SCHRODINGER'S CAT TRILOGY

by Robert Anton Wilson

  –B. Gilhooley, M.D.

  UFO REPORTER,

  JANUARY 1985:

  As the "Christmas Miracle" continues to accelerate worldwide, it becomes more obvious than ever that the old concept of aliens coming here in spaceships just cannot account for it. Even those most committed to the spaceman theory must admit, in the light of the recent events, that the sciences involved in what is being done to the human race are primarily psychic or parapsychological. If space beings are doing it, whatever it is, they must be doing it by what I can only call, vaguely, "psychotronic technology," and they could be doing it, for all we know, from their home planets, without physically traveling at all. By the same token, we have no need to posit spacemen at all, since whoever or whatever is doing this could be as close as the psychology department of some obscure university or the mind-control sector of any Intelligence Agency…

  Human minds are being manipulated on a massive scale; that is all we know, and all theories about the Manipulators-terrestrial or extraterrestrial-are mere guesswork…

  –J. Lacombe, Ph.D.

  UFO REPORTER,

  MARCH 1985:

  … The idea that the "Christmas Phenomenon" is being done to us by some Agency (terrestrial or otherwise) is based on the categories of Indo-European grammar and Aristotelian logic, which modern physics has long known to be inadequate. A Taoist or a Hopi Indian, for instance, with a different semantic "set," might regard the events as a cosmic happening or growth process, without trying to isolate out one part of the universe as the "cause" and thus relegating the rest of the universe to the dependent position of "the effects." Modern quantum theory, at least since Bell's Theorem (1964), would suggest strongly that these holistic Chinese-Amerindian concepts are more accurate maps of what is happening than the linear A-causes-B sequences of Aristotelianism…

  Does this mean that we abandon the search for a "cause"? Not at all. It merely implies that looking for humans or superhumans who did it is as fruitless as the medieval search to explain each oddity as the work of angels or demons. We should seek the cause in the quantum structure of life and of matter itself…

  –B. Williams, Ph.D.

  NATIONAL ENQUIRER,

  JUNE 1991:

  Of all the perplexing pixiedom that continues to trail in the wake of the Christmas Miracle, the most baffling thing to show-biz people is the continued absence of Cagliostro the Great. The idea that the magician's disappearance was a publicity stunt, calculated to cash in on the other mysteries beginning that amazing morning eight years ago, has long since been abandoned, as Cagliostro continues to remain hidden, wherever he is…

  The most bizarre sideline of this story concerns John Disk, the man who claimed to have murdered Cagliostro. Although held by the New York police for some months, Disk was finally released when no body could be found and the clothes discovered on Central Park West and identified as Cagliostro's were free of bullet holes. Disk, we have learned, is now an officer of the First Bank of Religiosophy and refuses to talk about his experience that mad and mysterious morning.

  "Nobody would believe me," he told our reporter. "You have to go to Chinatown and see it yourself."

  GALACTIC ARCHIVES:

  To understand what happened to the primates of Terra in the 1980s, a metaphor may be useful.

  Charlatans, jongleurs, wandering minstrels, stage magicians, etc., on all primitive planets, employ a device known as a Trick Top Hat. This appears to be an ordinary hat, and looks empty to the audience, but it actually contains a pouch out of which all sorts of amazing things can be made to appear-rabbits, yards of bright-colored cloth, glasses of water, and in general whatever the magician wishes to produce for the delight and amazement of his audience.

  This ritual, like all rituals and religious visions or ecstasies, is actually a memory of the future, but there is no way for primitives to understand that.

  Consider the epistemological plight of the Terran primates at the time of this ancient Romance. They knew that they were made of molecules, which were made of atoms, which were made of subatomic particles, which were expressions in space-time of quantum probability matrices. This knowledge, alas, was so recent that it had never been integrated into their philosophies, or into the rules of their social games, like religions, politics, economics, etc. Their whole social reality-tunnel was based on prequantum superstition and ignorance. The sociological nexus was Euclidean-Aristotelian-Newtonian; even Maxwell and Einstein had only been digested by a few.

  Over twenty-five hundred years earlier, one mutant primate, Lao-Tse, had written: "The greatest is within the smallest." Less than one-one hundredth (0.01) of one percent of the Terran primates were capable of understanding this before 1984. They looked for causality everywhere else: some known as astrologers scanned the distant stars; others known as Marxists scanned economics, etc. They knew that the physicists understood causality better than any other group on their planet, but few of them, even among the physicists, realized how quantum theory applied to their own behavior. Quantum psychology did not begin to emerge until the 1990s.

  What was known in their planet as Bell's Theorem-an elementary, kindergarten-level discovery routinely divined on every planet at about the same time as atomic energy and space travel are beginning-was only twenty years old among them and barely understood even by the physicists. The few quantum theorists, such as Sarfatti, who dared to speculate about "macrocosmic quantum effects"- large systems engaged in quantum-jumping-were usually dismissed as Romantics by their colleagues, despite the fact that each stage of metamorphosis of every living creature, including the Terran primates themselves, was obviously a quantum leap.

  The primate Mystics, most of them brain-damaged, endlessly told the other primates to "look within." Most primates assumed, in primitive Aristotelian fashion, that what was within was some gaseous entity which they called "mind" or "soul." Unable to find such an abstraction, they either gave up in despair or took their negative results as a positive revelation and became adherents of the "no-mind" or "no-ego" philosophy of Buddha and David Hume.

  Of course if they had truly looked within, scientifically, they would have found that their thoughts, percepts, and reality-tunnels were determined by the structure of the primate nervous system, which was determined by the genetic or molecular design of the primate evolutionary script, which was determined by the laws of quantum biophysics. That is concretely, their brains were shaped by cells shaped by molecules shaped by atoms shaped by quantum probabilities.

  Since the quantum connection is nonlocal, it is inevitable that introspection and meditation could discover no "ego" within; within and without are Euclidean parameters that do not apply to the quantum world. But the primates could not understand this. When, due to trauma, masochistic religious practices, alkaloid herbs, or mere statistical chance, their neuroatomic circuitry propelled them into Quantum Consciousness, they could not conceptualize that they were outside space-time entirely. Space and time, they still thought even after Einsein, were as solid as walls. They could only imagine, primate fashion, that they were traveling in space and out of their bodies; they called it "astral projection" and devised numerous primate superstitions about it.

  Similarly, when one of them would begin to learn how to use the metaprogramming circuits in the forebrain, they could not conceptualize that they were peering into alternative quantum probability matrices. Instead, they devised a whole mythology of heavens, hells, purgatories, astral planes, fairy lands, demons, gods, angels, UFOnauts, etc., to make Euclidean "maps" of such quantum experiences.

  We should be charitable to the Terran primates. All planets have gone through such superstitious stages before the HEAD Revolution is complete among them.

  When the neuroatomic circuitry, only occasionally released during most of their history, began to function fully in 1984, the primates could not begin to understand what was happening, for all of the above reasons. They were suddenly in communication, not just with one reality-tunn
el, but with all possible reality-tunnels. They could see quantum probabilities leading to all possible futures, but they were unable to conceptualize what they saw. The primate brain, always quick to cover ignorance with a primate archetype, projected all their traditional superstitions on what was happening.

  Terra was a weird and crazy place for several years. Giant lobsters with ray guns, Tibetan demons, Ignatz the anarchist mouse, and dozens of other fantasy figures were likely to appear at any time, any place, even in churches during funerals or at top-secret governmental meetings. The joke "We're all living in a surrealist novel" gained wide currency, although few realized how close to the truth it was.

  The intelligence-raising drug NEURO began to change things a bit after it appeared in 1988. People's fantasies gradually became more sophisticated and philosophical, and their reality-tunnels accordingly adapted. With the publication of Sirag's General Field Theory in 1993, the smarter primates immediately realized what was really occurring on their planet and throughout the cosmos.

  They gradually comprehended that all their myths had been memories of the future, available to them through the nonlocal activity of the quantum waves making up their brains. Age-old religious visions of Immortality, for instance, they recognized as precapitulations of the inevitable end product of their current longevity research. The "magic carpets" and "seven-league boots" they already had; the New Heaven and New Earth they were rapidly building. The superhuman heroes and heroines of romantic fiction were the humans they were themselves becoming as the HEAD Revolution accelerated them toward greater intellectual efficiency, more flexible emotional equilibrium, neurosomatic rapture, and metaprogramming wisdom.

  They understood that the Boddhisattva's Vow, common among the neurosomatic-circuit Eastern primates, was no idle fantasy, either, even though it promised to redeem all sentient beings. With time-travel made possible through the General Field Theory, they could change any past probability wave, creating a new universe where each entity would take the best possible path instead of whatever sad paths it had taken to arouse their compassion and intervention. They understood the words, previously totally opaque, of the Jewish mystic, Jesus, who had said, "All that I do, ye shall do, also; and more." They understood that every political and mystical ideal of freedom, however aborted in its first appearances, was fated to be achieved in some form, in the infinite nonlocal cosmos opening before them.

  They understood that the "oneness with earth" so many had discovered in the previous two decades had only been the overture to the discovery of nonlocality, as they shared more and more in oneness with all that is, and all that can be.

  And they understood, of course the time-honored allegory of the Trick Top Hat, which was just a symbol of the brain. This ritual was passed on from generation to generation, since it represented the greatest treasure in the universe, which is shared by all and belongs to none: the faculty of creativity, partially unleashed in each sentient being, fully released at the proper Galactic-genetic time by the HEAD Revolution.

  BOOK ONE

  The Homing Pigeons

  PART ONE

  WHO'S ZELENKA?

  All Cretans are liars.

  –empedocles the cretan

  The President of the United States is not a crook.

  –the president of the united states

  Death to all fanatics!

  –malaclypse the younger

  THE UNIVERSE WILL SURPRISE US

  Jen fa Ti: Ti fa Tsien T'sien fa Too; Too fa tzu-jan

  –LAO-TsE, Too Te Ching

  Tall, skinny palm trees, twisted to bizarre angles by dozens of Florida hurricanes, stood black against a cinnamon-streaked sky as the sun rose majestically in the west.

  "We stop here," Mavis said, as he had known she would; as was, perhaps, inevitable now.

  This must be the Gulf of Mexico, Dashwood thought. They could now load him with chains and drop him in the drink, as criminals said, letting him sink slowly down amid the sharks and barracudas, down where, after the sharks were finished, the King Crabs would pick what was left on his bones, down, down, down, full fathom five.

  And, as was inevitable now, Mavis motioned him out of the car, stepping out behind him (still holding that damned tommy gun, as if quietly toying with it) like the ghoats in hammelts.

  "We wait here," she said. "The others go back."

  "What are we waiting for?" Dashwood asked.

  "Don't be a dummy, George. We rescued you, remember? Like the gauds in ambers."

  Dashwood took a deep breath, counting to ten. "Why do you keep calling me George? You know my name is Frank, dammit."

  Mavis opened her eyes wide, pretending astonishment. "You really don't remember," she said sadly.

  A woodpecker landed wearily on the nearest palm, as if he had flown more missions than Yossarian and never intended to go up again.

  "I'm Frank Dashwood," he said. "Dr. Francis R. Dashwood. I'm a member of the American Psychiatric Association. I'm in Who's Who. Goddamnit," he added, irrelevantly but heatedly.

  "You're George Dorn," she said. "You work for Confrontation magazine. Your boss is named Justin Case."

  "Oh, balls," Dashwood said.

  The woodpecker turned his head, as perhaps was sure to happen now, and watched them suspiciously, like a paranoid old man.

  And Dashwood noticed, as for the first time, an unfinished building on the beach, probably a new condo, with girders going off at strange cubist angles. Skeletons in hard hats stood frozen like statues, and a giant squid reached up from the ocean to wrap its tentacles around the pylons.

  The sun was as hot as Gunga Din's loincloth.

  A vine-colored plaque at the gate said:

  FATALITY INC.

  Muss S. Sine, President

  S. Muss Sine, Vice President

  "If I'm George Dorn," he said finally, "why do I have this deep-seated longtime delusion that I'm Frank Dash-wood?"

  "We're in Maybe-time here," Mavis said. "You know: 'In addition to a Yes and a No, the universe contains a Maybe.' You've heard that, I'm sure. It's hard to keep track of social fictions out here, and personal identity is just a social fiction. So you've lost your ego for a few minutes and grabbed hold of another one. That's how you created this imaginary Frank Fernwood." "Dashwood," he corrected automatically. "Going home from here isn't easy," Mavis said, still toying with the tommy gun. "Some people never find their way back. That's why you must let go out of this Frank Fernwood delusion." "It's Dashwood, dammit, Dashwood!" "Fernwood, Dashwood," she said impatiently. "Deep down you know you're George Dorn."

  "You are a fruitcake, Mavis. Why did you rescue me from that jail, anyway?"

  "You're wanted," she said simply. "By whom?" "Hagbard Celine."

  "And who is Hagbard Celine?" They had reached the cabana and were standing beside it, glaring at each other like two chess masters who each suspect that they have wandered into some idiotic permutation of the Ourang-Outan opening. The woodpecker turned his head, probably a bit puzzled himself, and sized them up with the other eye.

  "You'll know when you meet him, George." ("Frank," he shouted. "George," she repeated firmly.) "For now it's enough that he wanted us to get you out of Bad Ass Jail." "And why the hell does Hagbard Chelling…" ("Celine," she corrected.) "… Celine, then, why the hell does Hagbard Celine want to see me?"

  "Why anything?" Mavis asked rhetorically. "Why sky, why oceans, why people? Jen fa Ti: Ti fa T'sien: T'sien fa Tao: Tao fa tzu-jan."

  "Oh, coitus," Dashwood said, avoiding crudity. "Don't give me obscurities in Cantonese at this hour."

  "Men are created by earth, earth is created by the universe, the universe is created by Nature's Process, and Nature's Process just happened," Mavis translated.

  Dashwood was not going to get involved in aleotoric cosmologies. "So Hagbard Celine just happened," he said. "And he just happened to want me out of Bad Ass Jail. And you just happen to like busting into jails with tommy guns and taking prisoners out. This is
the silliest damned routine I ever heard."

  "Well," Mavis said, grinning wickedly, "I also just happen to like you. In fact, I've had the Whites for you ever since I broke into the cell back in Bad Ass and caught you Lourding off."

  "Don't talk dirty," he said. "It's not becoming to a young woman your age, and it's getting silly and old-fashioned. It makes you sound like a refugee from the 1960s."

  "Nonsense," Mavis said. "It gets you excited. It always gets men excited to hear women talk like this. Do you know how I felt when I saw you there on the bunk with your Rehnquist in your hand? It made my Feinstein go all warm and mushy inside, George."

  "Frank," he said one more time. "And I don't have the Whites for you. Women with tommy guns don't turn me on at all."

  "Are you sure?" Mavis asked provocatively. "I'll bet I could make your Rehnquist stand up if I really tried." She opened her trenchcoat and he could see her magnificent Brownmillers bulging through her tight sweater. He had to admit they were a fine, firm pair of Brownmillers-"a pair you could hang your hat on," as an Irishman had once said-but he was not going to be tempted. This was all too weird.

  "I've had a lot of tension since raiding the jail," Mavis went on, slipping the trenchcoat to the sand. "I really need a good Potter Stewart, George. Wouldn't you like to Potter Stewart me? Wouldn't you like to lie on the sand and stick your great big pulsating Rehnquist into my warm, moist Feinstein?"

  "This is ridiculous."

  "Listen, George," Mavis went on intensely. "When I was young I decided to save myself for a man who completely meets the criteria of my value system. That's when I was reading Ayn Rand, you see. But then I realized I could get awfully horny waiting for him to come along. You'll have to do."