Nomad Codes

techno groups like the Shamen. Timothy Leary called him “the Timothy Leary of the 1990s.”
    McKenna also was a popularizer of virtual reality and the Internet, arguing as early as 1990 that VR would be a boon to psychedelicists and businesspeople alike. But unlike Leary, who planned to use the net as a stage for his final media prank, McKenna realized that the Internet would be the place where psychedelic culture could flourish on its own. “Psychedelics were always about information,” McKenna observes. “Their very existence was forbidden knowledge at one point. You had to be Aldous Huxley to even know about them.” To his great satisfaction, McKenna has lived to see the psychedelic underground self-organize online on sites like Erowid and the Lycaeum. But to McKenna the net is more than an information source. He is also convinced that it is hosting an unprecedented dialogue between individual human beings and the totality of human knowledge.
    “The Internet is an oracle for anyone in trouble,” McKenna explains, using his illness as an example. “Within ten minutes I can be poring through reams of control studies, medical data, and personal reports. If anything, my cancer has made me even more enthusiastic about the idea that through information, people can take control of and guide their own lives.”
    Unfortunately, by last October, five months after the initial diagnosis and treatment, he needed a lot more than information. Despite the radiation therapy, the tumor was spreading. McKenna traveled to the medical center at the University of California, San Francisco, where a team of specialists surgically removed the bulk of the tumor. They then soaked the cavity with p53, a genetically altered adenovirus meant to scramble the hyperactive self-replication subroutines of the remaining tissue’s DNA. Gene therapy is highly experimental; as Silness put it, McKenna became “a full-on guinea pig.”
    At first, the doctors at UCSF were extremely pleased with the results, and for four months the tumor cooled its heels while McKenna recuperated in Hawaii. But in February, an MRI revealed that it had returned with ferocity, spreading so thoroughly throughout McKenna’s brain that it was deemed inoperable. He retreated to a friend’s house in Marin County, and his family began to gather. By the time you read this, Terence McKenna will have died.

    It is the end of 1999, and I am visiting McKenna at his jungle home during his recovery from brain surgery. He lives a mile or so up a rutted road that winds through a gorgeous subtropical rain forest an hour south of the Kona airport. His house—a modernist origami structure topped with a massive antenna dish and a small astronomy dome—rises from the green slopes of Mauna Loa like something out of the video game Myst. There’s a small garden and a lotus pond, and the structure is surrounded by a riot of vegetation, thick with purple flowers and mysterious vines.
    McKenna has owned land on this mountainside since the 1970s, but didn’t start building the house until 1993. Every morning, I ascend a spiral staircase decorated with blue LEDs to get to the study. It’s here that McKenna spends the majority of his time during my visit, either staring into his Mac or sitting cross-legged on the floor before a small Oriental carpet, surrounded by books, smoking paraphernalia, and twigs of sage he occasionally lights up and wafts through the air. With his widely set and heavy-lidded eyes, McKenna looks like a seasoned nomad merchant.
    Silness has shorn McKenna’s usually full head of hair down to gray stubble, and the upper right side of his forehead is gently swollen and graced with a Frankensteinian scar. Though he is desperately ill, his spirits are as alive as ever: gracious and funny, brilliant and biting. But he tires quickly, and seems intensely energized only when the prospect of chocolate cookies or ice cream arises. He is also very skinny, having lost a lot of muscle in his thighs, and he moves painfully slowly when he moves at all.
    McKenna and Silness have hosted a regular stream of visitors and well-wishers over the last months, but the scene is definitely not Learyland. They are living life as close to normal as possible—which is how McKenna prefers it. “There are various options when you are faced with a terminal disease,” he says in his unforgettable voice, a charming nasal singsong. “One is cure-chasing, where you head off to Shanghai or