15
The actual experience of being immaterial is totally bizarre. You strip off all your clothes and put on these skintight, well, skin tights. Like, tights made out of skin. Fortunately not someone else’s skin. The suit is genetically engineered from your own harvested skin cells. Don’t think about it too much—it’s super-gross. Because the defusion sphere codes to your genetic sequence to ensure your molecules can be properly knit back together on reconstitution, it’s either wear the skin suit or time travel naked.
So, you’re wearing basically a leotard made of your own skin, but dyed blue-black to look cool. You’ve got skin boots and skin gloves and a skin cap that covers your head to prevent loose hairs from accidentally materializing inside your brain. You look like you’re about to do a luge run.
There are around seven octillion atoms in a human body. That’s a lot of goddamn atoms to disassemble, shoot back through time and space, and reassemble in perfect order. But biological entities have a major advantage over inanimate objects. They’re not discrete particles. Those 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms are spinning around in the thirty-seven trillion cells of the human body and each of those cells comes with its own architectural blueprint. Unlike stone or metal or plastic, a person is made of 37,000,000,000,000 maps of themselves.
You just have to program a quantum computer to read the map.
If you’re my father, you realize that when sending a person back in time, your best bet is to have everything you send with them actually made of the same genetic material as that person. That means employing a cutting-edge bioengineering team to forge some dark, dark magic in their plasmic vats and grow a personalized organic computer to integrate into every skin suit. A central operations node links via wires made of neural axon fascicles to a dozen coordination points, each a microscopic bundle of repurposed brain cells firing off simple electrical impulses.
Yes, when you travel back in time it’s wearing a suit of skin threaded with nerves to a dozen tiny brains. An organic computer system built for one purpose—to return you from the past to the present, safe and whole.
You step into the defusion sphere, a pearlescent white orb with a hatch that closes seamlessly, and the machine powers up with a low-gauge basso profundo hum. You get goose bumps everywhere. Your orifices dilate. Your nose and mouth feel dry and smoky, like a phosphorescent match got struck inside your throat. Your bones feel hollow, the blood frothy in your veins and arteries. Your eyeballs seem more buoyant in their sockets, as if they might float up out of your skull like helium balloons if they weren’t tethered in by your optic nerves.
And then you’re a ghost. People can see you, but you can pass through anything solid. You can’t talk—immateriality does something wonky to your vocal cords—but you can see and hear just fine. Scent is weird. Even if you’re smelling something right in front of you it seems like a faint whiff caught on a breeze from miles away.
I never really got to do anything cool while immaterial. It was only for experimental training purposes. I’d spend on average twelve minutes going through a routine series of tests and then, when I hit the two-minute red zone, hurry back into the defusion sphere to be reconstituted. You’re sluggish for a couple of hours afterward, like your molecules need to get familiar with gravity again, but otherwise you feel fine.
Not that it mattered how I did on my immateriality tests. There was zero chance I’d be going back in time. Penelope was too good at her job to even need an understudy.
I was there for four reasons, but really it was one reason—pity.
16
Why am I going into such detail about the defusion sphere? Because it’s how I saw Penelope Weschler naked for the first time. It’s also how she saw me naked for the first time. I was way more interested in the former, but the latter turned out to be way more significant.
Penelope and I are doing a routine training module, this virtual simulation on how to walk when immaterial so you don’t, like, sink into the ground or float off into the air and can actually put one foot in front of the other. It requires lining up the intangible molecules in your feet with the coherent molecules of the floor, sort of like strolling across a pond that’s frozen over with a thin layer of ice and trying not to fall through.
I do what I usually do, which is to try to imitate what Penelope is doing to the best of my ability and falling dramatically short. And she does what she usually does, which is to excel at the given task beyond all previous metrics while ignoring me completely.
And then . . . something goes wrong. Alarms honk, red lights flash, Penelope and I get hustled into a locked decontamination chamber. A voice, too loud, the speaker giving a tinny buzz on the vowels, tells us the security system flagged an unidentified pollutant that exceeds medically safe radiation levels. They have to follow protocol.
We’re told to remove our clothes. I’m a bit numb, because someone just told me I may have been contaminated with a lethal dose of radiation, so not really registering that I’m in a small room alone with Penelope Weschler and we’re both undressing. I take off all my clothes and she takes off all her clothes and we place them in a container that’s withdrawn into the wall by robotic arms.
I’m standing there, naked. She’s standing there, naked. They spray this mist onto us from nozzles in the ceiling and it smells metallic but it looks, basically, like glitter. You know, the kind that kids sprinkle on glue for craft projects. I’m sure there’s a sound medical reason for its appearance, but it makes my possible death by radiation poisoning seem awfully festive.
We’re six feet apart, glitter clouds whirling around us. I do my best to avert my eyes, because I don’t want her to catch me looking at her, but I also know this is almost certainly my one and only chance to see Penelope naked. So I dart a furtive glance at her.
She’s staring right at me.
Physiologically, it’s not exactly a surprise what happened next, but still—and I’m telling you this next part only out of full disclosure, so you’ll believe this is the whole truth, because if I admit something this mortifying and weird, what else is there to possibly conceal?—standing there naked with Penelope in the swirling glitter, both of us looking at each other, I can’t help it. I get an erection.
Penelope looks, you know, surprised. Since we’re being doused with an emergency antiradiation treatment. And I know it’s ridiculous. I might be about to die, horribly, lesions waffling my flesh, my organs liquefying, my bones ropey and gelatinous. But I don’t feel like I’m dying. It’s stupid, I know, but what I feel is vividly alive.
And Penelope, well, she looks at me like she just noticed me for the first time.
To clarify, it’s not that my penis is so magnificent she was overwhelmed with desire. It’s more that I’d never done anything notable in her presence before and this was such a demented response to the situation that it couldn’t help but stand out.