path: root/veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/Y of R CHAPTER ONE.txt

 	… It is just, it is just about to, it is just about to rolywholyover.  —James Joyce

Eigenstate One (The Year of the Rocket)
	It was the year they launched the first privatized rocket into orbit and it captured to imagination of the world much like I imagine Neil Armstrong did, although I wasn’t alive then.  It set in motion a global shift from stale cynicism to optimism; it turned our dreamminds back on.  At least from my point a view, in hindsight the rocket became incidental, as any revolution does after it is over, but at the time it was a monumental event.  The generation I grew up with had no one thing to identify our dreams with, in end we were all on that rocket and for me that’s where it all started.
Of course it did set off a chain of events that forever change everyone who lived through it but I only know that with hindsight.  At the time it was a symbol and I knew even then that the first step to making a dream reality is to have the right symbols, something needed to change in those days we just didn’t know what that it was.  We stumbled about like sleep walkers toiling through empty existences.  The rocket changed that; it brought the magic of space out of the hands of the government and gave the universe back to the imagination of the individual. 
 It was also the beginning of the end of government.  Of course the decline of government power was nothing, new for years sociologists had been aware that the human mind was decentralizing itself.  I remember in college a professor tracing the de-evolution of power from GOD to KING, to kings, to Congresses, and so on with control always being more diluted as time progressed.  But the rocket gave us a locus, it drew us onto a common ground of wonder, it was applied theory —reality.  
In Usinc the primitive tribal-monkey routine of government had been falling out of favor ever since the Internet replaced, first the Electoral College and then Congress itself.  No one was interested in politics anymore, no one cared, we just knew there were problems and we wanted to solve them.  It was a strange and unsettling time to be alive, even I had been a tad alarmed when it was decided that the United States would be privatized and its name changed to Usinc, but in the end it made no real difference in anyone’s daily life.  Except maybe the bureaucrats in Washington who lost their jobs, but most of them moved into the private sector without to much trouble.  
When the shuttle completed its two day orbit there were huge parties to celebrate and everyone was wondering how long before they could afford to go.  Only Televangelists like Walter Finks decried the new space race as obscene and immoral, but he thought everything aside from god was immoral and obscene. Finks had his loyal followers that were opposed to just about everything fun and no one paid them much mind anymore; only the most backward people still watched television and they had been left (or stayed) behind long before the rocket.  We were through with dire predictions from religious idiots and scientists alike.  In the end I guess Cynicism came full circle back to Hope and even the pessimists lost their audience —we had cried wolf too many times we already knew nothing would come of it.  Everyone talked about what an exciting time it was to be alive… people living in every age may well have said the same thing, but that’s only because being alive on the third planet is exciting.

The rocket went off at 6:23 EST from the NASA pad in Cape Canaveral; I woke up exactly three hours later just before sunrise in Los Angeles.  The room was still dark but I could see the translucent glow of morning beginning to bleed through the window.  I sat up and looked at the clock, it read 6:23; I had only been asleep for five hours. I didn’t know about the rocket yet but I could sense that something had happened, the prevalence of EtherTwo, the Virtual Net, had given us all a boosted feeling of what they used to call ESP.  It turned out that virtual reality activated previously unused portions of the brain that gave everyone a closer connection.  I wasn’t much for scientific detail, but I had noticed the effects shortly after my first trip, everyone had.
I lay there for a while staring at the rough plaster ceiling imagining it to be the surface of the moon and trying to sense what it would be like if I were slowly orbiting its convoluted landscape at about five hundred feet just floating in the infinite emptiness of space.  I believe it would feel something like I felt snorkeling last summer in the Cayman Islands.  I thought of about it then too, floating there on the surface of the water looking down at the ocean floor trying to see craters and ridges instead of coral and sand. The water filled in around my head, plugged my ears and cut off the outside world; I could hear myself breathing in the silence.  Space is pure silence.
I lit a cigarette and turned on my lamp; the warm murky-yellow glow of the rice paper shade gave a harsh glare and made me squint momentarily until my eyes adjusted.  At the time I was living in modest sized studio on Huntington Harbor which is about half an hour south of Los Angeles proper.  I was killing time or vacationing or some combination of the two.  I had family in LA so I was in town for the holidays and I had sublet this place for a few months.  I was anxious to get out of LA, but if I was going to be there I figured I might as well get a nice place.
The studio was essentially one large room with a door to the bathroom and half a wall partitioning off the kitchen. I slept on the couch to conserve space; the only other furniture was an oversized chair and a rinky-dink bookshelf I constructed out of cinderblocks and Walnut boards.   My only improvement on the place has been to paint the walls white and decorate them with my black and white photographs. I didn’t receive many visitors in those days so the place was spartan, but it was better than jail.
I had been released from LA County about a month before.  Like everyone I met on the inside I was innocent although, to be absolutely honest. I had been a thief, but to prove the irony of life, the crime I actually got caught for I never committed.  However even I knew that I would get caught eventually for something, and since the crime they convicted me of was considerably less than what I could have been charged with, I considered myself lucky and served my six months as a model prisoner.  Six months is a long time to spending a ten by twelve room, but it did have its upside —I read.  I read constantly in between being bused down to various other jails where three other inmates and myself cleaned cells, changed linens and mopped floors.  I read a lot about photography, which until jail had been just a hobby, but now it was a job.  Sort of.  And no I didn’t get raped; I was in county jail not prison.  
The first privately funded rocket was just passing over Los Angeles when I woke up that morning although it was too early for anyone to care much.  As bleary-eyed business people stood in line for coffee they slowly noticed the headlines and they went home to port into E2 and watch the video feed from space.  I didn’t port in until after lunch, instead I popped into the Garden of Delights and took a short acid trip, after an hour or so I got in the shower, and went for my morning walk.  I went as I usually did to Café du Monde, a kind of all night French diner if there is such a thing.  It was quaint and peaceful around eleven in the morning when I sat down for coffee.  
Café du Monde was on the boardwalk in Sunset Beach and Claire and I met for breakfast every Monday.  It was January but the weather was typically LA —seventy-two and sunny.  One thing I have learned over the years is that while everything will fail at some point, it will never get cold in LA.  I called LA home for almost twenty-five years and I can safely say that not once in that time do I ever recollect being cold.
Los Angeles was as it always had been for as long as I’ve known it, the epicenter of the cultural/tech revolution.  It was soulless and bright like the light at the end of the tunnel, but it was my home and had a connection to it whether I liked to admit it or not.  In fact before I began my career as a thief I had written a book about LA, celebrating the uneasy paranoid inferiority one gets from growing up in a land of actors, of course no one ever published it.  I worked here and there in cafés and wrote occasional stories to support myself, which is why I had so much free time.  That’s another thing about LA it always seems like you are the only one that has to work for a living while everybody else just floats from party to party; naturally that is not literally true, but if you spend enough time there it certain feels that way.
Someone had left a newspaper on the table and that was when I first saw the news about the shuttle; the headline was in one-inch bold type that fairly splashed across the page ‘DeLiTech Launches First Private Shuttle.’  Three executives from DeLiTech were orbiting the earth even as I lit my cigarette.  DeLiTech was the manufacturer of the first commercially available virtual reality system, which I had just used. DeLiTech was also rumored to be the largest and most profitable entity on the planet and many people clinging to old beliefs thought DeLiTech was running the whole planet by now.  EtherTwo was littered with sites ‘proving’ such a worldwide conspiracy, but rational people like myself really didn’t care.  Now they were going off the planet too. It made me laugh at first; I could picture the Ether jam that would hit by two o’clock as the conspiracy sites went into overdrive.
I sipped a cup of coffee and listened to my stomach growl as it snarled at the acidic liquid churning away in it’s emptiness.  Behind me I heard a middle-aged couple talking about the launch.  He said he wanted to go into space himself and wondered how long it would be before the common man could afford such a thing, and she wanted to know what sex in zero gravity would feel like.  We all wanted to know what weightless sex would feel like; kind of awkward I imagined.
I was waiting for Claire, it was unusual for her to be late, and I was about to call her Donne when I saw her running up the boardwalk; she was smiling and looked excited.  Claire was seven years younger than I was in age and several older than I was in lifetimes.  She had that inborn wisdom that a lot of us never get even at the end of the timeline.  I watched her smiling face framed by short blond curls; she was wearing tight black leather pants and a red shirt with a mid length coat; she had the smile of someone who has no worries.  But I knew Claire well enough to guess that there was pain down a couple stories in the basement of her mind.  Still she didn’t volunteer much of it and I was not in the excavating business.
“I’m sorry I’m late, my father called.”  She flopped into the chair opposite me; “did you order yet?”
“No,” I smiled at her as she reached into her bag and pulled out a cigarette, “what did your dad say?”  Claire’s father was a bit of a mystery to me, I knew he was rather wealthy and traveled a lot; he seemed to work very hard at whatever it was that he did.  He talked a lot about gambling and investing stocks I gathered he did something with IPO’s, but I had only a crude idea of what that meant.
“Did you see the paper?” she talked as she lit a cigarette.  I nodded and she told me that her father was good friends with ‘Arthur’ the head of DeLiTech, he had called her to say that he might be going into space in the next six months, but nothing was sure yet.  He had called to ask her if she thought he should go.  “What did you tell him?”  “Are you kidding?  I told him to save a spot for us.”
I smiled and thought for an instant that if this girl could get me into space I would marry her, but then I set that thought aside and pondered the reality of space.  The waitress took our order and Claire told me about her night at a club, but I was still thinking about her father, Arthur, DeLiTech, and what it meant to have civilians in space.  When I was younger the space program had sort of died; the public took little or no interest although I knew that the program itself continued to develop.  But at the table that day it occurred to me that just as westward movement of Americans had been precipitated by westward movement of soldiers, so too it seemed that space exploration was going to look a hundred years from now.  First we send the soldier to check things out and then if it looks okay we fall them twenty years later.
I read somewhere that the time between a scientific revolution and its seamless absorption into culture was usually about sixty years, which meant that the space thing, if you took the man on the moon to be the starting point, was just about three quarter of the way rooted into culture.
Claire’s story was that she had gotten kicked out of the club for being underage, but had managed somehow or other to get back in and then to her own genuine surprise she had been asked by some agent type to be in a video for EtherMusic.  My ears perked up at the end when I heard EtherMusic.
“I told my dad and he said not to do it, but that guy Arthur from DeLiTech… he knows some people who could get me into the interactive stuff if I wanted to do that.  I don’t know, it might be fun…”
“Is that how come you got VirtTECh for so cheap?”  I had always wondered where she got the money for the hardware; retail stores sold it for over a thousand and I knew Claire didn’t have that much money to waste on toys —I of course had stolen mine.  “Sort of, I think my dad won it somehow or other; he didn’t have time to use it so he gave it to me.”  Claire didn’t seem interested in my question and seemed somewhat annoyed that I had asked it.  She was always rather vague about her father.  I had been to dinner with the two of them a couple of times, but they spoke in some sort of code that I always felt I was intruding on so I mostly kept my mouth shut and listened.  
Claire was a dancer; she was a very good one, I met her two days before she was due to go and dance for New York City Ballet, but she hated it and came home two months later.  We had been friends since she was in New York, but the sex was limited to those times when we happened to be in the same city at the same time.  Once we were having a late night snack at this café by her house and the waitress, a friend of Claire’s, asked us how we do you do that?”  I assumed she meant the separation, but I wasn’t really paying attention to her and all the sudden Claire started sobbing and moaning out “I don’t know how I do it its so hard…he just doesn’t love me enough to stay in one place…” she put on quite a show and it was all I could do not to laugh.  How we “did that” was quite simple, we didn’t know any other way to do it.  
Some people have a need to be around each other constantly in order to be happy; Claire and I would have lost our minds in such a relationship, we were far to independent for some kind of obsessive compulsive love.  She was the first independent person I had ever been involved with and in the six months I had known her neither one of us had ever spoken about our relationship.  We were to busy doing to stop and overanalyze what we were doing and for me it was the healthiest thing I had ever had in my life.  I never asked Claire, but she seemed happy with the arrangement.  There was little else we could have done, both of us traveled a lot, me for the hell of it and her for dance.  In fact she had just been admitted to the prestigious Julliard Academy and was getting ready to move to New York.  
As for myself I was all set up with an odd job in some backwater eddy of Georgia with a wealthy client who wanted me to make AO images of his art collection so that he could construct a gallery in the EtherMet.  I didn’t know very much about AO’s I had helped a friend so something similar and I guess this guy asked him who did it and he passed it on to me, despite the fact that my friend had done most o the work.  I was studying up on digital imaging and if all went well the paycheck from this guy would keep me for a year or more, depending on where I decided to travel to.
The last three months had actually been the most time that Claire and I had spent in the same eigenstate together since we met.  For the first time I didn’t really want to leave her, but it was inevitable, we both had separate lives and if we didn’t respect that we would never last.  We talked about her plans for a while and then mine; after a smoke or two she had to go and I was left sitting on the boardwalk alone once again. After a while I went home to do some packing for my trip and to port into E2 and check out the space adventure firsthand.












Eigenstate Two 

	The collapse of the state vector was old news to physicists, but it meant nothing to the average citizen of the United States.  Sil Hawkard changed that.  He mixed metaphors and collapsed the state vector on everyone.  Sil started out college like every other white middle class acid-dropping freshman majoring in philosophy.  After that first acid trip though nothing was ever the same.  He dropped “the liberal studies crap” as he was later heard to refer to it, and double majored in Quantum Physics and Aeronautical Engineering.  When he had first brought this proposal to his professors they had laughed at him and when he refused to back down they got quite angry.  You can’t do that they said, no one could handle it. They were wrong and Sil got undergraduate degrees in both.  
He was something of a legend around the campus of Berkeley, wild rumors circulated about drugs, occult magic, orgies, the sort of things everyone wished they were doing were projected onto Sil.  The truth was somewhat more mundane, he had no friends in town and nothing better to do so he studied and worked eighty to ninety hours a week to get the degrees.  He then shocked an entire science department by getting a Masters degree in Philosophy. The same professors who said he couldn’t handle the former load couldn’t believe that he had turned his back on them after working so hard.  He went on to write his doctoral thesis on the history of anarchy.  
By this time he was taking some form of ethnogen on a monthly basis.  Sil refused to use the word “drug” and distanced himself from those who did.  He was primarily taking psilocilium-containing mushrooms, but he had taken acid and peyote as well.  What he got out of them is hard to say, but a good guess would be insight into the nature of reality, because he got very good at altering everybody else’s.
	Sil was quite amused when he finally left school at the age of thirty-two to find that very few employers would believe his resume. A woman he spoke to at the Berkeley office of transcripts told him that his was the most requested transcript in there entire database.  Sil took a variety of old jobs working in research labs, lecturing as guest at colleges, consulting for the Rand Institute.  Most people that Sil had contact with were academia and bored the shit out of him, so he took to hanging out with a different type of personality ones that were what most people call criminal.
Of course Sil did not consider them such except in the most close-minded legal kind of way, but a man who wrote his doctoral thesis on anarchy is not going to have a moral problem with crime.  In fact Sil saw crime as the future of mankind.  What is illegal and immoral three hundred years ago is the accepted reality of today.  Less than half of the adult population believes in God, three hundred years ago to say things like that led one to a human barbecue.  Hardly anyone thinks that sex is horrible and should be limited to twice or three times a year, and yet a hundred years go many in the medical profession considered it just that.  The list goes on, but the point is that to Sil’s mind, what is going to change tomorrow are the things we can’t talk about or do today. So it made sense to him to hang out with them.
Unbeknownst to most he wrote a book. He published it himself and distributed it privately; he called it End Government Now.  It was wildly optimistic and hinted at some rather strange, perhaps creative is a better word, solutions to complex problems like word hunger, human rights, space exploration, physical immortality and what he called “the only true law.”
	The first page read: 
Modern mathematical theory seems to validate the logic of anarchy by the simple recognition that events are seldom causal and are, curiously enough, totally acausal.  In other words what appears to be a direct cause-effect scenario is in fact dependent on a myriad of other factors which we can no longer afford to ignore.  A world based on acasual arguments is in essence the natural state of the known universe.  To take such a model of reality and use it to test all the human systems such as government, social conventions, economics and interpersonal relationships is the focus of this book.	Therefore to model the universe any other way and even to use this map without updating it on a minute to minute basis is to misinterpret the available incoming data.  To pretend as we do that the systems thought up by the greatest minds of two hundred years ago are still an accurate model of reality is tragic.  The evidence that nothing is working anymore is all around us and the pundits of all different beliefs are too busy laying blame to notice what is really the heart of the matter —our dreams are not reflected in our daily lives.  
Anything based on such an inaccurate map is wrong not because the thing itself is a priori wrong but because the map it started from is wrong.  Therefore all systems not operating on the laws of chaos are doomed to failure because they do not reflect what we know to be true.  Government does not work because it was developed from a binary map that is regrettably outdated.  
Government then is outdated and in my mind no longer necessary for humanity to function smoothly.  Just as we had to shed the feudal system of kings and serfs so now must we shed the democracy which has become every bit as much of a prison (literally and figuratively) as the dominator system it replaced.  Government has become a self-imposed limitation and in order to address the complex web of problems that faces the global community we must first address the system itself.  Government has had the acausal effect on the governed of becoming a surrogate god.  Instead of a savior from the skies we are waiting for one from the well springs of our own DNA and indeed our chances for success may well be less than our ancestors who prayed in vain to a god that we now know does not exist.
The first challenge to anyone wanting to faze out the dinosaur of government is bring people around to the idea that they need not look to the skies or their fellow man, but in stillness examine the “thing that thou art.”  Education (for those without the background in teleology) is the battlefield on which we will stake our fight.  It is my plan to do the very thing that all stale fundamentalists fear, to free the minds of their children.  Modeling language as a virus William S. Burroughs showed that successful brainwashing (learning) is no more difficult than giving the idea you wish to infect a point of entry. I can say no more than that, but first more on anarchy itself and how we use the term.
Anarchy is the only system which allows the brain to accurately map ideas, events, emotions, subconscious thought, dreams, hopes, and synchronicities because it allows the free floating mind to build a map as each new situation arises rather than trying to fit it onto an existing map.  The anarchist does not try to put a square peg in a round whole.  That is to say that the human mind in a way similar to a computer creates a path of electrochemical reactions each time it receives new information, however when confronted with the same or a similar situation it sends the idea back down the first path.  We call this process memory and it is indispensable for much of our reactions to stimuli.  For instance we learn at a young age that green means go, a signal path is created that says go and when the brain runs across green signals for the rest of its life it tends to send a go signal.  This is very useful, as we do not need to relearn it every time we are at a traffic light.  But it is not useful when we are dealing with the infinitely more complex realm of ideas and beliefs.
Fortunately it is possible to retrain the brain and in fact we might well recognize that all of human history is a record of our efforts to retrain our brains into new worlds and new ideas.  The term anarchy in the context that I am using requires you to re-train your brain.
Most people were taught (brainwashed) to fire the term anarchy down a signal path littered with associations of political chaos where murderers run naked through the street fucking helpless women and doing blizzards of drugs.  This apocalyptic vision is very much necessary for the current state of affairs to be maintained.  And a powerful minority of neophobes has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.  I do not mean to herein imply a conspiracy, on the contrary someone who is not open to new ideas could never manage a conspiracy.  What I mean is that static brains gravitate toward static ideas. Thus the secret to changing the world is to change the way we live in it.
	Anarchy, like life itself is infinitely more complicated than simple political gaming, left wing right wing; the whole concept of a binary system is not accurate.  The problem with the west in general is that it makes dichotomies out of what is really just a gray cloudy lump of shit, so to speak.  What I mean by that statement is that nothing is reducible to being either/or, belief itself is multidimensional. Any belief is necessarily wrong on two levels.  First it is wrong because it is not taking in any new signals and therefore does not reflect our day to day existence; that is what we mean when we say “yes I agree in principle, but the reality is…” Secondly a belief is inherently wrong because it is the product of a unique historical period and reflects loosely what Korzibsky called time-binding.  That is we are human and what we believe is true is a product of our internal personality not a reflection of the outside world.  In order to reflect the outside world one must first transcend the limitations of personal, cultural and even species histories. 
	Everything is in our heads, everything that occurs around us occurs in our gray matter which is to say that everything is an internal experience of the individual rather than the external event that is happening to the individual.   The promise of the anarchist who steps into this ontological mess is the promise of one who sees light at the end of the tunnel.  The anarchist realizes that in order to accurately reflect the outside world he must spend enough time in transcendence of himself, his culture, and even his species.  He is the modern day shaman and it was with good reason that the ancient tribes kept the shaman isolated on the edge of the community; he was not so much a part of the community as a tool of the community.  Our misguided belief that an isolated individual from inside the community can represent the entire community makes no more sense that saying a spoke of a wheel is the wheel.  
Anarchy is not a threat to political institutions; life is a threat to political institutions.  We are only human, meaning that only when we are beyond our mere humanity can we begin to perceive what humanity is.  We are finally beginning to perceive the ancient riddles were not riddles at all but clues not things to be understood but things to explore.  
We are drawing out all that which you have feared in order that you may see it and no longer live in fear.  
	
	Needless to say most people would not have the slightest idea what Sil was talking about, nor would they have been interested in learning, which is why he never attempted to publish it publicly.  Sil reasoned that it was not important to have more people understand; what was needed was a greater understanding and appreciation by those who were interested.  Sil was a rare breed; he was attempting to bring modern culture up to date in order that it should accurately reflect that which it ‘knew’ to be true and he knew that to do this he would have to start with a small group of missionaries, so to speak, and then move on to the world at large.  He gave this book (it went on for another hundred or so pages giving techniques for experiential validations and further illuminations of his theories and how he came to have them) to people he felt might understand it and occasionally for variety to those he did not think would understand it.  Out of this group of friends, acquaintances and strangers he formed a virtual reality think tank that he called DeLiTech.
DeLiTech began life as a consultant think tank, but quickly found that its ideas were way ahead of the people asking for its’ advise so Sil recruited a second group of “technicians” made up of like-minded (although in most cases not as eccentric) scientists, mystics, and computer programmers to design and build a new reality.   DeLiTech was beginning to think in gestalts instead of action-reaction analysis; it was trying to become a collective brain for humanity.
What started out as a whimsical idea of one strange man ended up in massive group effort that would in three short years turn the world upside down and inside out.  What went on in those three years is the stuff of legends; what first came out is more easily quantified; it was a virtual reality game/educational tool called ALTER, and it did just that.







Eigenstate Three: Utah Desert (five years until the rocket)

	Maya Stevens was born in a jacuzzi out back of her parent three room shanty house.  The Jacuzzi sat on a patio and overlooked the wind swept mesa country of southeastern Utah.  ‘Abbey country’ her father called it in reference to Edward Abbey a twentieth century anarchist and writer of unpopular fiction about the red rock canyon country into which Maya was born.  The day of her birth it was sunny and cold the air temperature was in the twenties and snow had dusted the distant La Salle Mountains the night before.  The infant’s first sight was a naked, grizzled old Ute Indian man named Horseshoe; he was a doctor of sorts and was there to assisted Maya’s mother in the birthing process.
He remarked later that she was the first child he had seen born that was not crying.  He left shortly after she was born and headed back down the canyon trail that led to his own depilated shack some three miles away from the Stevens’ place.  On the average the land just north of Moab Utah was sparsely populated boasting only about one person per twenty square miles.  It was a fine place to live if you could stand the desert and the isolation.  The nearest paved road was ten miles from the Stevens family doorstep, and that was the way Mr. Stevens liked it.
Maya’s father was a white upper middle class intellectual who, under the influence of Edward Abbey and others, had become a radical anarchist.  During the nineteen sixties, while hiding out in the desolate desert wilderness of Utah from charges of “drug” and weapons trafficking, he fell in love with a Ute Indian girl named Mary Waters.  They were never married but spent the rest of their lives together with their one daughter Maya.
Maya grew up as a Ute and all of her friends were Utes, in fact the land where they lived was actually part of a Ute Indian reservation which allowed her father to relax slightly from the fear of arrest.  Maya was raised in the Native American Church, which her father had joined in the late seventies when he found out that peyote was used as a sacrament for contacting god.  At the age of sixteen Maya herself ingested peyote as part of a traditional coming of age ceremony.  Of course only the peyote was traditional the rest was an elaborate contrivance on the part of her father who felt that one could mature better if there was a physical event to mark the passage between childhood and adulthood.  Besides she couldn’t get a drivers license since she did not officially exist in the first place.  
Maya did not know that the majority of the people in her country would classify her as mentally unstable and morally wrong for this little ceremony.  She did not know that most of the world believed that mescaline, the active ingredient in peyote was a drug.  In fact in the Ute culture the word drug does not have any contextual meaning; they do not see peyote as any different than corn.  One is food for the body; the other is food for the soul.  
Maya’s experience with peyote was convoluted and unique to her, she was not expected to talk about it, but her father noticed that shortly after her first time she started asking him about college.  Up until then Maya had been home schooled by her parents and had schooled herself reading and using the internet that her father had given her for her twelfth birthday.  She was not an isolated ignorant hick, on the contrary she was an intellectual of a very dangerous sort —she knew the words, but didn’t believe any of it.  That is to say that with her father’s ideas and her mother’s cultural sense Maya believed what she believed and no intellectual argument was ever going to sway the fundamental truth in her mind.  
Now if one had been able to give her a new understanding of something through direct experience, some sort of Gnostic conversion, that she remained opened to, but the silly mind games of western intellectuals meant to her what they meant to everyone except silly western intellectuals —nothing.  When you feel it you understand it, you don’t need to talk about it, understanding transcends words which is why people’s sympathies mean nothing in a time of crisis.
When Maya was seventeen she went away to a public university on a scholarship.  She went because she was young and wanted to see the world, the school part was largely because of paper magic.   Maya had no real goals like most college students; she did not go to school for job training which is what most people living in Usinc at that time did.  Her first year at the University of California at Long Beach was one of massive culture shock and if not for a chance meeting with a like-minded neighbor, Maya would likely have dropped out.  
To come from the relatively isolated reservation, whose main contact with the outside world was the internet, to the hustling-bustling wheeling-dealing town of Long beach was bad enough, but to make matters worse she found herself ostracized for her beliefs and feared because she was different.  Radically different and she brought with her the idiosyncrasies of her culture.  Little things that put people off, for instance she had adopted her mothers habit of quietly singing Ute songs as she went about her day and no one told Maya that to do such things at the supermarket in metropolitan areas was “wrong.” 
Her father, in the tradition of all anarchists wary of brainwashing, had raised Maya without commercial television and since his taste in movies ran toward the surrealist side of the video store, Maya was frighteningly ignorant of pop culture.  She knew the Internet well, but had never cared enough to have it be a real part of her life.  Her father had however made sure that she was well read and she was educated far beyond most of her peers, but that only served to make Maya feel even more like she was from another world.  This is not to imply that pop culture was totally foreign to her, it just didn’t mean anything, it wasn’t real and she had no connection to it and consequently no basis from which to connect with other people.  Thus to be cast into the epicenter of modern silliness—Los Angeles—was a shock to say the least.  One pearl of wisdom that her father had ingrained deeply in Maya’s psyche was the phrase “always question everything.”  In fact it was so deep in her brain it was sub-verbal, that is it wasn’t a continuous thought or conscious skepticism but an involuntary action of her existence and such anarchism does not fit well into the constraining venerated halls of higher learning.
	But Maya didn’t drop out.  She went to class and did her work and was a model student, but inside she was continually horrified by the behavior and culture of those that surrounded her.  She made no friends and lived alone.  She felt like an alien, and most of her classmates treated her like one.  Perhaps the genes of her mother made her able to survive, that Ute DNA that has been ostracized and plagued for hundreds of years has a coping mechanism —internal emotional composure.  
	But the truth of the matter was that Maya had far too little free time to actually worry about being lonely.  She also wasn’t entirely alone.  Maya was living in a fourplex, which was basically a big old house that had been subdivided at some point and was now four separate apartments that shared a common entryway and staircase. Maya’s apartment was upstairs and to the left if one were facing the building.  It was a twenties Spanish style villa with an arched entrance that lead into a courtyard with a little fountain, one of those pissing statues, and then on the far side underneath an arch supported terrace was the main entrance.  The courtyard had large willow trees in three corners; the one that would have been adjacent to Maya’s patio had been destroyed the previous year in a storm.  Maya’s upstairs place was small, but retained a quaint sort of charm that made her forget about the sordid neighborhood that lurked two blocks south on seventh street.
The ground floor consisted of a parking garage that opened into an alley and above the cars were the apartments themselves.  Maya had the end unit that overlooked Seventh Street, and owing to the lost tree her window was visible to anyone walking by.  She solved the privacy issue with a tapestry, but it depressed her that she had no view.  Being from the wide open redrock mesas, Maya had learned to appreciate the landscapes’ effect on character and mental health.  She found a solution just a week after she moved in.
As one came up the communal stairs and into the hallway their was another door before Maya’s.  For a week no one came in or out of it and Maya was going to ask if it was available, but then one afternoon returning from class she met the occupant.  His name was Cary.  Maya introduced herself and Cary, learning that she was new to California, offered to show her around.  He took her to Fluer De Lie a little French style café/coffeeshop and bought her lunch.
Maya liked Cary immediately, he reminded her of her father and she found herself finally able to sit and talk with someone who understood her if not totally at least better than most she had met.  Cary was well-educated in eastern philosophy which wasn’t very far removed from Maya’s own Ute beliefs, he was also an avowed anarchist so the two of them had long discussions debating the practicality of anarchy. As time went on she found herself more and more spending the warm fall evening with Cary talking for hours on his patio.  He introduced her to Marijuana, which seemed to her like a mild-mannered second cousin to peyote; he took her for drives up the coast to see Santa Cruz, Monterey, and San Francisco; he even took her shopping and bought her nice clothes.
They were even lovers for a while, somewhere between a joint, Monterey, and sexual thirst, she found herself taking his pants off one day.  Cary made her come in ways she didn’t realize existed previously, but after a week or two he cut it off because he thought it unhealthy for her and because certain state and federal statutes strictly forbade such things.  The looks people give a couple thirty years apart in age told Maya more about the emotional sickness of white culture than a thousand sociology textbooks ever could have.  After all Maya’s father was nineteen years older than her mother, so to Maya age was not a factor love.
Cary was only the third person Maya ever had sex with, and the first that she had felt anything for that might be termed love.  She did not know if she loved him or not, but she did sense that whatever it was it was more from her end than his so she let it go.  Their friendship however, continued.  A lot of people might have considered such a thing strange or even wrong, but when you don’t put fences around sexuality it can be a fluid thing that ebbs and flows through a relationship.  Theirs ebbed and then flowed away again.  Maya believed life was a rippling processes, not unlike a constantly churning pond, you can’t be static and remain alive so she accepted her relationship with Cary for what it was on a daily basis, setting no limitations or expectations.  Cary privately marveled to himself that in his near fifty-year life he had never run across anyone quite as natural and Maya, and yet he wasn’t even sure what he meant by that.  He just understood.
	Cary was gone a lot traveling out of the country virtually once a week, and when he was away Maya spent most of her time alone studying for classes or out of her own curiosity.  Cary got her into Taoist and Egyptian beliefs; he also introduced her to the scientific skepticism of Aleister Crowley who taught in a manner far different from her structured life at the university.  Maya started to become more and more interested in exploring the great unknown —the human mind.  Sensing that she wanted to be on the edges of human though Cary outfitted her apartment with the recently released and very expensive EtherTwo.  EtherTwo was the third generation of the internet, but instead of requiring a machine like a computer E2 as it was called ran off your own mind.  By the use of an infrared portal which fit over the face and recognized users by retinal scan; a small DNA based circuit board which you held in your hand; and a series of electrode patches which powered it up using the energy field that surrounds everyone’s body; one was able to explore a digital world that felt seemed every bit as real the “real” world.  It was interdimensional insofar as the dimension it led to was human created rather than “discovered” as in science fiction stories.  You walked out onto the street and took buses and cabs or subways to wherever you wanted to go be it a library, a hash den, or a business meeting.  It was just about to change everything and Maya was one of the first thousand or so people to start using it.
	Maya was absolutely enthralled by it and spent more time in E2 than in the real world, as everyone would later on.  It was simply better, safer, and more fun than the “real” world.
	But to be completely cut off from humanity, studying intensely, and living in different reality does not make for a well-balanced human being.   For that Maya had to force herself out of the house into personal interaction with others.  Thus once a week she would go to a bar or a coffeeshop or somewhere people congregate and observe and occasionally interact with strangers.  She often found that she couldn’t maintain conversations with people because she didn’t share their belief that life was a mess.  Most people she met ended up laying out their problems and at first Maya tried to help them but gradually she realized that it was the act of complaining that these people enjoyed so much.  They didn’t want to solve their problems because they believed that life “would be boring without them.”
	This crowd of neurotics tended, Maya noticed to congregate around establishments that plied the trades of caffeine and alcohol, and while she did not see either as the sole cause of their unhappy states of mind, they certainly weren’t helping the problem.  At first and in general for as long as he could remember being around other people was something Maya only did out of a sense of necessity or obligation.  It had never entered her head to want to spend her free time with others; she felt she needed to.  It was a distinction that caused a certain air of indifference about her, and others sometimes picked up on it.  Sometimes they seemed hurt or offended by comments that Maya never gave a second thought to, until Cary called her on it. 
“You may not put any stock in the words, but you live in world that does, and if you don’t respect that you will find yourself surrounded by bitter sarcastic people whom you don’t like.”
	“The words never seem to come out the way I want them to.”
To make matters even worse Maya was strikingly beautiful meaning that women hated her and men were afraid of her.  She had her mothers slim defined figure along with her sharp features and jet black hair, but her eyes were the piercing ocean blue DNA of her father.  In Freudian terminology she had taken an imprint at the oral stage which gave her the soft edges of femininity and inquisitiveness, and at the anal stage she had shifted slightly so as to be thin and strong, both emotionally and physically.  She was every emotionally deficient man’s worst nightmare and could reveal deep personal emotions as easily as she could analyze and abstract the complex causation that had led to the emotions.  Naturally she majored in psychology.
	Most men that Maya met were frighteningly simple creatures and one could only deal with them on the most mammalian of levels.  Every time she watched men and women trying to interact with each other her mind went back to a psych class on primate behavior patterns.  The Alpha male of the pack would spy a desired female across the room (often herself) and move in to attempt to mate.  Shortly after this the rest of the pack would come over to pick among the remaining presumable less desirable females or occasionally to challenge the Alpha Male’s authority.  The latter usually took place by means of a game called pool.  These poor men would have been completely lost without the pack structure, which Maya puzzled over for so long it became her thesis and senior project.  Her professors thought it was hysterical and graduated her with honors.
	Maya was accepted to graduate school for Psychology at Harvard University, but before she went east she went home.  As part of her graduation she and her father performed a peyote ceremony.  In her voyage Maya traveled backwards through the DNA loop and took the form of her father.  Maya saw herself through his eyes and felt his pride for her and she looked upon her mother and felt his love for her, she turned to her mother and speaking with her father’s voice said: “It is all here, I will see you soon.”  Her mother hugged her and kissed her and underneath the Utah sky Maya lost her last remaining piece of fear.  She replaced it with understanding
	Until then Maya had knowledge, immense amounts of knowledge, but no understanding. It was here through her “father’s” eyes that she learned that knowledge can be retold and formed into language, but understanding is unique to each individual.  For a moment with the help of an ancient herb Maya transcended herself and felt another beings understanding.  She saw the world from another alien point of view.
	Maya gathered up her books and moved to Boston Massachusetts to attend graduate school in the Harvard Psychology department.  The day she left DeLiTech introduced the first virtual reality game ALTER.  As a going away present her father had one of the first models sent to her a few days later.




Eigenstate four (the doctor will seen you in a moment…)

	Dr Waiben read to many science fiction stories as a child and as a result he was no longer a doctor anymore.  Officially anyway; that is he lost his license to practice in a fiasco that the CIA still referred to as “that Brazilian snafu.”  Dr Waiben preferred to call it ‘the Brazilian Caper’ and didn’t think it was a fuck up at all other than the fact the his staff and several government officials were killed.  Waiben had been crossing various strands of DNA namely termite, human and bovine; and had created something he called E.A.T.E.R. which was not actually an acronym, but he made it into one because he knew how congress loved them.  Engineer Augmented Territory Enforcement cReature was a hideous thing to behold.  It was like a termite of steroids with seven stomachs like a cow and the intelligence of an Arkansas hillbilly.  It went berserk one day and ate most of Waiben’s lab, his entire staff, and two visiting house representatives from North Dakota.  Naturally the CIA blamed the thing on Waiben and promptly promoted him back to the United States and made him in charge of “gathering information” from captured enemy operatives.  Naturally Waiben loved torturing people, but unfortunately he got so involved in the process he sometimes forgot to ask them for information.
	Waiben was a real artist and he spent his off time doing what any artist does —he looked for inspiration for his art.  One day while he was driving through upstate New York Dr. Waiben stopped at an antique store that was actually a converted barn.  In the very back corner of the barn there was something Waiben had never seen before, a rather phallic looking devise, which the proprietor told him, was a cattle prod.  Being from the city Waiben had no idea what it was for, but upon hearing that it delivered what the woman called ‘a motivating shock’ to get a cow moving, Waiben bought it for twenty-two dollars.


  Eigenstate one (Los Angeles)
	Two days before I left for Atlanta (Claire was already gone for New York) I gave up on the ghost.  I borrowed the phraseology from someone whose name is now long lost… part of giving up on the ghost.  The ghost tried to give meaning to everything to order the chaos and make some sense out of it, but I always saw through it and turned every thought into paradox and crushed it under the heavy weight of theory.  I wanted a model that would make shape out of the chaos, order it into some tangible thing that my mind could wrap itself around.  But from the beginning there was nothing but chaos and when I gave up I sailed smoothly through.  
Without the ghost everything proceeds with stark certitude, even in the midst of chaotic confusion.  And from the beginning there was never anything but that chaotic confusion and it enveloped me like a warm water blanket, saturated my amniotic gills until I was ether, vaporously thin and ghost-like.  I took the antidote from a Dr. of Letters, a fecund pact between the nefarious odor of my own ego and perfumed smooth heights of the chaos that falls like a curtain when you find yourself staring at the obsidian side of the moon.  
	I had a gift/curse which led me to always see the contradiction, the opposite, the paradox, the non-existent line between the real and the unreal irony.  I saw the joke and it was on all of us.  I was my own worst enemy; there was nothing I could do that I could just as well not do.  I was a philosopher even when my mother was still wiping that shit from my toddling ass and I was doomed to forever think.  Somewhere in the years that followed I contacted the outside world, the alien otherness of humanity.  I found them all dried and stinking of the putrid death-rot smell that hearkened me to a deeper understanding of the true horrors of the death camps. 
	I had no interest in life, if life was what surrounded me.  Most everyone I knew was a failure or if not, it was only because they were worse than failures they were great successes in a game called failure.  I pitied them and they thought me kind and generous and a host of other things that I was not.  I may have acted after those fashions but I was not any of them and in acting them I only did so because I pitied those that surrounded me.  I never failed.  I did something far worse and far more contemptible in their eyes, I never tried to live, I glided day to day doing the bare minimum of what was necessary to survive.
In their words I had no life and if what they called life; the money they carefully gathered up money in the bank and checked on it daily; the books they stacked neatly on stylish shelves; the gluttonous meals they sucked into ever larger stomachs; the hideously false and atrocious gods they prayed to; if these things are living then I was dead.  The world of Usinc disgusted me; I was only at home in the disjointed chaos.  That day I gave up on the ghost because I realized that all my life I had desired not to live —if what others do is called living—but to express myself.
	I wanted to live at the speed of light and found that the only way to do such a thing is to express myself at the speed of light to think faster than anyone could possibly live.  Whether I die tomorrow on a plane or four hundred years from now is of no consequence to me what I am running after is the specter, the holy grail of the infinite mind, the ineffable nothingness of my life.  I gave up on the ghost. Not out of volition or moral superiority but because I could no longer not give up on myself.  I climbed into the cell I made for myself with the gilded bars of intellect and logic I sealed it off and stopped living in order that first I would express myself
	By all accounts and standards of those around me I was not a total failure, but well on my way.  My friend John once called me a ‘junkie waiting to happen,’ which I take to mean that there was nothing important enough in my life to keep me from throwing it away on heroin and he ought to know he threw away four years himself to the endless game of trying to fill the needle.  I had my addiction, for the signs of failure are hung on posts called addiction; caffeine, nicotine, cannabis; I kept myself from heroin by feeding in a steady diet of slightly less dangerous, less parasitic drugs which kept the ultimate parasite, my own mind, at bay.
	For years I desperately wanted to succeed by their terms if only so I could then turn my back on them and show it all to be meaningless, but you can learn nothing by being the most successful failure, and then there was my own failure to attain such a standing.  I could not master that thing that ineffable separation that people manage when they separate themselves off into carefully cordoned halls and passageways that lead from room to room and in each ephemeral room is a different personality.  One room for work, one for friends, one for their loves, one for me, one for you, like great hotels these peoples’ minds confuse me I get lost; I could not subdivide my brain into carefully constructed track housing.  I tried for a while in spite of myself, just to see what it was like.
	I remain in gestalts, in patterns; I remain chaotic, I still see every contradiction between reality and the unreal irony of it, I puzzled over this in all the gutters of all the streets, of all the cities I have ever found myself in, and I have found the sweetest and most feminine caress of an answer, nothing could be more stark and aridly true —just like the ghost itself.
	Now I have learned that if I speak in riddles and rhythmic rhyme people will listen to what I say with a suddenly detached air of force abstraction, they look at me as if I might give them some insight they have always wanted into the “true” nature of existence as if I know something they do not.   The truth is that I know less than anyone does.  Talking with a well developed vocabulary and taking interest in my own mind are not things that I would logically expect people to take an interest in, but they do.  Everywhere I have been for any length of time inevitably someone says to me that I make them think about things that hadn’t considered before. As if I had somehow forced them to when it was after all their minds and their thoughts not mine.
	People tell me I could make great sums of money selling my words, I have my doubts about this, but if it were true for what end? Would I be any more alive?  Am I to finally succumb to the end-of-the-day philosophy that what ever else happens its money that makes us able to live?  Perhaps that is all there is.  I have some piece of paper somewhere that says I studied a lot of theories on the nature of life and that is true I have read many books and could name a couple dozen theories on the nature of life, but that all told me nothing about my own.  It told me in vivid detail what it was that certain peoples’ lives are all about, but nothing in it grabbed me and took hold in such a way that I wanted to act it out in my own life.
	I love the mystery of not knowing.  Gave up on the ghost and flew to Atlanta.  The plane ride went from being a banal way to spend a day to an electrifying adventure and an absolute act of faith in my fellow men and women with the simple realization that this moment this timeless intangible thought might be the last as the plane tumbled out of the sky. It didn’t but it was the most exhilarating flight I ever had.





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