Explosive eversion of a duck penis is a story of a young man's last night in Thailand. A chain of thoughts from a mushroom bad trip. Not in chronological order.
A girl he met yesterday gets up from the floor, drinks San Pellegrino, and seems to really enjoy it. She says she has to go home in such a way that he realizes it's serious. He is scared. He wants to love her even though he can barely do anything at all. She rushes towards the door and runs away. He thinks it's wrong. Should he also run and try to get her back?
At 9 in the morning the young man's plane will take off. What time is it now? How long are the mushrooms going to last? It must have been her saying: "I don't like it when you hug me like that". He simply didn't hear the "don't" part. An easy mistake to make. When they met, he thought she was Scottish but she switched to Russian because she knew the man was Russian. The young man used a dating app for the first time. She gave him a mango as a gift. He had nowhere to put it.
In Russian language it's easy to confuse "мне нравится" for "I like" with "мне не нравится" for "I don't like" because "мне" for "I" sounds not unlike "не" for "don't". What has he done!
After this chain of thoughts the man decides not to run after the girl.
He was a mathematician in the past. He thinks that one rarely expects to ever find oneself trapped in a topological space that does not have a metric. He had that two weeks ago after taking mushrooms for the second time in his life. It was in a beach club becasue he wanted to enjoy life but didn't know anything. He didn't like the music and it was full of people. Completely disoriented, he tried to walk home after being stuck for hours lying on the sand waching the clouds. The time was spent in fear and in hope that nobody was to unveil his intoxicated state. It was better now but he couldn't decide whether to go left or right. On an island, he felt, it didn't matter. He knew he lived on a beach and if he was to walk along the coast in any direction he would eventually reach every beach on that island and hence his home beach as well.
This realization very much contradicted his past experience. There certainly used to be the right way and the wrong way. He had to try Google Maps. There's normally this blue beam that shows where the iPhone is headed. Unfortunately, the visuals from the drug made it incomprehensible! He could not interpret a map. This made the man worried if the girl can safely get home. At this point an intense bad trip kicks in.
They kiss. He think life is finally worth living. His mind however starts thinking and quickly arrives to a well-known conclusion that it's actually not. It's "Time destroys all things" from a Gaspard Noe film. And the music! The men who wrote it, they all killed themselves! The girl says he has to figure it out himself because she doesn't know the meaning of life either. She smiles. This must be why some people jump from the window on psychedelics. The horror stories he heard from his mother did have some truth to them. He's holding the girl in his hands and she says she likes how he hugs her. The man finally feels some warmth covering the surface of his existantial abyss. The girl gets up to drink some water.
He's doing arithmetic in his head: 9 minus 3 is 6. How does he know that's correct? What is this 6? Six hours! Is that a lot? It's 2 plus 4! What does that mean? It's recommended to arrive at the airport 2 hours before takeoff. He sets the alarm for 4am. It's not too late, is it? Will it ring? Will he hear it? He decides to do 23 squats! 1,2,3...23! Is it better? Fuck! He's taking a hot shower. Breath in, breath out. He looks in the mirror and thinks he's beautiful! Why does it feel so bad? No, do not kill yourself! Out of the shower he is still too high. The alarm rings. He sets another one.
Somehow the girl reaches her home. They are having a phonecall. She says that she was paranoid and ran away for no reason. Naively she asks if the man is evil. He emphasizes that it's not a rational thing to ask but seeing that his answer was not in any way satisfying he says that truly he was not consciously evil. The girl regrets running away now. She says it was because of the duck video.
Many years ago the youung man, back then a boy, used to walk in a park with many ducks. Once he looked at the ducks and thought: "Can humans build a mechanical duck? Almost certainly not! Those ducks would have to be able to mine all sorts of metals, drill oil, build a chip factory, and a many other factories. Mechanical ducks doing all the human things on the human scale: mines, roads, factories, ships, warehouses, financial markets and the mechanical duck police. Real ducks eat grass and fuck. That seems to be about it. They have some truly beatiful property that all the man-made things don't posess. It's impressive how we absolutely cannot build anything like a real duck."
This the boy thought and he shared his realization with an older friend. His friend didn't find the mechanical duck story very interesting, dismissing it as a triviality. Instead he told the boy how the ducks fucked. He told that the duck evolution happend under a strong influence of rape. In females, a spiral-shaped vagina had been developed to avoid being raped. While in males, an explosive duck penis aversion, in order to deal with the female developments. The boy didn't believe his friend, and so the proof had to be sent over the internet. A video titled Explosive\ eversion\ of\ a\ duck\ penis.\ \[qwjEeI2SmiU\].webm (coming from some scientific paper) had been saved in the boy's laptop home directory. And there it stayed for around 3 years, surrounded by other trash.
The young man managed to unlock the door using his key. It took him a minute or two but they are finally getting in. The girl wants to take a shower. He turns on his computer and gets some music on. He decides on Light My Fire and a Beatles Rooftop Concert playing together at the same time. He is impressed by his computer and he thinks he can impress the girl by showing her a Haskell program that computes a snowflake but he can't find this program. The output of ls -la in his home directory contains all the filenames and is several screens tall.
He's reading through it. Most files are boring but sometimes a name catches his attention. What's in ~/drugs/ ? Some keys and ECDSA encrypted messages. This is the file that got the young man into jail! It only has his name and address in it. There's also a version signed with the darknet merchant's public key in another file. The young man thinks his computer is powerful. If one were to press the right keys one can get infinite money in 2 hours. And one can also go to jail for life just by entering some other sequence of keys. He thinks the people are blind if they choose to do nothing about this power. Perhaps they are right. Another name from the list catches his attention:
Explosive\ eversion\ of\ a\ duck\ penis.\ \[qwjEeI2SmiU\].webm
.webm indicates that the file is a video and he tries to open it by typing 8 keys:
(m), (p), (v), (Space), (E), (x), (Tab), (Enter)!
The first 3 form "mpv" being the name of a programm for opening videos, "Ex" is the beginning of the filename completed by the Tab key and sent to be executed by Enter. The video only lasted 11 seconds and its contents were as the file name suggested. It left the young man laughing and the girl deeply worried if he was insane.
A nuclear war could probably be started with fewer than 10000 keystrokes on any computer with an internet connection. Getting infinite money (unlaundered) might be much easier. A night can be ruined by a combination of 8 keys.
What is the best way to interact with the world?