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of his attention occupied by the multiplex image the stunglasses projected into any part of the visual field not under active scrutiny.
    The bus station was a ten minute walk away, but they didn’t talk much. They were absorbed in watching a dinosaur show. They couldn’t even tell that it was multiplex anymore. Their whole conscious minds were involved in the show they were watching, and the incessant messages from all the “sponsors” were being sorted out and stowed away subconsciously.
    Soon Bodine and Ace High had joined the long line of waiting citizens that snaked out of the old bus station. Everyone had stunglasses on. Some people were watching sports, some were watching old movies, some were watching sex, some were watching university extension courses. Nobody was watching the November sunlight sliding across the street like nectar from the last flower of the year.
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Note on “Enlightenment Rabies”
    Written in 1977.
    New Pathways , #9, November, 1987.
    When I wrote the amateurish “Enlightenment Rabies” I was exercised about the U. S. propaganda tactic of naming diseases after the government’s enemies: the Russian Flu, the Chinese Flu and the like. And, of course, I was filled with hatred for television. From the present-day vantage, the story looks cyberpunk. I sent “Enlightenment Rabies” to the short-lived magazine Unearth in 1978, and they were going to print it, but then they decided to serialize my novel Spacetime Donuts instead. Unearth ‘s policy was to print previously unpublished authors. William Gibson and I both had our first SF publications there. I eventually cannibalized the opening paragraph of “Enlightenment Rabies” for Chapter 25 of Software .

Schrödinger’s Cat
    “A cat is placed in a steel chamber, together with the following hellish contraption (which must be protected against direct interference by the cat): In a Geiger counter there is a tiny amount of radioactive substance, so tiny that maybe within an hour one of the atoms decays, but equally probably none of them decays. If an atom decays then the counter triggers and via a relay activates a little hammer which breaks a container of cyanide. If one has left this entire system for an hour, then one would say that the cat is still living if no atom has decayed. The first decay would have poisoned it. The wave-function of the entire system would express this by containing equal parts of the living and the dead cat.” —Erwin Schrödinger.
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    By rights, this should have been an important scientific paper…not a thrilling wonder tale in some lurid, mass-produced edition. But I must cast my net as wide as possible. I am fishing for minds, minds with the delicacy of thought to appreciate the nature of Ion Stepanek’s fate.
    Such are the facts: with my assistance, Ion Stepanek was able to build a sort of time-machine. He used this machine to produce a yes-and-no situation, which he tried to observe. As a result, he has split into an uncollapsible mixed state. Due to coupling effects, I suffer his condition, though not yet to the same degree.
    It is March 21, 1980, Heidelberg, West Germany. I am sitting in the office Stepanek shared with me, staring out at a white sky. The office is in the Physics Institute. Across the river, the great castle hovers over the misted town like a thought. Such are the facts.
    I did my undergraduate work at Stanford, then took my Ph.D. in particle physics at Berkeley. My thesis project helped lead to the first experimental disproof of the Bell inequality. At one time this was a fairly sensational result, although now more and more people have accepted the ultimate validity of the wave-function world-view.
    Schrödinger’s though-experiment is paradoxical because, according to quantum mechanics, until the observer opens the door, the cat is not definitely dead or definitely alive , but is rather 50 percent dead and 50 percent alive. The cat is in what is known as a mixed state