American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,140

one another. It has taken us some time to measure and quantify this theory, but we’ve found certain levels of background radiation near—

MICHAEL DERN: Drop that. And the names of the stars.

RICHARD COBURN: I hadn’t even gotten there yet. How did you know I’d name them?

MICHAEL DERN: Just drop it. Stick to the basics, Dick.

RICHARD COBURN: You do know I’m your boss, don’t you?

[SILENCE]

RICHARD COBURN: Fine. Well, the places where these universes bumped into one another did not fully heal, to use medical terminology. They bruised. And, since these places did not heal, the nature and behavior of these universes does not work… quite right there. Like a football player tearing a tendon—it will heal, but it won’t have the same range of flexibility, or it will twinge and pop sometimes. You know… is this a good metaphor?

MICHAEL DERN: It’s a fine metaphor.

RICHARD COBURN: I feel like athletics is very fertile ground for metaphors for politicians.

MICHAEL DERN: Athletics make great metaphors for politicians. Keep going. Tell him why this matters.

RICHARD COBURN [SIGHS]: Well. Well, if we can mimic these conditions—if we can create our own bruising, in other words, without having a whole universe crash into ours—then a whole host of possibilities opens up. Concepts like time, distance, tensile strength—

MICHAEL DERN: Tensile strength?

RICHARD COBURN: Yes. We did the tests with rope, remember?

MICHAEL DERN: It’s awful specific.

RICHARD COBURN: How about just strength, then?

MICHAEL DERN: Sure.

RICHARD COBURN: All right. Strength and everything all becomes malleable, unpredictable. What we are chiefly interested in is… travel.

MICHAEL DERN: What?

RICHARD COBURN: I am simplifying this for him.

MICHAEL DERN: Simplifying it into what? What do you mean?

RICHARD COBURN: I am referencing the neutrino signatures.

MICHAEL DERN: Ohhh. Oh. Say transportation, then.

RICHARD COBURN: Oh, that’s good! I should have thought of that. Yes. Transportation is what we’re concerned with. Because the primary consequence is a confusion of distance. Reality itself experiences aphasia—it forgets where certain things are, in other words. It’s almost impossible to control, or at least it’s possibly impossible, but we are attempting to see if it’s possible to have one item traverse a distance—any distance—without actually moving.

MICHAEL DERN: Saying possibly a lot.

RICHARD COBURN: I know. I just thought that.

MICHAEL DERN: So how does the lens work?

RICHARD COBURN: Well… how much will he know about the lens?

MICHAEL DERN: He’ll know it’s over forty percent of our budget.

RICHARD COBURN: Hm. I see. Well, the lens was conceived to try and examine if our own day-to-day activities—at a subatomic level, of course—might hold some similarity with that of cosmic bruising. No reality is perfectly stable, in other words, just like no person—or, ah, football player—is perfectly healthy. But we quickly found that the lens had side effects. Not dangerous ones. At least, we don’t think so.

MICHAEL DERN: I would definitely cut that.

RICHARD COBURN: Hm. Probably smart. Anyway, the side effects were that, if we examined a particle with the lens in a certain manner, then… it… well, the lens caused bruising itself. It seemed impossible at first, but, well, there you are. The closer we examine, the more the lens interferes, or disturbs, or interjects itself in such a way that it upsets things, like trying to look so close at someone that you actually knock them down.

MICHAEL DERN: You are doing great with the metaphors.

RICHARD COBURN: Oh? Should I stop?

MICHAEL DERN: No, no. Keep going. This is good, this is very good.

RICHARD COBURN: Well, I’m not sure where else to go. The lens causes what we are choosing to call subatomic aphasia. It interrupts our reality and elbows into a couple of others, a little, simulating bruising. Our reality forgets that that particle—or particles—is there. And in that moment, the thing it is examining is shoved—partially—into all those various other realities as well. So it could exist in a variety of states, places, et cetera. Even times, possibly, though of course that is quite hard to quantify. What we wanted to do was reduce the amount of possibilities until we had it in a binary state—that is, the particle is in two places at once, two physical places, I mean, within our reality. Or it seems to be. We’re not quite sure. Then we would need to simply shut down one avenue, one possibility—again, this is all so very theoretical—and then ta-da, it’s there. We’d like to be able to see if we can transport larger items, but, again, we’re not sure. The most interesting thing about all this—

MICHAEL DERN: More interesting than practical application?

RICHARD COBURN: Incredibly more