SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Dave was into it. He went right to work cranking open the warm water faucets to four of the five metal tanks that lined the back wall and Danny and I began dumping in the large plastic bags of Epsom salts. These weren’t the new age float tanks they have at the spa today, no, these were the old school metal boxes that they used to test out the effects of sensory deprivation way, way back. True government-sponsored chaos.

Danny pulled his t-shirt over his head and then asked the magic question, “So what are we supposed to do for this to work?”

“Just free your mind,” Dave said. “And it will all become clear.” Then he heaved a bag of salt into a tank.

“Free my mind?” I said. “That last time I was in this thing I fell asleep and had a nightmare that I was being suffocated by tentacles.”

“Use a koan,” Dave said.

“No,” Marty said. “This isn’t a one hand clapping kind of thing.” He went over to the desk against the side wall, slid open the pencil drawer, and removed a yellow Pokémon keychain.

Danny scrunched his nose in delight. “That’s Pikachu,” he said, then added in a high voice, “Pika, Pika, Pikachu.”

Marty forced a grin back and then put the key into the tall beige plastic cabinet next to the desk.

“That’s your security system?” Dave asked. “A key in the drawer next to the cabinet.”

“I only lock it to keep the door closed,” Marty said. “It swings open otherwise.”

The cabinet was stocked with lab supplies. Beakers, scales, rows of white plastic jars lined up by same color lid. Smaller cabinets filled the two chest-high shelves. Marty opened a drawer to one of those.

“We’re not doing shrooms again are we?” I asked. “That’s what brought on those tentacles.” A chill ran down my neck as I again thought of a hundred little slimy tendrils encircling my arms and legs, the tips tickling. Ugh. I shuddered.

“No shrooms,” Marty said. He held up four vials.

“Is that the liquid LSD you had last summer?”

“No,” he said, handing one to each of us. “This is totally different.”

“You’re taking one too? Aren’t you going to keep watch?”

“Nobody is coming around. This’ll be fine.”

I guess that was enough for us because we each swilled one.

“This tastes like battery acid,” I said. “Whadja mix in here? Aluminum?”

“Well there’s some psilocybin—”

“Oh man!” I said. “You said no mushrooms.”

“Just a trace. It’s mostly diatomic molecules.”

“What? What are you trying to do? Kill us?”

“No. It’s cool, relax, oxygen is a diatomic molecule.”

“Liquid oxygen?”

“No, I was just saying that oxygen is diatomic. That’s iodine and hydrogen coated in zinc.”

“What?”

“It’s cool, really. They wouldn’t let me give it to the animals otherwise.”

“Right,” Dave nodded.

How Marty thought that was a selling point I don’t know, but he had a way of talking people into whatever. “They’re little nanobots,” he said, “they’re like five micrometers thick. Nothing, really.”

“Really,” I asked. “You’re sure.”

“Yeah, they’re medical. The real deal. They’re designed to deliver a medical payload. In this case, diatomic molecules.”

“And what do they do?”

“The diatomic molecules produce a rapid phonon reaction. They’ll slightly shift your perceivable spectrum.”

“How’s that?”

“With the DMT.”

“You put DMT in here?”

“No, no. They leverage your own biological DMT to produce the phonon reaction, along with the slight quantum mechanical oscillations of the diatomic molecules, the diatomic quantum flop .”

“Like when you die?” Dave said. “And your whole life flashes before you.”

“Right. Your brain floods with DMT and you see a white light, or whatever else.”

“You are trying to kill us,” I said.

“You came up with this?” Danny asked.

“I found some old files on DMT experiments and what the subjects had to say. And then, like serendipity someone came up with this for the monkeys, and it sort of came to me, like a eureka moment, getting off on our own DMT. So I swiped some for us.”

“How long before this kicks in?”

“It’s time released. It will take them a good fifteen minutes to get where they need to go. But it’s a good trip. You’ll see.”

And it must have been, because a shudder amped up from the base of my skull and for a second my scalp felt like it was peeling away, and I realized, even though I was still talking to Marty, that I’d already been in the tank and out again. The conversation I was having was déjà vu, but at the same time I was already into tomorrow, and back to earlier in the evening walking up Marty’s porch, looking at the huge Om symbol on the psychedelic tapestry that curtained his window. And then I was gazing up at their ceiling of colored Christmas lights through a cloud of pot smoke. Dave squealing, “Pika, Pika, Pikachu,” and Marty saying, “It’s all about the trip across the bridge, the diatomic quantum flop .”

It was crazy because there was a four-day stint that all happened in the same slice. I mean I saw myself going about my business but not in a linear way. I saw the whole period at once, a blur of scenes overlapping with more tentacles and a few flying eels thrown in. It was too much to take in.

Then I came down.

My mind chilled back to the present, began to process the world around me as it was designed to, one frame at a time. I thought that was it—that was the trip. It was over the course of the next two days that the result of our little experiment became clear. It was two days of déjà vu, the tentacles and eels from the initial vision were gone, they’d only been there at the peak, but everything else, knowing what people were going to say, knowing what was going to happen next, every instant a repeat of the tank.

But that wasn’t the most eerie part. The wild thing was that it was like we were acting on privileged information, that by somehow knowing what was going to happen, we had changed the future. I mean things happened the same as I saw them, but they never should have went that way.

Danny Wong was the first to act on it. And we knew he would be because we saw him tell us about it, and it played out just like he said. The night after the tanks was Friday. Danny worked a shift at his parent’s restaurant, Wong’s Wok. There was only one of them then, not the chain Danny runs today, but I’ll get back to that. Marty and I were at his place with Dave when Danny came home. It was after midnight. He had a box of that delicious Wong’s crispy lo mein, and just like I saw in the tank, he threw a fat wad of cash on the table.

We repeated the conversation the four of us already knew word for word.

“Those guys have a serious addiction,” he said. We knew who he was talking about.

“The Chinese guys in the kitchen didn’t hold back. They kept doubling the pot.”

Marty asked, “You were gambling?”

It was like an echo.

The other three of us answered at the same time. “High-Low.”

And then our eyes met and I remember asking myself if that had happened the same way as we saw it, the three of us saying the words at the same time. I guess it had. It must’ve.

“Yeah,” Danny said slowly. “High-Low, and I knew what the card was going to be each time. I’d still be there but I cleaned them out. The further I went the more they threw into the pot.”

Marty’s face went blank. And we knew what he would say next.

“No,” I said. But then he said it anyway.

“We have to go back to the tanks.”