Sunday Pages: The LOOM

An unfinished sci-fi novel

Dear Reader,

Once upon a time, my literary ambition was to write one of everything. I didn’t want to be the pigeon-holed author who writes a thriller and then has to bang out another thriller, and then another, because that’s what the publishers want—even though, to be fair, publishers only want that because they concern themselves with artless and profane things like, you know, selling as many books as possible.

In college, I completed my first novel, My Brain Is Full, a coming-of-age story about a college student with literary aspirations (1994). Then I wrote a sort of long Gothic horror, Babylon Is Fallen (1996). In the late 90s I wrote the first version of a quirky NYC romance, which I rewrote approximately 498 times until finally giving up in 2007 or so, when my agent (I had an agent by then) couldn’t sell it.

None of these early efforts were published. This irked me in the moment, but now I’m grateful, because none of these early efforts were much good. (The older I get, the more I understand why writers burn their old manuscripts.)

My first published novel, Totally Killer, is a thriller (2009). Fathermucker is a “day-in-the-life-of” chronicle (2011). Empress is historical fiction (written in 2014-15, published later).

Six novels, six different genres.

What’s missing on the list? Science fiction. I tried my hand at that, too. Back in the summer of 2000, right after much-ado-about-nothing Y2K, I decided I was ready to take on that challenge. Most novels don’t require much in the way of world-building. You have to build the worlds of the various characters, of course. But setting a book in, say, New York City in 1991, as I did with Totally Killer, is like building a website with Wix or Wordpress, or writing a sonnet: the underlying architecture already exists; you’re just building on top of the existing framework.

Sci-fi isn’t like that. You get to—or, if you’re being pessimistic, you have to—start from scratch. You’re coding your own website. You’re writing in free verse. You’re making the rules. New York City in 1991 is easy; New York City in 2091 is a lot harder. It’s more work. Not only do you have to conceive of this brave new world, but you also have to figure out how to convey information about it to your readers without sounding like a Wikipedia page or a Christopher Nolan movie about nuclear scientists.

I got the idea while on the phone with a notably good-humored customer service representative from American Express. She was entering data to pull up my account, and it was taking longer than expected, and she said, “Sometimes the computer can’t read my mind.”

This was innocuous, a joke, meant to keep me occupied while she futzed with the keyboard. But that line was all I needed. It opened a door to something, and I saw, in a flash, what my book was going to be about—including how it would end. I used it as the third and final epigraph to the new sci-fi novel-in-progress:

Sometimes the computer can’t read my mind.
—AMEX customer service operator, 11 July 2000

Later, I added two more epigraphs. The first was from one of the most “mad genius” works I’ve ever read, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, in which Julian Jaynes makes the argument that the fusion of the two halves of our brains is a relatively recent phenomenon, and when, in the literature of antiquity, the gods speak to the heroic protagonists, what those ancient Greeks really heard was not divine counsel but voices from the right halves of their own brains. Jaynes is dismissed, I think, as pseudoscience, but man was his book fun to read. Here is Epigraph #1:

…it would be wrong to think that whatever the neurology of consciousness may be, it is set for all time. The cases we have discussed indicate otherwise, that the function of brain tissue is not inevitable, and that perhaps different organizations, given different developmental programs, may be possible.
—Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

For the last epigraph, I went with something the eminent astrologer Robert Hand—whose intellectual brilliance shines like the Sun conjuncting the Ascendant—published in 1981, Reagan’s first term in office, when the World Wide Web was a flicker in some Defense Department contractor’s eye. He was commenting on how the popular conception of the Age of Aquarius—literally the “New Age” that gives its name to the entire woo-woo section of bookstores—as a healy-feely, hippie-dippie, love-will-steer-the-stars paradise is dead wrong:

If the coming age is really Aquarian, it may be an era in which individual considerations, emotional ties of love, and bonds of tradition are ruthlessly rooted out in favor of various utopian orders that are conceived entirely in the head and not at all in the heart.
—Robert Hand, Horoscope Symbols

You’d be hard-pressed to find a better descriptor than that of the future world the Elon Musks and Peter Thiels and Alex Karps and the other Epstein-adjacent tech-bro oligarchs are trying to create. And, as I’m sure my friend Elisabeth Grace of Why Now News would confirm, the only thing more strictly “Aquarian” than social media is AI.

Play it again, Sam. We now live in “an era in which individual considerations, emotional ties of love, and bonds of tradition are ruthlessly rooted out in favor of various utopian orders that are conceived entirely in the head and not at all in the heart.”

Every time I read that sentence, I get chills.

---

The central idea of my sci-fi novel is that anything you can do with a computer now—that is, in 2000-2002 or so—you will be able to do, in the future, entirely with your brain: send a text, listen to music, read a map, take a photo, check the score of the Knicks game. But in order for that to be achieved, everyone has to be logged into the vast network that connects everyone’s brain. I called this network “the LOOM,” a word that means both a device used to weave, and also a sense of foreboding and dread of what lies ahead. The working title of my novel-in-progress was Servers of the Loom. Later I shortened it to The LOOM.

The future earth of my novel was overpopulated, and a repressive U.S. government controlled everything by instilling fear (of travel, for example, or otherwise breaking the rules), by emphasizing the group over the individual, by hokey platitudinous religion (less Jesus, more self-help), and by constant surveillance via the cerebral processors, or “CPs,” that everyone had implanted in their brains. Reproduction was tightly regulated; professional “helixers” working in “Genmod” worked to rid our DNA of birth defects. People born from those modern methods were called “coders.”

Brand names took on lowercase letters and were “kleenexed”—they replaced the generic word for what they are: gapkhakis for pants, pfizers for prescription meds, otis for elevator, nikon for camera. The first line of the book hints at this:

I wake up twenty minutes before the bulova with the music still in my head.

Spellcheck did not thrill to this.

The most fun detail is that everyone’s last name was the name of a corporation. There are minor characters named Alicia Lucent, Javier Sony, Takeshi Honeywell, and Monsanto. The protagonist and narrator is one Drake Starbuck. (The corporate coffee concern is actually named for a character in Moby-Dick, so I was merely taking something literary that had been appropriated by commerce and returning it to its rightful place.) He is an artistic soul, is Drake: a loner and a dreamer, who wants to create art of some kind, but lacks the requisite solitude and the requisite means of self-expression. He is a melancholy sort, a young man who intuitively understands that the world around him is fake and hollow and unfulfilling.

The action picks up on the eve of a major piece of legislation going into effect. President Septimus J. Bofa (Get it? B of A!) is going to sign into law a bill that will legalize “downloadable RX.” Instead of taking pills, people will now be able to download their “pfizers” via their CP. The chemists—who make the drugs, and who will soon be out of a job—have formed a union, loosely aligned with a so-called “terrorist group” enigmatically named “the DWALA,” which is led by Gusta Merck.

Because Drake Starbuck has special abilities, of which he is not yet aware, he is recruited by agents of the DWALA in their mission to stop the downloadable RX from happening—and liberating all of humanity—by destroying the Servers of the LOOM, where all the data is stored.

I got about a third of the way through the project, but I never finished it. There were problems I was having that were hard to put my finger on. I couldn’t achieve the right tone. The rapid acceleration of tech IRL made it hard to pinpoint. Conveying all the information you need to convey to create the world wasn’t working as well as I wanted. Drake was a bit too self-righteous, too much of a wet blanket. Much later, I realized it should really be a YA novel, and I made Drake a bit younger. But that still didn’t work. So I abandoned it—one of the few writing projects I shelved that I was sad to leave behind.

I have thought about The LOOM a lot lately, for obvious reasons. Heartless members of the oligarch class are trying to foist their earthdestroying data centers on us. Not just one big data center, as I’d envisioned—even one larger than Manhattan Island, as Shark Tank’s dastardly Kevin O’ Leary is building in Utah—but many of them, all over the place: sucking up vast energy reserves and hoarding all the good water. (It had not occurred to me 25 years ago that our visionary tech overlords would be so myopic as to commit mass suicide by thirst.)

In short, a sci-fi novel about a group of young, renegade creative types committing an act of mass sabotage by blowing up data centers to liberate us from the tyranny of heartless technology feels very of the moment. So, at the risk of appearing self-indulgent, or of trying to fish for praise, I thought I’d share some of the unfinished novel here.

We open with a dream. Drake wakes up with a song in his head; he tries to remember the melody, but he loses it. This depresses and consumes him as he goes through his morning: walking across the campus, listening to the newsfeeds, being late for work in the Distribution department at Cryohealth Industries.

Here is a snippet of the fourth chapter of Part One (“DREAMSURFING”). Starbuck is explaining to us why he no longer indulges in dreamsurfing, even though he longs for his nightly forays into the mind of his crush, Ursula Tokai:

Ursula lived across the hall from us at the Commons. Not a day went by that I didn’t visit her subconscious five or six times. There were stretches, it could be said, when I literally inhabited her brain.

Ursula had some wonderfully intense dreams. I remember some of them as vividly as I remember my own. There was an energy to her dreams, a passion for life, that I have not encountered anywhere else in the LOOM—or realtime either, for that matter. How I treasured every moment I spent in her mind!

But I gave it all up. What my myopic guide failed to properly explain were the risks involved with dreamsurfing. Believe it or not, I never knew the principle behind it, that to access someone else’s dreams, you had to make available your own. I never realized that in order to dreamsurf, I had to let down the firewall to my own subconscious. I was vaguely aware that people could surf my dreams. But I had never even heard of dreamsharing. I asked Monsanto about it one morning.

“Dreamsharing? That’s where you see how many people shared your dream, in realtime. It’s pretty boring, if you ask me.”

“What do you mean, in realtime?”

“When you sleep, you dream. When you dream, someone else dreams the exact same dream. It’s an adaptation, they say, something we started doing after the LOOM technology was introduced. It helps the subconscious relax.”

“Show me.”

He showed me.

I discovered that the night before, over a thousand people had shared in my dream. How a mortician in Managua, a bartender in Bangalore and a helixer in Helsinki could all have a dream set in my workstation at Cryohealth Industries was beyond me. But they managed, the vultures.

---

The action returns to the present in chapter six, which finds Starbuck taking lunch in the Commons cafeteria:

Dick Gibson is in the caf when I arrive at noon, his tray pushed to the center of the oblong table. A paid employee of the Cryohealth Distribution Department, he’s older than me—twenty-five years older, maybe, although we don’t know for sure—and looks his age. Dark eyes peek out from piles of wrinkled skin, discolored and splotchy. More skin hangs loosely from his chin, and could cover considerably more neck than his. His teeth are yellowed and crooked, his hands speckled with liver spots, his hair the deep gray of machinery. The whole package is contained in a pair of denim overalls, a look that went out of style a decade ago. There is speculation, not unfounded, that he is organic. Certainly coders don’t age so badly.

I take the seat opposite him.

“You’re early”

“I was hungry.”

“You should have messaged me.”

He shrugs and nibbles on a slice of pear.

“You’re in a good mood,” I tell him. “Bad day at the office?”

“Woman in Michigan messages me every five minutes. She’s waiting for her pfizers to arrive from Fed-UPS. She’s running an analog O/S and can’t download the new tracking wetware, so I have to do it for her. This is my job, you understand, to run tracking programs. Every five minutes, Drake. Unbelievable. I can’t wait till they approve the downloadables. Can’t. Wait.”

He examines the slice of pear. “Also this pear has no discernible taste.”

Gibson can be a jackass sometimes. Of course the pear has no taste. Not without the palate plug-ins. That’s what the palate plug-ins are for.

“And I didn’t take my pfizers this morning.”

“How could you forget to take your pfizers?”

“I didn’t forget. I just didn’t take them.”

I give him the look of incredulity the comment deserves. “What would possess you to do such a thing?”

“I don’t know.” With thumb and forefinger he rubs his eyes. “I guess I want to feel how I’m supposed to feel, not how I’m supposed to feel.”

He takes his hands from his eyes and scans the ceiling tiles, as if the logic of his statement might be located there.

“And how is that?”

By way of reply he shakes his head.

“You can’t just not take your pfizers, Dick.” I take a bite of my pear— which, thanks to the plug-in, tastes perfect—and savor it for his benefit. “Mmm. Delicious.” I wipe my mouth. “Best darned pear I ever had.”

Gibson is glowering at me. “You’re a reasonably intelligent guy, Drake. But sometimes you infuriate me.”

“The feeling,” I let him know, “is mutual.”

This isn’t really true. Dick Gibson has never infuriated me (which is saying something, because I become infuriated more quickly than most; the pfizers can only do so much). Even when he is in one of his dour moods, like today, I still enjoy his company. Why, I can’t say. Perhaps because he’s an adult, and most of the people I know are much younger. Perhaps because he has a wry sense of humor, and people like that are a dying breed. And, yes, certainly the cachet of his name adds to his mystique.

Of Cryohealth’s three million employees worldwide, he is the only one named Gibson. Whereas there are eighty-three Starbucks at Headquarters alone. In fact, there’s another Drake Starbuck right down the hall, in Cosmetic; occasionally I get his voicers. I won’t even tell you how many Drake Starbucks are in the LOOM; unique snowflake I am not.

During a rare burst of sentimentality, Dick told us how he managed to retain his ancestral surname. Seems his great-great-grandfather—or however many generations ago it was that the bluechips began individual sponsorship—wangled a deal with a small company that by coincidence had the same name as his. The company went bust just days before Congress passed the Mandatory Sponsorship Act. Under a grandfather clause, everyone named Gibson was allowed to keep the name. That amounted to a hundred people, if that.

What type of company had Gibson been, I asked him.

“They made musical instruments,” Dick said. “Talk about obsolescence.”

I take a bite of soyburger and contemplate telling Gibson about my dream. Perhaps he could make something of it. Just as I muster the courage to open my mouth, though, he says, “Oh, wonderful.” With difficulty he curls his lips into something close to a smile and waves at someone behind me. “Honeywell is here.” Pronouncing the word seems to cause him physical pain. “I can’t handle that guy today.”

“I thought you liked Honeywell.”

“It’s an act, Drake. I’m acting.”

At this point Takeshi Honeywell pulls up a chair and plops down right next to him. He is a slim guy, my age—which is to say, eighteen—with perfect posture and bright black hair that becomes the fluorescent lighting. If you look closely enough at his vacant eyes, you can see that he is of Asian descent. And that is about the most interesting thing I can say about Honeywell. Even his dreams, which so dazzled Monsanto, proved, upon further review, lame.

“Have you heard the news?” This is a rhetorical question, as Honeywell gives us no time to answer. “The chemists have formed a union. They are threatening a march on Washington unless Bofa grants them an audience.”

Across the table Dick Gibson struggles to keep the smile on his face. Suddenly I am annoyed by Honeywell’s presence. With Honeywell you have to stick to the proscribed topics: news, weather, sports, sites.

“Don’t you want to know why they want to form a union?”

“Why,” asks Gibson, “do they want to form a union? Please enlighten us.”

Poor dimwitted Honeywell does not pick up on the sarcasm. “Because with the advent of the downloadable pfizers, they will all be out of work.”

This is old news. Huffpo has been predicting a union of chemists for months. And a child could identify their rationale for banding together. Chemists are needed to supervise the transition to downloadable pfizer technology; after that, their role diminishes greatly, if it doesn’t disappear altogether. If ever the chemists are to join forces, the time is now, before the transition is complete.

Gibson shrugs. “Lucky them.”

“President Bofa,” I echo what the huffpo bloggers have been reporting for weeks, “will find them something. Just like he’ll find us something.”

“They don’t want something,” Honeywell says. “They want to be chemists.”

“Well I wanted to play centerfield for the Rockefellers.” Gibson mushes his pear with a spork. “We don’t all get what we want.”

…

What I want—all I really want—is to create. I want to be an artist; the medium is not important. Whether I act in films or compose music or write fiction does not matter to me, as long as the product is original. But the product is never original. It can’t be original. For so long we surfeited on culture that now there is none left.

So I distribute pfizers instead. Worse—I’m studying to do so.

“You got that right.”

“It will be interesting to see how Bofa handles this,” Honeywell muses, “if he’s still around next week. Clementine Hatch says she’ll meet with the chemists. She’s against the downloadables. She even hinted she would cooperate with DWALA.”

“And negotiate with terrorists?” I put in.

“Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.” Gibson pounds his fist on the table. Honeywell has touched a nerve, it seems. “This better the fuck get approved. I can’t handle these dipshits much longer. Bofa for President!”

“Bofa for President!” seconds Honeywell.

“Four more years,” I intone, without much enthusiasm.

---

Later, a bit of what is called “shoe leather”—conveying information to the reader:

Instinctively I flip on my CP. President Bofa is streaming live from Paramount Mansion. He sits beside a glowing fire in a red leather lazyboy with Dubya, the First Dog. The scene is serene, but the speech is not:

“My comrade Americans, I speak to you today about a threat to all of us; indeed, to the very fabric of our great nation. The chemists, my comrade Americans. The chemists have formed a union and have threatened to walk out on the job should the FDA approve the downloadable form of prescription medication.

“If this very excellent piece of technology is approved, the chemists, the people who make the pfizers all of us depend on, the very people we trust for our everyday health and welfare, will endanger all of us. In an act of selfishness and greed, they will pull the plug on a vital operation, and all of us, every one of us, will suffer greatly. You, me; your friends, and mine.”

The view closes up on his face, the smooth skin, the formidable brow, the flat Dravidian nose. “It’s no secret who is responsible for this. The union claims to be working independently, but we all know Gusta Merck is calling the shots, Gusta Merck and her band of terrorists. Make no mistake, friends, this is DWALA’s doing.”

He furrows his brow. Hatred radiates from his soul, hot and ugly. The view pulls back. Dubya barks. “Gusta Merck remains at large, my friends. It is of the highest priority that she be captured and brought to justice at once. She is reportedly in the vicinity of Miami. If you have any information concerning her whereabouts, please report them to the Department of Justice.”

He rises to his feet, walks towards the nikon. “This is a very real threat to the health and welfare of the American people. Let me repeat, friends: This Administration will not allow the chemists to strike. We will not allow it. It is well within my powers to quell this threat, and make no mistake; I will do so. Thank you, and God bless America.”

Dubya barks one last time, the frame freezes and fades out.

DWALA: five letters, all caps. They give us the initials but not what they stand for. I have heard different interpretations: Disgruntled Whores And Lawless Atheists. Dissident Workers Against Lobotomizing Anyone. Declare War Against LOOM Apologists. And my personal favorite: Don’t We All Love America?

An interesting question, that.

Eventually we find out that DWALA actually stands for “Down With America’s Landed Aristocracy.”

---

Later that day, Drake bumps into his crush Ursula Tokai in the Commons. After teasing him about his no longer dreamsurfing her subconscious—and mortifying him—she invites him to a party at her residence that night. She teases this further by telling him, before they part: “You’re one of us, Drake. I just know it.”

Drake tells us about the last party he went to—everyone in a big dark room, “hoisting,” or being in the LOOM and not present. Sad and dull.

Part One culminates with Drake going to the party…and I had to laugh, reading this over today, on where exactly in Ursula’s residential building Drake goes to:

When I get to the Commons I head for the ballroom. Such an antiquated word, ballroom, hearkening to the lavish extravaganzas thrown by Astors and Vanderbilts, when society still had a capital S. Hard to imagine those debutantes in this warehouse, with its dingy walls and bluechip logos and faded pink carpet. I open the doors expecting to see Ursula and her friends settled in the foam rubber chairs, hoisting. But the ballroom is dark and deserted.

Panic grips me. What if the party is not tonight? What if I remembered the information incorrectly? Sometimes I do that. Sometimes I space out. I fire up the CP decks and replay the conversation. I hear Ursula say, clearly, “See you tonight.”

So where is everyone?

I fire off a voicer, asking Ursula that very question. In reply I get an error message: RECIPIENT UNKNOWN. Which means either a glitch in the LOOM—highly unlikely—or Ursula’s CP is switched off. And that makes no sense. How can she throw a party with her CP off?

A horrible thought strikes me: Ursula could be putting me on. Maybe she’s not having a party at all, but trying to humiliate me for neglecting her dreams. Maybe she loathes me. The notion is too much to endure. For the sake of my sanity, I force myself to give her the benefit of the doubt. She never told me to go to the ballroom. The party must be somewhere else. Her apartment, perhaps.

I ride the otis to the fifth floor, where I used to live. As I slip through the doors, a familiar figure is rounding the corner. He’s alone, thank the gods, and looks to be in a hurry. “Well, well, well. If it isn’t the defector. How are you, Starbuck?”

With some effort, I manage to smile and make nice. Later I will hate myself for it. “I’m well, Monsanto. How are you?”

The helixers did nice work with Monsanto, and Mother Nature cooperated. He is the paradigmatic tall-dark-and-handsome guy, a matinee idol, perfectly modelled on Mel Gibson, smirk and all. That someone so attractive can be so unattractive is a paradox worthy of Swami Almitra. “Better now that you’re gone.”

“I’m glad,” and this is the truth, “that I’m not the only beneficiary of my relocation.”

The smirk leaves his face and he looks me over, up and down, like a dojo would. “What are you doing here, Starbuck? As the updikes wrote, ‘You can never go home again.’”

Monsanto always quotes the updikes for my benefit—because I’m familiar with the canon, he claims. But the cynic in me (who seems to have a run of the place these days) believes he does it to remind me that I am not, and never will be, an updike, that my ambition is vain, in both senses of the word. It gets him off to dwell on my failures.

“I’m going to a party, if you must know.”

“A party? Nobody booked the ballroom tonight.” He flashes a winsome smile, even as he cuts me down: “Are you sure somebody’s not playing a joke on you?”

I decide not to indulge his curiosity. Even if he’s right, what business is it of his? Instead I ask where he is rushing off to.

“Late dinner. With Braun and some of the guys from Cosmetic.” He punctuates the word Cosmetic to spite me. He knows I want to work there.

“Well. Have fun. And tell Braun I said hello.” An inane thing to say, given LOOM technology. But consider the company.

“Oh, I will.” Monsanto vanishes into the otis.

The encounter throws me off kilter. I press my palms against the wall and stretch. I take a few deep breaths. A wave of nausea comes over me—curse that styrofoam penne!—but I fight it down. I’m here to see Ursula, after all, not Monsanto.

“He’s a jerk, Drake,” I tell myself out loud. “Don’t let him get to you.”

I round a corner, and am greeted by noise spilling from Ursula’s apartment. Muffled voices, glasses clanging, laughter, and, if I’m not mistaken…music? But it must be my ears playing tricks on me. She’s a recipient unknown, and they don’t make boses anymore.

I check my reflection in the mirror on the far wall. I’m wearing my best gapkhakis, a pressed blue oxford, and my navy blue hilfiger. My hair, a forest of cowlicks, is not behaving. Otherwise I look as good as I can look—no high compliment. I was not coded to resemble Mel Gibson.

She answers the door. But the Ursula standing before me is not the same Ursula who watched me drop my yams a few hours ago. She is the Ursula I encountered in the LOOM, dreamsurfing, but here she stands in realtime.

“Starbuck. You came. I knew it.”

She is wearing a black gown, the kind you see on history clips, with thin shoulder straps, a V-line front, and knee-length hemline. Her legs are tan and smooth, the contour of her calf accentuated by heeled shoes, which add two unnecessary inches to her height. Her fingernails are painted a deep red that is almost black. So are her lips. And her eyes are highlighted by black kohl. She is stunning. And she looks happy to see me.

“Come in, come in.” She clutches my arm, pulls me into the apartment, and slams shut the door. We are now standing in a long dark hallway, just the two of us.

“I tried to message you,” I tell her, “but the…”

“Is your CP on?”

“Of course.”

“Turn it off.”

“Turn it off? But I can’t…”

Dexterous fingers move to my earlobe, and, with a hot squeeze of her fingertips, my CP goes dead.

“There. That wasn’t so bad, now was it?” She doesn’t give me time to answer. Why do people ask so many rhetorical questions? Ursula shows me a smile I know well from dreamsurfing, the euphoric smile of her aerial dreams. Goosebumps form on my forearms.

“You look lovely. You look like the belle of the ball.”

“You’re sweet.” She clutches my arm. “I’m really glad you came. Come on, let’s go inside.” Ursula leads me down the long hallway and into the living room.

The twenty-some-odd partygoers are decked out in wild clothes, the kind of clothes the gaps don’t carry, the kind you have to buy at vintage clothing stores—and not the crumby ones we have in Kendall. The men are in tuxedos, the black suits with striped pants that were once worn at weddings, with ruffled white shirts and black bow ties. The women sport evening gowns, some black like Ursula’s, others in a wide array of colors: red and blue and green and purple. It is an all-ages party, not just students—there are quite a few adults. Some sit, some stand, but everyone is engaged in conversation, arguing, telling jokes, laughing. In the corner I see the source of the music: a live, three-piece jazz band! One sits behind a pile of tamas, one plucks the strings of a stand-up bass, and the third plays a fender. Real tamas, real bass, real fenders! Now this is a party worthy of a ballroom!

“The band,” I say, “is so high level.”

“Right? Friends of ours from Huntsville. Kickass musicians.”

I decide not to tell her that they are the first live band I’ve ever heard. She already knows I’m a rube by the way I’m dressed—no reason to belabor the obvious.

Ursula is at the bar now, pouring moet into two glass flutes. “You got an error message,” handing me one, “because my CP is off.” She raises her own glass. “To freedom.” We clink glasses and drink.

“Everyone’s CP is off, here. Parties with CPs suck.”

“You got that right.” I take a sip of the moet, which is not outstanding. The expression on my face gives it away, I guess, because she says, “Turn off your palate plug-ins, silly. Everything is organic, here.”

I do what I’m told.

“Now try.”

I sip the moet, and am almost overcome by its exquisite flavor. The palate plug-ins are so essential to cuisine, you forget that food and drink once tasted good without technological boon. But the taste soon turns sour.

“Ursula…isn’t it…illegal?”

“Isn’t what illegal?”

“Switching off our CPs, and making such a racket, and drinking real moet, and…”

“Drake.” She reaches out her hand and caresses my cheek. “Don’t worry. Check out the top of the fender.” She gestures to the bandleader, riffing away on the magical instrument. “See what it says?”

It says, in an old-style font, GIBSON.

“Yeah. Dick would really dig this.”

Her expression goes grave. “You mustn’t tell him. Please.”

“Why not? Because this is illegal? This is illegal, isn’t it? It must be. Maybe I should go…”

Instead of an answer, she gives me a kiss—a peck on my cheek—and any thought of fleeing evaporates like so much mist. “Let’s just keep the party entre nous, ‘kay?”

I don’t like the idea of excluding Gibson, but I do like the idea of including me. “Gibson’s not one of us, I suppose.”

She likes that. “No. No, he’s not.”

We are joined by a tall dude of perhaps twenty with black hedgerow hair and dark brown skin. He carries a bottle of moet, which he pours into our freshly-drained glasses.

“You must be Drake Starbuck. I’m Dalian Gateway.” He extends his hand, which, after much awestruck scrutiny—one side is dark, the palm pale, like mine—I pump vigorously.

“Gateway is my new housemate,” Ursula informs me, grinning at him. “He shares my appreciation for all things organic.”

“Unfortunately the others do not,” Gateway says. “But they’re away tonight, on business.”

“Business? Where do they work, that they leave Kendall?” Monsanto and Braun never spent a night away from the apartment, ever. There’s nowhere to go.

My question goes unanswered. The band kicks in just then, playing a raucous tune that all the guests but me recognize. I want to find out what it is, but my CP is off, so I am left with the odd sensation of insatiable curiosity. People shout, clap their hands, and jump up and down to the beat of the song. Ursula grabs my hand, which is uncharacteristically damp. “Let’s dance.”

The next thing I know, I’m in the middle of the room, jumping and twisting like the others, releasing myself to the music. Every so often I twirl Ursula on my arm, or she holds me close. It’s different than cyberdancing; there is a magic to it that the LOOM, good as the simulations are, cannot replicate. Monsanto would disagree, but there is just no substitute for a live Ursula on my arm, period.

The dance goes on for about an hour, until the band takes a break, and the dancers, sweaty and exhausted, cool down with moet. I follow Ursula to a sofa in the corner, where we sit.

“So why don’t you dreamsurf anymore?”

“It’s a long story.”

She sidles closer. “I’ve got time.”

I give her the short version. I tell her about Monsanto, and dreamsharing, and that I hate knowing that my dreams are not my own. “All I want is to be original, you know?”

“I know what you mean.”

The pleasure of the dance, the blend of euphoria and nervousness caused by Ursula’s close proximity and apparent interest in me, the unprecedented physical exertion, the intoxicating moet, the not-quite-dissipated sense of anxiety—I still don’t know if this party is against the law—and the thrill, if it is illicit, of violating a puritanical commandment and getting away with it, have made me skittish and jumpy. My sweat-damp hands are shaking, like Honeywell’s.

“Listen, Ursula. I wanted to ask you about something, about this recurring dream I’ve been having?”

“Shoot.”

I tell her about my musical mountain dream. As I speak, she regards me intently, oblivious to the party around her. What rapture, to command the undivided attention of anyone, much less a gorgeous woman like Ursula Tokai.

When I finish, she tells me it reminds her of a poem, which she recites by heart:

Adieu! adieu! Thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream
Up the hill-side; and now ‘tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music: — Do I wake or sleep?

“Yes,” I tell her, “that’s it exactly!” The lines are so moving, and spoken with such eloquent authority, that the fact that even my failure to grasp a fading dreamsong is not original does not depress me. To the contrary: I feel comfort that I am not alone in my loneliness. “What is that?”

“The last stanza of ’Ode to a Nightengale,’ by John Keats.”

I’m not familiar with the poet, and tell her so.

“He was phased out after the Literary Canon Act limited the number of dwems that could be taught in the public school curriculum.”

“Ah.”

“You should read his stuff—it’s really good.” She gazes deep into my eyes, as if taking a long drink. “Your dream is puzzling, Drake. But you know what I think? I think it’s a prophesy. It’s a prophesy and a memory.”

“How can it be both?”

“It’s a memory, an inherited memory, of where you’re from. And a prophesy that you will return.”

“What about the music?”

“Music,” she declares, “is the sound of joy.” She gives my hand a squeeze and, with another hearty peck on the cheek, excuses herself to use the restroom.

Social butterfly that I am, I’ve been here for an hour and only talked to two people. I’m not much for mingling anyway, and why stray from my lovely hostess? I decide to get a closer look at the instruments. I move to the corner of the room where the band is set up. The stand-up bass is made of polished wood and gleams in the lights. I’m afraid to touch it.

“Nice, huh?” I turn around. Dalian Gateway is standing there.

“Very.”

“Wish I could play. Too expensive, though. And not enough time.”

“What do you do, Dalian?”

“I work for Cryohealth, in Production.”

“Production? Doing what, programming?”

“I’m a chemist.”

He downs the remaining moet in a quick, joyless gulp.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I know what you’re going through. I intern in Distribution. Once they approve the downloadables, I’ll be changing majors. It totally sucks.”

He cocks his head at an odd angle and chortles at me. “You don’t get it, do you? You think I give a damn about my job?”

This throws me. “That’s what Voice of America says.”

“About me?”

“About chemists. You’re forming a union, right? To protest losing your…you know.”

“Ha.” He grabs the lapels of my hilfiger and pulls me closer. He is much taller than me. His scent is musk and baby powder, a pleasant if unusual combination.

“Do you have the slightest inkling of what will happen when the downloadables are approved? Do you?”

I take a few steps back and grab his wrists. He looks down at his hands as if they maybe belong to someone else and begrudgingly retracts them. But the intensity remains. His eyes are all fire.

“Right now, you take pfizers that are prescribed for you by doctors, all of them employed by the State. Do you have an idea what’s in those pills, Drake? Do you know what chemicals do to the human brain?”

This is probably a rhetorical question, but I answer him anyway. “They make us feel better. They curb the base impulses and make us happier, healthier, more productive.”

“They can do that. But they don’t.” Dalian pauses, glances around the room. Ursula is nowhere to be found. The musicians, high on moet, are working their way back to the corner, where we’re standing. Otherwise no one is paying any attention to us. “Come with me.”

He puts his arm around my shoulder, gently, and leads me to a room I recognize immediately from my dreamsurfing adventures. The bed is queen-sized and white, the walls painted dark red. There is an Persian rug on the floor and flowers in vases on every available table. Fake flowers, obviously.

“This is Ursula’s room.”

“She won’t mind.” Dalian Gateway closes the door. “You probably voted for Bofa, right? Probably think he’s a real good guy. A guy you’d like to go have a bud with, right?”

This doesn’t seem the right moment to disclose that there’s a picture of President Bofa hanging above my bed. True, almost everyone displays his picture somewhere in the home. True, it was there when I moved in. But I could have taken it down.

“I voted for him,” I admit, “but I’m not crazy about him. My friends like him more than I do.”

“Your friends are idiots. Stop listening to them.”

“I already have,” I tell him, and while true, this has not occurred to me before. “Are you one of the DWALA?”

“No.” Gateway shows me his biggest smile. Two rows of perfect teeth, white as LOOM space, stark against the dark skin. “But if I were, I wouldn’t tell you.”

I know he’s lying, and what’s more, he knows I know. But he doesn’t seem concerned. Perhaps he trusts me. Perhaps he is One of Us.

“But,” he points his finger at me, “that doesn’t mean I don’t think chemists are important. I believe in what we do, in our benefit to society.”

So Dalian Gateway believes, fervently, that he has a positive impact on the world. That is something. Even Gillette, deep down, must realize that there is no vitality in data entry, that we are all of us inessential.

“Must be nice.”

He ignores me. “With us, at least, there’s a buffer, an extra layer, to protect people. Without that buffer, without that extra layer, the doctors, who are financed by the Department of Justice, can send pfizers over the LOOM to be downloaded directly into our brains. What if they screw up? What if they send you the attachment that was meant for Ursula, or for me? What if they botch up the dosage, and the pfizer is lethal, or turns you into a vegetable? And what if the system gets hacked?”

“The LOOM can’t be hacked.”

“The LOOM gets hacked all the time. And we all let down our firewalls and leave ourselves susceptible. We invite disaster. What if some enemy, some odious despot like Prohibito Fumar, or a rogue terrorist agent, hacks the LOOM, and we all download corrupt files? What then?”

I don’t quite share his ardor for the conversation, especially with Ursula wearing that dress. But I’m stuck with him, so I might as well throw in my two cents.

“The government,” I sit down on the bed, running my fingers over the duvet where Ursula sleeps, “would never let that happen. The goal is expedience. That’s what they tell us all the time. They want us to be quick, they want us to be efficient. They don’t want us to make mistakes, and they certainly don’t want us hurting anybody.”

Dalian grunts in disgust, which is more damning than any argument he might have raised.

I feel the need to defend myself, to flash my admittedly-limited intellect. “Look, I read my Huxley, okay? This isn’t Brave New World here. Our pfizers are medicinal. They’re good for us. They’re not psychedelic drugs, where everyone is doped up and zoned out. I’ve known people who have stopped taking them, and the results haven’t been pretty. Plus, in Brave New World, the government safeguarded information. They weren’t even allowed to read Shakespeare, remember? I can read Shakespeare, or John Keats, or Stephen King. I can read anything I want. I have all the information of the world, a million Library of Ninevahs, right here.” I point at the CP switch on my earlobe.

“You can, but do you?” Argument won, Gateway folds his arms and leans against the wall. “You’ve been brainwashed, Starbuck. You’ve been brainwashed, and you don’t even know it. Hello, Ursula.”

I stand up as soon as she walks in. It’s presumptuous to sit on her bed, much as I’m enjoying it.

“It’s cool,” she reassures me, “stay put.”

Gingerly I ease myself down.

“Drake, I want you to meet someone.” She gestures at the door, and in limps a familiar figure—the young woman I saw by the Ronald Reagan statue this morning. “This is my friend Julie. She lives in Fort Lauderdale.”

She’s wearing a black dress, Julie, which hangs limply from her shapeless body. Up close, I see that her eyes are slightly crossed, and there are freckles—freckles!—on her cheeks. Despite, or perhaps because of, her slightly crooked teeth, her smile is infectious. One glimpse of those pearly whites is enough to set my whole being at ease.

“I saw you this morning.”

“So you did.”

“What brings you to town?”

“I came for the party, of course.”

“You came all the way from Fort Lauderdale,” I am floored, “for a party? Not that this party isn’t lovely, but traveling is, well, you know.”

“It’s only an hour’s drive.”

“You drove? In a car?”

“That’s generally what people drive.”

“But it’s so dangerous.”

Before I can question her further, Gateway excuses himself. “Anyone else want more moet?”

Everyone wants more moet.

“Be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

“I’ll go with you,” Julie says. She follows him out the door, which she closes behind her. I am now sitting on Ursula Tokai’s bed with Ursula Tokai. Best of all, she seems in no hurry to be rid of me.

“Drake,” she inches closer, “I need to ask you a favor.”

“Sure. What is it?”

“Julie’s not feeling well. I’d let her lie down in my room, but the party might go on for hours, and she has a terrible headache. Would you mind if she stayed at your place? I only ask because, you know, you have the single.”

This is an odd request, but no odder than the rest of the evening. “Sure. But I only have the one bed.”

She leans closer and whispers in my ear. “You can stay here, with me.” I feel her tongue dart into my ear and just about explode with anticipation.

“You mean here? In your bed?”

She does not answer in words. Instead she kisses me square on the lips, her tongue probing the inner reaches of my mouth. Reflexively my tongue moves to meet hers. Ursula said music was pure joy, but what she’s doing now is much more joyous than what you hear on the LOOMcast. I am lost in the moment, my entire being focused on the beautiful fusion of tongues.

Alicia Lucent derided physical pleasure, but what does she know? Our society venerates the sanitary, which means it also venerates the sterile.

When the kiss finally breaks, I am dizzy, breathless. I’ve seen her so many times in the LOOM, sitting on that same bed, that I feel like I am now walking in one of her dreams. Or one of mine. She is so radiant, so beautiful, in her vintage dress with her hair all mussed, and I feel that at that moment I would glady die for her.

“I’ve missed you, Ursula. To not surf your dreams feels like, I don’t know, banishment. I feel like Adam, booted out of Paradise.”

They make out a bit, and we learn about the state’s strict control of the reproduction process. Then:

We lay in silence for a long time. The band is playing a Cole Porter ballad. The din of the guests has died down, but I can hear Gateway’s booming laugh. He never did come back with our drinks. Two shakes of a lamb’s tail evidently equates to about an hour.

“Ursula? When you said I was One of Us, what did you mean? That I was immune to pfizers?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

She says nothing, just stares at me, smiling. I get a message just then through the LOOM. From her. It reads: ARE YOU ONE OF US?

“What does that mean?”

She remains silent, her smile widening. I’ve had more moet than I’m used to, and I’m a bit slow on the uptake. There’s something she wants me to figure out, but what?

Then I remember that my CP is switched off. She sent me a message, and I opened it—even though our cerebral processors were off.

She must be able to read the epiphany on my face, because she starts to giggle like a little girl.

---

So Drake is able to do with only his brain what most people require a CP to do. That’s why they recruit him. He’s a mutant, a new human. And he goes with the DWALA on an adventure, almost all of which unwritten, to get to the LOOM servers and blow them to smithereens.

The last version of The LOOM has the servers located in upstate New York, where I live now. But I’m pretty sure that in the original, the servers were housed in [glances at the story about Kevin O’Leary] Utah.

I never got around to writing the middle, but I did write the very end. What happens is this: Drake and the DWALA successfully blow up the servers…and nothing happens. As it turns out, the servers—the data centers—were just backups, superfluous, no longer necessary. All the information in the LOOM is decentralized. It exists in the collective consciousness, the network of individual human brains, and can never be destroyed as long as humanity continues to exist.

Right after that happens, Drake is subjected to “brainhacking” by the dojos—Department of Justice Officers. And all that he knows, all his memories, everything in his gray matter is deleted—but not before he finally recalls his dreamsong, and shares it, as well as the story we’ve been reading, through the LOOM: broadcasting it to the whole of humanity.

Here is the very last chapter, “Song of Starbuck:”

The bit of the drill pricking my skin jars, at last, a buried memory. The song of my dream—my song—comes back to me, in all its symphonic glory. [The head dojo Evander] Nixon’s face contorts in evil pleasure. I open my mouth and sing. And as I sing, I weave the song into the LOOM. Swirling stradavarii, buzzing cello, euphonic woodwinds, the smash of cymbals herald my accomplishment, pre-empt all existing activity.

Everywhere around the world, everyone plugged into the LOOM, some twenty billion fellow-travelers in the caravan across time, hears my song. As the drill pierces the skin, as blood dribbles down the bridge of my nose, the music crescendoes. I can see President Bofa, across the room, wrinkle his nose. The other dojos exchange quizzical glances. Even Nixon pauses, for a moment, in awe of my power, a power that soon will be destroyed. Nixon, who will never know of inspiration, of innovation, of creativity.

“You will tell us what you know,” Nixon says, unaware of the irony in his threat. All I have ever wanted was to share what I know, with anyone who cared to listen.

The two competing forces in the universe are not good and evil, as the Swami Almitra indicates, but creation and destruction. The updikes wrote of the agonies of creation, and creation is agony. To create, one must also destroy. There is a paradox worthy of contemplation, dear Swami! To create is to die a little—and sometimes, a lot.

They say that the Creator has been silent all these eternities since the beginning of the universe. Perhaps She died giving birth to the world, as I will die, bearing my creation.

We have destroyed the servers of the LOOM, to liberate humankind from its oppressors. The servers could be blown apart, but the LOOM is immortal, sacred, divine. The LOOM is not life, as our national slogan suggests. Life is finite; the LOOM is forever, and it is present in all of us.

A sharp grinding noise, as the drill bears through my skull. Curiously I feel no pain. I have defeated you, Nixon. I have defeated all of you. My body perishes, as flesh and blood must, but my soul forever survives: in the child Ursula will bear, in the LOOM infinity, in the account that the world now reads. That you now read. The third movement of the conspiracy.

My story is all I have to offer. It is original. And it is mine.

Now my sleep has fled, my dream is over.

This is the end.

(Nothing ever ends)

---

I don’t know what that all means, really. I didn’t know then, and I certainly don’t know now.

When I was writing The LOOM, I was following my instinct, working on autopilot—like Drake, groping in the dark. But I saw the ending quite clearly. I knew this was where it all led: to the autocrats being thwarted, to their state-sanctioned terror not having the desired effect, to the communion of all people—but in a good, positive, soul-healing way.

Most of all, I knew—I believed this absolutely then, and I still do—that art would triumph, and creativity would prevail.

Thanks for indulging me, Dear Reader. Happy Mother’s Day!

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ICYMI

We were joined by the great Molly McKew:

I will be with Nina Burleigh at KGB in NYC on Wednesday, May 13, at 7pm. I’ve been asked to sing silly songs. Please come down, if you’re available!

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Photo credit: Andrea Hinojosa.