Nomad Codes

sensations, it is also the emergent body conjured up by yoga students, dancers, clever hedonists, and practitioners of certain alchemical arts.
    For if Gak takes us back to our primal sensations, so too does Gak take the science of chemistry back to the primal metaphysical ooze of alchemy. Conventional history has it that the alchemists’ most cherished goal, the Philosopher’s Stone, allowed them to transmute lead into gold. But in more esoteric terms, the Stone was imagined as the mercurial soul of the Earth itself, as well as the alchemists’ own magically transformed bodies. The Lapis Philosophorum was the original metamatter.
    It’s easy to make the analogy that Gak has become the TV-toy industry’s Philosopher’s Stone, turning goop into gold. But perhaps there’s a deeper connection as well. In his play The Alchemist , Ben Johnson described the Lapis in strangely familiar terms:
    Tis a stone and not,
A stone; a spirit, a soul, and a body,
Which if you do dissolve it, it is dissolv’d,
If you coagulate it, it is coagulated,
If you make it fly, it flieth.
    1993

ALIEN VIEWS

    Joe Firmage, Silicon Valley UFOnaut

    Late one night in October, 1997, just for the heck of it, Joe Firmage decided to go web surfing. As the CEO of a major Silicon Valley start-up, USWeb, Firmage didn’t have a lot of leisure time. But he had studied physics as an undergrad at the University of Utah, and wanted to brush up on some of the latest findings. So he plugged in a few searches, and soon came across a report by a Lockheed Martin scientist asserting that inertia, the Newtonian force that makes your tennis balls sail, was an electromagnetic side effect of something called the zero point field. To the author, this suggested a new method of space propulsion—a way of conquering gravity without rockets—and Firmage, who was fascinated by all things extraterrestrial, was intrigued. Very intrigued.
    But Firmage, then twenty-six years old, couldn’t concentrate on the article with everything else pressing down on him. He had been in Silicon Valley for two years, and USWeb, which he founded with his partner Toby Corey, was hitting the big time. An Internet consulting firm that was launching monster companies like Harley-Davidson and Levi Strauss into cyberspace, USWeb had snatched up scores of Web development shops on its way to becoming a billion-dollar operation. That night, frazzled from preparing USWeb for its IPO, Firmage downloaded the article to read later and went to bed.
    The next morning his alarm buzzed at 6:00. Instead of getting up to go to the gym, Firmage rolled over and hit the snooze button. As he lay there half-slumbering, an image appeared over his bed, a bearded gentleman with a dark brown head of hair.
    “Why have you called me here?” the being asked, clearly irritated.
    “I want to travel in space,” answered the astonished Firmage, who spoke without a moment’s deliberation, as if in a dream.
    The fellow remained nonplussed. “Why should you be granted the opportunity?”
    “Because I’m willing to die for it!”
    Then, says Firmage, the man produced a sphere, an electric blue ball about the size of a cantaloupe, that entered Firmage’s body, taking command of his muscles and producing unimaginable waves of überorgasmic ecstasy.
    As you might expect, Firmage greeted the day feeling rather light on his feet. Which was a good thing, because the Asian currency crisis was unfolding just as USWeb’s pre-IPO road show was set to begin. But Firmage came through with flying colors—USWeb raised $50 million—all the while secretly nursing memories of his baffling encounter. “Anybody you’d talk to prior to this whole escapade would describe me as about the most rigorously logical, analytic type you could possible meet,” he says. “So for me this was a particularly profound experience, because it was inexplicable.”
    Nonetheless, Firmage’s visionary experience did not exactly appear out of thin air. A descendent of Brigham Young, Firmage was raised a Mormon, and grew up hearing tales of the otherworldly humans who led the young Joseph Smith to the golden plates he translated into the Book of Mormon. And though Firmage abandoned his faith at age fifteen, the precociously intelligent boy brought rather religious emotions to his new world view of science, feelings of cosmic awe that he traces to that defining moment of his generation: Star Wars . But sci-fi wasn’t enough. What really sealed his