David Wallace - Infinite jest

‘I too confess experiences of anxiety for annulation with Tex Watson, though I am Trivially thirteen and not yet required to grapple in hard science.’

‘Mario in the sauna kept telling Doucette to just imagine somebody doing somersaults with one hand nailed to the ground, which what the fuck is that, and lo and surprise didn’t help the Booger a whole lot.’

‘Did not part the veil of Maya.’

‘Didn’t do jack.’

‘Annular energy cycles are intensively abstract, my home nation believes.’

‘But my whole message to Boog was that DT-cycles aren’t all that fucking hard if you don’t paralyze your brain with career-with-wings brain-cartoons. The extra-hot breedering and lithiumization stuff gets hairy, but the whole fusion/fission waste-annulation thing in toto you can imagine as nothing but a huge right triangle.’

‘You are presaging to give the thumbnail lecture.’

‘Commit this one simple model to your little Pakistani RAM-cells, and you’ll tapdance right through Watson’s kiddie-physics and up into Optics, which is where the abstracto-conceptual fur really flies, kid, let me tell you.’

‘I am one of the seldom of my home nation whose talents are weak in science, unhappily.’

‘This is why God also gave you quick hands and a wicked lob off the backhand, though. Just picture a kind of massive pseudocartographic right triangle. [237]You’ve got your central, impregnately-guarded O.N.A.N.- Sun-strand waste-intensive fusion facility up in what used to be Montpelier in what used to be Vermont, in the Concavity. From Montpelier the process’s waste’s piped to two sites, one of which is that blue glow at night up by the Methuen Fan-Complex, just south of the Concavity, right flush up against the Wall and Checkpoint Pongo —’

‘Which our tall and sleep-depriving fans in our area point at to blow away from the south.’

‘— Roger that, where the toxo-fusion’s waste’s plutonium fluoride’s refined into plutonium-239 and uranium-238 and fissioned in a standard if somewhat hot and risky breeder-system, much of the output of which is waste U-239, which gets piped or catapulted or long-shiny-trucked way up to what used to be Loring A.F.B. — Air Force Base near what used to be Presque Isle Maine — where it’s allowed to decay naturally into nep-tunium-239 and then plutonium-239 and then added to the UF 4fractional waste also piped up from Montpelier, then fissioned in a purposely ugly way in such a way as to create like hellacious amounts of highly poisonous radioactive wastes, which are mixed with heavy water and specially heated-zirconium-piped through special heavily guarded heated zirconium pipes back down to Montpelier as raw materiel for the massive poisons needed for toxic lithiumization and waste-intenseness and annular fusion.’

‘My head is spinning on its axis.’

‘Just a moving right-triangular cycle of interdependence and waste-creation and — utilization. See? And when are we going to get you out on the old Eschaton map for a little geopolitical sparring, Ars, what with those hands and wicked lob? Incidentally, the arrhythmic meaty whacking sound is Booger hitting himself in the thigh and chest in there, which self-abuse is a textbook symptom of an anxiously depressed episode.’

‘With this I can create sympathy. For, confusingly to me, fusion produces no waste. This we are taught in the science of my home nation. This is the very essence of the promise of the attraction of fusion for a densely populous and waste-impacted nation such as mine, we are taught fusion to be self-sufficient and wasteless perpetuation. Alas, my need to visit the lavatory is becoming distended.’

‘But except no, although this was the very roadblock that’d stymified annulation, and what had to be overcome, and was overcome, though in a way so unintuitive and abstracto-conceptual that this is where your Third World educational system’s real sadly in need of like a massive up-to-date-textbook airlift or something. It’s also at just this point in the fusion-wastelessness problem where our own glorious optical Founder, Inc’s ex-Da, Mrs. Inc’s poor cue —’

‘I know who you refer.’

‘The man himself, at just this point, makes his final lasting contribution to state science after he quit designing neutron-diffusion reflectors for Defense. You’ve seen the coprolite placque in Tavis’s office. This is from the A.E.C., for the Incster’s Da’s, like, lasting contribution to the energy of waste.’

‘The purpose for which I was upon the stairs and became disoriented was to visit a lavatory. This was long ago.’

‘Hold your water one second is all this’ll take. You wouldn’t even fucking be here without Inc’s Da, you know. What the guy did was he helped design these special holographic conversions so the team that worked on annulation could study the behavior of subatomics in highly poisonous environments. Without getting poisoned themselves.’

‘They thus are studying holographic conversions of the poisons instead of the poisons.’

‘Men’s Sanity in Corporate Sterno, Ars. Like an optical glove-box. The ultimate prophylactic.’

‘Please conduct me.’

‘Like but for instance did your nation know that the whole annular theory behind a type of fusion that can produce waste that’s fuel for a process whose waste is fuel for the fusion: the whole theory behind the physics of it comes out of medicine?’

‘This means what? A bottle of medicine?’

‘The study of medicine, Ars. Your part of the world takes annular medicine for granted now, but the whole idea of treating cancer by giving the cancer cells themselves cancer was anathematic just a couple decades back.’

‘Anathematic?’

‘As in like radical, fringe. Wacko. Laughed out of town on a rail by quote mainstream established science. Whose idea of treatment was to like poison the whole body and see what was left. Though annular chemotherapy did start out kind of wacko. You can see these early microphotos Schacht’s got that poster of that he won’t take down even after you’re sick of it, the early microphotos of cancer cells getting force-fed micromassive quantities of overdone beef and diet soda, forced to chain-smoke microsized Marlboros near tiny little cellular phones —’[238]

‘I am standing first upon one foot then upon another foot.’

‘— except and corollarying out of the micromedical model was this equally radical idea that maybe you could achieve a high-waste annulating fusion by bombarding highly toxic radioactive particles with massive doses of stuff even more toxic than the radioactive particles. A fusion that feeds on poisons and produces relatively stable plutonium fluoride and uranium tetra-fluoride. All you turn out to need is access to mind-staggering volumes of toxic material.’

‘Therefore placing the natural fusion site in the Great Concavity.’

‘Roger and Jawohl. Here things get abstractly furry and I’ll just skim through the fact that the only kertwang in the whole process environmentally is that the resultant fusion turns out so greedily efficient that it sucks every last toxin and poison out of the surrounding ecosystem, all inhibitors to organic growth for hundreds of radial clicks in every direction.’

‘Hence the eastern Concavity of anxiety and myth.’

‘You end up with a surrounding environment so fertilely lush it’s practically unlivable.’

‘A rain forest on sterebolic anoids.’

‘Close enough.’

‘Therefore rapacial feral hamsters and insects of Volkswagen size and infantile giganticism and the unmacheteable regions of forests of the mythic eastern Concavity.’

‘Yes Ars and you find you need to keep steadily dumping in toxins to keep the uninhibited ecosystem from spreading and overrunning more ecologically stable areas, exhausting the atmosphere’s poisons so that everything hyperventilates. And thus and such. So this is why E.W.D.’s major catapulting is from the metro area due north.’