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MEMOIRS OF THE UNREALISTIC CHAPTER 1

Grampa dreamed of fame. Not about achieving anything in particular to earn it; he just liked to fantasize about having it. About being a celebrity. His journals contain long meditations on how he would deal with his public. Would he give autographs? Yes, he would; he would sign autographs day and night. He would lavish love upon his public. Or: No, he wouldn't. He would remain aloof from his public. He would "vant to be alone." He would eschew interviews. He would be demure. He would outwit the paparazzi. He would pass among the masses unseen, a windblown shadow. His public would be frustrated, maddened, but in the end they would come to understand the gift he had given them: a hero unsullied by commercialism. A man who hadn't sold himself.

If Grampa's journals reveal anything, it is the inner life of a man self-absorbed, escapist, deluded, detached from society, abjuring any productive relationship with his fellow citizens – in a word, and from every angle, an "unrealistic" man.

And this is precisely where I differ from Grampa. My experience with fame is authentic; his, fabulistic. He ate baked beans cold out of the can and dreamed of caviar. I've eaten my share of caviar and don't even really like it much. Fame does not impress me, nor do its accoutrements. This is no doubt because of my immersion in the milieu of celebrity. I am a biographer, entertainment journalist, and sometime-ghostwriter. And I am lucky enough to count among my friends the most celebrated entertainer of our time, Flicky Flounder, a fact that has undoubtedly played its part in demystifying that which Grampa looked upon as a fetish.

I can't overstate my affection for him. Most of the worlds know Flicky as the star of such eleven-dimensional mo-tainment spectaculars as The Fish Who Saved Madison County, Mr. Limpet Goes to Wall Street and Moby Dick VI: Gladiators of Atlantis. Gear-heads know Flicky as a state-of-the-art eighth-gen autunculus, a slack-stringer, a pocket phantom. But I know the fish behind the technical strata and PR glitz. The Flicky I know is not the Hollywood idol; nor is he any mere refraction of a set of probability equations projected within a highly energized, tightly focused gravity beam through the prism of micro-dimensional spacetime.

The Flicky Flounder I know is an artist, and a deep soul. He is profoundly wise, and profoundly sad.

You hear this phrase all the time regarding celebrities, but I'll say it anyway, because in this case it is so true: people don't understand Flicky. People have the wrong idea about autunculi in general. But I think, because of his origins in 3D computer-generated animation, they have an especially wrong idea of the Great Flatfish. He is beloved, especially by children, for roles in which he displays a cartoonish talent for distorting his features. Such talent is, no doubt, a vestige of his Pixarian ancestry. Yet he is no cartoon; he is anything but. (I address all these issues, and more, in my upcoming biography of Flicky, Nobody's Fish out of Water, the very real life of the worlds’ greatest entertainer.)

Integral to his depth and strength of character has been his struggle against bigotry. There will always be those prejudiced against admitting the equal authenticity of the Cosmunculus and our Cosmos. And that is sad. For me, there is something especially poignant about it. I am, let me assure you, an unwilling champion for the cause of equality. Were it not for my personal stake in the matter, I wouldn't consider for a moment agitating for a transformation of the popular consciousness. There's nothing I'd rather do than flow along with the course of historical events, causing nary a ripple. But destiny has demanded otherwise. There is an over-arching armature of fate that pulls the strings. I find myself having to apologize for the preachy tone that inevitably possesses my voice. Against my nature, I've become a kind of evangelist.

But why should it be so difficult for so many to acknowledge how intertwined the Cosmos and the Cosmunculus have become? And this outrage I hear – as if such a condition had been thrust upon cosmorganic humanity with the precipitous shock of a truck accident – can there be anything more disingenuous? As if we couldn’t have seen the Sluice coming. Even as the first theoretical universes were in the process of being modeled in the Quantum Ocean, the ocean of qubits, part of which evolved into the Undermind, the seeds of the jungle of realities we now inhabit were already beginning to sprout. Anyone who was shocked by the Sluice must have been living in a cave for the six decades prior.

A good historical analogy is the development of radio broadcasting in the early twentieth century: listeners initially had no doubts whether they were being spoken to by another human being, thinking thoughts within their own heads, or listening to electromagnetic signals translated into sound waves by a receiver; yet, by the early twenty-first century, the human information environment was so saturated with signals – electromagnetic, olfactory, tactile, sonic, and visual – that personal broadcast/receive devices were as integral to human awareness as eyes, ears, noses and skin. Of course there was still a difference between, say, being bodily in a war and experiencing a war via electromagnetic transmission, but the difference was no longer one of "natural" versus "artificial." They were different ways of perceiving a war, each with its own limitations and advantages, but neither more nor less "real" than the other.

The same argument for authenticity applies to those who originate in the Cosmunculus. The colloquial terms, "slack-stringer," "gravity puppet," and the archaic pejorative "pocket phantom," are misleading in their evocations of artifice. Likewise, the term normally employed in “sensitive” discourse and journalism, "autunculus," brings to mind, even in its most respectful connotation, a will exerted from behind the scenes to manipulate an otherwise hollow projection. It casts the Undermind as puppeteer, the Cosmunculus as a stage, and the autunculi as its puppets.

Needless to say, there's a great deal of cosmocentrism at work in the metaphorical universe these lexical relics conjure. Remember, to the autunculi, it's OUR world that is a projection into THEIRS. Conservatives will point out that our world came first; but what makes an old world more real than a younger one? Were the Titans more real than the Olympians? Is the Old Testament more real than the New?

Others will assert that, since humans authored the original quantum computer programs that formed the Quantum Ocean, any reality catalyzed thereafter by the Undermind is in some way contingent upon the more "real" reality of our universe. To me that's no different than asserting that, because we long ago altered the genes for frontal lobe development in chimpanzees, the differential calculus chimpanzees use today is less real than that which was employed a century ago. But we know this to be untrue. Both are the same calculus, using the same equations for the same purposes with identical accuracy.

The milk is contingent upon the prior existence of the cow, yet both are equally real.

Is an ancestor more real than its descendant?

I think not.

MEMOIRS OF THE UNREALISTIC CHAPTER 2

As I reveal in the biography, Flicky and I met while attending a mo-tainment presentation at the Snerd Sensorium, an event called "WOO-MO-MANIA." It was a rare retrospective of student works by the three giants of the Woo mo-tainment dynasty, presented in the original media peculiar to each generation of the artistic clan.

The patriarch John Woo's art school mo-tainment product was displayed on a classic "silvered" screen. It consisted of images cast by light passing through a transparent, gray-toned, sprocketed membrane, in the classical tradition.

To a mo-tainment connoisseur such as myself, if I may be allowed a modest display of self-esteem, it was the usual pretentious student tripe: camera panning across actors straining to appear motionless, then abruptly fainting for no rhyme or reason. I found it somehow comforting to note that even a mo-tainment god of Woo's stature had begun his career as just another navel-gazing poseur. Even the rest of the audience, inveterate snobs versed in the art of feigning deep appreciation for shallow nonsense, could not watch it without snickering.

The next piece, by Woo's grandson, Yassir Zappa-Woo, was projected in its original cineplasma format. I must admit to a prejudice here. Cineplasmographic mo-tainment never fails to nauseate me. Perhaps it's the sense memory of the seasickness I succumbed to while watching the opening scene of the plasma re-engineered version of Woody Allen's masterpiece from the classical celluloid repertoire, Husbands and Wives, with the pitches and sweeps of its "handheld" technique. Still, I don’t think I’m alone in considering Zappa-Woo's an unremarkable work, and at this showing a gelatinous quiver caused by a rickety old compressor rendered it all but intolerable. Its sole saving grace was its brevity.

The third piece was what I'd really come to see. More than likely, so had most of the crowd. It's justly esteemed a masterpiece of the third-gen pellunculas. Directed by Woo's great-granddaughter, Chastity Minelli-Zappa-Woo, arguably the best artist of the Woo dynasty – you really must see it, if you haven't already – it's a short pocket called, "All the Puppets Know Pinocchio." The plot, such as it is, is worth recounting, as it bears more than a little symbolic relevance to my story. The pelluncula begins by extruding the viewer's consciousness through six dimensions into the seventh-through-ninth-dimensional pocket environment of a deserted carnival on the Mediterranean coast:

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We are an overweight, middle-aged Italian businessman wearing a cream-colored suit and a narrow black tie. This is Pinocchio, all grown up. His tie flaps in the wind. He smokes a cigarette as he treads gravely through the abandoned seaside fairgrounds. The smoking of this cigarette is giving him no satisfaction. We feel his sadness, his loneliness, his vague, numb despair.

The world, in return, understands itself as the barren thing Pinocchio perceives it to be: an environment empty of joy. The sea throws itself upon the shore in sacrificial angst. Now we are the sea, wave after wave of salt sea, collapsing in abject apology, falling on our faces in the wet sand, again and again, stumbling over one another in impotent, penitential abandon.

Pinocchio's wandering takes him to the old puppet theater where he used to work. The jolly paint on the plywood façade is aged and peeling. The door hangs on one hinge, revealing a velvet black that sways heavily in the wind. He throws his cigarette away. Far off, gulls cry. Pinocchio pushes the black aside and enters.

We are the darkness within.

We are the theater's darkness hovering near as Pinocchio enters the melancholy space. He wanders to the stage, sits on the lip, and lights another cigarette. He blows smoke up into the lighting grid. The folding chairs on the plywood risers are all empty. Pinocchio climbs the riser stairs and wanders among the vacant seats. Finally, he sits, facing the darkened void of the stage.

Then a Fresnel above the stage comes on with a warm hum, revealing a set: a seedy tavern. Pinocchio stares at it awhile. All at once he is possessed by the sardonic impulse to inhabit that dramatic space. He rises from his seat, and his heels knock dull echoes on the plywood steps down from the risers and up to the stage. He walks to the lone table on the set, entering the cone of warm light. His cigarette smoke curls upward, high up into the flies, joining a swarm of motes swirling just in front of the hot, yellow lamp lens.

We are a silent darkness, observing.

A marionette barmaid comes to his table. It's Signora Rosaura, looking as sad as cracked paint on a weathered carousel horse. She recognizes him. "You're … Pinocchio, right? That puppet who got his wish to be a real boy? How did that work out?"

Pinocchio takes a world-weary drag of his smoke. "Not too badly."

Rosaura takes Pinocchio's drink order and marionettes away into the darkness, her wooden limbs clacking softly together, like bamboo chimes in a breeze.

Other marionettes emerge, taking seats along the bar. They are old puppet drunks, small timers and whores.

"So, you're a big man now, aren't you, brother?" sneers one barfly, whom Pinocchio recognizes as his old friend Arlecchino. The puppets have all heard about Pinocchio's success, how he's climbed the corporate ladder at the Fiat division of MSN-Pfizer-Benz. "A big shot he is now." "Big apartment in Rome." "Chalet in the Alps." "Villa in Tuscany." "Pretty ladies. Real ones, anatomically correct." "What's he come back here for, to rub our noses in it?"

Rosaura clatters back with Pinocchio's drink. "Look, at least he didn't waste the freedom he got from the Blue Fairy. He made the most of it. Could any of you have done better? Cut the guy some slack."

"What does he need slack for?" one drunk puppet – Pulccinella – slurs. "He doesn't have any strings." The other puppets snicker at that. They stink of envy and self-pity and alcohol, and their clothes are distressed by puckers and cigarette burns, with permanent wrinkles at the joints of those limbs whose flexibility is so limited. There is an odor of mold, and an overall patina of hopelessness.

Pinocchio takes a sip of his drink, whisky on ice. The puppets all watch him, as do we – we who are the hovering darkness. He drinks. The ice knocks in the glass. He takes a drag of his cigarette.

"Where's old Fire Eater?" Pinocchio asks.

A few wooden heads wag back and forth over their drinks. These are marionette gestures of pity. Arlecchino speaks:

"He got burnt out. Trying to keep up with the trends. We did some expressionist performances here for a while. He was a good expressionist director. We adapted Caligari. Pulccinella played Cesare the somnambulist. Had those harsh angles whittled into his face especially for the part."

"Hmm, I thought you looked thinner," Pinocchio says.

"For all that it matters now," Pulccinella replies with a rueful downing of grappa.

Arlecchino continues: "But no sooner was expressionism in style than it was out again. Now everyone wanted Futurism. Next, absurdism. Then surrealism. Fire Eater went crazy chasing each zeitgeist. We even went through a period where we had no strings – like you, brother. Fire Eater was dabbling in the Japanese puppetry form known as bunraku. He thought, if he could just predict what the next big theatrical movement was going to be, he could stay a step ahead of the market, get on board a trend at the beginning instead of having to play catch-up.

"But we had to reattach our strings when Futurism made a nostalgic return.

"It was when the rage came in for Javanese shadow puppets that he really broke down. Where was he going to find a gamelon orchestra? And none of us had profiles striking enough to cast shadows of the proper intensity. In the end, he raised a lot of money, spent a lot of money, and lost it all. The glowing coals cooled to ash in his eyes. He quit show business and went into data storage. And we turned the theater into our private tavern."

Pinocchio has absorbed the tale. By the end of it, he's shaking. He can't even light another cigarette. He tries to drink and drops his glass. We (the darkness) reach out in vain to catch it; we hear it shatter; we absorb the sound.

Pinocchio breaks down weeping.

Turns out he misses his strings and the proscenium of the theater. He misses the parameters they set. His limits were defined, and he took pleasure in going just beyond them into mischief. He longs for the cycle of ups and downs, crises and reprieves, devilishness and repentance, that once gave his life order. Because now his boundaries are vague. His life is an expanse of potential of which he can only fall short. He even misses the growing nose, erstwhile barometer of truth and lies. These days he's never sure whether he's telling the truth or not. Truth is the most elusive thing of all. Even now, as he bares his soul to the puppets, he has no idea if he isn't perhaps merely acting out a dramatic lie to give a cleaner shape to an awkward situation. The authenticity of his own emotions is in doubt, even to himself.

"You're wrong, Rosaura, I have wasted the Blue Fairy's gift," he weeps. "But there is no way not to waste it. One must be something, and in being something, one inevitably fails to be all other things."

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As the drama ended and the pellunculan pocket collapsed, our consciousnesses retreated, with that familiar squirting sensation, back into our heads. We came to ourselves in four-dimensional spacetime. We were still in the Snerd Sensorium, of course, per the technological requirements of the older mo-tainment formats that had begun the evening. But, you know what? Formats, shmormats, I enjoy the experience of mo-tainment in a theater, with a crowd. It's a communal experience. It's like worship in a temple. Yes, of course, there's no real need for theaters, since the advent of spacetime pockets and consciousness extrusion. One can sit on a park bench and absent oneself into a pocket environment for hours on end, exploring worlds and sensations with enhanced, nearly godlike perception.

But there's still something quaint about a theater. Something friendly. Something human. And, after all, if I hadn't gone to "All the Puppets Know Pinocchio" in the Snerd Sensorium, I never would have met Flicky.

When my mind returned from the micro-dimensional representation of the sad Italian carnival and filled up my skull again, I could still hear the sound of weeping. Was this one of those trick endings, where you only think you're back in your native spacetime? I hoped not. It would have added a cheese factor that would have ruined the piece for me. I looked over to the seat next to mine, from where I'd determined the sound was coming. And there I saw the famous flounder himself.

He had his face in his fins. And he was sobbing, as though he knew exactly the pain and failure of which Pinocchio had spoken.

MEMOIRS OF THE UNREALISTIC CHAPTER 3

Back in the '030s, Grampa wrote in his journal about seeing caricatures of friends of his in the New Yorker magazine. There wasn't an article about these friends, just a calendar listing. But these friends of his, Mr. Quintron and Miss Pussycat, were not merely listed. Their listing was punctuated with a cartoon drawing of them, beneath which ran the caption: "Mr. Quintron, inventor of the Drum Buddy, and Miss Pussycat, at the Mercury Lounge, Friday at 9pm." The cartoon showed Mr. Quintron and Miss Pussycat performing, Quintron at his vintage Hammond organ, Pussycat standing nearby in a sequin leotard, tutu and fishnet stockings, holding up a hand puppet. The hand puppet looked to be a plush donkey recently recovered from severe burns. The Drum Buddy, a drum-sound-producing machine topped by a rotating lampshade with star-shaped holes in it, was also pictured in the cartoon.

Grampa wrote, "I'm happy for them, and proud to know them. But at the same time I'm envious. I've always wanted to see myself caricatured. And not by one of those charcoal-wielding hacks on the boardwalk who draw you with oversized head and tiny body, participating in your favorite interest. I want someone to distort my features out of cleverness, not in obeisance to some arbitrary formalism. For my needs, as a matter of fact, the style of the drawing of Quintron and Pussycat is too straightforward. I want something splattery and warped. I want to see exactly which features of mine a perverse artist believes make me look like me. Bulging forehead? Squinty but penetrating blue eyes? Pointy nose? Pouty lip? Weak chin? Jowls? Veiny temples? I wouldn't take offense, regardless of how ludicrously I were rendered, or what unattractive attribute the artist chose to amplify. I would be fascinated. I would stare at it for hours, wondering at the mysteries of identity.

"Because I am sick of exploring those mysteries in my mirror, and in the disarray of the squalor in which I live. I want to see a trivial item that seeks to represent me. I want to stare at that item, seeking the mystery of myself, the mystery of what others see as me, and the mystery of emptiness in the representation of life. Because one cannot view one's own corpse. And maybe that's what I really want, to see my own corpse. Or to be at my own funeral, to see who shows up. But only fame affords one that kind of luxury. Fame enough to have a great caricaturist caricature one -- what an honor that would be! You know you've really made it when you're caricatured for an article in the New Yorker. (And not just cartooned for the calendar -- not to take anything away from Quintron and Pussycat.) To be sold in a blister pack as an action figure would be an even greater honor. A springy bobble-head less so. But, ah, to be a gashapon key fob! A super-deformed mini-fig in the Japanese kaiju style, side-by-side with the likes of Rodan, Mecha-Ghidora, and the great Godzilla."

Flicky and I often reminisce about the night we met at the Snerd. I'm not the type to be star-struck, and I think he sensed that right away. (As I hope I've made clear, unlike Grampa, I don't differentiate between Fame and any other condition of life. To me they are simply points on a continuum between infinite solitude and infinite public exposure.) Flicky appreciated not being fawned over, and he jumped at the chance to have a normal discussion. We ended up going out for drinks at Musso and Frank's. I'm a fan of their respect for the genuine martini, and Flicky loves the oversized booths, upholstered with cracked red leather and brass brads, designs from a bygone age of gentlemanly smoking rooms, while actual elderly gentlemen rollerskate here and there in short white jackets, delivering drinks and rare meat. Here we had the first of many nights of alcohol, steak, and aesthetic discourse. The subject at hand was, of course, "WOO-MO-MANIA" and its strengths and weaknesses. We agreed the event had offered rarities worth seeing at least once, but that the only satisfying piece was "All the Puppets Know Pinocchio." We both loved it. The focus of our discussion tightened around Minelli-Zappa-Woo's aesthetic strategies. During our intense volley of analytical insights, Flicky made a very perceptive remark about her choice of the ninth dimension as the depth axis for Pinocchio's midlife crisis. It's a comment that invariably returns to mind whenever the subject of gravity as an artistic medium comes up in conversation.

"You know the way a minor chord in music conveys sadness?" He was smoking a cigarette and nursing a whisky on ice, "Or a major seventh at the end of a blues melody turns one back towards the beginning with the gallows humor of the chronically unfortunate?" I nodded. It was the hour when drunk, meat-fed philosophers unveil their finest truths. That's the time to nod when a famous fish draws you in with quiet sibilance. "Well, the ninth dimension," he said, his eyes -- the two of them crowded together on one side of his face -- clouding over with a mist of reverie, his mouth off to the other side of his head, lower jaw slack, fish lips, like Belmondo's in Goddard's Breathless, setting a curl of smoke adrift:

"The ninth dimension, in a pocket setting by the sea," he said, at such an hour, "is the dimension of regret."

MEMOIRS OF THE UNREALISTIC CHAPTER 4

By '059, Grampa had lost touch with the family. He was able to maintain relations with himself, however, and persisted in keeping a journal. It traces much the same tragic arc followed by so many superstars: a meteoric rise to fame, then a slow but certain descent into the gutter. With his innate sense of economy, though, Grampa skipped the rise and cut straight to the plummet. It was undoubtedly less painful than falling to the gutter from a great height, having to drop only from the relatively humble level of complete obscurity. More like rolling down a shallow incline, really, and coming to a gentle stop at the bottom. There, Grampa at last found a trade suitable for a man with his species of idealism: dirty old bum.

Earlier that year, the Firearms, Drug, and Entertainment Administration (FDEA) had okayed consciousness extrusion for experimental trials on human subjects. So began the most concerted cooperation between academic, medical, and corporate interests in recorded history. Physicists were quick to perceive the implications of a technology that handled consciousness as a modulation of the gravitational field; consciousness could be conducted along curvatures in Planck-scale spacetime dimensions as easily as electricity through a copper wire, yet the theoretical and mathematical underpinnings of the process were still up for grabs; here, for the first time in over a century, observable phenomena had appeared in advance of any calculations that could explain it. Psychiatrists, too, were all over the process, vying with each other to develop its therapeutic uses. And money migrated everywhere, backing research projects, buying stock in any remotely promising application, capitalizing start-up companies run by chimpanzees who'd barely mastered algebra. It was the beginning of a cultural renaissance reminiscent of the tech bubble of the 1990s, but with even more starry-eyed confidence behind it, fueled by pop culture pundits cheerleading a consumer revolution.

How pathetic, then, that the most common manifestations of the new technology were virtual sex pellunculas and sleazy porn pockets. How tawdry, how typical, how squalid, how human. Meanwhile, Grampa's destitution had brought his self-hatred to fester like Mr. Hughes' raisin in the sun, or, rather, like Mr. Hughes' running sore. Whichever, having his dreams deferred had rendered Grampa the perfect sucker. He lived on only the pittance paid to research subjects, and on the simulated human warmth he found in pornuncraphy. Thus, Grampa's relationship to the blossoming cultural renaissance was the perfect marriage between vulnerability and opportunism. And, lest you thank your lucky stars and think, There but for fortune go I, consider for a moment that Grampa's situation represents nothing more nor less than the marketplace at its least varnished. Our own circumstances differ only by the degree to which they are dressed up as civilized. In this, at least, we are all equal.

There were few regulations governing the nascent industry, and no enforceable safeguards protecting research subjects. Ethics in this environment ran the gamut from negligent to Tuskegee-syphilis-study unconscionable. Grampa writes, "I keep having to sign these 'recursion echo' risk waivers. I don't know what a recursion echo is, but apparently it's a risk I take every time I'm in one of these studies." A few weeks later, he's found out what a recursion echo is, but writes that, by then, it was "an acceptable hazard. I've never loved or felt so loved before. Everything's changed. Life would be meaningless without Maria."

Maria. He'd just met a girl named Maria. She was a first-generation autunculus. Of course, being first generation, she could only meet Grampa in a prismatic micro-three-brane, a complex warping in Planck-scale spacetime along xyz vectors 5-7. This was a nice piece of fraud on the part of the porn provider, by the way. There was absolutely no reason autunculi and cosmorganics couldn't have cross-projected through the interstitial matrix by this time, except that virtual reality providers wanted to retain a monopoly on the process. The porn guy Grampa was dependent on to provide him and Maria a prism within which to rendezvous was selling both of them a bill of goods, a pig in a poke. Maria was a starving artist who had auditioned for her role in the pocket, and Grampa was a low-wage guinea pig. Had the two of them been allowed to find their own ways through the interstices of the spacetime fabric -- had they understood that there was really no division between the two of them at all, in gravitational terms -- the pornuncrapher would have had no way to justify his research grants, no hope of an IPO, no corporation whatever. The porn guy, and thousands of providers like him at the time, colluded to defraud such people as Grampa and his autuncular beloved, letting them believe they needed to continue risking their lives to be together. Grampa bought the pig in the poke. So did Maria; hook, line, and sinker.

The recursion echo is a thing of the past, but in the past it was a thing of dread, albeit a rare phenomenon. The recursion echo was what happened when the gravitational frequency of your extruded consciousness happened to sync up exactly with the resonance frequency of the gravity warping the pocket dimension into which you were being projected. If that occurred, your consciousness would dissolve into the structure of the pocket and, as soon as the quite temporary dimension ceased to exist, so would your identity. "You" would disappear into the universes' general flow of gravity, and your body, in the virtual reality booth, would simply die. It's analogous to the Placido Domingo tragedy, in the '020s, when the great tenor sang the F that happened to be the exact resonance harmonic of the newly built Chernobyl Opera House. The note vibrated at the exact acoustical frequency as the very structure of the building, which set it resonating like a tuning fork, and, although he'd stopped singing, the echo of the note built in intensity, focused on poor Domingo at the center of a bombardment of wave after reverberating wave of sound, until finally his skull imploded under the barrage.

I said the phenomenon was rare. In the medium of sound, Domingo's fate was probably unique. In the medium of gravity, however -- in the world of consciousness extrusion -- recursion echoes were not quite so rare. They happened just often enough to require the signing of a recursion echo risk waiver.

In Grampa's case, that was too often by a factor of one.