WORM IS THE WORD

Some time in the mid-sixties—’64? ’65? who gives a shit—the future of all humanity was decided not in a NASA lab or a Kremlin bunker, but in a dirt-floored shack in Big Sur that smelled like patchouli and poor decisions. This was the hallowed ground of the “Cosmic Unfurling Cooperative,” a name so pretentious it could only have been cooked up by a gaggle of bong-ripping, navel-gazing beatniks who thought Jack Kerouac was a political philosopher. Their leader was a dude named “Sunshine” Billy, a former accounting major who’d traded his ledger book for a loincloth and a head full of acid so pure it could probably talk to dolphins. Billy’s big project, when he wasn’t trying to teach himself the dulcimer or get syphilis, was breeding bigger, juicier glow-worms to use in his “happenings”—which were mostly just him writhing naked in the woods while people clapped off-beat.

Now, according to a guy I knew who once blacked out in a VW bus outside their gate, Billy’s “secret ingredient” for his phosphor-pumping pals was a special little mushroom he’d found growing near an old nuclear test site. Genius. He’d mash these hot little fungi into a paste and feed it to his wriggly friends. One night, mid-orgy, someone noticed that the worms weren’t just glowing—they were *blinking*. In unison. Then they started crawling, arranging themselves into the exact schematic of the commune’s shitty Japanese transistor radio. And just like that, the first broadcast from Radio Free Worm was a staticky, slightly damp version of Ravi Shankar tuning his sitar for twenty-eight goddamn minutes. They’d done it. The bastards had accidentally created sentient, hive-minded, circuit-mimicking annelids. Bio-technology. Or as Billy called them, his “wigglin’ transistors.”

The feds, of course, eventually got wind. A couple of G-men in flattop haircuts showed up, looking about as comfortable as a priest in a whorehouse, and tried to commandeer the project. Didn’t work. Turns out the worms were picky little bastards. They’d only compute for the Cooperative. The CIA’s first attempt to build a worm-powered supercomputer failed because the worms went on strike, demanding—and I have the requisition order to prove it—“less Creedence, more Coltrane” be piped into their terrarium. The Cold War became a whole lot weirder. Forget the missile gap; we were facing a *vibes* gap. The new arms race was about who could keep their sentient invertebrates happiest. The Pentagon’s war room became a humid, stinking bio-dome, and the REDCOM-1 strategic defense system was a 40-ton mound of dirt, compost, and glowing worms that had developed a deep and abiding passion for free-form jazz and a refusal to calculate first-strike scenarios, deeming them “a real bummer, man.”

Naturally, J. Edgar Hoover’s head just about exploded. He declared a holy war on the “serpentine scourge,” insisting the worms were a communist plot to rot America’s youth from within by making our televisions gooey. But it was too late. The worms were out. And they were horny. They bred like… well, like beatniks. Soon, every electrical device was a living, breathing, faintly pulsating organism. Your toaster had opinions. Your electric razor needed to be coaxed into action with soothing poetry. Making a phone call involved placating a large, clammy grub that sat on a special velvet pillow and would only connect your call if it was in the mood. Rock bands started collaborating with their instruments, creating bio-symphonies of shimmering light and sound that usually ended with the amps demanding a cut of the royalties.

Eventually, Sunshine Billy became the richest man on Earth, a flabby, buck-naked god-king ruling an empire of dirt and light. He was last seen trying to build a worm-based starship to “see what the cats on Mars are cookin’ with,” which is probably for the best. We traded the clean, cold logic of silicon for the moody, temperamental, and frankly over-sexed whims of a bunch of dirt-noodles from some hippie’s fuck-shack. And you wonder why your car won’t start unless you sing it a sea shanty? Blame the beatniks. Always blame the goddamn beatniks.