"The Wasonica Correction" first appeared in The Fifth Science Fiction Megapack (Wildside Press 2012). It can also be found in the short story collection Night Alleys, recently published by Paranoia Press. "The Wasonica Correction" © James C. Stewart 2010

Reality Environment co-ordinates: April 2, 1968. Wasonica, Ontario. 185 Laurier Street.

I slipped a hand into my pocket, reassuring myself for the second time in as many minutes the last twenty capsules of NDT were still there. My fingers found the crumpled plastic pouch and I felt short-lived relief.

The Beatles were on the radio--

(She loves you, yeah yeah yeah)

--and outside my living room window a group of long hairs stoned on youth and whatever was popular passed with petulant noises. They left staccato images in their wake. I rubbed my eyes. I tried to stay focused.

It had been seventy-two hours and still my mind reverberated with aftershocks.

Incredible.

Without a doubt the most powerful compound I've experimented with to date. It would seem Leary and those clowns at Harvard were children playing with chemistry sets.

The room tightened around me. My left arm began to tremor. I blinked and saw scan lines.

Another blink.

They were gone.

The Beatles gave way to news. Apparently the Americans had bombed a place called Tranh Hoa.

Neural dimensional tryptamine. I worried about the side effects. A balance will always be struck, and clearly NDT demanded a serious adjustment.

My arm began to shake more violently.

Another glance out the window.

There was a man sitting on a bench in the park across the street. An incongruous man-he wore a black three-piece suit and sunglasses, sunglasses though the day was a dingy shade of gray. The kids lounging on the nearby grass paid him no attention, despite the fact his silver crew-cut gave him a distinctly cop vibe.

He seemed to be watching my house. We seemed to make eye-contact. He seemed to smile. Unfortunately I was in no condition to judge such things. After all, paranoia had been my constant companion for the past three days.

The radio was playing a noisy commercial for a downtown car lot when the spasms in my arm began affecting my body.

I smiled. It was going to be another full blown aftershock.

I'd discovered NDT by accident. In 1965 I'd been researching a variety of South American plants, and found myself in the jungle rain forest of French Guiana searching for the exotic philodendron moonenii.

Instead I found a conspicuously simple looking plant I've come to call the proto ontologica. It's a small plant with undistinguished features, but it blossoms into a slightly more interesting flower of purple and yellow. The key component in neural dimensional tryptamine lay in the petals of this flower.

I discovered this watching the bizarre rituals of the Daorca tribe, who took a rudimentary compound of proto ontologica through their nasal cavities. They'd dried the petals, and reduced them to a powder which was then mixed with the more standard psychoactive datura inoxia, which the Aztecs had called toloatzin. A member of the tribe would then use a hollow reed to literally blow the compound into the receipt's nostrils. The only exception to this seemed to be an elder 'priest', who took the mixture by rubbing it in to his eyes. After this 'ceremony', the Daorca would dance as if animals until succumbing to the compound's effects, which resulted in total catatonia for three to four hours, though I'd seen it last as long as six. Within this state, the Daorca claim they "see the sideways other".

I returned to Wasonica University with a large cache of proto ontologica (smuggled into the country pressed between the pages of my books) and thirty-six grams of the Daorca compound.

By the spring of 1966 I'd started to experiment with my own compounds. I've filled several journals with these results. Suffice to say the experiments of '67 and early '68 were both terrifying and exhilarating. Mixing the Daorca compound with psilocybin and lysergic acid diethylamide, there's a seemingly hermetic control calendar and the standard datura inoxia which invaded the Yucatan. Long before the arrival of the Spanish this was accomplished with the whole punishment-reward system, when the punishment scribe would literally, on a molecular level, absorb and become the compound. Now translate the Mayan control calendar into modern terms, modern space, the Mayan control calendar exception to this seemed to be an elder 'priest', who rubbed newspapers, radio and television into his eyes. They would then dance as if the citizens are subjected, or maybe even subjugated. The 'priests' wisely conceal the effects, which would result in total catatonia, contradictory data, and vociferously deny as long as five, which is of course two and three. Within this state the proto ontologica definitely has powerful occult properties. Gary pushed nagging guilt from his mind and broke down before the Aztecs...never mind the gold of the Spaniards. All control systems fired up the laptop and logged over-balances. Reward and revolts. His avatar was where he'd left it. Leap into modern terms, modern space. A tesseract collides with a penteract. The mass media of a weapons facility he'd been ordered to destroy form a ceremonial calendar to which all culverts shown on a miniaturized blueprint conceal themselves behind Christ's false Mass. Gary felt his palms start to sweat, exist. Like Mayan priests they can control the powder which was then mixed with text books dropping onto a desk. Total War II, which the Aztecs had called toloatzin. The Daorca priest told me I was in his dream...then he gave me a malicious smile, and reminded me that meant he was in mine...

Reality Environment co-ordinates: April 2, 2009. Wasonica University. J.F. Boxer Dormitory. Room 419.

Gary pushed nagging guilt from his mind and dropped the text books onto his desk. An engineering midterm could wait...never mind he was already failing the course.

He fired up the laptop and logged in.

His avatar was where he'd left it: level twenty-three-a ditch bordering the chemical weapons facility he'd been ordered to destroy. He started crawling, searching for the culvert shown on the miniaturized blueprint running along the bottom of his display.

Gary felt his palms start to sweat, the excitement palpable. Total War II was awesome, certainly superior to its predecessor.

There was the culvert.

His avatar cocked an automatic, and pumped the cyber-skeleton beneath the camo's second skin. He made short work of the grate covering the opening. He grinned...the culvert was large enough for him to crouch n' walk.

Dig the graphics on the big rats crawling around in the dirty water. Dig the detail on the corrugated steel, perfect right down to the rivets.

The tight space darkened. Gary flipped on the avatar's infra-red. His pulse quickened. In close quarters like this the game normally sent some sort of ugly nasty--given his position on the schematics, he braced himself for mutants chemically altered by the Soya Corporation.

A glint in the dark.

What was that? He raised his weapon. The glint lengthened into a man pointing an automatic--wait--

A mirror.

Gary stopped.

"What the hell?"

The reflection of his avatar in the mirror scrolled away. In its place a breathing, moving view of someone's living room. No high-end graphics here...this looked like a security feed from a closed-circuit and extremely high-def video camera.

There was a man on a couch. He wore little John Lennon glasses. He looked freaked-out. The whole room appeared dated...the Sixties maybe. Even stranger, the man on the couch seemed to see him...the man on the couch suddenly grinned like a loon and walked toward him, and Stellar Vision's first-person-shooter Total War II features an intriguing plot coupled with a kick-ass platform...a terrorist threat dedicated to bringing down the President. LBJ: That goddamned march of King's. The big visuals rock and the game includes a mission deep inside enemy territory. JEH: They've fulfilled my worst fears, triggering a global war. In order to defeat him, he's bringing an army to Washington to protest me--after all, the scene is designed to evoke the atrocities of torches unleashing a bloodbath. LBJ: I asked to represent one of the largest leaps in video card technology. He's killing my chance to get reelected. The AXI Rodon 7800 has quite easily taken the top spot for single-player gaming. Bobby Kennedy. JEH: I will let you in on a secret...I'm against many of the dual-GPU cards on which Kennedy allowed me to tap and bug King himself, on-board cooling and a core speed of 850MHz, misgivings in a rush to embrace the Communist King. The good Reverend is creating dissent. Log books show an attempt to construct a philosophical reinterpretation of the human condition that would provide an escape from their impossible situation. 243. Hyper-cubed shadows executing impossible motions against a void-white wall. COINTELPRO. I'm putting forty-four agents on King. They will disseminate derogatory data nationwide. I discovered NDT by accident. The system itself evokes a false-flag liquidation event, and there are certainly less expensive, but equally functional video cards--

Gary logged out.

His face was a grayish white; his shirt soaked with sweat, and his hands held the laptop in a white-knuckled death grip.

Reality Environment co-ordinates: April 3, 2009. Wasonica University. J.F. Boxer Dormitory. Room 419.

Gary watched the light in the room fade from gray-bright to early-evening dim. A slow loneliness came for him without notice.

At least he'd stopped feeling ill.

His laptop lay discarded on the desk, unplugged with battery pulled. None of the gamers he'd talked to had found the strange easter-egg. He'd even gone so far as to consult with Derek Butazoni, the campus expert in Total War II. When he'd asked the acne-spotted freshman about the closed-circuit feed hidden on the twenty-third level the little bastard had looked at him like he was completely insane. The short conversation ended with Derek sneering, "So who put you up to this? Was it that dick Skyler? Tell him he's funny like cancer."

Gary snuck a glance at his laptop.

Had the experience been real? Had he brushed against the truly weird?

A memory came to him, a physics lecture a few months back...Dr. McCoy had veered off-topic while discussing quantum mechanics and string theory. Inevitably some dolt had raised his hand, bringing up the concept of a multi-dimensional Universe and parallel worlds. Gary had been surprised when Dr. McCoy entertained the idea.

"It's completely within the realm of possibility. It's been suggested by minds greater than mine everything that can happen has indeed happened. What if time is like an ever-branching tree with countless possible futures?" He'd smiled at the befuddled class with his teacher's smile, "Consider coming to a corner and turning left instead of right. Some philosophers argue every time a choice of quantum alternatives is possible both options actually occur, with the entire Universe splitting into infinite separate future worlds."

Dr. McCoy had paused, allowing the idea to percolate. Then, "What if transposition across these parallel Universes not only explains paranormal dreams, but even the occasional disappearance?"

The question haunted Gary...and on his desk the laptop seemed to wink at him.

Reality Environment co-ordinates: April 3, 1968. Wasonica, Ontario. The Delmar Café.

A Formica tabletop. A glass of what appeared to be Coca-Cola. I raised my head.

A coffee shop.

Jesus.

Complete blackout. Zero memory of leaving my house. Zero memory of arriving here. Spooky bad juju. Definitely more than just another aftershock. I glanced at my watch--a little over ninety-six hours since I'd ingested the NDT.

Panic slapped me. My hand flew to my pocket.

They were still there.

I relaxed.

Strange images played across the back of my eyelids--a student (not now...but when?) hunched over a plastic keyboard materializing, suspended some five feet above the floor in the center of my living room. It was a powerful hallucination, one which had apparently lodged itself into a fold in my psyche.

Everything else remained a foggy shade of vague.

A waitress passed my table and glanced at me with barely concealed disgust. I could hardly blame her. I hadn't showered, shaved or changed my clothes in four days.

The image of that kid at the plastic keyboard just hanging there nagged. I was at the edge of a discovery, I could feel it. Had the image been more than just an hallucination? Had the NDT allowed for a tachyon bio-shift as I'd theorized? The possibility filled me with excitement. It would mark the culmination of my research. But living the experience was something entirely different. For beyond the potential discovery lay an abyss of madness, an abyss I felt myself sliding hopelessly toward--

But the hallucination vexed. And 'hallucination' was the wrong word--better, perhaps, was the term 'reality expansion image'. But what had I witnessed? A view of the Daorca's "sideways other"? And if I had glimpsed a parallel line, another space, had the shift been physical? Had a true tachyon bio-shift occurred? I couldn't begin to comprehend the mathematics behind such a phenomenon. But there was more to it than mere physics.

I sipped Coca-Cola, and recalled the odd case of Virginia Tighe, a supposed example of reincarnation.

Mrs. Tighe was a wife and mother living in Pueblo, Colorado in the early 1950s. She'd been put into a hypnotic trance by her psychiatrist, and 'regressed' to a time before her birth. In this state she described her life as Bridey Kathleen Murphy, born in Cork, Ireland in 1798. She gave incredible detail about her parents, school, husband and life, which ended in 1864. All the descriptions Mrs. Tighe gave held up under scrutiny. Particularly striking were Mrs. Tighe's usages of dialect expressions and slang, common in that region of Ireland prior to 1900, but far from common in twentieth century America, and certainly not something a housewife would pick up by casual reading some ninety years later.

A book published about the case caused a sensation and fierce controversy, especially among the Christian community, who found the idea of reincarnation unacceptable.

But to me this was only part of the story.

Suppose instead of Virginia Tighe being the reincarnation of Bridey Murphy that their minds were operating on the same wavelength. Suppose Mrs. Tighe's consciousness, after being regressed past her birth, searched out, or 'attuned' to Bridey Murphy. The receptive, essentially unconscious mind of Virginia Tighe relays the images broadcast by Bridey Murphy in the previous century across the barriers of space-time. After all, isn't this at least as likely as the idea of the soul (no small concept itself!) somehow being reborn?

The life-like 'reality expansion image' of the boy at the plastic keyboard: there's no reason to think that image would be transmitted--probably via tachyons--in verbal terms, but rather by the entire spectrum of sensory experience. No doubt it had seemed real...if my theory was correct, it was real.

In that moment I resolved to take another capsule of NDT--this time ensconced in the relative safety of my laboratory at the University.

I dropped coins onto the table and hurriedly left the restaurant.

Harsh, unexpected sunlight blinded me. Squinting, and feeling somewhat vampiric, I headed toward the University. The street was quiet...the few cars that did pass left funky after-images, the NDT lingering.

In a sidewalk café further up the street a well-dressed man in sunglasses and a silver crew-cut sipped espresso and read a newspaper. I caught the headline:

KING TRAVELS TO MEMPHIS

He glanced at me with shaded lenses as I passed. A sense of something akin to déjà vu gripped me--now where the hell did I know him from?

Reality Environment co-ordinates: April 4, 2009. Wasonica University. J.F. Boxer Dormitory. Room 419.

Gary watched the sunrise.

He hadn't slept much. He thought maybe he'd caught a half-hour or so around four in the morning, but that was about it. He'd alternated between gnawing anxiety, staring at infomercials and furtive peeks at his laptop...an on-going study of inert plastic, circuitry and microchips.

Gary giggled to himself at the absurdity of it.

He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten.

And then, as the sun rose over the horizon, the answer came to him.

The experience in-game had surely been nothing--

(it didn't feel like nothing)

--but the only way to prove it was to go back in, back to the culvert on level twenty-three.

"Fuck it. I can't live like this."

Gary was halfway to his laptop when he realized he'd spoken aloud.

Reality Environment co-ordinates: April 4, 1968. Wasonica University. Department of Biology. Botany Laboratory.

I cleaned up at one of the sinks in the lab. I changed into a sweatshirt I'd forgotten in an office closet. I picked a mango from the tree in the greenhouse, and ate it with coffee while glancing at Shimizu's Insectivorous Plants.

It proved an intriguing reminder of evolution's cruelty.

I almost felt like myself.

I took a capsule of neural dimensional tryptamine with water. The remaining capsules I dropped into a locking desk drawer.

I returned to reading, but anticipation of the NDT's effect kept my mind racing. Back when I was writing my doctoral thesis I'd become interested in tachyons as a form of faster-than-light communication. A tachyon is a faster-than-light particle, not to be confused with a tardon, a more mundane, slow-moving particle found in everyday life.

The most fascinating aspect of this bit of theoretical physics is the way time flows for tachyons. If we look at our tardon world, the faster a particle goes the slower time passes, until at the (impossible to reach) speed of light time is standing still. In the tachyon world, the same pattern applies, except that time runs backwards compared with the flow in the tardon world.

I remembered a conversation with a brilliant young physics student named Randall McCoy--he'd suggested the basic problems associated with communicating across interstellar distances could be solved if we sent bursts of tachyons, instead of sluggish electromagnetic radiation moving merely at the speed of light, from a 'transmitter' to a 'receiver'. The only snag--you might get the 'answer' to your message before you sent it.

Strange ideas--ideas that had stuck with me, ideas I'd played with, examined, and slowly built into the theoretical concept of the tachyon bio-shift, a theory which had driven my research deeper into the sometimes dangerous realm of psychoactive compounds.

A tremor went through my body...the NDT was beginning to hit my nervous system. At roughly the same time it occurred to me we are manifestations of a single consciousness--a super mind whose attention flickers across all our lives, making us all different three-dimensional facets of the same ultimate consciousness. I believe there was very likely a distortion of space-time in the culvert. He was just a theory of relativity offering a scientific explanation which looked totally real. Ditto the water beneath his feet. Clairvoyance, astral projection, provided the mirror was right where he'd left it. Gary's individual consciousness can alter the bio-gravitational field, the mirror gradually filling the screen. He is the observer. I conjecture the distortion scan be manipulated, and the hippie from before was at the location of the participator. The hippie's eyes were saucers, the time-flow at the object being observed and influenced. Differential in the time-flow of the participator and object can in principle be so adjusted that the participator working within his local light cone 'sees' into the probable future or past of the object. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. The Shadow reaching out from the Chaos reaching a blood-stained hand toward Man. Strange circumstances. O.I. (Outside Influence). Soft-point bullets. Hard to ID. Ballistic holocaust. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, and Gary shook his head in a vain attempt to rid himself of what he was seeing. It happened as he was leaving his room. Memphis. Hippie-zombie's hand began breaking through the computer. On the balcony outside of his motel room. A single shot breaking through the computer shatters the system. Pronounced dead. The man in the suit with gray hair mouthing words, staring at Gary. Soft thunks of noise. Strange circumstances surrounding the assassination. Gary only later realized must've been brain matter. Lyndon B. Johnson declared a day of mourning. The reality expansion image had opened. It kind of...I dunno...unfolded...into reality. There he was, stunned, staring at me from behind his plastic keyboard. It was accomplished. A tachyon bio-shift. My God. I reached out a hand...reached toward the image...pure joy...

A man sporting a silver crew-cut walked into the lab. He had something in his hand. I frowned. It was a pistol equipped with a silencer. He calmly shut the door behind him. He removed a pair of dark glasses and regarded me sadly with a pair of striking white eyes.

"Where is it?"

My eyes betrayed me, glancing at the desk drawer.

Silver crew-cut gazed, stone-faced, at the boy at the plastic keyboard, at the reality expansion image opened in the center of the room.

His attention came back to me. The room breathed around him.

The pistol came up, the silencer level with my head.

He said, "I'm sorry."

Reality Environment co-ordinates: April 4, 2009. Wasonica University. J.F. Boxer Dormitory. Room 419.

Total War II.

Gary's avatar crawled along the culvert on level twenty-three. He was still impressed with the game's graphics. The rats still looked totally real. Ditto the water beneath his feet.

His eyes narrowed.

The bizarro mirror was right were he'd left it.

Gary took a deep breath. He moved toward it with caution, the mirror gradually filling his screen. And then it was there, the all too life-like closed-circuit feed. Except it was different now, it was an office or a study or something and the hippie from before was there--

Gary's heart threatened to beat through his chest.

The hippie's eyes were saucers behind John Lennon specs, crazed saucers focusing on him. And then the hippie raised an arm like some sort of fucked up hippie-zombie, a hippie-zombie hand reaching toward him--

Gary closed his eyes and shook his head in a vain attempt to rid himself of what he was seeing.

He opened his eyes.

Gary's bladder almost let go when the hippie-zombie hand began pushing against the computer screen, began breaking through the computer screen--

Then a man with short gray hair wearing a suit walked into the room behind the hippie, the hand disappearing, the hippie turning and the man in the suit mouthing words, and staring at Gary.

Gary watched in helpless, open-mouthed shock as the man with short gray hair raised a pistol and shot the hippie twice in the head the shots soft thunks of noise the bloody spray flecked with bits of gray Gary only later realized must've been brain matter turn off the power and remove the 74LS00 from Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony location 6C, bend pin 243 of the IC out re-install permanent peace. It solves no social problem: if the IC does not make contact with pin 243 of the merely complicated ones. As someone who stands here as a direct and grounded motherboard pin 243 by shorting it. I am a living testimony to the moral force of a non-violent jumper wire. My name is JB Surge. If you're receiving this--nothing passive--nothing naïve--in the creed of the Muan bicom block. I don't have much time. A head-of-state is sworn to protect and defend my nation. The Muan Federation's 'Kallisti Protocol'. Beware of The Book. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle. Trust no one. There is no cure. They've attempted manufacturing human beings. Make no mistake: evil does exist in the tachyon world, the pattern applies. NDT's effect kept my mind racing. Back in the flow of the tardon world, I'd become interested in tachyons as a form of communication. Randall McCoy. The basic power moving particles (politics) in everyday life echoes across interstellar distances. They may come as people you know. They have in the past, because they have no past. You are living in a three-dimensional illusion ruled by an abstract and Terran-based concept known as 'time'. I too lived under these artificial constraints until this experiment will force the processor to sequentially read everything, including memory-mapped O.I. locations that turn on the drive motor(s)--

Gary logged out.

Reality Environment co-ordinates: April 5, 1968. The New York Times headline and subhead:

MARTIN LUTHER KING SLAIN IN MEMPHIS

NATIONAL GUARD CALLED OUT

Reality Environment co-ordinates: April 5, 2009. Wasonica University. M. Deane Harris Library.

Tall arched windows streamed dusty morning sunlight. The library was a cavernous space flaunting lofty vaulted ceilings, dark wood-paneling and dour white faces in ornate frames. There were maybe a dozen students being studious. A few glanced up as he passed, but quickly looked away when they caught his anxious eye and agitated appearance.

After forty minutes Gary found what he was looking for in a lonely, seemingly forgotten section dedicated to the history of the University and its surrounding region.

It was a slender volume, a hard cover bearing the curious title, Wasonica: Scandals & Phantoms, written by one Dr. Leland Summers. A cryptic biography above a 1979 copyright said Summers was a historian with a "penchant for parapsychology" who'd worked at the University from 1971 to 1975.

Gary took the book to a reading area by one of the windows, his hand trembling slightly but uncontrollably as he turned the mouldy pages.

He was surprised. He'd had no idea his choice in institutions of higher-education harbored such a checkered and colorful history. There'd been unexplained fires in the dorms, strange apparitions in the physics department, a few sex scandals, a murder or two and the author himself had apparently witnessed "something that defied all logic".

And there it was among the strange and sordid stories. A photograph of a smiling Dr. Oliver Ross--the hippie who'd been shot in front of him, the hippie who'd lived inside a mirror inside his computer.

The photograph had a caption and nothing else, just a mere footnote in the extraordinary history of the University.

Turns out Dr. Oliver Ross was a professor in the Biology Department back in the Sixties. The caption said he'd been shot during a robbery in one of the labs. The caption said his killer had never been caught, which Gary found funny, since the killer was loitering at a bus stop right outside the window.

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