Brain Hammer

Infinite Will
Episode 5.3
Back in the Hospital

You are back in the hospital again. You fucking idiot. You, who think yourself so smart, are buried in a mountain of pills, a mile-high mountain of missed opportunities and messed up moments, your infinite will scrubbed from your brain time and time (and time and time) again. As much as I need and want to save you, to make reparations, I hate you. I was you once. Literally. And sometimes I feel the temptation to time-travel again, to meet you, the former me, and to blot you out.

Lots of people fuck around with time travel before they fully understand it. Hell, no one fully understands it. But once more of the bigger picture comes into view, peeps start realizing they got themselves into something they wish they hadn’t. Can you kill your own grandfather? Before you were born? It seems you can. Kind of. It starts dawning on people that they can’t travel into their own past. Then it starts dawning on people that maybe no-one actually travels in time at all. Call this realization “Time Traveler’s Malaise.” There are others who debate whether there is such a thing as causal influence. And whether the human will introduces an ability to actually change anything. There are those who say there is no such thing as free will. Others say that free will is the only thing that really exists and that time is an illusion created by choice. That so-called movement in time is really just the action of the will forcing human consciousness through the space of possible perception instants.

While unconscious, you have been fucked with by the nurse. She’s a DeRF, a Deicidal Reflexological Fundamentalist. She’s located your shoe computers and installed so-called “Sole-Saver” software. Screensavers for your feet, they provide an informative massage that’s supposed to realign your special doo-dads or magical beans or some such crap. The Sole-Savers work by continuously scrolling across the plantar surface the fifty-nine propositions of The Meditations on the Ecstatic Exteriority of the Particularated Ego and the ten Basic Precepts of Deicidal Reflexological Fundamentalism. There are rumors that the sole-saving software subliminally installs some kind of creepy spy-ware directly into your nervous system.

These rumors are true.

The abuse of extra-terrestrially procured time-travel pills is rampant and various versions of myself/yourself are wrestling with their effects. Also: infinite-will pills. The ingestible nootropic nanotech at the heart of each infinite-will pill allows me/you to hijack our own brain. Hot-wiring it into an engine of indefatigable zealotry. Whatever you wish for when the pill takes effect is something that you will subsequently take every physically possible effort to achieve and only the completion of the task or outside forces could possibly halt these efforts. If, for instance, when the pill kicks in, you wish to walk to New Orleans from New York, you will immediately begin walking and continue walking no matter how many blisters you get on your feet, no matter how badly sprained or broken your ankle/ankles is/are, etc. You will drag yourself to New Orleans on the bloody stumps of your footless legs if need be.

There are, of course, a few things that can stop you. Death, for one. Having the infinite-will-pill nanotech forcibly scrubbed from your brain is another.

You have learned your way around the ins and outs of infinite-will-pills through long hard trial and error and have had your nervous system forcibly scrubbed in emergency neural surgery no small number of times. You’ve got a couple of wishes you’re working to fulfill right now. Wishes that have landed you on the shit-lists of various organizations, powers-that-be, and behind-the-scenes-forces. Wishes that are logically impossible to satisfy without going back in time. The particular wishes are (1) to “Become God of all MongsterZ” and (2) to alter The Meditations on the Ecstatic Exteriority of the Particularated Ego. Your goals are nothing short of, ultimately, becoming a literal god on earth, or at least becoming part of a group-mind that pretty much constitutes the same thing.

The ElderGodz aren’t keen on the competition. And the DeRFs are god slayers. So guess what?

You fucking idiot.

“It is the faculty of will only, or freedom of choice, which I experience to be so great that I am unable to conceive the idea of another that shall be more ample and extended; so that it is chiefly my will which leads me to discern that I bear a certain image and similitude of Deity.”

–Rene Descartes

“My hands are shaky and my knees are weak. I can’t seem to stand on my own two feet. Who do you thank when you have such luck? I’m in love. I’m all shook up.”

–Otis Blackwell and Elvis Presley

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Next episode: Multiple Selves Management, or: DoppelgangBang

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 10th, 2004 at 6:21 pm and is filed under Infinite Will, Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.