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He led me through a door into a small space equipped as a physician’s examining room. I stripped to my socks and he ran me through a rapid battery of medical tests. Chuck fed my blood into a machine that separated the DNA and began converting it to binary code. He left the room to make further preparations.

I wondered if other people went to such extremes for a story. Normal S.F. writers probably snapped off time travel ideas like downing coffee. This made me chuckle as I recalled my father telling me that Edgar Rice Burroughs’s first publication was under the name “Normal Bean” because he was afraid readers would consider him unbalanced. At one time I’d thought of using a pseudonym. My father’s only S.F. novel, The Castle Keeps, was about a writer in Kentucky, and the name I considered was the son of the protagonist. I decided against the idea because it granted my father too much influence over my writing. Besides, he used over a dozen pseudonyms and I didn’t want to be like him.

Dad was essentially a fantasy writer of sword-and-sorcery, soft-and hard-core porn. But when I was a kid, he and Harlan Ellison were the new young Turks in the science fiction field. After their falling-out, Dad used to impersonate Ellison at the supper table—talking fast in a high voice, cursing a lot, and calling himself “Arlen Hell-raiser.” I was at the stage where I copied my father, and thus refused to read Ellison. A few years later, after realizing that Dad disliked me, I read all of Ellison’s work, particularly enjoying his short stories.

Chuck entered the room and asked if I was ready.

“You bet,” I said.

“Listen, Chris,” he said. “The chimps come back different— healthy, but different. I sedate them first, and maybe that’s the reason.”

“Different how?”

“It’s intangible, as if they return more alert.”

“Okay,” I said. “But no sedation. I have to finish my story.”

He led me to a large chamber that contained a transparent metal table with a giant Lucite lid. An entwined network of cables was attached to the underside of the table, then ran along the floor to a surprisingly small console of computer equipment. The room was otherwise quite austere, silent, and oddly calm. Chuck explained that everything would be recorded on digital video. I lay on the gel-foam table, which re-formed itself to my body. Chuck began easing the lid shut.

“What’s that for?” I said. “Makes me think of a coffin.”

“Maintenance of adequate oxygen supply. It’s got tiny sensors embedded in it that monitor your vitals. I can also administer a CAT scan, X ray, MRI. Only three of these machines exist. They are often used for—”

“Okay, okay, okay.”

“How do you feel?”

“Like a moron, mainly.”

“You are a pioneer, Chris. First human in the bucket.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, fuck it then.”

He latched the lid. It occurred to me that I was quite possibly trusting a madman.

I felt rather than heard a distant hum, like cicadas thrumming against my skin. At varying times in my life I have attempted meditation that placed me in an odd state of non-waking, non-sleep, similar to a hypnotic trance, which I have entered at least three times—once by a traveling hypnotist who came to my high school and induced me to sing like Elvis, again by a Kevin Bacon movie in which I was hypnotized when Kevin was, and once when I was very young and my father put me into a trance on the couch and I only recall waking in the darkness with him scared and kneeling beside me, something I‘ve long been curious about and even considered being rehypnotized in order to learn what happened then, and now in Chuck’s lab I entered a trance-like state for an indeterminate time until I was abruptly aware of the greatest liberty I’d ever known.

Gravity ceased to exert a hold on me. I was buoyant with no water, hovering with no atmosphere. I had become mobile perception, yet unable to see, hear, feel, smell, or taste in the conventional way. I was grok. I was all. I felt each distinct beat of a hummingbird