Rayguns Over Texas

  Tim frowned. DMT tended to attract the mystic cranks of the psychedelic underground, people following in the steps of that loon, Terence McKenna, and his hallucinated “machine elf” intelligences. They were as bad as UFO nuts.

  “Any suggested dose?”

  “No.”

  “Recipe?”

  “In the text file.”

  Tim pulled that up and read through it. There were careful, step-by-step instructions for creating the monster--even the steps everyone knew--and some of the process parameters were incredibly tight (“heat for 97 seconds at 178.3°C”). They went on for 10 pages and 189 detailed steps. One step required an ultracentrifuge and another, a 1500 PSI pressure vessel. No amateurs need apply.

  “Can you do it?”

  “Still reading.” Tim went through the instructions a second time. Some of the steps were extremely tricky, even with the right equipment, but none looked impossible.

  “I think so. But it’s going to take some time.”

  “How long?”

  “At least a month.”

  Doug nodded. Obviously, the beast couldn’t be built overnight. “What do you need?”

  “I’ll send you a list.” The deal was that Doug would provide any needed base compounds from his underground connections (especially the ones on any of the DEA watch lists) while Tim did the work. “Did your DMT guy have a name for this?”

  “GOAP.”

  “Goap?”

  “God of All Psychedelics.”

  #

  It didn’t take quite the whole month, but it wasn’t easy. Following the recipe took half the top-end equipment in Welch Hall, careful attention to detail, and patience, as well as his usual clandestine stealth.

  Fortunately, he was also working on a hard-money project using various alkaloids as possible buffering agents for erectile dysfunction pills. (It seemed like boner pills were half the medical compound research they did these days.) It was possible to intersperse his GOAP work with his regular batch processing. He smuggled some of Doug’s special ingredients in, via a false bottom in his old, metal lunchbox. Intermediate compounds were kept, locked up, with his other work.

  There were setbacks. Hydrogen chloride impurities ruined one precursor batch and a petroleum ether phase failed repeatedly until he realized he had a faulty pressure valve. And it had to wait on the back burner for the ED work the single graduate class he was teaching that semester.

  But slowly and surely, GOAP took form. Spectrometry readings were good and everything was on schedule.

  That’s when he hit the first roadblock, heralded by an email from the chemistry department dean asking to drop by his office.

  “You wanted to see me?”

  “Yes. Come in and sit down. And close the door behind you.”

  That was rarely a good sign. “What’s up?”

  “We’ve got a drug problem.”

  Tim kept his face studiously neutral, despite his racing heart. He carefully furrowed his brow. “Really? What is it?”

  The dean signed and sat back in his chair. “Austin police raided a makeshift meth lab in Creekside last night. They kept it out of the papers this morning, but it will probably be on the evening news.”

  Tim made sure his face showed concern rather than relief. “That’s terrible! Were any of our students involved?”

  “No chemistry majors, just an EE who took Chem301 last semester. How much do you know about cooking meth?”

  “I know it’s dangerous, nasty stuff, especially if you get the process wrong.”

  The dean nodded. “The last thing we need is some ignorant undergraduate killing himself. Do you know what all the meth precursors we use in the department are?”

  “Some. I can look up the rest on the Internet.”

  “I want you to make a list for me and do an inventory of everything we have here that could be used for meth and make sure we have adequate controls over it. Are you at a good pausing point in the ED project?”

  “There are a couple of batches I need to do microassays on, but other than that, yeah.”

  “How’s that coming?”

  It was Tim’s turn to sigh. “I think the process is viable, but I don’t see it scaling commercially. At least until they come up with a better bleaching agent.”

  The dean nodded. “Thought so. But they’re the ones paying the piper. Do the inventory and get back on it. Both the campus and Austin police want the inventory results, so I’ll give you their contact names.”

  And that’s how Tim became the Chemistry Department’s designated police liaison for illegal drugs.

  #

  Though it increased his camouflage and made it easier to further his research into recreational pharmacology within university time, it put him behind on GOAP. There were lots of chemicals to inventory and the ever-inventive meth-cooking community had added a few new ones since the last time he checked. Ammonium formate, mercuric chloride, metallic sodium, and even the ubiquitous bottles of acetone all had to be checked, tagged, and cataloged.

  He was starting to get the itch--the vague feeling that his mind wasn’t as sharp is it could have been. Some people felt wrecked or freaked out after dropping acid, but for him psychedelics had always worked as a sort of intellectual and emotional dump and cleanse, making him feel sharper and more creative the week after. If he had a particularly difficult computational chemistry problem, the solution would often come to him a couple of days after a trip.

  This time, GOAP was the problem.

  After the inventory, Tim was able to start back working on the ED project and, with it, GOAP. Bromine, dimethyl disulfide, butyllithium. Heating, stirring, filtering. Some steps were so easy a child could do them. Others brought him to the edge of his own abilities.

  And then, finally, it was done.

  The spectrometry peaks and melting point matched the recipe.

  He had produced just under two grams of GOAP, and wasn’t sure what the effective dose would be. LSD worked in micrograms, but this hit so many receptors he suspected it would require more.

  He sent Doug a simple text message: Got a package from home, and waited for him to set a time and place to split the GOAP.

  #

  Friday night, Tim was sitting in the recliner at his apartment, a sports program with the sound off playing on the TV and Philip Glass on the stereo. On his left, he had his laptop with his trip diary open. On his right was a blotter with 250ug of GOAP. It might be too low a dose to start with, as some of Shulgin’s menagerie required 200 mg. If worse came to worse, nothing would happen and he could try again tomorrow.

  And, for a half hour or so, nothing seemed to be exactly what was happening. Then soccer players replaced the sportscasters, and Tim started to see trails stretching out behind them as they ran. The GOAP was starting to kick in. He checked his watch and typed in his trip diary:

  27 minutes visuals start to kick in.

  Physically he felt fine, no detectable nausea or vertigo. He felt at peace and a little heavy.

  Comfortable lethargy.

  It was like any of dozens of trips, though the trails and visual patterns seemed brighter and more intense.

  High visuals.

  So far, so good. It was a nice trip. He wasn’t feeling any paranoia or anxiety, and felt that his intelligence was unimpaired. To prove it, he brought up and solved a simple quadratic equation. He finished it in record time.

  No impairment. Enhanced intelligence???

  If GOAP measurably increased intelligence, then it lived up to its moniker, promising to be the drug he and his fellow psychonauts had been searching for.

  Despite his excitement, the trip still hadn’t peaked. The colors around him brightened further still, until it seemed like his walls were slowly dissolving into a
sort of multicolored fractal fog, letting him see beyond them. The swirling visuals faded into the background, and he could see clusters of different sized red glowing lights moving beyond the walls of his room. Some would drift slowly, stop, then start moving, while others seemed to stay still the entire time.

  Moving lights?

  He stood up and moved around his apartment. Still no vertigo. Except when his gaze swept over a light source, he wasn’t seeing the characteristic “spark trails” anymore. But the red lights were different. Not all moved with his gaze, most seemed to stay in fixed positions, something he had never experienced on a trip before.

  He left his apartment, carefully navigated his way down the stairs (probably overcautiously, since he still wasn’t feeling any vertigo), and walked down to the Drag.

  He stood on the corner for a few minutes, watching the students walk by, and realized that the red glows he had seen were coming from (or rather, within) people’s heads. Some were brighter than others, but each moved with the person.

  Beyond the glare of the streetlights, he could see hundred of faint glows off in the distance, apparent even through intervening buildings. Not only was that novel, but it suggested real Doors of Perception cognition enhancement. He wondered if it was just another form of hallucination.

  He saw a cluster of five lights moving toward him from about half a block away, following them until five students stepped out from a side street and onto the Drag. As they passed, he thought he saw what might have been lines of the same radiance stretch between them, but it was so faint he couldn’t be sure.

  He walked around for hours, looking at the tiny red glows inside each person around campus, some brighter, some dimmer. Jester dorm had more lights than a bedecked Christmas tree.

  He laughed off someone in dreads trying to sell him a joint from the Artist’s Market. No, he was doing just fine as is.

  Finally, he felt the trip start to ebb and went back to his apartment to take detailed notes.

  #

  Tim woke the next morning to find GOAP had given him one more gift.

  His dreams were even more confused and vibrant than usual after a trip, but upon waking he rushed to his computer to get down the final image in his mind, terrified it might dissolve.

  Unlike most dream revelations, it didn’t.

  It took a good half hour of input, but when it was done, the result in his molecular CAD program matched the image in his dream. GOAP II.

  It hit the same receptors as GOAP, but instead of four arms branching off the main spindle, it had six. Instead of acting as an agonist for one unmapped receptor, he felt sure it hit three.

  Looking at GOAP II spinning in its terrible, impossible perfection, Tim felt a sudden chill. Dreams had often handed him the answers to difficult questions, but never before in such detailed, crystal clear form. It was almost supernatural.

  Tim didn’t believe in the supernatural.

  It was time to meet with Doug.

  #

  “You okay?”

  Doug sighed and shook his head. Tim felt fantastic, his mind clearer and sharper than it had ever been, but Doug looked like hell, with dark circles under his eyes and his hair uncombed.

  “Bad trip?”

  “No, the trip was fine,” said Doug. “Great visuals, fantastic plateau.” He brought the coffee cup up to his lips, hands shaking. “It’s the come-down that’s been hell.” His eyes darted around the room, as though looking for something.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You been sleeping okay?”

  “Like a baby.”

  “Not me. My mind keeps racing. I can’t get to sleep because my mind won’t shut off.”

  “Tried melatonin?”

  “Yeah. And Tylenol PM. If that doesn’t work, I’ll up the dose. And if it still doesn’t work, I have a few emergency barbiturates tucked away.”

  “Did you see any lights?”

  “Yeah, lights and glowing strings, but they kept shifting. Plus something else.”

  “What?”

  Doug was silent a long moment, drinking the rest of his coffee. He shook his head again. “Hard to describe. Sort of a pattern that shifted around. Not something obvious, but sort of an overlay of distortion.”

  “How much did you take?”

  “750ug.”

  “That’s three times what I took.”

  “What was your trip like?”

  Tim described it. Doug hadn’t made the connection between the lights and people before, but saw the strands of web-like connections far more clearly than Tim had.

  “Between people?”

  “Between everything. It was faint, but I saw those strands everywhere I looked.”

  “I wasn’t even sure they were there.” Tim sipped his own Frappuccino. “You haven’t slept at all? No dreams?” Doug shook his head.

  Tim pulled out his laptop. “Not only did I sleep great, but when I woke up, I had this in my mind.” He pulled up the molecule for GOAP II.

  Doug’s eyes got big. “That’s insane,” he said, rotating the molecule. “Those are two more agonists at the end of the branches, aren’t they?”

  Tim nodded.

  “What receptors?”

  “Dunno.”

  Doug shook his head incredulously, then his eyes suddenly darted up to a point above Tim’s head.

  “What?” asked Tim, turning around. There was nothing there but an old Armadillo World Headquarters poster for Captain Beefheart.

  “Nothing,” said Doug. “Sometimes I catch a glimpse of the distortion pattern I saw out of the corner of my eye.”

  “Did you ask your DMT guy about it?”

  “Yeah. He hasn’t answered.”

  “What sort of pattern is it?”

  “Not quite a spider, or a spiral, but sort of like both. But it was never clear. And it kept changing.” He shook his head again. “Probably just an afterimage. I just need to get some sleep and it will go away.”

  “Here’s a list of ingredients for GOAP II.”

  Dough looked them over and nodded. “Shouldn’t be too hard. I can have this stuff in about a week. But I won’t try this monster until you do and say it’s safe. I don’t like this paranoia.”

  “Paranoia?”

  “You know that pattern I kept seeing? I started to get the impression it was watching me.”

  #

  A week later, Doug slipped him the ingredients for GOAP II. He looked better, saying the barbiturates had worked and he had slept for a solid 14 hours, after which the pattern and paranoia had disappeared.

  “Any word from your DMT guy?”

  Doug shook his head. “He hasn’t been on all week.”

  They had agreed not to share any of their results with the underground until Tim was able to synthesize GOAP II.

  Tim got to work at once, but the boner-pill project was winding down, which meanthe had to schedule his GOAP runs more carefully, as the next hard money project (high temperature formation of self-organizing plastic polymers, something he had covered in his Masters thesis) had no alkaloid angle. Fortunately, he had figured out shortcuts for the existing GOAP steps and had mentally nailed down all but a few of the additional ones necessary to manufacture GOAP II.

  But those last few steps proved elusive. Once again, he started feeling mentally fuzzy, sure that his mind wasn’t quite firing on all cylinders.

  If he was going to finish GOAP II, he needed another dose of GOAP.

  Friday night found him in the familiar chair, basketball on TV, laptop open, and a blotter with 500ug of GOAP on it. He hoped that splitting the difference with Doug’s bad trip dose would let him experience the trip more vividly, without inducing the paranoia.

  At least that was the theory.
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  At the higher dose, the onset was quicker, just shy of 16 minutes, and the visual trails and strobing effects more intense. In fact, the trails behind bright objects looked less like the usual trip visuals than a temporary rifts through which some sort of underlying, fractal geometry was briefly visible.

  He took notes and solved a benchmark quadratic equation even faster than the last GOAP trip, but the fractal patterns were making the screen hard to see.

  Once again, he watched the walls dissolve, which was interesting in and of itself, as he rarely experienced repeat discreet hallucinations. And once again, he saw clusters of red glows stretching off into the distance. Those glows were, if anything, clearer than the time before, and this time, he was sure he saw the faint webwork of strands that stretched between them.

  That suggested two possibilities. Either his first trip had primed him to expect that particular hallucination or GOAP, in best The Doors of Perception fashion, was letting him see a real, previously hidden, underlying structure to the world.

  He couldn’t tell whether the second possibility elated or terrified him. Probably both.

  He carefully walked down to the Drag again, wondering what the glowing lights and strands meant. As he walked, the usual clumps of students moved around him, the strands passing through himself and other objects without incident. But looking at people’s heads as they passed, he noticed that where before he had seen only a single diffuse glow, he now saw five or six discreet glows sharing a single head, with the glowing strands stretched between them, as well as connecting to the glowing areas in other people. He didn’t know what to make of it.

  The obvious surmise was that the strands were some sort of deep connection between sentient beings. If so, he would have expected those between groups of friends to be brighter or thicker, but looking at people as they passed on the Drag, that didn’t seem to be the case. And he had no explanation for the multiple glows.

  He wondered if separate glows could be seen in his own head and if the strands stretched out from it. He wondered if he could see it in a mirror. Assuming it was real, probably not.