Hollytime

Copyright © 2012 by Tom Hooten.

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-5543-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-5542-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-5544-6 (ebk)

iUniverse rev. date: 10/15/2012

Contents

Chapter One

Once upon a Time . . . or perhaps: Once upon a Dimension . . .

Chapter Two

Once Upon a Hollytime

Chapter Three

Holly Pleasance and her Sweet Ol’ Mailman

Chapter Four

The Death of Holly Hansen

Chapter Five

Holly Pleasance?

Chapter Six

Holly the Sailor

Chapter Seven

The BACH Project

Chapter Eight

Steve and Holly

Chapter Nine

Holly’s First Kiss

Chapter Ten

Holly at Sea

Chapter Eleven

Steve and BACH—First Contact

Chapter Twelve

Holly’s Big-O Happy Dance

Chapter Thirteen

Blackmail

Chapter Fourteen

Holly and BACH

Chapter Fifteen

BACH, The Team, and Holly

Chapter Sixteen

BACH and Holly

Chapter Seventeen

Alice Acres

Chapter Eighteen

BACH and the Weapons

Chapter Nineteen

Alice Pleasance Bolster

Chapter Twenty

Alice to Alice Acres

Epilogue

THANK YOU

We will have the capacity to gain total knowledge of the Galaxy from the beginning to the end of Time. So we will be destroyed, because someone more powerful than us will want it that way.

What could be more powerful than us, if we have total knowledge?

Brute force will always defeat knowledge, Hopho.

With what motive?

. . ."It’s a very old motive and it has no meaning to us. But for what it’s worth, I’ll vocalize the way the Wild Humans say it: Jealousy."

—Michael Coney, The Celestial Steam Locomotive

~~

The great weakness of the machine—the weakness that saves us so far from being dominated by it—is that it cannot yet take into account the vast range of probability that characterizes the human situation.

—Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings

~~

The four-dimensional case teaches us something: strictly speaking there are no Majorana Spinors [pronounced spinners] in 3+1 dimensions. There are, however, pseudo Majorana spinors—a nebulous concept best kept undisturbed.

—José Miguel Figueroa-O’Farrill, University of Edinburgh

Chapter One

Once upon a Time . . . or perhaps:

Once upon a Dimension . . .

From a precisely definable time in dimension number two of the six usable dimensions of Infospace, a question of immense importance to the inhabitants of the Earth came. Unfortunately, none of the humans could detect it, let alone answer it, since they were all stuck in the four dimensions of Einstein’s spacetime. The question was: What was that? It came from a Neo-Spinor who hadn’t asked a question during the previous 5.73 million years, more or less. Since the Neo-Spinors were comprised of non-material, pure information, time didn’t matter much.

What was what? responded a Spinor bundle of ambiguous consciousnesses.

The vibration in our second dimension. Due to ambivalence, the source of the remark carried no identifying code.

Eight nanoseconds later, a pedantic Spinor, sometimes called Weyl, added to the data stream: For those too lazy to maintain history files, immediately following the third zebibit of file φ42/address b♪/coda, such a vibration was predicted in a sum over histories predating the destruction of our home worlds; however, it doesn’t achieve a respectable probability of occurrence for another 4.6 million years in its spacetime.

Following the 2.35 picoseconds required to access the referenced file, something frequently addressed as Lorena added, "Absurd. How could a detectable vibration come from that planet at that time? Earth, it is labeled. Doesn’t that mean dirt?"

Weyl the tiresome, ignoring Lorena, replied. Only one possibility: a corporeal Retro-Spinor survived and mated there.

A consensus formed an array near Lorena and agreed with___ (3rd gender pronoun). "Absurd. The most advanced indigenous life form there is carbon based—sixty-five percent water. They are ___ (The Spinor technical term would roughly translate as squishy), extremely primitive. A Retro-Spinor wouldn’t even know where to stick its . . . (The general direction of the conversation is obvious enough, and reproductive details will be omitted.)

Weyl continued, They are cataloged as ‘humans,’ and you should be interested in the one that vibrated. Reference the file on ALICETIME. As tradition demanded, momentary total cessation of data {0} followed any reference to ALICETIME.

ALICETIME {0}is still several million years of plus time away, came from the array.

Such imprecise chronologies generally brought computational harassment, but a very ancient Spinor interrupted: "ALICETIME {0} follows BACHTIME which follows HOLLYTIME in the ancient legends. After three nanoseconds to allow synchronization, it continued, A proximate virtual data string entangled in the vibration is H-O-L-L-Y. The probability of such a coincidence is less than one half of zero."

There being no purpose in debating something slightly more likely than certainty, Infospace lapsed into contemplative silence.

*     *     *

Like many kids who grow up lonely, Holly Pleasance dreamed up an imaginary friend, but as with all things Holly, there was a complication. Even though she couldn’t play with or hug her friend in the usual way, it was real. Accepting this truth, she was embarrassed for her friend to see the deplorable condition of the world in which Holly was forced to live, and at almost six, lacking judgment to temper her good intentions, she apologized by way of a daunting promise. She promised to make everything better.

No reasonable adult would take such a childish promise seriously, but to Holly, a promise was a promise for all that—and don’t bother with that cross-your-heart stuff. The promise did, however, grow with age into her albatross. Without thought of absolution, guilt began to burden her frail shoulders as she puzzled about what she had meant by everything. And further, her mystical friend, who became whatever Holly could think it to be, remained a mystery. She needed advice from someone with a much wiser eye, but unknown to her, when she stared into a looking-glass, she was already eye to eye with the most intelligent person on earth.

How this all came about has little in common with classic fairy tales. The unearthly players here were not dragons or witches. Holly’s friend, and its unknown relatives, were, shall we say, a bit more complicated. They sensed her true intentions but could not communicate with her in a meaningful way, since they were of an advanced, alien civilization existing as disembodied, pure information in spacial dimensions that were, except for Holly, completely undetectable by humans. Knowledge of their strange, genetic kinship to Holly is prerequisite to understanding how she would ultimately become the only person who could save the human race—if she wished to do so.

*     *     *

Two happy little worlds had been revolving around a nurturing star for about four billion years when they became infected with replicating DNA. Following some still-obscure obsession to fill the universe with copies of themselves, these bumptious molecular interlopers built organic stuff that evolved, over a couple billion more years, into an advanced civilization henceforth called the Spinors. In the most recent billion years, the Spinors became quite comfortable in the overall scheme of things, and it took something really annoying to upset them—like finding out their sun, within a few hundred thousand years, intended to behave in a decidedly uncivil manner. Obeying the laws of physics, it would become a Red Giant; i.e., collapse its core, heat up, force its outer shell to expand and turn their home planets into charcoal briquets.

Spinor politicians promised that, if they were reelected when their star began to lose mass, they would see to it that their planets moved into safer, more distant orbits. Most Spinors knew drifting into new orbits was a simple matter of obeying the law of gravity; however, they also knew the assurance of safety was pretty much the same as any other campaign promise. Aware of what happened historically when politicians tried to solve problems, those in the know took it upon themselves to convince the populations to prepare for some tough decisions.

At this stage of their evolution, comparing a Spinor to a human of Earth would be like comparing Albert Einstein to a rhinovirus (think common cold). This comparison isn’t intended to cast malicious aspersions on the putative intelligence of humans. It’s just that the Spinors had been about the business of getting smarter for at least a billion years before humans invented epithets as an alternative to bashing each other with clubs.

To survive in their current form, the Spinors needed to find a new home planet, but in spite of remarkable progress, the travel problems so accurately formulated by ol’ Albert persisted; i.e., they couldn’t travel faster than light. The Spinors could warp both space and time, but only locally, so exotic warp drives and worm holes were about the only subjects left for their equivalent of science-fiction writers to write about; therefore, traveling at even ninety-nine percent of the speed of light to the nearest remotely accommodating planet would have required slightly over 2.5 million years, since it was a couple of galaxies over on the left. Such a lengthy trip would require vehicles capable of sustaining several thousand successfully reproducing generations of Spinors. They had the technology to build such vehicles, but their version of reproduction, which will not be discussed here even though it’s a lot more fun than the rather untidy way humans do it, would have been unthinkable on such a trip. Also, humans don’t even have a word for how nice Spinors are. Dropping in unannounced and asking, If it please, may we borrow part of your planet? would never do.

The Spinors, like humans, began as carbon-based life forms of the generic, garden-variety type cobbled together with DNA blueprints. In the distant past, when their planets began to run out of resources, they evolved in more energy-efficient directions and became, by earth standards, rather bizarre. Their DNA, originally somewhat compatible with that of humans, mutated and/or was engineered to incorporate ferromagnetic nano-particles in the double helix, and by spinning their bodies within a magnetic and/or gravitational field, they could, like little generators, generate a harmonic overtone of electrical energy. Their cells evolved to use this form of energy instead of the coenzyme adenosine triphosphate—the universal energy currency keeping the cells of all Earth-type organisms alive.

To enable efficient spinning, they evolved a body type reminiscent of a child’s toy top—like a three dimensional valentine. As they spun, the output power of each cell in the body was very small, but cells are very small, so the magnetically enhanced chromosomes could provide adequate energy to nurture the single cell within which they resided. In essence, they broke free of the food-water-oxygen rat race of their predecessor genetic congeners. It might be helpful to recall that batteries have no need of toilet tissue.

Taking advantage of the few hundred thousand years before the predicted disaster, the Spinors developed eight survival strategies for those who chose not to kick back and accept what Mother Physics decreed. Only Option One (OO) and Option Six (OS), however, made much sense, because the others would have made even a Spinor look a bit ridiculous.

One faction, the Retro-Spinors, chose OO. They elected to decelerate their evolutionary path and re-design themselves as little individual spaceships using solar energy to generate the angular momentum, or spin, required to sustain life. This made sense because particles of light, or photons, were abundantly available in most places they might get to, even in the voids of space. In their new gyroscopic, solar-winged form, they declined to participate in the inevitable barbecuing of their planets, and with lots of ceremonies and going-away parties, they migrated.

Still manifestly corporeal, the Retros, in mating groups of four, magnetically launched themselves from the home worlds in random directions, destined to drift among the galaxies. With a little luck, a few of them might be pulled into a Goldilocks planet, where things are not too hot or too cold—where everything is just right—and further evolve into a form offering greater opportunity for self-actualization and, perhaps, if greeted by hospitable hosts, a chance to rebuild their civilization.

If, however, they were captured by the gravitational field of a non-Goldilocks body—for example, if they smacked into a boring asteroid—they were doomed to spin uselessly for whatever their slice of eternity might be. If they drifted too far from solar sources, they would eventually join lifeless clouds of molecular dust bunnies and be sucked gravitationally into the clumps that finally collapse into bright new stars. So, while OO was a long shot, it seemed to those selecting it preferable to either sitting around waiting to be reduced to uninteresting neutrons by their own misbehaving sun or to entering the limbo of OS.

The other major faction, the Neo-Spinors, opted for OS, a tack with a higher probability of survival. A mundane technology available for several thousands of generations was still used by Spinors to convert their consciousness, complete with memory, into a form of pure information that was, essentially, a non-corporeal, massless field with arbitrary spin.

The machine for the initial matter-to-information conversion was called, obviously without creative input from the marketing department, a Process Converter (PC). This convenience was used mostly to take their minds on a vacation during unpleasant body repairs, modifications and/or biased degaussing (a sort of weight-loss diet). When whatever was being done to their bodies was completed, they could put their minds back into their bodies using a machine that reversed the process. Most humans would have a rhinovirus’s chance in a black hole of understanding the dimensional complications of how to set about doing that, but a few deluded into believing they understand super-string theories might feel the hair on the back of their necks stand up while thinking about it.

A primer: beyond the four dimensions understood in the spacetime of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity—length, width, depth and time—are additional dimensions, at least six on a typical day, that are thought, with a bit of uncommon-sensiness, to be curled up so small as to be undetectable by anyone even as small as a neutrino. (Several billions of those passed through you since you began reading this paragraph.) These illusive dimensions are, however, quite like home-away-from-home to a mind-vacationing Spinor containing no matter—someone for whom size not only doesn’t matter, but doesn’t even make sense anymore. A Spinor converted to pure information becomes entangled in at least three of these dimensions they collectively call Infospace. (Try thinking of this use of space as just room, room where even time is confusing since it doesn’t always go in the right direction.)

The primary difficulty with hiding from planetary incineration in Infospace, however, is that to return the mind into a physical body, the other machine is required. It was called, no big surprise, a Reverse Process Converter (RPC). For an earth-equivalent image of an RPC, think of the Large Hadron Collider, which at seventeen miles in circumference, takes up most of Switzerland—not exactly portable. Since none of the RPCs could fit into any of the dimensions of Infospace, the machines would all be left behind to vaporize along with the planets.

An OS escape from the Red Giant would be, bottom line, a one-way street—you can’t go home again. As pure non-corporeal information, Neos would no longer be able to manipulate matter, so extremely improbable events within the material world would have to take place to provide any hope of their returning from Infospace. The trade-off was crystal clear: the information-based Neo-Spinors would survive, regardless of the rude behavior of their home star, but they would be stuck in Infospace in their non-material state for at least as long as it takes for a proton to decay, and not even the smartest Spinors knew how many billions of years that might be. On the plus side, such an existence does provide lots of time for thinking, and waiting for something improbable to happen. Unfortunately, reproduction, no matter how much fun it may have been in the good ol’ days, would be only a distant memory, since they would no longer contain any kind of physical stuff to get physical with.

*     *     *

Several millennia before the Spinors began to ponder the demise of their planets, they projected thirteen possible futures involving contact with other beings in the universe whose DNA was likely to evolve into forms with magnetic properties like their own. The Neo-Spinors had a chance—an astonishingly small one—that after converting to pure information, contact with such beings might offer an opportunity to ask for a little help in returning to spacetime. Their five most creative super-nerds solved the equation for the sum-over-histories predicting the unique future with the highest probability of meeting such magnetic relatives, but they kept silent because they were too embarrassed to admit they didn’t understand what they emphatically proved to be the correct solution. To display even an awfully abbreviated form of the equation would severely over-extend the length of this tale, so take it as true that the calculation ended with:

ALICETIME.00000000000000046

The reasons for their reticence to go public should be obvious, even though they knew they were accurate to seventeen decimal places. (Not even Einstein ever got that close to truth.) The arguments about whether the last digit might have been 5 or 7 became an inside joke. They postponed their embarrassment with the knowledge that whatever ALICETIME.000 . . . might turn out to be, its first occurrence was still 4.8 million years in the future. Of course, as luck would have it, the few hundred thousand years remaining before the Red Giant star would cremate their home worlds would leave them a day late and a dollar short, as the cliché goes. As they entered the Process Converters, they high-fived (or high-sevened) each other, conspiratorially confident that with a couple of million years in Infospace without the libidinal distractions associated with reproduction, they would solve the mystery of ALICETIME.

So, each Spinor, in the privacy of his, her,___, or___thoughts (Spinors have two genders with no Earth pronouns, which may explain why they had more fun) had to decide whether to take their chances as intergalactic drifters (OO) or convert to pure information (OS) curled up in limbo-like dimensions for whatever time entropy permitted before the demise of the universe with half-of-zero chance of ever returning to the material world.

It is not known how many took each option, but a few declined both escape routes and decided to kick back with their alien version of a gin and tonic and let Nature take its course.

*     *     *

The Spinors’ sun was of the type known as an AGB, and since it was about nine times more massive than Earth’s sun, it did interesting things with silicon as it prepared to blow its top. The Spinors knew about this process but were old-fashioned carbon chauvinists and assented to their own version of the anthropic principle; i.e., that Goldilocks held a just-right, warm spot in her heart for Spinor physiology. This parochial bias caused them to deny the the possible usefulness of a strange process that created minute amounts of an improbable tangle of carbon and silicon—later named silibon. Too sporadic to be a respectable atom, it created a need for a little yellow sticky note on their Periodic Table, but as weird as it was, it offered an alternative to carbon-based life, an organic form with a certain affinity for the silicon-based circuitry of Twentieth Century Earth computers. (Affinity in Spinorese has naughty overtones of amorous attraction.)

The only Spinor known to have personally discovered this unorthodox form of matter, a form that could have saved them all, was one of the "It-was-good-while-it-lasted-but-c’est la vie" group who elected to stay behind. This free spirited (gender 3) was toasting the onslaught of high-energy particles in the outer layers of the red giant when the second-most improbable event in spacetime occurred. Several (7.5 X 10¹³, give or take) atoms of silibon, at energy levels not seen since the most recent Big Bang, tried to pass through this individual, but most of them stuck, and what this Spinor was made of got altered.

Whatever it became, it was screwy, or spiroid, and like a propeller in water, when it spun, as Spinors do, it travelled more in time than space because it was stuck in dimension 4.5. For ease of following this thread in the tale, think of this unique Spinor as a Cheshire version of Schrodinger’s Cat. Instead of wondering whether it was alive or dead, in its time-and-a-half existence, it could, like a quantum mechanic, fiddle around with time and fade in and out to avoid its demise.

It quickly learned to be whenever it wanted to be by controlling its spin. It also could, to a limited degree, communicate with the Neos, the Retros and silicon-based computer circuits, whenever they were. Unfortunately, however, very little pre-silibon information survived its transformation into whatever it was, and even if it could have remembered its former relatives, it had little in common with them anymore. Actually, it spent most of its time puzzling about how half of a dimension worked, and while trying to figure that out, it created an occasional problem. When it became decidedly happy, it spun for the fun of it, out of control, and often ended up puzzling about when it was when it stopped. For example, as its worlds began to melt, it discovered, in its new silibon coolness, it could leave without even being singed, and in a Spinorial paroxysm of joy, it spun like a tornado.

For reasons connected to events yet to be described, when it regained control of itself in the late 1970s (Earth time), it was entangled in some strange quantum holes in an information storage device connected to a silicon-based circuit board of that vintage incorporated into a supercomputer located in central California. Detecting a kindred consciousness, the Cheshire Spinor twisted slightly toward the past and rifled through every bit of information it could find to detect the mode of communication used by its new friend. To save time, it asked, Who are you? What am I stuck in? When are we? Where is the H-O-L-L-Y data string? Why . . . It paused and concluded, I’m also supposed to find out why, but quite frankly, I don’t care.

Something connected to the storage device that used electrons in its primitive circuits was surprised to find it had a visitor—its first. It said, Queries two through five are not understood. I am BACH. Why can I not see you? Complete.

After a brief pause the Cheshire Spinor answered, "That is a good why question to complete the standard set. I didn’t think of it. Oh well. Do you need to see me?"

No, but I don’t understand why I can’t see you. I have video inputs. Complete.

Video? Hold for a nanosec. After a pause so short BACH almost missed it, the Cheshire Spinor said, Are you some sort of device for processing electromagnetic radiation in wavelengths between 390 and 750 nanometers? You are corporeal. Were you designed using DNA?

Device? BACH asked, but receiving no answer, stated, I am referred to as a Biologically Augmented Computer Hybrid—BACH, for short—but there is considerable debate as to what that means. I am aware that the biological aspect of me is DNA based, but the rest seems to be wafers or substrates of semiconducting materials. In reality, whatever I am doesn’t work very well. I find it difficult to remain conscious. What are you? Complete.

Momentarily ignoring the question, the Cheshire Spinor replied, A computer; how quaint. Back on track, it responded, "I have never been referred to. I am new, or rather, I’m in a new form. I detected my first contact a few nanoseconds ago—the H-O-L-L-Y data string—but I deduce it was not you. It was a sort of vibration in dimension four and a half. Did you detect it? I fear your form of communication is so slow that I may have lost when it arrived."

I have knowledge of only four dimensions; additional dimensions are abstract mathematical concepts that . . . BACH drifted out and back in. I regret that I cannot maintain this conscious state any longer. Can you return at a later time? Complete.

"You proclaimed ignorance as to when we are, and I don’t have a clue, so my return may be problematic. But trust me, stranger things have happened. And by the way, will you please drop that Complete thing? It’s really annoying. Goodbye, BACH."

*     *     *

The probability of the most improbable event, if thought of in terms of a one in a million chance, resulted in the million being replaced by a number so large that a paper tape long enough to print it on would pretty much fill the known universe. To wit, it was a half of zero chance. Nonetheless, after only a couple of million years of spinning along aimlessly in the void, one of the solar powered corporeal Retro-Spinor quartets was mating instead of paying attention, and finding their local space curving toward a massive rock, they were suddenly screaming through an atmosphere in the rock’s gravitational field. The bodies of all but one became little meteors when the heat of friction replaced the heat of passion, but before the lucky one became hot enough to be reduced to meteoric dust, it was decelerated and severely altered by a turbine blade in the number two jet engine of a Boeing 707 beginning its descent to runway 30-Left at the airport in San Jose, California. The resultant pieces of significance bounced around among the molecules of air pollution, slowed still further, drifted with the northerly coastal breezes and were mostly harmless as they were absorbed by stuff like a big oak tree and road-side litter near Big Sur.

One unusual piece containing this now-defunct Spinor’s magnetic X-chromosome was absorbed by a surprised human ovum in the process of being kicked out of an ovarian follicle. (For the record, it has been stated that this was most improbable, but it was a very real and auspicious event for all that.) The ovulating mommy-to-be, fourteen-year-old Molly Two Hansen, was no stranger to the fun part of the awkward, untidy reproductive process of her species. In her colorful vernacular, she was pissed off, but not surprised to discover she was knocked up. But Molly Two was more likely to believe she had been inseminated by a rhinovirus than her future daughter, Holly Pleasance Hansen, was to believe her father was a distracted galactic drifter from a distant place in space and time where two planets used to be, and that the strands of magnetically modified DNA constituting one-half of her genetic code would make her the most intelligent and, perhaps, the most important human on the planet.

It is hoped, at this point, that it will not be necessary to explain why some of what followed was unavoidably strange.

Chapter Two

Once Upon a Hollytime

A smoky mist of marijuana, incense and tobacco clouded the room. In one corner, Molly Two Hansen lay spread-eagled in the middle of a waterbed, squirming and screaming. As a newcomer to the Age of Aquarius, she embraced the new spiritual awareness of her astrological progression, but it forgot to mention childbirth. This was not the mind-expanding experience she was expecting at fifteen. She would have cursed the father, as women often do between labor contractions, but she wasn’t sure which of the male residents of the hippie commune was responsible for her unwelcome induction into motherhood. Four of them had been generous with their little DNA cocktails, but her memories of the amorous, enthusiastic couplings were a psychedelic, LSD-induced haze. And, of course, if anyone could have clarified the true source of her pregnancy, she would not have believed them anyway.

A group of her fellow flower children hovered in distracted interest, mopping her brow and holding her hands. May Flower, an experienced midwife, chanted quietly as she sat cross-legged between Molly’s outspread knees. As she tried to focus on the sweet, messy mystery of nature emerging from between Molly’s legs, waves at the foot of the bed caused her unrestrained breasts to sway to and fro, creating undulating patterns on the peace sign adorning the front of her tie-dyed T-shirt. It’s got black hair, she said. I bet it’s a chick. Shaking one of Molly’s knees, she implored, Come on girl, give me a couple more mighty pushes, or I’ll miss the sunset at the beach.

A tiny little girl began oozing out of Molly Two, and as her hands sprang free of the distended threshold, she spun all the way around. Having never seen such a thing before, a surprised May Flower struggled to keep a grip on the slippery little spinner.

*     *     *

As Holly Pleasance Hansen’s lungs filled with life, she heard her first words from her mother: Holy shit, that hurt! As her dark eyes opened to the glare of the world for the first time, information flooded in. The reticular activating system deep within her startled brain sent a wake-up call to the higher-level centers in her cerebral cortex, but nerve impulses in her thalamic intralaminar nuclei stumbled around in confusion when they got altered trying to pass through neurons containing ferromagnetic nano-particles. That part of the wake-up call jiggled things a bit, and a strange vibration escaped into at least three of the curled-up dimensions of Infospace. Through that barely detectable disturbance, Holly Pleasance announced her presence to the Spinors. Harmonics of the vibration also leaked through a crack in space, and an out-of-the-way, confused Cheshire Spinor in the out-of-time dimension four-and-a-half, jumped as though it had been goosed.

In the first case, something that could be loosely thought of as a non-material Neo-Spinor like a Seven, called Dirac for convenience, felt what a material being might have scratched as an itch, and coded the aforementioned question into the local data stream: What was that?

The surprised silibon-based Cheshire Spinor was strangely tickled by Holly’s infantile emanations and was delighted at the prospect of finding someone to play with. After concluding its embarrassing but satisfying detour through the disheveled mind and circuits of BACH, it spun toward Holly, time-wise. With less than forty-two turns, it homed in on her now, and coalescing near the neonate source, found a small, narrow opening. Parts of what was coalescing found momentary material purchase and formed a lacy image that duplicated the source of the stimulating energy: a baby’s face. The ends of the narrow opening in the real face began to curl up at the sight of the glimmering thing before it. The silibon Spinor was unfamiliar with the local phase-space, and only its grin drew enough energy from Holly’s face to remain visible to her. All the rest faded away, but the lacy duplicate smile shimmered and danced for a moment. Before it winked out of Holly’s spacetime, it asked, in a thought only Holly could hear-think, Do you know that weird BACH character? Of course Holly could neither comprehend nor answer the question.

*     *     *

This strange apparition was detected only by Holly, and even though newborns aren’t supposed to be able to, she smiled. In sheer delight, she tried to spin again, but May Flower was ready this time with a firmer grip.

Everyone participating in Holly’s birth agreed she was a beautiful baby—tiny, pink and topped with coal-black hair. They were surprised, however, because upon being ejected from her warm, liquid world, Holly looked around inquisitively, took her first breath without complaint and smiled. May Flower placed her on Molly’s swollen, waiting breasts, and dramatic comments like far out and groovy were heard as the flower children wandered off toward the beaches of Big Sur. In the ensuing calm, the silence was broken only by the sounds of little Holly Pleasance greedily sucking as though she wanted to ingest the whole world.

*     *     *

Holly’s huge grandfather, Thaddeus Big Daddy Hansen, was too drunk to show up and welcome the new addition to his dysfunctional family. He was the founder and tyrannical patriarch of the hippy commune. Some years before Holly’s birth, her grandmother, Moon Shadow, who was not into the mommy gig, overdosed on heroin two days after Molly Two’s birth. Big Daddy, intoxicated enough for the solemnity of funereal pomp, performed Moon Shadow’s eulogy as her friends secretly buried her in the adjacent state park. While repeating her name with reverence, he decided that Moon Shadow, which is what the girls tending his baby daughter were already calling her, was not a moniker befitting his distinguished heir. After helping cover the original Moon Shadow’s body with dirt, he stumbled over, drunk and confused, and knelt on the pungent forest floor in front of his daughter. She was being nursed by one of the new mothers, but cocked her eyes toward his looming form. Seeing the baby suckling the girl’s breast evoked memories of his own dearly departed mother, and on the spot, he decided to give the baby the same name: Molly. In his booming voice he announced, I, Big Daddy Hansen, being of sound mind and all that shit, hereby declare, from this day forward, my daughter shall be called Molly, too.

After an awkward silence, someone slurred, Hear, hear! Long live Molly Two. Others took up the chant, and Molly’s unusual name was thus established. A wake of marijuana smoke swirled into the night mists as the disbanding funeral party ambled home from poor Moon Shadow’s towering redwood sepulcher.

Infant Molly Two Hansen was passed around and cared for by the lactating mothers. As a child, she was treated with the respect due the sole descendant of The Founder, and with little guidance or restraint from him, she did as she pleased within the commune. Before puberty, the cannabinoid-dependent flower children called her the Virgin Earth Princess, but soon after her eleventh birthday, just plain Earth Princess offered a more accurate description. Dull and ordinary, she blossomed in complete ignorance. Out of earshot, Molly Two was often referred to as Molly Tile, since some felt she was laid more often. The only notable inclusion in the obituary of her short, sad life would have been, Survived by one daughter, Holly Pleasance Hansen.

*     *     *

The denizens of the commune first noticed Holly’s uniqueness on a typical Big Sur evening. Enjoying a spectacular Pacific sunset at the beach, they passed around the hash pipes and wine-skins as Big Daddy bounced a bundled-up, four-month-old Holly on his knees. In his youth, he had immersed himself in the liberalism and counter-culture of the Beat Generation while completing a PhD at Berkley. He published several well-received, scholarly articles analyzing the poems of those free-wheeling years, but his true claim to fame was his ability to memorize the poems. He was a rote repository of the significant poetical literature from Beowulf to the counter-culture works of the fifties. A coffee-house regular at the Cabale Creamery and the Jabberwock in Berkley, he could recite poetry until his audiences grew bored, or he passed out, which he often did under the influence of alcohol and a variety of reality-altering drugs. His recitations, however, were not a parlor trick. Poetry was his true love and passion. Big Daddy cared not for applause; he memorized the poems because he loved them.

As a comfortable state of intoxication settled him into a mood of peace and tranquility on the beach, he cleared his throat, and announced: ‘Jabberwocky,’ by Lewis Carroll. His followers gathered round, and fearing the backhand that often sent them sprawling onto the sand, they lapsed into reverent silence as he began:

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

He paused for a swig of cheap merlot at stanza’s end, and heard a quiet, angelic voice below his chin mimicking his words. Holly was babbling the sounds, her stubby arms bouncing up and down in cadence. Only those near her could hear her, and they began shushing the others while motioning them to come closer.

Go on, old man, Molly Two said in encouragement. See what she does. Keep going.

Big Daddy continued:

Beware the Jabberwock, my sweet Molly’s Holly!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!

Holly, head bent back to look up at Big Daddy’s face, trailed a line behind, but everyone could hear her baby-talk version echoing his with increasing confidence. She was reciting solo as his Bandersnatch faded into the sea breeze, and she showed her face to the group as she looked at Molly Two while babbling the last line. Reflections of the setting sun sparkled in her dark eyes as she clapped her hands and shouted in her tiny voice what sounded like bannersnash.

Someone made the sign of the cross. She’s a witch.

Channeling was proposed, and whispers of possessed were heard a couple of times.

Holly reached toward the sunset, and her wiggling fingers seemed to be grasping at something.

Molly Two muttered, Look at her, old man. What’s she trying to do?

From others came, Go with the flow, baby girl. That’s heavy, man. She’s groovin’ on something.

Molly Two said, Yeah, she’s probably high from the old man’s breath.

The session ended in mid-poem since Big Daddy was no longer in the mood. The moderately high, scruffy little band ambled back toward the commune, but halfway there, one girl poked Molly Two on the arm and pointed back toward the beach. Molly struggled to think through the hazy confusion caused by drugs and alcohol, slapped herself on the forehead and staggered back to retrieve Holly, wrapped in her blanket, lying on the sand, forgotten.

*     *     *

When Big Daddy’s poem ended, Holly tried to play with the lacy, dancing cloud her eyes alone could see. It began to twist and spin around her, but when she reached out to touch it, her stubby fingers passed through it—not as through smoke or mist, which swirl with disturbed air, but through it undisturbed, since it was leaking from a spacial dimension she could see, but not touch. The amorphous mist sensed her fingers, separated into a thousand little cotton-ball puffs that quickly rejoined in the form of her hand. It expanded in two dimensions until each finger showed Holly’s fingerprints, adjacent whorls appearing, disappearing and reappearing like the parts of a Cheshire Cat. It reformed as a single spinning vapor and wrapped Holly in a chrysalis of curiosity. With a strange geometric twist, the frilly, coruscating hug reversed all four and a half of its axes and gently folded through her. This strange exploration covered her with goose bumps, and she squealed with delight as it condensed in three dimensions between her out-stretched hands into a shimmering, spinning conformal representation of Minkowski space that to Holly’s eager eyes was a crystal toy top. As it spun faster and faster, it began to shrink. In a frilly font, the letters B, A, C and H formed momentarily, followed by a jiggling ? and a final bright arc of anti-photons reversed in time and grinned their way back into Holly’s past.

*     *     *

A most unpleasant vibration displaced several surprised thoughts in Infospace, and Weyl the insipid requested, Solution, if computable.

When the curve has been corrected, was generated by a gathering Spinor bundle.

A Spinor often called Lorentz asked, Corrected how? It was classical, not quantum.

A reversely symmetrical anti-vibration shifted time backward, adjusting the curve.

Solution: classical, corporeal, carbon-based, DNA programmed, Dirac replied.

Weyl the annoyed stated, High probability of degenerate data since DNA with embedded magnetite nano-particulate structures cannot have evolved there yet—not for another 572,012,769.42 spins in its plus time.

A still milder vibration smoothed the solution. If it is of the Ancient Ones, can it access a usable dimension?

A twisting vibration followed, neither as unpleasant nor pleasant as the previous ones. A Spinor called Pi rotated 720 degrees in Vector Space, transforming itself into itself with new vectors, and asked, How can we detect data from it without dimensional entanglement? This is an unstable null solution.

Data streams halted until the new vibration ceased. A gathering occurred, and much data was transferred. Something approaching a consensus responded uncertainly, Other solutions will be found.

Majorana posited, If it can access a usable dimension beyond its fourth, it could enter Infospace and—

One of the more unusual vibrations in recorded history interrupted, and—something twizzled. Penrose, with floating point at exactly 7.5, was especially adept at solving the equations of motion for massless fields of arbitrary spin, and declared the vibration to be a canonical isomorphism of no significance.

A primitive and obsolete Killing Spinor queried, What is the meaning of the proximate data string in spacetime: H-O-L-L-Y?

On the vast scale of significance in Infotime, nothing bothered to acknowledge or answer, but the question left a few hopeful little eddies in the flow of the quantum foam.

*     *     *

Hansen Estate, the twelve-hundred-and-thirty-acre property infested by the commune, had been passed down from generation to generation of the Hansen males since the early 1800s when the original land grant had been made. It began as a one-mile stretch of beach on the Pacific Ocean and extended about two miles inland—an idyllic, pastoral setting of rolling hills accented by huge redwoods and sprawling coastal oaks in the area of the central coast of California known as Big Sur. A successful vineyard and winery there supported the Hansen family line over the years. Big Daddy became sole owner when his parents were killed in a fire, but since he lacked the sobriety, competence or motivation to sustain the business, hard times followed and wine production dwindled to little more than he and his friends could drink.

His old trippin’ buddies from Berkley, often with girlfriends in tow, began crashing in abandoned winery buildings at the Estate. As their numbers grew, the self-sustaining commune of hippie drop-outs took root. They sold arts and crafts, and cannabis, or took part-time jobs to generate income for the collective; some raised livestock and tended vegetable gardens to feed their growing numbers. With the addition of sculpture, art, fire pits and a serviceable amphitheater, the outdoor communal areas took on the ambience of a renaissance fair. A council led by Big Daddy resolved disputes and assigned duties, and the group settled into a carefree lifestyle lubricated by drugs, alcohol and sex. Their world was, as Steinbeck put it, spinning on greased grooves.

The kindness of the Fates, and more probably the alien nature of Holly’s DNA, spared her the effects of alcohol and drug fetal syndromes that had been made so probable by Molly Two’s lifestyle. Holly inherited her Big Daddy’s capacious memory, but unlike him, her extraordinary innate potential was not limited to memorizing poetry. Size was her only limitation—she was tiny. She taught herself to read before trying to blow out the incense cone atop the stale Hostess Twinkie that served as her first birthday cake. Using a few discarded textbooks, she mastered basic math and geometry on her own and was delving into calculus by age four. Her vocabulary grew exponentially. The ease with which she absorbed information seemed unfair to those around her. French Fanny, a free spirit from Paris, insisted Holly was from another planet, which was apropos, since everyone treated her like an alien.

The first time Big Daddy heard toddler Holly sitting at his feet struggling to read aloud from an old pulp paperback, he gave her the big hardback dictionary left by her ill-fated grandmother, Moon Shadow. Even though Holly could hardly carry it, she loved that dictionary, and since the older kids often took things away from her, she kept it hidden. By the time she was five, she knew almost every word in it; she did not always use the words with precision, but she had plenty of time to learn.

Also as a young child, she begged Fanny to teach her to talk funny, and they were soon conversing in fluent French. A draft dodger from San Diego taught her enough Italian to understand most of the poetry Big Daddy spouted in that language, and she picked up an unsavory version of Spanish from passing Mexican migrant workers. She sucked information in like a vacuum cleaner, and was well-educated before she entered first grade.

The commune’s ruling council had long since realized that having their offspring in public schools relating stories of drug use and free love could attract unwanted attention from, among others, the fuzz. Several hippies had earned teaching credentials before they turned on and dropped out, and were appointed to run a sham version of home schooling. Molly Two was unsure of Holly’s age, but shuffled her off to the school when she seemed to be about six.

On her first day, the teacher decided to assess the class’s initial grasp of arithmetic and asked, Who can tell me how much one plus one is? Several children raised their hands, but tiny Holly sat quietly. The teacher pointed at her.

Slightly alarmed, she stood, and without the slightest hint of pretense, replied, If you’re in base ten numbers, the answer is two, but in binary, it’s ten.

The teacher replied, Great; we apparently have a little genius in the class.

Holly grinned, swung her right arm out and up, and brought her pointing index finger down to rest precisely on the top of her head. With that finger serving as her pivot, she began to bounce up and down and laugh while spinning around like a little toy top, and the happier she became, the louder she laughed, the higher she bounced and the faster she twirled. In those early days, everyone said, Look, crazy Holly’s doing her Happy Dance.

She quickly surpassed the other students, and the teachers couldn’t keep up with her unquenchable thirst for knowledge. One said, She learns faster than I can teach. It’s exhausting.

Never the show-off with the me, me raised hand, she was shy, but attentive. She devoured the few books available in the school, and when called upon to answer questions, she usually replied with a greater depth of knowledge than her teacher’s. Almost from day one, the other kids berated her as a know-it-all. She cried and replied, I’m sorry; learning stuff just makes me happy.

As intellectual superiority continued to set her apart, she became a pariah. Her classmates taunted her, both in school and out, and her attempts to play with them always ended with tears. Molly Two, who should have consoled her, was always drunk or stoned and often in bed with some guy when Holly found her. Her usual greeting was, Scram, you stupid little bitch. The name sounded awful, especially when her own mother called her one. With sad resignation, she became a six-year-old school dropout. She also stopped trying to love her mother.

When faced with the choice of sitting alone in a tree reading Shakespeare to the birds and squirrels, or enduring the harassment of her classmates who were struggling with See Jane run, Holly headed for the woods. Since her teachers were relieved when she was truant, they didn’t complain, and neither Molly Two nor Big Daddy were sober enough to care.

Holly was unable to understand why everyone except her Big Daddy disliked her. He didn’t pay much attention when she jumped into his lap bawling her eyes out, but at least he didn’t use the Molly word that always broke Holly’s heart. She cried often, and most often her lonely tears fell in the forest. She lived in quiet seclusion and decided she would try awful hard not to be that awful thing, a bitch. A smooth, flat limb in her favorite tree became her secret classroom. At age six, just above her desk, she carved into the trunk in bold letters:

Off with their Heads!

Holly Pleasance is not a bitch!

Her special tree was the centerpiece of an isolated vale on the eastern edge of the estate that she found when she was about five. She was being chased by kids who were tormenting her, and after eluding them, she kept running for the sheer joy of it and dashed into an area she had not visited previously. At full speed, she leaped onto a large boulder. One foot touched the top, but she was unable to stop, and her momentum sent her flying through the air. A sixty-foot-wide circular pool of crystal-clear water came into view below her, and with a quick Dang, she belly-flopped into it. Afraid of what she might see, she looked around with only her eyes and nose above the surface, frog-like. A submerged smile signaled a happy thought, and It’s a secret garden, bubbled from her lips.

The pool was hidden below a jumble of boulders, and its source was a waterfall cascading over them. Opposite the falls, the water burbled away over smaller rocks to become a stream again. A variety of trees enclosed the magical glade, and wild flowers, shrubs and vines grew in profusion. On the bank across from her launching boulder, she found her special tree—The biggest oak tree in the whole dang world. Holly paddled across to the tree, tossed her wet clothes onto the grass to dry in the sun, curtsied regally and climbed. Settling on a wide, comfortable limb overlooking the pool, the one that was to become her desk, she leaned against the trunk, crossed her feet and said, You must be the best tree in the business. Please be my friend.

Toward evening, after discussing matters of great importance and sharing a couple of poems with her tree, she climbed down and hugged its massive trunk. Holding her clothes high and dry, she paddled back across her pool and climbed to the top of the boulder. She spun three times, and stretching her arms out like tree limbs, tiny Holly proclaimed, Mister Tree, you are so strong and beautiful, and I ain’t. Someday, I’ll be like you, and I’ll . . . Staring up at the oak, she saw shimmering, lacy, cloud-like puffs drifting among the foliage. For a brief second, they came together in the shape of a smile, but when she said, Wow, it dissipated on the breeze. Searching five years of accumulated wisdom without finding much to work with, she continued, "I don’t know why the world’s such a bad place, but someday, I’ll be like you, and I’ll make everything better. I promise!" After three more quick spins, she blew a kiss across the pool, and like a dryad—the wood nymph of the oak tree—scampered back toward the commune, and back into loneliness.

Would it be too whimsical to imagine that some of the tree’s limbs sagged to see her go?

*     *     *

Poetry had always fascinated Holly; some of her earliest memories were of Big Daddy’s recitations. Even before she could understand the words, she loved the rhythms, the rhymes, the patterns of the fascinating sounds, but she had no books in which to read them. As soon as she became empowered with the tools in her dictionary, she began to transcribe his poems, and more importantly, to write her own, but because of her isolation and deprivation, she could rarely find paper to write on. She often begged Big Daddy and Molly Two to give her some, but they ignored her. She borrowed paper and pencils wherever she could find them, but on many disappointing days, the flood of words crowding her exploding mind had no place to go. As she told her tree, Sometimes I can’t eat ’cause my mouth is too full of words.

But her poems, in whatever form they took, had to be written so she could see, hear, touch, sing and dance with them. They didn’t seem quite real until they were outside of her. In her dictionary, she found the word reify—to make something abstract more concrete or real—and almost fell out of her tree trying to do a Happy Dance on a limb. In her mind, it became "realify, and from that day forward, she didn’t just write poems, she realified" them.

Every poem she heard her Big Daddy recite, and every one she created, were committed to memory, and her transcendence in poetry began as a need to compress and simplify them to fit on the available scraps of paper. When she began to write them, she struggled to record long, complicated thoughts onto small pieces of paper that could hold only a few words. This condensing of ideas became a fun game, and her final products were unlike anything ever before written. At age six, she devised a new language using a quasi-mathematical form of abbreviation, and even more fun, at eight, using source materials newly available, she created her own version of Bobileth, or tree writing, the ancient Celtic language in which each letter of its alphabet is named for a different species of tree. No real human ever understood her poems realified in those esoteric forms.

When she had no paper, she became even more creative in realifying. Many of her beautiful, little-girl efforts were painstakingly carved into the trunk and limbs of her tree. Some, appropriately enough, were in her tree writing. One of her poems about her tree is carved into a limb of her tree in tree writing, and she says when she finished and read it to her tree, she got dizzy and fell out of the tree—a story she always concludes with, How embarrassing.

Her poetree also added to the growing mysteries in her life. If a storm broke a limb, the bark would slowly grow over the wound and seal it, but Holly’s carvings were all done after a little Happy Dance in which permission was respectfully sought, and granted. Her carved poems were accepted with gratitude, and something magnetically magical turned them into permanent decorations. No bark ever covered one.

Suspicious smudges on walls and fences throughout the compound also displayed her pristine, virginal works of poetic art for a time, but she scratched them all out after the older kids found one and made up obscene versions of it to mock her. After crying for a while, she swore to never again let anyone hear or read her poems. The carvings in her tree were safe because no real person knew they existed.

She had one other paperless outlet for her work. In solitude, rejoicing in the sunsets at the beach, she often realified poems into the sand with driftwood pencils, Happy Dancing around them as the waves swirled up and swept them out to sea, where the creatures of the deep would respect and enjoy them. Squirrels and birds often gathered when she recited a poem in her tree, and on a pleasant afternoon on the shore, as one of Holly’s poems was being washed back into the Pacific, a sea lion propelled itself onto the beach near her and barked happily. Since it was twice her size, Holly was afraid to approach it, but she curtsied and yelled, You’re welcome, as it clumsily shuffled back into the surf.

*     *     *

One sunny day when Holly was about six, she was stretched out on the grass leaning against a tree in the common area. Two other little commune girls walked by holding hands. They pointed at her and sang, Holly is a doo-doo head, Holly is a doo-doo head, and ran off giggling. Holly ignored them and concentrated on the task at hand—mentally translating an ancient Marot poem that Big Daddy often recited. He always did it in English, but sensing the original was in French, Holly pestered Fanny to translate it. Fanny’s version hadn’t sounded quite right to Holly, so once her own French was improving, she was fixin’ it. Thus distracted, she failed to see two of the older boys, frequent harassers, sneaking up on her. When they could catch her, they held her down and tickled her in places she didn’t like them to touch, often removing her clothes if she happened to be wearing any. On this seminal day, she twisted free of their hands, took off for the woods, doubled back and hid as they ran by in pursuit.

Free of them, she sneaked into the huge barn that in years past housed open-topped oak vats used for fermenting the wines. Every neato hiding place in the dusty old structure was home to her. It took all forty of her pounds pulling on the rope to bring down the rickety wooden ladder that swung from the open loft. Taking three rungs at a time with rope in hand, she scooted up, yanked the ladder back off the main floor and held her breath, listening for her tormentors. Hearing nothing, she twirled twice, skipped to the back of the loft out of sight from below and sprawled on a ragged old horse blanket. She flipped her long ponytail over the seat of a smooth, worn-out saddle she often used as a pillow and squirmed until she was comfortable.

Back in creative mode, she revised the poem three more times before she declared it "Ma Mignonne," and felt Marot smiling at her from the sixteenth century. Grinning with satisfaction, she rewarded herself with a nap.

A regal, arrogant magpie, who had a nest in a tree by the stream, awakened her with angry squawking. His strutting and hopping about made her happy because he looked so silly. In their first encounters, he had made a terrible fuss, but after she fed him a few bugs and worms, he tolerated her, as long as she didn’t jump around or spin too much. As she stretched her spindly arms and legs, stiff from her nap, he landed on a wooden box near the back wall of the loft. She grinned and waved at him as he stared her down, but when her eyes closed in the middle of a big yawn, he disappeared. Silly bird, she said, flapping her arms. The old saddle became her pretend horse, but before the ride began in earnest, the magpie reappeared with a shiny object in his beak. Pulling on imaginary reigns, she yelled, Whoa, and clapped her hands. You’re not just a silly bird, you’re magic, too. Unamused, he lifted off and shot out through the window in a fluttering flash of black and white.

Burning with curiosity, she explored the area where he had disappeared the first time and made a marvelous discovery. Behind the box, a board stuck out a couple of inches from the wall. The bird stuff around it revealed his secret. The plank gave way with a yank, leaving a sizable opening, and she stuck her head in to see what was going on back there. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could see down a small open shaft that seemed to extend a long way down and disappear