Hylozoic by Rudy Rucker

said the garrulous pitchfork, thumping the heavy vine. “The stalk is a friend of mine, a native aktual name of Art Zed. Nothin’ to be afraid of. You’ll pick up some powers and you’ll meet a couple of folks. Won’t take long. And then you’ll be back home with the frau.”
    Jayjay gazed at the gently swaying vine. It gave off a pleasant, musical hum. It stretched to infinity, an endless maze of branching paths. He’d wanted to get high, hadn’t he? “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”
    His hands and feet found ready purchase on the stalk; he climbed upward with ease. Groovy bucked along behind him like a caterpillar. Soon they’d reached the first fork.
    â€œRight or left?” asked Jayjay.
    â€œListen to the beanstalk,” said Groovy. “Follow his song.”
    The music seemed a bit louder to the right, a bit sweeter, so that’s the branch that Jayjay took.
    â€œAtta boy,” called the pitchfork, close behind him. “And keep doubling your pace. Do it like a Zeno speed-up.”
    With the coming of lazy eight, scientists had begun discussing a theoretical trick for covering the endless axis of eighth dimensional memory in a finite amount of time—they called it a Zeno speed-up. In principle, you could search the first gigabyte of your lazy eight memory in a second, the next gigabyte in half a second, the next in a quarter of a second—and at the end of two seconds, you’d have searched your whole infinite spike of eighth dimensional memory, winnowing through alef-null gigabytes,
alef-null
being the mathematicians’ word for the first level of infinity.
    But in practice, each step of a search took a certain amount of energy, and there seemed to be fundamental limits to the speed at which you could do things. Normal people couldn’t actually carry out Zeno speed-ups with their minds, let alone with their bodies. The nimblest human thought processes usually pooped out around ten octillion steps.
    But right now, on this leafy beanstalk, a Zeno speed-up seemed physically possible. Jayjay was reaching each successive forking twice as quickly. Right, left, left, right, right, right,left, right . . . The beanstalk’s sweet music was guiding him, and it was feeding him a strange, wonderful energy as well.
    The farther he went, the bigger the leaves became. Or maybe he was shrinking? They were the size of houses, the size of stadiums, flipping past in a blur. Limbs working mechanically, following the song, not paying much attention to which forkings he took, Jayjay chanced a glance down toward the Subdee desert below. The flat expanse shimmered like a sheet of glass, and for an instant he could glimpse the contours of his cozy living room on the other side. If he turned his viewpoint upside down, it was as if he were crawling down a lacy root system, and peering up through his cabin floor.
    Meanwhile the music of the beanstalk had segued into a voice, a man’s murmur, so very similar to Jayjay’s internal monologue that at first he mistook it for his own thoughts. But these weren’t the kinds of thoughts he normally had.
    â€œI’m a transfinite being,” the vine was saying. “We call ourselves aktuals. I live in Alefville. Each of our tree branches has an endless number of jiggles. My apartment building has alef-one floors, and the town has alef-two streets. My full name is—”
    An intense, skritchy sound filled Jayjay’s ears. It was like hearing someone handwrite an endlessly long phrase in a fraction of a second. But, regarded in another way, it was really just a pair of syllables, a simple name that Jayjay could very easily say, a name which, come to think of it, the pitchfork had mentioned before.
    â€œArt Zed?” said Jayjay.
    â€œYes. Before too long, you’ll be visiting Alefville.”
    â€œWow.”
    The pitchfork seized on Jayjay’s moment of dreamy