Discrepancies that were visible never got by in the security world without lots and lots of explanations. So Hal was very grumpily sitting in the plain, undesignated security chief's office with the usual cigar in his mouth, but without the beers and without the female companionship. He and the Chief, also a Major, argued with great intensity for a few minutes over yet another question: What were they going to do about their Reportable Nuclear Accident Report? Both decided to forget about it later over a beer at the Officer's Club--at least, until after they'd had the beer. And Hal, of course, had still not forgotten about the Captain. In fact, he was thinking of ways to sidetrack Jim Breedice into duty with the base security chief so that he could have the duty with the nurse Captain.
- * *
We have carefully studied the flow of your individual lifetime to select the proper time frame for our initial transmission to you. Our calculations indicate that the next six or seven day-units of your life will be absolutely uneventful. You will have sufficient time to make preparations for the transition. If, for some reason, you decide that involvement with us is not to your individual liking, we will be able to observe this with our remote monitoring system. You do not have to write it out or state the decision in so many words. Merely experiencing and settling in on this opinion consistently for a period of several hours will allow us to realize that we must make another choice. Possibly even from another galactic system, and another time nexus that is linkable with our matter-energy translation technique. Above all, there must be a strong voluntary component on your part, in order for us to cooperatively establish the necessary cellular electromagnetic transtime bridge for altering universal entropy and transtemporal dyssynchronisms.}
Introducing Julian to Pearl E. Mae and the other group members did not remove the fact of Gabriella's death. Lyle, had he been like many other people, might have reached for a drink of straight scotch or a couple of hits off a joint after he really accepted the fact that Gabriella was dead. But did she know that she was going to die? Was she aware of anything at the moment of death? Or was everything all over in a couple of seconds? Gabriella was fast, and a couple of seconds were enough for her with her street smarts to pick up what was going down and avoid it if at all possible. Gabriella's entire life, from some perspectives, had been a long series of hot spots and difficult positions, one after another. Gabriella always survived the most outrageous situations. And now she had been snuffed? Why could it not have been a dream? It had not been a dream. If anything, that part of his life up to this point with Gabriella suddenly seemed distant and faded off in the past and dream-like when he compared it to the uncomfortable and embarrassing sensation currently in his chest that was yearning for Pearl E. Mae. He wanted to get into her britches like he'd been there a lot before. It did not matter if she had a name out of the Old West, or that she could sing country-western with a real twang. There was some solid-home comfort he could feel for her in his bones. Yet he ached vaguely in the shock of Gabriella's death. Lyle was getting a feeling of sadness and disorientation. He yearned for the comfort of the love feeling he had with Pearl E. Mae and he grieved for Gabriella even though their relationship had been brief. Lyle began to feel pain, and to feel lost.
Without warning, a part of Lyle's mind suddenly gaped wide open. Then it happened again. His body's mind began to calm itself through the breathing. Like the day before, something felt involuntary but also very familiar, in the same way that pressing the accelerator or the brake pedals might feel familiar to a driver. The megastepped Lyle had some great built-in safety and regeneration devices. While his body's breathing systems calmed him, his mind sensed a calming issuing from the six other beings. His self-relaxation was enhanced much more than tenfold, it seemed. When he closed his eyes and prayed for strength and stability, the swift answer was the group synergism. Like a small cloud of white light programmed for a healing mode, the effect of the group was to make him feel very supported. The grief for Gabriella was much less painful, and he had the distinct impression of having shared the grief with others. Then he felt the light and had no thoughts whatsoever for several minutes. The white light enveloped him and conveyed a soft, pleasurable sensation to the central part of his chest. The light in the heart expanded to further envelop him and gave him feelings of Divine protection. In a psychic sense, there was an intense chasm of disjointed energies suddenly settling down into a harmonious crystallization of unity. Unity with something unlike anything Lyle could remember, even considering the massive amount of reading he'd managed to sneak in for free while working as a clerk in the book store. After awhile, the entire process of his occult growth had become almost like something out of a comic book story of occult powers and extrasensory abilities. Whatever he read about seemed to take shape in a literal or figurative way before his very eyes during the days and weeks following exposure to the concepts or spiritual practices such as those described in Tibetan Yoga. He often wondered whether some part of this could have been auto-suggestion or self-hypnosis, but it was unlikely. This was something different. Very different!
Although Lyle's friends who came into the bookstore often told him that his imagination was too active, Lyle didn't see it that way. Most of the spiritual teachings he was interested in enough to read about felt almost natural and intuitive on first reading. Books and essays that felt strange or in any way incomprehensible he simply put down since there were so many more books in the store left to sample. So much of the stuff had already changed his outlook, at least compared to the highschool dropout guitar player reading background he had when he first started the job at the Crystalline Book Shop.
The day's events were not that illogical an extension of what had been going on the day before, however. Even with the profound inner sense of peace and love, Lyle's head still buzzed -- 24 hours later -- from the thunderclap rainstorm and the multichannel data of the six other group members that was nearly inundating his nervous system. The presence of six other beings in his life brought Lyle constantly back to the here-and-now in the same way that musical groups had brought him back to ground after flying too high and too long on a solo passage. Lyle Crawford was just one day past undergoing a mega-evolutionary step toward becoming part of a unique man-machine synergism: DR TOMORROW. The initial, sudden contact of the seven beings and their mentalities was the main substance of the first of many MindLink/HeartLights on the day before, and Lyle energetically set to work with the group by starting out the day with another MindLink/HeartLight despite having the grief of Gabriella's death sitting on his heart.
Julian was pretty cool about my not smoking, even though he continued to reflexly pass the doober whenever he finished taking a hit. I was more surprised that my tobacco habit was not speaking to me through my body. Ganja was nothing to quit smoking, but tobacco withdrawal was a major overhaul. Julian reminded me of my deceased ex-, Toos, and how she always maintained that quitting heroine (which she had done twice successfully) was much easier than quitting tobacco (which she had done only once successfully). Julian, my man for Everything, was now a little freaked out at all that was unusual at my house. He was hanging out with us when Su-Shan gave me the Eternal ring he had brought for me into the past. Julian took a look at the ring and then split. I noticed the ring right away after the megastepping because of the highly unusual shape of the pewter-like silver structure. The Eternal Ring was a tiny and powerful supercomputer from 32,000 A.D. with multimedia functions and projection systems. Atop a double-spiral finger-ring, the small silver pyramid sat inside a thin, corner-shaped silver shell. Along the top outside border of the shell were the six control buttons. The small pyramid possessed a frighteningly effective laser kineholographic projector, and the silver shell's control panel contained two tiny microefficient stereo speakers for very realistic sound and incredible stereo imaging. Many cuts above the best screen projection systems I've seen in video stores, the Eternal Rings can play back ultra high fidelity stereo video images in a three-dimensional format. The Eternal Ring, of course, is also an auto-zeroing, voice activated communicator and networking device. The ring possesses capabilities for storing objects in virtual space on an indefinite basis while safeguarding the stored objects with combination of voiceprint and digital analysis of radial arterial pulse wave. Field-induction linking permits the linking up of all our computer modules, but the rings have another type of synchronizing function. Special synchronizing pulses laid down by each Eternal Ring let us synchronize our bodies' physiological signals more efficiently, especially when functioning in a multitracking environment. Pulse multitracking gives all seven of us special potentials for relating to MIDI music and troubleshooting problems with the MIDI wiring, interfaces, and circuitry. Of course this sounds too heavy for me to save in my personal memory, so I just put on the ring, and resumed preparing for MindLink/HeartLight A small part of my mind worried about Julian, and whether or not it was O.K. for him to be alone. I wished he could be in on our MindLink/HeartLight, and I wished for him to feel some of the love and cohesiveness and HeartLight that we Eternals were beginning to have as a group. Especially because of the HeartLight, I was sure that the residual effect of being centered in the heart was something we could pass on to Julian and any other human we felt close to.
This time, we are sitting around the pool. It is our second day together, and the MindLink/HeartLight is almost as important as the first one we had the day before because we learn about travelling together as a group. The first MindLink/HeartLight demonstrated to us that we were already a group and could function together in a heart-centered and creative way by producing the musical thought form and composition that terminated with the bat signal. The first MindLink/HeartLight gave proof of how unified we could become. This second MindLink/HeartLight was powerfully facilitated by Quail, who helped us to learn how to travel and work together as a group. She taught us to travel together out of the body and to function as Eternals while out of the body.
Quail came to DR TOMORROW from perhaps the farthest away point in the future. An inhabitant of the Light Dynasty Galaxy and the Twin Federations, Quail was tall, very buxom, and capable of both instant invisibility and physical plane space flight. She very rarely spoke with language, and yet was one of the group's most powerful telepaths. Quail could play or emulate nearly any musical instrument, and could also synthesize or emulate a wide variety of esoteric clicks and other sounds. When singing, she was able to alter her voice over a large range of octaves and had the capability of making her voice sound like nearly any of the controls on any of the group's synthesizers. Quail was also imbued with an ability both very ancient and very futuristic: she could voluntarily split the frequencies of her voice so that she sounded like several voices singing or chanting at the same time.
These abilities were somewhat ironic, because in her native habitat, Quail's physical form resembled more that of an fish. The specific form that Quail's native configuration resembled was that of the earthly Manta Ray. Quail's home planet was mainly a series of liquid seas made up of sulfur-silicon congeners. As a being originally possessing physical structure based on geometry of the silicon atom, Quail was required to undergo extensive matter transposition before being sent to carbon-based Earth of the past via the thought-matter projection unit by the I.S.I. technicians. Quail's humanoid identity, after karmic resettling, was that of a Tequesta Indian Princess who had been a champion huntress. Just as Quail had been an outstanding heroine of the Light Dynasty Galaxy, her humanoid alter ego had been a female hero from an advanced Indian civilization that antedated the Florida Seminoles by hundreds of years.
Quail found the human form quite interesting when she compared it with her native life-form. When she and Morphosa swam together in the DR TOMORROW pool, Quail's human form felt almost like a plastic costume or sheath. Quail could easily remember the soaring underwater movements of her Light Dynasty life-form and she really missed it at times. She found it a challenge to see whether or not her human body could slide gracefully through the water, but a bayonet-type of glide was all she could manage because the densities and specific gravities were quite different. Quail once observed Earth athletes performing a `dolphin kick' in a televised swimming race and it made her laugh involuntarily. Morphosa and Quail felt a certain type of comradeship, because both of them had the capacity for changing their molecular structure. But when it would be necessary for DR TOMORROW to do any really fast physical plane travelling, Quail was always the one who served as the bus driver.
During the MindLink/HeartLight on this Saturday, Quail served as designated leader. The meditation began and there was an intense sensation of linking up with each other, that could be most clearly felt in the breathing. After we had been inked up for a little more than thirty minutes, Quail was able to easily transport all seven of us in one common energy package to wherever we wished to go. On this Art Festival Saturday, we ascended over the house and went zooming over the Grove at tree-top level. Even though all seven of us were out of body, there were sensations of the breeze and smells from the Art Festival. Quail flew us over the city and out to South Beach. We had a breathtaking view of the entire Miami Beach hotel and motel strips in all their fluorescent afternoon glory. Then Quail shot us up in the direction of outer space and quickly circumnavigated the entire planet from space, and returned to the southeast Florida coast. We then returned to what Quail felt was the strongest power spot in their neighborhood. Only a few miles away from the DR TOMORROW house. Quail loved the trip out to the tip of Cape Florida, where the ocean was blue-green during the day, and beautiful and usually undisturbed late at night because the State Park Service closed up the roads to the park just before sunset. She pointed out a section of houses half a mile offshore in the water built up on stilts. We had flown over the houses before returning to the Cape Florida ocean wall and sitting together there. It did not matter that their physical bodies were back in meditative trance around the pool. They sat together and contemplated the stilt houses which Lyle identified as occasionally having extremely loud and rowdy parties.
At the sea wall by the ocean, Quail was able to teach the Eternals how to use the large fluid medium as a means of communicating with all other large bodies of fluid media everywhere. Although most of the group members other than Lyle were familiar with the use of plants for telepathic communication, both fluid wave and plant communication were definitely something new for Lyle. Quail merely demonstrated to the Eternals that any large body of liquid was able to absorb, resonate with, and emit an unlimited number of vibrations. Earlier in the MindLink/HeartLight, members of DR TOMORROW learned about telepathic fluid wave communication between Earth and Venus during the third planet's ancient history. This form of communication was infinitely cheaper than utilizing gross, physical plane electronic or quantal energy. The early Venusian colonists communicated with the original Mind back on Venus by simply living clearly and being in the vicinity of any large body of water. Despite increasing contamination in all continents, the major oceans of Earth actually served best for this purpose because their volumes most nearly approached the relative volume of infinity, Quail taught. Whenever a fluid volume approached that of an infinite conductor, the frequency of oscillations necessary for relatively infinite long-distance propagation becomes minimized.
Since the large volume of Earth's oceans approached, for practical purposes, infinity, nearly any of the oceans could be used for fluid wave energy projection. Quail taught the other members of DR TOMORROW how to talk to each other through the Atlantic Ocean. They learned how to bounce and beam thoughts and sensations from the rolling waves along the surface of the ocean and they also learned, while out of body, to bounce themselves from the depths of the ocean floor in giant swirls and eddies of much larger and slowly changing waves that were nearly invisible but of immense scope and size compared to the waves that rolled along the top of the water's surface. Low frequency and extra-low frequency signals and stimuli sometimes have the greatest biologic impact. Slow oscillatory vibrations could also penetrate the earth's crust beneath the ocean bed to emerge on the opposite side of the planet. Quail also taught them the trick of using the ocean to focus the energy propagations of radio and other wave-form and quantal communications.
To Lyle, this was all astounding. Many of his forays into the written word had spoken of the Hierarchies, but his fellow Eternals seemed to put many of the higher spiritual principles into direct practice. With his megastepped mentality, Lyle grasped these techniques with amazing ease. He experienced no difficulties in learning how to bounce vibrations off the ocean's surface, or from the large slow eddies in the ocean's depths. He was also learning how to use the large body of fluid to focus his own higher energies when necessary. The Miami area had so many points of contact with bodies of water, that Lyle found it easy to nearly always use the hydro-bouncing and focusing during all of his meditations. Since the Eternals do not require food or drink on a regular basis, it was difficult for Lyle to convince the other Eternals about the seriousness of the water contamination and the drinking water shortages.
From their position many thousands of years in the future, the I.S.I. technicians watched Lyle on their multi-coordinate monitors and gently smiled. Lyle, despite his mega-evolutionary changes, was still very typical of pre-Cataclysmic people. It was easier for Lyle to accept mega-evolutionary changes initially just in terms of his physical being, and he still comprehended mental and spiritual changes in higher energies as being primarily physical manifestations. Lyle was able to understand and use the idea of water being part of telepathy, but he had difficulty applying the process itself. This was paradoxical considering the extensive telepathic communication that goes on between musicians in a group while they are playing. So even though Lyle was a sensitive, he was rather redneck about considering the possibilities of either plant or electromagnetic field consciousness. Technophobic or not, Lyle treated all equipment with respect. He even talked to his computers. But when it came to having communication with plants, he drew the line. That was just for Walt Disney characters.
The other members of DR TOMORROW had no such problems. Simple plants had been used for thousands of years as rudimentary telepathic communicators throughout most Galaxies. And the fluid medium, water of life, aqua vitae, was the primeval source of all simple plants. On Earth and many other planets, plants both originated from water and possess water as the vital and the single most characteristic compositional substance. Telepathy involves wave propagation or transmission. The members of DR TOMORROW all knew that both speech and thinking were different forms of waves. Since a body of water such as the ocean always has waves, to send the waves of communication through water was very easily done by simply superimposing one set of waves (telepathy) upon another set of waves (the fluid). Many galactic systems were not based upon the carbon-hydrogen-oxygen combination, but always had some form of a basic fluid medium. When the fluid happened to be a condensed form of a gas such as methane or a silicon congener, the overriding relationship between the liquid and the waves and the communication was still universal.
Although the DR TOMORROW pool was fairly small, Quail had been able to demonstrate this Saturday that when the members would carry out their MindLink/HeartLight around the pool, it was slightly easier to communicate feelings and concepts by using the waves in the pool. Despite the fact that the pool was so small, the Earth's rotation and gravity fields actually caused very tiny waves even in such a small body of fluid as the swimming pool. Lyle quickly realized that with continuing practice, the members of DR TOMORROW could utilize the waves of airflow for communication.
Megastepped Lyle was still the most primitive member of DR TOMORROW. The Primitive. The Primitive megastepped into Eternal status. The other Eternals, because of I.S.I. translation and projection techniques, had some say in their choice of physical vehicles and also physical plane personalities. Despite enhancing of his own muscular development and definition to a superior level from an earthly point of view, Lyle was still a Primitive because of being firmly rooted to a nevertheless advanced physical and emotional body. Long before his DR TOMORROW days, Lyle had already learned how to temporarily transcend the physical body during meditation. During the daily MindLink/HeartLight experiences, however, Lyle was astounded to learn that even though all members became One in a sense, it was also possible to trade and shift physical bodies as well as lower-plane personalities. Since Lyle had been a musician prior to the electric cataclysm, it was not so new to him to learn that this type of body-shifting and personality-trading also resembled what was possible while playing music together as a group.
During the the first musical session, later in the day, Lyle was also fascinated by learning to listen to, without actually hearing, many other trains of musical thought that seemed to be going on at the same time as the physical plane music the group, DR TOMORROW, was playing. Many of these trains of musical expression seemed to come in waves. During the first MIDI-mediated rehearsal, Lyle felt himself inadvertently being carried away and losing control over his guitar playing and his voice. Like what the druggies used to call overamping. Only the common musical MindLink/HeartLight of the other members was able to help Lyle keep his feet on the ground and stay musically grounded with the bass and drum lines. Music rehearsals and performances were just be a special form of the daily, vibration-forging MindLink/HeartLight.
It was Lyle's idea that some common physical movements and exercises for the group might be helpful. Despite the fact that disco was no longer trendy, Su-Shan used several programmed disco beats and songs as a way of experimenting with musical body movement patterns. However, most of the compositions played during that first rehearsal belonged to two other types. One style was a very subtle wave-like movement combined with minimalistic techniques that resembled what Lyle had seen in Eastern musicians like sitar and tabla players who were performing ecstasy music. The other main type of composition emerging from the first DR TOMORROW session was more of a neoclassical, hard rock beat. Lyle opined that it would be useful for the music to focus on breathing sounds and breathing patterns, so the hard rock beat began to feature whooshing air-like sounds that would randomly seem to track the listeners own breathing. Aloysius, the computer, made an important contribution here, even though his existence had not yet been officially recognized. Suffice it to say that VDT graphics consisting of schematic patterns reminded Su-Shan how simple it would be to add a white sound generator. Su-Shan and Noman later added three of the white sound generators and arranged them in a triangular configuration. The idea proved very effective. Some of the air-like sounds, as well as the white sound patterns were included in both the hard-rock music and in the disco-patterned music.
The changes and transitions were very fast and seemed natural. Lyle and the Eternals were living together in the large, palm and cypress-shaded Art Deco house off Tigertail in the Grove.
Despite being able to control ectoplasmic projections of mind-energy, Pearl E. May had very little control of her own physical structure. Her dark hair and Aegean china doll-like face belied the multi-colored Vesuvius of higher plane energies she became whenever she transcended. One of the first official acts Pearl E. May performed for DR TOMORROW the group was taking Lyle's blue Indian bedspread material and parcelled it out so that there was enough to make UniSex shirt-garments for all seven members of the group. From the time when Pearl E. May began to work with the blue cloth, its shimmering qualities seemed to increase and become more intense. Pearl E. May decided to ectoplasmically shape the cloth into long Indian shirt-garments for each member, and the shirt-garments seemed to begin independent and separate lives of their own shortly after Pearl E. May's abilities molded them into existence. For one thing, cloth became instantly fireproof and indestructible as far as ordinary means were concerned. The garments also seemed to have a Morphosa-like quality of variable density. When the Eternals were wearing these garments on a hot and muggy day, the cloth appeared to become sleazy and diaphanous. One the other hand, the blue Indian bedspread material became very much like velvet during the rare nights that were chilly on the ocean. In the tropical rain storms, the material took on a synthetic plastic-like consistency and yet was able to allow the interchange of inside and outside air. In nearly every one of the group images of DR TOMORROW, all seven Eternals appeared in the blue Indian shirt-garments. In addition to having and performing distinctively with Aloysius the computer, the Indian shirt-garments actually became a trademark of the group. The shirts were really a far cry from all the punk and glitter-rock used by many musical groups and entertainers. However, since the shirts did have a density-altering property, they also tended to diffract light of different colors in a random way. And actually took on the appearance of colors other than blue.
Of course, the shirts had a very special meaning for Lyle, because he was able to understand some of the eerie feelings he had as a child when he first received the gift from his mother. The Indian cloth was an interface between Lyle, the past, and the future. The megastepping had not only changed his physical vehicle, but empowered him with the ability to receive, understand, and manage intense amounts of energy. Just as much as he had been or seemed very dull and humdrum before, Lyle now was able to maintain a powerful level of equanimity in the face of nearly overwhelming and massive overload on any plane including the physical. Lyle now already experienced two of the automatic calming incidents during which his body itself started and maintained the process of slow deep abdominal breathing. During the first two MindLink/HeartLights, Lyle, as a member of the common mind, met his father who had died in India. On one of these occasions, a blustery arctic wind seemed to convey all of them into the Himalayas, where the group, Lyle's father, and two Tibetan monks had a great silent conversation. On other scattered occasions that followed, Lyle directly reencountered the energies of his father and learned that these energies gave him certain powers or abilities to communicate with passed-on spirits. This again was difficult for Lyle to really grasp. His Western background made it difficult for him to be able to really believe in spirits. Gradually, however, and with the passing of days and sufficient experiences with atypical kinds of energies, Lyle was able to react to even the word, `spirits,' with less disdain and more of an open-minded attitude.
With the exception of Su-Shan, each Eternal came to Miami with only the robe, belt, pouch, and ring. In addition to the Eternal ring intended for Lyle, Su-Shan, the drummer, also brought a large piece of highly compressed carbon through the time transporter-translator. Diamonds, because of their compressed carbon-lattice crystalline structure, caused the least amount of entropic disturbance, and I.S.I. agents had very carefully and scrupulously calculated out the energy required through the LaPlace transforms for the whole diamond. Earthside, Su-Shan used an ordinary hammer and chisel to break up the large hypercrystalline fragment. The many smaller pieces were quite negotiable in the gold resale shops located far out west on Bird Road.
Understanding the entire electronic requirements of a musical group was the most serious problem facing Lyle and his six friends because music technology in this Primitive culture, while based on relatively simple programming principles, was packaged in some very complex ways. Lyle's previous music involved only a small but very heavy combo guitar amp and a few effects pedals. Now it was necessary to set up for an entire group. Just a couple of the tiny diamond fragments yielded a large ammount of dollars. Lyle managed to buy the basic sound-production set-up equipment for the group's initial musical efforts although the group members' appearance nearly caused a riot in the music store. They selected amplifiers for the individual instruments, a multichannel board along with a fairly standard PA system, and a portable DAT recorder. Lyle also purchased an inexpensive Macintosh computer, voice and patch editors, and some sequencing software. Then Lyle ran into a brick wall trying to explain Primitive ideas about signal processing for both sound production and sound recording. He himself barely understood Earth electronics. So even though his mind had been megastepped, he still came up with a blank when Su-Shan and Noman tried to initiate him into the mysteries of field-induction linking and transmission. Field-induction linking was the way that Al the computer system had managed to recruit all their different computers into his microprocessor-based shenanigans. Some day, field-induction linking would permit Eternals to link with each other by using their rings. Field-induction linking was the mechanism by which each Eternal could now access any or all of Al's different systems. Field-induction linking was a problem for Su-Shan. Su-Shan not only understood it very well, he was able to communicate the technical information very efficiently to Lyle and the others, using both verbal and extrasensory techniques. Some Eternals came from galaxies or times that did not use electronic transduction for music, but instead used plasma flow transmission units or simple yet sophisticated systems of built-in genetically engineered vibrating membranes that produced the musical sounds directly while being colored by resonance properties of the being's own structure. Lyle had always been a fair and sometimes commercial guitar player, but the megastepped energy changes (like the changes he experienced with his own muscular structure) placed within his fingertips' grasp a startling knowledge of all stringed instruments. He now viewed the electric guitar as a rather primitive precursor of Draconian feeling-lutes. Lyle managed to adapt himself to the six-stringed Drac instrument with startling speed. Piano and keyboards are stringed instruments also, and Lyle began playing both guitar and keyboard during different parts of a tune in the group's first rehearsals. What was even more impressive to Lyle and other members of the group, however, was the speed with which they navigated and understood modern electronic design and the currently available products. Su-Shan, the percussion expert, was also a 30,000 A.D. expert in nucleonics. It was difficult for him to make a transfer back to the archaic physical plane electronic components such as LSI, VLSI, and bubble memories. But he and Lyle quickly mastered the low-level difficulties of MIDI implementation codes and the elementary programming involved in the patch editors and sequencing software. With some of the tone generators and a special rack-mounted interface for the black Cube computer, Lyle and Su-Shan ran the main outputs of the stereo PA board into the DSP 56001 chip that was set to sample the music at a rate of 48 KHz and meet the technical standards for DAT quality recording.
After a blazing day of MindLink/HeartLight and music rehearsal, the group broke up into two different directions. Noman, Su-Shan, Quail, Morphosa, and Rico decided to go visit the Peacock Cafe across from Peacock Park. They would pretend to eat while checking out the street scene.
Pearl E. Mae and I looked at each other and laughed. It did not matter whether the other Eternals could read our minds or not. We changed our clothing, got the dogs, and went out into the pool again. I have never known any lady who had previously been an aquatic life form, so I never had any idea of how fish do it, until now. At first, it felt like Pearl E. Mae had rubber lips. She kept them semi-pursed as we kissed. I tried not to laugh, but she picked up my mirth and looked at me with questioning eyes, that spoke of her inner channel that grasped my humor with puzzlement. I kept pushing my lips softly against hers. My fingers touched her orange-reddish face and her eyelashes seemed to emit electrical sparks as my fingertips ran over them.
Talk about chemistry, this was going to be Electrocution City. The tip of my tongue gently pried itself between her lips. She softly opened her mouth and began to suck on the tip of my tongue. As we kissed, it seemed like the rockets' red glare was going off in my throat and in my chest. Except that it didn't feel like it was anything that belonged to me anymore. It felt like the rockets' red glare going off in our throats and our chests. Chemistry City within the context of Electrocution City. We were really melting into each other. It didn't matter whether Pearl E. Mae had been a fish, or a cow, or an octopus, and whether I had been a monkey or gorilla or whatever. Together, the two of us were two globs of light blending synergistically. It didn't matter that the blending was taking place from a base of the physical body. It was tighter than MindLink/HeartLight and sweeter than HeartLight. An unending collaborative series of dolphin kicks plunged both the depths and the heights of aquatic consciousness with very efficient, high-amplitude eddies.}
It was a spectacular black and red and yellow sunset.
The old man's hair shone like platinum in the sunlight. Waves of light appeared to cascade over his head and onto his shoulders. Although his face was unfamiliar, there was an urgency and deceptive familiarity to his voice that demanded careful attention. The words felt as though they were being spoken underwater, without any clear sound dimension but a type of low frequency pressure or pre-sound sensation. Within the same bubbles of pressure were included images that were almost but not quite visual. After some minutes of conversation, the actual words and images lost their bubble-like quality. The power of transcerebral translation software and field-induction coupling soon had Yo-Vah speaking colloquial Earth English.
"Welcome to transitions, transitions, and more transitions. I wonder why none of you have asked any questions about why this I.S.I. project has been codenamed `DR TOMORROW', what it means, why music is involved at all in the project, or what the role is of harmony in a transtemporal entropic intervention. No one has asked whether there is to be a doctor involved in the project."
"Since it was my computer that started telling the story," Lyle offered. "I'd like to ask how my name got involved with it, and how come the little notebook computer also gave me a three-dimensional straight-ahead view of my immediate future that was 100% accurate."
"I'm afraid you're still being a little Primitive and concrete, Lyle... The information that came to you via the little computer was being issued to you from a place where there is 100% accurate, as you would say, representation of a person's immediate past, present, and future as well as past and future lifetimes. Just the fact that one has access to information of this type suggests the need to consciously function from more than just the physical plane."
"O.K., I own up to being Primitive, Yo-Vah. But hit me with your best shot. What does `DR TOMORROW' mean. Like, I noticed there wasn't any period after the 'r' in 'Doctor.' Does that have anything to do with the name? Am I the Doctor Tomorrow character?"
"Good guesses for a Primitive. Both the group and the project codename are DR TOMORROW. The `DR' is an acronym for Direct Reclamation. And the letters of `TOMORROW' abbreviate a complex mathematical algorithm that represents critical elements of the timetransit process. Or, tomorrow equals future when viewed from the correct perspective. Briefly, the project involves Direct Reclamation of the Future as timetransit. The project seeks to re-direct entropy-critical energies by means of culturally-valued music and artistic science-fiction materials featuring time travel. Megastepping you into your Eternal form and injecting the other Eternals was the first and most important step in the project. Despite being a terminally Primitive planet, Earth has the cultural seeds and elements which can evolve into help for the future. Many of your own future lifetimes will be spent as famous physicians and healers. These lifetimes will reflect upon your successful DR TOMORROW project. Extensive data from these lifetimes has been projected into you at the moment of megastepping. You will gradually realize some of these otherlife abilities. You actually are a healer and a physician from the future, but above all else you are a teacher. You will soon be able to discover and use creative ways of teaching. The word in many systems for healer often means teacher as well. Earth's Japanese culture, I believe, uses the word, sensei, to mean both doctor and teacher. In nonPrimitive cultures there is often a common educational and professional pathway for both teachers and healers. The MindLink and HeartLight exercises will help you to integrate otherlife information. Never forget that the HeartLight is always the way to your Higher Mind. And Higher Mind, for both individuals and the group as well, is the best platform from which to deal with otherlife information. Noman can teach you much about otherlife abilities and how integrated and realized beings can draw on otherlife abilities in a very balanced way. Future events will demand that you have many skills of which you now have no conscious recall. When the skill is needed, it will appear, especially if you let it happen. For example, although you are now a musician, you will soon be drawing extensively on your abilities as both a musician/composer and healer. Remember -- `Both/And'? I believe you were discussing these words with someone recently. The healing abilities will emerge if you allow them to do so. Remember, it is DR TOMORROW as a thought form that is most important. Please remember the thought form! When you begin to work more specifically on the thought form, you will also find that part of your megastepping includes extensive cultural and language knowledge from several of your main planetary cultures. Since culture has been one of my abiding hobbies, I saw to it that you will find within you fluency in Russian, Japanese, and Spanish languages. The languages will help with the thought form, but also with having more of a feeling for your planet. Remember also that from a galactic point of view, it is of course Primitive and limited to only view the outcome of a single planet in the Universe."
"O.K., I guess I did say to hit me with your best shot, and that was a pretty good shot, Yo-Vah."
And Yo-Vah said unto Lyle, with almost stern admonishment:
"So now is the time when you must take up the cape of divine human and assist the Guardians, the Eternals, and the I.S.I. with preserving the entropy balance of the Universe. Why do you think your planetary subcultures all have the common myth of the Super Man who has more than mortal abilities? Do you remember the special properties that Superman's cape had? The Cape I give you now is a real object, even though it is invisible and exists only in virtual reality until evocation, it will project and amplify your abilities considerably farther than what you observed with the being your media termed, 'the Man of Steel'."
"Good grief, Yo-vah! Do you mean to tell me that your computer analyses included our animated comic book heroes as well?"
"Not only have we analyzed your comic book heroes and themes, but we have also intensely catalogued and cross-referenced most of your science fiction and fantasy literature as well. One of our members even wrote up a History of the Universe as a comic book series and injected it into your cultures. There are at least several Guardians who are specialists in your twentieth century English science fiction. For a soon-to-be-extinct planet, your Primitive culture has been the site of some very worthwhile cultural achievements, especially in your science fiction. Bradbury and Asimov, we love too. But do you think that either of them actually comes from your system? Another of your later injected, `walk-in' writers, William Gibson, was my personal favorite because of the amount of realism along the optimism-pessimism dimension that you found in his writings. His `Matrix' into which software cowboys plunge by the simple act of `jacking in' with electrodes is a virtual reality that operates at different levels within itself. Gibson's heroes live in both a physical reality and virtual reality simultaneously. Gibson's Matrix, however, is just one of very many possible virtual realities. Far in the future, we begin dealing with virtual virtual reality. This level is a virtual representation of a virtual reality, as with a symbol of a symbol, or the mathematical derivative of a derivative. In virtual virtual realities, the mathematics become impossible, even when you are able to use complex equations and multivariate imaginary functions. At this level, symbols become even more powerful and can sometimes cause a bleed-over of effect from a higher plane to a lower plane if the symbol is a very good one. Consider the cross, and the labelled-as-miraculous cures that have been seen on your planet associated with crosses and other religious objects. Occasionally, in the course of a planet's or a culture's rise and fall, the most trivial objects, or even objects of hatred and scorn, such as the cross in pre-Nazarene days, can assume proportions of immense proportions. Your comic book heroes come from somewhere similar, don't they? In your occult readings, you have become familiar with Jung, as I can read from the infrared patterns of your mind. You know about the Myth. Well, Doctor Tomorrow is one of the new Myths that we believe you and your group can sell your planet. A myth of hope and positive attitudes, backed by optimistic applications of technology borrowed from your future. Firearms and weapons are merely the least optimistic applications of technology because of the old-fashioned anachronisms of violence and destructiveness that require and merit replacing. You will need to get the new myths across to the entire planet, or else there will no sector 221 of Your Local Group. Maybe even sooner than the 2105 A.D. date I gave you before."
"...meaning that I will not be able to couch-potato it for the next forty years."
"Meaning that it might be good for you to have some experience being a couch potato, if you are going to know how to get across to millions of couch potatoes who are presently helping to subvert the general equations of entropy into the mire and sludge of general sloth and apathy."
"Aren't you being a bit overly dramatic?"
"Absolutely not! When you see billions of your Earth 'humans' with addictions to drugs, sex, power, and food, this is not a trivial example of what happens as the entropy equations begin to mire and sludge. It is just a matter of very basic temporal mathematics for the I.S.I. technicians in your future, but it would require unending time for me to be able to explain this to you, even with your obviously megastepped mind and nervous system. Just trust me, whether or not you have ever read or understood anything by your planet's Buckminister Fuller. If you properly design or otherwise alter the environment, in an all-inclusive sense, the beings within the environment will surely change. So trust me. Believe me : if you can succeed in having a harmonizing effect on the energy of the planet at this time, you will yourself begin to observe individuals undergoing change for the better. And believe me when I also say that harmonizing is one of the few transtemporal activities known to not increase the randomness of the overall Entropy Equations. So please, be my guest, and harmonize away. You have nothing to lose but your anergy. That is, the anergy of your so-called Human Race. To many of our Eternals, your planet has resembled more of a Human Crawl or a Human Drag, as in dragging to heels to avoid becoming really Human and caring for each other in ways that are entropy-efficient. Do you get my drift?"
"O.K. O.K. Are you going to give me some kind of superscientific device which will add to the harmonizing of the entire planet, or the entire city, or the entire neighborhood...."
"I'm glad to see that you've grasped the idea. It doesn't matter if you are expressing it in the reverse, the same principles still apply. But we were talking about using the experience of being a couch potato for positive rather than negative ends. And your typical Primitive orientation towards material objects still persists despite your megastepping courtesy of the I.S.I. The superscientific device you referred to is the thought form of DR TOMORROW. Not just the music, the group, the story, the media forms, but the thought form. That's the way you have to approach it. Because you are seven Eternals,... or... eight... or seven and one-half... is what I seem to be receiving from your group's energy fields. You will have to explain that to me later. Maybe it has to do with your computer system. Anyway, it is the higher, thought form aspects of DR TOMORROW that are the most important. You will realize it more fully when you have been able to more fully appreciate your own megastepped mind. As you are probably now aware, a change of body is infinitely easier than a change of mind. Primitives, especially, almost never realize the degree to which their own individual minds define the boundaries of their individual universes. Because of this limitation, Primitives, by definition, never learn to use their minds as networking devices."
"Maybe I am a Primitive, or a megastepped Primitive, or whatever. Maybe I don't know about networking, either. I always thought that networking was a word that women's libbers used to mean a `good old girl' system like the `good old boy' system that still rules the southern U.S. But even though I am a Primitive, I do know that you are talking about a whole lot of heavy philosophical stuff that most people don't want to be thinking about. Maybe I don't want to be thinking about those things, either. Maybe I shouldn't be thinking about those things -- that could be dangerous. Most people don't want to be thinking about why nearly everyone's water supply is poisoned, or why halfway clean water costs $25 a bottle all of a sudden. It's like Mother Nature has turned against us, and is now charging us for generations of uncontrolled littering."
"Lyle, you are getting off the subject. Mother Nature is a mythical figure created for you by advertising agencies and salespeople, just like the ones who dreamed up the mutant turtles and the animated transforming vehicles. Primitives always need to have some type of divinity projected outside of themselves, because it is difficult for Primitives to recognize or utilize their inherent divinity."
Marshall F. Gilula, otherwise known as NeXT Registered Developer (NeRD) #1054, spends a lot of his time with a customized white Steinberger guitar, and a couple of racks of rapidly-aging electronic equipment controlled by a Mac IIsi running MOTU's `Performer'. This version of DR TOMORROW was part of a Ph.D. Dissertation written for Columbia Pacific University. DR TOMORROW is a project that aspires to being a profitable multidimensional wellness learning system. Marshall Gilula lives in Miami with a black Cube, several Macs, numerous stringed instruments, and two beautiful gigantic German Shepherds, She-Ra and Bullet. `DR TOMORROW' and `Project Talking Dog' (She-Ra and Bullet) are two scientific activities of Life Energies Research Institute, P.O. Box 588, Miami, Florida 33133.
DR TOMORROW will be continued next issue.
mgilula@miasun.med.miami.edu
Quanta is Copyright(c)1994 Daniel K. Appelquist.
From here, you can go to the contents by issue, or go to the Quanta home page.