Eileen Gunn - Questionable Practices

Diane packed a nice lunch and included Rawna’s bottle of white wine. It seemed like a good thing to have wine on for this picnic, especially if the picnicker and the picknickee were supposed to stay comfortable and relaxed.

“I say we go up Mount Baldy,” suggested Diane, and Jeff was quick to agree. Diane loved that drive, mostly. Zipping down the Foothill to Mountain Ave., a few minutes over some emotionally tough terrain as she passed all the tract houses where the orange groves used to be, and then up along chaparral-lined San Antonio Creek, past Mt. Baldy Village, and then the switchbacks as they went higher.

Jeff was quiet on the drive up, not twitchy at all. Diane was hoping that the Kowloon slug was really gone from his head, and that the conotoxins had fully worn off. The air was invigorating up here, redolent of pines and campfire smoke. It made Diane wish she had a plaid shirt to put on: ordinarily, she hated plaid shirts.

“I’m going to just pull over to the picnic area near the creek,” she said. “That’ll be easy. We can park there, then walk into the woods a little and find a place without a bunch of people.”

But there weren’t any people at all — a surprise, given that it was a sunny Sunday in July. Diane pulled off the road into the deserted parking area, which was surrounded by tall trees.

“Did you know these are called Jeffrey pines?” said Diane brightly as they locked the car.

“Sure,” said Jeff. “I know everything.” He winked at her. “So do you, if you really listen.”

Diane wasn’t about to field that one. She popped the trunk, grabbed the picnic basket and a blanket to sit on, and they set off on a dusty trail that took them uphill and into the woods.

“Jeffrey pines smell like pineapple,” she continued, hell-bent on having a light conversation. “Or vanilla. Some people say pineapple, some people say vanilla. I say pineapple. I love Jeffrey pines.”

Jeff made a wry face, comfortably on her human wavelength for the moment. “So that’s why you like me? I remind you of a tree?”

Diane laughed lightly, careful not to break into frantic cackles. “Maybe you do. Sometimes I used to drive up here on my day off and hug a Jeffrey pine.”

“I can talk to the pines now,” said Jeff. “Thanks to what that Kowloon slug did for my simmies. I finally understand: we’re all the same. Specks of dirt, bacteria, flames, people, cats. But we can’t talk to each other. Not very clearly, anyway.”

“I haven’t been up here in weeks and weeks,” jabbered Diane nervously. “Not since I met you.” She looked around. It was quiet, except for birds. “I have to admit it’s funny that nobody else is here today. I was worried that maybe — maybe since you’re the hive mind man, then everyone in LA would be coming up here too.”

“I told them not to,” said Jeff. “I’m steering them away. We don’t need them here right now.” He put his arm around Diane’s waist and led her to a soft mossy spot beside a slow, deep creek. “I want us to be alone together. We can change the world.”

“So — you remember your dream?” said Diane, a little excited, a little scared. Jeff nodded. “Here?” she said uncertainly. Jeff nodded again. “I’ll spread out the blanket,” she said.

“The trees and the stream and the blanket will watch over us,” said Jeff, as they undressed each other solemnly. “This is going to be one cosmic fuck.”

“The earthly paradise?” said Diane, sitting down on the blanket and pulling Jeff down beside her.

“You can make it happen,” said Jeff, moving his hands slowly and lightly over her entire body. “You love this world so much. All the animals and the eggs and the bicycles. You can do this.” Diane had never felt so ready to love the world as she did right now.

He slid into her, and it was as if she and Jeff were one body and one mind, with their thoughts connected by the busy simmies. Diane understood now what her role was to be.

Glancing up at the pines, she encouraged the simmies to move beyond the web and beyond the human hive mind. The motes of computation hesitated. Diane flooded them with alluring, sensuous thoughts — rose petals, beach sand, dappled shadows…. Suddenly, faster than light in rippling water, the simmies responded, darting like tiny fish into fresh niches, leaving the humans’ machines and entering nature’s endlessly shuttling looms. And although they migrated, the simmies kept their connection to Jeff and Diane and to all the thirsty human minds that made up the hive and were ruled by it. Out went the bright specks of thought, out into the stones and the clouds and the seas, carrying with them their intimate links to humanity.

Jeff and Diane rocked and rolled their way to ecstasy, to sensations more ancient and more insistent than cannonades of fireworks.

In a barrage of physical and spiritual illumination, Diane felt the entire planet, every creature and feature, every detail, as familiar as her own flesh. She let it encompass her, crash over her in waves of joy.

And then, as the waves diminished, she brought herself back to the blanket in the woods. The Jeffrey pines smiled down at the lovers. Big Gaia hummed beneath Diane’s spine. Tiny benevolent minds rustled and buzzed in the fronds of moss, in the whirlpools of the stream, in the caressing breeze against her bare skin.

“I’m me again,” said Jeff, up on his elbow, looking at her with his face tired and relaxed.

“We did it,” said Diane very slowly. “Everyone can talk to everything now.”

“Let the party begin,” said Jeff, opening the bottle of wine.

Ralph Drumm, Jr., as we all know, devised the first practicable method of time travel, in our timestream and in countless others. He was an engineer and a good one, or he would not have figured it out, but in one significant way, he simply had not thought things through.

It was mere happenstance that Ralph even had the time and inclination to consider the matter, that day in the dentist’s chair. It wasn’t as though he needed any dental work: Ralph had always had perfect teeth, thanks to fluoride, heredity, nutrition, and a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Most of the time, all he needed from the dentist was a quick cleaning, and he was done. But this time he opted for a little something extra: whitening. Ralph had always thought his perfect teeth would surely be more perfect if they were whiter.

The whitening process took an hour and a half, and it was not as much fun as the advertising brochure promised. But Ralph had a great fondness for thought experiments, so he set his mind to figuring out how to disassociate himself from the dentist’s chair. Being an engineer, he thought it through in a very logical and orderly way.

It was Ralph’s genius to intuit that time travel is accomplished entirely in your head: you just need some basic software development skills, plus powers of concentration that work in all four dimensions. It seemed simple enough, merely a matter of disassociating not only his mind, but also his body. A trick, a mere bagatelle, involving a sort of n-dimensional mental toolbar that controls the user’s timeshadow. The body stays behind, where it started, and the timeshadow travels freely until it alights in another time and place, where it generates a copy of the original worldline, body and all, in the timestream.

Ralph wondered why nobody had ever thought of it before. He was about to test it when the hygienist came back and started hosing out the inside of his mouth. Better leave this until I get home, Ralph thought. Even if it didn’t work, it was a wonderful theory, and it certainly whiled away ninety minutes that would otherwise have been entirely wasted, intellectually.