MEATSPACE JOE

by Martin Olson and Robert Sheckley

Robert Sheckley and I were out smoking cigarettes in my back yard overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice, California. It was a perfect day, late afternoon, end of summer, 1993. My wife brought us a cartoon-sized joint to celebrate the check we'd just received for writing a live action video game. The yard took on a blue and orangey hue as Bob started talking about the strange, recursive structure of Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, which led to a recurring topic between the two of us, writing The Ultimate Story. He was being witty, metaphysical and tastefully bombastic as I howled laughing, typing notes on my piece of shit laptop.

Our story premise was to create a simple narrative that engulfed all other stories. Among anarchic pantheists, our story premise was trendy and unoriginal, that the universe was a sentient being ignorant of its origin and destiny, if it had either. We figured the story would begin after this cosmic dunce had accidentally split off into infinite replicas of itself, organic and otherwise, manifesting itself in all levels of scale, all of its separate parts sharing the same knowledge and ignorance regarding its origin and destiny, if it had any knowledge about it, which it probably didn't.

The appealing thing about this premise, of course, was that in it the greatest thing that existed, the universe, was a moron. A sincere but self-absorbed cosmic idiot. Exactly like us. The simple conceit at the core of the entire Shecklian Universe.

We imagined the lowliest of these self-aware replicants, struggling to get by in a Beckett-like state of aloneness, crawling through the muck, wondering where exactly he was going. We called him Meatspace Joe, after William Gibson's use of meat as a metaphor for the physical world.

We never wrote the story, and now that Bob is gone, it will never be written. But when Gail Sheckley called and asked me to contribute to this book, I remembered how much we both loved this idea. I dredged up these old notes from an ancient five-inch diskette, found Bob's subsequent notes scrawled on a dot matrix printout, merged them into a cleaned-up draft, and present them here in all their ineffable, incomprehensible glory.

Be prepared to be bored. Feel free to skip to the end where I tell what happened to our video game script. But some of the philosophic asides that follow are Bob's own words, and it was damn fun. For what it's worth, then, what follows are the complete notes of our conversation by the canal, surrounded by ducks, lighting cigarettes and passing the giant joint back and forth, trying to nail down The Ultimate Story, a story that will never be told.

NOTES ON THE STORY OF MEATSPACE JOE

The mystics were wrong.

The point wasn't that the universe was made of mind stuff. The point was that it was shaped, somewhat sloppily, like a tube with Creation at one end and The End of Creation at the other.

The tricky part was that the two ends connected somehow. When you come right down to it, the whole thing was a mess that barely held together.

Whatever poor shlub thought up Creation in the first place apparently didn’t really think it through all the way. Then again, creating everything must have been a little on the impulsive side, which makes sense if you look at the crazy fireworks of the so-called Big Bang.

Then again, contrary to intuitive models of space-time cosmology, perhaps The End was not The Beginning at all.

All intelligent lifeforms, which, despite arguments to the contrary, includes homo sapiens on reedy planet earth, had dispassionately evolved after eons of self-regurgitations from dense life-forms into evanescent light-forms. At the end of this evolutionary process, humans are balls of light. These light beings settle and shake out into a default mode, appearing roughly eighteen years old, at the height of physical health. The light being shares the meta-time view of the creator, and therefore, at the end of the process, the entire span of evolution seems to take place in an instant, like time-lapse photography.

Humanity's ultimate evolution had finally been attained, and all life forms had evolved into spheres of conscious light sans physical bodies.

It did appear, however, that the End and the Beginning of the universe were one and the same, since the evolution of the universe took place outside of time, and was rigorously complete. The game seemed to be over the moment it began.

Significantly, at the end of cosmic evolution, with all the layers of gore and blood stripped away and replaced by sinews of light, and their corresponding layers of scriptures and myths stripped away from their minds, the truth was clear that ultimately no one was in charge, and that everyone was in charge.

(Olson's Note: The following rambling paragraph in particular should be skipped over and ignored; my wife however told me to leave it in, because it is mostly Bob.) Let us say for argument’s sake that there are those reading this whose minds are locked in a lazy, comforting world of myths created in the early evolutionary state of their particular life-form, those who are cogent and yet insane, who protect their minds from insanity by keeping their thoughts chained to linear logic and ignoring paradox and analogy as much as possible so that it all appears to make sense. Some replicants reading this may not be interested in the concept of ultimate evolution, having skirted the issue that heaven and nirvana are idiotic, cowardly and namby-pamby goals that a god would disdain; or alternatively they may find the very act of thinking about ultimate evolution unpleasant or annoying; or they may find themselves unable to remember the gist of it, since the concept requires mental toeholds in the mind without which these thoughts dissipate into a fog of potential synapse connections. (This last-listed case is the most touching and vulnerable state of affairs for sentient replicant, for it suggests a homeostasis,

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self-protective function which prohibits certain thoughts due to the organism’s sympathy with its own mental imperfection.)

Sit back and let's begin, as a part of you --the part that is attracted to the premise that the universe is alive, infinitely divided into sentient permutations, and all taking place in the same point--now welcomes the story of Meatspace Joe.

Joe was a being made of light who had evolved after eons from a meatspace life-form. Reincarnation was a bizarre reality due to the virtual indestructibility of the so-called electron elementals comprising each being's life-form-field. The personality of each incarnation of the same life-form-field was different and lacking memory circuitry connected to its former incarnation. (Yet due to the confluences of chance, on rare occasions some life-forms did remember a past life, ironically a drawback to the life-form rather than a boon; for who wants to remember being someone else?)

The shape of the story:

ON JOE AS A LIGHT BEING

Ultimate Evolution is a satisfying place. Evolution is complete. You did it. Game over. Sit back, have a cocktail and relax. On a practical level, it means that your light body exists in many different parallel universes simultaneously, and that when you look at an object, you see its past, present and future. After a while, the constant information overload seemed rather overwhelming and annoying to Joe. He yearned for a simpler time on physical material earth, when he perceived things one at a time and enjoyed seeing the surface of things, rather than multidimensional views of everything.

This sets the stage of our story: Joe reaches his ultimate evolutionary state as a light being, but unlike his other evolved brothers, Joe is strangely disappointed and dissatisfied. The secrets of the universe don't live up to all the eons of hype. He's bored at knowing everything (except his ultimate origin and destiny) and prefers the simpler, heavier dimension of earth, where every instant isn't drenched with profound meaning, where simplicity and ignorance are the comfort blankets of existence.

Joe can only exist in the material world if the vibration of his light body matches the vibration of earth, which it doesn't anymore. Not by a long shot. The only way to return to earth is to somehow de-evolve back to his less sophisticated, more primitive state of vibration, to make his light body denser. If his body is in effect "heavier", it will tend to sink down through dimensions until it reaches its own level of vibration.

Now Joe has a mission. He travels around his cosmic environs to find out what “things” he can absorb from outside himself that will allow him to have a denser light body.

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Finally he meets a light being psychologist and gets a tip. It seems that absorbing material and adding weight isn't the only way to do it. According to the shrink, it requires serious meditation exercises to de-evolve, and depends on practicing a more materialistic way of thinking and feeling. Since Joe's light body is simply a glowing representation of his thought- and emotion-streams, his thoughts will have to dumb-down through these difficult meditation exercises.

While following the shrink's dumbing-down exercises, Joe happens upon a gym on the outskirts of nirvana frequented by disgruntled light beings who are also bored with the perfection of ultimate evolution. In the gym, these guys practice group meditation exercises to purposefully dumb-down their thought-streams in order to beef up their thought-streams by practicing narrow, linear, pipe-line thought. They’ve found that by weaning themselves from metaphor and analogy entirely, the thought-streams in their heads tend to congeal into a “mental body”, the reverse beginnings of a physical brain. Even better, continued exercise of narrow, mundane thinking also creates a wall of thought-muscle in the manifesting brain which separates the higher evolutionary thoughts on the right side from the lower ones on the left side. Only through actively developing the illusion that you are separate from the oneness of the universe, can light beings lower their vibrations, form a physical brain, and begin to experience and savor things slowly and luxuriously, one thing after the other, as in the material world.

Fine, but while he's doing these exercises, is there some dumbing-down protein elixir he can buy at the gym to beef up his thought sinews faster while he does the stupidity exercises? It turns out that one of the light being trainers deals in the shadier black market stuff Joe is looking for. He gives Joe a package of so-called "stereo-electrons", particles which interlock in the developing brain to form a wall of meat between the higher and lower parts of Joe’s thought matrix. Just don't use too much of it.

Unfortunately, Joe doesn't listen. He wants to de-evolve faster, figures he can handle it and starts taking double-doses of the stereo-electron mixture. Joe slowly becomes addicted to the stuff, but his brain sinews are developing and thickening at quantum speed. At the same time Joe does his meditation exercises three times a day, concentrating on separatist concepts, divisive and racist ideologies, meditating on them until he actually believes them. Soon the wall in his mind solidifies and he finds that he is literally of two minds. Thrilled, he can almost feel what it will be like to savor things one after the other. He can hardly wait to once again attain the human level and see only the surface of things!

But before he can achieve his goal, he notices something horrible happening in his newly configured and separated thoughts. Not only have his thought-streams become swollen, contorted and disfigured, but the two halves of mind are now at odds, and begin a war against each other! The left brain, representing an individual separate from the universe, cannot stand interacting with the right brain, representing the feeling of oneness with the universe.

Trying to cool out his thoughts, Joe goes to see a thought movie. While standing in line at the theater, the conflict between left and right sides of his thoughts reaches a peak. A fight begins inside himself. He goes wild and begins thrashing around on the floor. And with his newly beefed up thought sinews, he's abnormally powerful; nobody can stop him as he has his mental

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breakdown and trashes the snack bar. The light being police show up, taser him and drag him away.

In this section Joe in effect goes mad and finds that the shrink he thought was his ally is in reality his enemy. The chairman of a psychiatry board, the shrink commits Joe to the most dangerous insane asylum in the cosmos. Even worse for Joe, the conflict in his mind has stopped his progress towards being able to experience things one thing after another, which was the whole point.

In the insane asylum, he soon finds that he is the most violently insane patient there, and that the warden is not interested in curing him. Curing Joe would be a lot of trouble; extra therapy means extra man-power which the warden does not have. Not to mention the long hours filing tedious thought reports on Joe's progress. Therefore the warden pow-wows with two light body male nurses who agree to strap Joe to an illegal Unexistinator, a particle beam attached to a random number generator which will scramble Joes particles, causing them to lose their spin and dissipate into nothingness, effectively unexisting Joe. However, an insane female inmate gets wind of the plan and warns Joe. Faced with the threat of unexistence, Joe rises to the occasion, concentrates and overpowers the two warring sides of his mind, forcing them to work together. Now he is able to create a clever plan and, with the help of the insane girl, he escapes from the asylum.

The aftermath and assessment.

After he escapes, Joe confronts the shrink who was responsible for committing him to the asylum. The shrink reveals that he did so with a secret agenda, to assist Joe in his de-evolution. For only the threat of real danger and extinction could motivate Joe to force his two minds to work together. The shrink thinks that Joe may indeed be ready; he puts his pencil in front of Joe's face and asks him what he sees...

Joe stares at the pencil... and for the first time, he doesn't see the past, present and future of the thought-form pencil, he just sees its surface! The shrink was right. The two parts of his mind have integrated, a result of having to work together for self-preservation. Now Joe can savor things one after the other and experience the wonder of shallow, linear thoughts.

Tears stream from Joe's eyes. What a joy to have simple, mundane thoughts! However, the shrink clucks, there is the little matter of the unavoidable negative side effect of growing denser, de-evolving and developing a brain. Namely, starting now, Joe may experience his descent through densities a bit too rapidly, ripping through thicker and thicker onion skins of parallel universes until he at last stabilizes in the parallel dimension of the material universe.

Hmm, Joe's not worried, but not exactly thrilled. He didn't want the change to happen quite that quickly. He had assumed that his de-evolution would be a gradual process, gently drifting into lower and lower levels till he gets back to the solid physical world. After all, it took him eons to evolve going the other direction, from a human to a light being. He wants to stay where he is for

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a bit, go to that new ephemeral Thai Restaurant on the corner, perhaps have a thought smoke and just cool out.

But it's too late. The shrink gives Joe a touching farewell as Joe's light body, growing heavier with each instant, fissures, shatters and dematerializes, sinking through the cracks in dimensions into the next-heavier density.

Joe yelps as he experiences an unpleasant transition, smelling the odor of burning sneakers, and finally materializes in a density called The Transparent World. This is the world of ghosts, a virtual world of murky emotions and shadowy creatures which can interpenetrate each other, a denser vibration halfway between the mental and material worlds.

For the nonce we follow Joe’s misadventures in the transparent world, having a toothache and needing a ghost dentist, trying to get a decent ghost latte, or desiring a sexy female ghost in the world of shadows.

But as the shrink warned him, his light body is now on a rapid course of de-evolution, a process out of his control and one that cannot be reversed. Just as Joe finds himself ensconced in the drama of The Transparent World, his habitual linear thinking is making his particles heavier and heavier. Something's gotta give and it finally does. Joe dematerializes from the ghost density and partially materializes in our normal physical world, at night, on Halloween. Not quite physical, he appears to human trick-or-treaters as a ghost. And due to his de-evolution, his ghost-body particles are spinning in a direction opposite to those in the material world, which gives him unpleasant special powers and perhaps unexpected abilities.

After his misadventures as a ghost, his increasingly dense particles finally and dramatically congeal into a bone fide physical body. Joe has finally become one with meat. Now fully entrained in the physical world, he finds himself at a Halloween party in a city with machines, smog, rain, pain, girls, apartments and parking tickets. No more flying around, now he's locked to the earth, as if there were magnets on the soles of his feet. He starts to remember what it was like, eons ago. It's great to be back here again, this time with the knowledge that the whole universe is a just a game and that there's nothing per se to be afraid of.

Mundane thoughts abound. Even his ridiculous physical body is a novel pleasure with its bizarre thirsts, hungers and drives. Finding a woman he loves (perhaps a physical counterpart of all of the light body women he's met during his de-evolution, he finds joy, peace and satisfaction in not examining her too closely. He's discovered the real secret of the universe, that peace is bobbing on the surface of things, and not dipping into the quagmire of existence too deeply. At last he has found his home and is determined to dumb-down his thoughts for as long as his physical body lasts and never evolve ever again.

But both he and the light body shrink made a deadly miscalculation.

The negative side effect of de-evolving doesn't stop at the material level. Because of the power of his unorthodox, reverse-evolutionary momentum, he can't stop his thoughts from becoming

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more and more linear and narrow, making his body particles heavier and heavier! The air around him gets thicker, darker. What's happening to him! The electrons of his physical body begin vibratng at a lower level, making his existence on earth incompatible! He screams as he slowly dematerializes from our world and slips down the rungs of evolution into an even denser dimension...

And thus Meatspace Joe journeys deeper into densities, materializing into heavier worlds of sediment and shadow. Now, inevitably, Meatspace Joe sinks faster, deeper, de-evolving rapidly until his essence is imprisoned in a clay-like viscosity which hardens into something akin to hardening plastic or molasses, which in turn solidifies into something akin to rock, his essence trapped like a bug in amber.

(Perhaps he is still capable of having a misadventure with other entities similarly trapped around him i their own globs of amber, other beings on their own de-evolutionary descent.)

Finally Meatspace Joe sinks deeper still, towards the very densest dimension at the lowest end of the evolutionary spectrum. He feels himself hardening in a tight black world so incredibly compact, even light can barely penetrate it, so dense it seems devoid of the possibility of change. Herein is an end to motion itself and, therefore, an end to time.

Cold, frozen, timeless blackness.

And now, as the blackness, which is nothingness itself, wraps around him, he realizes that his desire to become human again only made him a victim of his own desires, now trapped at The Bottom End of Creation, the Dead End of the Universe, an infinitely dense clot of blackness from which there is no possible escape. This, in fact, is Meatspace Joe's final thought in the last flickering blip of his consciousness... as the last thought particle in his mind slows, stops and blinks out.

There is nothing. Then, something rather unexpected happens.

The bottom suddenly falls out beneath him! Unable to withstand its own incredible density, the bottom bursts and Joe falls through it, locked in the block of black nothingness. And as he tumbles chaotically, the thick black shell around him fissures, cracks and crumbles. Meatspace Joe hatches from his egg of nothingness as he falls, emerging like the self-born Phoenix, a glowing light being, roughly age eighteen, exactly as he started.

Ironically, the densest blackest dead end is in fact a secret short cut to the other end of creation. The mystics were wrong. The universe is not circular, but rather infinite layers of parallel universes with extremes of equal and opposite densities that break through to each other like flats in a creaking Hollywood set. It seems that the densities are ruled by the Law of Opposites. The Very Lowest cannot help but to be One with The Very Highest.

Once again in his light-body, back where he started at the highest plateau of the evolutionary scale, Joe stabilizes and looks around. He certainly recognizes the place, but he can't quite

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remember what just happened. And a fortunate thing it is to forget, or despair would surely follow. And who needs despair if you're a light being?

Joe cannot think the following thoughts, but we can:

This simple but awesome faculty of forgetfulness, usually thought of as a liability, may be a secret self-protective function which kicks in once a being has explored the path of Reverse Evolution, and has thereby experienced all of the secrets of existence.

Perhaps forgetfulness is the only faculty that created beings do not share with their sad sack creator --the ability to forget and to start over, to experience things fresh before the inevitable boredom of existence eventually sets in.

And, although our story is over, this brings up an interesting sidebar regarding the difference between a hypothetical creator and his replicant creations. For there are two telling and intractable differences between Little Joe and Big Joe, differences which, when all is said and done, make the creations superior to the creator:

1. The Creator is forever locked in a loop of remembering, unable to forget that there is nothing but himself.

2. The Creator is saddled by the yoke of his own existence, and unable to do the one thing that his lowliest creations can do whenever they want. They can kill themselves and he can't. The Law of Unexistence is greater than any god.

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Well, that's it, and this is Martin again. Sheckley left for Portland the next morning. That afternoon, we found out that the president of the gaming company decided to kill the live action video game we had just written. It turns out he was divorcing his wife who was the lead actress in the game, and he wanted to snuff out her acting career before it started.

Thus our game story of multiple forking paths instantly unexisted itself, although it still existed in our minds.

But twenty-six years later, four years after Bob's death, our non-existent story called Meatspace Joe unexpectedly weaseled its way into a tenuous, ephemeral existence of its own, through the story you have just read.

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