I finally understand what I have been judging.

Tell me my friends, have you ever played the efficiency game?

It’s dangerous how much I play it. It’s self-indulgent and self-destructive. I have these people around me who love me and want me to succeed, so I try to succeed, only I’m playing at life like it is a game.

See, you keep score and suddenly your ego gets involved. It becomes a challenge and a test to see how valuable you really are. I started playing the wrong way when I realized that I could program myself. There is a category of the game that is dangerous to play, it leads into a very deep rabbit hole and into some strictly preposterous conclusions.

Like that by going into the wild I could win by costing the world nothing.

Like the truth being more important than anything else.

Do you understand the game? No. Well let me tell you how I have been playing it. I just had a thought. “Some Taco Bell would be wonderful right now.” Should I give myself points for that thought, or take them away? What about both, or neither? It would be wonderfully tasty, but my digestion would certainly suffer.

What about the time that I dropped a joint in my friend’s car and couldn’t find it? If the police had pulled us over and held it in their hands, lives would have changed that day because of my actions. Not only did I lose points for myself, but I also caused a potential terminal loss of points for everyone else in the car.

If I had been efficient in the execution of my life’s actions, no loss of points would have occurred. No loss of value would have been suffered.

Almost ruining his life made me feel like a shit-eating asshole for a while.

If I could conceive of a system that would work that would categorically divide the positive points from the negative ones and identify actions to maximize the positive and minimize the negative, I could just do what that system says and I would be great. I would have defined value for myself and the struggle to know what I should do would be over. It would be such a simple matter to say: I want to maximize my positive efficiency points.

A non-falsifiable value system has so many uses. It could be a legal system or the operating system for a creative computer—what?

They used my website to make one of those?

I established the project and am still a 20 percent owner. I did all those things. Wow, this amnesia thing needs to stop, and soon. I definitely lost about a week’s worth of memories before I dropped off the grid.

****

Oh, the efficiency game, that’s right.

You don’t have to keep score. But no one else can keep score for you. It is important to notice both the points that you make and the points that you lose. For a while I was using the ratio in a calculation of my overall self-image. I convinced myself that I was depressed for a while; that I was socially inept; and that my friends could barely stand to be around me. I had this dream that they would draw straws to see who had to be the one to spend time with me.

It seems like life, but it isn’t quite. It’s different.

When it really gets into your head, the analysis is brutal, even if it is fast. Someone will make a statement that seems falsifiable, and even if you don’t think about it, or look at it, I’d see the lost points. I’d get mad or disappointed that they said this thing that I knew was wrong.

And because of how I am, I would think of ways that me and the other person could create value by correcting their false statement. That’s why I invented the collaboration agreements. Only most of the time the person wouldn’t be playing the game, or wouldn’t think that they had lost points. They were joking, or didn’t care, or already had all the money they needed.

The worst was when someone said “There’s no way that ______.”

Even if it was totally unnecessary, I would think of ways to falsify the statement and redeem those lost efficiency points. I branded the commandment ‘maximize your efficiency points’ too deeply into my own psyche. I was too good a reprogrammer, and not a good enough decision maker.

Do you mind if I rest for a minute? No, ok, I’ll be back with you soon.

****

Thanks, I needed that. Meditation is fundamental.

The efficiency game is a framework for looking at reality. It is possible that it turned me into the Tripping Prophet, well, that and the ganja. See, I convinced myself that weed limited my ability to focus on more than two trains of thought. Then I tried to do penta-dimensional problems and then think that my inability to do them was due to the drugs.

From the beginning, I always liked meditating before I smoked. I think that entering a lower dimensional consciousness is easier if you have recently practiced being in a low-d state.

Can I explain that statement? Um. Yes. It’s not really worth it though. You’ll understand it when you see it in the recording. There are things that are so much more important than my own crazy perceptions.

Like Lauria: see, if I were playing the efficiency game with her, I would have to give myself a pretty high score. She likes me, and I like her too. We hadn’t said it to each other yet, but we both know. The game suggests that I need to avoid actions that might lead to the dissolution of our unspoken collaboration agreement.

It basically ascribes negative efficiency points to fighting.

But what about the times when fighting is necessary to establish the genuineness of a belief? What if by not fighting, I ended up misleading her and convincing her that it would be more efficient to have her go.

Yes, it’s ok dear Lauria, I know you’re not going anywhere.

As I got deeper and deeper into the Tripping Prophet I became centered in this binary universe of positive or negative, something about my ability to understand the universe according to systems larger than two dimensional was lost. It started all being about accruing points or losing them. Right and wrong. Fuck that is a lonely way to live.

If faced with the decision to fight or not fight about an issue. I would get overwhelmed and do neither. Most of where I live was the gray area, where there weren’t a lot of low-hanging ethical decisions to be made. That became my M.O. If I couldn’t foresee an action resulting in only positive efficiency points I wouldn’t take it. I didn’t notice it, but that lack of decision shrank my life down to almost nothing. I did little, my work became all, because it was something that the Prophet could do well. The true-false binary that he worked with fit naturally into the Research Forum.

And then I started the topic “How not to take advantage of your teammates.” That led to the common collaboration agreement. I literally came up with nothing else that was a categorically true statement about proper manner, or behavior, or however you want to say it.

I convinced myself that I was a bad friend.

I think somewhere in me there was an angry man yelling that life was more than what I was making of it. He would generate truth statements like: “all consumption of energy is wasteful” or “inactivity alienates allies” and the Prophet would try to disprove them.

The straw that broke me was the statement “a man should be able to support himself.” The next thing I knew I was playing my own game of worst-case scenario in Canadian mountains.

****

It was nice at first. For the first time since my parents died, I knew that I was not directly hurting anyone and I was in my element. The more aware of the true reality that I was, the better I would eat. You can survive for a long time on berries, nuts, and squirrel jerky.

Then I found a wild pot plant and saw the glacier for the first time. I let myself lie about the glacier when I was fiercely Tripping Prophet. I convinced myself the glacier was out to get me. The fear felt amazing, it was such a potent feeling after months of monotony. It had been years since I was genuinely afraid; rationality can beat most of the normal fears eventually and it’s not like I got a lot of threats working on my computer, but the glacier was supernormal. That was the point of it.

Eventually I got bored with just looking at it and went out onto the glacier. I got tired of being afraid. I don’t think I was trying to kill myself, maybe I wanted to have a mystical experience. Maybe I just wanted to overcome that fear. What happened was the seed sprouting and breaking the Tripping Prophet’s hold over me. I realized that he couldn’t plan.

It seemed so simple at the time. The Tripping Prophet is a two dimensional creature, and planning requires thought about at least three things: action, intent, and consequence; or maybe past, present, and future describes it better.

I was still playing the efficiency game all the time, but at least I wasn’t trying to program myself for the future anymore. When I saw the steam column that meant I was about to wake up on the Peacemonger, I knew that I was ready to be back, I just didn’t know how to stop playing the game.

How do you stop playing the game?

You can’t stop playing the efficiency game.

You just have to learn when not to keep score.

****

Lauria watched him as he started to come down. The things that he had said while the drug was in his body were confusing and fascinating. The mind that had conceived the thoughts was one that she couldn’t understand, but somehow she did maybe understand the person that had created them. She had studied accounts of other Revelations during MDMA therapy and it wasn’t uncommon for patients to reveal themselves deeply, to generate new understandings about their inner lives that would propel them into the next phase of their lives.

He liked her, too. She knew it, but it was nice to hear in such a way that was obviously not a lie. Somewhere in his self-discovery he admitted that his neurosis wouldn’t allow him to lie.

When she thought about how much of her world he was responsible for creating, it made her dizzy. He had created the Valuestream. Honestly, that made her a little fucking intimidated. Her job was governed by a collaboration agreement that was still 85 percent his words. He was an international celebrity like Bill I-can-fucking-build-it Gates or Richard I-can-fucking-do-it Branson. He had already changed the world. He had already changed her world.

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When she had joined the ‘Stream 3 years ago, the trajectory of her life had turned: finishing her degree, getting out of debt, joining a union, and now healing people -- at first it had made her feel like an outsider in her own life. Hmm… had. I guess I finally feel like I deserve this.

When he had looked into her eyes as she told him about the Companionship, she hadn’t seen any signs of anger or disappointment. Honestly she hadn’t seen much surprise either. The captain had been extremely forthcoming about the amount that he had read during his recovery, if not about the specific topics. TP had left a book out for her to ‘find’ that made it pretty clear he suspected something was up.

There was only one thing left for her to do during the therapy session, and they had decided beforehand that it was her question to ask. It had been she that had been the first to ask, and it made sense that it should be she that got the real answer.

Dr. Clorence-Peraster had told her that she would know when the time was right to ask, and she knew enough to trust that they were right.

He was talking about the first project that he had started on the Valuestream, but they were just words to her. It was the vocal pattern that she was trying to grasp. She had seen something about it that wasn’t quite right on board the vessel, but hadn’t quite understood it. During the session, she thought that it was possible that she was starting to understand. The way that he talked about things outside of himself was incredibly precise. The way that he talked about himself was descriptive, but not truly explanatory. The things were definitely not relevant.

When she tried to recall things that he had said he wanted to do, she could only recall one: her. When asked how he was doing, he would always reply with a non-answer and counter-request. Only once in the time that she had known him had she seen he express anger, and that had been at two cooks who had gotten into a fistfight. He had ended the fight by simply walking up to them with a look in his eyes that she would never express.

They had talked a lot about anger and the necessity of expressing negative emotions to those who you trust. He had explained the trouble that he had had concerning unintentional coercion, and his own underlying belief that any interaction was a form of coercion. “Writing is the worst form of coercion, next to speaking.” Then there was his unsubstantiated belief that if he made eye contact with someone he could get them to do whatever he wanted.

On the Manson Scale of Sociopathology, he registered somewhere between Glenn Beck and George W. Bush, but no one on this ship expressed concern because he also expressed an overwhelming abhorrence of violence. She wasn’t concerned because she trusted him, and, as much as she wanted to be hesitant, careful, and wise, she was drawn to him.

She tried not to think of how the other relationships she had been drawn to had worked out.

As traumatic as his amnesia must have been, she was deeply glad that they had met before his identity became obvious. He would never think that she was only with him for his fame.

The pair who were working with him had shown her the agenda for his Revelation therapy session. She had been very impressed by their level of planning, especially since she was so directly invested in one portion of it. There were stories about the Companionship Revelation where the deceived party refused to see the Companion ever again. If TP had been such a man she would have had a frankly terrible holiday.

The man, Questro, was talking to TP. “It sounds as though you have learned a lot about yourself in the last 18 months. Will you tell us about some of the mistakes that you’ve made?”

“I hit someone I loved in anger once. I didn’t drink enough to black out for a year afterwards, but that doesn’t change the horror of what I did.

“I suspect that I have made more than my share of mistakes. I mistook a desire not to judge for actually not judging. I would judge but not acknowledge it to myself, and I became an arrogant ass who acted like I was right, but talked and thought of myself like I was the Buddha.”

He stopped talking for a moment and looked inward very intensely, it was like watching a flashlight in his eyes turn off. “Wow, I am arrogant.”

It was only a moment, then he was back. “My greatest sin is hypocrisy in all its forms. I acted like I was interested in a person, and then treated them like they weren’t even close to a priority in my life. I tried to live my life as though I didn’t need anyone, except when I did, I used them like I was a human addict.”

The rueful smile on his face was one that Lauria was used to seeing. It was one that he had worn the first time that the captain had asked him what he could cook, and the time that someone had asked him to teach them to throw. “There’s another thing… I think I almost became ashamed of my own ability, ashamed of the separation that came into being between myself and those around me.”

“I used to never finish anything.” He laughed a throaty chuckle that resounded into the entire room; it seemed to grace the ears of all the listeners. “That was actually one of the reasons that I created the Valuestream. That way I could work as little as I felt like and still get paid at the consummation of a project. It was my way to continue the illusion that I could live life on my own terms.”

“I want to say that it was a mistake to run away but I can’t. It was too good for me. It was such a break from the insanity that I had tried to live to do everything that I wanted and still keep myself in good credit. Maybe I should have taken someone with me. But there was no one that I thought could stay with me without catching the sickness in my head.”

The woman, Annagail asked him, “Can you explain what you mean by that?”

His face crinkled. The eyebrows drew together, and the flashlight of his gaze dimmed. “I don’t know, but I’ll try.” He took a few deep breaths. According to the therapists this was one of the most important moments of the entire session: facing the neurosis. “I started seeing the truth, or thought I did. I felt as though I was dialed into reality, watching everything as it actually was. It made me feel as though I could do anything. President, astronaut, athlete. Any job, any skill, any art. It was all within my grasp because if I could really see, I could think of ways to improve on the technique of anything. I tried to be right all the time and speak the most important truths I could in every moment. I tried to turn myself into the perfect editor for the Valuestream.”

He stopped and cast a pleading look at everyone in the room. It nearly pulled Lauria from her seat he looked so fucking desperate. “Do you understand what is so monstrous about that?”

****

Q probably doesn’t understand, but I do, Annagail thought. It was a malady that had struck her husband from time to time. That had been the start of the recent funk that she had been forced to shake her husband from. Her religion professors in college had tried to argue the point that, throughout history and across religions, the greatest sin was trying to be God. Napoleon had done it when he tried to conquer Europe and Hitler when he had condemned the Jews. The foundling, who she was now certain was the Valuestream’s founder as well, was trying to be something altogether more alarming. He had been trying to be a secular God, all wise and all-kind. The pressure of it had driven him into a psychotic break.

He was going on about specific mistakes that he had made, the sort that were insinuated into every person’s life. Like choosing the wrong friend as a role model or asking the wrong questions when trying to learn.

Lauria was looking at him with what was Annagail concluded was deep affection. She recognized it from photos of her and Questro from their honeymoon days. Questro himself was in as heightened a state as she had ever seen him. It was as though he knew that he was in the presence of one of the few people on the planet who was truly his peer. He was one of the finest researchers on the ‘Stream, one of the finest scientific minds of his generation. Yet, he was looking at the creator of the Valuestream. When last she looked, his company directly employed more people than the US government. It also managed the value exchange of some hundred trillion other transactions.

When she took the time to reflect without the lens of professionalism, she thought that she might cry or recollect a thousand memories from the session. It was possible that she would never fully understand the dementia of the tortured soul that was trying to find itself in her chamber. But she was confident that she could help him to understand it enough to escape and find himself again.

When he allowed a natural break in his recitation, she stepped in with the next question on the agenda for his rehabilitation. “What do you consider your successes?”

His body language told her that he was getting healthier. Before she had seen the frown that would accompany his answer to such a question. Now, he smiled.

“For a long time I couldn’t think of any. While I was in the woods I had so much time to think of the past. The future and the present were entirely taken care of, so a lot of the time I lived in the past more than the moment, especially when I was high.”

He paused and looked at Lauria, who had joined the session after her revelation. “When I decided to reach out to someone, I did it well. I have been honest and somehow she has appreciated me for it. The Ultimate League was another of my successes. It was the last project that I started on the Valuestream… I gave it all of my attention for the last week before I dropped off the grid. The three-D broadcasting system that I created for it stunned me as soon as I created it.”

“My relationship with my mother got so much better before the end. When I spoke at her funeral, I was proud of myself and of her. Just a few years before she passed I never would have thought it possible.”

“I remember when I was in negotiations with Google about their use of the Valuestream, they tried to get me to sell it to them outright. I almost passed out when I saw the number of zeroes, it was nine or ten, and my company had only existed for a year. Instead I just leased them the ‘executive version’ of the software for 8 zeroes. That was one of the best decisions I have ever made.”

“Let me stop you there, TP. It sounds as though you have a good grasp of decisions that you made well. Can you tell us about what you want for your future?”

She watched his face. It was moving through emotions so quickly that she could barely follow them. This was the thing that she had to grasp in his personality, they called it the lynchpin in her classes: the moment in therapy where the individual had to understand what was happening in his head.

“TP. Look at me. Take a few deep breaths. You know that you are in a safe place. Please, relax, and tell us only the things that you know you want to do.”

The frenzy drained off his face as his breathing slowed. The color in his cheeks cooled. He opened his mouth a few times. “I want to do sports and play games.” Immediately he smiled. The truth of the thing that he said was evident on his face. “I want to be financially secure.”

Lauria’s face broke for a moment into incredulous amusement, but snapped back to seriousness before TP saw it. He didn’t know how well the Valuestream had done. “I want to work on the Valuestream with people that I trust and I want that work to hurt no one. I want to get fit and to help others do so. I want to do stand-up comedy. I love making people laugh; I just got so twisted up for a while that I couldn’t laugh at my own jokes.”

“I want to be a father.” The words slipped out, as though he almost regretted saying them. Gesturing like he could pull them back in, his face began the process of becoming a mess of emotional conflict again. Annagail thought that she had found the key, and was fairly certain that Lauria had seen it too.

“TP. Breathe. You don’t have to stop yourself from desiring things that seem out of your grasp. That is one of the reasons that people have goals, so that they can see the path towards becoming what their goal entails. It doesn’t matter if the research engine in your brain says that you shouldn’t be a father. It is still something that you can want. It is something that you can work towards.”

As she began speaking she saw the frenzy die on his face. To be replaced with something… null. It was like she was looking at the face of a vegetable in a coma. He must be hearing her, but the look on his face was like so much skin hanging off of bones and muscle. It was like he was absent, and in his place was a biological machine that saw the truth and tried to optimize it.

And it obviously believed her.

Then he started crying.

****

As Lauria held her sobbing lover, she understood the Tripping Prophet’s disease. And she understood that she could never think of him as the prophet again. The world that he had been living in was so incredibly structured. His entire existence must have been a challenge to continue to justify his own existence. How sad would it be to be to think your existence was a waste?

Even if he knew that he could change, the changes that he could implement would be based on what he thought that he could be. He had changed himself into a rational creature that could only become more rational. He could not change into what he wanted to be because he wasn’t ready, or worthy, to do what he wanted.

While he sobbed in her arms, she realized she had never seen him cry.

Now it was over. As he quieted, hiccupping a few times, she realized that it was almost time for her to ask her question.

He looked into her eyes. Her professionalism fled. She cared for him. His eyes were so open; their vulnerability was disarming. The glaze was gone, replaced by red rims from his tears. She didn’t know how long he had cried, and she doubted that he did either.

“You understand,” he began. “you understand why I am this way. I changed myself too much I couldn’t change back. If I hadn’t run away, maybe I never would have seen through it.”

“I remember telling one of my old girlfriends that everyone deserves at least three legitimate rescues. Thank all of you for giving me this one.”

As he looked at each of the people in the room, there was no shudder in his gaze. He smiled when he looked at Lauria and nodded at the other two. His gaze did not shift. He didn’t make any noise. He seemed at peace.

It was time for her question.

“What is your name?”

He smiled and looked back at me. It felt as though the whole room was vibrating with his emotion, a joyousness spilling into everything. She worried that the smile was going to jump off of his face. He touched my face so gently, “How did you know to ask?”

“It was time.”

“So true. My name is Julius Thomas Socrates Paine. I think that ideas are the most valuable things in the world, and I made it my mission to make their spread unstoppable. It seems as though I succeeded. Thank you for bringing me back.”