Mad Professor by Rudy Rucker Page A

quantum state. Come on, it’ll be fun. Our minds will be like Web sites for each other—we can click links and see what’s in the depths.”
    â€œLike my drunk-driving arrest, my membership in a doomsday cult, and the fact that I fall asleep sucking my thumb every night?”
    â€œYou’re hiding something behind all those jokes, aren’t you, Rick? Don’t be scared of me. I can protect you. I can bring you along on my meteoric rise to the top.”
    Rick studied Amy for a minute. “Tell you what,” he said finally. “If we’re gonna do a proper test, we shouldn’t be sitting here face to face. People can read so much from each other’s expressions.” He gestured toward the boulder-studded lawn outside the cafeteria doors. “I’ll go sit down where you can’t see me.”
    â€œGood idea,” said Amy. “And then pour the carbon into your hand and lick it up. It tastes like burnt toast.”
    Amy smiled, watching Rick walk across the cafeteria. He was so cute and nice. If only he’d ask her out. Well, with any luck, while they were linked, she could reach into his mind and implant an obsessive loop centering around her. That was the real reason she’d chosen Rick as her partner for this mindlink session, which was, if the truth be told, her tenth peer-to-peer test.
    She dumped the black dust into her hand and licked. Her theory and her tests showed that the mindlink effect alwaysbegan in the first second after ingestion—there was no need to wait for the body’s metabolism to transport the carbon to the brain. This in itself was a surprising result, indicating that a person’s mind was somehow distributed throughout the body, rather than sealed up inside the skull.
    She closed her eyes and reached out for Rick. She’d enchant him and they’d become lovers. But, damn it, the mind at the other end of the link wasn’t Rick’s. No, the mind she’d linked to was inhuman: dense, taciturn, crystalline, serene, beautiful—
    â€œHaving fun yet?” It was Rick, standing across the table, not looking all that friendly.
    â€œWhat—” began Amy.
    â€œI dumped your powder on a boulder. You’re too weird for me. I gotta go.”
    Amy walked slowly out the patio doors to look at the friendly gray lump of granite. How nice to know that a rock had a mind. The world was cozier than she’d ever realized. She’d be okay without Rick. She had friends everywhere.

MS FOUND IN A MINIDRIVE
    In the summer of 2004, while traveling in the West, I found a small electronic device in a meadow near Boulder, Colorado. It was a fingertip-sized minidrive of the type that can be plugged into the port of a laptop computer. There was but a single document stored upon the drive: the story that I have appropriated and printed below. The actual author, one Professor Gregge Crane, seems to have gone permanently missing.
    â€”R. R.
    THIS  summer I was asked to submit a piece for an anthology of tales inspired by Edgar Allan Poe. The publisher’s somewhat tendentious idea for the book was that each contributor should create a story relating to one and the same unfinished Poe manuscript.
    The seed-fragment in question, known as the “The Lighthouse,” takes the form of a few journal entries by a disinherited young noble (poor Eddie’s perennial theme!) who has signed upfor a stint as a solitary lighthouse keeper on a shoal of rock in some far Northern sea.
    The reader quickly senses there will be trouble within and without. On the one hand, “there is no telling what may happen to a man all alone as I am—I may get sick, or worse . . .” and on the other, “the sea has been known to run higher here than anywhere with the single exception of the Western opening of the Straits of Magellan.”
    There’s something unsettling about the lighthouse’s construction. The space