, he's sure one of them would say. More to the point, this brooding crypt was a perfect place for two media jocks to talk the slippery slime of their business.

"Hey thanks. I was way out-a my league."

As Brian pulls off his coat, the bright green shirt explodeth forth. Migel thought his eyes were frying in his head.

"I'm buying. What'll you have?"

"Gin Martini."

"I drink vodka."

"Shaken, not stirred, right?"

It was too old a joke, and a rocky start to a lot of obscure, twisted -sounding questions. "About that shirt of yours. . ." Then Migel thought better of it. "I like it. Where's it from?"

Brian instantly silenced with suspicion. It was the first positive comment he'd ever received wearing his favorite piece of clothing.

"Sez right here!"

Pointing with some belligerence to its logo. Brian wasn't at all sure of Migel. Migel might be buttering him up to sell some phony film company stock, or actually quite cheaply cutting him down. It was a tough interview for Migel to correctly steer.

"Interesting color. I've always had a thing for chartreuse."

Migel was sure he'd blown it. Ahh, that was some trouble you found out there. What got you front and center with the Sumu twins?" New tactic: Start all over. Return to zero, and creep slowly forward again

"I just came from Englan'," Brian more amiably slurred, "and everybody walks the wrong way over there. Just when I was getting used to hoofing left, I came here. Come to think of it, they don't walk the wrong way, they drive it. Their mixed up walking reflects an inability to motor correctly."

That's when brain dropped the elephant bombshell.

"I think, whoever made up the story about the popcorn ball did so as a plant."

"'A plant.'"

Brain was stymied.

"Like animal-mineral-vegetable plant?"

The second martini went down harder than the first.

"A plant-like, a vie for attention. A cue of some kind."

What in the world is he talking about? How doth it submit itself to green's most awful shade; who is the president of the Mathematical society, and why am I here on a workday getting shnockered? Questions of varying magnitude filled the synapse junctures of Migel's brain, in between the rout assertion.

"A cue. . ."

He didn't know how to follow that up. It was a rare lapse of logical reasoning in vibrant Migel's career.

"Cue. . .?"

With the patience of a man who has stands in rainstorms for seven hours trying to optimize a six second shot of a US president shaking hands with another foreign deity people save expurlitives for, Brian Jocker attempted to illustrate this point.

"You're saying, the Iowa popcorn thing was all a setup."

"A what?"

"Setup. S-e-t-u-p. Like loading the computer with some new program."

"Setup, right. Got that part. Why though?"

"Hell if I know. It's your assertion."

"You agree with me, or not?"

Brain overloads both parties' logic centers.

"Don't know. Can't make it out on the tapes."

Tapes?

"Recorded Snoopy's doghouse, or what?"

It wasn't even close to what Migel accepted as a normal thing to say. Migel, the normally impeccable conversationalist, had violated his agreements. Brain clauses 1.006d4A.2 to A.23 clearly demand everything must make sense, by referring to other series of things that either make sense, are funny, or demonstrate both qualities simultaneously. Clause 1.006d4A momentarly struck itself from mouth contract; brain flapped in crisis winds, while both lips mimicked. . . Brian:

"When I got my hard copy back, I heard you and your friend talk, heard myself rustle around, and (would you believe?) six or seven other conversations. We cleaned all the background from the tape (without the slightest idea how got there)... I was there for a few seconds, and suddenly, there was no transmission left."

"'Suddenly'; meaning?"

"However we tried to comb that background dandruff, we couldn't get my newsbrief without it. When we edited out the conversations, the interview disappeared."

"That's not so unusual."

"It is, if it's this case. All that junk was on separate tracks. S'like a god-damned recording studio did it."

"So . . ." Migel struggled to realize what Brian was telling him. ". . . the interview was a composite of its background tracks in a way that couldn't happen. Is that it? Jungians would love this story."

"Who?! What do they have to do with it?"

"Nothing. Just kidding."

Wine didn't suit the post-Vodka brain.

"Anyway, our sound engineer had a nervous breakdown trying to figure it out. The gist of it-in the second of the seven-sign conversations, was popcorn is a missing link in some grand earth equation."

It was undoubtedly, one of the craziest things Migel had ever heard.

"Popcorn!?"

(Perposterous!) And yet, something inside seemed to resolve itself. "What do you think?" Brain queried.

(After all, he had a shirt of mathematical approval.)

"I think it's the lowdown-craziest thing I've ever heard, and what's more, I'm not sure why I'm telling you about it after all the insults you and your two-bit friend gave my shirt. You don't 'like' my shirt, you think it's . . ." but that's when the butch queens came in.

Things went from worse to terrible.

Roberto tried his best to contact that sound engineer who worked the popcorn newbrief, because Migel had bumped off another half-carafe of wine when Brian's brain stormed out before calling Roberto through the mashed-grape haze. Migel was giggling so hard, Roberto had a difficult time understanding what he dribbled into the receiver.

"And then he went out the bar's door in a biig huff, and these two huge chicks (?) were there, and a huuge shouting match happened, 'cause I'm sure he walked the wrong way again. Did I tell you he's back from England? Our right-laned sidewalks are his whole problem in the first place."

"The math problem, or the shirt-color one?"

"I Didn't tell you about Breasty and the two mud wrestlers!?"

It took a good hour to sort him out.

Migel called the Iowa chamber of Commerce for the second time in the chartreuse investigation, to get the facts on the popcorn ball's theft. They put him on hold for seven bill-raking minutes, in which time he listened carefully to local Iowan world news piped through the phone cue. It filled his empty post-wine mind with obscure vantage points, on the progress humans were making in their religious vision-quest to concrete slab the planet's surface.

"Hello! I'm . . ."

Migel went through the information-gathering formalities for the half-dozenth time.

"But, why do you think the thieves wanted it?"

"Publicity."

"What's so interesting about two thousand pounds of goo?"

It was a truthfully blasphemous question.

"Well, it's a little known fact outside these parts, and even here nobody likes to talk about it; and I really shouldn't be telling anyone, especially the media, (over the phone!) and a total stranger at that; but . . ."

She lowers her voice to a barely audible whisper.

". . . there's a group of six-six-six people who worship corn."

"What! A popcorn cult? You've got to be kidding!"

"I wish I were."

"Where did you hear about this?"

"Don't say you heard it coming from this office!"

"I haven't heard anything yet."

"And that's the way it'll have to stay."

Click.

"Hello? Hell--oooh!?"

Migel hung his phone up, having significantly less about the world's working than he knew eleven minutes before he'd dialed their 'helpful' number. For instance (thanks to the news loop on hold) he'd stupidly thought rebar steel constituted the best out-n'out structural bias for concrete, when in fact, Fermar (a new space-age, cost-effective substitute) left in salt water an entire year showed no visible signs of corrosion. Fermar was lots cheaper than rebar. His brain fully re-addled, Migel promptly called Roberto, who was trying to call Migel, with hard-gained Marv Redburn info. Their lines were mutually busy, and the worst part came to Migel having no idea what Fermar really was. (Plastoid? Steel reincarnation?)

Neet-Neet-Neet-Neet-Busy; dammit. Work was not going well. Roberto's assignments seemed petty and insignificant vis-a-vis evolutions of ongoing babble nothing making any sense linking his invisibly thin fate to absolutely low-co tulip bulbs bloomin-nonfiction fiction colors. His dreams were in bright green Techni-chloroform, knocking his normal senses nutty each Snoopy-eyed too-early morning. He would sit listening to the whole grain toast crackle and pop, letting it burn, smelling the black smoke inevitability like an ear's drum beat, wondering when he'd finally wake up.

Ring!

"E-loh?" the line gravel-voiced.

"It's Migel. Fine, yea. Hey Roberto, I think we need to take a road trip."

That took Roberto's early morning by surprise.

"And to tell you the truth. . . five seconds ago I wouldn't have pointed that out."

Everthing was getting rather obtuse.

"Point what out? Road trip to where?"

Migel had astonished Roberto, by instantly making him want to agree to the caper. He warmed up his voice for some kind of reply. (What?)

"Five seconds ago I would have said no. Unequivocably."

"What about now?"

"I'm foolishly intrigued. Go on."

"I don't know how to. We need to go somewhere to figure out how to roast the weal in a percolator's drip pan."

It made no sense whatsoever. For that reason alone, Roberto got it immediately.

"You're right, there."

He fiddled with his pink pajama-buttons.

"It doesn't make a single snifter of sense whatsoever. I can't even sleep without dreaming green anymore."

Migel was so overjoyed to hear this, he forgot to tell Roberto about the alleged popcorn cult. He wasn't sleeping in Disney Technicolors, either.

"Try green."

"What!? I'm hearing you wrong, right?"

Migel laughed at three consecutive statements of nothing.

"I mean, try sleeping in green. Green sheets, green PJs, or pillow cases. That's what I did last night."

"Did it work?"

"You betcha."

"What'd you dream about?"

"Your basic crazy witch who's dreaming of us dreaming of her wondering who we are and where we're going."

"That's three of us."

"At least."

(1PM). . .Ball-bathysphere-popcorn-hippocampus shrinkage- Gold. Atom bombs. Secrets. People sluicing secrets from the abyss. Submarines carrying secrets under the surface. Weapons of massed destruction . . .? If, or; when? YEEEOOOWW!! Roberto completely forgot about DNA computers. He's slipped the luckless grip of tenement shoppers in Korea. When his overlord editor says to check the pulse of a tip on the top of that popcorn iceberg, and 'tie it into that god-damned computer story somewhere will you?!' he does it willingly "I'm sick of it.", he adds, because Roberto clandestinely fed memos into the News Central computing net, hoping important eyes would see them. Just at his critical point of total confusion (holding a black smoldering toaster fork), Ms. doctor called his home phone's offagainonagain answering machine. He clubbed it savagely.

"Sorry about that. Damn thing won't let me get a word in edgewise."

"Maybe you should get another one."

"This one refuses to die."

"Speak of the devil, how's that story going?"

"I havent written it yet."

"Let me guess-you have something so important to do, the cure for cancer has to wait a turn at bat."

He wanted to say yes. He wanted desperately to ask her about huge popcorn balls, third degree burns, and who needs sugar fixes bad enough to steal a lifetime supply of them? He wanted to say all that and more, when someone else piqued the call-waiting line.

"Just a second, I'll be right back. Promise. Two seconds." Click.

"Hello?"

"It's me Roberto. Migel."

"Oh hi, say, I've got someone on the other line . . ."

"Wait-you've just got to hear this. Corn has a full vampire-type cult following attached to it."

"Where'd you hear this?"

"Right from an Iowan's corn-cobbed mouth."

"No kidding!"

"That's not the brunt of it-"

"Hold on a sec, could you Migel? I have someone on the other line."

"Sure."

Click. "Hi. Are you there?"

Shit! I must have cut her off.

Click "Migel?"

"Yea, it's me. Listen to this . . ."

"Look, I have to call you right back. I got cut off from the person on the other line."

"Okaay, I'm at my office."

"No problem. Four minutes."

"Right."

Click, was the metalic noise of the jangling mental note Roberto hadn't the dingiest clue what Migel's office number was. It was clearly Migel's name carved on his desk in the absolute haste of no pen short of a knife to write the the number the Chamber of Commerce gave him. His letter opener felt guilty enough shaving a telephone number in its nice maple desk, so it skipped the second (office) one proffered.

"Damn it all!"

Roberto furiously dialed the doctor's number, and found it busy. She waited on his line that hadn't fully disconnected, by some sinister twist of fate.

Long before Fermar and concrete had any destiny to meet, the B-29 Kee Bird belly-landed in the inhospitable waste of Greenland. It was preserved in an icy stasis, 950 miles North of the Arctic circle on a rather horrible plain of rock, noxious wind, mud-drenched dreams. This poor Boeing Superfortress, sporting a mere 220 flight hours, was the first sophisticated metallurgical attempt Earth made to reconstruct its operational codes.

A man named Darryl Greenamyer was selected (much as Jack was selected to blowgun his fire truck green) by the big, cosmic, offbeat mime of fate. One Arctic summer day, Darryl loaded his precariously airborne 1962 Caribou transport with everything from a bulldozer, to freeze-dried weenies. A mere 5000 lbs overweight, it pogo'd through the ice when the flaps failed, blew its tires, and had to resourcefully whisper to a mechanic (in the language of metalic cold-assed inspiration) to refill its Goodyears with propane gas. The Earth wanted its code replaced. It wanted that Caribou airborne again. All this would never have happened if in 1947, someone understood Trinitite. The scientists missed its point completely when they stare at fused green surface of Trinity's N-bomb site. The tower had already vaporized, by the time the mental windows started blowing out. A hundred twenty miles away, they continued shattering, as Oppenheimer mumbled an ancient Hindu text the Mayans copied, and passed down as a bad elephant joke (translated as Lame-a, for Lama [llama]). It went something like this : I am become death, the shatterer of worlds. Give me another peanut. Oppy practiced his big eternal moment the day before, as brass seconded a press release saying an ammunition dump had somehow blown up. It was 1947; after the sharks chowed the 500 dead of the Indianapolis, torpedoed after it's fated N-bomb#2 delivery. It was then, that the ultra-secretive planet collective Jungian consciousness realized Wackoid Earth had gone onerously awry. The deepest knowing of this planetoid federation sent an obscure message to the strange people inhabiting a rebellious Earth's surface, in the form of an strange alien spacecraft inhabited by abysmally drunk Jovian pilots. Just as the big answer was about to unfold, the entire incident was surreptitiously hushed up.

"It wasn't a spaceship like we said, it was a weather balloon."

And people believed, just as they believed atoms' shatter was a pile of conventional explosives.

"What color was the . . . ?"

But nobody asked it out loud. Thus, a '47 Superfortress had to crash. About the time the Caribou was shuddering its impossible engine loads in a drip-for-drip race with melting snow, it occurred to another mechanic (wrenching a frozen fuel line lead) that this bonny relic had belly landed here for a definite reason. He was about to tell Darryl, when his icy spanner slipped, sending him sprawling. His resulting tweety-bird headache erased any doubts he'd harbored, by erasing everything the last six minutes accrued. A whole week later, B-29's four monster engines spat fire, and belched a half-century smoke, right as Jack toyed with the idea of buying a firetruck. The plane was unwittingly seamed with molecular crosschannels caulk, polarized a few milliseconds after Quasar.X#-^-ŸÞ-@2Ð1 (as identified on standard Bathserian star charts) emitted the trans-dimensional question of its fiery existence. "Why am I so powerful? I am the energy of whole galaxies. Why are there no others like me being born? I am insignificant; and I am the shatterer of worlds. This sucks." Its rhuminations coincided with Earth (on the eter-matial continuum) at the exact point of Arnie's light blue gooped-up caulk gun. It was rather unfortunate. Had the plane flown, it would have become big questions answers. It couldn't fly, because the exhausted mechanics took wings too literally. Instead, it decided to burn.

"Fuel leak-ask your suns, they know why!"

Were its final words to the collective's schizophrenic Earth spat. Darryl Greenamyer stood there, looking at his futility burn in half and melt the ice the sand became, glazing the surface to Trinitite. It's still stuck in its wasteland of an answer. So basically,

it was up to Jack now.

"Malaria, or bad air, was thought to be carried by sweltering, moist, febrile winds. It followed a preset course . . ." and the rest was XXed out. Written in unmistakably bold-faced type underneath, was: "T(something)receiver of all dunderheads who leave women hanging out on the phone."

The doctor hassled Roberto's number with all manner of strange binary bit-mapped messages. He asked for two weeks off, and researched nuclear medicine. "I owe it to her. I said I'd do a feature." he haranged himself. "As soon as I'm done, I'm going to balloon the Bathyspheric question out into a popcorn witch hunt. Migel will have to wait."

But Migel couldn't.

"A-mass. I've finally got it down."

"When's the article due?"

"Soon."

He lied through his teeth. He'd been on the tail of a nuclear comet, sidetracked irrevocably at the card-catalogued entities of J.C. Penny mannequins' 1953 account of the above-ground atomic test. His superordinate sense of an audience's need to know facts resisted its own prognosis. Roberto's egcentric program had scrambled for the better by appearing on the edge of its insane decline.

"How you die is the most important thing you ever do. I've been waiting for this for years."

For Roberto, Tim Leary's inoperable cancer statement came and went, leaving hardly a neural wake. Some old hand at super-secret films candidly amassed bloopers, and sold their rights to late night TV, saying-"Now it's so late in the game it doesn't matter if they kill me." addling the screen in face morphed with digital triangles. Roswell incident explorations of fuzzy-focused aliens' body cavities showed no Kodachrome colors. Verichrome-green blood? Preposterous. A weather balloon? Coincidence. She's making me crazy. He plied piles across a library's reading desk, while Migel made two tickets on Bane's American Airlines layover.

"What have you been up to?"

"Nothing, really."

"I don't believe it."

Bane quizzed her high school friend.

"What have you been doing?"

"Same old thing."

Her friend tossed a shock of frizzy dyed hair, laughed brittle-tinkle notes, and clapped a cheap formica table.

"Same old thing! Yea-right! And what might that be?"

So Bane told her about the Presidio.

"I went for a walk in the most remote Military installation of the Spanish empire in the Northern United States."

"Interesting." she was drying the formation of tears at her own sad joke. "Do-tell more."

"In 1769 the Spaniards hoofed in from Baja, found the San Francisco Bay to their liking, and promptly occupied it. They built an adobe fort, and lugged heavy 13 cannons in to defend it."

"From the rain? I had no idea."

"Neither did I. And did you know there's a pet cemetery on the grounds?"

"No kidding!? What else?"

"I went for a longer walk through the barracks, and read about a Mexican takeover, and an American takeover, and the casualties shipped in from wars, and more casualties yet, earthquake reliefs, armed guard National park patrols, Nike missile high-powered defense stations dotting surrounding hills, and . . ."

"How'd you get inside?"

"It's a secret."

Actually, it was no secret at all (to somebody familiar with wide open roads).

"Tell me anything more?"

"There were no trees a-tall, till the army planted 60,000 of them."

"Best thing the army ever did. Now; tell me about your love life. Don't hold back."

Bane had no qualms jamming the mundane full of imaginary facts. Her friend was terminally bored with housewifeisms, and needed all the nitty-gritty smut she could ever seethe sullenly over.

"You lead such an exciting existence, Bane. I wish I could go where you do."

"And you do not, because . . ."

"Because why? I want to know!"

"You're suppose to fill in that nagging blank, Ginny."

"Oh, I know. I'm just saying that.-I'm really pretty happy."

"Vouchsafed happy in bullshit, did you?"

She could say it. Does have nothing to lose jumping high fences.

"All right, so I'm not happy any more."

"Then come with me."

"Where are you going?"

"Auburn."

"Is that a country, or are you foaming at the mouth of color? You know I don't do that LSD stuff any more."

"Honey, you never did it in the first place."

"I tried that half!"

"a Half Tab isn't enough."

"It was for me!"

The old argument missed its spear-tipped point, so they divorced the subject from the kiss on the phone cheeks each gave the other.

"Good-bye Ginny!"

"Goodbye! See you sooner than this time, I hope!"

She didn't hope anything. That was her entire problem.

(Bane thought later.)

. . .popcorn-changing shape-exploding out inside out Bathyspheric representation. Green a potential energy state. Rain a relief from dry. . . and he woke with a Sports Illustrated over his face.

"Huh!" said to no one in particular. "Gotta go back to sleep-I was onta something.

Bathyspheres--cells. Pontoons--buoys. Egypt--cells linked--Uranus--situation of plontoonium decay. Trinity--Trieste. Tiger penises. Toadstools. Alice in wonderland took a cuppa tea and sloshed over her new Cheshire she-devil black boots. Must eat toadspools of something to get somesplace. Where though?

"'That's when it got really green. Really green.'"

"'How green?'"

"'I don't know. How green is green?'"

"And you're sitting in a barber's chair?"

"I can't remember now."

"Go on."

"Something about PEAT."

"Who?"

"PEAT. Umm-plasma energy applied technology."

"Yees. . ."

"You can manufacture new materials with it."

"How? and what does this have to do with really rowdy greens?"

"That's the clincher. PEAT makes plasmas."

"'Green is a plasma-based color. What you see is a harmonic of a complex chemical reagent occurring on other times and places.' That's what the big reclining Buddha said."

"He was in the dream too?"

"Yea. Mutherfucker was fat. No wonder he has to lay down."

"What else did he say?"

"Something about bardahl being bullshit because we're already there-oh, that's right! He said JILA's close to PEAT."

Roberto anticipated the next series of questions.

"JILA was . . .joint . . .lemmesee . . .institute of (for?) laboratory astro-somethingor other, and it just found something new. I think, it was a new molecule. Then Buddha belched-a real stinker, and I woke up."

"What do you make of it?"

Migel was no stranger to looking things up. JILA, (the A for astrophysics), had recently found an entirely new state of matter predicted by the illustrious Albert Einstein (and the lesser known, harder to pronounce, Satyender Nath Bose). It occurred while 2000 rubidium atoms were huddled in the coldest sphere of man-made temperature deficits ever produced (to the protean mean of several billionths of a degree above absolute zero). In their panic to say uncle, the coldest rubidiums condensed into superatoms-a staggering 20 microns across, in climbing all over each other to stay warm. This Bose-Einstein condensate merged by-an-by a still "normal" matter, creating naked-eye model of strange, subatomic phenomena.

"The man sided with hard science, saying it's for the betterment of mankind."

"How's that?"

"I was unclear on that point. Something about bigger, more gregarious, lightning-fast computer chips."

"Just what we need."

Fidgeting, Migel observed Roberto' s own discomfiture."

"What?"

"Something about the last thing you said."

"Yea."

"And I quote. . .'Anyone who hates dogs and children can't be all bad.' " The audience murmured. What did that have to do with Russian vodka?

Wolfbane hadn't the slightest idea why she sided with the man on the podium. He was a fascist, misogynist, loud-mouthed son of a bitch who didn't belong elevated on any public edict of the state of Sino-Soviet relations. She stayed just long enough to hear his predictable, obtuse distraction number eleven in a three hour antipathic sermon to slack-jawed academiticians.

"'Duue too the currrent state of theengs in utterr gen-e-ral,'" she mimicked afterwards, "'a seem-pole pastoraal peeople haave suc-cumbbed too thee Vest's fevvorant at-ti-tuudes of summtuous, technoogical leeving.'." she's laughing. "Now Gobi desert dwellers want TVs and automobiles instead of fizzy colas. They want refrigerated beeer, and consumer marketplace ammeenites, instead of mares milk, a good tent house, and family values."

"That's pretty good, Bane."

"Your basic jerk. I don't know why I stayed so long, except it was raining, and you weren't home yet."

"I wish I'd gone. We could have howled once or twice for fun." she stroked Bane's shoulders, to massage out fatuous fits of anger, always hiding there.

WolfBane was fascinated by his use of strongly unassociated quotes, going so far as a camel joke that was supposedly told by legionnaires patrolling the desert, on the interplay of useless women and anchors. It burned her up dried up dickless academics were so influential in a paternal, male-overboard world.

"He was a son of a bitch all right. One minute he's going on about the Gobi's pristine resources' exploitation by Fanta-providing companies following screwup routes of post-Soviet modernism, and the next he's quoting some Bedouin bimbo, and relating to two-humped, rain and pussy-starved camel-jock banter."

"How'd you know it was a bimbo?"

"I don't, I guess."

"I think that first quote's a little familiar-like I heard it on TV when I was a little girl."

"What?"

"The thing about children and dogs. Give me a minute-I might remember."

"Funny you'd say that." Bane said slowly.

The quote had been so out of synch, Wolfbane remained to see where it fit with the rest of his dry, rusty speech."

"W.C. Fields! That's it-my little chickadeee!"

Rayven was laughing with abandon.

"I always liked that old coot."

They flew thirty-five thousand feet higher than Bane's return to her birthplace, leaking gigantic plumes of water vapor high above automotors, lugging people slowly along the ground.

"No Business Class. That's what we're flinging ourselves thorough the air in. We have no business being this high."

Migel humped up his permanently slouching seat.

"I don't know who talked me into this."

"It wasn't me; I just makes da' suggestions."

"Anyway, it's a Fruit-Loopy idea."

"Got any great schemes beside it?"

He hadn't a clue. A doctor was all over him for a rambling, disjointed exposé; his boss wondered when he's get back to Earth; the rent was long past due, and here's Migel waving a free ticket to bumfucknowhere, to examine an old chartreuse firetruck!? 'Marv sided with the astrologer's worst fears.' Migel confessed. He bit the cat's tail in the psychiatrist's office and let a blood-curdling howl out of his Ibex-downed past life, to emulate animal through and through. "All subsequent vibrations point to perfect freedom from silicon." he'd told his servile analyst. "I heard it on the 666 program (between tracks six and seven)." 'What else did he tell you?' "Well, there was this thing somewhere in suburbia that's the next viable Christ-coming." "Very interesting. Did he mention what it. . . it is?" Migel said he was exciting the very atoms around his question waiting to come out. "Did he say anything about DNA, or computers?" "No, only about fire trucks, I'm rather aghast to say."

Roberto was noticeably disappointed. He was joanzing for the quintessential Bathyspheric link tying his dream to the material world. He followed his breakneck-blather father with ever-increasing frustration, trying to assume the lowest possible phone bill, with the highest chance of solving his obsession.

"What about it dad!? Tell me what it means!"

His senile, gutter-ball bowling father stopped tailspinning for a heart-renting instant.

"I thought you knew, son. That's why I've harassed you so much."

"'Me!!? You must be joking!' I couldn't believe it. All this time his failing mind has pummeled me with labile expressions of his twisted, quixotic, subterranean anti-knowledge!"

"Anti knowledge of what?"

"Your basic ontological ignorance of the last meaning behind the collative consciousness of spheroid symbols."

"Mouthful. I wouldn't say that to an angry gang member."

"Me either. I'd say, 'Shoot, and get it over with'."

"On my honor, your logic is a snake eating a fish two times its size; and by the say of it, I'd like to eat your leftover halibut."

"You call that halibut! It's bottom food for shitsucking fish."

"What'daya want, barracuda?"

"Gets an arm and letter grade about a mile above carp."

That's no carp. Migel know da' carp all right.

"Help yourself."

"Don't mind if I do."

How did you get the name of this place-here? Never even heard of it. It's because you don't visit suburban areas in a lather of using up your vacation needlessly. What do you think is there? Who kindles fires where no burning is positively allowed? Butt-fuck crazies. Well, check this film clip out!

and Migel threw a videocassette over the long, cluttered discussion.

Riiing!

"Migel?"

"Yes?"

"You're kidding, right?"

In the dim blue flicker of a ten o-clock room, Roberto fast-forwarded flames of a burning bark factory, a plea for a mountain to ashcan the top of with a rail recovery launch system, and a direct mail order make your fist slam business desk front and center louder and more authoritatively self-help move your first million closer than you ever imagined credit card numbers taken now half-hour video telethon show.

"I can't put it together. Your worst, is no better than your best attempt at sense."

"What do you mean!? It's all there, plain as day!"

But a show-watching asker of lavish need to repeat the sequence of You'll shake and shout with joy answering our need to ply your water of life with caustic, expensive, self-help remedies for a pathetic, indulgent lack of bootstrapping yourself up somewhere! didn't think so, withering in his late-night blue-flicker ether. Why his letter of the law engorgement of advertising specials had to be preempted by a lot of awful clips of ghetto children riding around green fire trucks was beyond him. He's asked the station for substance, and they'd caustically sent him a chartreuse hamburger bun, without any 100% ground beef!

"It's the water."

The bib-overhauled patron of Ella's diner lurched for the immaterial toilet door, and landed square in Bane's purfumed lap.

"Soo-rry. And that'sbout it."

"What?" she asked.

"The bor. Oleempeea : Itzs the water. . . that's 'bout it."

"Males!"

Although he was refering to the beer he's just commanded twenty cans of, she was assaulted by his unlinear thinking, and smelly beard draped near her private parts.

"Ah, excuse me!"

If you don't get up now and I mean right now, I'm going to ask some supra-natural piece of jism-swat to make you up a week's worth of world's worst nightmares. (That's what she was fuming.)

"Said I'z soo-rry lasdee. Now get off me so I can gfo ta-ta pissr."

"You're on me you klutz!"

The last time she'd experienced something this annoying, arrived dancing the Elvis Lives! coffeehouse pinball table at three AM, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

"Oh shtop confuming me."

He draped an oversized mitt cross the chair next to her, and ineffectually tried to locate the best spot to push himself up. Unfortunately, it was precisely a story Brian Jocker evaded. Finding no appropriate lever for his unfulcrumed consciousness, he pawed the opposite direction, succeeding in grasping a point of tension. . . nobly attached to a bulging-bicepted humanoid engaged in a riveting vortex of conversation with the almost-lovely bartender.

"Whaaat!!"

Was probably the last thing the twenty beer looser heard before cantipultation from a love-struck witch's eyeful of lap.

"He bothering you?"

"Me too."

before she even answered.

Smack! Pow! Shlapp! Sip! Zang! Bang! plong prang boom branched out to subtler motives, talking to him after (long after) he'd ceased operation in conscious realm. Like scolding a vagrant cat after it's road pizza. Bad! Don't you go out in the road again!

Is it butter for the bread of next life's therapy? One-upping the careful reading of parentally-approved fairy tales to unborn funnel-stuck fetuses? Anyway, Bane was hotter than hell, not the labile sort of hot, but as horrendous heart-raving hot that heard whisperSOcarefully come, forming secret words of the last sisterhood of an order she'd so recently been infideled to.

"He's one of us."

It was the most perplexing thing she'd ever heard, coming harbor to all womyn together fuck the men and we don't mean literally unless it's to gain power of sexuality over them.

"My lady of darkness-light, is it true?"

"It is."

"Just when I thought I was getting it."

"You are."

"I am?"

"No getting it by not getting it."

"Bane!"

"What? Huh?"

"You're staring."

"So? He foamed at the mouth, and beat the customer into a pulp. Why shouldn't I?"

"He owns the place, and your eyes rivet on his wife-or-mistress. Haven't you read thy bible, oh evil one?"

(That mad hatter? He belongs somewhere more profound.)

"I want to meet him."

"I'm sure you do."

Hoyt Rasonberry was Jack's nearest half-blood relative.

"Really Migel, this place sucks. It hasn't stopped raining since we arrived."

"That's what makes it famous."

"Better to be famous for potatoes, or honesty, than rain."

"The natives'll think you're crazy complaining about a place

measuring rainfall in inches. Out on the Olympic Penninsula, they

measure it in feet!"

"Let's not go there."

"When does a little wet make any difference? Wet is wet."

"Some wets are wetter than wet."

"Out here the rain's always the same."

"Yea. Miserable."

Bane loved the man's inclusion. She thought it mattered. She brazenly foxes the young blond admirer, and gets a slap in the face. He slips her his mumbled number, smitten, as she is; buoyed by destiny's breech of confetti beverage, before their all-night flinging body drinking binge begins.

"What did insistent tongues say?"

She burned smudge that night, invoking the spirits to whisper the mumble she so half-heartedly forgot. Now, it was the crotch before the head phenomena.

"Get off it,"

They told her, said with less-than-enthusiastic reverie:

"And don't bother us so much. We: We the lost people."

"What?"

"will call you."

And chilblains wracked her open-minded plea.

Get on with it, she told herself.

Auburn was right around the hill.

"How'd you happen to see this joker on television?"

I was screening stock footage when somebody I worked with came over and slid this video into my edit slot. 'Di'ya ever see anything this stupid?' he asks me. 'People running from plagues and wars, jet bomber zooms of civilian last-laughs on earth, and we're full of this shit! Washington's a real fucked-up private Ecotopia, if you ask me.' He left and I turned it on."

"What was it?"

"A bad recording of Deep Throat. He gave me the wrong cassette."

"Sounds all-too familiar."

"As soon as I pointed out his error. . ."

"What, the next day?"

"Soonafter. Anyway... I got the cassette he meant to give me, and saw this boy riding a glitzy green firetruck. The rest is airplane history." And that moment out of time and space, Alberto piloted his mission to prance on the world's unrecorded speed record. They were the same people, after all, coexiting sine and time's lost way done. A minus R is the last time plus this one. The Nobel prize went to the forum that makes the biggest bang after Alfred Nobel's weak, vainly philanthropic hope high-explosive TNT would stop all worship of wars' louder and better bombs. He knew a dynamite computer was viable, but kept crashing all his prototypes. His farthest-reaching hallucination (hushed up, for its dangerous liasons with his own time double), accounted for the programming of plutonium fission after the Uranus-named element had been superseded. The last statement in the computer fbang philosophy, whatever it managed to mean to the officious disciples who followed it, was when we named out the planets to their farthest elemental reach, we'd have to solve the big bang edu-quation (or disvocate Pluto, as the most distant orb know to man).

In her mind, she was a gay priest's life story the Paramount Pictures accepted for a book. It was a thick, ruddy, gold-embossed book. . . your basic effluent didactic leather dusty, never seen life off the library shelf old sitting group with an overly-vivisected sort of decor romance-yearning Victrola room denizen. It was jacketed severely out of her situation decreed in time. In her unauthorized biography, she never published in the media film arts. And that's what kept it from handing her another nothing script to follow.

'It was a weird dream, Rayven."

Rayven had come along two days later.

"What did it mean?"

"I'm not asking for the right things."

"What is the writhe in the right?"

"Good question sister."

"I just made it in a silly place in my head; I know you kind'a like things like that."

(But it irked her almighty a little bit.)

It came down to a quantum mechanical dilemma. There were things scientists studied that had discernible tendencies to exist when by all practical measurements other that made the fist banging on the table declaring reality!, there were other fists extolling the inarguable calculations proving beyond shadows of semi-normal matter doubt, that there was in fact nothing there. It desecrated the curates' statues quantum mechanics had on a public's imagination as the singlemost next all-powerful world-guiding religion finally purged and sanitized of all nagging doubts black might be white (and vice-verser) eideticing fore-square posts of tunneled dials in invisible either this or that spacae. It was a deep, cistern of doubt philosophers swam, in their decrepit, worm-eaten dreams. In tying errands of loose flapping strings to their telltale selves, occasional blame fell on massive doses of radiation, appearing from and disappearing to, some quantum mechanical glitch in physicists' best-lain mice=men theories.

"Massive doses of radiation can rupture cells. Lesser doses are known to damage DNA, overcoming the viable body's ability to replicate successfully, or repair itself." It was the new manifesto of Earth. Redburn dreamed it in the last gasp in rational waves of logic, washing over his waking consciousness, "I've seen!" they recorded on his data sheet.

There was a worker at Hanford's Eastern Washington facility they called the atomic man. He waded the xylemic stem of a blooming flower, setting off Geiger counters fifteen meters distant. This "explosive accident" that makes the man famous, didn't kill him. He was a publicity victim of fate's asking the world troupe to look at the world, and wonder about the quantum fluctuations too many millirems produce. Officially, the same source says-the one that brought you the explosive dump kam-blowup at Trinity, the Japanese did not have upwards of near enough uranium to build a massive global destruction computer deliverable by balloons. If anyone asks, Yoshio Nishina's laboratory was immolated for sure by US planes on April 12, 1945.

Those orange-sized fuel balls took 51,000 people 27 months of laborious sweaty-palmed questions to delay until after preachers asked them about what they thought laying eyes on the mushrooms' 40,000 Hiroshimas dumped into atmoshpeeric days to days breaths. The first false sun created a hundred billion atmospbathyscapes of pressure at a mere four times the heat of Sol. Something mago-mundi happened in its birth-death soul-rendering instant. Three thousand miles longitudinally east, with a self-righteous pinch of South through and through a nostalgic wander north, a man was single-handedly steering himself around the globe reading Man's Athletic Endeavors part three for the sixth time. Only two people were ever killed in the Tour De France's ninety year history. "Tha's incredible." he slandered out loud. Then he remembered it was an old book. It's surely three by now. And that's when the whole global dilemma hit him smack in the face.

His generator was baked; Jester-destiny had cooked his short-wave batteries, there were no mail stops, and the last land was sixty hours heading the long way from where he intended to go. "Do what ye must." he remembered his grandmother saying, so he ennuied a million to one note, and cast in the cask of earth's deepest puddle, one humungus genie. After this episoak, he drained another bottle of Portuguese wine (in case there was something to add later), lashed the faulty Auropilot, and went on his hard, short cot. Blissfully, getting progressively more longitudinal, he dialed off the world's edge. They wrote him off to tax evasion.

"'Get this'? Do what?"

"Down in the Southern Hemisphere they found a message in a bottle from some guy they thought had dissipated from the round-the-world race."

"So?"

"Don't you get it?"

"Frankly, no."

Jack wasn't home. Nobody knew where he was. Actually, he didn't even work here, he used to. He didn't ever live here. Where did he hang out now? Like, look around. Haven't you seen his car? They wouldn't even call it a car, to be honest. More like an eyesore.

"Any idea where we would start looking?"

"Beats me."

They drank happy-hour beet and carrot juices at Edith's the hippie daughter's brand new soon-to-be foreclosed Jazzarama Vegie Bar.

"Place is kind'a dead, huh?"

Its shiny stainless stellar centrifugal goosh-relief separators took an hour each to clean, from the trill of five layers of drinks all day long.

"How's business?" Roberto asks her, to avoid less answerable questions.

"Stinks. People always say they gotta start eating right, then order coffee and sweets. I say I got only Vegan cookies and decaf grown without pesticides, and they leave. You two are the first juice customers all day.

"Sounds rough. A.M. in the rain needs some hard-edged purgative."

"Ever tried wheat grass juice?"

"Nope."

"No whiners mix with it."

"Meaning?"

Migel said it as discretely as possible."

"It takes you; you don't take it."

"Sounds like a dare."

I ask her what color it is; she says. . .

"Gimme one."

"Single or double?"

"Triple. I want my socks' blow-off nuclear."

She frowned, but ground the frighteningly bright green liquid from the mushy pulp of lawn clippings.

"Taker' easy." she warned. "I can tell it's your fissure that craved this."

"What fissure?" he said before he gulped.

"In your aura. You're missing something."

"Whaat?"

It was. . . well. . .something. Something sublime-like hitting your thumb with a hammer.

"Brutal stuff, that."

"If you're unattuned. Part of your spectrum is missing."

"You can tell that by looking at him?"

"Of course."

Like, ear corn boils to perfection in seven minutes.

Thy past is thy present is thy future. It was a gum machine mechanism where you maneuvered a crane into a stack of lamely-worded fortunes. Migel happened to land a good one, and remembered it for seventeen years.

"What else it. . . I mean, is it you see?"

Nothing ventured, nothing . . .

"Tacoma."

"What about it?"

"I don't know. It's a word log-housed into your color gaps."

"Uh-huh."

"Take it or leave it. I don't tell people these kind of things very often."

"Thanks-we're . . .honored. Now I'd like to see you prosper as well, so I'll give you some business advice. Sell things before people can think about what they're buying. Don't word it so self-righteously. Better yet, carry dairy-fattening chocolate I-can't-resist-it treats, so you can be the pusher and the counselor providing therapy for their addiction."

"Can't do it."

"Why not?"

"No will power. I'd eat them over the whole day, and be fat as a fairground cucumber."

Wait! She's selling what the inner part of her doesn't really want?!

"My humble advice is: think about that piece of self-honesty, and how laden with non-vegan stuff it is, as you contemplate chapter eleven."

"I'm almost afraid to."

"And that, if I could see auras, would be your hole. Thanks for those concoctions."

They closed the bright chrome door noisily.

"You trashed her. She's just a kid."

"All's fair in business and war."

"You're right though. W.C. Fields used to say, 'According to you, everything I do is either illegal., immoral, or fattening.'"

"Wise words from the wary. That girl would have sided with Mai West, or whoever he sadistically said it to."

"Like Mr. Fields, do you?"

"'Anyone who hates dogs and children can't be all bad.'"

"Bravo!"

Things were slipping into the former Soviet Regime. Fifty percent of school kids had some form of chronic disease, and ten percent came into the workforce with serious variance to how a percent-top human is suppose to genetically look. Their R.A.P.D. (randomly amplified polymorphic DNA) tests came basking in skews, for five years earlier it had been unthinkable someone could do them, and now there were guidelines of normal, one could so easily violate. Genome mapping had cartographer's syndrome, where Scientist Maily Keestone drew the lines. She loved dogs, and Sino-Soviet children, and worst of all, obscure species of high-gut tapeworms. They penetrated her fingers' probing, answering her boundless verve with malaise, making her miss some crucial elements-and some important hues-on the polychrome R.A.P.D. system analyzer.

It shouldn't have been hard to futily fight. Studies showed empirical nonsense about sexual abuse equaling Viet Nam's vet trauma on the oblonged hippocampus long before anyone guessed the world's genetically-altered past had Tao'd a whole new pack-n-parcel of humanoids into being. They addressed the rift in the self-replicating programs' broken quick fix-to-the-rescue system, by genome mapping entirely different trains of space and time-thought. It was entirely the kind of mistake that let NASA buy a mountain for a 600 m.p.h. toboggan ride, while encoding microchips with the digital information necessary to seamlessly assemble laminated sheets of graphite and epoxy in space, once pre-sliced, by a cunningly sharp pinpoint jet of steel-cutting water. It was all so terribly treacherous, Dr. Morgan was incited to send the apoplectic scientific community the following mess of work:

"I believe that...(pause) Hot plumes of magma we're responsible for geographical flood basalts." the paper grossly misquoted. "These plumes formed at or near the earth's core, and rose through the mantle, burning straight into the crust to wreak global apocalypse."

He said havok, in truth. Some blue-eyed parson gangly-fingered a word or two, imagining it better tinted, than when only partially real.

The seventy digit DNA TT100.4 computer sat idle, while Janism groped for its ass. Yiddish tickled its arm; the Egyptians made it look around and Dr. Asish Basu gave it the hiccups considering core-mantle boundaries. It hadn't been invented, but it had already.

Reality occurred the next day. Jack had a long draank on his personal occultist's expense account, and woke up to find explicit operations in his morning routine. Pour your friggin' coffee just so; not so much sugger, will you!? Ask yourself why the laundry is late being finished and button that shirt better. You divided that last cell all wringin' wet wrong. Start over and try again. Huh? A viceroy surveying a freshly-emptied granary couldn't have been more bedwildered. Gross negligence. I have arisen, before I have awakened. It is the only logical answer.

He followed the letter of the commands, just in case, and began wondering how he's ta go about waking his dream body up, before the house burnt down. Toast. Next routine was toast. Have to shut that one off. You must have your charcoal Wonder Bread, so do not think and reality-ease yourself elsewhere. It is a plot to destroy the liberty of a sentient being to create a computer processor out of a inanimate fire quenching object. It is the alien collective preparing for scarab-implant correction. Now plug the toaster in the top outlet and set the adverb for the lightest setting. Burn-that is light. Your toaster has no light. Some part of me is sabotaging all I've thought. It wants me to funnel the firetruck dream off the chute; it wants me to. . .

And there was a ringing natter from the front flank.

"Hello? Anyone home?"

Locks jangled, and light spilled in. Bane stood there, looking at the man who answered in his undershorts.

"Hi. I'm ah. . . looking for. . ." she glances at the sidewalk by his color-shouting truck. "I just . . ." why doesn't he say anything? "Was walking by and. . ." she shakes her head. "No, that's not true. I had this nightmare, or, more of a vision you could say. . ." she stops her intelligent roll to notice the blisteringly hot-looking haze coming from his kitchen. "but, . . .umm, excuse me, I think something of yours is burning."

She told mister Jack a thing of two. He sat ether on his migratory friend the couch, sad with longing to catch the place on ontological fire, trying to slip the witch's penetrating insights.

"You know. How do you know?"

You ask from the part of you that wants to shut the whole thing down, she more or less said. That was the burnt toast. It was the purging forewarning the computer would work. What did I don, making myself all those directions? A biddy's apron. The mind went rambunctious, hoping to foil the divine prophesy. And what might that be? The Uranium solution, of course. You're waht? I won't hear under the rug of reason these things are clearly wrong.

"I had a vision, I told you."

That's when she decided to slop her Kool Aide on his couch.

"What the hell?!"

Awake noel, the strictures are lifted.

"I thought I'd. . . and you. . .!"

He was pidded platted and lipted.

"Neptunium went all wrong, and. . ."

He sat there dumbfounded, looking the lime-green stain up and over.

"Who do you represent, and why?"

"I've come on hand-to-ear secret from a certain collective. E-mail just wouldn't serve our ends."

"And just whom might your collective represent?"

"Outland."

"Like the comix strip?"

"Just kidding. We're interested in letting the earth live up to its potential."

"Another Greenpeace? I suppose you'll be asking for a collection soon."

"Not all of us are cloaked in money's needs."

"That's the problem with the earth; what meeks you think you can help?"

"We. You're already well on your way to helping."

She needed to tell nobody and everybody about the new galactic measurements. Jack! Don't you know the universe has been red-clocked at 9.5 billion years, give or take a billion or so, and the oldest stratum of stars timepiece in at twelve to sixteen?! What down and out bridge captain with a half-pint of Rotgut could ignore this discrepancy? The cosmologists ate the wrong salient facts for breakfast, and forget to imagine fact is a cosine of falsehood in a universe where everything's changing. The universe is ectoplasm-it ebbs and flows it superstructures without regard for the man-made constants. M69's relationship through division of its own receding velocity in regards to its Earth distance is heaped with nonlinear rubble. You're in the old-school thought, trying to break through to the emergence of the new.

Did she level with him?

"I know what you're up to."

He slayed the fire-eating dragon with one word.

"So?"

She sat there, unconsumed by here and now's scuttle of her speech. A fragment of popcorn's bass-stickiness lay enclosed in a Safeway shopping bag right under her cloak.

He didn't know about Einstein's "greatest blunder of my life." The organically mad, shock head white haired scientist shared some peculular beliefs with the witch collective. He called it his cosmological constant; they called it other, unpronouncible things, based on bad renditions of early pagan hand-me-down tales. Basically, there was a focus physics called a force that remained grounded in a constant usurping Hubble's famed recession-expansion rate of the universe at large. Nobody in modern science had been able to confirm or deny this undertow, which affected large bodies across vast anti-gravitational mind-boggles of space. Einstein seemed a little party-shy, when he learned he's rediscovered something indeterminately old, and wrote his thinking off. It was the 18 billion year old solution, that made the universe an insect larve within the heated kernal of a corn voled in the Native American coals. The explosion was the answer.

"Too far out." Einstein suggested to a tight-lipped friend. "It manages to supersede some grand prove-mes, but I fear its reduction to nethers of multi-symboled numbers will wreak some bad juju on all of us."

"Too right. I'd bedevil us both trying to find some new slots to pound the round pegs into."

"It's decided then. I'll call it a blunder, and take my cape from its bedroom."

"Here here! Your thought's mum with me."

Later, the Cepheid cateracts opened, and narcked what they'd heard. The stars had told Jack, without telling him anything. "Pit yourself agaisnt the tales of the stones." an insistent voice told men. He listened, and filled the space under his bed with river rocks.

That night the doctor had an idea-struck dream. She intestinally felt a germ migrate to a "know". A know was an F piluic bridge. Your basic germ had the capability of transferring updated genetic material to another, less savvy brethren-microbe, F piluic bridges of cause and effect. The good doctor had been studying their genome freeways (in regards to the spread of cancer), spleening entirely too many hours of hopeful scratched lids forcing plasmids to harbor hidden agendas, she was nearly rabid to hip-hip-horray! shoulder as truth. In this dream of all thrombic dozes, she saw the Earth as a germ in the universe answering a gnomic phone line of thrashing, translucent ectomaterial. Earth was attempting to receive the garbled transmission of a vociferous code, but grounded on her billion-mile personal opinion, the operation of the one-cell planet had been seriously genomized, or skewed, in such a way the material seemed garbled. It was as if Earth had forgotten its own language, and mixed its letters up. This mansard of timeliness dropped on her head like a gold bullion blanket, suffocating every sense of what was happening. "This was the exchange of indigenous material to ward off an infection. Your research describes the shuttling of cancer-related antibody codes," it said, "and known virtuosity in evading hitherproof antibiotics. A-Here; A-Mass responds total-look inside the popped kernel of the corn-what change in matter?"

Bolt upright, sweating a grand revelation-where's the paper? Too tired, dozing slightly-every motor's mead needs a flask to hold it-pen?-I'll remember. Sure I will. How couldn't I?! ZZZZzzzzz. One to one odds swore she should have forgotten completely. But she didn't. Gashed by one image, she called Roberto, the nuttiest neurotic she could think of, and left a decidedly non-antagonistic message.

"Bathyscapes. Are you listening? I've had a preternatural glimpse into the workings of symmetrical steel spheres. Bathyspheres are related to popcorn. Popcorn in its unexploded state is a model of something profound-perhaps the Earth, and maybe even the universe in general. Call me collect; is your machine still. . ."

Beep!

". . .hell-bent on vexing important messages by cutting them off?"

Yews chopped down for canvas tarps full of bark. Yews were all the mind could conjure. Cancer cures. Earth in a state of disease, it was all so. . . excruciating together; and apart as will. I would venue it on my nest of research, and they would wipe their brows, thankful for a reason to shut it down. She's looped. One bear hug too many. Too many beakers for the solutions. . . I can hear it now.

She called back and politely finished the message.

"I got the craziest message on my machine."

"What?"

"I don't know how to describe it. It made some sense-makes a lot of sense, somehow-but it hardly means anything et-al."

"Which one sent it?"

As if Migel knows the players intimately.

"It's a cancer research doctor I know."

"No kidding! Listen to this:"

Migel shuffled a loose sheath of papers he slung from a tatty briefcase. "I wrote it one night trying to link something to the unprecedented miasma Jocker gassed us with."

"Was it that profound for me? I'm not sure. Breathing in people's microscopic fecal matter, especially if you know what it was in its pre-digested state, isn't my idea of profound experience."

They'd gone back for a forgotten cord, and suffered the wrath of day-old bratwurst with sauerkraut-Brian strengthened, in a sub-sonic gale of sphincter-contraction.

"It was a stinker, all right. It was it's pungent, disassociative action that thrust me out of myself. . ."

"Where is the soul of a mustard gas attack? I wouldn't want to be a disembodied stool in astral form."

"What?"

"Nothing. Go on."

". . .so anyway, I thought about this big neon glowing sign."

"Makes sense. It lit up the area, olfartorally."

"Yea. It was green-that all-malevolent hue of his electrical discharge shirt-and it said a lot of things."

"Like?"

"I couldn't see them. It was a very rapid vision."

"So you associate this paper in your hand?"

"Better than that. I used a hypnosis tape I'd dubbed to relate the scenario."

Roberto was mightily impressed.

"Hewn straight form the collective version of your unconscious! Lemesee."

DNA upload, cells self-righting mechanism cancer breakdown

coinciding with getting closer to cure doctor's advice. Listen!

"There's some gaps, as you see."

"True, but it's interesting, nonetheless."

"How do you think she'd correlate this?"

"Beats me; besides call and ask her."

It was busy. She was on-line with the aluminum company of Canada, who were filled with rhetorical demands by Sague-nay-Lac St. Jean's regional population, for an investigation of their four slap-dashed smelters in conjunction with whales beached right down-seaway, stone-cold blubber-dead from intestinal cancer. What if it was the other smelters' fault? they wanted to know bolt outright. How would we ever know the difference? The large company wanted insurance a chemical signature could be rendered from a whale's genetic aberrations.

"No likea' the phone device. EEt never works for me."

"Well, nevermind about that. We need to cruise the police stations and ask about that green truck."

"You think they'll know?"

"We're the news. They can get on the radio and

bloody-well ask."

"Blarmy! You're cheeky bastarrt."

"Too friggin'-right mate."

They Monty Pythoned the car, and shut the door with a bang.

"Who said that?"

"I did."

Their egos were frayed as the edge of a shoddily-kept oriental rug. Three strangers seeped their stratagems into Jack's favorite couch while he showered, and sought a semblance of traditionally rational thought to explain the kooks and weirdoes infesting his inglamorous living room. A witch, a writer, and a cameraman. Aren't I lucky! His Dial soap filled with very prophetic curses, before he dropped it, misstepped its painful, tearwracking rabbit-free test abuse to his optical membranes, and flew close-quartered arse over teacup. Yonder, his body walked aimlessly as the deep vibrato ring of his porcelain cast iron claw tub drew fainter, and the tweety-vultures circled his head.

That got me (Roberto?) thinking.

I wonder what they did in that other book-the one I didn't (or did?) wire together with the three friends. Did they ever get involved with the project, or did it die on its rack? Who was the voice Jack had ordering him around in his half-awake state? Is it . . .?

Then a whole new line of thinking struck me.

What if the mind is lined up with intuition-threatening it with incessant bids for prominence? The mind is agog with the non-linear nodality spirit has its basis in. Your mind has no casual effect to explain déjà-vu, and inklings of things about to happen-thus the known must fear the unknown-trying to possess its fountain of wealth, and the listening that fount commands. It is listening to the voice so carefully, it learns its nuances, and is able to undermine the clarity of it, emulating the partial truths, and twisting what surrounds them. The mind then questions the answers. It has infected the pure, unadulterated collective dialogue with impassive seeds of doubt.

Maybe the voice I constructed Jack to listen unerringly to, was this form of infection. Your (his[my?]) inner voice is an impostor, discerning ten or twenty percent truth as real, convincing evidence there is validity to this voice's commands. The mind then turns its analytical apparatus to the eye that construed its statements inscribing the circle that mind will validate. The mind is trying to prove itself, focusing on inane bits that are partially, or fully true. It chose these, so it will change its arrows, to accentuate their minor(ity) preternatural truisms. Look! You should trust this voice! It has given you inventions beyond the mind's linear capabilities!

It has gleaned little scraps of news and compiled them into a tasty treat.

The mind, by society's preoccupation with its self-defined role, defines what is important in the earthly senses realm. Now I understand.

I am working with a polluted correspondent.

It isn't avid, in its purveyance of its own failures.

It gives the fodder of "intelligent" questioning, disregarding the mechanism of its interpretations. Jack is listening to a bossy cow-one that's panicking with the fate of facing his three impending interlocutors. He is on the verge of a rational letdown (bringing to life the stones' earth knowledge under his bed) that his impossible chartreuse firetruck is the next world-savior. He is about to engineer the pretuned path of nothing linearly making a watch-fob of sneezy-nosed sense. The mind dowses big questions' trucks running repeatedly over its rancid, squished world paradigm.

Your-my-we're-Jack's Roberto's etc.'s worlds are crumbling.

Yea. Not bad.

There are four main characters-

should I probe their arcana?

Roberto, Jack, Bane, Migel

There's the mind, the spirit, the body, and the emotional sense.

The story I first started writing had four characters that were suppose to write it, providing terribly differnet styles, and inner workings;

but they declined the offer. They were wise. It would have been a cataclysmic brawl on paper for dominance, as split pieces of the melon humanity, banged on each other, to watch their juices run.

I'm curious now what the other sotty story led to.

Who dodged who, in the other version of this take?

What if I draped myself with the knowledge I didn't know ?

Like now. Like always.

Pretend I took a left instead of a right, when the voice with twenty percent truth steered me right

instead of center.

What would it have been like?

Why don't you see for yourself?

I'm suspect of you now.

That's your mind again. Listen closely for the voice that didn't command or suspect beforehand. It is the hundred percent, you have unwittingly received form time to time.

What part of the part that's infected is this?

As soon as you ask a question like that, you're infected.

I don't get it.

Your half-hearted mind has erected its screen.

Leave the knowledge you think you know what's going on behind. Computers-pictures---the origin of words-close your elses' interpret. Remember that part?

Yes.

What do you think it's saying to you?

Be ready for anything; act quickly and fully; don't judge beforehand with pictures, or-else's, or hardwired definitions.

Excellent.

So I should start writing the other book-the one I could have, but didn't, and see what happens?

Just see what happens. It's all written-you're joining with its possibility by discovering it's here.

Is it boring?

Mind. Who cares? Judgment : if it's "boring", it's not worthwhile. Whose thinking? Yours?!

I'm not sure.

Better find out.

It had me a bit perplexed.

Was this the adulterated spirit speeding through the maw of the mind,

or the mind-emulation of the sounds-alike spirit?

It was disjuncted, and yet . . . intriguing, because of it.

it was a little like the Theory story, in the hackers who came across a preposterous schemata of symbols they constructed into a machine. Or, not a machine as anyone would authenticate the word. It was a should-work concept stolen from the height of secure government files, based on a run-in with a patently secret happening that members of a UFO watching-club encountered. Their public debriefing constituted the "official" security breach, monitored, morphed, and replanted by a hard-edged member of the SScomputer police. He was one of four archetypes in the individual-collective, who worked dilligently to deny all possibility anything but the rational existed. Mind, in other words. They build this machine with no moving parts, based on the random compilations of the mind-watch man who tryed unsucessfully to disemodem them from more-secure info stashes. The censor, by fate and design, ladles the revolutionaries a force of even-keener information, paging through old books of ancien-symbologies' scan this and that, utilitarianizing his will's surrender to a mild intersection with something mystically inherent in their bone-handled serifs, and seductive curves. His spirit had a carnival's rings' toss, and instructively said nothing specific about the choices. The spirit chose a reality nobody recognized well enough, to judge right or wrong. It made no sense to the other three characters, who decided to build the machine; but they assumed something constructed from beyond the world's dominant plane, wouldn't.

In asking for the impossible, those hackers got it. They met on the Internet, a disembodied, mediocre medium for soaking in the old, immutable ideas. They had a cyber-link through the limitations of the system they were born into, to the dark sective powers that believed the dream we all became. They began their machine in earnest, thinking it would change things immeasurably, by offering patients of the giant psycho-hospice Earth, a new series of arguments to measure themselves through. It would embroil the elaborate design in much speculation why it didn't world-work right off the bat.

"Oh well. We tried."

"It was interesting."

"Yea."

One year later, they got the shocks of their lives.

In time-related phenomena, you'll predict (with some success) events' starts and finished lines. In their forthcoming, you can prepare the psyche for all its semi-predictable changes. In the work of all three-dimensional lives, propaganda asks the system to comply with its whims. Fourth-D adds problems. There are no demarcation points. All schedules are useless. They turned on their static machine, and it worked. Now a year's worth of life's aggressive tendencies has thrust the original inventors apart. They one by one realize their close proximity must be the thing causing scenarios of middling, to horrific disaster. Everything ties into their employed symbols; shhh. The governmental disinformation begins to ring in white house corridors, and the pursuer of the three hackers realizes he's the key to this non-linear, chaos-island's, scaled, but barricaded walls. They assimilate him; he is faced with the magnitude of the government's groundwork to facade irrational aspects of earthly day to day life, and he barely manages to deny everything.

That's the mind for you.

It would have been a great story.

I can see why it's full of garnish, and wracked with holes as well.

You're the votive burning at the old pagan alter, and the hewn statue asking to be bowed at. A book is the mumbled prayer, scratched from some nebulosity in-between. It is the rough, translated image of an ineloquent war between the senses-the personas of the representational characters-if you will. I didn't know who they were, and thus, they didn't either. Their whole discovery is an end of road, whose cul-de-sac bristles with nobody's useful input. You want to hit glass later, and blow a conversation out the nether, into a place discovery exists?

Liar.

The brain demands the convoluted, must make silence. The brain is the overworked CEO, thinking the whole contract demands his correct suit-color selection; or the fair running his country deserves has basis in securing avuncular accounts. Their brain, is blown out of proportion. Cortex thinks it's the end-all General, directing a new (holy) world-war. Cortex judges books to completion, or kills them at an operations stable. In other words, trying to slip the marshaling of the brain . . .the book fell flat; because?

It had no injunction to do so. It hadn't properly deceived the deceiver.

The spirit was trying to say something viable, through a series of stories brain infected. Spirit grappled with Earth mortar witlessly, casting here and there, fleeing realizations round building comes ferociously close to "viable", square-brick mentality.

The brain edited its message.

He cursed low-skied high heavens at Ashley, and his accursed book of knots. "Cliffort W. Ashley, you deman of fingers and minds, I say your mangy name out loud, to remind me there's nothing less frustrating than watching fresh white pages crinkle blue to fat black crispies." Jack said it with his lighter poised, fighting the impulse to go AWOL by torching his Coast Guard textbook. All those height-of-treachery monkey fists, and verted sheep-shank triplehitches belonged stuck in the splicer's hall of arcane fame. No decent-minded person should have to carry an apothecary of worm squiggles around in-between their neural junctions. The book was indecent exposé to what existed around him. All thought ran gauntlet fear of bondage, summed up to form as analytical protein moles wiggled their ends of: Put line here first, then there instructions straight off Ashley's pages. Migel Matisse Littlefield liked to play with short ends of rope. He secured a tease of string that kittens might have hassled, and unconsciously tied a noose with double bowline blighting. Jack stared aghast at his freshly inducted dishonorable service record, and felt its necktie strangle his faceless lisp. There was sweat on his brow, as Migel began his case.

"We have something for you also, but we don't know what."

That's nice, Roberto thought. Right to the point. No fanfare.

"Do you know a guy named Brian Jocker? What about. . .

-fat media dude? No, I suppose not. What about. . .?"

He didn't know prophet Marv either.

"-sound engineer antichrist? Well, you never do know."

"Right-beggin' fanatic, that boy. Hell was knickerin' stirrups for socks on tyhat boy, when we pried your patriotic street address from his gee-whizzed sound-tracks."

"What, are you talking about?"

Something big is going on here, Jack. Can't you feature this on your biological movie screen? We're all here to act out a big what-ever.

"Popcorn, Bathyspheres, airplanes, cancer, and a shitload of there-me-heres and there-me-nots shot us here. We're suppose to be here. You're the link with all the nutziness out there." Roberto flung a finger recklessly in general the direction of the loud old firetruck. "That thing is gointa change the world somehow." Bane added.

(Roberto and Migel surveyed her with suspicion.)

"Ah, yea. Anyway Jack, some pretty weird things have happened to get us here, and we're curious to know what you're goinnt-do about it."

Jack eyed the sticky chunk of world-record popcorn ball now effectively melted into his palm. He handed it back to Bane, asked her to keep it for the time being, took a deep breath. . . "He called Domino's pizza?! How come?" because he was hungry, and asked if a pepperoni was all for one and one for all. Bane, the only vegetarian, reluctantly said yo...

"Make that one-third vegie. Right. See you in fifteen."

Migel was elected to get it.

"Okay, you two have a special property tax to levy."

Bane and Jack's immediate leg-jerking left, looked at each other's lopsided questions forming at the corner of their mouths.

"Anndah; what might that be?"

Roberto jew-harped.

I had no clear idea why I did it. Putting itching powder in the captain's shampoo seemed a natural thing to do. All straight-thinking children (with a leaning towards natural maliciousness) would hail it a nautical prank of fine, twisted mien. Not Seo, the Anti-fun Elite Squadron Leader, who turned my guilty hand itinerantly in. He was parked over the captain's asshole, hoping for a particularly nasty fart he could brown nose to aromatic perfection.

"JACK!"

That was the last time any Coastie called by his first time name ever got in so much trouble. They heaped part-n-pac a'blame on the man, for everything that had gone serendipitously wrong for the last six months. Ordinary, Joker Jack yearned for such lands of misbegotten distinction. This time, well-meaning fame became a boot-n-the arss out. Little did he know, a universe had decried and directed his divestiture.

"Yes Sir!"

His forage grasped dead twigs, and litters of loam-to-be leaves.

"We have to support an im-possible assertion."

one of his shipmated croaked. He was under suspicion of honesty.

"Not that we know what it is. The lie just yearns to be discovered."

In the seconds after uttering that prolix, Bane watched a mind's eye-forn-eye playback, of talking to a slippery-Hari (post)-Krishna Coffee Corral patron, two weeks before.

". . .it's physical; it's not sitting at a desk all day. You get to drive around." He was a secret serviceman, of what watchdog agency, though? She'd better-guess him a plumber's inspector, than a covert aggrandimiser of automobile travel. He was a good liar, but she knew it. Her better abutments against liars on the make, warned her to keep lithe with her concierge-for he lacked a base, primal desire in his plum-wide, prying eyes.

"Bane?"

"Yes?"

She was a long way off.

"I must be honest with you."

"P-leasse."

"We should sleep together."

"Right now?"

She was stunned by his obvious lack of tact.

"No. I don't know. Why not?"

He was a flat-topped adolescent, struck by the amalgam of do what you think, and nothing ventured, nothing gained.

"Is this the property tax?"

Jack was undoubtedly twisted. His ancestral DNA had suffered at the end to the Permian Era, when sadly, 95% of the earth's plant and animal species were exterminated. Old had to give way to the new, which is now called old because dinosaurs are so irrevocably out of date. The core mantle boundary defined Jacks strange continence and forbearing in the field of the normal everyday life most people loved. Jack asking Bane to sleep with him, wistful as he was, delined its queer emphasis as soon as the jocularity of virtually everything, kindly wracked him over the head.

"Oh, that's. . ."

As he burst into laughter.

". . .pretty good. Now that you mention it, I suppose we should get to work." Having been internally concussed since she was three, Bane tired easily trying to sort double meaning'd conscious-unconscious statements from joking dead-seriousness. In other words, she was still wary work meant play. Pronto, it rang on the glass-ringed coffee table.

"You cane along walking, as if you need no assistance. If I told that to an old man, he's want to hit me."

"So?"

Dr. Asish Basu's stone-trapped H3 bubbles percolated Mr. Jocker's long-forgotten past in aprimordial stews. Jack longed for the list and burst of thirty million years of rotten recollections locked in the flood basalt's last covering. He was an updated, outdated computer's regeneration after it was due to die once more. Computers got more precise in losing the thread of their original argument, from distinctly organic, to inert materials worship, then finally, turning back to DNA. The nuclear weapons testing conglomerate needed computers hundreds of billions of times faster, to pretend to do what they'd like to if they weren't too afraid to predict their button-pushing was carotid artery-slashing. Scientists said "billions of times faster" was an unlucky seven year cycle, provided their DNA didn't pan out. DNA didn't appreciate being asked alchemicies of its own destruction. Radiosity required phantom operators in radiospheric space and time. Cosmic observer Ray Redfield Jamison would have loved to occupy Jack's mind. Functionally, he had no logical train of thought a pigeonholing scientist would recognize. Jack was a prototype of a different kind of human-obfuscation the EARTH computer was capable of producing. Jack slid down the rings for Saturn's amusement, thinking nothing more or other than : "This is fun."

Jack was A-Albacore. All things in Human Evolution are demonstated thru nature first. Then, because we're so thinkingly-stupid, humans want build them in machine form, and call themselves "inteligent". Machine's are brains at work. Machine's definition is who were we, and who will we be in one now, to the new ideas of what a next now is. Machines prototype what is coming-growing, in both spirituallyisms, emotionally see-your-counselor tomorrowotropisms, and physically seldom-figure-it-outs. Jack was the pure research vessel of classified speed and depth. He existed for the press only, out in a obfuscate cloud of hard black paint. Anyway, Albacore was one of the last miniature pre-nukeisms. It was laid in keel March 15th, 1952 at a prominent New England shipyard. Albacore is a tuna, really. A small warm-seas variety, with the lengthiest pectoral fin per bodily distance around. Albacore was a bonza name for a tin fish coffin (in fact, that's exactly what the first version became). SS 218, commissioned June 1, 1942, sent eight Japanese naval vessels to a bottom before deep-sixxing itself on a mine. AGSS 569 (its post-mortem descendant) served the cold war maliciously, though it never carried a single weapon, nor participated in any defined "conflict". It was the grandfather of all post-modern submarines. It's neolithy told us for twenty years: Praenuntius Futuri!-or-Forerunner of the Future, latinizing the truth in painted-on mottos, so we could teach its sermon cryptically.

Have you ever seen how enlisted men sleep on a crammed-in submarine? "Sleep tight!" doesn't mean anything useful anymore. In older than hell days, significan't lee after the Egyptians were long-forgotten in their post-scarab computer quest, it meant you should tighten your rope-sprung bed. Those were the days when society helped with leather-thronged buckets emblazoned in family seals, braving flames to save chicken-feather stamped-on mattresses filled with hungry bedbugs. It was a time before basalt knows it's full of H-three, and longs to tell the onyx, its black is better. Scientists still thought fire was a basic buildilock of nature, there were no nuclear fuel silos, and the Germanic physicist Erwin Schrödinger's genes had yet to gain assembly, so he could think of putting a varmit in a box, silencing a noisy cat in a bag theory to a quietude of feline-existing, or not-in the asymmetrical square corners of a malequin main frame. Jack thought the Schrödinger's cat paradox summed up the worst and best of people's inability to go off the deep elevator of life. The automobile selected to carry the first plutonium, existed in a similar quantum state. Sealed in a heavy nitrate syrup vessle contacting the sedan's rich, deep, apostrophe seats through its stainless steel can, the fuel was shuttled in motorcar sequestration along the mighty Columbia River, to its waiting train in Portland. As long as it wasn't opened, the steel cylinder box with the metaphorical cat existed in a quantum-machinational state. It rode the wave of superimposition, depending on a statistical decay of a single radioactive atom (hooking to a poison capsule), conjuring probabilities outside the dark, tree fall in the woods does it make any noise? interference of environmental observation.

Well, when the fist of too-much-pressure crumbled the nuke powered Thresher, (or was it a Scorpion?) Jack wasn't going to war. He was a little too young yet. Young meant you had to fight other commies of ways and means. So they cracked out canned hand-wringings and farewells, wondering id too much if the Soviets would bathyscope the wreckage for the missiles on board, that weren't officially suppose to be on board. If only they'd used the expensive lesson inherent-intrinsic and interdimensionally stitched throughout the Albacore AGSS 569. When Earth realized the big mistake, it was yonder down the road. The first Navy sub had already been launched and condemned in 1872-the same day, in fact; but providence whispered loudly (knowing Nazi good sayings) and predictable halcyon back would have to find their ways in deep, dark times. Earth, you see, wanted to test a theory. It liked the idea of nuclear fuel stranded in secret, inaccesible places.

Jack inducted a lot of highly sophisticated thoughts without knowing where, or why he got them. Actually, he breathed them. They were floating in the nethers, exhaled by overly-indiced research jocks as their bodies sought to expel the poisons of excess thinking without wherewithal near enough for opium-pipe outdoor sex, wild maniacal yelling, and a hand grenade politely lobbed into law school flurry of burgeoning sharks. It was the fate of most individuals on the planet to remember way too many things that didn't matter one whit, and forget all the important, festering commands the computer downloaded into a fantastically rare, now insectually-extinct insect-eater some would feel direct kinship to. It had been a grandiose mistake-one our planetary's collective had painstakingly arranged, to test its lesser lost-soul members. Jack breathed in crazy ideas that coalesced in the syphilis of togetherness (all souls are one, somewhere), transmuting to the strangest things quite anyone would ectoplasmically hear.

"We have to start the nestle of the ese that will become the next computer languish. We have to devoid the space will exists for, and start all over again. This is the plan: We; the people who alltogether know not a whole hell of a lot, will start immediate work of getting this computer up and flying. To begin, we'll need a new name."

"A new personal name?"

Bane just got her name. Did she want another one so soon?

"I sort of like the me which is securely hidden in my god-given title."

"My point exactly!"

Roberto loathed the idea. Migel was intrigued.

"Your thoughts can not b-compluted by told notions of what machines do when they were invented to calculate things. We think it will make our out-and-out lidlocked lives easier. Machines make life easier. We think that into anti-being when ever we read, or hear a plea to buy this and that or another thing nobody can escape. We are the puppets of the programming a-computer wreaks. We must find a new term for

couching the... Jack stopped talking, obversely observing a picture Jeremiah had drowned in a late-summer spill of ice-cream. He's called it his two-worlds drawning, because he couldn't say w's without ns attached. Jack had needed a second breath examining it. For some reason, he stored it in the firetruck's second tier of it's third gear stash box..

"MY God!"

"What's the matter?"

"We forgot to allow a few minutes to eat pizza!"

Migel had a silly smirk on his face.

"Not me! I chowed."

Roberto was ill-equip to handle the bossing around Jack. He was slapping himself for coming, and wondering if there were still time to see a chiropractor, or perhaps a psychologist, to sort this delusional life back out. Jack was off and running. He had a last-minute bite of Hawaiian chili-pineapple special, and launched into a dream he had before hollowing out the floorboards beneath his bed, and filling their cavity with lovely rocks.

Warheads were disassembled in the bigger is better Pantex plant in Amarillo Texas. Earth made sure they fumbled with the tritium parts in gravel gerties (an affectionate name for dirt bile caverns located in specific purports of geologically-based resuscitation). Yippity skippity! Earth got on its painted wagon, answering human's ongoing concern for 12.5 year half-lives with the nameless reality of mining more and more ore. In the emergency version little-plutonium-packaged destruction-computer scenario, there would be a very arguable mistake in the rock of attempting to save fruit for later loud-mouthed, big-stick bombs. The Japanese, being ahead of their times, decided to enact the last item on their fail-safe list. Legend had it, they came from the stars, so believing this, they ontologically assumed the planets collective Is it working? If it doesn't, you know what's next! and thought they were the messengers of all divine worry. Plutonium lasted so long, it could always be retrieved.

Earth loved it when the little ants scurried to assemble bombs. At least it could detonate the answer. Even rock could remember that, through the broken strings of post-Permian codes. Glen Seaborg had been carelessly selected from a vast array of grey matter physicists to name the element after Neptunium, tweaking atomic valence states here, and there. He didn't even know it (in non-atomic quantities). The US government, thinking it thought these matters out foot by twelve inches to the foot (based on intelligence, and dreadful causes elsewhere), insisted: Were we to choose to make two elements, which two would we make?

Hanford assembled itself the lowest VD rate in Army Country, gouging its bid for plutonium, while Oak Ridge fanatically gas-extracted it's two out of three bargain. Fifty three tons of former at get-go metal buttons the size of dimes to a never-before-seen race of forgotten, insect linked men, really palmed nicely by us, at on or about 2.8 millions dollars per (that's declassified-classified, and provisionally unadjuncted for ecomonic ups and downs) gizmo. 26 more tons of the fantastically heavy items languished in-between the messy stops and states to completion. Each homo-Sapiens' plutonium dime was the product of two tons of reactor fuel, which in turn represented too many tons to keep track of straight from mother earth. Earth was elated. If everything went to hell, plutonium was around for tens of thousands of puny-human years. She-he could engineer an earthquake readily.

What really winced in the fatalistic gullet of the scientist in charge of containing this encomium, is uranium. Its half life, (the 238, that is) registers at the current age of Earth, which seemed very suspicious to enquiring minds. Why not one-eighth? Why not one quarter? He's a very superstitious man, who says what he thinks, even if it wasn't the exact way he thought it. "Like the earth planned it this way-leaving this stuff around to refine." (He kept that working theory strictly to himself.) "Some coincidence, aye? If 238 wasn't so long-lived, there's nothing we could have refined." Heads of agreement. Fortune has smiled on us, becomes: Veda scripture. Oppenheimer, didn't make many McCarthy-era friends.

"You franchised that material. How did you know to dream it?"

"Bid that into a defense contract!"

"I didn't read it, I'm sure. It's the lectern material from a class I'm always late to."

"In that dream?"

"Do I look like a college student?"

They surveyed him critically.

"Maybe; if you dream it."

Bane was drawing pentagrams on her grease-stained napkin.

"I've never had a Hawaiian pizza before."

Causally, it dictated his life. In his formative "yes-mummy" years, the program had never set in properly. Laboratory experiments had shown that if maternal licks are deprived during days seven to twelve, baby rodents have fewer hormone receptors in the nubile folds of their sniffy-whiskered brains. The rats form abnormally, even though the requisite amounts of insulin and growth hormones circulate throughout rodential blood systems. Although this information had been available for quite a time in the scientific community, the money-first baby adoption agencies lobbied a moral injunction on extemporizing rats towards human fetuses. Jack was in the psychodramic dark about his naturalization to Earth. His mother useto lay him on fresh clover, and drop her seventh glass of absinthe fifteen feet since a three hours last touch. He yawned into sunburn, or vibrant lavender, depending on the season of their outing. When he entered into the child welfare system, people talked histrionics about the Romanian boobies who littered small children across mass-dormitory conditions, ruining their business with defective babies. Tooo skinny, dressed in frayed rags, depressed, anxious. . .we have to lie a blue strontium storm to worried, infertile, super parents to-be. They've founded hope on getting a bargain, not a discount close-out. If fate's written in the cards by age one or two (will the kitty be fluffy, or mean?) why even bother? That's what they'll think. They'll start asking all sorts of engendering questions, like why blue-eyed white babies lever twice the price as half-breed Chicanos arresting three times the cash as very black, single-mother specials. "We thought life was priceless!", they'll say.

Jack was a preturned dowel by age one. His loving nettle of a mother wanted him gone, until he was goofing off, wanting to go. Now, she said she lived for him, lavishing all forms of attentions on his adult frame. Just to prove the point, she stopped drinking. Now it's like i-waz in the only times that mattered. She said cryptically. We can be closer like we were. And Jack believed her. Jack thought his affinity to ground was a function of their mutual mother-Earth, and the connection everything shared through childhood. He didn't realize his body functioned as a wave which created a complex interference pattern with Earth's program. Earth was concerned with plutonium, and resurrecting the nuptial Neptunium. "I pondered entropy," Jack said twenty years later, "not knowing it was the residual of the electromagnetic bucking field." his chew-on-grass childhood initiated, all those years after its fact.

Jack M. Splatz It said on Bane's little slip of paper. Her sandals ate up the cracked pavement ten blocks dictated from the ragged, dog-eared phone jacket, that housed an even rattier volume of missing-paged addressed numbers. Did she realize quantum theory allowed for any object to be either a wave, or a particle as she stepped on every other crack to break her mother's back? It didn't occur to her a car key she still had on her ring from a boyfriend's old Dodge she'd long ago broken yup with, could be a (yet to be discovered) operation-mode particle, and the left she perceived as her immediate right could be sauntering around as a wave. Did she realize the Earth was a single parricidal blob of single-particleness, while it was also a numinous carrier of innumerable waveforms? No, she probably didn't. Jack thought about all those witches eating popcorn balls and started laughing.

"What?"

Bane sensed something less than flattering was gingering his mirth.

"Why didn't you bring that blob of stolen sugar?"

"I did."

"I mean, whole. The whole blessed amoebae."

She was irregularly spaced. Jack could tell her tensed moments (from future vacillating to past) were slightly skewed. It was the quantum wave irreconsilability, where all parts of any whole couldn't exist in the same state as the parent object, even if it were considered the infinitesimally last work in progress on basic, subatomic master building blocks. All wholes wrecked their own symbolic consistency, grounding out their immutable irreduction on false premises. They existed in one of two quantum states at every monumental moment, (viz. if they didn't, they'd be forced to disappear) because we ordained their difference. The premise we were all trying to secure, is the one which demands we examine all the parts, trying to find their conclusion. You can see quite reddly in the chartreuse firetruck something was amiss. What was it, though? The fire truck is not suppose to be green (or yellow; perchance your veritable brain is not wired in that conclusion?), because firetrucks are notrucks from and to the proper source if they aren't red (or at he very least, airport canary-colored). It violated the clause by circular reasons-ing. I found that can of paint on Japanese sakè volume-ten; thus, it was the rifle butt thinking: fire? to the shoulder that weighed the stock attached to the finger. "Fire!" I sprayed. I was outside the resonant loop. The truck changed clashing color. I was in quazistate of ecstasy between the mind thing, and the body reason. Your waves eulogy particles' need to be standing in lines getting counted, and thus-simulating waveforms.

"I wouldn't know that. I was told you'd know what to do with this. I assume you do, and that the whole sticky mess wasn't needed to conjure whatever whatcharmacallit that is."

"True."

It was probably true. Maybe it would be fully true in the future, or partially true in the past. Whatever it was, Jack played along.

"Let me see that again."

She had difficulty ignoring the paper it was wrapped in. There was a band of bright red and yellow coloring, and some orange words that were filmily peeling off, like a decal for your skin.

"Yuck. What a mess."

In fact, she hadn't the foggiest what he was going to do with the thing at the very instant god granted him a divine inspiration. Before this moment, she was certain he'd know exactly how to handle it.

"EEnt-her-esting."

He was reading the backwards work painted on the yellow blue-overlapped type-adhered sugar-coated popcorn representative.

"He's flavored our evening with some mischief."

"Who's 'he'?"

The doctory of the fanatical cancer researcher suffered. A good watcher of details convivial to any shred of evidence even far-fetched minds shrunk from (where cancer cells were concerned), she was lately undoing herself. In the dead of night, she worried about growth hormones, and how women/children were especially vulnerable to tumors' appetites. She had a disturbing dream with a lecturer batting her hands when When? was hand-raise asked. He was droning on about the cure of histronical cancer, and how it alluded scientists for longer than it should have. She tried How? with little more success. Why? she was desperate; she winced, ready for the slap that never happened.

"Funny you should ask that. I have been preparing a doctorial thesis for one of my stronger-suited, successful students on that subject. Why, you ask? I will tell you."

But he didn't. He blathered on about interferometry, an exceedingly old technique in which waves are split, and forced to interfere with each others' frequencies. Why had a fundamental disregard to the question he posed answering.

"So you see, nature decided to show us a transparent sheet of multimentionable electron tracks. Where is it? got the scientists in trouble one century, so they decided to ignore that line of reasoning the next. In the single tracks, were hole-universes, waiting patiently for frantic riving into smaller and smaller component waves. As this happens, they exhibit strategic misalignments, recombining to form separate particles. Any other questions?"

Her hand was black and blue to hear any more-forceful answers.

"Good! Class dismissed."

She was the only one there. As she stood, he pocked his soft pine table with a savage blow.

"You there! you'll stay over."

He started undressing, neatly folding his skivvies, by hefting them high above his head. Where did his pants go? she wondered, in a mild state of panic. Part of her know she could just wake up.

"What color is it?"

"What color?!"

He grabbed his puny elephant trunk, and started frisking. As the happy face emerged from its hood, she noticed it wasn't red, or even vaguely pink.

"Well?!"

His impatience was leveraged by a periodic moan.

She was fascinated by his spectacle, vaguely aware anyone could walk in, and he'd probably loose his job.

"What color! Are you deaf!?"

Jack meets Brian in a race. The popcorn elements' set up the theft.

Butter green. Brain isn't happy with this. Argonauts.

She jotted nonsense in her early morning, trying to remember some clues. Argonaut wasn't in the dictionary. It sounded suspiciously like an undersea term. All of a sudden, Roberto comes to mind.

In a lot of places, people were flaying their old concepts. Air conditioners kept steam from gathering too much pressure in shirt collars' strictures, and appeasements to the primordial emery wearing us down to ashes, waited out eternities in nether's appellate courts. Too many proving grounds were falling pray to the unanswerable questions' utter folly. Why does fat chance instead of slim chance mean the same-damnable thing? Who thought of the last thing we'd ever say, when we're already dead? If you're not allowed to drink and drive, how come there's Drive-Thru liquor stores? When something profound happens, you stand up and take note, or sit down and take it in. Submarines were modern classic symbols for the unconscious. Brain was a slip for Brian. Slips are slippery, because they're suppose to be; slips make you fall don. Donning shredded skin makes you remember what you've tried to forget. Don is a type-o of down. That's a slip. Bathyspheres have no propulsion. Your basic Treiste on a tether drops its bathysphere down to a depth nobody thought possible to visit. Deep Challenger had no grapplers, reticulated arms, TV cameras, sample-takers, air scrubbers, backup emergency-powered theatre lights, or tape-driven hard-disk reboot scenarios, just in case. It was a suicide ball into the inky indecipherable unknown. People went there and swore, they'd never feel stupid enough-(thy kingdom for a...)-to do it again. They weren't far past time beloveds were grave-marked with common field stones. The kind of rocks back-bent families removed from infertile fields. Those stones bloodied their hands. Yore cursed them into higher and higher pathosdoms, securing property lines in haphazard tumbles some fool termed a fence. Trieste marked such deathe. Daddy eats his young so the young can grow to feed the old. Stones know these things. They told Jack. The doctor had dying-patient rocks in her somnambulating stomach, trying to forget what it meant to spell the inegregiously indifferently, with a whole new set of symbols.

"I just got a note on my recorder."

"So?"

"It said, whatever you're doing, I'm certain its affecting the A-Mass we spoke about."

"Is that bad or good?"

"I'm not sure."

"Anything else?"

He shifted his turkey sandwich to the other side of his mouth, to ask.

"Yea. Brain might be brian (of was it the other way around?), bathyscaphs are the mind's eye inside out and backwards. . ."

"Like an exploded popcorn kernel."

"Yea."

The metaphor was now ingrained to their perception.

"Some other stuff as well."

"Who was this?"

"The cancer doctor. She had a dream."

"Like Martin Luther?"

"She said she nervously forgets whatever comes out that weird, fearing it will somehow get her research security-checked."

"Don't they supervise it anyway?"

"Yea. I hope so."

But he didn't know.

"Say, turn on the radio, will you? They're about to announce the O.J. verdict."

The diodes crackled their lack of reception.

"Shit! Wouldn't you know it?!"

They were searching for a peculiar sign. Yielding their innovation at every turn of the road over the mountains-what's that? What about the rock off over that'r-way?-they searched for the property tax Jack said was present. Jack, meanwhile, probed Bane.

"Did you have protection?"

"I try not to?"

"Why not?!"

"The natural reaction to protection, is needing more of it."

"So?"

She was passing, with flying colors.

"We're in the same pot of fished-out seas."

"Profound; or it isn't. I remember when the Okie man sided with my point of view, asked: 'How older-yu son?' and I told him. He said I got a good 'grast' on the apocollapse of life, 'fer beein such a yungstr, an-all'."

"Also: witches who've been hurt need protection. I've never been seriously hurt; this is a result of my limited time in the Wicca; therefore, I need no psychinetic fields' surround."

It was an odd dextrin for the body to assimilate.

"Psychinetic. What's that?"

"My own proven work points to its eccentric, unpin-downable nature in the phomonimalogical world."

"I've foraged, and found what your alludes suggest. If an armory is of a known fallacy, or casual effect, it can be armed against, or neutralized. The unknowable defense is never properly prepared for."

"People really hate fighting tanks with bows and arrows."

"So they never arraign an attack. Linear time supersedes the old wards of worry with the assumptions newer, and more virulence-oriented weapons have proliferated."

"Did the cold war ever produce direct super-fortified supercountry conflict?"

"Are we allowed to speak plainly? I'm not a radioactive cinder, so I suppose the question is moot."

"That's not what I meant. Maybe it did."

Jack was thinking deeply. His mind wandered the Marianas trench, and snooped in the Azores' treasure ship chests.

"You're not the one, then."

"Then. Did I ever say I was?"

I can't be direct enough, for being too direct. She was full of contradictions. I came here to help you find Osmeal. Who's that? A dreamer. It's an old bastardized name for one lost in iniquity. What's it mean? One who doesn't know. She doesn't know, but she has the answer?

You of all people should know, nothing nonsensical is easy.

"Where shall we look?"

"We could begin with the assessors."

The assessors were road-weary with dirt... dirt roads, dirt fir tree clear-cuts, dirt on the car, their shoes'n hands and everything else. As soon as it started to fracture into dust, both of them started thinking of asses, and then it rained. Their project was to collect something from something interesting that seeded strange thoughts-the kind of thinking you're afraid to talk about in public. So-do we get any clues?

Roberto tried to soften Jack. You just got them, he'd said.

"I'm fried."

"Me too."

"What if we just picked up anything, from nowhere in particular, and called it good?"

It was an intriguing concept.

"That's a strange place; about the last place anyone could look."

Roberto scratched his head that I'm thinking about it sort of way

"How's that 'levying a tax.' though?"

"Well, all this looking is busting ma-Ass. I don't know about you, but I'd say we're the property that's bin taxed."

"You're right brother-I'm with you. Testify!"

The radio had cracked and fizzed to life three miles the length of the mountain range, and spit old black blues in their post-gospel faces.

"No wait a minute! What's that doctor say? She was afraid to tell anyone about it?"

"What?"

"Her dreams!"

Dream country. Noplace. Bring back nothing.

As the firetruck sat idle for two weeks.

"Sure you can come out! You'll never believe what's going on here!" Roberto bit the springy coils of phone cord.

"What?"

"Well, it's hare and fox. First we have to get you here, then the things will kindle."

"That's no good."

"Tell her something else." Jack tutored.

"You're right."

Roberto hung up the imaginary phone call, and sighed deeply. "We need something analytical. Something she can sink her scientific teeth into."

"It has to hare the cracks in her logical image. It must lure her weakest, most non-linearized bits and pieces."

"Touché."

He picked the phone up, answered, and tested his throat for hidden words. "Hi, it's me."

"Best start I've heard."

"Capital." Migel coached.

"No, I'm off on the wrong foot. Sure of it."

He put the receiver down for the third time, and it immediately rang.

"Here we go?"

"Destiny calling."

Bane's two cents were true.

What happened?

No answer.

I sat there looking at the mountain of hastily-piled manuscript.

Whay out that pilo-paper, is some kind of funky answer to the question I forgot.

I hand-butt a little humming in my left ear.

It's solid, and I turn on the amplifier.

'Your comfort, has to manifest from a place of knowing you've uncovered treasure, that not like radioactive isotopes, will be potentially harmful if treated carelessly.'

I thought it out carefully.

What was it I was uncovering with this story?

Anti-logic?

'What about a test piece with no holds barred?'

'What about an empty-handed reach at something different?'

Was this 'something different'?

I didn't have the foggiest idea why these quotes came back to me, but they seemed to fit with a phone call I never made. I was calling myself, but I refused to pick up the line to see who it was.

Hello?

"The sparse, radio interferonomy signals tied to the last singularity this universe can foretell having had, which is roughly equal in time-place weather forecasting, to about to have (roughly interpreted as: planning to have). They bounced around a very empty, apparently germ-free causeway of near-perfect carrier wormholes to arrive at Earth. Are you ready class? I'm going to make you include this somewhere in the story. 'Why?' Before now, you would have been searching for just this answer. Now get to work. The bell's a long way off."