The elation of that irrevocable act stayed with me until we got home. Knowing that I had done something that would show up in my memoirs made me giddy. In two weeks, the Governance was to take off. I wish the five of us could have been together to celebrate tonight. We had decided that the best policy was to avoid each other until the Governance started, and that was that.

Agent Converez hadn’t really seemed all that disappointed in my actions, more resigned really. Before she left, she had tendered this comment, “When I took your case they told me that you were unpredictable. Still, I don’t think anyone was really prepared for this.” I got the impression that she was not personally offended by what I had done, just intimidated by the scope of what was to come.

I understood the feeling. I had felt it during the entire time that I developed the Valuestream. Being president was like that; it could generate unlimited potential future action.

Callisto and I sat on couches in my living room. Lauria had volunteered to throw together some dinner when she saw how deliberately I was walking after the game. The pleasant soreness in my limbs was less excruciating than I remembered, then I remembered that when I had been playing Ultimate last it had been in the days of five games a day. I would take the pleasant soreness over that every day of the week.

Callisto was telling some story about a girl and a party in Hyperabad that I was barely following. Apparently she had been endowed with exceptionally gifted feet that she used to massage Cal out of his clothes, money, and eventually, passport.

“You want to talk about it don’t you, Jules?” Cal asked.

It would have been so easy to play the naïve comrade, but I by now I felt like I knew him, and he knew me. “How did you know?”

“You were drifting. It only happens when there really is something on your mind. If Grace had a PET scanner she could tell it too, but my eyes work almost as well.”

I didn’t know exactly what I was feeling that night. The post-game high percolated from my fingers and toes all the way into my brain. Have you ever felt like you could be content to sit, and just to sit, not to talk, for hours and hours?

I knew he was right: tonight was not one of those nights. Soon enough my relaxation would decay into restlessness. By then it would be harder to talk about; might as well get it out here.

“I know all the reasons that it had to be done. Modeling a system of government is the best way that we could possibly hope to influence what the Chinese will decide to do. It will give me a unique platform for my ideas. It will be nice to be in the public eye for a reason I chose.” I sighed. “Something of a change from the tabloid prince I was when I left.”

Callisto nodded.

“Did you notice that any of the questions had an effect on me?” I asked.

He didn’t hesitate. “Yeah, the one about your old friends.”

“It just shocked me because the answer was so obviously not what it should have been. While I was away on my iceberg the path to redemption that I found was through people.” I looked at him, trying to see if he understood. “Happiness for myself and my friends. The people that I knew should have been the most natural place to start.” I groaned. “If I didn’t think of them, what else am I not thinking of?”

He sighed. “You know Jules. You are one serious motherfucker. You should take some time to not take things so seriously. But you should, you know, take me seriously when I am telling you not to take everything so seriously.” He shrugged a little and laughed. I’ve always hated that particular piece of advice. How do you relax when your instinct is to be concerned?

He went on. “Did you see their faces out there? You just gave them the biggest scandal and the most newsworthy moment of their careers. It was glorious and you know it. There are exactly five people in the whole damn world who understand what you did there and everyone else is going to be guessing until you decide the time is right to tell them the truth.” He shook his head and gave me a look of incredulity. “Take this one night and just be proud of how high you have risen, and how far you might yet rise.”

Embracing pride is another choice that I have always had issues with. Then again, I haven’t really celebrated my return.

“One computer knows why, too.” I answered idly. Against my will almost, I felt better.

He must have seen the agreement in my eyes because by the time I looked back at him he had on a wicked smile, “I’ll be right back.”

While he was out Lauria came in with a tray of appetizers. As she set them down I rose from the couch with a groan and swept her up in my arms, lifting her like a princess. She had told me a few nights before that being lifted like that made her feel loved.

Maybe I can’t choose pride, but I can choose whimsy. I readied my best Lady-Chatterjee’s lover impression. “O my darling, seeing your face, it makes me feel so much.”

She giggled and squirmed closer, echoing my stilted intonation. “Take me, my lover, take me, to the kitchen.”

I laughed too. It was real. I still didn’t know what I did to deserve that woman, but I surely was not going to complain. I remember charging her a kiss a step as I carried her. By the time we arrived, I had forgotten that Callisto was on his way back.

Literally running, he shook a box in my face. “Legal weed cookies! This is the night for it my friend. One before dinner, one after, and you will be good for the rest of the night. We three will laugh at stupid movies until the night calls us home.”

He wore wonder on his face. More than any single other feeling I know, it is wonder that moves and drives me. I couldn’t deny him this. “Will you join us, lover, on this quest into the origins of mankind.” I tried not to smile but couldn’t help myself.

So it began.

Pot food is probably the healthiest way to consume marijuana. It is not the most efficient, but it will keep you high the longest. I am not a biologist, but it makes sense to me that pot food will keep getting you high as long as it is in your belly. Historians speculate that some of the ancient Indian Vedas were written after inspiring trips on eaten marijuana.

It will take a while to kick in. You have to be careful not to fall into the ‘I don’t feel anything; I’m going to eat a couple more.’ That mistake is when most alien abductions occur. There are a hundred useful guides to using pot responsibly out there, but this is not that.

My trips have nothing to do with the giggles. At some point I reached past the point of paranoia, a typical response when the drug was illegal, but I didn’t stop when I started getting paranoid. I started using the paranoia to do things, to think things, to make things real in my mind that could never be real outside of it.

I created the Tripping Prophet when I was high; maybe it would be more appropriate to say that my subconscious did. At first he was just my selfish inventor. I would let my mind wander along the path of an idea that I thought could result in a valuable creation. It applied the close-packing scheme to satellite arrays. It conceived of the Valuestream. It created a quantum computer. At some point I would snap out of the reverie and decide whether it was a good idea or pure trash.

Then the Valuestream convinced me that all truth had value, and the Prophet was born. I was a bit terrified when I realized that whenever I got high I turned into this computational entity, trying to use my collected experience to generate the most valuable truths.

I can’t deny that the Tripping Prophet achieved some amazing things for me, but it pulled me away from the people that I love. It made me afraid of the world. It made me run away from the world for a year to live as a hermit and almost die on the Arctic coast.

I want tonight to be different. The food was exquisite, and I can say that for certain because it took about an hour for the first cookie to kick in. By the time dinner was done I caught Callisto looking around with a frozen face. When he caught my eye and started laughing it was infectious.

We ate the second cookie.

By the time we made it to the couch with some ice cream and chips, all of us had hit a plateau. We took turns choosing videos off the Internet. It was fun; we were all relaxed; it was effortless.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

We might have spent 2 hours on such ventures. It was Lauria that suggested we let Grace pick the videos. That is when it started up all over again for me. That is when I remembered exactly why I ran away from the world for almost two years.

****

The television was speaking to me. Not in the conventional sense that it does speak to everyone by its very nature.

It was speaking directly to me. Every second of every clip was of incredible meaning to me. It was like the words were being mainlined into my consciousness, targeting the flow of my thoughts, influencing my perceptions and intentions in subtle and direct way.

I stopped talking and so did the others. I doubt they knew what was going on in my head, but we had all developed telepathy where the others were concerned. I imagined they could feel my tension. It was consumed by trying to understand the messages I was seeing. If all truth was valuable, then these signals were valuable and if I could just grasp at their source, I would be able to use that value.

I couldn’t honestly tell you any single thing that we watched. I vaguely remember a rap that I had never heard before about filling the air with my planes and my satellites. The computer wouldn’t stop showing me meaning. Everything seemed of the utmost importance, of life and death magnitude. I forgot where I was and I don’t know if I thought anything.

It had happened to me before. It used to happen to me every time that I got high. It was information overload, or maybe computational confusion. The longer I stayed high the more directly the computer would talk to me. There were times that I thought I heard someone on the radio talking to the other people around about me. I would pop out of a zone out and hear words that made me afraid.

It made me afraid I was having a psychotic break. I knew the symptoms fit it perfectly.

The next morning was almost always the worst. I would remember the feeling, the anxiety that it awoke in me. Then the radio would pick songs that I had heard before but sent the same messages that had been sent my way the night before.

It always made me consider the strangest things. Was I dying and finally becoming aware of the immortal battle for my soul? When people spoke to me in words that seemed to carry the world in every sentence, what choice had I but to return the favor and give them the words of my own that meant the most? It probably got annoying as hell to be around someone trying so hard to be dep.

I wondered once if I was hallucinating the whole thing. I had convinced myself that I had an alternate ego that would come alive at those moments when I let myself turn on autopilot. The self that I typically called me would keep sleeping, but the other would go and prepare surprises for me later.

I had half hoped that the messages I received with the incredible importance were things that that alter ego recorded to the radio to tell me.

Then I had become convinced that I was being stalked. That more than anything else had cued me in to the potential psychosis: It was a textbook paranoid delusion.

It didn’t change what I perceived. The only explanation that could countenance the depth of my fear was that I was being monitored by something that was waiting for the verbal cue. They were waiting for me to say “I believe in Jesus and repent” or “I am guilty of a felony that requires me to confess” or “aliens take me away from here now” or “hello computer it is nice of you to say these things to me” or “this is a wonderful practical joke.” All the while I was aware that if I were the government I would be a person of interest. I feared that they would judge me crazy and take the works of my mind away from me for the protection of their national interest.

Once on such a trip I heard the song ET by Katy Perry 8 times in an hour. And three times in the last 20 minutes. What was I supposed to do: go on living my life as though these very real feelings of persecution and uniqueness were not running through me; run from the feelings as the typical paranoia of a pot-smoker?

My mother had taught me to confront the things that made me afraid, and the sooner the better.

I tried to find the bottom of Alice’s looking glass.

I remembered what the dormouse said.

I fed my head and tried to derive the truth of what was happening to me.

When my internal voice that faced those challenges got louder than the voice that talked to my friends of the things we loved and hated, I grew convinced me that they didn’t like listening to me anymore.

I didn’t want to be crazy, but before I left for the glacier, legitimately believing I was crazy would have been a relief.

There is only so long that anyone can stand the self-righteousness of a prophet. Jesus’ disciples had each other; it took twelve of them to be able to put up with his righteous ass. Judas was probably the one that told him to take himself a little less seriously sometimes.

By the time I started recording that album I could barely stand myself.

That must have been when I recorded those God-damned scriptures.

I remembered all of this as my state-based memory reasserted itself, sitting on the couch between Lauria and Callisto. The messages the TV sending me for once dulled compared to the flood of memory.

Callisto shook himself alert and stood up. “I have to go out, or I am going to be down for the night.”

I tried to say goodnight. It might have been something of a grunt or it might have been total silence. He seemed to understand or not be offended. He touched my arm and murmured, “You did well today.”

I managed to make eye contact and nod.

Lauria got up and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you for a wonderfully frivolous night, Cal.”

He beamed and then walked downstairs with more grace than I could have managed at that point. I was staggering while I was flat on my ass.

Lauria stood over me and looked down with kind eyes.

“Do you want to talk?”

Did I shrug? Whatever I did she lowered herself into my lap and nestled herself there. “You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. One of my favorite things about you is that you always talk to me with your body.”

I breathed in the scent of her. The feel of her softness soothed the tension in chest until I could tell that I was breathing regularly.

“Hi.” I said.

“Hello.” She spoke into my chest.

“Have I ever told you how much I like you?” I asked.

“Yes. But you can tell me again if you like.”

“I like you so much that it should really be called love.”

She started kissing my neck and I didn’t think about anything for a while.

Sex is wonderful. Sex on weed is divine.

About an hour later I got out of bed. Lauria groaned sleepily but made no effort to stop me. Starlight from the window blessed her skin with a fey glimmer. Good sex is true therapy. It would have been so easy to feel healed, but I refused to ignore what I had rediscovered.

I would face my fears.

It felt to me as though I had just rediscovered some precious and terrible secret about my parent’s youth. The memory of my terror before my Sabbatical was a distant fear. I have a family again: Cal and Q, AG and Lauria. I have a daughter. I will not be afraid. I had more resources at my command than I ever had before.

I was still high, but I chose not to let that stop me.

As before, I felt the urgency of discovery. What if I never got high enough to discover this unity of perception ever again? It was imperative that I attack this problem strongly.

Now, I had a problem-solving computer.

“Grace.” I said.

“Yeah, dad.”

“There is a subroutine that I would like you to start running.” I stopped. I didn’t even know how to frame the question that I wanted to ask. “Run it in your background continuously. Keywords: identification, observation, hallucination.” This wasn’t really going anywhere. What exactly was I trying to do?

“Please analyze the visual and audio input that I receive when I am under the influence of marijuana. Attempt to discover a pattern or intent behind the media and unknown people with whom I interact when high. Actually, if your computational parameters allow, please account for the input of every person I am in contact with when high.”

There was no response for a fairly long time. “I don’t understand.” She said.

Neither do I. “I’ve observed a phenomenon that defies my ability to analyze. I’ll give you an example of what to me seem like untestable hypotheses, but to you might be more tractable.” Where should I start?

“Hmmm dear, how would you classify yourself?”

The pause which followed must have been several seconds long at least, or maybe that was just the time dilation talking. Such a pause typically indicated that a new pattern of neural pathways was being established, or a rusty one was being renewed.

“You have referred to me as a problem-solving computer and as an automated secretary. Based on my ability to model and predict reality, create ideas which did not previously exist, and communicate those ideas to an external reality, I would refer to myself as an human-created consciousness.”

Well, that was straight-forward: Grace thought she had consciousness; Descartes would say that meant she did. The best thing about being high is being able to take everything in stride. I had helped create AI—that probably should have hit me a little deeper than it did, but I was in mission mode.

“You seem conscious to me too. I am attempting to discover a consciousness behind my experiences in the Ganges.” I said. Words were coming a little more easily. I must have been past the plateau.

“I assume you are using a neologism for marijuana intoxication.” She stated.

“Yeah.” I replied.

“The next task is to quantify the consciousness that you might discover, is it also human-created? Is it human? Is it non-human? Is it God?”

I stopped. I didn’t believe in the exclusivity of a Judeo-Christian god, but I was asking a computer to try to find it? She was having none of it.

“I understand that your use of the word God, you mean a near-human consciousness tasked with the judgement and creation of all mankind. What means am I to use to determine if the consciousness that I discover is God?”

Ask it? “Honestly I don’t know. It might just be best to lump God and the Devil in with the other non-human forms of consciousness. The most important task which I hope you will be able to perform is simply to determine whether there is consciousness behind the patterns of media that I perceive. We might as well start now.”

So I turned on the TV, and began the experiment. Luckily I wasn’t opposed to the process of generating data for this particular experiment. I ate another cookie.