Short Burst of Light

By Eric Lunde

Dr. Delambre has developed the technology to copy objects and people. But in the process he discovers he has also developed a way to copy time. Through the process, it is discovered that the daughter of an associate has begun to display odd behavior that may or may not be the result of Delambre's research. Meanwhile, a global military industrial concern, who originally funded the project, have started employing his invention in ways Dr. Delambre had not intended. Delambre and a group of his old associates decide to shut the company down before the company can proceed with a diabolic plan that could end life and time as we know it. The book tells this story through short vignettes and stylistic procedures that mimic the temporal complexity of the narrative. It is the first installment of the project Mimeoverse trilogy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312426009

Book preview

Short Burst of Light

SHORT BURSTS OF LIGHT

Eric Lunde

If there is any question about the soundness of the science presented here, I would say, well, no it isn’t sound. But what science isn’t? What science isn’t falsifiable? And doesn’t science function efficiently when it is?

Needless to say, science itself is not immune to being bent into a shape that serves the purpose of an agenda, and when that agenda is art or a fictional narrative, well then I think it is justified. (Take that Alan Sokel!)

So, anyway, I would need to Thank and Recognize a number of influences etc. First off, Mr. William Seward Buroughs for Mr. Bradley and Mr. Martin, of which/whom in his is/are one of the most intriguing character /s in his writings. Anton Zellinger, of course, for the notion of teleportation (it doesn’t teleport! It copies!). Derek Parfit, whose philosophical considerations of the notion of teleportation and personal identity over time, has greatly influenced me, Mark Hillery and Vladimir Buzek for the theory of the  Quantum Copier, Giulio Tononi, Anthony Burgess, James Clavell, George Langelaan, Charles Edward Pogue, David Cronenberg, Stanley Kubrick, Gene Rodenberry, Arthur C. Clarke, Greg Egan, Paul D. Zimmerman, Chicago (where I once lived (albeit too briefly)) and Normal IL (which I’ve never been to (thanks Wikipedia and Google Maps!)).

After that, there are my friends and correspondents, my editors and proofreaders; Jeph Jerman, who took the time out to scour the pages for the usual grammatical errors.

Blake Edwards, whose corrections and advice I heeded as much as possible in between the other Edits.

Julia Cross, without her support and patience I would never have had the time or the energy to complete this or any other mission.

This is volume 1 of the Mimeoverse series.

THIS IS EBOOK EDITION: ISBN #: 978-1-312-42600-9

© 2014 ERIC LUNDE AND

MIMEOHAUS PUBLISHERS LTD

(a faux-house for printed ventures through POD and ebook outlets)

CONTACT: [e-mail]

Or visit mimeoverse.squarespace.com

for further information.

However, if after having completed the whole experiment I ask my friend, What did you feel about the flash before I asked you? he will answer, I told you already, I did [did not] see a flash, as the case may be. In other words, the question whether he did or did not see the flash was already decided in his mind, before I asked him.

(REMARKS ON THE MIND BODY QUESTION, EUGENE P. WIGNER)

Through the Ground floor entrance off Harrison, past the brass, shaped and raised, letters; STATE OF ILLINOIS DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION TRAFFIC SYSTEMS CENTER.

We are located between Harrison and I-290, named for former President and General Dwight D. Eisenhower. We are not open to the public.

Red brick but modern and neither modernist nor post. A pseudo-Prairie-style maybe but mostly inconspicuous bureaucratic. I enter, using the handicap door but not engaging the opener. In, then past the administration and public relations offices. Grey flannel business modular carpet is even quiet now, a sound-muffling device, acoustical resistance. What was that place called? An anechoic chamber, yes, a room designed to reduce sound. So quiet it was maddening, all sounds negated by the screens of felt protrusions in the wall. Quiet and the sounds quit. Quite.

Everyone wants to talk above the fray but they don’t want to hear you do it.

The door says TSC, frosted glass door with TSC stenciled on it. I scan my ID card and the magnet disengages, unlocking the door. I swing it open and as I enter there’s Craig, standing there, eating dry roasted peanuts.

Good morning Ger! everyone calls me Ger. As if it’s that difficult to say Gerhardt.

Craig’s greeting me is not one of my favorite routines. I chafe at his overtures but return the greeting just the same. Craig is our IT guy. Craig is an idiot.

You’re back, huh? I thought you were taking today off?

Back? No, not today, maybe tomorrow, make a long weekend of it. What’s it look like?

Pretty much the same thing, same as yesterday. You can set your clock by it….wanna peanut?

He extends a blue bag of Planter’s roasted peanuts out to me. I politely decline.

Well, back to the grind…. And Craig walked off. Can’t trust the ninnies!

IDOT District 1’s Traffic Systems Center located in Oak Park initiated the nation’s first computerized expressway surveillance system in 1963, followed by the first computer- timed ramp metering signal system in 1964. TSC monitors sensors placed at 1/2-mile intervals over 153 miles of northeastern Illinois expressways. Sensor data from approximately 2200 vehicle detectors is transmitted to Oak Park where TSC algorithms determine congestion for highway segments and travel times between landmarks with 5-minute updates.

I walk into the locker room and open up my locker, stuff my personal items in and pull out my headset. The earpieces are formed specifically to my ear, negative copies of the relief contours. I put the headset on and activate the Bluetooth, then shut the locker door.

TEST. Testing… Steve responds, his grating voice made tin shaped by the lo-fidelity of the earpiece.

Yeah, you’re coming in fine. But you’d asked for today off. You come back early?

Why do people keep saying that? Yes, I was planning on taking Thursday and Friday off; make a vacation out of my trip to my parents. Yes. But not today. I don’t know. It’s a Monday.

Well, no, Steve, no that would be Thursday and Friday this week.

What? Again? Jesus I wish you guys would work. Wish I was union, getting all that off time….

We weren’t union. And Steve took plenty of time off, he just stopped accounting for it because, in his own words, he’s the boss, so I can do what I want.

You ready to get back to business?

The headset is redundant. We don’t really need them to communicate to each other. I mean, Christ, Mike is over there and I can shout to him really, and, well, Rhiannon (I greet Rhiannon with a nod as she hustles past carrying a load of paper in her arms. Hey Ger! Would stop to talk but…. Doppler effect, she gets louder as she gets closer then fades as she departs. Once again, that fucking song locked into my head.

"Hey Rhiannon

All your life you've never seen a woman

Taken by the wind

Would you stay if she promised you Heaven?

Will you ever win?

She resides in the cubicle adjacent to mine. All I’d have to do is stand up and tap her shoulder. But the headsets facilitate communication while multitasking, smooth, uninterrupted communication. And we can better monitor patrol communications.

I move toward my desk and sit down. Arrayed along one wall of the Central Monitoring Station, of what Mike likes to call the killing floor (well its fucking Chicago! Hog butcher to the world or something like that!"), the sunken work area we occupy, at the south end, one hundred and eighty-four monitors all stream video surveillance from strategically placed cameras at various points along the major thoroughfares.

Automatic Traffic Recorders (ATR) are set in permanent locations along the roadway where continuous traffic data is collected and retrieved throughout the year. IDOT maintains a network of 85 ATR locations throughout the state.

My computer accesses every point in the Chicago corridor, cameras, ATRs etc. I primarily watch traffic flow, speeds, patterns. I watch these patterns in order to anticipate possible delays that may or may not result in hazardous conditions. If the probabilities increase that such conditions are developing I tell Mike over there who pretty much is on standby for emergencies. He alerts the State Patrol who will in turn alert the EMPs.

Now, that’s the intended response, a matter of anticipation. But in reality, you don’t have much control over it. Quite frankly one is always anticipating some sort of conflagration or another all the time. It’s not really anticipation but high alert. If something is about to happen, I, nor anyone else in this office, could really do anything about it. Once I caught this guy on camera going about 140 miles per hour in the WB left lane of the Kennedy, zipping in and out and around the slower cars. I’m following him for like 10 minutes. Just as I get a fix on his location, I notice the state patrol is behind him, two cars.

Westbound Kennedy I say to no one really but everyone in general, specifically Mike I guess who I was hoping he would hear me but right around the Edens the car spins, flips, and hits the median, flies into the air and lands into the in front of a green Taurus and blam, fire, smoke fire, traffic immediately slows to a crawl, a wave of brake lights in monitor 111b.

Well, fuck, I’ll call fire. Patrol’s obviously alerted. Mike informs us and no one at the same time, no one in general. No way ever to really stop such events.

As I say, we’re here just to get the guts scraped off the pavement.

Clean up in aisle 94. We’re bag boys for a traffic system that is merely controlled chaos, we manage nothing. We maintain it. There was nothing indeterminate about it really. After so many years observing traffic and traffic patterns, I no longer see evidence of free will at work. You make a decision to travel and after that you’re at the mercy of the elements. Sure, you make snap decisions as you proceed, one of many that just stack up, one after the other, leading you towards an inevitable destination, but these decisions affect subsequent events, events of which the elements involved direct their influence in a determinant manner. It’s accumulative, not instantaneous. It cannot be any other way because the convergence of all these elements dictates that it is so. It cannot be any other way. As it is in traffic, it is in life. You wake up, you decide to drink coffee, you decide to do something. After that, everything that follows is necessary and inescapable. One could suppose that the best way would be to not make a decision. But then again to decide not to decide is still a decision, and the stasis and stagnation that would follow from such a refusal would be necessary and inescapable.

Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t.

Look, even if you don’t intend negative consequences, you remain guilty. It’s not a case of moral damnation, no, it’s just simple: the convergence of elements cannot be any other way. So say a person commits a heinous act, say of murder. In exercising his free will, his decision initiate a chain of events that may or may not result in the death of another. This may not have been the result he intended, but the consequences are there and because of the convergence of elements they could not have been any other way. It’s that time, that point of time in which the infinity of elements converges at that one moment. Even if deprived of free will, the suspect remains guilty, because guilt is yet another outcome of this alignment of events. Nothing of course is predetermined; it is concurrently determined, it is determined as it proceeds, as it is assembled.

So the guy who crashes his car into another car here shouts I couldn’t help it, in his defense, and he probably very well could have, but given the extraordinary circumstances of all the elements at that moment, the convergence of this infinite disparity of elements at that one moment, it could not have been any other way. And it still spells g-u-i-l-t. It is an algorithmic path.

Pete from the janitorial service enters, hunting down the dangerously overflowing wastebaskets. He locates one, picks it up, and empties it into his large Rubbermaid garbage can. He approaches me. I’m not entirely keen about this. Pete’s demeanor is positively bland, resigned, self-deprecating, or something. The people the janitorial service employs are general life disturbances, of varying degrees of mental and physical infirmities that require patience.

Hey boss. He says to me. Can I get at that? he asks, pointing to the wastebasket.

Sure.  I scoot my chair back and Pete empties the basket.

It’s mechanical, he picks it up, empties it into the larger grey Rubbermaid container, puts it back and I scoot in.

Okay Pete?

Okay, boss, says Pete, who moves on to Steve’s workspace.

Yo, Pee-tay! How you doing today.

Great boss, great.

Pete empties Steve’s basket and picks up the wadded balls of candy bar wrappers up from around it. Then proceeds to the next wastebasket, a communal and commonly used basket that is also spilling over. This is Pete’s rounds, the 7 am after the overnight shift clean up. I’m greeted with this mess every morning.

You Pete are dependable. Not like this lot! I should employ you instead of these guys. Christ, these guys go off anytime they want. Not us, right Pete?

Steve says these things because he loves us. That’s what he says. My Wife? Fuck she knows I’m as asshole! That’s how she knows I love her!

Yeah, Steve is the district manager. A day that none of us kill him is a good day.

I have a problem with managers that attempt to find labor-intensive tasks in a job that is essentially not labor-oriented. We have our tasks, we watch the monitors and the recorders, we virtually run ourselves but somehow Steve thinks we should be, oh, I don’t know, displaying more signs of intense labor; sweat, strain, cursing? I don’t know. Its not a coal mine, it’s not a factory. We’re part of the hidden network of traffic management, not its clerics, not its advocates, just nodes in an infinite array of nodes and circuits. We need only wait, stimulate, and respond.

Steve paces along the raised floor, looking into what he calls ‘the pit’, and Mike refers to as ‘the killing floor’, and pauses to observe us and then the monitors.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned….

If there’s one thing I’ve learned…. He begins, the start of some weird bromide and exhortation, a message of inspiration, drawn by analogy from some idiotic event from his short life. A previous employment experience, something his daddy said.

…its what my daddy always said ‘son there’s people who do good work and some people who work good.’  So let’s do good work today! Minimal lag time. He stops for a minute, sips from his coffee. The house is open! Place your bets….

The bet. Yes. Every morning we bet on the time and the place a major accident will occur. A major is two or more cars involved in enough of a wreck to bring any single artery to a stand still. Yes, consider it atherosclerosis; a clot forming that impedes the flow of platelets.  Anyway, Steve takes a single bet from everybody manning a cubicle, writes the bets on the whiteboard. I don’t think we’re supposed to do things like this but that doesn’t necessarily inhibit Steve. He likes action and thinks it makes the day go by easier.

So since the probability of an accident at this time of the day is pretty much a sure thing, and one happening on the Kennedy or the Eisenhower likely as shooting fish in a barrel, yeah, its pretty easy. And Mondays, oh, this day and Friday, yes, these two days are considered kill days. On Mondays you’re in no hurry to get to work so you’re not paying attention and on Fridays you’re in a huge hurry to get away from work, so you’re not paying attention.

I’ll take 8:35 on the Eisenhower Mike posts. That’s an easy one. There’s always one on the Eisenhower, the closer to downtown, the more likely.

Rhiannon offers hers, 7:45 on the Tollway, westbound. Yea, that’s just simple math there.

Bill takes 8:05 up on the Edens. I think a little and throw mine out.

7:55 Ohio Ramp on 94.

Then Craig, who slips in unannounced, trailing coax and RCA cables, offers his.

8:55 Congress!

No one solicits Craig’s bets but he manages to squeeze one in.

What? I’m hooking up the new GPS!

You have a ten-minute margin, that’s what Steve’s system allows for. Anywhere within that 10 minute window counts as a win. And as for odds, well on any given day, it’s not a matter of ‘if’ there is an accident but ‘when’.

It’s all about time. Time and timing.

I wouldn’t normally admit this but I often speak to myself this way, in the first person singular. I add running commentary and narrative to all my minutes, days, seconds. If anyone else does this, I wouldn’t know, I don’t think anyone would admit it. And for some this is considered a mistake, conceptual thought a barrier to enlightenment, nirvana. See the Buddhists.  Conceptual thought. The running commentary. But for reasons, yes, maybe I need to continually remind myself of myself. I think that’s it. This continuity of narrative provides continuity of existence. It is how I guide myself, negotiate myself through myself. The noise of myself, like soundings, in sonar, bouncing noise into the depths to locate an object, a vessel, topography, a sonar for oneself, a location device, where am I, keeping the sounding going to confirm one’s presence, all day long, so why must it be from within? But it isn’t, it’s as if sounding bounces the noise off the environment, by absence, by noting where I am not. Confirmation, confirmation that I exist, less as a trace than as a fathom, as a measure of depth, as a unit of measure.

Assume, I suppose, that you, your day and your environment are indistinguishable from each other. Fused aggregation, small parts, minutes, seconds on one hand and the confirmed object occupying space and your field of vision and tactility. Sensed objects are or become indistinguishable both from the moment and from the senses. Interrelated, all of these elements ‘become’ you, at least for that moment.

I need to remind myself of myself. See, I forgot pretty easily. I need to confirm myself, in place and in time, and the internal commentary provides the bearings required to accomplish this.

It is around 7:30 now and the rush is about to commence.

Good flow through Congress right now, Lake Shore Drive is picking up.

I’m clicking through various video feeds on my monitors. You have to develop a quick visual response system, see, as you operate. You cannot concentrate on one window for too long, you have to pass through and allow the flood of the mundane, the usual conditions to pass through your field in order to respond to any abnormalities. It’s continuum versus discrete, flow versus interruptions. You allow the flow to play itself out because that’s predictable, that’s foreseeable. Banality is the background track and to sense any sort of aberration in that flow allows for a faster response.

I’m pacing through the various feeds being sent to us, one corridor at a time, I mean the cameras associated with each stretch of freeway. Nothing really out of the ordinary, I mean in general that would have relevance to our communal pursuit.

But I do see the green LTD.

This is the same one as yesterday. There’s a bottleneck at Ohio and I’m tracking the LTD. Once it brakes I’ll be able to confirm this, by zooming into the back plate.

Yep, 763ABB, Illinois.

Fuck.

See I’ve been tracking this car for three weeks. For three weeks it has been passing in and out of various cameras on various corridors, up and down and across the entire metropolis. The ghost car, the phantom LTD. 1990s model, two tone, a dark emerald green top with a more muted, greyish green on the sides. Chrome trim, what remains. Peeling vinyl roof. A functional, but operating, wreck.

I first noticed this car on the video surveillance feed at a gas station down from where I live. Parked at the gas pump, it looked abandoned with the driver’s side door open and the hose still attached to the gas outlet. I looked it over. No driver to be seen. I noted the license plate number. I always do this. I think all of us at the TCS do this, because its like having unfettered access to people’s personal information. A kind of God-like power that remains a secret. Quite often you see a car that is suspicious, amusing or attractive and you bring this information to work and you look it up. And throughout the day you track it around the city. It’s like playing solitaire on your computer, a way to kill time.

I put my ice tea and Powerbar on the counter.

28 bucks on pump 7. I said. And this…and by the way, did the guy on pump 6 abandon his car?

The cashier looked out. What car?

And I looked out and it wasn’t there.

Didn’t you just come in just before? said the cashier.

Well, ah, no, I hadn’t, I mean I haven’t been here in weeks….

You sure? Weren’t you holding up a video camera? Shooting video of this place? Yeah, it sure was! I told you you couldn’t do that without the permission of the manager.

Well, no not me and I’m not shooting a fucking video now!

The cashier, a soft ball of oh, say, sixty year old female, gruff smokers voice and grey matted hair, harrumphed, took my money and handed me my change.

Well I’m sure it was you. Have a nice day.

Video camera?

So my doppelganger is running around with a video camera. Why?

When I got back to work, I looked up the license plate number and discovered it wasn’t legit. It was expired and taken off a 2011 Mazda. I should have reported it but decided to wait it out, see if I could track him through the system, his whereabouts.

Over the last few weeks the LTD kept appearing, in and out of frame. Down the Kennedy over to Lincoln, stops on Rush Street and then onto Lake Shore Drive, down to Hyde Park.

Or.

Over the Eisenhower west out towards O’Hare where he would park and apparently watch planes.

Now I had him, he was getting off the Eden’s at Skokie. He proceeded east for a couple of blocks and then stopped at the Vienna Red Hot shop. I pan the camera located there and zoom in.

He’s sitting in the LTD, just sitting in there, the front of the car focused on the front door of the shop. What is he doing?

Got a two car up on Fullerton and Kennedy. I hear Mike say.

I’m about to scroll over to that location when there’s some action, the front door opens and out steps a man. A man who is also, well, even under the blur of the zoom, even with minor pixilation of the single I can unmistakably see that he, this man, looks again remarkably similar to me and then the LTD, coming from within the LTD an arm projects out holding something, some thing, and this something is unmistakably being aimed at the man walking out of the restaurant and then there’s this whiff, this shock of smoke and spark just so slight and the man walking out of the restaurant falls to the ground. The LTD backs out in a rush of dirt and dust and speeds off, west, towards the Edens.

What the fuck?

You seeing that Ger?

I guess. But not. No. Not the same thing.

No…. I can’t react to Mike not right now. No. The narrative in my head has taken a sharp turn here its…no… I can only describe it as being trapped now trapped in a head that won’t go away, a story in looped skin.

I missed it….

No I haven’t, I haven’t started looking for it.

Rhiannon, can you watch this for me? I…I got to move away for a moment…not feeling too well right now….

Sure, sure, what do you got?

Gotta watch what Mike’s got its…where is that again?

Fullerton and the Kennedy. Southbound. Starting to mass up up there, see?

I’ll update the board now…

I get up out of my cubicle and make for the locker room; I pull out my bag and shut the door.

Fuck, I owe whatshisface 20 bucks.

I scroll up a twenty and slide it into the fin of the locker.

Steve is at the door.

Not feeling good?

No, I’m not, I’m gonna go over to the minute clinic and then we’ll see….

Steve looks me over.

Fuck, yeah, you don’t look that good. Yer all kinda sweaty….alright, I’ll get someone up here to fill in. Probably Craig, he knows enough. Call me when you know.

Yeah, I will, I will….

I’m stumbling into and through the door; I nearly trip on the grey carpet, right myself, and continue on.

I know. Now. I know.

I know I’ve got to get out and away. I know that. I’ve got to get out and away. Fast. And out. End this thing now. Something. 

I trip over the curb running towards my car. Fuck. And pain. And scratch up my knee and pieces of asphalt inside the wound I can see little black pieces in the slowly filling scrape through the hole in the fabric of my pants. But I can’t stop. Where did I fucking park?

There. The Blue Mazda.  Next to the Orange Mitsubishi. That’s mine. The Mazda. Not the Mitsubishi.

I fumble for the fob in my pocket, find it, unlock the car, the simultaneous chirp of the alarm and get in.

No sigh of relief not here start the car back up and out and speed off into away down towards the river, the Des Plaines, Thatcher Woods, see yes, that’s blind enough, that’s what I’m doing see away from because no one need know anything at all even as I sit here longer now parked by the river watching the river because

I know now.

Who is the copy now?

I slide the Beretta 9mm out of my bag. The new Beretta Px4 Storm pistol is the most advanced expression of technological and aesthetic features in a semiautomatic sidearm. Built around a modular concept that a pistol can be adapted to different needs and modes of operations, without compromising on ergonomics and the renowned Beretta reliability and performance, the Px4 Storm emphasizes power, ease of handling, performance and reliability.

Manufactured in three calibers, the Px4 Storm uses an exclusive Beretta designed innovative locked-breech with a rotating barrel system, the strongest action to date. I brought it for protection but I don’t know about that I don’t feel entirely protected with it and now I’m the bigger threat to myself and how do I protect myself from myself the long hollows of my being, the head chambered up rattling echoes of words narratives but that isn’t even essential anymore nothing to confirm because there is no voice anymore.

I put the end of the barrel into my mouth.

It doesn’t taste bad.

This is going to hurt.

I am convinced that the chemical composition of our atmosphere contains methamphetamines. I have no proof of this, but think about it; the various chemicals released into the environment would inevitably intermingle and interact, especially methane. The interaction of methane with any number of compounds, especially any molecular compound that is chiral, like asymmetric carbon. At least my research has led me to this. The rest I suppose is merely conjecture. But it would explain so much, especially in terms of human behavior. We are breathing meth. I mean, yes, small amounts in general. Or amounts that vary according to concentration, large urban areas that chose to neglect to regulate pollution levels for the sake of business and prosperity.

We are addicted to breathing? To life?

And even this thought, is it meth-fueled conjecture?

I suppose. But I’m hungry right now.

I felt like sitting on the park bench. Yes. Summer, the end really and heading towards autumn and there is something to be said about the routine of four seasons, what the entire cycle does to one’s being. There is no sense of forever here; one is bound by the cycles of gain and loss, comfort and discomfort. Everything draws to a close and emerges, reemerges. There is always an end. An ending. And it is always there.

The bench in the park is tucked in beneath a sprawling elm, a thick blanket of shade. In the brown paper bag is a steak sandwich I’ve been traveling with for about 10 miles. KayBob’s in Doyle has the best steak sandwiches, well worth the trip. Also a can of Doc Brown Ginger Ale and a bag of chips.

The trip here was unremarkable.  Traveling the hundred-plus miles to my parents’ house always reminds me of Hanna-Barbara Cartoons: economy of the animation required the reuse of background cels over and over. Fred’s house appeared longer and wider because the background wasn’t really the same but was repeated. The washed pseudo-stone and the same lamp the same chair over and over again, different in that it appeared at a different instant of time but the same in that it was the same background.

So it was for the rural landscape: one corner on the rural route reproduced from a previous corner, same red barn in the same position as the farmhouse prior to it, in the same position of the similar open field. You would approach both from the south, traveling north, rounding a bend, a different bend sure but nearly the same in terms of degrees of arc, and there they would be and you’d swear you’d been here before but you haven’t. But I had, many and multiple times.

Small towns, small town USA, Flyover country. It deserved to be called that. Why anyone should waste his or her time here or anywhere like it is beyond me. Admittedly in the Big City I’m not exactly the scene maker or gadabout that such arrangements encourage, nor do I take advantage of the cultural institutions the city offers, but I feel better knowing they are there for me, to engage or indulge in or not. I could if I want to.

Small towns are overrated, small town values particularly so. They assume a certain moral superiority because of the simplicity they embrace, but they remain simple. Subject to the same laws of the universe as any other place. Cities assume superiority through the complexity of their structure…yet; even then, life within it remains equally, incredibly simple, just more frequent. Frequency might be the distinction, degrees of frequency of encounters, contact, multiplicity, criminal acts, deviance. I happen to know that I’ve lived 10 blocks from a former acquaintance and have not once encountered him in the neighborhood. And that might be the key here. In any given rural area an encounter would be more likely, more frequent. The frequency of return varies from place to place: return more likely, more frequent in small towns, less likely in larger cities but return remains even then and the redundancy is inevitable, unshakeable. 

If I lived in this small town, sitting in this park this long would invite an encounter with someone I most likely had just encountered the day before, maybe even that morning. And then there’s this irony of the small town park in the middle of this vast expanse of relatively untouched wilderness. Why don’t they just go back to their homes and frolic and play and run and climb trees? There’s land enough. My family’s ranch home sits in the middle of 50 acres of pristine forest with small fields occasionally interrupting the continuum of forest (More likely a farmed property including a house, a settlement, cleared for that purpose back in the 1800s).

I admit I like the park, despite the irony of its placement, a man-made terraform, land crafted and fabricated by design and intent. A clearing that may not be an idealization of nature itself but mostly of function and respite, of what and how humans can interact not with nature but each other. I can observe the traffic of humans as they work into a pattern: the park occupies a perfect rectangle, bordered by 4 streets. Thru-traffic on Oak Street, which would pass through the very middle of the park, is effectively blocked. Within the rectangle, four cobblestone paths start at the middle of each border and converge in the middle where an old-fashioned gazebo/bandstand resides. Jane 1 and Joe 1 walk together down the stone-paved walk way from the east towards Jane 2 and Joe 3 and Charlie 4 who are probably around 10 or 12 years old and are playing a cursory game of tag by Elm 10 just about 12 feet NNE from the gazebo. Old Joe 6 is sitting idle on the bench SSE from me, smoking a cigarette and reading the paper. Joe 8 arrives from the street that borders the South of the park after parking his car and makes his way towards Joe 6, Joe 6 greets him and Joe 8 sits down next to Joe 6.  Jane 5 and Jane 6 lie next to each other on a blanket in the SSW quadrant of the rectangle. And oddly, oddly enough I sit on a bench on a hill, a hill crafted by the ancient landscaper, topped by Elm 6. Not much of a hill, but enough to provide a vantage point on the rest of the park.

I work my sandwich and observe. It’s a relief in a way because I feel no requirement to report.

There is something about knowing and of not knowing, that we must account for what is not known, not observed. Is there room enough? Maybe there is.

I finish my sandwich and pack up my refuse, find a receptacle and dispose of it. Stand for a moment, a quick pan of the park, a survey of the sky. A sparrow launches itself off Elm 3, the take off trajectory low, maybe for 20 feet at an altitude of about 13 feet, then a sudden, abrupt lift and he/she is gone.

Dusk. It is becoming dark.

At this rate, I won’t arrive at my parent’s house until well after dark.  Shit. Gas. I should stop for gas. So I do. And so my point on the earth moves that much further away from the sun.

That’s what I want someplace to not go, easy enough stay at home no one follows you there no fucking headlamps blinding you off the mirror get around me fucker….

Dark.

Headlamps the trace occasional purple flood of Xenon and then the red of the rear receding off these two points going nowhere into

Dark.

Flood of similitude the same undifferentiated I can‘t tell. It’s a truck reflecting. Little white eyes in the dark. That’s how you know they are there, I mean cartoon characters. Why cartoons I don’t know seems illustrative of…life. I mean of movement. I mean is anyone moving no its one stop at a time, one frame at a time, and in darkness it is neither stop nor advancement we are always at

24 frames per second so

We cannot tell what frame we are in or were. The Flintstone world disappears, just a flat backdrop. If it were Flintstones, there would only be the white eyes blinking in the dark indicating position, presence of characters. But there is no dimensionality now, only from where light is present or absent, removed or in place.

Holography is an optical technology by which a three-dimensional image is stored on a two-dimensional surface via a diffraction pattern. Light rays that are initially either parallel or contracting generate a light sheet. Entropic matter systems carry mass, which causes the bending of light.

The mind provides continuity, a continuum, the basis for it I suppose, not a story…no but the idea of continuity, cohesion, and the mind again believes it. Feedback, the one feeding back into the other…continuum…story….narrative.  But really there is none, no such thing. It is not an illusion; it is the outcome of the shortcomings of the mechanism. It’s just what it does because it can’t do any better.

6 days on the road and I’m a gonna make it home tonight…

But I won’t, I’ll make it sooner

little                                             white                                                   pills...no not my game caffeine yes but nothing more disturbing to surrender one’s self to such uncertainty  must stay awake but do it reasonable whatever under your own power time enough sleep will wait

another tractor trailer rig and another redwhite stripes and reflectors amber and white flashing flashes of light short bursts of light the light hidden by mass, mass concealing light distance one passes the other a mass of light and a mass of darkness short bursts of light in the darkness

only a little further

It’s a scrumptious day.

The bacon is done. He can smell it.

He describes the day as scrumptious. This is debatable.  He asks himself this everyday. What and how to describe the day, the environment, that day, that moment. English is insufficient, but somehow he needs to address the condition.

He is finishing up an email to a colleague in Nevada.

My old philosophy professor, he had an unpronounceable last name, something maybe European, maybe Indian. Dot not feather….

Wrong, I’m sorry.

He backspaces and deletes that.

Anyway.

"He was this peculiar little man, 60 or more at the time, a bald head he came by naturally, it didn’t look shaved. And these visible veins working their way under his scalp. An odd territorial domain really, something like a topographically accurate globe, contoured with depressions and mountains, veins are streams, curled up old rivers and oxbow lakes. Reservoirs of ideas. I had just taken a geography class.

And he says to us, leaning back in his chair, he says: It’s a beautiful day isn’t it? It’s a beautiful day to die?

And this catches us by surprise. We had read such statements but had never heard them uttered out loud. Why up to this point was this considered verboten? Hmmm? That’s what was shocking. Not the content, but the having stated it.

So he continues: would not such a day, so full of life and light and obviously love, would this not be a good day to die? In the greatest comfort? In the greatest luxury the universe can offer?

And we were all thinking: what was his problem? What is his plan?"

Bill! Breakfast is ready! His wife June shouts from the kitchen.

Just a minute! he yells back from his office on the second floor of the split-level.

"Was he going to kill himself? But you know that wasn’t the answer. No, he came back that following Wednesday because it was a Monday, Wednesday class. Such is this day. I don’t know why anyone would want to die. To me, it would be appalling, because being such a nice day you wouldn’t want to….

Anyway, let me know if the suits have issues with anything else and I’ll be in there at 8 Thursday morning.

He signs off, ‘Bill’, puts his computer into sleep mode and exits for the kitchen.

Coming down the stairs he looks over the living room and maybe for the first time, he doesn’t know, maybe he’s never noticed, or has but has not paid attention to it, to them, he stops to look at the two bronze butterflies that occupy a portion of the wall behind the leather couch. They are symmetrical in their position, respectively, one at the 7:00 position the other at the 1:00 position. Why do we need 2?

He approaches the kitchen and motions to June towards the living room.

Pointing at the butterflies he says, You see those things?

June nods her head and affirms Mmm-hmmm.

Do we need both of them?

June looks at him with exasperation.

Wait, now, what? Those butterflies?

Yeah. Do we need both?

Well, yes, Bill, they compliment each other.

I suppose, I suppose. But do we need two, I mean, look at it, that one looks too much like the other.  Why don’t we get rid of it?

June steps back and rolls the fingers of her right hand into a ball. William Amherst Delambre! Jesus! Ever since you retired, you’ve been a pain in my ass! Christ, first it was the way I washed dishes, then it was how I parked the car in the yard! And you know what? It’s worked for me for 30 years and I expect it to work for 30 more!

She walks briskly towards the kitchen and, expecting Delambre to follow, stops short, turns around.

Bill, Christ!  Breakfast is getting cold.

OH! Yes! and he turns to follow her.

She has the kitchen TV on and there’s the usual local banter of the local personalities, chatting about the possible drought conditions and then the cute panda bear birth at the National Zoo and then they turn to the news desk for your morning update.

A square-jawed young man delivers the news.

A shooting in Skokie Illinois has police baffled. We turn now to our sister station in Chicago, Channel 8, CBS….Authorities report that a greyish green 1980’s LTD pulled up into the parking lot and waited then shot and killed 32-year-old Gerhardt Hedison, a technician for Department of Transportation in Oak Park. Mr. Hedison was apparently exiting from the Crosstown Vienna Red Hot Shop and Deli when someone shot him in the chest and in the head. Authorities are now conducting a search of the area for the car and its occupant. From what can be gathered the murder occurred without rhyme or reason. During a news conference the Skokie chief of police admitted; If there is a motive for this crime we are having some difficulty establishing it. Mr. Hedison was not known to be involved in any current or past activities that might attract such criminal acts. We are working with authorities around the Metro area and ask the public for their assistance in capturing this perpetrator."

Chief! Chief! someone shouts in the background.

Yes….

Is this random or intended….

I can’t say right now.

Jesus, didn’t we used to go to that place? June says while serving herself a round of bacon strips.

But that’s not what causes Delambre to stop dead. A sudden warmth of familiarity, and a nausea of anxiety, he’s shivering a little and tries his best to conceal it from June.

What is it Bill?

Ah, nothing, nothing must have….I don’t know, maybe I got up too fast earlier….

But he knew. He knew it wasn’t going to be a good day. Because it was starting. It would happen soon. Soon enough.

The phone rings. Caller ID shows it to be Bradley-Martin. At first Delambre hesitates, but then gives in.

Hello? he answers, hesitating, then he moves surreptitiously towards his study.

Bill, its Stathis. Did you see it?

Delambre wants to say no. But he did. He knows what he’s asking about.

You mean the shooting in Skokie?

Silence.

Yeah. That. See, its getting weird. Kinda spinning out of control. I can’t figure it out.

The bright sun.

On the sidewalk. Off the walls of cream brick or red brick, off their windows, reflecting and refracting. She knew someone once who lived THAT CLOSE to the EL, at the same level, THAT LEVEL. 3rd floor.  Every few minutes a train would come screaming past literally shaking world and screeching through and past and he hated it but she thought it intriguing. Just like a movie, a book, a plot, a story, the beat down romantic, a poet of collisions and juxtapositions, the flight of reeling away murmuration of words and paint. Yes. That wasn’t him. He was just poor, sluggish. Unmotivated. In any one else’s frame, in someone else’s presence yes they could make do with it. Not him. Attractive, yes, and she was young. New to the city.

So it was that the sun split through memory and cinderblock. Everything. It spills over and out onto everything into everything. Swollen with light. Even the train. Especially the train. The tracks the sun lighting the twin beams of track but the ride is unendurable yes the return of the same the same of.

Towards what is the world going is not the world arriving. The EL world of arriving on the right is not the EL world of departure on the left. A train makes the same pass at different times but then again it is not the same at all is it? It’s like different worlds that one can only be in one at any given time.

So she is now in the right EL world of 4:47 pm. And down the stairs and out through the turnstile out for what not getting in and easy to jump but she has 6 blocks to walk through sun.

For now clouds. A few maybe. Yes. One an imperfect copy of another and then. She stands before the window of the trifles store because that is what its called TRIFLES, they are whimsical accouterments for what attaching to maybe having a personal relationship with an object fashioned from clay or plastic or metal. There are salt and peppershakers, twin not twin yes they are curves that attach as a yin and yang, black and white ‘I would want a speck of salt in the pepper and an speck of pepper in the salt’. That would match. What she knows about Oriental is from her brief foray into Feng Shui. She knows where not to put her furniture. But she does know her door is in the wrong position. North/south axis. She needs a side door.

And there’s her reflection faint in the between of internal lighting and the sun. She is now looking for her reflection. Then she isn’t.

Onward.

A right off and down the street that is considered a side street east west and its nice, not a major street, quiet. A canopy of oaks and elms extends over and obscures the cloudless sky it seems cloudless now but there is the occasional passing cloud. Its what you can’t see you must account for.

A flat with bay windows it’s too bad it’s on the first floor. Not directly on the ground there are stairs up from the entrance landing.

The side bay welcomes arguing couples for some fucking reason or another. They stand beneath it and bicker back and forth, yelling expletives and slapping at each other.

Veronica has called the police on numerous occasions but they always manage to settle and flee before the cops arrive.

Once inside, it is warm. Not because of the heat no, Veronica keeps the stat down around 70 because utilities cost so much.

It is warm despite the hardwood floors, the sheen from the poly, the clinical white paint that covers every square inch of wall space. Even on the molding, even the French doors, which Veronica keeps open. The paint covers like Liquid Paper, deleting features of the apartment, concealing it. Snow. Until it is gone. Creating time by denying space? Editing space. Removing the details to make a general space where time is homogenous and undifferentiated.

She puts her bag and her laptop on the kitchen table, having entered from the rear, having walked under the bay window to the side. West.

‘Better get some dinner.’

She picks up her landline and dials her mother’s number as she pulls out a Lean Cuisine, a lo-cal Asian chicken with snap peas item, with rice.

‘Mom? Yeah it’s me. Hey, I’m going to stop by tomorrow. No, nothing serious. I have a story to do in Normal so I’ll be going right past…thought I’d stop in. Is that all right? Maybe on the way back, yeah. Oh, if it all goes well around 4? Okay. See you then."

She takes apart the rice component and sticks the vegetable component in the microwave. Shuts the door and sets the timer for 4 minutes.

‘I should get a cat.’

For the most part, the equipment at the lab was rudimentary, a bricolage of various components strung out over 16 tables, 8 metal portable shelf carts, each with 6 shelves (obtained from the food service department over a period of a year, each intern on staff hijacked a cart when the moment proved opportune), two desks and 15 chairs. Why such an array?

This is expected Professor Delambre would say, As you improve, you complexify!

Having started with the basic formulas devised by Zellinger, Zurich, Wooters, and Hillery, Delambre proceeded to improve through improvisation, adding a component every time we made progress.

We began with a simple beam splitter, an interferometer, very basic apparatus, a number of lasers. It was entirely modeled on the Austrian model and actually remained embedded in this existing array. Somewhere. Nobody really knows right now where it is in the entire room.

But it was the first.

We were the first. We were the first department to not only take teleportation seriously but we pursued it beyond the boundaries of most departments. We would theorize into the night and take theories and run them against each other, colliding them with greater centrifugal force, much like that which used to occur with the Fermilab collider down the road apiece, like the Large Hadron collider. Theories would collide and jettison parts, segments, fragments as if small atoms smacking into each other and we would sit back and account for them, track them, compare them and then start the whole process all over.

And our answers would return, refined and neatly elegant but not enough so we’d reload the theory collider and start all over….

Four fast-paced, intense and compressed years. A black hole of theory. Sucking everything into it.

With the Austrian array it was nothing to track what appeared to be teleportation of photons. And with further tests we’d confirmed they had. But how to get from the photon level, the micro-micro level where just about every and any thing can happen, the inconceivable, the absurd. None of which they, the particles, intend.

It chafes me when people attribute anthropomorphic behavior to