“You mean you don’t know how many there are? You put the fucker together and you don’t know yourself?”

“I didn’t put the fucker together, old buddy.” Mel gave a jerk to the coil between his hands and somewhere deep in the recording device there was a click. “A Hewlett-Packard computer did. I only told it what to make, and it made it.”

Arthur just stared at him. Then he took an annoyed swallow from the glass of whiskey in his hand. These Goddamn paraphysicists. It would be just like the sons of bitches not to want to know how many connections you had to make to record an entire human mind. But he said nothing. When Denise had talked him into doing this thing he had made enough objections. Such as, “Why me? Why should I be the guinea pig for some crazy attempt to make a recording of a whole personality?” Denise’s answer had merely been, “Because Mel is your friend.” And so on.

So he sat and drank his drink and watched Mel finish checking out the helmet and submitted quietly when Mel placed the heavy thing on his head. He could just barely see beneath and around dangling wires and he was wondering how long he would have to put up with it to please his wife and Mel when he heard and slightly saw Mel walk over to the recorder and heard him say, “Here we go, old buddy.” Then he threw a switch….

***

And Arthur awoke to a world askew and furred. Something was madly wrong with his vision, even though the wires were gone. His eyes could not encapsulate the scene for him; all he really saw were pale colors, pale lights, some slight movements. There were smells somewhere, too, but they made no sense: roses, maybe, and vinegar. Somebody somewhere was singing in Chinese, or Anglo-Saxon. He closed his eyes. Only one thing was certain. He had an erection. He went to sleep.

Even the dreams were not right. They seemed to be someone else’s dreams.

Days passed. He woke from time to time, and was fed. Sometimes there were tall, slim people in the room with him. They spoke Chinese. Or Anglo-Saxon. Once a long-haired person spoke to him in strange English, “How are you, sir or madam?” He had no answer for that.

Finally he woke up and was able to focus his eyes and brain well enough to see that he was not in his own body. He learned that from his arms, which were hairless and chocolate. Was he a Black? A Polynesian? He did not feel as shocked as it seemed he should have felt. Drugged? Very likely. Whom by? God knows. He felt of his face. It was all wrong: the nose was too broad, the chin too soft, the ears were too big. Why is it I’m not upset at this? Drugs? But then he had been wanting to be dead for over a year, had been thinking of suicide with the intensity that some of his colleagues had when they thought of a promotion. So maybe whatever had happened to him didn’t make any difference. If he didn’t like it he could always kill himself. And there was no pain in whatever was going on. He felt all right.