Chapter 2
Jay Leno woke up with a start: he'd fallen asleep with his head in the ice cream bowl, and the bowl could hardly have been considered empty. His face was sticky and cold, and his head felt numb accordingly. Turning to his left, Jay Leno noticed the open door of his refrigerator, then he turned to the oven timer to see the time. It was 1pm. "Golly gosh, that must've been open all night-" A little voice in the back of Jay Leno's head squealed, "-all morning."
A biologist rummaging through the refrigerator's shelves could have made a career out of one shelf alone, for every major kingdom and phylum of the tree of life found themselves represented here, each a unique and precious cog in one of separate and autonomous ecosystems. For instance, the top shelf was dominated by a miniature fungal forest, with microscopic legged-fish hauling themselves up on to the shorelines of a tiny ocean of spilled milk. The milk itself teemed with lifeforms never before seen on Earth: sharks with three eyes, underwater venus fly traps, starfish the shape of squares, octopuses with 9 tentacles etc. On another shelf, herds of minuscule sauropods roamed the landscape: "they do move in herds!" a biologist would exclaim, yet noting that their long necks were not actually for reaching the taller trees, but functioned like the blades of a helicopter, allowing them a swift escape from any danger. On one of the lower shelves, humanoids were already building the pyramids in a tiny Las Vegas.
Yet Jay Leno only saw that all of his food was unsuitable for human consumption, and took his refrigerator out to the dumpster. Breathing out a sigh of frustration, Jay Leno stepped into his car and turned on the ignition. "Oh, uhh, hang on; did I lock the front door?" he said out loud. He looked for a memory, somewhere in his mind, of him locking the front door but found nothing, but, serendipitously, neither did he find a memory of him NOT locking the front door, so Jay Leno pulled out his driveway and onto the highway.
On the highway the radio swerved through different stations, up and down, AM and FM, never resting on any station for more than a few seconds. Sports news, the weather forecast, neither really interested Jay Leno right now, and it was hours until rush hour, so traffic updates didn't matter. As for the airwaves' musical wares, the radio offered nothing which he would part with his hard earned silence for. His hand stayed glued to the radio dial, turning it with the perseverance of a safe cracker. Turning the dial again, the radio landed on a local station broadcasting news on crime. "Nothing but the same old gory stuff, probably." And with that, his brain gave the command for two neural impulses to make their perilous journey down his spine and into his fingertip and thumb to tune into a different station.
Since it was only early afternoon, traffic in the brain was sparse, with only impulses from the desire section of the brain commuting to the refrigerator part and Jay Leno's memory of not locking the front door evading capture by the thought police possibly getting in the way. Thus the new impulses made their way out of the brain with ease. By the time the pair of impulses were halfway along the shoulder, Jay Leno's ear was sending frantic messages to the central nervous system, relaying what the local news story was saying: "In other news, residents of {the road where Jay Leno lives} have been reporting suspicious behaviour. An unidentifed individual has been spying on people inside their garages. We speak with a concerned resident...". Upon hearing this, the central nervous system panicked and called upon its advisers.
"What can we do? He needs to hear this news report, but the neural impulse to change the station is already en route to his finger and thumb!"
"perhaps we could blockade one of the synapses on the way? that way, maybe, we could stop the impulse before it gets there, and he'll hear the rest of the story." suggested one adviser.
"perhaps we could shut down his arm entirely? Just abort it, you know?" another offered.
"no! that's far too drastic, he'll need that arm for the handbrake later; and I don't think we can block a synapse in time, we'd have to send another impulse after it, and we don't have the kind of speed that'll let us overtake an impulse already half way to its destination. Damn it, think!"
the central nervous system oscillated between rubbing its temples and drinking coffee. Black coffee.
"At last! I've got it!" Cried one adviser.
"Spit it out, what is it?" The central nervous system was half demanding, half pleading.
"We lie and tell the brain that his fingers are on fire: tell it that the dial is really goddamn hot, and if the brain is working properly, it'll send an express impulse at 3 times the normal speed of a neural impulse to take his fingers away from the dial immediately."
"What?" the central nervous system exclaimed "are you kidding me? Do you even know the first thing about neuroscience? That's not how it works at all!"
"With all due respect, sir, this is the only chance we've got."
"Ow! What the?! How in the hell did this thing get so hot?" Jay Leno ripped his fingers from the radio dial and thrust them into his mouth to soothe them. He then shifted his attention to the radio report, and listened with a sense of unease: "An unidentifed individual has been spying on people inside their garages. We speak with a concerned resident, who has declined to give us his name: now, when did you last see this mysterious individual?"
"Well", replied the resident, "I was sitting in muh garage, sharin' a intimate moment with uhh, with uhhh one of muh cars, and I saw this figure out the corner of mah eye, and I said, I told myself, 'who was that guy?' and I just sat there, wonderin' who that guy was 'n' what he were doin' in my garage. Was he there just to watch? I don' think so... Was he a alien, doin' research on the human species? prob'ly not, how many aliens do you see 'round here? I tell you how many aliens we see here, none o' the sciencey type aliens, that's fer sure. Maybe it was just my imagination? But you know what? Years o' the crystal has rotted my brain out, I couldn't even imagine a llama with a suitcase these days; I didn' even imagine that, I was rememberin'. You know, uhh, did you know that I actually saw a llama with a suitcase before? Yup, 'round about that time, I decided it was time to leave Mexico, but that was mostly fer tax reasons."
"I see, sir," hesitated the reporter, trying to dial back to before the resident's tangent, "What time did this actually happen?"
"Oh it was sixteen years ago, the governor of the state o' Mexico I was I livin' in raised liquor tax, and you know, I said to myself, I said, I asked myself 'Am I going to pay some Mexican extra money fer my beer?' And so I said yes, but I were deported anyways fer some meth related crimes. Hey, that was around about that time I saw a llama with, hold on, a llama with a suitcase. Ain't it funny how that happens? Anyways, When I moved to California, I were seeing space aliens left and right, but none of them were the sciencey types, they liked art and history though, I know that fer sure. But you know, they didn' know much chemistry, so they had none of that crystal for sale, just human feces and advanced space travel equipment. Of course, it was really expensive, the feces, because they had to take it from people when they're sleeping. You see, they liked it fresh, so they used anal probes to-"
Jay Leno turned the radio off, he was breaking into a cold sweat. Perhaps he could use some silence for a bit.