(also see Advances in Skin Science
and Egg Physics 101 and Back to OZ)

Last week the mad scientist, known also as "the dirty old man," "Q," or "Saint Nick," finally coughed up the goods. I'd been pestering him to show me his quantum tantra sex toys and introduce me to his friends, an interworld travel cult. The night began with a shindig with the boys. I was encouraged to take as much of whatever mind-altering substance was to my taste. Later I'd learn why. In retrospect, I realized this was what passed for an initiatory hazing for this fringe-science travel cult.

The boys turned out to be hackers, but the kind of hackers who'd been hacking before computers were invented, even before agriculture or the wheel. In aboriginal times they would have been called shamans. But now they were hackers, real hackers, the kind who stride the inner mysteries of computers like familiar jungle paths.

Just as the mad scientist is a real scientist, the kind who accelerates particles and writes numbers like words. If this had been fiction I would have felt more at home. I was like a fictional device, the guy the audience is supposed to identify with, because like them, he doesn't understand a word that these brainy bastards say.

To be fair, in spite of their drunken carousing and salutary advances on our waitresses and women at neighboring tables, peppered with a technobabble of hacker jargon that made my vision blur, the boys were very polite and friendly towards the lowest common denominator, yours truly. I'd often wondered what the mad scientist saw in me, and occasionally I asked him, carefully, since having a mad scientist as a friend was too good to screw up by appearing as stupid as I really am. He patiently explained to me that by his estimations and "scans" he had determined that my habit, or "knack" as he called it, for constantly seeking, and imagining a better pornography was potentially a real boon to the science community.

He was constantly trying to tease the pornographic visions from my head. Truly, I have some good ideas for pornography that no one has done. And surely, they would sell. And really, I don't care if I do them or someone else does, since all I want is good porn, and a comfortable world that is more conducive to hedonism. So I'm happy to share my dream-inspired sex visions, in a nutshell or expanded to tree size.

In a nutshell, I fantasize about all the enlightened immortal women that I'd read about in my religion books ganging up on humans and banging them into samadhi. Men watching these luminous fuck scenes would get their chakras lit up from the comfort of their homes and the stories would be chock full of educational materials, ready to feed the newborn and ravenously hungry higher chakras, but never for a moment interfering with the good fucking, which is what the audience thinks it's paying for. So I happily gave everything I had to the travel cult, and they were polite and adjusted their hackerese to accommodate my religious lexicon, substituting words like God and Enlightenment for whatever are their hacker equivalents, and willingly went down the yellow brick road of tantric sex with me, pointing out many new sights I'd never noticed along the way. Later, when I was well sloshed, the mad scientist shuttled me away with winks at the boys. "I know it's late, Kelly," he said, "but there's something I've been wanting to show you."

We drove out of Santa Cruz and into the mountains, proceeding from paved road to dirt, from smooth to rutty. We passed the Goddess Temple, where the saint said he often stopped to take in a belly dance or kundalini session. The mad scientist's secret lab was way beyond that, past nightmarish hells of rusty car skeletons and No Trespassing signs ominously holey from bullets. He explained that his real estate choice was partly due to financial considerations, and partly because all the meth labs, grizzly gun-toting Okies and Viet Nam vets served him well as a front for his secret experiments. "They're almost as good as an army," he explained.

"But the first lines of modern defense are always information mazes, media blinds, propaganda traps. And anyone nerdy enough to get past those is usually pretty easily scared by an old man with a gun and a dog." "Are you working on anything a government or terrorist group might want or fear?" I asked.

"Ah," said the madman, arching his brows significantly. "The meth labs are simply a moat. They are not the last line of defense."

Finally we arrived, the wheels of the car balancing like tightrope walkers on the ridges of ruts so deep they would have swallowed the wheels of a SUV like the hungry swamp blob in an old sci-fi movie.

The mad saint's secret lab looked like a shack, but the floor opened and led to a cavernous basement that, even when flooded with bright light, still faded at the far end into darkness.

"Of course you know," he said, literally jabbing me in the ribs with his elbow, "that now you can never leave."

I laughed dutifully and not a little nervously. The place was full of all kinds of mysterious equipment, some of which he pointed out as we proceeded briskly towards the darkness.

"There's the ecto-typewriter. That's vintage mad scientist stuff. There's my sex toy, Claire, the AI." Sitting on a chair was a stunningly beautiful woman, seemingly frozen in time, like a 3D photo. I goggled. Here was all this stuff I'd believed were only fictional devices. Perhaps I myself was real as well!

"I'd like to give HER a Turing test," I ventured lamely.

He snickered and we passed a huge cloaked blob, with all sorts of roundy and jabby things concealed.

"What's that?" I asked. "That's not ready to show," he said quickly, picking up his pace. "It's a prototype of the zazzomatic."

"The telepathy machine?"

"Yes."

"But it's so big!"

"Just like early computers. Commercial models will be much smaller. Like all truly revolutionary technology, size is not what matters. It's sneaking past the meter-maid snipers. You have no idea how many really wonderful devices that could have helped humanity and other species have been shot down because they would have undermined global, meterable systems."

Now we'd reached our destination. My eyes must have looked like saucers. It was something else right out of fiction. A myth not yet visible in popular culture, only as rumor whispered around campfires by neo-shamans "high on a vine," or a molecule, a tribe well-known for cloaking the ineffable in allegorical terms, so that their stories were rarely true at face value.

But there it was, a real Egg! It was surrounded by panels that looked like jet airplane dashboards.

The controls were mostly the old-fashioned toggle and dial type. And there were exposed tangles of wires connecting various panels which were apparently being constantly added or disconnected, sometimes set in boxes of nailed-together plywood or haphazardly soldered here and there. I took it all in like a kid in a candy shop.

"Wow, a real live Egg," I said in the hushed tones that invariably issue from the lips of religious zealots or sports fans adoring their idols. "What is all that stuff?"

"You've been asking why I found you so interesting," the saint's voice came from behind me as if from a discarnate entity, a voice-over of the images panning before my documentary camera eyes.

"Yeah," I continued talking in an absent-minded way, "I thought maybe I was sort of like a lab rat, but" (I recovered enough presence of mind to tack on some etiquette) "I always considered you a 'good' scientist. You know, you were kind to your rats, gave us lots of cheese and stuff."

"Well, I guess in a way you were not that far off. You see, I've been modifying this travel device somewhat, according to your pornographic rants. I've been milking you like you were a psychic channel plugged into a spring of future science. If I was a really good friend, I would have counseled you to sign an NDA before giving away your ideas. Pure gold. And speaking of NDAs..."

The saint produced a big machine-rolled joint.

"This is better than any NDA. Also it's not safe or effective to operate this Egg while you're straight."

He got it lit and passed it my way. Good shit! I was in doper heaven! "So what do you mean," I said, speaking while inhaling, "that you 'modified' the Egg?"

"Well, in the original Eggs, you had to be fucking a tantrika--a sexually skilled woman--in order to make it work. And if you could get it to work, you ended up on a parallel Earth. Then you couldn't get back unless you could do it without an Egg. As you can imagine, frustrating even for 'initiates,' and nothing close to marketable."

"A Sputnik Egg dog..." I said contemplatively, taking another hit.

"Yes. Anyway, inside you will notice three concentric circular screens. The two outer screens target systems deeper than ego. On the central screen you will see the "new and improved" pornography, that you've been pining for. It's not the canned stuff--this is real-time actual fucking..."

"Where?" I muttered, "how?"

"I'm glad you asked that, Kelly. Now, look out here. This is a panel that controls that orgone antenna on top of the egg. Reception strength and range are partly determined by the receptivity of the traveler. On the central screen you'll see the sex scene that you are tuning in on, and all around suggestive variations on the themes that have caught your attention. That's the basics." "However, there are many settings you can tune from out here before you begin your trip. This dial, for instance, determines the number of chromosomes of the organisms you'll see fucking..."

"You mean you can get interspecies pornography on this thing?" "Of course. And here's a toggle that determines if the life forms you'll tune in are even DNA based or not. The default settings are for earth-type humans..."

"I think that's where I'd like to start," I said, agog. "Most people have to. You'd have to be pretty damn advanced to tune in to squid sex, or fuck a molecule or a sun spot. Human sex is like training wheels for Real Sex. Now, pay attention. Here are the dials that determine the range. Do you want to tune in to sex in your home town, your country, your world, nearby worlds--or shoot for other galaxies? And here's a toggle that determines if the orgone antenna will seek signals hyperdimensionally. That's how you get to the parallel earths. And here's a dial that can scale you up to higher dimensions or down to 'flatland.'" "I'll stick with 3-D..."

"I wouldn't let you try anything else, safety considerations, ya know. And speaking of safety, that's one thing that's really a quantum leap between this new Egg and the old ones. With the old Eggs it was sink or swim, teleport to Java 2 or just cum in the magnesium salts and have to clean up and go home to the same old world."

"But with this new Egg, when you get a good resonance with a certain fuck, your consciousness will piggy-back on the consciousness of the chosen fucker...and you will ride around in his bean, seeing and feeling what he sees for a little while, before your natural affinity for your own "self" will automatically return you here, to your body floating in this Egg...

"Can I be a woman if I'm a man?"

"Good question. Thanks for reminding me. Here's a toggle that determines sex. Always start with your own, for practical purposes. If you're a man you'll see the fuck from the man's point of view. It's quite a neural tweak to do transgender, but it is possible, in theory. There's even a switch here to turn the male/female toggle totally off, since, as you might suspect from a casual look at nature, there are species that do not use that system..."

"Like if I wanted to fuck a flower or a worm..."

"You might be in an amoeba-like one-sex situation...or in many cases there are more than two sexes, and even more than one species involved in sex. You might be surprised to know that many of these bizarro modes of copulation are easier to navigate than a man becoming a woman.

"Anyway, we'll start you out as a human male..."

"Thanks, but, you know, I'm starting to have second thoughts. I'm happily married, you know."

"That's another good point. Eggsex is clearly not "cheating". And that's not mere rhetoric. The sex really is happening between totally other people. At worst, the Egg traveler could be called a voyeur. It really is just innocent old pornography, but with a new twist...

"Now get in, and stick this on your dick. If you were a woman, you'd use the dildo version. This is your sexual feedback interface. It's your means of tuning the sex scenes. You can scroll through fucks and focus in on the one that arouses you the most. This is also a good way to start practicing for inter- species sex. Once you get your libido revved up on humans, you can let the sexual momentum carry you across the chromosome gap.

"I improved this dick device too. Actually Sony Corp did. A Japanese friend in their R&D department smuggled it out to me. As long as I don't use it commercially, it doesn't matter. What it is is a virtual reality sex toy, for hi-tech phone sex. You view your partner on screen or in goggles or whatever, and as you get turned on, this thing heats up, and makes a nice simulation of thrusts using peristaltic contractions. Your partner would feel corresponding sensations through her "smart dildo". I've modified it so that it syncs up with the image on the central screen and reads the flow of your orgone in your body, across the viewscreens, and beyond.

"How does this orgone thing work? "

Another good question. But why do I get the feeling you're stalling? Strip. Get in. And I'll explain it to you some more while you get jacked in. There's an internal speaker and mike for communication."

Once I was afloat and strapped into the Sony sex toy the screens flickered to life. A porn movie on the center screen. And I recognized it! Zazel. A good one. I started to get erect, and suspicious. This was all some kind of elaborate practical joke!

"Hey, that's not nice, getting me all worked up like that," I said. "This is not an orgone antenna thing, is it? That's just a porn video."

"Of course it is, you jerk. How do you expect to tune orgone signals with a limp dick? The dick is just the tip of the iceberg, you know...the limp dick, that is. The erect penis is the tip of an endocrine flame that licks towards orgone like oxygen. So just shut up and enjoy the show. When your mind starts hungering for reality, for the dimensions of sex that the pornographic movie cannot convey, you'll start tuning in to real sex scenes..."

So I watched the copulations and strip teases with increasing interest, and between a brain fine-tuned to respond to pornographic images and pulsations of the Sony cybercunt I was fully erect in no time. On the central screen, the movie dissolved into an interlocking array of amateur porn scenes like a fly's eye view of some cosmic whorehouse. The outer screens were filled with pulsating psychedelic variations on the cosmic whorehouse theme—a disturbingly intense abstract sexuality that was bypassing my conceptual censors and sucker-punching my id.

"Wow," I said into the pitch darkness. "All I can say is, wow. That, and you're gonna be rich! Even if this is just pornography, even if I'm a joke butt, I don't care. This is like nothing I've ever seen, or felt, before." I focussed on a woman's face and her image filled the screen, wreathed by a circle of copulating bodies like the sculptures on the sides of some Hindu sex temple in the middle of the jungle. She was a stranger--a woman I'd never seen before--in the throes of deep passion, her face transfigured, as I'd seen happen to many an ordinary female, in my premarital days of sewing my oats, into the face of divine beauty. I've never seen pornography do that! You had to have had to have been there. And I was indeed experiencing this woman through another man's eyes, not via the conventional camera angles that can be so distracting in pornography, swiveling and panning around the fuckers, zooming in on the penetration site or cutting away abruptly to some unrelated situation. I was indeed at someone else's whim, just as with pornography. Only in pornography, it was the whim of the cameraman or the director none of whom is actually turned on during the film making. Now I was at the whim of the desire-driven male mind on whom I was "piggy-backing". I looked where he looked. And I began to sense his thoughts, syncopated with my thoughts, sometimes our two waves fusing together, sometimes apart. At the moments when our minds meshed, I got a rush of the sensations he was experiencing.

It was already getting intense, so I tried disengaging myself from the action by closing my eyes and just listening to the sound track. My mind was mostly my own again so while I had a moment of being able to "think for myself," I spoke against the moaning darkness into the mike.

"How's this orgone tuner thing work?"

The voice that came to me through the ether was like God or something...a God that seemed incredibly beneficent in my aroused state, a friendly God singing me a gnostic lullaby.

"Orgone is another name for the divine. A sort of sea of fields, electromagnetic, genetic, and mind fields all amalgamated into a sea of bliss. People and beings of all kinds are like droplets of this sea, held together by the force (evaporation) that separated them in the first place, combined with circumstance, where they fell as rain, what river they rolled into, what animal drank them, what cell filled with them, and so forth."

"No matter where any droplet (person, being) may be, there remains always a direct, trans-spatial way in which they are intuitively connected back to the sea. Sex. Sex is one key. At that moment of union and division, the personality membrane of the droplet opens in the "direction" of the divine orgone sea. That's the interfacial wave the orgone antenna surfs, the momentary openings that spontaneously appear between seemingly discrete selves and the no-self sea of endless orgasmic bliss..."

The saint's soothing Lullaby of Truth rose and fell in volume as I opened my eyes again, and entering once more the cosmic whorehouse I scrolled through couple after couple eagerly, getting the hang of the tantric Egg rig.

"AHHHH," I began to moan... "They're all...sooooo beautiful. UNGGG. UMMM. yeah, what a tight wet one. .O my God, this one smells like a new breed of animal flower. OOO, how can they ALL be so FUCKING sexy?"

"Every sex act more or less opens the fuckers to the divine. But the better the sex, the deeper the love, the stronger the arousal, the more intense the signal. An erect penis is a dowsing rod towards a particular brand of Truth. Some day every body part will be as sensitive as the dick to hot new worlds. A side benefit of Egg travel is that the traveler is training his whole body to sexually embrace the ordinary world—the tantalizing world outside the Egg."

"A shortcoming, no pun, is that the fucker often falls asleep right after coming and you're "left in the lurch". With practice you can hone in on the more alert types. Look for signs like fucking somewhere other than a bed, the taste of coffee or some other stimulant, daylight, and so on."

As if on cue, I lost it right then.

Weirdest orgasm I'd ever had. Empty hands full of fleshy globes, body slippery with sweat and the salt bath. I was here and there. I had lost it in a syncopated moment, and was still oscillating back and forth between my mind and the other guy's, quivering with the post orgasmic shivers.

I rolled off a goddess girl feeling deeply in love, and really fucking tuckered out. I looked at the ceiling speckles in a trance, my vision fluttering, my mind sinking into a featureless drowsiness.

"Oops," said the disincarnate voice. "Don't worry, that's what usually happens the first time. You got a sleepy one. Takes practice. I guess I forgot to tell you, the thing is, when you decide who you want to be, you ride them right to the point of orgasm, then pull out pronto. That's the time when his Reichian body armor seals back up, right after coming, with you inside. It's sort of like a vortex trying to suck you in, so you gotta avoid the orgasm moment until you've learned to handle the turbulence. Avoid the orgasm—that even sounds kinda tantric."

"NOW you tell me. I hope these Sony sex toys are cleanable."

"Naturally. But I can read right here on the panel that you didn't come. It was only your target. If you come you will loose your link. Or in a rare case, coming in exact time with your target, you could get stuck in them."

"Fuck! I thought you said this was safe?"

"SafeR. No guarantees in life. Now, it occurs to me that it's getting pretty late, and your wife will probably be really pissed."

"I didn't want to say anything."

"Don't worry, I take good care of my lab rats. You see, there are a couple of controls I've installed that were turned off for your first trip. One limits your travel to current time, it screens out time travel. If you have time travel toggled, you also have to screen out your own self, or you'll almost always gravitate towards your own fucks. Especially the good ones. Now, when was the last time you and your wife made love?"

This sounded like the classic newlyweds question. It was always embarrassing for newlyweds who hadn't fucked much. Sometimes they'd lie about it. But, in my case, no need to lie. We fucked just yesterday."

"Was it good?"

"Monogamous marital sex has remained surprisingly good, after so many years, even improving in many unexpected ways. And changing. Of course, there are always variations. But deep down, I have cultivated this sense that, even when I look at women pornographically, really they are all in essence my own wife. Maybe it's just my superego struggling to integrate the dissonance of my polygamous id impulses..."

"OK, Kelly, shut up. I've set the time travel parameter to include a week in the past, and turned off the self censor. Are you still hard?"

"As a rock."

"Good. You should end up in your own fucking self the moment I flip the switch. If you let go in orgasm, you'll get stuck in yourself. Do that, and you'll literally be able to tell your wife that on your night out with the mad scientist, he got you home before you left. Don't worry, I'll clean up the Sony. Enjoy yourself."