CHAPTER X BREAK ON THRU #2 # LOVE OF MAN WOULD KILL ME The casts were off now. Dr Hewitt had taken them off just a few days before...sometime between the conception of the COMPLEX NOISE-GATE & its actual construction....I had spent many long afternoons in the physics lab at the Invisible College, reifying the schematics Dr Bender had MODEMed me. The cast-cutting instrument took the cast off thru sonic resonance w/ the synthe-plast. Nancy had sat holding my legs w/ plastic cast-material all the way up to my thighs; the resonance had split the thing like Jove's thunderbolt...I could walk now. A dozen feet at a time, aided by 1 of the nurses. I could walk! "I'll be going home in a few days," I told Melanie, who sat on the bed, for once not blushing in embarassment or livid w/ hatred. I looked into angel eyes...was what I was doing right, mutating her into a kinder, gentler Melanie by re-programming her brains w/ the monad? Love...you cannot force someone to love you, not even w/ a monad.... "This is it?" she asked. "The machine? I mean like, it'll cure me? I can pass the PET-scan?" Dr Rose was sitting quietly in a chair that she'd brought in from her office. Actually, I suppose it had been her "confidential" conversation w/ Melanie which had gotten her to undertake this experiment--perhaps even threats w/ the van Hohenheim laws; Melanie, like any mental patient, had no rights. It sucked. "The ring is the transdcucer for the micro-miniature Shaft; the signal-processing programs are in the computer," Amber Rose said, taking a sip of coffee from a styrofoam cup. "Yeah, if you can pass the PET-scan...we'll reinstate you. At full salary." Melanie looked apprehensive. She slid the ring onto her finger like some promise of engagement...w/ a pervert. I felt grievously, deeply ashamed of the way I had treated her. She was probably still deathly afraid of me; probably had been forced into this experiment. By Rose. I remembered Dr Rose, suddenly a stormer like the rest of us, suddenly lewd & lascivious...offering joy in an instant, pleasures I had almost accepted, lost as I had been in a wilderness of pain. I loaded the noise-gate program into the computer. Mine was only 360T per m-crystal; I had borrowed an advanced machine from the Invisible College for the express purpose of turning back into a man...& curing a friend at the same time: No greater love has any man than this...to lay down his life for his friends.... I called up the logos. The replicant of my mind that I had cloned--so I could create a female Lead. To love me; to have & to hold... "What is that?" she asked. "It doesn't look like a chromosomal map...I'd guess it's a meme or a logos. So why are you screwing w/ my logoi when all I want is to be normal?" Rose said, "Is that the gene/meme/logos you were telling me about? The Primordial Oneness? The World Equation?" "Yeah," I said. It seemed as good a lie as anything else. I was rapidly reconsidering the morality of what I was doing: making Melanie into my Twin. Let her hate me. At least she was starting to like me now. For curing her of her bipolar storms. Mindstorm: Depression ravaged her features, an overnight change. The smile was a mask; though the eternal embarassed blushing was gone, her eyes yet dropped to the floor. Losing her job...that was probably what had done it to her. I was now to be her savior. A savior in need of salvation: I needed to change myself morally: I needed to let her hate me, if hate was what she wanted. The W.C.Leadbeater-engrams logoi were clearly dislayed now; I hit DELETE & the monadic image of my mind crashed. "Why'd you wipe that?" Melanie asked. "If that was the noise-gate program...you should've started it running, not DELETED it. Is there something you aren't telling me?" "I had...I was going to...you'll hate me if I tell you, so why should I? Just slip on the ring; the monad field'll increase your brain in robustness past..." "What was on that menu?" she asked, mania suddenly burning in her eyes. I confessed. I told her that I'd been planning to dump my neural logoi into hers, create a mental twin, "...because you hate me so much, & I thought if you could just see thru my eyes...you'd give up all the hate....It wouldn't've changed your personality, you know; there just would've been a little bit more sympathy between us, cuz really, you can't fit an entire mind onto an m-crystal...no matter what they say about machine intelligence. You just would've seen things from my viewpoint, understood...like why I pinched you on the ass...You'd never even have realized you'd been altered; you just would've suddenly understood." Rose was silent during this conversation; perhaps behind those steel-gray eyes her computer-mind was assessing my own mental stability. Things a positron-emission tomograph just can't show. Confession is good for the soul...I may've signed a 1-way ticket for myself back into the Bobo Boat. Melanie looked at me; those hungry eyes. "So...can you give me big tits? "Didn't you hear what I just said? I was going to reprogram your animus; put myself into your mind....I'm an asshole. I'm the asshole you always thought I was. So why don't you hate me? Why aren't you running out of here crying, he's trying to steal my brains?" She squeezed my hand. Warmly, the way lovers do. "I already understand." Rose just sat there listening. She took the last sip of coffee from her cup, tossed it in the garbage underneath my DAT-man. I felt her eyes upon me like a mirage upon a glacier; the world seemed somehow blue & all-color, & I wondered how this conversation was going to affect the future of the SIMPLE/SIMPLE monad. Melanie looked at me, for the 1st time w/o the fear & dread of her own bipolar storm; a new, clear dawn--I wondered if she still needed the machine. "I had a dream: You were in your apartment...I've never seen your apartment, but there was a large living room w/ a plush green carpet the color of your shirt, dirty from cigarette butts--you smoke too many cigarettes, Lead--& you went into the shower. "I didn't see you naked, if that's what you're thinking; but I do remember water, splashing liquid....You came out in a towel & Toni & I were taking your stereo, ripping you off. You told us to stop, Toni said, We're part of a special police project which fixes stereos for mental patients, yours had to be taken in; you asked what kind of nut we took you for, suddenly started to chase us. We ran down a long hall, some flights of steps.... "Then suddenly I was you; I was a prisoner of the Dream Pol- ice. I was in Isolation, being beaten; somebody put a thora- zine into my mouth but I wouldn't swallow it; it dissolved...it was bitter, like base, caustic lye. "It was like looking in a mirror: The other me whipped me--for nothing...& the Dreamers had stolen all my possessions & laughed. I screamed, I'm going to get a lawyer; fight you sons of bitches! & the other me just laughed & turned up the voltage on the ECTs; there was a pain like fire or ice; then suddenly I awoke &...there's a mirror in my bedroom; I looked in it...I saw what I'd become: A Nova Conspirator. "I cried all night & today...your anima has already been implanted. Okay, so you used to have fantasies about psionics. ESP. Or...sympathy. The Savage Id." "Melanie..." Dr Amber Rose said, brushing back a curl of blond hair, "You don't need to go thru w/ this experiment if you don't want to; listening to you...I think you may already be cured. By good, old-fashioned dream analysis; the stereo: a machine, phallic, the man who tried to molest you; the pill...oral incorporation fantasies, the incorporation of the hated man into the woman's body, a symbol of sexual union; & yourself in Lead's position...we may want to just go ahead w/ lithium therapy, maybe some tranks, antidepressants...I'm sorry I invoked van Hohenheim on you; you know, I really..." "I'll still do it!" Melanie exclaimed. "I want...big tits! Come on, Lead, give me a pair of knockers like Toni...& legs, I want legs that look like...well, yours...." Honestly, I admitted, "I used to think you were gutless. Now, I don't know." Even while I had been talking I had activated the monad, was hacking into her mind-logos. The monad measured the entitativity of her brain systems, began turning the developmetal lock. As the hierarchy genes/mind/culture. Her cognitive/adaptive system was displayed as an actual lock structure; the various wheels began rotating as fast as Rose's IBM could turn them. There were audible clicks as the tumblers hit the proper sequences for an evolved mind. The clicks in the reverse direction were coming thru better w/ my noise-gate in place, but the system was still having trouble finding the click-stops. I turned the THRESHOLD control on the noise-gate higher & the inter-level noise receded more deeply into the S/N ratio, displayed as dbs on the screen. We were, indeed, 90 db down now: But it was not enough; I locked in a sub-synthesizer & the high-pitched pops now became deep thumps. We had hit 70 db down now & the evolutionary processes were proceeding at a faster clip. I was tempted to hit the LEAD LOGOS BACK.UP FILE: A 2nd version of my brain logoi which I hadn't dumped.... I reached for the button. I would make a lover for myself as Mirror, another me to love me in a way Toni couldn't...I finally had the fox in a submissive role; if I could alter her she'd be perfect.... Just then Toni came in the room & kissed me on the top of the head. Love tore me apart. Again. I hit DELETE BACKUP & my guilty secret was forever forgotten. Depends. Depends how much Rose knew about computers. But I wasm't sure she could tell a d-lock noise-gate program from a mind-logos. The screen blacked out the image of compensating archetypes represented as (what else?) black boxes & an image of a near-infinite cylinder lock came on the screen. The Cosmic Chromosome. Melanie was rapidly correlating properly w/ her environ- ment...an environment which was infinite, stretching all the way up to the metaphysical Source, a Unity beyond all Dualities. The Nous, the Two become One. There was a phoenix-rainbow shimmering around Melanie The One & the None as Two... "What is it?" Melanie asked. "What's happening to me? Before it was as if I saw darkly, as though thru tinted glass...now suddenly it's as though everything is clear...I see everything perfectly; I see a world I never dreamed of..." "The clicks...that's actually the sound of a developmental lock being solved, isn't it?" Rose asked matter-of-factly while I wondered if she was going to figure out what had disappeared when I hit the DELETE key. It wasn't God. The Cosmic Chromosome...call Her what you will.... Then in an instant it was over. All that I saw was Melanie, even as Toni held my hand & squeezed. As though I were still a man. Melanie was subtly altered in appearance: All complex systems overlap & integrate w/ each other; in advancing her brain from Woman to Superwoman various factors affecting her appearance had been pushed & pulled thru my signal-processors w/ it. I could've PHENOTYPEd her, but that would've cut down on my chances of successfully rearranging her brain... She was taller, her breasts were large tapered cones instead of small & round, her nose was smaller & more upturned. She studied herself in the mirror even as her clothes strained at the seams...the way my own shirt had ripped when I had grown breasts. "Nice," she finally said. "Cute," Toni said grudgingly. Toni & Melanie had never been real friends; it was worthwhile to hear that Toni at least wasn't going to take this opportunity to be sarcastic. "We'll do the PET-scan right away," Rose said. "Lead, if you've successfully de-stormed her...your entifying monad will definitely be used as a weapon of...Peace. Vast, galaxy-cruising machines radiating Peace...entifying machines in orbit...evolution everywhere sped up to thousands, millions of times its natural rate! As the Medical Staff Member responsible for this experiment...I'll be negotiating for the use of the SIMPLE/SIMPLE monad by the Thorazine Police...." Rose vanished to her tests & her machines, taking a woman I had finally made peace w/ w/ her. "How long would it take for that machine to turn me into a man?" Toni asked. "I mean, if you'd let me be your boyfriend? & you stayed a girl...? Would I still have time to get back to work before Break is over...?" "Why would you want to be a man?" I asked. I was at 1st totally shocked by her suggestion, then felt arousal teasing me like a sea breeze....If Toni were Tony, I could still be Wendy, & she could be my boyfriend....It was a perverse idea. Yet a thrill. "Don't ya just love reversing roles?" Toni asked. "I'm a liberated woman, you know that, & if you can alter X into Y chromosomes & vice-versa...the old sex-roles will completely vanish! A man'll wake up, plug in his monad, go to work as a woman, come home, change into a man to play football, maybe change into a woman so he/she can make love to a friend...of whatever gender....I want that! I'm a Nurse & not a Dr cuz I'm a woman! Sex roles...even in the 21st Century! Now come on, Wendy, you've been a girl for the past week, the estrogen's probably hitting your brain by now & making you horny. I'll be your boyfriend. You & me...we can be whoever we want to be." It only took a few moments to realize that I was, indeed, feeling horny. For a man. I slid the ring over her finger, saying, "Will you marry me? I mean, a monad isn't your usual engagement ring but..." "Shut up & hit the switch," she said. I typed in Y TO X & hit PROGRAM RUN. A glitter of enveloping sparks cascaded around Toni. Her breasts shrank as though in some mastectomy, became at 1st just cute roundness like Melanie's breasts, then protruding nipples, then became a totally flat chest. Hair grew there; I could see chest hairs sticking up thru her bra even as she took it off: Her chest was flawless, great spirals of hair upon nipples that were shrinking from half dollars to quarters...she at last began to put the uniform shirt back on. "Wait!" I said, even as her hips were shrinking to vorkling leanness. I ran my fingers across Tony's chest & took a strange delight in it. I became aware of a firmness in her slacks. She had a hard-on. Tony had her 1st hard-on. His. He leaned over & kissed me. His lips were moist upon mine--my 1st kiss as a woman. "Hell yes I'll marry you," Tony said. "Do I get to keep the ring?" # End of file Press RIGHT ARROW (#6 key) of the numeric keypad to load the next file.