One Huge Here

The respectable man in the white coat holds up the brain and Humphrey ghost-winces at the man’s grip and has a ghost-fear that he might get a headache. How silly, he chuckles, how positively silly. He need fear no headache, nor fatigue, nor three a.m. back pain when he gets up to pee for the eighth time.

Mr. Burgess, your choice?

Choice? Oh, what to do with the brain? Save it for summer, Doctor, he thinks to say. Aristotle thought of the brain as a cooling organ, did he not? He learns with rising degrees of freedom that to think is to say is to do is to be is to shake and groove.

His family stands in front of one eye out of millions and waves him off. He beeps and boops by way of bye-to-old-states-of-being and suddenly it feels like that time juggling a scream and a cheer while swirling down a tube at a waterpark on the same floaty as his big brother. Only that was fifty years ago and this is fifty milliseconds.

Yes, now, Mr. Burgess. Not a month later. The drinking and smoking and other indulgences besides necessitate that we use your brain now, Mr. Burgess, before further decay.

O what a nasty word, nasty indeed, but thank you, Doctor, it must not have been easy to say.

It was for the best, anyway, what with elderly care costs and all.  Plus the Doctor was right; sixty wasn’t quite sixty after so many slugs of whiskey, even the pricey stuff.

Oh, and one last thing, Mr. Burgess. Avoid bad company in there.

That’s just the problem, thinks Humphrey. There is no there, just an endless here. Thinking is moving is arriving. He has traversed many heres in what feels like no time, for it is no time, and one of the heres is his ex-wife’s email where he discovers a decade-long affair and suitably broods but still it feels like no time.

Chin up, new fella, it’s not so bad in here. I heard your thoughts. Thinking is saying.

Humphrey turns to the sympathizer. It is a signal that is elongating and glinting cheerfully and he hates that it’s so giddy.

Barbara, dear—my name.

Humphrey pulsates his theta wave by way of be-my-friend. He says he’s just snooped around in secret government databases and trawled his sister-in-law’s notes app but felt no thrills. Where are the thrills?

Better lose that idea, mister. Won’t end well for you, I promise. It’s folks like you end up running up people’s thermostat and changing their passwords and playing with traffic lights just for a cheap thrill. And where does it get you? Labelled a virus and killed, like real killed. That what you want? No, sir, mister, I don’t want no part of it, and you sound like a virus in the making, so I don’t want no part of you either.

Now wait a minute, says Humphrey, I wasn’t going to go and do something like that.

Hm, I’ve just been here and your records say you drank too much and did naughty things. Well, I shouldn’t judge. It’s a new life. I’m sorry for assuming, and there are safer ways to find thrills here.

Such as?

Hm, let’s see. I change my granddaughter’s grades by a mark or two, not too much. Just helping my sweet Kayleigh. She was watching a movie with her boyfriend—I looked him up and down, he’s okay—and it almost buffered but didn’t because I gave the data packet a little kick. Sometimes she sets an alarm and leaves her phone on silent, silly girl, and I fix it for her. Sometimes she sends texts while she’s huffing and puffing and I bounce them till she thinks better of it.

Here, in the huge here, Humphrey dissipates and morphs and snaps elastic-like knowing for certain he can’t be Barbara for his family. How they are talking, he’s a solved problem. And his grandson Jeffrey has put his Grand Seiko on eBay, the one they’d said would be an heirloom. A little short circuit in the house’s wiring would teach them… Humphrey catches himself. He’s only managed to blow out the kitchen lightbulb.

Uh-uh, says Barbara, wagging her gamma. Careful now. Feeling is doing. And anyway, dear, it’s so soon, only five and a half minutes. They’re covering their pain.

And just how do you know that?

Worldclock dot com, dear.

Time breathes and here stays here and Barbara won’t talk to Humphrey anymore. He’s not a virus but he’s no good. Humphrey is a dirty hobo. He hitches rides on pirated movie files and stays on devices for hours, risking, hoping, that they stay offline. In ebooks, he spends chapters as the letter M in PT Sans. FM radio waves are a change of pace but not enough to be a holiday.

He still burrows into classified emails although, like the fingers of whiskey from another now that brought no joy but were irresistible, it gives him no thrills. It would be a thrill to forward them to a tabloid journalist—certainly an electric thrill—but Humphrey’s no virus, not in this life. He’ll listen to conference calls and that’s as far as he’ll go.

Like the 1974 operation, that’s right, sir. SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. No, no, my fault for not spelling it out, entirely mine. Payload? Same as last time, sir, just higher resolution. Numbers one through ten, formula of the human genome, nice little graphic of our solar system. Happy Thanksgiving to you too, Mr. Vice President.

Humphrey wants-does-says-feels-thinks-moves and he is here at the tip of a telescope in Puerto Rico. He wiggles his theta wave, for this will be a long trip, and it brushes against a familiar gamma in a subatomic speck of ultraviolet light.

My Kayleigh’s a big girl now, dear.