Spacetime Donuts Read Online Free

decide when." He indicated a rheostat dial on the panel in front of Vernor. "You make it to five, and you are Angel," he added, finally smiling.
    The switch was a dial with the numbers zero through five on it. At present it was set at zero. Moto-O and the technician moved away from Vernor, and he was alone with the machine. Clearly the idea was to inch up to five, hang on for a minute, and whip back to zero.
    Cautiously, Vernor turned the dial just the tiniest bit towards one, and then, feeling only a slight tickle, jumped it to two. He closed his eyes to savor his impressions. "A garden of light," Andy had said, and that wasn't far wrong.
    Patterns formed and dissolved faster than Vernor could objectify them. That is, he would experience a certain train of thought with its concomitant association blocks, but the whole mental structure would turn into a new one before he could step outside of it and record it. As yet, however, the thoughts did not feel much different from his ordinary thoughts, though it was hard to be sure. It felt pretty good, actually.
    He felt light-headed, reckless. He reached out and turned the dial up to five with one motion. Only after they unplugged him ten minutes later did he have time to try to form a description of what full brain interlock with Phizwhiz felt like.
    As he told Alice at supper that night, it was like suddenly having your brain become thousands of times larger. Our normal thoughts consist of association blocks woven together to form a network pattern which changes as time goes on. When Vernor was plugged into Phizwhiz, the association blocks became larger, and the networks more complex. He recalled, for instance, having thought fleetingly of his hand on the control switch. As soon as the concept hand formed in his mind, Phizwhiz had internally displayed every scrap of information in his memory banks related to the key-word hand . All the literary allusions to, all the physiological studies of, all the known uses for hands were simultaneously held in the Vernor-Phizwhiz joint consciousness. All this as well as images of all the paintings, photographs, X-rays, Hollows, etc. of hands which were stored in Phizwhiz's memory bank. And this was just a part of one association block involved in one thought network.
    The thought networks were of such a fabulous richness and complexity that it would have been physically impossible to fit any of them into Vernor's unplugged brain. Once Moto-O disconnected him, they were gone.
    "Wait," Vernor cried, "I was just about to get the whole picture." He had a feeling that some transcendent revelation had been cut short.
    Moto-O laughed in delight, "You were almost gone to be whole picture. One more minute and . . . wearing the Happy Cloak."
    Suddenly Vernor remembered that this had been a test. "I'm an Angel now?"
    "Oh yes," Moto-O replied, "I welcome you." He shook Vernor's hand.
    The technician looked up from a bank of dials and nodded at Vernor. "The system is definitely energized, Mr. Maxwell. You do good work."
    "That's what I don't get," Alice asked after Vernor related the experience to her over the supper she had prepared. "If you have so much better associations and so much more complicated thoughts when you're plugged in to Phizwhiz, why does he even need you ? I mean it's not like you're adding a whole lot of brain space to the machine."
    "It's not my memory or switching circuits that Phizwhiz needs," Vernor responded. "It's my consciousness . . . my ability to discriminate. Inside Phizwhiz it's like a sea of information. The whole time I was in there I was picking out pieces and putting them together into patterns. It was sort of like listening to static until you hear voices."
    "Can't Phizwhiz form patterns of his own?" Alice asked.
    "Only the ones which follow logically from his initial program," Vernor explained, then added, "actually he can pick out random patterns as well. But he can't do what a person can do . . . put