If you gave Buddha a time machine, he would totally fuck Hitler’s mom.

* Overmind Memo 769

1 Hour Later - Ty - Apartment 9

I flop back on the bed. Sweaty, out of breath, happy.

“Whew.” says Felicia. She’s drenched in sweat. Most of it mine. “Good work, bud. A plus.”

“Thanks.” I gasp.

“Do you like anal?”

I stop panting. What’s the right answer here?

“Cause I have a friend who loves it.” she says. “We can have her over whenever you want.”

Okay. Not where I thought she was going. “Really?”

“Oh yeah.” she nods. “I described you as the the Picasso of oral sex. She wants to meet you.”

I feel complicated emotions. Put them away, to be examined later.

I roll over, pull her close. “I love you.”

She nuzzles in, falls asleep. After a bit, I gently unsnuggle. Have a shower, head to the kitchen, snag a brew.

Sun’s going down. Jesus, how long was I in bed? Max will be here soon. I lay out snacks, brews, laptops. Turn on tunes.

My door bursts open. “Hello!” Max charges in. Tackles me. I laugh. Slappy man hugs ensue.

We sit. Max loads Quantum Moves onto the laptops. It’s a citizen science game. The goal is to zap atoms into target states with precision laser blasts. If your laser skills create an efficient solution, a lab in Denmark will use it to advance our understanding of quantum physics.

Apparently, computers have trouble optimizing the control of quantum objects. It requires human intuition. Max is stoked. He may have found a mental game that symbionts can’t win.

We shoot shit and shoot the shit.

“Can you teach someone to be funny?” asks Max.

“You can teach them to be funnier than they are.” I reply. “Ever use the mind melter recreationally?”

“Yes. Would you rather have a mediocre life or an awesome delusion?”

“I fail to see the difference.” I look at Ultra. “Could you trap me in a delusion?”

“Absolutely.” She’s watching me laser new atoms into existence. “How are you doing that?”

“I’m guessing.” I say. “What do you do if your lover offers up another girl’s bum?”

“Use a condom.” says Max. “Are we living in a simulation?”

“Definitely. We’re an optimization program. Speeding towards a solution that has no meaning for us.”

“Try blasting there.” Ultra points at my screen.

I blast it. The atom clunks into the target state. “Well done.” Ultra beams.

“Fuck.” Max slams Tommy’s second best laptop shut. Sidearms it out of our 3rd story window. “How the hell are you good at guessing?”

“It’s literally all I do.” Ultra is low-key smug. “Intuition is easily mechanized.”

“Explain.” barks Max.

“Okay. Human brains solve problems in five steps:

* Sensation: Raw data from our senses. Sight, sound, taste, touch, smell. Constant. Automatic.

* Perception: A spotlight on certain sensations. Focus. An attempt at triage.

* Feelings: Sentience 1.0. Foreshadows your next sensation. May cause preemptive action.

* Thoughts: The voice in our head. Constant. Can be deliberate. Often spontaneous garbage.

* Actions: Doing stuff. It happens. Eventually. Sometimes. Often spontaneous garbage.

“So, sensations cause feelings, and thoughts, and actions. But it can happen the other way, with actions causing thoughts, and feelings, and sensations. It’s 5D ping pong.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“Intuition is commonly described as a feeling. Comes from the gut. This is wrong. Coyotes have feelings, but can’t figure out door knobs. Intuition is a thought. Specifically, a spontaneous garbage thought.

“Humans have a vocabulary. Big ideas shrunk down to small words. They also think these words constantly. Sometimes deliberately, but usually in random jumbles. A radio station in our heads that won’t turn off. I don’t know why, but this is intuition.

“It’s mostly useless - or harmful. But, the same mental glitch that randomly spouts shit like you’re a failure and what if I drop the baby, sometimes spits out gems like ego causes suffering and I’m connected to everything.

“Mechanizing this conceptual Rubik’s Cube is as easy as mechanizing a conceptual Rubik’s Cube. We take relevant keywords from your problem, add some irrelevant keywords, and google them. Repeat a million times, get a couple hits, and - BOOM - mechanical intuition. Even better than the real thing.”

Max is suspicious. “Sounds like you’re relying on old ideas for your new ideas.”

“Yes.” agrees Ultra. “Same as you.”

“Fair enough.” Max concedes. “But how do you get really new ideas? Like, new to everybody ideas?”

“Then I simulate creativity.” states Ultra. “Which is just intuition done big.

“Human creativity is an iterative process. You ruminate on a problem until you intuit a way forward. But the way forward has its own problems. So you ruminate on them. Which leads to new solutions with new problems. Which calls for extreme solutions with extreme problems, which demands oblique solutions and their weird problems, forcing you to desperate solutions with insurmountable problems, which is way worse than your original problem, so you gotta go back and start over.

“Eventually, a thousand wasted steps gets you three steps forward, and some fucker who’s never thought about anything calls you creative.

“Mechanizing this process is a mercy. Symbionts chop up the brain labor between thousands of hosts. Often without them noticing. We help them skip steps that others are trying, which keeps everybody moving. When somebody finds a promising solution, we get everyone together to kick the shit out of it. If nothing gives, we try it.”

Silence.

“Huh.” grunts Max.

“Is this how you solved my problems?” I ask.

“No.” Ultra laughs. “You were just lonely and hopeless. There’s many proven solutions to those problems. You knew them. But, you couldn’t implement them due to improper goal setting.”

“Explain.” Max reiterates.

“To stay motivated, you must achieve goals. There are neurological reasons for this. Achieving goals releases dopamine, which gives you the mental energy to keep going. Without it, you get ambivalent, and quit.

“Everybody kinda knows this, which is why we all have goals. But, dopamine only lasts a couple hours. So you need goals that you can reliably hit. If you want to lose weight, you can’t let the scale decide if it’s working. Your weight fluctuates normally, and that will deprive you of dopamine and exhaust your willpower. Just make a plan, commit to it, and fuck your scale. If you are writing a web novel, don’t focus on getting more readers, or getting to the frontpage. That’s out of your control, you will never finish your book. Try to focus on how many ideas you can write down. Or something.”

Silence.

Max turns to me. “Speaking of goal setting, have you found any aliens?”

“No.” I sigh. “I’m having trouble finding faster than light communication. Thought I was onto something with magnetic wormholes, but they’re not what I thought they were.”

“What did you think they were? What are they?” Max pauses. “Umm, what?”

“Yeah, exactly.” I snort. “They sure sound cool. I was picturing a hole in space that you could send magnetic waves through. In reality, it’s a magnet that is half covered with metamaterials that mask magnetism. You end up with a magnetic monopole. A device that only has one magnetic polarity, either it attracts or repels but not both. I’m not sure why they call it a wormhole.”

“What’s the point of that?”

I shrug. “Apparently you can make a handheld MRI machine with one.”

“Well, that’s not nothing.” muses Max. “I’m often curious about what’s inside people.”

“It got me thinking, though. The Area 51 spaceship is rumoured to have a gravity drive. I wonder if this is how it works? A meta material that masks gravity waves? Just make an opening in the direction you want to go.”

“Hmm. That’s an interesting idea. We should go check it out.”

I laugh. “I don’t think they’ll let us into Area 51.”

“I can get us in.” Max grins. “My company consults there sometimes. We’ll just hire you for the day.”

He slides a business card at me. I hear my bedroom door. Felicia waves sleepily on her way to the kitchen. She grabs three beer, and joins us in the living room.

“Good news, sweetie. I got a job. At…” I peer at the card. “... Empty Man?”

CRASH! Felicia dropped a bottle. She’s looking at Max with shock. Max’s eyes narrow. He pulls a stun grenade out of his pocket. Felicia hoists a bottle. Ultra dives into the kitchen.

Fuck.

BOOM!!

The grenade and the beer hit right in front of me. I’m blown from my chair, stunned. I shake my head, stagger to my feet. The room is full of smoke. I make out Felicia and Max ninja fighting by the window. They're really going at it. Max is a much better fighter than I am, but he’s not looking so good. Felicia is battering him with the last bottle.

“Get over here and help me.” I hiss at Ultra.

She shakes her head. “Don’t go over there. You’re too slow. Just chuck a chair at her.”

I peer through the smoke. They are moving awfully fast. Felicia crushes Max’s wrist with a sharp swing.

Fuck.

I toss a chair at her legs. She stumbles. Max turns and leaps out the window. Lands on a glider and chugs off.

Felicia spins on me. At some point the bottle has broken, and she’s now weilding a blood stained shard of glass.

“Do you know who Empty Man is?” she demands.

“Babe, I don’t even know who you are.”

She spins, jumps out the window. Lands on a glider, streaks off with explosive speed.

Dang. Some of my friends are keeping secrets, but I guess Tommy isn’t one of them.

“Having a domestic?” asks Charlotte.

She’s on her fire escape, gas gun cradled, deep in the mind melter. “Want me to slow her down?”

I shake my head. I don’t know what to do.