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  ‘One hour and forty-nine minutes!’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘Thoughts go through brains and pull up information; that’s a given. How they do that precisely is in question; we don’t really know exactly how that works, and we don’t really have to: we’re good at it anyway. We do know a few cool little tricks for—we can implant things—devices—DBS and whatever; we can control brains to some degree, arguably simplifying thought and remapping—well, not remapping, exactly, but re-establishing points. Can’t remember something? We can fix that. Can’t control your legs? We can fix that. Smallish stuff like that. We do know that the brain ultimately contains all this shit; we’re still in the process working out exactly what does what; but that’s not the point.’

  ‘So, what is the point,’ Leslie asked.

  ‘He hasn’t got one,’ HippyGuy lied.

  ‘Sh’up,’ Leslie told him.

  ‘We can DBS into storage,’ I said, ‘right?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Leslie said, ‘Depending what “DBS” is.’

  ‘Deep Brain Stimulation,’ I said, ‘Bionic implants reestablishing contacts within the brain.’

  ‘More fiction from the writer,’ HippyGuy lied, ‘Bullshit theoretical cybernetics.’

  ‘One hour and forty-eight minutes!’

  ‘You’re an idiot,’ I told him, ‘Likely, you’re an idiot who’s already met a cyborg: we’ve been implanting people for years. Well, obviously: pacemakers are implants in the strictest sense. But, yeah: there are people walking around today—a lot of them—with DBS allowing them to walk around. Idiot.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  Meekly, HippyChick told him: ‘My grandmother has DBS for Parkinson’s.’

  ‘Whatever,’ HippyGuy told her.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘We can reestablish processes within movement disorders to a large degree; we can with limited success override OCD and Tourette’s; probably, we can slam an electrode into, like, the caudal zona incerta—’

  ‘The what?’ Leslie asked.

  ‘The brain. It doesn’t matter, really. But, probably, we can use this to reattach lost memories to the brainbased searchengine, as it were. That make sense?’

  ‘I guess so,’ Leslie said.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘Now, something else we’d have to take as read: simple memory being acoustic and ingrained memory being semantic—whether that’s true or not; it doesn’t really matter—stored memory ultimately ends up in the hippocampus. Then you get into that whole central executive episodic buffer thing and you have no idea what I’m talking about again.’

  ‘Not really,’ she said.

  ‘It still doesn’t matter,’ I said, ‘What matters is that, probably, everyone’s functionally eidetic—well, not functionally—that’s the problem—but everyone seeing and hearing and thinking anything retains a copy of it somewhere in his brain. Let’s assume that for now.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘One hour and forty-seven minutes!’

  ‘Then let’s assume that DBS or something like it didn’t need to be implanted; let’s assume it could be external, possibly as some sort of InputOutput thing. Like there’d be a way to WiFi brains.’

  ‘You’d get interesting new hackers,’ she said.

  ‘Crackers, really,’ I said, ‘But yeah. And this is where it gets important to the story. I’m not WiFied here, because this place kinda sucks; the phone and laptop are getting online through Verizon. To go WiFi, I’d have to get close enough to a hotspot, and possibly crack my way in to get online. Because the signal strength on WiFi sucks. Because the FCC suck. How do we get around that? Signalboosting. Theoretically, if unshielded, a hotspot could be, well, the size of the universe, I suppose. Given enough power behind it, the range could be unlimited. I think. I actually haven’t ever looked that up. But that’s okay: this isn’t about WiFi.’

  ‘Of course not,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah. Brains store information; thoughts access information; we know that. And we hear from Sagan that aliens can receive broadcasts from mechanical sources. Let’s drop Sagan and stick to thoughts. What if aliens could access brains externally, using a slightly advanced version of what we’re already using, and from parsecs away.’

  ‘If they could read minds from other planets,’ Leslie said.

  ‘Yeah, basically,’ I said, ‘Not only would they read thoughts,’ I said, ‘but they’d see what we were seeing. If you were watching Tyra Banks or Jerry Springer, processing that information into your brain, these aliens could ultimately be receiving that information after however many years it would take at lightspeed to reach them.’

  ‘So, that’s scary.’

  ‘One hour and forty-six minutes!’

  ‘That’s me: scary,’ I said, ‘Add in a few other ideas, like tachyons and wormholes and everything the genre already relies on, and, purely theoretically, the aliens could chronologically receive your thoughts before you’d thought them.’

  ‘So, “Minority Report”,’ she said.

  ‘Uh...no,’ I said, ‘But sorta. In reverse. Kinda. Forget paradoxes for a minute; we’re not gonna care about those because there’s no reason to pretend that the universe would explode over the instance of a causeless effect.’

  ‘And we’re back to physics,’ she whined.

  ‘Quantum; but yeah,’ I said, ‘Only to dismiss it though. As many questions as it begs, we’re starting to look at the universe as an eternal thing. Like, there won’t be a bigcrunch with all the mass gravitating back into a singularity and reexploding. And we’re dismissing the concern that, one plus two being three, three now being three, removing one from its history, it’s still three; that doesn’t end the universe, because it’s silly. If you write something down and throw away the pen, what you wrote down still exists; it doesn’t really matter.’

  ‘Throwing away the pen doesn’t erase it from history,’ Chuck mumbled, waking up.

  ‘Okay,’ I allowed, ‘but: erasing the pen from history doesn’t undo the universe.’

  ‘Why not,’ he said

  ‘Because...it’s my book and I say so; it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘This is about the book?’ Chuck asked, ‘Okay.’

  ‘One hour and forty-five minutes!’

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘Let’s wait a few octillion years, since the universe isn’t going anywhere. That gives our aliens time to evolve and go all technological and they can be anywhere in the universe—technically, they could be on Earth—or, not really, since the sun’s only got five billion years to live. But they could be on a planet like Earth, the right distance from the sun, protected from asteroids by something like Jupiter, containing the amino acids required for life to autopoies...ise—happen. Or, for all I care, to allopoiesise. Somewhere out there in the universe, maybe far into the future, these aliens exist and thrive and invent the means to scan the universe, theoretical border to theoretical border, from the literal beginning of time. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ Chuck said with the wrong face for okay.

  ‘Anyway: the aliens scan the universe, possibly sequentially, from the beginning, and, close to fourteen billion years into the scan, these goofy little primates on a rock ninety-three million miles from a star in an arm of a galaxy over in, you know, “Plural Zed Alpha”, or whatever, inadvertently report watching Springer and Tyra and Donahue and fucking FTroop and whatever else the human animal should be a little ashamed of. And, being the sort of aliens I as a deity create while working in mysterious ways, they take offence and declare war, flying—or teleporting—to Earth and throwing down.’

  ‘Why not just blow the planet up entirely,’ Leslie said.

  ‘To make the book longer.’

  She pondered for a moment. ‘Okay. I don’t get it. But you get it. And it’s your job to make me get it. So just write it down, using small words.’

  ‘Boring,’ I said.

  ‘Isn’t that the point?’ she asked, ‘That we’re boring? So the aliens wanna kill us for being boring?’

&nb
sp; ‘More or less,’ I said.

  ‘One hour and forty-four minutes!’

  ‘Maybe they wouldn’t just blow up the planet because some people were worth saving,’ I said.

  ‘In a boring species,’ Leslie said.

  ‘It could be the whole firstcause thing,’ I told her, ‘Like one guy, or a few guys—people—whatever—had to survive in order to invent something important. The aliens are from the future, so they’d know that, I guess. Or, maybe, they’d see things fourthdimensionally, knowing all possible outcomes—the only real way to be omniscient while omnipotent. Which isn’t quite the point. They could know that this guy or these people would—oh. Maybe, if they didn’t exterminate the stupid, the thing wouldn’t be invented. Something like that. That could be the whole punchline: that, like...it could even be a timeloop thing. Aliens kill almost everyone; these guys who aren’t morons invent something to counterattack; that invented, uh...something allows for something which allows the aliens to develop the means in the future to scan for Earth and all. Kinda like “The Terminator” was before they cut the ending and made sequels and a television show to fuck it all up.’

  ‘The cyborg ending up in the factory which later developed the cyborg from the remaining parts,’ Leslie said, ‘That was the sequel.’

  ‘Originally, it was in the first film,’ I said, ‘The camera pulled back and up and showed that the factory was called “Cyberdyne”.’

  ‘They cut that?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Idiots.’

  ‘One hour and forty-three minutes!’

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘I’m not cutting that. Our Hero has to survive to invent something to repel the aliens, allowing humans to evolve with this new technology, become new species, explore the universe, and eventually, I suppose, become the aliens who, without remembering any of all that, have to go back to Earth in the twenty-first century to kill the stupid people, for their own reasons, allowing Our Hero to invent...over and over.’

  ‘Cool,’ she said, ‘I like it; do that.’

  ‘So, probably, the aliens wouldn’t be all that fourthdimensional after all; but that’s okay: Vonnegut already did that. Of course, Crichton already did this, kinda. “Sphere”. But...you know: “Beowulf”; it’s all been done already; that’s a given.’

  ‘So,’ Leslie said, ‘You’re doing a sort of “Terminator” meets “Sphere” meets “Donnie Darko” meets—’

  ‘Yeahyeahyeah,’ I said, ‘I dunno. There are problems with it still: humans aren’t gonna evolve into starbugs. Though human interference could be what allows the starbugs to evolve. Humans—Our Hero—start up the technology; humans die out; bugs benefit from it somehow...I can make it work; I just have to think about it a little more.’

  ‘One hour and forty-two minutes!’

  ‘And,’ I added, ‘If I can think about it in the next hundred minutes before the world ends, that’ll be good too.’

  ‘The world’s ending?’ Chuck asked.

  ‘Nah,’ I said, ‘But, since no one has any idea what George is counting down to, we’re calling it that. Speaking of, you know, “Donnie Darko”.’

  ‘If that fucking rabbit shows up here,’ Chuck said, ‘I’m gonna freak. I hated that thing. Creepy fucking rabbit.’

  ‘You just didn’t understand it,’ HippyGuy said.

  ‘I understood it,’ I said, ‘Also, I liked it. Furthermore also, you’re still an idiot. Go back to waiting for DBS to be invented.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  Jessica walked by with the last of what she’d removed from 74 while cleaning it up. ‘You okay on coffee?’ she asked.

  ‘I dunno,’ I said, lifting the coffeepot and shaking it, ‘Maybe not entirely. Actually: You think I could get, like, a big plate of ch—fries?’

  ‘Sure,’ Jessica said, ‘Like, a double?’

  ‘Probably,’ I said, ‘Since everyone else’ll try to eat them.’

  ‘Ranch?’ she asked.

  ‘Um...sure,’ I said, ‘why not.’

  ‘I’m good,’ Chuck said, ‘I just ate, like...what time is it.’

  ‘One hour and forty minutes!’

  ‘Four twenty-eight,’ I said, ‘apparently.’

  ‘I get fries though,’ Leslie said, ‘Right?’

  ‘With ranch,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t like ranch?’ she asked.

  ‘I like it,’ I said, ‘It just confuses me. When did it go from being a dressing to a condiment. That just happened one day. It’s like it’s following Miracle Whip, if that ever really was a salad dressing.’

  Leslie shrugged. ‘Ranch is kinda the same though, isn’t it? It was always for fries.’

  ‘No it wasn’t,’ I said, ‘One day in about nineteen ninety, it just became a dipping sauce. It didn’t make the news; it just happened.’

  ‘Nineteen ninety,’ she said, ‘I was three. Or, probably, two.’

  ‘This is why I hate you,’ I said, ‘I was in college. Postgrad.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I forgot to be twenty years older than this.’

  ‘Just don’t let it happen again,’ I told her.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  EPILOGUE

  A mere ten billion years after cooling from magma into an oblate spheroid capable of sustaining life—that life rising from amino acids delivered by meteors in the first three hundred million years—that life evolving from RNA to DNA, to infusoria to fish to mammals to humans: Earth began once again to melt, its sun—in the end an asymptotic giant branch—expanding its diameter to three hundred fifty gigametres, its hydrogen depleted, its helium fusing, its existence—and that of the planets relying upon it—ending.

  The life itself hadn’t ended. The protozoa ameliorating to fish and mammals had branched and fractured, giving rise also to the arthropods, the myriapoda, the diplopoda: a class once containing some ten thousand species, one of them Illacme plenipes, a siphonophorid with a future.

  The humans had died out, along with the rest of the mammalia, bequeathing the planet again to the arthropods. The siphonophorids evolved and thrived, diversified, and grew larger, and smarter.

  As the planet began to melt back into magma, the progeny of Illacme plenipes were gone, but not extinct. They’d left Earth to explore the stars, evolving, fracturing, and spreading.

  Three hundred billion years beyond the death of the sun supporting the planet their ancestors had once occupied, living now on new planets in new galaxies, millipedes the size of motorbikes now scanned the universe for signs of life: side to side, back to front, top to bottom, and beginning to end.

  It took less than a million years to catch a signal: a creature on the minds of millions of its fellows; a creature called Taylor Cleveland.

  It and its fellows, the millipedes concluded, were too stupid to survive.

  END

  I saved it and turned the laptop to Leslie, then grabbed some chips.

  ‘You wrote the epilogue?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah. I know how it ends now,’ I said, ‘Or, really, how it begins.’

  ‘Hang on,’ she said, ‘Should I even ask what all these words mean?’

  ‘Probably not. That’s what I’m wondering about: without looking them all up, can you grok them from context.’

  ‘Oh. Okay: hang on.’

  ‘One hour and ten minutes!’

  ‘Did you look all this stuff up?’ Leslie asked.

  ‘The spellcheck went batshit,’ I said, ‘So I made sure I was spelling things correctly. Otherwise: not really. The plenipes is real, by the way: discovered in I think nineteen twenty-six and then lost until about four years ago when someone found another one; six hundred legs on average; the record is seventy fifty.’

  ‘You really are evil,’ she said.

  I ate fries at her. ‘I went with the plenipes partly because it’s the closest thing we know about to a true millipede, since nothing actually has a thousand legs. Also, it’s in California, so it’s got a bit of a headstart on handling
heat. When the planet warms in the next billion years and exterminates mammals and reptiles, it’ll probably go back to the arthropods.’

  ‘Yeah. I’m reading that: “bequeathing the planet again to the arthropods”. You might wanna explain that somewhere.

  ‘I will,’ I said, ‘I’m gonna have a palaeontologist come in to analyse the bugs. But for the Permian extinction, the arthropods would probably control the planet today.’

  ‘I guess that’ll help,’ she said.

  ‘One hour and nine minutes!’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘that still leaves writing most of a book; and I might change things a bit in the epilogue by the time I’m finished. But, I know how to play it now. The rest is mostly just typing.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘Stick to dialogue; you’re good at that. You don’t even need descriptions: people get what’s going on just from people gaying dings—gang on...just from people saying things within quotes. Also, eat your fries or I’m going to.’

  ‘We can get more,’ I said, ‘I just wanted something to munch on. Also, more importantly, I want a cigarette. So: AFK now.’

  I got up and moved toward the door.

  ‘Wait,’ Leslie said, ‘Did you delete the rest of the book?’

  “AltTab,’ I said, ‘I started a new file for the epilogue.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I got outside and lit a cigarette. Chuck showed up after a minute, lighting one too.

  ‘I can’t believe I fell asleep in there,’ he said.

  I shrugged.

  ‘And you didn’t stop me,’ he added.

  ‘No one cares,’ I said, ‘That idiot manager’s still missing. And Jessica’s not worried about it.’

  ‘She said that?’

  ‘She didn’t say anything. If she were worried about it, she would.’

  Chuck rolled his head around on his shoulders, cracking his neck. ‘Maybe I’m getting too old to hang out all night at restaurants.’