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

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

      Tinker almost fainted, recognizing it for what it was.

      He took it gingerly, not quite believing it.

      “Why, Bill?” Tinker said.

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

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

      * * * *

      Tinker felt it.

      The onset of the synchrogenesis mindset.

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

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

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

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

      The universal tao was immanentized.

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

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

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

      What was the solution to their problem?

      Better yet, what was the problem?

      Only a correct statement could lead to a solution.

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

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

      Restore the old environment.

      Or make everyone’s brain conform to the new.

      The first was impossible.

      So it had to be the latter.

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

      When he did, the world disappeared.

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

      Hesitantly, he plucked at a collection of blue neurons.

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

      It appeared that Tinker could do things here inside himself.

      So he got busy, rewiring.

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

      But not as his old self.

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

      He was alone for only moments.

      Then he reached out.

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

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

      Unity. Oneness.

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

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

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

      And they were him.

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

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

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

      And Happy New Year.

      INTRO: BELOW THE WRACK

      Like Philip K,. Dick, I imagined, early on in my career, such as it was then, that I might really be a writer of mainstream, contemporary fiction, not genre work. I’m not sure what inspired this delusion, since I enjoyed fantastika above all else (while still admiring much naturalistic prose, such as Faulkner, Nabokov, et al). And so here and there I essayed a mimetic tale and tried to place it at the unfamiliar venues who knew me not. Needless to say, I did not have much luck. Decades later, writing such novels as Joe’s Liver and Roadside Bodhisattva, I got the bug pretty much out of my system. Though there is still this one tale remaining that I want to tell, about an itinerant postcard salesman in the 1930s….

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