Gorgeous Evasions

By RW Rudnicki

Tom Deadlight, a founding Gen Xer, dedicated his life to teaching Millennials and Gen Z college students. He picked up hitchhikers and stray animals. He believed in ghosts and panpsychism. But now, in 2075, during the Tech Revolution, he's been chosen for biorejuvenation to teach at a new kind of university named SAJE that crosses the river betw

• Language: English
• Publisher: RZTYKJ
• Release date: Dec 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9798985036008

RW Rudnicki

A professor of American literature, RW Rudnicki specializes in post-1900 fiction and literature of the South. He also teaches a science fiction class in which they discover literary portrayals of historical paradigm shifts as well as imaginative and clever renderings of controversial social issues. Rudnicki taught at Louisiana Tech University for almost 20 years, where he was a senior endowed professor. Further, he also taught at Texas A&M University, Louisiana State University, and Alcorn State University, all representing a diverse career of university teaching of 26 consecutive years. Currently, he is interested in the rhetoric of AI, transhumanism, animal studies, and genomics, as well as the ways our discourse is changing to accommodate these forces that are technological, but also social and linguistic, as we learn to interpret and portray our world no longer strictly in terms of the Anthropocene, but in a new age of the Machinocene. He continues to write on these topics, and has most recently been teaching science fiction at Texas Christian University. RW Rudnicki has published essays, reviews, interviews, book chapters, and a book on figures such as Walker Percy, William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Robert Penn Warren, Carson McCullers, Ralph Ellison, Richard Ford, Lewis Nordan, John Kennedy Toole, Thomas Bell, Charles Olson, Stuart Dybek, and Jericho Brown. His writing has appeared in the Mississippi Quarterly, the Southern Quarterly, the Faulkner Journal, the South Central Review, and the Arkansas Review. His work also has appeared in books by Louisiana State University Press and the University of Alabama Press, and in a digital edition by eBooks on EBSCOhost. Many of RW Rudnicki's essays have been reprinted and made available through the service known as The Free Library, which is significant in the sense that no subscription is required, and no enrollment at a university and no tuition is required. Further, Google easily translates the documents into any language. Global and unrestricted, the way they should be. For example, one essay uses both literal architecture and house metaphors in William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, and Nietzsche to understand the schism between humanism and postmodernism. Read it here!: 'TheFreeLibrary.com.' RW Rudnicki's writing has also been quoted in many scholarly books over the years, including ones by the presses of the University of Georgia, University of Tennessee, University of Alabama, Louisiana State University, Wesleyan University, and Oxford University.

Book preview

1

1854  VESTA PLANTATION & TRIP’S DISCOVERY

Twenty Corinthian stone columns, each forty feet tall, stood on a ten-foot-tall raised circular podium that had a diameter of one hundred and ten feet. Each solid stone column had been shipped from Europe and raised in three segments and was covered in a nearly seamless facade of precious Statuario bianco, or rare white marble with gold veins, topped by elegant Ionic volutes with sweeping Corinthian acanthus leaves.

The two-story exterior walls were octagonal, and all of the upper story walls and six of the lower story walls contained two large, vertical, rectangular windows with heavy cornices. The second story walls, which contained the bedrooms, had modest doors between each window that opened onto the wide balcony or loggia that encircled the house. The only two lower story walls without windows were the front and rear center ones with doors, which had in their center fifteen-foot tall and eight-foot wide—sixteen in total—double-door entrances, though architecturally these two walls and entrances were identical and indistinguishable from a front or back. The house was inspired by and named after the Roman goddess of the hearth, the home, and domestic tranquility. She had been the first-born of Kronos and Rhea, and thus was the first child to be eaten by him and the last that Jupiter, or Zeus in Greek, was to free. Because of this she was considered both the oldest and youngest of gods, and was revered as the very center of Roman activity. Even the Latin word hearth means focus, and she is where the expression keep the home fires burning is derived. Her Greek name is Hestia, and her Roman name is Vesta. Romans kept a sacred fire eternally burning in her honor for a thousand years until around 400 AD when it was permanently extinguished in favor of Christian rituals imposed by a new ruler who was a Christian convert.

The unlikely reincarnation of Vesta, 1450 years later in the slaveholding Southern United States, was so massive, that riverboat passengers could see its gold cupola and the wisps of smoke it emitted from the hole in its center over the trees from the upper deck as steam engines chopped the ship’s paddles through the muddy Mississippi. Mark Twain in fact mentioned seeing the top of Vesta from the wheelhouse in one of his riverboat accounts during his piloting years. The steamboat that he captained in his youth was among the over seven-hundred that exported eighty-percent of the world’s cotton supply to the North and to New Orleans on its way to Great Britain during these decades. Although the home itself was on the Mississippi side of the river, the entirety of the plantation grounds were enormous, believed to be the largest in the South, and covered many square miles of land on the Louisiana side too. The property was said to total 45,000 acres and held in bondage over 400 men, women, and children. The US and Great Britain officially abolished the slave trade in 1807, but that only meant the US couldn’t buy any more people from other countries. After 1807, during the first half of the 1800s, Maryland, Kentucky, and Virginia had been selling most of their slaves down the river, which usually meant to the Congo Square in New Orleans, where they would be separated from family, auctioned off, and relocated to farms and plantations mostly in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

Constructed in 1810, this is how the Vesta plantation acquired its workforce, from the literal auction block. On the plantation, slaves and their yard-bosses, or drivers, used flatboats and poles to cross the river where it was shallow back and forth. You can guess who pushed. In the deep South, the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 had revitalized slavery and given rise to a handful of mega-plantations, and although northern abolitionists were making themselves heard, the reality was that the textile industries in the North and Europe looked the other way to get their hands on all the cheap raw material, and in turn furnished the homes of both wealthy southern planters and members of the northern and southern middle class with many of the trappings of domestic life, such as lamps, books, rugs, and bedding—all the luxuries of comfortable living. Standards were raised, but it was a devil’s bargain. At its height, Vesta alone was producing one-million bales of cotton each year. Meanwhile, the patriarchs of these plantations were not thinking of themselves as Jeffersonian Yeoman Farmers, meaning that you own your farm, live on it, and work it yourself, or frontiersman, or pioneers, or anything that had to do with the American 19th-century spirit of nation-building and moving upward as forward-thinking individualists or entrepreneurs. No, they looked to the past, not the future, for their bearings. Windsor Castle. King Arthur’s Camelot. The Roman Colosseum. The Greek Parthenon. Alexander the Great. Augustus. And, for a time, they did their best to build, order, and even name things accordingly.

So this morning, a young man who had been purchased and given the name Triptolemus was plowing a field with Jenny the mule on the Miss’ssip side not far from the audacious big house, getting ready for spring planting. It was cold, and the ground was hard, late February, he knew, but he didn’t know the date, only that it was Monday. But hell, Trip didn’t even know his birthday. He had never known his father, and he had been taken from his mother when he was big enough to work in the fields, though no one told him what age that was. And his brother and sister were both younger than him, and he hadn’t seen them since. How could he have known that his great-grandfather had been a warrior hero in the Kingdom of Kongo who fought the invading Portuguese before being captured and taken to what they called a seasoning camp in Jamaica to be prepared for life as a slave? All Trip knew was that he was taken away as soon as he was as tall as his momma. Then he had been sold again to Vesta, where they told him that he was nineteen years old. Sometimes he tried to remember when he first realized that he was somebody else’s property and he couldn’t do it. It just wasn’t one of those lightning bolt moments, you know? That’s what was so insidious, when Trip thought about it. The whole system was just slowly inculcated upon a little kid watching his mom go about her day. He just thought that’s how things were. But he did remember that when he knew for sure that he was called another person’s slave, and that he understood that slave meant he was owned by someone, and that owned meant belonged to, that he was nothing but property, and he was thought of as an animal like Jenny here, that he would not be satisfied until he was free and recognized as a person. He had thought about running plenty of times, about how he would do it. But so far success just hadn’t seemed possible, and he had seen the frightening results of failure up close. He knew the time was coming soon though.

Until then, he had done what he could. He had grown into a man who was tall, with wide shoulders, chunky deltoids, a V-shaped back, well-developed trapezius muscles, large hands and wrists, and solid forearms from the last few years of clearing forests for new planting by working with an axe and a two-man crosscut saw and carrying logs. But he wasn’t burly or you wouldn’t pick him out in a police line-up as the strongest person. He had been a lanky bean-pole, with no muscle or body fat, and now he was just ripped, still no body fat but now all muscle—one of those rare ecto-mesomorph types. Yet he realized long ago that brawn alone would not free him, that knowledge was power, and that the medium for delivering that knowledge was language, the written and spoken word. So it took time, but through cunning and determination, Trip both taught himself and convinced others to teach him the letters and words and pronunciations he needed help with until he could competently speak and read and even write. More than competently. He did this so well, in fact, that he hid the writing part from the Vesta family. He wasn’t certain why, only that once a secret was out it couldn’t be taken back, and he suspected that they might think a fully literate slave is a slave in danger of running for the free states. For instance, from Vesta’s library he knew that they named him after a Greek demi-god who invented the plow and presided over the sowing of seed and harvesting of wheat and that the name meant he who pounds husks. And that the Greek Triptolemus was supposed to honor his parents by bringing them his bounty. Trip understood the twisted irony, too, in giving him this name, but he never let on. A slave who has the name of a half-god. They must think that’s real cute. Then Trip’s mind wandered to far more pleasant thoughts, ones about an enchanting young lady named Octavia. Trip and Octavia had been arranging clandestine meetings at night in a small, hidden glen he had discovered in the forest bordering the slave quarters on the rare occasions she could safely slip away from Vesta or was allowed to stay nights in the quarters with her family. Octavia worked in the house, as a handmaiden to one of the daughters of Vesta’s patriarch, the owner of the plantation. The daughter she had to serve was named Zynthia. Her father was Wallace Shaw. Upon discovering Trip’s language skills when he arrived at Vesta, it was Master Shaw, who might as well have been Nebuchadnezzar or Naram Sim himself, who had given him access to Vesta’s library once a week for three hours. Small recompense, yes, but even so Trip knew that he relished that time reading.

Trip was thinking about all of this and finishing his eighth row when Jenny abruptly stopped. The point of the plow was caught on something, probably a root or a rock. Trip sent Jenny a slight rap of the reigns on her hindquarters to give her a start. She rumbled forward a bit, but made no real progress. Deciding to go around the obstacle instead, he backed her up, turned her slightly left, and spooned around the obstruction, unhappy that his perfectly straight and parallel rows had been disfigured. When Jenny made enough progress for Trip to catch up to the problem, he said to Jenny, Whoa!, and dropped the reins. He walked to the left and unhooked Jenny from her harness and put down her water pail. Then he took a few steps back toward the fresh mound of black, rich Delta soil that Jenny had unearthed but not been able to break straight through, but Trip stopped just short when he saw what appeared to be a crystal formation of some kind protruding from the dirt that Jenny had upturned.

He had found several pyrite rocks in a nearby creek bed once, also known as Fool’s Gold, marked by their shiny brass crystals usually in the shape of cubes. He had to turn them over to his field boss because he was told they sometimes were mixed with real gold, and of course were Vesta’s property. As was he. But this formation wasn’t the yellow metallic color of pyrite . . . . It was pink. With much smaller amounts of blue. And it was softly glowing. He got down on both knees and dislodged several pink and blue crystal octahedrons from the rocky growth. What Trip did not know was that they were pink and blue versions of Fluorescent Fluorite, or Fluorspar, which glows blue, and had been discovered and whose phenomenon had been named fluorescence just a couple of years earlier in 1852 by George Gabriel Stokes. What else Trip did not know was that the beautiful, small crystals he was holding had both thermoluminescent and triboluminescent attributes, meaning that they emitted light when exposed to heat as well as when crushed, scratched, or broken. But in addition to luminescence, these crystals were like no other that had yet been found and categorized by the British empirical mind and scientific fervor of the times. These gently glowing crystals, soft and fissile, were also what would over two-hundred years later be referred to as temporo-luminescent. When heated, or provided with mechanical energy, they did not simply emit light, but distorted time. Trip put the other rocks in his pocket and wiped the dirt from one of the blue crystals with the bottom of his shirt and felt how smooth and almost malleable it was. He knew that miners and those who panned for gold could verify that is was indeed gold if it were soft if they bit down on it. He didn’t know why, but he raised the stone to his lips and gently placed it on the side of his teeth and slowly closed his jaw, first with slight force, then with more. Suddenly Trip’s eyes, whether open or closed, were filled with blinding white light and then nothingness. Jenny was found later that afternoon under a tree by the river, but despite the widespread search over the following days, there was no trace of Triptolemus.

Vesta’s massive ledger, which rested open on a walnut credenza near the thick, marble, half-sphere bowl containing the home’s center eternal flame, and catalogued the ownership and monetary value of the plantation’s human flesh alongside the annual birth and sale of its farm animals and number of cotton bales produced, would record that Triptolemus was a runaway . . . not once, but twice.

2

2075  GOOD MORNING, NOW WRITE YOUR EPITAPH

It was Tuesday morning just after ten o’clock, the last week of September, and everyone was assembled haphazardly in their notepods hovering just above one of the four different half-amphitheater levels of the seminar room. Tom Deadlight, today wearing a deep blue track suit, seated in his ball and claw-foot wing-back lecture chair connected in its back to the wall by a thin smooth white mech tentacle that allowed him to maneuver fluidly about the room and then stand up and walk around the various levels, finished taking attendance. No longer necessary, but an old habit. Tom returned to his seat and as it was retracting him backwards to the front of the class he noticed Shilo. Her name meant tranquility. Shilo’s parents claimed she was designed with DNA from archaeological finds of the original followers of Eli, who became known as the Samaritans, meaning guardians, about eighteen-hundred years ago. She was always docked on the lowest middle aisle, talkative and sunny, and had needed a permission slip from the dean to enroll because this was just her first term. Tom never asked, but the dean approved it sure, due to her test scores, but he bet the real reason was because she could converse on his level. But that hadn’t been the case over the last few classes. Today once again her head was pointed down and she looked anemic. Tom resolved to talk to her after class. But first things first. Sorry Shi. He streamed the following line to the class, which also appeared just over his head at the front of the room: DEAD ARE ALL THE GODS: NOW IS THE TIME FOR THE OVERMAN.

Who wrote that?, Tom asked. He thought about how the practice of teaching had changed so radically. The very concept of it. None of these kids ever had any or had used actual books until my class. SAJE had an impressive library, but one which was more of a museum, or salon in the old sense, than anything else. They only had a book in class if he required them to for an assignment. And then they treated it like a paleontological dig. And why shouldn’t they? Any information they seek appears on enchanted screens or walls or objects within their reach or the sound of their voice wherever they are. Or it is embedded on their palms, or forearms, or projected on their eyeglasses, visors, contacts, or piped straight to their optic nerves by their AI augmentation. Some of them had AI units like 4Tell. And a few of them had processors implanted in their cerebrums, which allowed data to be mainlined directly to their minds. So there was a time when the question, who wrote something, and what does it mean, had meaning. It involved work and a process. It meant they had read the assignment or they had studied. Now the world was driven by data. Information on seemingly anything was free, instantaneous, and comprehensive. But while this new access to such a vast amount of information provided useful connections and recognized patterns, it gave us no clear or reliable path to true knowledge or discernment. Not yet, anyway.

Fredrich Nietzsche—Thus Spoke Zarathustra, said Urjencee. She was a junior zoo who was sitting in the middle of the second row and was cerulean blue today, who thanks to octopus DNA could change colors, make herself practically invisible, and could sense the emotions and intentions of others through her tactile perception of touch. And like an octopus, she was very curious and wanted to learn, but she was a total suck-up. Always staying behind to ask Tom a question or patronize him and then do a little heel-turn and skirt-flip and look over her shoulder and say See you Thursday Dr. Deadlight! and bounce away. She was beautiful, though.

Okay Jen. You found it first. So what does it seem to mean?, Tom replied.

Yah, Ur-jen-cee, what da fuck does it mean, you brown-nosing, zoo-bitch, octo-cunt? Tell us that, why don’t ya!, howled a student named Epicenter from the fourth row on the left. Epicenter was neither a zoo nor a jim, meaning neither zooman, or parahuman who had animal DNA, nor a GM, a jim, or genetically modified human only. He was an aug. This means he made up for any disadvantage by being heavily augmented, with internal nanobots, but mostly with bioware, both bio-integrated and wearable, many with assault capabilities. More or less everyone had nanobots, AI units or algos, and bioware to varying extents.

Epi shut the fuck up you auggie piece of trash or I’ll come back there and shove my foot up your ass right now!, yelled Urjencee over her mic. They were both strong. And potentially lethal. Teaching this class reminded Tom of as a child when he went to the circus and saw the lion tamer, except the lion tamer had a whip, and the lions were trained and behaved. He had no such luxury.

Jesus, Epi, is that your best?, said Tom. I’m disappointed. You know some have said that people employ epithets and foul language because they lack the vocabulary to formulate their criticism in an original manner. And Jen, there will be no shoving of feet up any asses in my class if you please, okay? So again, what’s this statement about?

I think he basically means that you are supposed to live not for any religion, but also not live for the concept of humanism, which is the idea that we can achieve a political utopia or answer all our questions about life through science. You should rather live for yourself in the here and the now, Urjencee said. Without looking at him she held up her arm and pointed a blue middle finger towards Epicenter.

Thanks Jen, Tom said to the class. That sounds about right. What does everyone think? Any thoughts?

A jim—genetically modified only—named Epiphany spoke up and said, "Nietzsche said this was living the life of the OVERMAN, and called it the Grand Style."

Phany, thought Tom, looked like a Nordic ice goddess. Everything about her exuded strength and sensuality. She also reminded him of the history of what once was called eugenics. Phany glowed. She was just a little larger, longer, brighter, more robust, just . . . better? People always think of Hitler and his concept of creating an Aryan race, but there was a prior, American history to eugenics too. The notion of improving the quality of the American population didn’t quite begin with Teddy Roosevelt, but he really promoted and legitimized it. He wanted women from good backgrounds to have as many as six children for the betterment of the American race. Conversely, up until 1931, twenty-seven states had sterilization laws for young, lower-class white women to prevent them from further propagating the population with their undesirable traits. So ironically, women could finally vote in 1920, but could be legally sterilized in many states until 1931. Amazing. Not many years ago, once everyone realized the possibilities and the ethical dilemmas of human gene editing, the nations leading the way in genetic research had tried to reach a consensus about limiting its scope. At first they said it should only be used to eradicate disease. But then the slippery slope became, to eradicate disease, or to improve quality of life. And before we knew it, we had a generation of demi-goddesses, or ultra-humans, like Epiphany, and demi-gods, who were almost a different species than the vast populations who were living outside the perimeters, largely untouched by the quantum revolution. Then came a wave of parahumans, with selected animal traits, such as Urjencee. Many of them were not even born from their mother’s womb, but had their chromosomes designed in a genomics lab and then were fertilized and grown to term in an AI womb capsule.

What do you think of that, Shilo? said Tom, hoping she had been listening and might respond. Several seconds passed but Shilo kept staring down at her imaginary spot in space. She looked peculiar.

Someone else?

Thankfully, Epiphany spoke up, Well, if you want to be an absolute cynic, it’s as though he is saying that humans have been deluded by all of our major ways of finding meaningful lives. By our belief in god. And by our secular beliefs that humans could one day achieve worldly perfection through art and science. So instead, he says we should just live in the moment and not believe in any system of authority or social construct because they are all about conformity. Then we would free ourselves of those shackles, and would be living the so-called grand style.

Sounds like the life of a gangbanger to me! said Epicenter.

Why is that Epi? said Tom.

No rules, do what you want. If there’s no god, and nothing to believe in here on earth, then I figure any truly brave person’s got two options, one, kill yourself, because it’s all a joke, or two, try to conquer everyone and become a king by any means necessary. Mass murder, whatever. Take no prisoners. Carpe Fuckin Deum baby. said Epicenter.

And if everyone thought that way it would be total anarchy. It sounds to me like the way some psychotics think today. They just keep it to themselves. And every now and then one of them goes off the rails and you see it on the news, said Urjencee.

Both good points. Let me back up just a bit and put some of this in context. The Greek Stoics believed that death was merely a waypoint toward another state of consciousness. But it was the Christians who came along and changed that idea to one that you actually ascend to a heaven, as you were, but as an individual spirit, and would be re-united with your family forever. Then the Scientific Revolution ushered in the age of Humanism, otherwise known as the Renaissance, which was the belief in the perfectibility of humankind. Rather than thinking of humans as flawed, and born sinners, humanism was the belief that through politics and scientific experimentation we could advance and make progress toward a perfect, or nearly perfect world. A heaven on Earth. Sometimes politicians will still label themselves as progressives. This is what they think they portray. It was Nietzsche, though, who began, well ahead of his time, what would later become known as the age of postmodernism, which was the idea that all values, and laws, and ethical systems, and scientific assumptions, are subjective and relative, and have no real foundations in truth, which is why he announces that ‘dead are all the gods, now must live the Overman.’ He was saying that we should not be Stoics, Christians, or even progressive Humanists. As different as they are, each value system rests on crutches. We should instead live in the moment.

Nietzsche had a notion he called ‘am arty.’ By that he meant a higher morality, or an ‘unreality.’ It was the idea that mankind’s morality, their sense of good and evil, is untrue, just made up, because it is really just a product of their environment and their psyche, not derived from a higher law. He called it ‘a disease of the eye.’ I like to call it the ‘terrible fish’ in a Sylvia Plath poem called ‘Mirror,’ which is about the reality we perceive in reflections. In other words, these belief systems were not allowing people to see the truth and get the most out of their lives. What Nietzsche is revealing is that there are no epistemic foundations for any of our belief systems or branches of knowledge. But this left us with no room for what is called eschatology, which has to do with the study of origins and ends. Such as, ‘Where did we come from?’ ‘Where are we going?’ So this led to a counter-response to Nietzsche’s postmodernism, which is called contemporary humanism, also sometimes referred to as ethical criticism. The most famous practitioner of this movement was Edmund Husserl, who used the analogy of a matchbox to make his basic point.

At this moment Tom displayed a giant matchbox slowly tumbling above his head.

First of all, have any of you ever seen a matchbox?

Yea, Boss, Epicenter chimed in, The Dodson ‘ChargeUp’ sells ‘em. The ChargeUp was one of Dodson’s three energy stations, but was most notable because it was the only one with a liquor license. Tom had trouble not calling them gas stations anymore.

"Thanks, Epi. Good to know. Okay. You know the matchbox has six sides, but you can only see three sides at one time. Such is the case with reality. The point is, there is a part of reality that is transcendent, and just because we can’t see it, does not mean it isn’t there. This new form of humanism does not offer life after death in the Christian sense, but it does claim that something exists beyond our sensory capacity of detection, and beyond what science has been able to explain, which is perhaps another dimension, or plane of existence. But it does not necessarily claim that we go there. But now of course, in the race for artificial superintelligence, we are trying to create our own new dimension, in a way, aren’t we?, by working to upload human consciousness rather than waiting to find out if we go to heaven or another dimension when we die. That’s what the race for ‘Dominion’ is here at SAJE, and that’s about where we are today, everyone," concluded Tom, and the matchbox disappeared.

So think about where you stand on all this. Give it some thought and make an entry in your journal about it titled ‘The Grand Style,’ okay?

"Alright, people, your other assignment for our next class is to write the epitaph that will go on your headstone when you die, or let’s just say if you die, in no more than six words. I want three serious versions, that you think will truly represent your life, and one sarcastic or funny version. You have to present them to the class. You also have to write the book jacket about yourself for the novel you will write at the end of your life. The first half of the book jacket, or the front flap, must summarize your life up until now. One hundred and fifty words. The second half, or back flap of the book jacket, should summarize what you might like the remainder of your life to be. One hundred and fifty words. So three hundred words total. That’s almost nothing, you losers. I’m the easiest teacher there is. Basically one double-spaced 12-point page. So chose your words carefully. Also presented to the class. I’ll choose people at random," Tom said.

What’s an epitaph?

Look it up, brainiac, replied Tom.

What do you mean by jacket?

It’s a coat for books, Tom said.

I’m being cremated!

If we are going to the cloud, what’s the effing point of this!

I’ve got one: Professor D Was a Giant A-Hole.

It would be more graceful if you used my full surname and spelled rather than hyphenated your curse word, Tom suggested.

From the back row: Mine eyes have seen the glory!

He jiggered one thousand women!

Bird-watching goes both ways!

Then Epicenter, Shit check Shi out! She alright?

Just as Tom was about to dismiss the class and heard Epi’s cry (or was it an epitaph?) he couldn’t help but see Shilo again, but this time, she was staring back at him, and instead of looking anemic, or pasty green, her face was now a translucent, glowing pink, her head had devolved into something Denisovan, and her large jaw was agape, revealing flat, lower incisors.

Everyone seated near Shilo quickly and quietly move away right now! Tom said loudly and barely avoided shouting.

Inevitably there were several screams and scuffles, but within seconds Shilo had a perimeter of twenty feet, and none of the movement seemed to disturb her. They all just stared, whispering while recording Shilo and broadcasting to friends and various channels who knows where, though SAJE filters and blocks certain transmissions.

Well that’s just great. The youngest and one of the most promising in the class was on what the kids at SAJE call Pank, thought Tom. Pank is a psychedelic party drug circulating on campus that is rumored to have actual temporal side effects, meaning you temporarily travel through time into the past, or think you do. How far into the past depends on how much you take, but it’s unstable, and on occasion takes you on a literal bad trip. But they say it’s worth the risk. SAJE suspends students caught with the drug or who are found under its influence for one academic term, and then expels them from the university permanently if they are busted a second time. It’s becoming a student body epidemic, and a bad scandal for the administration. Tom knows because he represents the faculty on the Behavioral Standards Committee.

The students call it Pank for a few reasons. The drug is made from small, rare stones or rocks that are said to be mined somewhere in this region, though no one seems to know where. The stones, keep in mind, have a pink luminescence. The student body, drawn nationally and internationally, and who speak clear, standardized English, though often as a second language, think it amusing that most of the locals here in Tom’s deep US South, do not. Their particular accent and drawl and ee-nun-she-a-shun, you know, in other words, their stigmatized vernacular dialect, which historically has made them appear to outsiders as ignorant and lacking high cognition, will even today have many people in this region say the color pink phonetically as pank, rhyming it with bank. So in part the drug’s name came from the students’ mock-version of pink’s pronunciation by the locals.

The students thought this was especially droll because Pank was also a rhetorical spoonerism for the combination of pink and what’s called Planck Time. The concept itself of Time has to do with the field of quantum mechanics that they study in their other classes. As far as we know, the smallest components of nature are called quanta, which are tiny bundles of light and energy, or minute particles of mass, and within these quanta there are grains, or units, that can be given individual value. The smallest unit of time one of these grains can be, meaning the smallest scale that human science at our stage of development is theoretically able to measure, is 5.39 x 10⁻⁴⁴ seconds, which is one divided by one followed by sixteen zeros. That unit of time is named Planck Time. If a student disappears and reappears, that’s what he might say to the following question:

Where have you been, Artimus?

Just Plancking.

Pink. Planck. Pank. Real funny. But on occasion students do not reappear, in which case our scientists at SAJE speculate they may be experiencing units of time on the other end of the human scale, not smaller than we can perceive, but larger, such as gigaseconds, maybe even teraseconds. A gigasecond is one billion seconds, or 31 years, 287 days. 3.16 gigaseconds equals one hundred years. And one terasecond equals one trillion seconds, or 31,688 years. So it’s anyone’s guess when, or if, or in what shoddy condition, those who have been lost will reappear. The administration and their security haven’t been able to discover who is selling the Pank, nor have they found the dealer turning it into crystals and liquid vials and other devices to smoke or inject, nor have they located the source supplying the stones. Further, local folklore has it that there are time stones of other colors, blue ones, supposedly, but none have emerged, and what they would do is unknown.

In the meantime, poor Shilo’s head was now twice its size and looked like a diaphanous bubble with protuberances, as were all of the Paleolithic features and prominences one could see on her face, hands, and feet. And if to the Paleocene era was the trip she was about to take, Tom was guessing, he hoped for her sake it was before 250,000 years ago, because further than two-hundred-and-fifty thousand, humans weren’t yet cooking their meat and they were still cannibalizing their dead. Hopefully only their dead.

Tom walked up to her and got on his knees. Shilo, he said gently. Can you hear me? Will you tell me where you are, or if there is anything I can do for you? He waited for her to emerge from her fugue.

OAK-ER, Shilo’s Pank-self said.

What was that, oak-er?

Oh-curr, she said softly this time, and as she did her gossamer presence dissolved into thin air with the breath of her final r. She must have seen the color ochre, which was widely used in the Stone Age. It was the color she might very well be painting her body with soon to attract a barbarian mate. Because Shilo, the place she was named after, the first home of the Ark of the Covenant in the Bible, if she actually just traveled where Tom thought, would not occur in her reality for another one or two hundred thousand years, depending on when she arrived.

Dr. Deadlight what’s going to happen to her?

Is she dead now?

Where did she go?—I can’t track her.

Standing up from his kneeling position, Tom scanned everyone’s faces.

Solemnly, Tom addressed the class. I’m sorry I don’t have an answer to your questions. Hopefully Shilo will return soon, and the sooner the better, intact, unharmed, and unaltered. Some of you may know second-hand, or even first-hand, that this is usually the case. It is so often the case that I know so-called Pank is thought by your student body to be harmless. But you are gambling with your life. My advice is please don’t try it. And if you do, stay away from my class. You are not welcome. I think we have all had enough for today. If this event has upset you, please stay behind and I’ll accompany you to a counselor’s office. The rest of you are dismissed. I’ll see you next time. Be well.

Their notepods, which they used to navigate the two campuses and looked like liquid, metallic bullets, little comfy cockpits not taking much more geometric space than themselves and that auto-disassembled when not in use, reminded him of bumper cars at the state fair, neither of which existed anymore. They didn’t know just how much, because as they waited their turn to exit on one or the other side of the amphitheater on each level, one would bump another, and he would hear an apology, or after a hard bump, curse words would be exchanged, or it was gossip about what had happened to their friend Shilo.

2018  HAIR LIKE RED VINE LICORICE

Opening his left eye he could see a few geometric shapes, rhomboids and tetrahedrals, which happened to be a bit of wood wall paneling, one wood leg of a den chair recently gnawed on by the new puppy just a few inches away, and a small patch of wood floor. His right eye was encrusted shut. It was dilated and wouldn’t have worked right or been at the correct angle to have been of help to him anyway. Movement of any kind, though, was not something that had yet occurred to him. His cerebral cortex was only slowly realizing that there was existence and he was a thing that existed and was made of solid stuff and was connected to other stuff called a body and that people called this thing Tom. But he did not understand the concept of getting up and the Tom-thingy was bundled perfectly still on the floor there like a tangled fried noodle until he began to process his situation and comprehend the notion and then the passing of time.

He first tried to pick his head up off the floor but could not. The reason was not clear. So he wiggled his fingers and toes. He could feel them. Then he tried his left arm. It moved. He brought his wrist up close to his one eye and looked at his watch. The watch's movement was mechanical and because he hadn't wound it lately it had stopped at 7:27 on SAT. His didn’t display the day of the month and mostly only digital watches display a.m. and p.m. so he didn’t know which it was. There was light in the room, but it wasn't daylight so that alone meant nothing. The blinds stayed closed. He had always slept with lamps on with low-wattage bulbs, 40s and 25s, all over the house to encourage accurate navigation when it was late at night and he had been in his cups. Did he remember anything from today? No, but that meant nothing, either. It could easily be morning or night. All he knew was that it was at least 7:27. Think, thought Tom. Think. What about Friday? Anything from Friday? No. Thursday??? Yes. Not Thursday night, but his most recent memory would have been on Thursday afternoon. That means Thursday night, all day and night Friday, Saturday morning, and if it's currently 7:27 or later p.m. instead of 7:27 or later a.m., all day Saturday, too, were a complete blank. It might even be Sunday. He puzzled over that little gem of a thought for a few minutes, at first dismissing it as logistically possible but impossible to accept. For some reason he was reminded that the Catholics believed Jesus died at 4:33 p.m. on 4/3 AD 33.

But that idea that it could be Sunday instead of Saturday kept slowly growing, and then Tom, instead of not wanting it to be Sunday, wanted it to be ONLY Sunday, because he realized to even greater horror, who is to say his watch didn't stop two, even three days ago? It could be 7:27 MONDAY, OR TUESDAY NIGHT, OR LATER, and people would be wondering where he was by now. His right hip and shoulder were beginning to hurt, and he was dizzy and one side of his face and head felt numb. His mind, though, was slowly beginning to reboot, and was receiving reports from his body concerning its condition and his predicament. He was weak, and oddly, his stomach, normally sedated, was registering hunger. For the past three months he had eaten exactly one fast food cheeseburger, one slice of pie, and drank one glass of milk very late or in the middle of each night and had no other nourishment the other twenty-three and a half hours. The rest, as always, had been coffee, water, diet drinks, alcohol, and pills. He felt for his phone, but nothing. He was able to shift his arms and legs to give them some relief, but his head remained firmly in place. Tom brought his left hand to his lips and ran his index finger around the inside of his mouth. He still had all his teeth. Then he moved to his head.

He realized the entire right side of his hair was glued with dried blood to the floor, and gooey tentacles had oozed out in several directions and hardened, serving to further anchor his skull in its place, like the way the drippy edges of caramel on a candied apple look when it is sitting on a cooled cookie sheet of wax paper. He tried, at first tentatively, then in earnest with more pressure, to raise his head. It wouldn’t budge. If he could pull his head up with enough force, he supposed he could pull his hair out at the root and