record brain-waves and then “play them back” with a special headset
adapter that made use of emerging theories about electromagnetics.
It was a tool that would theoretically allow people to directly
experience alternate realities.
Harvey decided to spearhead this research after his boat trip with
Ling. The doctor’s jokes. Those meaningful, meaningless, self-
referential loopings. How visceral, how vicious and yet how
profound, the pun. He had been struck by the collisions of worlds
implied in those collisions of words. They had been enough to impel
him to vomit. And yet…and yet…the more he thought about it, the
more he wondered: Humor had always been one of the greatest
human mysteries, up there with music and love. And the pun was the
lowest, most molecular form of humor. Humor was a hint at
something deeper, yet at the same time something so obvious that it
hit you in the face like a custard pie. Harvey wondered if that was
because humor exposed the inner workings of the brain, briefly
revealing the machine beneath the man.
Take any two thoughts, put them together, and something wholly
new arises from the association. The shock of recognition that came
from an intellectual insight was no different than the one which
comes after a pun. Puns were random associations between
unrelated phenomena that shed a brief new light on reality. Weren’t
they something like the very building blocks of consciousness? Two
reluctant neurons backing into each other, seltzer bottles in hand?
This provided Harvey a starting point for his dissection of human
consciousness. It was an absurd endeavor, a meandering, difficult
path and he struggled for years to cut his way through the jungle. The
data was endless: Brain waves were everywhere. He needed to devise
an interpreter.
The awkward doctor had no idea a simple boat ride with a
madman might lead him into this crazy crusade. But after many false
starts and a relentless search for patterns in the waves, he believed he
was beginning to see the imprints of the mind, albeit through a
smudged and blurry scientific apparatus.
And then quite suddenly his research funding ran out. His
theories and data were still too inconsistent, too sloppy to merit
continued support from his academic department. He was forced to
throw in the towel. Only here Ling came to the rescue again,
suggesting that he pursue support elsewhere: from venture
H O L Y S H I T !
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