Time Off

Chapter Three

Our tributary eventually joined the mighty Colorado and we continued to flow westward. At some point, we were sucked out of the river and carried in an aqueduct before finally being released in a huge open field in southern California. No sooner had we seeped into the ground, when we got sucked up by a grass root and ended up near the top of the little plant. Some big cow soon nibbled us right off and we went for a long, wet sticky ride through that animal before ending up somewhere in its eyeball of all places. Now cow eyeballs are cool but apparently not very useful to humans, so when the poor cow, whom we had named Bessie, finally got put down with a cash knocker over in Coalinga, Bessie's eye was sent to some horror show in a remote building where all of Bessie's unused parts, along with those of her neighbors, were ground up, dried and dumped into big sacks. 

 Our sack sat in a warehouse for what seemed like forever, but eventually was loaded on a truck and delivered to a big outfit near Modesto. And what do you know? This time we were gobbled up by a chicken, Dixie, and she was an attractive brown Lohmann hen with a huge appetite. Long story short, I found myself right smack in the middle of an egg yolk. Now that egg was packed up and ended up with a food distributor that specialized in provisioning Hispanic markets and restaurants. 

I soon found myself on a messy countertop at the El Grullense in Palo Alto awaiting my turn to get wrecked, burned, wrapped and eaten by someone. Sevy worked early mornings on Thursdays, helping to cover the breakfast rush, which involved a flood of plumbers, gardeners, carpenters, electricians and a few daring students or hackers that had discovered what real Mexican food tasted like. Sevy didn't have early classes on Thursday, but had to rush home by nine thirty and get to his first class by nine fifty. At nine fifteen that day, he got behind the grill and made three extra-special breakfast burritos and ran home, which was only a few blocks away. You guessed it. I was in one of those tasty burritos.

As luck would have it, on that particular day, Angel was home because she had a dental appointment and had just returned to Buena Vista and was getting ready to leave. Sevy reached into the bag and pulled out a winner, namely my burrito, as Angel kissed Sevy's forehead and walked out the door to catch the number twenty two bus at nine forty three. Angel was relieved to see that unlike normal days when she left around seven and the bus was slammed with people, this bus had plenty of seats open. She settled into one and opened her large handbag and pulled out the burrito. She thought of Sevy as she ate it because it was made especially for her and she knew it. Just as the burrito for Lolita was a special one made just the way she liked it. She sighed with gratitude and then swallowed, sending me tumbling down my last digestive tract to date. 

 I didn't have any great illusions about where I was going at that point and I won't get into what was the most likely scenario. But then I really won the lottery. Through countless nearly random events, I was chosen to make my new home in a neuron cell within Angel's hippocampus. Wow. How unlikely. Most cells don't live very long so it's easy to get swept up by cells that need new materials as they continue to divide and replace themselves. But brain cells, now that's a different story. You have to be a very lucky mineral to be permanently incorporated into an existing cell through a repair process or something. And the hippocampus plays a big role in learning, memories, and emotions. Wow again. I would never have concocted my plan if not for my great fortune.

And it was while here that I realized the opportunity. No doubt I might have had better luck with someone else, given the subject matter involved. But let's consider what was good. Angel was relatively young, living in a technically savvy community, working at Stanford no less, mainly in the physics buildings? Hello! And actually, Angel was highly intelligent. She could have been a physicist under different circumstances.

And now the circumstances are different and she will be a physicist, I hope. You see, I only have one shot at this. Because I need help from my colleagues. The first time, when they don't know what I'm up to, they will have to react according to how I need them to react. But after this seven zeptosecond break, game's over. They will all be wise to it and ignore me. Imagine how frustrating that is. 

Think about it. I get a seven zeptosecond break about three trillion times per second. If I could use all my times off to make this happen, it would be a snap. But I have only one shot at this. The way it works is that I can plant an idea. But I can't do it alone. I need a lot of help to amplify the signals. We call it ringing. We are normally not supposed to do it, but if we do, it indicates something like an emergency. We have free will and something like your first amendment. We can assemble in terms of actions and thoughts if we choose to. We call it clustering. Normally clusters are limited to maybe a fraction of a quark or it could extend even beyond a nucleus. 

 For my plan to work, and unbeknownst to my colleagues, I became something of a politician, and I managed to establish a cluster nearly the size of a cubic centimeter. Everyone agreed. It was the biggest, baddest cluster ever assembled in the entire universe. I convinced everyone that this would be the new norm. I argued that when hosted by an emergent, we had a duty to be able to protect them, which we could do by alerting them with enough signal to help them act more swiftly or make a better decision or what have you. So with this mega-cluster at my fingertips, located squarely in the middle of Angel's hippocampus, I devised and waged my seven zeptosecond campaign to change the course of history.