—I mean it was always understood that this would still be here when you got back, just the same, exactly the same, right?

—Well ha-ha guess that’s why we called ’em vacations, son! Cause you always do come back to old Realityland, don’t you.

—You always did.

—Listen Tyrone, you don’t know how dangerous that stuff is. Suppose someday you just plug in and go away and never come back? Eh?

—Ho, ho! Don’t I wish! What do you think every electrofreak dreams about? You’re such an old fuddyduddy! A-and who sez it’s a dream, huh? M-maybe it exists. Maybe there is a Machine to take us away, take us completely, suck us out through the electrodes out of the skull ’n’ into the Machine and live there forever with all the other souls it’s got stored there. It could decide who it would suck out, a-and when. Dope never gave you immortality. You hadda come back, every time, into a dying hunk of smelly meat! But We can live forever, in a clean, honest, purified Electroworld—

—Shit that’s what I get, havin’ a double Virgo fer a son….

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF IMIPOLEX G

Imipolex G is the first plastic that is actually erectile. Under suitable stimuli, the chains grow cross-links, which stiffen the molecule and increase intermolecular attraction so that this Peculiar Polymer runs far outside the known phase diagrams, from limp rubbery amorphous to amazing perfect tessellation, hardness, brilliant transparency, high resistance to temperature, weather, vacuum, shock of any kind (slowly gleaming in the Void. Silver and black. Curvewarped reflections of stars flowing across, down the full length of, round and round in meridians exact as the meridians of acupuncture. What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing? Shadows of the creature’s bones and ducts—leaky, wounded, irradiated white—mingling in with its own. It is entangled with the bones and ducts, its own shape determined by how the Erection of the Plastic shall proceed: where fast and where slow, where painful and where slithery-cool… whether areas shall exchange characteristics of hardness and brilliance, whether some areas should be allowed to flow over the surface so that the passage will be a caress, where to orchestrate sudden discontinuities—blows, wrenchings—in among these more caressive moments).

Evidently the stimulus would have had to be electronic. Alternatives for signaling to the plastic surface were limited:

(a) a thin matrix of wires, forming a rather close-set coordinate system over the Imipolectic Surface, whereby erectile and other commands could be sent to an area quite specific, say on the order of ½ cm2,