The Big Aha Read online

  We rode in silence for ten minutes, letting the night air beat against our faces, each of us gathering our thoughts. It was a September evening with a low chunk of moon—the air hot, moist, and luscious, boding a night of mystery and promise. I was picking up a musky scent from Loulou, and with it came little pings from her personality. I had the feeling Loulou was qwet like Carlo had said.

  “Pull into the next road on the left,” she said in her husky voice. “That clearing behind the old Ballard school? Nobody will bother us.” She nodded, emphasizing her plan.

  Synch beyond synch. The Ballard bower was exactly where I’d gone with Jane on that night I’d just been thinking about. The first place where Jane and I’d had sex.

  As soon as we stopped, Loulou started kissing and rubbing on me. Five minutes later we were naked and making love in the back seat of my car. Romantic to be doing it outdoors, behind the Ballard school, a return to the glories of youth.

  On the hood of my car our two qwet rat helpers danced in celebratory glee, savoring our rich sensations.

  After sex, Loulou and I lay on the smooth old leather of my car seat, looking up at the sky, with Loulou nestled nude on my chest. I felt very close to her, and to the world around us. Close like never before.

  It was more than Loulou pinging me now—I was blending with her thoughts, right inside her skin. I was feeling the minds of our qwet rats, and, in some indefinable way, I was feeling the shapes of the gently swaying trees and the scuttling of the insects in the rotting leaves on the ground. Everything loose and impressionistic. Like the hues in nurb-paint before you tightened them up. All the walls were down.

  “I see the I’s—” I stammered, having trouble with my words. “I see you.”

  “Please don’t freak,” whispered Loulou, her lips against my cheek. “Please get used to it.”

  “You’re teeping too? You’ve been that way all along, right?”

  “I caught it from Joey. They switched Joey over to quantum wetware last week, remember? So that he could merge his mind with your rat’s.”

  “And you made me qwet just now? By having sex?”

  “It’s contagious if you’re intimate. You might say that—qwet teep is a sexually transmitted disease?” Loulou let out a warm, two-note giggle, higher on the second note. “Teep is good, Zad. We’ll use teep to merge our minds into one.”

  “A beautiful dream. Are you sorry for Joey?”

  “Sure I am. But Joey’s stopped making sense. Also he hasn’t washed for a week. You’re my knight for now. Maybe we’ll be right together. Relax into it, baby. Qwet is like a magic power.”

  Easy to relax, but a little scary. I didn’t want to drown, didn’t want to be a piece of dust in the cyclone of the minds. I was merged with Loulou, and with our two qwet rats, and now, as if sensing lights in the distance, I was feeling the minds of Carlo, Joey, Junko, Gaven and Artie the guard as well.

  Gaven was drooling over Jane. Carlo was putting the moves on Reba Ranchtree, and Joey—he was in a straitjacket inside the shell of a road-turtle about to take him to a clinic downtown. Junko Shimano was studying the circuitry of her and Gaven’s clunky prototype qwetter device, mentally paring it down, looking for ways to replace it with a biomodded nurb. Artie was staring up at the sky, wanting to be in bed with his wife. All their little voices were in my head, blurred and unclear. Kind of cozy.

  Loulou was right. I didn’t have to fall apart. I could still be me. I was reaching into the other mind flows, tasting them, not remembering any real facts, but somehow changing my vibe.

  I fell back on the image of cruising the web. As if the other minds were websites I was browsing on multiple screens. The screens were in the flickering zone of my peripheral vision.

  Maybe I hadn’t been wasting time cruising the web in my dreamchair for the past few months. I’d been getting ready. Ready for qwet.

  * * *

  4: Oblivious Teep

  I brought Loulou to the room behind my store and she spent the whole night with me. It was epic. I was with her in my dreams. Like sleeping through a transreal biopic movie.

  Let me pause here and say more about how quantum wetware leads to teep. It has to do with what you might call quantum psychology.

  If you ever take a serious look inside your own head, you’ll notice that you have two styles of thought. We called them the “robotic” and “cosmic.” Robotic thought is all about reasoning and analysis. Cosmic thoughts are wordless. It’s easy to be dominated by your endlessly-narrating inner robotic voice. Step past the voice and you can see the cosmic mode. Analog consciousness, like waves on a pond. Merged with the world. Without opinions.

  Ordinarily your mind oscillates between the cosmic and the robotic at a rate of maybe twenty cycles per second. You need both modes. The cosmic state is a merge into your surroundings, and the robotic state is when you draw back and say, “Okay, it’s me against the world. I’ll plan what to do next to stay alive.”

  Junko’s technical discovery was that we have a specific physical brain site that controls when our state of consciousness flips between the cosmic and the robotic. And, like Carlo had told me, Gaven liked to call the site the gee-haw-whimmy-diddle.

  So, okay, your gee-haw-whimmy-diddle controls when your consciousness flips between the cosmic and the robotic. And Junko’s quantum wetware allowed us to lean on our gee-haw-whimmy-diddles and keep our minds in the merged cosmic state for a longish period of time. A loofy thing to do. You could stay fully robotic for hours at a time instead—but I personally wouldn’t see much point in that.

  Now for the pay-off. It’s the cosmic mode that leads to teep. How? Well—from a physicist’s point of view, your mind isn’t your physical brain. Your mind is a Hilbert space wave function that happens to look like a brain. Matter and wave, one and the same. If you and someone near you are both in the cosmic state, then your quantum wave functions can merge into a single combined wave system that gets gnarlier and more interesting the longer you can maintain the merge. Your brain waves overlay each other like two sets of ripples. And that’s teep.

  Serious dark beauty, qrude.

  I know I’m droning on for too long—like an old-school professor tap-tap-tapping his chalk on a freaky, dusty blackboard.

  But I have one more tidbit to tell. According to quantum mechanics, whenever you make a mental note about what you’re experiencing, you automatically bust your mind state down into the robotic mode. And your teep connections break. To remain in the teep state, you need to stay cosmic, and you can’t be laying down any organized memories.

  Putting it another way, qwet teep is oblivious. As in unseeing, unaware, ignorant, forgetful. This means that when you teep with someone, your memories of the trip will be as vague and flaky as last night’s dreams.

  “Zad!” It was mid morning, nearly ten. I didn’t usually sleep this late. Loulou was up on one elbow, dark and beautiful, twirling a lock of my hair. She waved hello.

  It took me a minute to get my robotic mode going. “An intense night,” I grated. “I know everything about you.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  By now my randy cosmic wave function had retreated into the shell of my skull, and everything about our big night was unclear.

  “I—I forgot to remember,” I said.

  “Don’t worry. You’ve integrated it all into your psyche. Stuff’s gonna drift up. Flotsam from the crystal ship. Jetsam on the shore. Postcards from the Nth dimension.” Loulou pursed her lips and studied me. “Don’t look so worried. You’ve got a new mind! Feel around!”

  “You grew up in a horse-drawn trailer in Mexico?” I asked, grabbing onto something that resembled a memory.

  “A scavenged split-level in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. But, yes, my mother is Mexican. And my father’s a Hungarian mathematician. He’s a math professor at Georgetown University, specializing in quantum computation. He did some consulting on the prediction software for the United Mutations biomodder wands. As fo
r the horse, yeah I had a little nurb model of a horse.” With one hand, Loulou mimed a toy horse prancing across the sheet.

  “Okay.” Another recovered memory emerged. “You were raped by a cuttlefish from a UFO?”

  Loulou guffawed. “Actually that was a heavy date with the boss when I worked for a nurb modding company called Itchy. I got the job because I won some tournaments in that biomodding game Levolver? I’d be working with a biomodder wand, and I’d keep adjusting the mods on a nurb I’d be building. I’d force a full-body refresh after each new mod, to see where I was at. You know how it works. The competitive aspect of the Levolver game is that there’s three or four of you making nurbs at the same time. Battle-nurbs.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And for the final act, the nurbs fight. Those Levolver battle-nurbs can be very loofy.”

  “All along while I’d be modding a design, I’d keep an eye on what other contestants were doing,” said Loulou. “We’d push each other to new extremes.”

  I dug into my mind, combing the web. “There you are! Loulou Sass! You really were the champ.”

  “Yeah. Papa wanted me to go to college, but I couldn’t be bothered, and then I got this hot biomodding job at Itchy. It was great. But then the sleazebag boss had his way with me. Jerk. It could have been okay, but he posted a video of us, and it gave me a bad name. Especially with Mama.” Loulou put both hands to her throat, as if choking herself.

  My fanciful half-memories of Loulou’s life story kept rearranging themselves. “So then you stole a UFO?”

  “That would be the Itchy boss’s luxor nurb scorpion vehicle. I muted its tracking unit and I hit the road. I didn’t want to live at home anymore—Mom thought I was a slut, and Dad was looking down at me for not being an academic scientist like him. Even though my salary at Itchy was higher than his at Georgetown.”

  “More to you than meets the eye,” I said, admiring Loulou.

  “Always has been. I rode the scorpion to Louisville. I wanted to see some thoroughbred horses. The trip took awhile. Since I was on the lam, I couldn’t use credit and I’d left too fast to bring enough cash. I got very fond of that scorpion. I kept having to stop and scam more nurb chow for him. Shoplifting, chores, sob stories, and once I even entered a local Levolver tournament. Wiped out my competition with a thing I called the Brr Bird.”

  “And then in Louisville you worked as a stripper in a funeral home?”

  “I was a designer at the Louisville United Mutations campus, out near the airport.” She put on a wide-eyed, good-girl face—miming her job-applicant persona. “Once I told them who I was, they wanted me. And they cleared my problems with the boss at Itchy. Made all the charges go away. And then—eek—I switched to helping on Gaven’s farm. Maybe that’s the funeral home part.”

  “You switched from being a biomod designer to being a maid?”

  “Well, I am in fact helping Junko with the qwet stuff quite a bit. We’re going to have this new way of modding nurbs, see, and we’ll be solving the DNA retrofit problem with this instant-enlightenment qwet mode that I’m calling cosmic logic.”

  “Whatever that means,” I said. “Let me finish with my memories. I see an image of a snarling dog?”

  “Joey Moon,” said Loulou, smiling. “I met him in a bar on Bardstown Road. He does have a sweet side. He makes me laugh. He was wild about my scorpion. He was making these loofy exploding balls of nurb-paint. Art grenades. We started living together. I got tired of going to United Mutations all the time. I didn’t like my boss there either. A guy called Whit.”

  “Whit Heyburn?” I exclaimed. “I hate that guy. And he’s everywhere. Please tell me you didn’t fuck him.”

  “No reason to,” said Loulou, studying me, enjoying my reaction. “Not yet.”

  “Let’s get back to you and Joey.”

  “I was using my Levolver tricks to help Joey with his art. I never had much interest in making it as an artist myself. I’m, like, where’s the money? Long story short, Joey got us in with Gaven. But that’s enough with the total recall, Zad. I think you have food?”

  “Chow for us too!” squeaked our qwet rats, perched on the foot of my bed. Skungy and Sissa. I remembered having fed Sissa a lot last night. The two rats were the same size now. Perhaps they’d been in on the night-long mind-merge? I had a feeling there’d been scuttlers and crawlers within our vision-thickets. Hopefully just the rats.

  I got to my feet and opened the locked cabinet where I’d parked the nurb chow.

  “Rich toasty goodness!” I said, feeding a couple of the tobacco-smelling cubes to the eager rats.

  “It’s funny,” said Loulou, studying my naked body. “When I see you in teep, you’re fat. But you’re not. Just a soft belly.”

  “I have a poor self-image,” I said, glancing down at myself.

  “Better than Joey’s!” said Loulou, making a gesture of slitting her throat. “Could you believe how gnarly he acted at Gaven’s farm? It was sick how he bent back his leg.”

  “Like a contortionist.”

  “Yeah. He has a high threshold of pain. It bothers me. Don’t you be that way, Zad. Respect yourself, even if you’re not making it as an artist these days. You’re cozy. I could live with you, if you like.”

  “Uh—wow,” I said, not wanting to commit. “I’m kind of boggled right now. Coming to terms with qwet teep. Hard to see where everything’s headed.”

  “I see your food nurbs right over there,” said Loulou pointing to a little table in the corner of my bedroom. “It’s time.”

  “Right. My endless sausage, my eternal loaf, my coffee plant, and my rubber chicken.”

  The rubber chicken wasn’t really rubber, we just called them that. She was a hen with no feet, and she had a butt-tube that pooted out whatever type of egg dish you wanted. She required more chow than the other nurbs. The sausage and the loaf were like snakes. You fed chow to their mouths, and you lopped off as much of their tails as you felt like eating. They tasted like salami and like a crisp French baguette, respectively. The coffee plant had green leaves on it, and its stalks were shiny, metallic tubes. Like a tiny refinery. It whistled while it worked. A cheerful tune.

  I bustled around, assembling us two breakfasts, and then I sat on the bed with Loulou to eat, happy in the cosmic mode. Sweet morning sun was slanting in through a skylight. Loulou was naked like me. She smelled good. We did some teep, sharing the moment.

  But as soon as I tried to analyze our situation, I was robotic again.

  “What comes next,” I said. “Do I really start trying to sell qwet rats? What if they keep biting people and giving them qwet teep?”

  “Qwet will spread no matter what,” said Loulou. “Teep’s good. And I love the cosmic mode. It’s an inner high.”

  “I can imagine the DoG banning quantum wetware,” I said. “The Department of Genomics. I mean—if it’s easy to space into cosmic mode, will people still go to work?”

  “Work sucks,” said Loulou. “My carefully researched conclusion. We’re filling the world with miraculous nurbs. Like genies, almost. No need to labor like anxious peasants.” She threw her hands out in a lo-and-behold gesture. “The rapture of Saint Loulou. I open my heart to the nurbs. And to teep, to horses, and to sex. My latest dream is that I get a serious wad of money together and own a horse farm like Gaven’s.”

  “You could seduce the man himself.”

  “Too steep. I’ll leave that to—Jane.” Loulou did a quick teep merge on me, relishing my reaction.

  Which was? The same disgust and jealousy as last night. “Let’s talk about us instead,” I suggested.

  “Talk about Jane,” pressed Loulou. “Can you take me to look at her apartment? The place you two used to share? I love seeing fancy homes.”

  “She, uh, she might be there,” I objected, starting to wonder what Loulou was after.

  “Call her and find out.” She laid on her most alluring smile—and literally batted her eyes.

  “Well, all right.” I was
in fact curious about Jane’s whereabouts myself. As I mobilized my wristphone, I worked out a pretend reason for the call.

  “Hi, Zad,” said Jane’s voice. No visuals from her end, no map info. I had my visuals off too. No way did I want Jane to see Loulou in my back room. She’d go wild.

  “Reba told me she saw you bringing that Loulou to your shop last night,” said Jane, already in the know. “Reba was flying Carlo home to her housetree.”

  “Lots of excitement,” I said as blandly as possible. “I, uh, I called to say I’m ready to pick up that vat you were talking about. I can do it right now.”

  “Well, fine,” said Jane. “Only I’m not in my apartment. But I can tell my door to let you in.”

  “So you spent the night at Gaven’s?”

  “Nosy, aren’t we? I’ll be very glad if that vat’s gone before I get home. Bye now.”

  “Bye.” My wristphone went dark.

  “Vat?” said Loulou, cocking her head.

  “The stuff I use for my paintings,” I said. “Nurb-paint.”

  “Tweaked nurb-gel,” said Loulou. “Sure. Each of the modded slime mold cells has color organelles like the ones in squidskin. Cold Days in Hell. I know all this.”

  “I talk to my paint and I push it around,” I said, wanting to talk about it. “Or I message it on the web. It can take on shapes as well as making colors. But I don’t have to dig all the way down into biomodding. I can’t believe Reba told Jane that I brought you home.”

  “Louisville’s a small town, isn’t it?” said Loulou. “Chatty, chatty, chatty. Anyway, I’ll be glad to see Jane’s apartment. And to get your nurb-paint.” She studied me. “You’re a big artist with his own gallery. Gaven has one of your paintings. Joey kind of liked it. He said it was camp.” She trailed off, not coming up with the full-on compliment I hoped for. I didn’t dare teep into her head.

  Instead I pointed towards one of the works I had in my room. “Wave on this one. Cold Day in Hell: Hunter Thompson Versus Muhammad Ali. Two famous Louisville figures from the twentieth century. The white guy with the swollen liver is a writer, the black guy is a boxer. And because I used the nurb-paint, they’re animated a little bit.”