Cover by Rocky Kelley

As we barrel toward the August 29 premiere of Rayguns Over Texas at LoneStarCon 3 (aka the 71st Annual World Science Fiction Convention) in San Antonio, I am presenting book excerpts, one contributor per day.

Today’s selection comes from Lawrence Person‘s “Novel Properties of Certain Complex Alkaloids.”

For centuries man has searched for the God of All Psychedelics. In this hard science exploration, Lawrence Person ponders what happens after the ultimate pharmacological experience.

IT WAS A thing of terrible beauty.

“What do you think?” asked Doug.

Timothy Shackleford shook his head. “Complex” was all he had to say. He didn’t know what to think.

The object of adoration was the molecule slowly rotating on the screen of his laptop, a small miracle featuring a central spindle and multiple branching arms, the latest and greatest synthetic psychoactive thrown up by the kitchen sink wizards of the chemical underground. Tim was impressed despite himself, because most emanations of that underground were utter crap beneath his contempt.

There were people out there taking random walks through the alkaloids and hoping that whatever they brewed up in their shitty home labs wouldn’t kill them. They would get a recipe off the Internet or a copy of PhIKAL or (God help them) The Anarchist’s Cookbook and thought they had a freaking clue. The vast majority didn’t, and were a danger to themselves and others, assuming their poorly ventilated labs and makeshift equipment didn’t kill them first. There were twenty brain-dead cretins trying to cook meth for every one that had even a tiny inkling of skill or ability, and underground chemists who could do even slightly competent reductions for psychoactives were an order of magnitude rarer.

Tim had two overriding passions: Information theory and recreational pharmacology close enough to his regular organic research chemistry topics so as not to rouse suspicion as long as he was careful. (And he was careful. He did all his psychoactive molecular modeling inside a virtual machine on his own laptop, did all his reading of the underground literature from a coffee house WiFi, and encrypted all his notes.)

Which is why Doug, a fellow psychonaut from his college days, was his only conduit. Naturally he went into computational chemistry. It was easy enough to do information theory on his home computer, but where was he going to get access to an integrated gas chromatography/mass spectrometer on a regular basis?

Which is how he ended up teaching and researching at the University of Texas chemistry department. Benefits included access to high quality college lab equipment, perfect establishment camouflage, and a steady income to fund his experiments. The latter allowed him to avoid the most common downfall of underground chemists: getting busted for making stupid, boring crap like meth to pay the bills.

Tim hated meth. In addition to the central nervous system stimulation, it fooled you into thinking it made you smarter while doing the opposite. He took careful, clinical notes of his psychonautic excursions, and was able to track the obvious degeneration in his thinking on meth. Drugs that make you dumber? No thanks! Plus the entire drug warrior apparatus had watches on dozens of meth precursors. Too much heat, not enough profit, and best left the Mexican cartels and their industrial-scale production.

Besides, once you figured out the chemistry and process controls, there was nothing interesting about cooking meth. It was a solved problem. No challenges.

But phenethylamines and tryptamines offered vast topologies of chemical search spaces and lay of the underground. Not only was Doug equally careful, he had even better cover: The company he worked for did drug testing for police departments around the state.

Tim was cautiously optimistic whenever Doug texted him for a meeting in a private little room of a funky coffee shop near campus, but most of the time he was disappointed. The most interesting thing he’d ferreted out heretofore was a novel reduction of hydrochloride salt in creating 2C-B.

The beast on his screen was in a whole different league.

It was a beautiful molecule. It was also completely insane. It shared characteristics with multiple alkaloid groups, and each arm end seemed to act as an agonist for the 5-HT_1A, 5-HT_2A and 5-HT_6A receptors

Even more amazing, unless he was mistaken, the structure of the fourth arm end suggested it acted as an agonist for a previously unmapped receptor. That was off the charts.

“Well?” asked Doug. Doug was a competent chemist in his own right, but he knew Tim was out of his league. And until he had seen the molecule, Tim would have said he was out of anyone’s league now that Shulgin was retired.

“Where did you get this from?” he asked.

“A guy that specializes in DMT synthesis.”

Tim frowned. DMT tended to attract the mystic cranks of the psychedelic underground, people following in the steps of that loon Terence McKenna and his hallucinated “machine elf” intelligences. They were as bad as UFO nuts.

“Any suggested dose?”

“No.”

“Recipe?”

“In the text file.”

Tim pulled that up and read through it. There were careful stepby-step instructions for creating the monster, even the steps everyone knew, and some of the process parameters were incredibly tight (“Heat for 97 seconds at 178.3°C.”). They went on for 10 pages and 189 detailed steps. One step required an ultracentrifuge and another a 1500 PSI pressure vessel. No amateurs need apply.

“Can you do it?”

“Still reading.” Tim went through the instructions a second time. Some of the steps were extremely tricky, even with the right equipment, but none looked impossible.

“I think so. But it’s going to take some time.”

“How long?”

“At least a month.”

Doug nodded. Obviously the beast couldn’t be built overnight. “What do you need?”

“I’ll send you a list.” The deal was that Doug would provide any needed base compounds from his underground connections (especially the ones on any of the DEA watch lists) while Tim did the work. “Did your DMT guy have a name for this?”

“GOAP.”

“Goap?”

“God of All Psychedelics.”

Excerpt from “Novel Properties of Certain Complex Alkaloids” © 2013 by Lawrence Person.