Recently I read Anthony Burgess’s 1964 novel Nothing Like the Sun. It’s a tale of William Shakespeare’s life, largely written in Elizabethan late 1500’s English. At first, starting out the book, it seemed too hard. But, just like when I see a Shakespeare play, I adapted a bit—and lived with the fact that many of the unfamiliar words were unknown to the Oxford Dictionary in my Kindle. Indeed a few of the expressions or words don’t even turn up hits on Google. But I did find definitions for a lot of them, and the remaining ones I could figure out from context, which was kind of fun.

These days I often read books on Kindle—because I can put them into a font size suitable for my old eyes. I do love paper, of course, but font size matters more. Another bennie of using the Kindle is that I can highlight passages that strike my fancy, email the passages to myself, and use them as the text for one of my photoblog posts. So here are my quotes, with some short comments, also photos, mostly from New York and Santa Cruz, plus a couple of my new paintings.

“Gems Diptych” acrylic on canvas, August, 2019, Pair of paintings, each 24” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

The young Shakespeare has sex with a passionate older woman, who speaks in a ladylike way afterwards, even though, to his shock, “[her speech] in no wise congrued with her lying near-bare against him nor with that horrible steaming-out, some few minutes past of a mouthful apter for a growling leching collier pumping his foul water into some giggling alley-mort up by the darkling wall of a stinking alehouse privy.”

(I did the two paintings above by starting out by brushing in a flowing Art Nouveau grid, as if for a stained-glass window, and then filling in the cells with colors, going to great lengths to have the shading be nice and smooth. The first one took me nearly thirty hours to do. I liked it so much that I did a second, using approximately the same colors, so they make a nice pair, or diptych. The paintings have zero connection with the quote above, but I wanted to put the Gems first in this post because I love them.)

Life in a nutshell: “…the eternal terrible truth of the skull disclosed at the feast’s end.” (This summer will turn to winter…)

Nature writing: “Leaves gold and brown lying like fried fish; birds twittering like rats in branch-companies, ready to leave the sinking ship of summer.” (Photo from a Santa Cruz bluff.)

Ah, the Shakespearean insights. “The play we act in is still busily being written in that dark room behind, the final couplet not yet known even to the cloaked and anonymous writer.” (The picture shows J. P. Morgan’s rare book room in Manhattan.)

A resentful older rival of Shakespeare’s famously applies this description to him in a pamphlet, soon after our Willy the Shake made it into the London theater scene: “An upstart crow, beautified with our feathers.” (Full house at a Broadway performance of Hadesland.)

Shakespeare writes a pamphlet length poem called Venus & Adonis, dedicating it to an earl whose support he needs. “It is not good, but it is as good as many. I cannot waste my whole life in longing for this man’s art and that man’s scope.” (The beauty queen in the photo was on a float. She’s gearing up for a Cuban parade in Manhattan, and she’s checking out a photo her friend took of her practicing a pose.)

Birds really are not our friends. “They were swans, but like the swans that sailed in the barge’s wake, greedy and cold-eyed. And the kites that flew to and from their scavenging in the June air, the ultimate cleansers of the commonwealth, they attested the end of all noble flesh.” (I rode my bicycle along the cliffs between Three Mile Beach and downtown Santa Cruz, and hit on this deserted cove. The driftwood here looks like a an alien slug. Possibly a flesh-eater!)

Burgess really raises his game in Nothing Like The Sun . “It was for lying, he saw hopelessly, that words had been made. In the beginning was the word and the word was with the Father of Lies.” (Not that this innocent and entertaining busker in the photo in Madison Square is the Father of Lies! But his beseeching pose vaguely fits the quote.)

Shakespeare is a father now, and he ponders how strange it is to to have spawned new human lives. “Only from them, the makers [that is, the parent], was hidden the enormous pulse of the engines, whose switch they touched by an alien curse concealed in the fever of rose or apple or mirror.” And looking out at the spreading lives of your offspring, “Yet there was only the one personal burden of being the source of the whole, the centre of the projection of shadows into the real that, bigger and undying, yet moved as oneself moved, in the mock court of an endless sterile reign to truckle and mow [not sure what he means by mow here].” (Rudy Jr. and me in Maine, photo by Embry Rucker III.)

A young writer’s unkind thoughts about his elders in the field. “There are examples enough of other poets and players who sought, when their powers failed for the enactment of sin, to whine to Almighty God of their deep and profound repentance. Yet call time back and they would be staggering anew in their drunkenness and grunting in beastly thrusting at their ragg’d and spotted drabs.” (That’s a full-size car. Sculpture in Manhattan near the midtown boat taxi stop.)

Love this quote. I’d like to start using this all the time. “I have news for thee, snorer.” (Photo in the Met.)

“Then to thy bed, belching in sloth, to lie there, paper unwritten on save by random sprawling greasy greedy fingers, ale-drop jottings, dust settling on the pile.” (At one of our fave restaurants in Manhattan, L’Express on Park Ave at 20th St.)

“WS blinked back to the painful world on a hot morning, openmouthed at the strong mid-morning sunray infested with motes.” I love looking at motes in the sunlight. Each mote a universe. (Cubans getting their outfits on for the parade. Love how cheerful they are. A holiday outing.)

“Five Eggs” acrylic on canvas, August, 2019, 24” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting. (This was a third version of the “Gems” paintings, but this time I wanted to put critters into the cells, so they’d be like eggs.)

“…a thrust of opal drops in animal ecstasy unleashed a universe — stars, sun, gods, hell and all.” “Soon, his heart sank to think it, she would be enticed to cornfields to beguile the dullness of a country spring.”

You never really know what you’re doing when you’re writing. All you can do is hope for the best. “…a man’s art and skill grew or languished or merely changed, and all beyond his control.” (The Met. I like to pretend that the crater at the top is the mouth of this being, with the black dot the eye. Sort of a half-fish half-human Bosch/Bruegel critter.)

“Only he himself knew what might be done if the words and craft could descend in a sort of pentecostal dispensation of grace. He saw dimly, a vision lay coyly beyond the tail of his eye. This stuff was play. There was a reality somewhere to be encompassed and, with God’s grimmest irony, it might only be grasped through playing at play, thus catching reality off its guard.” (A shrine to the Blessed Virgin Mary in Los Gatos near a Jesuit Center. Dig the praying saint on the left.)

“For the first time it was made clear to me that language was no vehicle of soothing prettiness to warm cold castles that waited for spring, no ornament for ladies or great lords, chiming, beguiling, but a potency of sharp knives and brutal hammers.” (Some of my recent Night Shade reprints on the shelf in the Barnes & Noble in Union Square in NY. Yes!)

I recently wrote a fourth preface for my classic Infinity and the Mind. It’s out in a new 2019 edition from Princeton University Press in paperback and ebook. The book has sold several hundred thousand copies by now. I wrote it over about four years in my early thirties, around 1980.

In my latest preface I decided to go for it and argue that the physical space that we live in is infinite in the highest possible degree. We live, I claim, in an Absolute Continuum. By way of explaining what that means, I’m going to put an edited (and surreally illustrated) version of the preface into today’s post.

Let me also mention that, by way of action-testing my idea, I wrote a new SF story about our physical space being an Absolute Continuum. The SF story is called  “Everything is Everything” and you can read it online in the zine Big Echo.

And now for the new Infinity and the Mind preface:

These days people are prone to thinking digitally. The internet and the handheld device are everywhere. And there’s a numbing tendency to suppose that our world could be a virtual-reality simulation on a grid. But is your mind just a few lines of code? Space a heap of blocks? Time a scrapbook of stills? The cosmos an integer? Surely not.

Some people don’t want the world to be infinite. They concoct bogus theories and metaphors to imply the world to be finite. The intellectual hero of Infinity and the Mind, Georg Cantor, had sharp words for such doubters. Here’s what he wrote in 1885:

The fear of infinity is a form of myopia that destroys the possibility of seeing the actual infinite, even though it in its highest form has created and sustains us, and in its secondary transfinite forms occurs all around us and even inhabits our minds.

We can take Cantor’s remarks as phenomenological observations about our experiences. When he speaks of “infinity in its highest form,” he means something like the Cosmic One, the Big Aha, or the White Light. It doesn’t have to be a traditional religious thing. I’m thinking of an all-suffusing glow, or a feeling that all is one—an experience which many of us have, however briefly. Thereby we get a numinous sense of the absolute infinite.

And when Cantor speaks of transfinite forms being all around us and in our minds, he’s expressing another aspect of our perceptions. When you’re in a relaxed mood, the physical world feels smooth, sensual, rich, and endless. Note, however, that if you’re feeling stressed, the world seems cramped, shoddy, and finite. Like an airport waiting room with so-called news blaring from a TV screen on the wall. Don’t want to be there.

Cantor was inspired by his wonderful 1873 theorem that the countable infinity of the integers is smaller than the infinity of decimal values on the real number line, which is often called mathematical space, or the continuum. The first of these two sets is said to have size alef-null, and the size of the second set is called c, for “continuum.”

Cantor showed that there’s a tower of infinities: starting with alef-null and alef-one. Alef-one is the next transfinite after alef-null. The scale runs ever upward. Cantor wondered if the size of c might be alef-one—this question is known as Cantor’s Continuum Problem, which is unsolvable on the basis of our current knowledge of infinity. That is, we can’t prove anything about the proper place of c among the alefs. Some new insights are needed—or perhaps c can’t be matched up with any alef at all.

At the top of the endless run of alefs is what we call absolute infinity, or Ω. It’s like the vanishing point in a perspective painting. Ω is ineffable. If you reach out to grab it, you always find you’re holding some smaller cardinal. In set theory, this phenomenon is known as the Reflection Principle.

The Reflection Principle is related to a theological principle articulated by St. Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century. “No matter how far our mind may have progressed in the contemplation of God, it does not attain to God, but to what is beneath God.” Let me repeat that I’m not out to discuss the God of religion here. But the science of the infinite is, you see, almost like mathematical theology.

In this note I want to broach a fresh means of bringing the transfinites into ordinary life. I have in mind an additional type of absolute infinity, that is, the absolute continuum. It’s much larger than the garden-variety space continuum of decimal numbers.

Math alert. The construction principle for an absolute continuum is this: every gap is filled.. And by a “gap” we mean any two sets of points L and R, with every member of L being less than every member of R. In an absolute continuum, there’s always a point in between. And we’re allowed to have L or R be an empty set. So if L is {1,2,3,4,…} and R is empty, then the simplest number in the “gap” will be alef-null. A more concise way to describe the absolute continuum is as what the topologist Felix Hausdorff would call an eta-Ω class.End math alert.

The construction principle for an absolute continuum doesn’t sound like much, but it produces a lot. You end up with all the familiar real numbers, plus all of Cantor’s transfinite alefs, plus the infinitesimal reciprocals of all the alefs, not to mention crazy things like “the alef-seventh root of pi divided by alef-one.”

The great John Horton Conway worked out the theory of the absolute continuum in his ground-breaking 1976 book, On Numbers and Games. The legendary old-school computer hacker Bill Gosper once remarked: “Conway is approximately the smartest man in the world.” Conway’s system was elegantly popularized in the computer-scientist Donald Knuth’s popular presentation Surreal Numbers. Wikipedia has a great entry on surreal numbers. Conway himself used the name No (as in number) for his version of the absolute continuum, and we’ll use that name for it too.

Math alert. The absolute continuum No is a type of absolute infinity that’s quite distinct from the “largest number” Ω. No is at least as big as its subclass Ω, and if No can in fact be measured on a linear size scale then it would probably have size Ω. But it could be that there’s something about No that resists being well-ordered at all. Perhaps it’s too wide, or too deep. The question of whether the absolute continuum No has size Ω is akin to Cantor’s Continuum Problem, which first asks if the decimal real number line can be measured as any alef at all, and only then asks if that size might be alef-one. End math alert.

My mission in this post is to stretch your mind and get you to imagine that we live in an absolute continuum like No. That is, our physical space is an absolute continuum, and time is an absolute continuum as well. How might we imagine this?

Infinite sets of discrete, separate objects aren’t very natural to think about—consider the stars in an endless universe, or the ticks of an eternal clock. To imagine such collections, you have to partition seamless reality into chunks, and envision all the chunks at once, and somehow enumerate them.

It’s simpler to think of infinity in terms of a continuum. An interval of time, a gradation of color, a nuance of feeling, a puff of air—these are infinitely subtle continua that fit into daily life.

And what of Cantor’s transfinites, that is, alef-one, alef-two, and the rest of his prankster band? If physical space is an absolute continuum, it extends all the way out to Ω. There are star-studded gulfs at transfinite removes. You encounter an absolutely infinite supply of planets on your way towards Ω.

But, again, it’s more satisfying to think about higher infinities that are within our immediate purview. And this can be done via the absolute continuum. Given that, for instance, alef-three is present in our spatial absolute continuum, then the reciprocal of alef-three exists—and very near by. Supernumerary gulfs of stars fit in among our atoms, nestled within our bodies like reflections in the mirrored surface of a crystal ball.

Alef-seven dreams in the petal of a rose.

At this point I need to interrupt my agreeable fantasia and mention the tedious difficulties posed by quantum mechanics. One hears that it’s meaningless to speak of space at levels smaller than the so-called Planck length, which, measured in meters,  is 1 divided by 10 to the 35th power.  Which is about one sextillionth the size of a proton. Very small, but it’s not continuous, and I don’t like that. Especially if these cheapskates say that space itself is tessellated into indivisible lumps or cells that are the size of the Planck length.

Ah, the myopic fear of infinity! First comes a call for finitistic austerity, then a grudging admission that granular space doesn’t quite make sense, and then comes the lilting injunction: “Be happy! The universe is incomprehensible! How wonderful!”

(Foaming at the mouth like a rabid moose.)

To me, incoherence isn’t wonderful. It means your theory isn’t done. Reality comes first. Theories come second. The world arises on its own, and our opinions don’t limit what the cosmos can do.

Brave words, but how am I going to preserve our absolute continuum in the face of quantum mechanics? Well, let’s suppose that the quantum level is like an interzone, or a glitch, or a rumble-strip. We can trundle right over it.

And beyond, or beneath, or beside the quantum-transition layer we enter what I like to call the subdimensions. According to the viewpoint I’m describing, our physical space has sub-quantum, subdimensional levels that allow space to be an absolute continuum.

I think of an 1877 work, Die Philosophie des Als Ob, by Hans Vaihinger. In English the title would be The Philosophy of As If. I like those two German words Als Ob. Vaihinger proposes that you might, if only for pleasure, choose to believe certain kinds of metaphysical doctrines, even though there might be no hope of firmly proving these ideas.

And right now I’m fascinated by the notion that our physical space is an absolute continuum. I’ve always felt it’s sad to stare out at the stars and yearn for distant vastness. We can have humongous, ginormous infinities right here. Thinking this way makes the world seem more interesting, and provides a sense of peace.

There’s an extra bonus to having our space be an absolute continuum. Mathematically, any delimited region of such a space is an absolute continuum as well. In that you occupy a region of an absolute continuum, your body comprises an absolute continuum. So you’re absolutely infinite, just as you are. Your endlessly various gnarliness runs down past the alef-seventh level, and ever deeper towards the ineffable 1/ Ω. You’re a higher being, friend.

One more bonus: adherents to the pawky doctrine of quantized space say that your body is a finite pattern, like a set of pixels. And, therefore, they prate, if space is large, then your pattern is likely to repeat, and there might be endlessly many yous. How dull. And what a waste of infinite space! The finitist argument doesn’t go through if each of us is an absolute continuum. We have enough wiggle room to be terminally unique.

For a dramatization of life in an absolute continuum, see my 2008 science-fiction story, “Jack and the Aktuals, or, Physical Applications of Transfinite Set Theory.” The tale is about a mathematician named Jack, and his visit to the land of Alefville, which is an absolute continuum. In this realm Cantor’s transfinite numbers are indeed real, both in the large and in the small. And the denizens of Alefville are called aktuals, thus the story’s title. The story appeared in the online site Tor.com , and it’s also in my anthology, Complete Stories, available in print, ebook, or browsable online.

But I didn’t go far enough in “Jack and the Aktuals.” I didn’t argue that we really are living in an absolute continuum. That’s what I do with my science and my science fiction, you see. I convince myself that the world around me is really, really weird. And that makes life more interesting.

While I was working on the new preface to Infinity and the Mind, my wife Sylvia and I drove to the seaside town of Santa Cruz. While Sylvia scavenger-hunted the shops for buttons for the two grandchildren’s sweaters that she’d knit, I sat on the 3rd Avenue Beach in the sun, enjoying the long smooth waves, and pondering the absolute continuum.

As I say, I’m trying to imagine that the space around us really is transfinite—not only with all the usual real numbers, but with even more points dusted into the infinitesimal gaps. I’m supposing that space is an absolute continuum, jam-packed with surreal numbers. And never mind about atoms or quantum mechanics—you can go on down and down. And sure, there might even be superclusters of galaxies down there—why not! There’s room for everything amid the cascading levels of alefs.

Why wouldn’t our actual world be as rich as possible? The traditional philosophical Principle of Plenitude supports this view. God’s got the big budget, right? Why would the Cosmos chintz out? We’ve got the real thing, the deluxe edition. We live in an absolute continuum!

Dream with me. Let our full native space be a glittering absolute continuum, running up and down the size scales, with no end in sight. We’ve been safe in heaven all along, with stars twinkling within and without, our absolute continuum like a phosphorescent sea, like a spangled scarf, as above so below.

If only I could remember this for more than a few minutes at a time!

 

“Juicy Ghost” is a story I couldn’t stop myself from writing. And it seems relevant on this particular 4th of July. You can read this shorter intial version story if you scroll down in this post.

I felt a need to take a stand. Not that I’m urging anyone to follow my character Curtis Winch’s example. But I definitely took satisfaction in crafting his tale.

The writing and revising ran from January to June of 2019, which is a very long time for me to spend on a short story. In April, 2019, I sent my draft to a couple of SF magazines. One editor didn’t feel comfortable with something so topical; another felt the story didn’t win them over.

I turned to the idea of publishing “Juicy Ghost 2019” as a part of a special, all-political issue of my old ezine Flurb. I contacted some of my writer friends. They gave me positive feedback. Marc Laidlaw, John Kessel, John Shirley, Kek-W, Paul Di Filippo, and Brendan Byrne sent fine contributions, and pieces were promised by Eileen Gunn, James Worrad, Christopher Brown, and Cory Doctorow. I’m grateful to them all.

But at the start of June, 2019, I lost heart. Putting together a new Flurb felt like too big a push for me. With embarrassment, and with apologies to my authors, I backed out of the political Flurb.

Even so, I couldn’t stop working on “Juicy Ghost 2019.” I kept at it for the next three weeks, doing rewrite after rewrite. It was like finding my way across a tightrope. By the end of June, 2019, I felt ready to go public.

This shorter version “Juicy Ghost” appears in this blog post below, loosely illustrated by whatever photos I had kicking around. You can also read this shorter version of “Juicy Ghost” in issue #13  of the online zine Big Echo.

Or listen to me reading this shorter version as an episode of Rudy Rucker Podcasts.

In September, 2020, with the cataclysmic Presidential election coming on strong, I doubled the length of the story to get a longer version that I also posted  on my blog.

And in 2021 I did a Kickstarter campaign to self-publish a full novel version called Juicy Ghosts.

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“Juicy Ghost” by Rudy Rucker (2o19 Version)

Copyright © Rudy Rucker 2019.

“A mob of Freals,” says Leeta. “I feel safe. For once.”

She makes a knowing mm-hmm sound, with her gawky mouth pressed shut. She’s not one to think about looks. Lank-haired and fit. A fanatic. I’m a fanatic too. We’re feral freaks, free for real.

Is Leeta my girlfriend? No. I’ve never had a girlfriend or a boyfriend. I don’t get that close to people. My parents and brother and sister died when I was eight. A shoot-out at our house. I don’t talk about it.

It’s nine in the morning on January 20, a cold, blue-sky day in Washington D.C. Inauguration Day for Ross Treadle, that lying sack of shit who’s acting as if he’s been legitimately re-elected. Treadle and his goons have stolen the Presidency for the third time in a row, is what it is.

They outmaneuvered the media, they purged the voter rolls, and supposedly there’s an unswayable block of Treadlers. A stubborn turd in the national punchbowl. Not that I ever see any Treadlers. Admittedly, I live in Oakland, California, not exactly Treadle country, but I personally wonder if the man’s so-called base is a scam, a figment, a fake-news virus within the internet’s chips and wares.

Doesn’t matter now. Treadle’s on his way out. I’m here to assassinate him. And Leeta’s my bodyguard. I’ll die right when I kill Treadle. I’m trying not to care.

I’m Curtis Winch, part of a four-person Freal cell. I’m a gene-tweaker, a bioprogrammer. And we’ve got gung-ho Leeta, our money guy Slammy who might be an agent, and there’s a skinny twitchy web hacker who calls himself Gee Willikers. Gee spends all day with his head in the cloud. He’s crafted me a special device that has my whole personality inside it. Gee calls it a psidot.

We have our base in Oakland, near the port, in a cheap-ass, beige, trashed, 1930s cottage amid pot-grow warehouses and poor people’s squats. I implanted some special eggs in my flesh two weeks ago. Today they’ll hatch out and attack Treadle. And then the Secret Service will gun down my larvae-riddled remains.

Upside: Gee will put a low-end chatbot version of my psidot online as an interactive Paul-Revere-type inspiration. Curtis Winch, martyred hero of the New American Revolution.

“Tell us what it was like to take down Ross Treadle,” the admiring users will say to my memorial chatbot. “And thank you, Curt, thank you!”

Too bad I won’t be around to savor this. From what I’ve seen, dying is like a jump-cut in a movie—except there’s no film on the other side of the jump.

While I’m still alive, I’m continually updating my psidot. The device itself is a wireless antenna and a brainwave transducer. A shiny piezoplastic disk the size of a freckle, on the back of my neck. Like a paste-on beauty mark, except it’s smart and it can crawl around a little bit.

My psidot captures whatever I experience and stores it in the cloud. Works the other way too. My psidot feeds me info. And, better than that, it uses heavy cloud-based processing to munge my data stream, and if I ask, it’ll suggest what I might do next.

Right now the psidot is showing me Gee Willikers. Gee is excited, more than excited. Messianic.

“You’re immortal,” Gee Willikers is telling me. Not that I believe him. They’re shining me on so I’ll do the hit. Gee giggles. He’s not a normal person at all. “With my latest upgrades, you can live inside your psidot, as long as it’s leeched onto a person or an animal or even an insect. As long as you’re leeching, you’re a juicy ghost. My ultimate hack, Curt.” Another giggle. “I’m God.”

“Be quiet, Gee.”

The crowd around the Lincoln Memorial is beyond epic. Bigger than a three-day rock fest with free beer, bigger than a pilgrimage to Mecca, bigger than any protest D.C. has ever seen. More than two million of us.

Freals stream in via the Memorial Bridge, down Constitution and Independence Avenues, piling out of the Metro stops, walking in along the side streets and the closed-down highways by the Potomac. Cops and soldiers stand by, but they’re not trying to stop us. They’re working people too. Low-income city folks. By now a lot of them hate Treadle too. Him getting to be President again is like some unacceptable bug in our political system. And the Freals are here to fix it.

Our crowd swirls around stone Abe Lincoln on his stone chair in his stone temple. We mass along the reflecting pool, as far as the Washington Monument—but not yet onto the Mall.

A belt of armed troops blocks us from getting all that close to the Capitol. My psidot is jacked into the media, and it shows me how the Mall is blanketed with actual, for-real Treadlers—deluded, sold out, in thrall to an insane criminal, awaiting the dumbshow of their hero’s noon Inauguration.

What would it take to change their minds?

We Freals are zealous and stoked, filled with end-times fervor and a sense of apocalypse. We’re rarin’ for revolution. Ross Treadle’s opponent Sudah Mareek is standing atop one of Lincoln’s stone toes. She’s shouting and laughing and chanting—wonderfully charismatic. Her voice is balm to my soul, and she’s calming Leeta too. The whole reason we two didn’t go straight to the Capitol steps is because we need to see Sudah get her own Inauguration. The real one.

Sudah Mareek did in fact win the election—both the popular vote, and the House of Electors. But somehow Treadle turned it all around, and his packed Supreme Court took a dive. Treadle says he’ll charge Sudah with treason once he’s sworn in. He says he’ll seek the death penalty.

But the Freals are going to inaugurate Sudah just the same. We have one supporter on the Supreme Court, and she’s here to administer the oath of office. She’s ninety years old, our justice, in her black robe, and she’s brought along Abe Lincoln’s Bible.

We fall silent, drinking it in. The Presidential Oath—short, pure and real. Sudah’s clear voice above the breathless crowd. I’m absorbed in my sensations, The trees against the sky, the cold air in my lungs, the pain in my flesh, the scents of the bodies around me. We’re real. This isn’t a play. It’s the Inauguration of the next President of the United States.

For a moment the knot of fear in my chest is gone. This is going to work. Our country’s going to be free. We cheer ourselves hoarse.

But hatch time is near. Leeta and I need to haul ass to the Capitol steps so I’ll be close enough to terminate Treadle. And everyone else wants to head that way too. The crowd rolls towards the Mall like lava. But there’s the matter of those armed troops at the Washington Monument. They’re in tight formation.

“Let’s skirt around them,” I suggest to Leeta.

The side streets are blocked by troops as well. We’re like a school of fish swimming into a net, which is the U-shaped cordon of soldiers. They have batons, shock-sticks, water-cannons, tear-gas, and rifles with bayonets. Behind them are trucks, armored Humvees, and even some tanks.

At this point, Leeta and I are near the troops along the right edge of the crowd. Armed men and women, all colors. Leeta begins pitching our case.

“Sudah Mareek is our President,” she calls, sweetening her voice. “We just inaugurated her. Did you hear the cheers?”

“Move along,” mutters a woman soldier, not meeting our eyes.

“We’re your friends,” I put in. “Not Treadle. He’s ripping you off. He hates us all.”

Behind me the crowd of Freals is chanting. “We’re you. You’re us. Be free.”

“Be Freal,” echoes Leeta, reaching out to touch the woman soldier’s shoulder. “Put down the gun.”

“Let’s do it,” says the soldier at her side, He throws his bayonet-tipped rifle to the earth. “Yeah. That gun’s too heavy.”

The woman does the same, and so does the guy next to her, and the woman next to him drops her gun too—it’s like a zipper coming undone. A whole row of the soldiers is defecting. Going renegade. Treadle will call us traitors.

A few soldiers stand firm. They spray water cannons, which knocks down Freals and muddies the ground. A handful of teargas shells explode. Some hotheads fire their rifles into the air. But the flurry damps down.

The soldiers aren’t into it. They don’t want to kill us. We’re people like them. This stage of the revolution is a gimmie. Hundreds of thousands of us chant as one.

“We’re you. You’re us. Be free.”

The soldiers whoop and laugh. Grab-assing like they’re off-duty. Some Freals try and the tip over a tank, but it’s too heavy. One of soldiers, some wild hillbilly from Kentucky, he breaks out a crate of magnesium flares. He and his buddies go around prying open the caps on the gas-tanks and shoving in flares. Low thuds as the gas-tanks explode, one after the other. The rising plumes of smoke are totems of freedom.

We cheer our incoming President. “Sudah. Sudah. Sudah. Sudah.”

A pyramid of Freals holds the small woman high in the air. She’s waving and smiling. She’s the one who won. She’s ours. In my head, my psidot shows me the news commentators going ape. Treadle’s faked election, political U-turn, people’s revolution, President Mareek.

Treadles’ strategists strike back. Two banana-shaped gunship choppers converge on the Washington Monument, circling like vengeful furies. Men with massive machineguns stand in the big doors. They lay down withering fusillades, shooting at will into our crowd.

The gunships are painted with Treadle’s personalized Presidential seal. The pilots and crews are from the chief’s palace guard. Dead-enders. Pardoned from death row, recruited from the narco gangs, imported from the Russian mafia.

People are dying on every side. It’s insane. Next to me a man’s head explodes like a pumpkin. Am I next?

“Asymmetric attack on unarmed demonstrators,” mutters Leeta. “Stop screaming. Curt. Use your psidot.”

Good idea. My psidot is overlaying my visual field with images of the bullets’ paths. A hard rain. Simultaneously, the psidot is computing our safest way forward, showing me a glowing, shifting path on the ground. I take Leeta’s hand and lead her.

We come to a cluster of renegade soldiers who’ve salvaged a rocket bazooka from a charred tank. A dark, intent sergeant raises the tube to her shoulder.

My psidot brings the nearest chopper’s path into focus. I see the dirty bird’s past trajectory as an orange tangle. And I’m seeing its dotted-line future path too. As usual my psidot is using cloud crunch to estimate what’s next.

“There,” I advise the woman soldier, pointing. “Aim there.”

Whoosh!

And, hell yeah, our canny missile twists through the air like live thing, homing in on Treadle’s hired killers.

Fa-tooom!

The chopper explodes like a bomb. Shards of of metal pinwheel as if from an airborne grenade. The blazing craft hits the ground with a broken thud I can feel in my feet. The second chopper flees, racketing into a wide loop above the Potomac.

“That there was my vote!” whoops the rocketeer woman, pumping the bazooka in the air. “For President Sudah!”

I feel high. Seeing that chopper go down is like winning a round in a videogame. But this game has a ticking clock. My parasites twist in my flesh, ever closer to my skin. I need to be at the other end of the Mall when Treadle mounts his rostrum.

The blockade of troops has thinned, and many of the Freals fled back toward the river. Those who remain are tending to the casualties on the ground—the gravely wounded amid the dead. Fire trucks and wailing ambulances arrive.

Leeta and I hurry on and filter through the Treadle base. They’re striving to maintain an air of festivity—even after the rush of Freals, the troops’ desertions, the massacre, and the downing of the chopper—even now. Bundled against the cold, they’ve laid out their sadly celebratory picnics. Doing their best to ignore the bitter, embattled Freals, they wave their Treadle signs, and draw their little groups into tighter knots.

Leeta’s good at crowds. She eels forward through the human mass, finding the seams, working her way up the Mall. I follow in her wake. Soon we’re within thirty yards of the the Capitol steps. The dignitaries are still there. The charade is still on. I feel that the Secret Service agents are watching me. Treadle is about to appear.

“I bet dying is easier than you expect,” Leeta whispers to me. Her idea of encouragement.

A wave of dizziness passes over me. As if I’m seeing the world through thick glass. Those things in my flesh—they’re leaking chemicals into my system. Steroids, deliriants, psychotomimetics.

“What are we doing?” I moan. “Why?”

“You’ll be a hero,” Leeta murmurs, iron in her voice. “Be glad.” She leans even closer, her whisper is thunderous in my ear. “The Secret Security knows. Mm-hmm.” She nods as if we’re discussing personal gossip. Her bony forehead bumps mine. “They hate Treadle too. It’s all set. They’re actually paying us. Slammy set it up.”

“And I’m your patsy? The fall guy? What if I change my mind?”

“Don’t fuss,” says Leeta. She rolls her eyes toward the strangers pressed around us. To make it all the creepier, she’s wearing a prim, plastered-on smile. Her voice is very low. “Be a good boy or they’ll shoot you early. And then Treadle lives. We can’t have that, hmm?”

My psidot is jabbering advice that I can’t understand. Mad, skinny Gee Willikers is in my head too. As usual he’s unable to say three sentences without bursting into giggles. I hate him and I hate Leeta and I hate my psidot.

Fresh insect hormones rush through me. My disorientation grows. They critters inside me are splitting out of their pupas and preparing to take wing. Sixteen of them.

Treadle takes his oath. It’s like, “Ha ha, I’m President again, so fuck you.” And then he’s into his Inauguration speech, in full throat, hitting his stride, spewing lies and fear and hate.

“Well?” nudges Leeta.

“It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done,” I intone, quoting Dickens. I know I’m going to kill Treadle, but I’m trying to rise above the seamy details of our conspiracy. “It is a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known.”

“You got that right.”

Weird how my whole life has led up to this point. “There’s this thing about time,” I tell Leeta. “You think something will never happen. And then it happens. And then it’s over.” I pause and peek inside my shirt. Bumps and welts shift beneath my skin.

“Trigger then now!” hisses Leeta.

“Whoa!” interrupts a Treadler at my side. A mild-eyed old man with his leathery, white-haired wife. He’s staring at a wriggly lump on my neck. “Are you okay? Do you need help?”

“Allergy,” I wheeze. “Overexcited. It’ll work out pretty—”

I’m interrupted by a shrieking clatter. It’s that second chopper, attacking the Freals and renegades and EMTs who are helping the fallen around the Washington Monument. We all turn and stare as the whirlybird stitches gunfire into the ragged band.

“Done at my command,” intones Treadle, raising his heavy arm to point. “I keep my promises.” He juts his chin. “We’re gunning for Sudah Mareek. A traitor. She meets justice today.”

Hoarse, savage cheering from the Treadlers. Terrible to see Americans act this ugly. They’re mirroring Treadle. I have to kill him. But, wait, wait, wait, I want to see how the scene at the Monument plays out.

The cheering dims—and I hear what I’m hoping for.

Whoosh!

Yes. The rebel soldiers have launched another rocket.

Fa-tooom!

The blasted second chopper corkscrews along a weirdly purposeful arc. Like it’s remotely controlled. The hulk smashes against a face of the Washington Monument. My psidot feeds me close-up images.

“Bonus points,” goes Gee Willikers in my head. He giggles. Sick gamer that he is. “Part of the plot,” he continues. “We pin this on Treadle.”

Gee hacked into the falling chopper’s controls? Wheels within wheels. The plot is a web around me. It’s time to act but—I can’t stop watching.

Cracks branch across the great obelisk’s surface, running and forking. Bits of marble skitter down the pitiless slope. The Monument’s tip sways, vast and slow. People are scattering. The upper part of the great plinth moves irrevocably out of plumb. It tilts and gains speed, the bottom slow, the top fast, as in an optical illusion.

The impact is a long explosion—followed by thin, high screams. A veil of dust. A beat of silence. I feel sick with guilt. And weary of being human.

Leeta is screaming into my face. “Do your job, god damn you! Now!”

“Get Treadle,” I finally say. The trigger phrase. I don’t say it very loud, but it’s loud enough to matter.

Within my flesh, the hymenoptera hear. Ragged slits open on my neck, my chest, my my belly, my arms. The pain is off the scale. I shed my coat and my shirt. The bloody, freshly-fledged, bio-tweaked wasps emerge. All sixteen them.

For a moment they balance on their dainty, multijointed legs, hastily preening their antennae, unkinking their iridescent wings. They have handsome, curved abdomens like motorcycle gas-tanks. They feature prominent stingers and bejeweled, zillion-lensed eyes. They’re large, and preternaturally alert.

Leeta slithers off through the crowd. The cuts in my flesh pump bright blood. The Treadlers around me point and shout. The wasps race up my torso, across my face, and onto the crown of my head—a wobbly mob. They rise in flight.

My job is done.

Or maybe not. Gee Willikers is hollering inside my head. “Your psidot! Put it on a wasp!” I can see an image of my psidot on the back of my neck. And I note a single laggard wasp on my shoulder. My mind projects a target spot onto the wasp’s wing.

Though faint from loss of blood, I manage to get the psidot off the back of my neck. It’s easy. The smart, piezoplastic psidot hops onto the tip of my finger. And when I bring my hand near the wing of the target wasp, the psidot springs into place.

The wasp is pissed off. She stings my finger. Numbness flows up my arm and toward my heart. The wasp venom contains curare, you understand, plus conotoxin. A custom cocktail for Treadle.

My vision is dark. I’m an empty husk, a ruptured piñata—poisoned and bleeding. And if all this wasn’t bad enough, there’s the matter of the Secret Service. They’re good shots. Yes, they might want Treadle out, but right now they’ve got to do their thing. For the sake of appearances. For an orderly transition. I go down in a hail of bullets. It fits.

Last thought? I hope the wasps will sting Treadle. And then I’m dead.

At this point my narrative has a glitch. Remember the jump-cut thing I was talking about? Well, it turns out that, for me, there is some film on the other side of the jump. Granted, the all-meat Curt Winch is terminally inoperative. But—

I wake, confused. I look down into myself. I’ve got my same old white-light soul. My sense of me watching me watching the world. I’m hallucinating a little bit. I feel like I’m in a huge, crumbling old Vic mansion with junk in the rooms, and with paintings leaning on the walls, and doors that don’t properly close. The furniture of my mind. Somebody’s in here with me. A jittery silhouette against the light. Gee Willikers.

“You’re a juicy ghost, Curt! A Gee Willikers psidot. Play it right, and you keep going for centuries” His compulsive giggle. “Def cool, Mr. Guinea Pig.”

I try to form words. “Where…”

“Your psidot is a parasite, dude. Like I’ve been telling you. It hitches onto a bio host’s nervous system. Gloms onto the axons and retarded potentials. Sponges mysto quantum steam and all that other good shit.”

“Host?”

“You’re riding a wasp, der. The one you stuck the psidot on, doink.” Gee makes a trumpeting sound. “Juicy ghost!”

“You were wrong to topple the Monument,” I tell him. No response. What now?

The junked, phantasmal mansion around me—that’s my operating system and my data base. In the cloud. I look for a way to hook into my host wasp’s nervous system. Deep into this as I am, I want to be part of the final attack.

“Over there,” goes Gee. “See the smelly rope? Like a tasseled curtain-pull in a Gold Rush saloon? All thick and twisted and dank?”

I fixate on it and, just like that, I’ve jacked myself into the wasp’s nervous system. I’m seeing through her eyes. I am the wasp.

I join the swarm. They’re eddying around Treadle. He’s bellowing, dancing around, slapping himself. He’s fighting for his life. He has foam on his lips like a rabid dog. My fellow wasps are landing on his face, his fat neck, his wattles. But Treadle is swatting them before they sting. He’s killed eight.

His roars are taking on a tone of triumph. I can’t let him win. His shirt is untucked. A button is loose. I spy a patch of skin.

I arrow into the opening, and land on the man’s bare chest, very near his heart. I sting—I sting, sting, sting. His voice changes, as if his tongue is turning stiff. His volume fades. He’s wobbly on his pins. He totters backwards. Falls. A groan. Silence.

It’s done.

With trembling wings, I escape Treadle’s shirt and spiral high into the air. Hovering with the seven other wasps, a hundred feet up.

The Freals and soldiers are leading Sudah Mareek forward through the discombobulated crowd. She’s going to be President. Everyone knows it. In the whiplash intensity of the moment, the Treadlers convert to Sudah’s cause. Sobs turn to hysterical cheers.

Mounting the dias, Sudah swears the oath again. The massed politicians applaud. Treadle’s proposed Vice-President has lost his nerve. He’s bowing out. Sudah’s Vice-President emerges from the Capitol, just in time. They swear her in. Our coup is more organized than I knew. I was in the dark.

Gee Willikers is ecstatic. “Secret Service on our side, dude. Army on board. Congress is down with it. Done deal.”

I feel a shifting sensation. A doubleness of vision. A group of Freals is carrying my bloody, broken form up the Capitol steps. They hold my remains high, heedless of the dripping gore. Wave after wave of applause. Sudah Mareek and her Veep salute my remains.

“Curtis Winch, martyred saint of the New American Revolution!”

“Do I have to keep being a wasp?” I ask Gee.

“Glue your psidot wherever you want,” he says.

“Another host?”

“How about somebody in this crowd,” suggests Gee. “That Treadler babe in the trucker hat?”

“Idiot. Can you get the fuck out of my head?”

“Sure,” says Gee.

“Oh, and don’t forget to post the toy chatbot version of me for the Curtis Winch memorial.”

“Online now,” Gee assures me. “Slightly redacted. Your memorial’s up to twenty million hits. Viral flash mob, Curt. User tsunami.”

“And obfuscate the living shit out of this psidot I’m living on, okay? Hide the links. I want to go dark.”

“To hear is to obey, Saint Curt. I’ll run you a global SHA-512 scramble.” Gee makes a wiggly hand gesture—and he’s gone.

Beating my wings, I leave the swarm and buzz on beyond the Capitol. On my own, feeling good, savoring the quantum soul of my insect host.

My compound eyes watch for hungry birds, but there’s none around. I make my way into the residential neighborhood northeast of the Capitol. I fly until it shades from gentrified to tumbledown. I spy a mutt on a cushion on a back porch. A collie-beagle mix. Yes.

Gently, gently I land on the side of the sleeping dog’s head. I preen my wings, detach my psidot with my mandibles, and nestle it onto a bare patch of skin deep inside the dog’s floppy ear. The dot takes hold—and I’m in.

I stand, shake my body, and bark.

Joyful. Free.

---

---

In closing, let me repeat that, although Curtis Winch’s tale is a rousing fantasia, voting out our oppressors is a far better path for change. And if we can’t vote them out immediately, we’ll wait them out, keeping our ideals alive, and making our presence felt. History is on our side.