Your colleagues reveal that you are a jack of several high-tech and show business trades. Currently you are a "scenarist" and game developer based in Japan. It's amazing to hear, but so far you've drawn a complete blank. Next, they try recounting memorable stories from your past. As it did with the French, a Storyteller translates whenever your colleagues speak Japanese. But too much time passes and full recollection does not occur. Something seems dreadfully wrong on this occasion. A visit to your cottage in staff quarters reveals what it is. In an underground passageway, you chance upon Farnsworth and the two Japanese managers in the midst of a conversation about you. Hidden from view, you overhear how they'd secretly added wild mushrooms and mescaline tea to the food and beverages served throughout your stay. They left acid-laced bar snacks out in hopes you'd consume then, which you now recall you ddid. The mushrooms may have been poisonous, of the psychotropic variety, or completely harmless -- your enemies aren't sure. But scary enough is hearing what they'd hope to accomplish. And, worse, how far they're now willing to go: This trio is clearly contemplating foul play. Then a plant apparition appears and assures you that none of those mushrooms were poisonous (but obviously of the psychotropic variety) and recommends countermeasures you should take. It is a stunningly brilliant plan that projects in the sky as a panorama of scenes that will occur in the near future. This is when you realize you were, all along, actually assisted in your scenario by the magic mushrooms and mescaline tea that the opposition had added intending to harm you. Their ingestion, when combined with the mind altering drugs administered at the outset, had apparently triggered mental faculties no one could have foreseen. Then, moments later, when you enter your cottage, the inexplicable happens: your thoughts rush headlong into the maelstrom of another mindset as you find yourself standing inside to a similarly furnished residence you once occupied in Tokyo. There, you relive a memorable evening with the imagine21 music composer, during which you dazzle him with the apartment's built-in special effects while he dazzles you with the wide range of music in the audio portfolio he's brought. Returning from that three-hour flashback, you find the real composer standing before you, assuring you that no more than thirty minutes has passed. Well, there's no longer any doubt in your mind about this other you. Certain now of the strong bond that exists between you and Ray, you divulge your plan to give les saboteurs a taste of their own hallucinogenic medicine. He thinks it's hysterical and can't wait to get started. You haven't fully recovered but now definitely feel you're coming back in stages. Rae explains the head voices as a kind of direct pipeline to the collective unconscious, a faculty you and others possess nowadays. He says you've recaptured a bicameral mind state. How does he know all this? Because, he says, it's what you are always preaching to him when you're in your normal state. Back in the lab, you outline your strategy, which requires the team to quickly assemble a series of powerful illusions. Scripts are hastily written, voices recorded, music assembled and costumed characters filmed. Then "RenderRama" (their nickname for thirty networked computers) takes over to process the data, giving everyone the chance to reassemble and once again try to bring you back. This time the focus is no longer on your past but instead returns to the just-completed scenario. You want to see if several unsolved puzzles might be psychic markers that "the other you" left behind in hopes that it would later trigger full remembrance. You review events and soon uncover several anomalies. For instance, why in the world would a portrait of an old man who resembles you be hanging on this set? Why did The Village Journal publish brain twisters (and obviously clues) that were never used in your scenario? The answers are fascinating and, oddly enough, all interconnected. The disparate incidents and topics finally meld into the long-awaited synchronicity. Which hits like a psychic earthquake. (Continued)