Hello again, internet. Hope you’re doing well. It’s still been raining here a great deal, and I’ve found that my backyard doesn’t drain well at all. Arnold our Yorkie has to sidle along the edge of the grass at our porch to find a dry spot to use as a bathroom. I’d pity him if the sight wasn’t so awkward and hilarious.

Somehow, in the midst of all this rain, my wife has managed to collect three nails in one tire of her Prius. It’s almost amazing, her bad luck. I’ve never had a nail in my tires at all.

*              *              *

Had a beer with Dan the other night. I really enjoy having a neighbor on hand to have a beer with, and I think Dan does, too. We split a six pack of Lone Star in his shed. He seemed a little despondent, or at least more than usual, and after a while I gathered that his creation was giving him trouble.

 
It had been giving him trouble for the past four months, it turned out. Exactly what was wrong was hard for me to gather, as I’m completely inept when it comes to math (I still don’t know how my car’s mileage works), but he said he was almost sure his numbers were right and he’d been parsing out problems as he passed through the testing phases, but now he’d hit a dead end. He could see nothing wrong with either the theoreticals, the hardware, or the software. In theory, everything should work. But it just wasn’t, or at least half of it wasn’t.

I asked how hard packaging could be, and he grew a bit sheepish again and admitted that “packaging” was his cute and rather reductive term for the machine’s actual purpose. I prodded along and asked what that would be.

“Hm,” he said, and thought. I could tell he was trying to put this in the most lay of layperson’s terms. “Well, you know matter is made of mostly space, right?” he said.

“Space?”

“Yeah. Like, atoms are largely empty. If you had a nucleus of an atom that was the size of a speck of dust, the orbit of each electron would be several miles wide.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well. I think I learned that, once.”

“Right. Well, what I was trying to do was, well, reduce that. To reduce the space in an object, so then it’d be easier to, well, carry around and stuff.”

“So… it’s a shrinking device?” I asked.

He winced. “Not exactly. It doesn’t shrink the object, whatever it is, it makes it… infinitesimally small. And it’s not like a small version of the object itself. It… It packages it. You wouldn’t even be able to see it. It pulls it all apart until it’s its barest components, pushes it together, and then, theoretically, it reassembles it and adds the space back in so it’s all whole again. It packages, then unpackages. See?”

“So you could…”

“So you could carry something that unpackaged would weigh tons, like a tank, but packaged it would weight literally nothing, at least in any measurable sense. Then when you took it to where you wanted, you’d, well, produce it out of thin air, practically. You could do it to anything, so long as the equipment was big enough. You could store fuel in genuinely no space at all.”

“I see,” I said. “Or I think I see. But, wait, aren’t there, like, fields and stuff?”

“Fields?”

“Opposing forces? Magnetics? Nuclear energy and such?”

He smirked a little. “Well, yeah. But the first step of the machine is to sort of negate that. Turn it off so it has no effect. Which isn’t as hard as it sounds.”

I laughed at how casually he said it, and said it sounded like something NASA would be interested to hear about. But he then became very bitter and muttered something about how NASA wouldn’t care to hear anything that’d contradict what they felt they already knew. Things became a bit awkward then, and he apologized. I asked if he had history there and he said he had history everywhere. Eager to move things along, I asked what was wrong with the machine.

“Oh,” he said. “Right. Well, see, it does half of what it’s supposed to. It takes the object. Turns it off, so to speak. Then collapses and packages it. But then… Unpackaging it… It can’t find it. It should. Everything  seems calibrated properly. And the numbers are solid. But it doesn’t.” He rested his chin in his hand. “I’ve no idea what the hell to do.”

I scratched my head, then swigged the rest of my beer. I asked if I could see it in action. He asked if I was sure, and I said certainly. He then got up and went to the sack of apples in the corner and pulled one out. “I don’t know why I picked apples,” he said. “They had a deal on them at the farmer’s market when I started, I think. Now I just use them out of habit.”

He checked some switches, then placed the apple in the steel and rubber box. Before he did, though, he marked the apple with a single line from a Sharpie nearby. He didn’t explain what that was about. Then he shut the shutter and screwed it into place and pressurized the box. He checked more switches, more gauges, then pressurized the glass portion of the device. The little pump hummed so loud it made my teeth hurt. Then he went in the back and flipped some breaker switch, and came back with two pairs of lab goggles and said we didn’t particularly need them, but safety had long become a habit for him. We both fixed them on our eyes, and he sat down in front of the old Macintosh.

I asked him where I should stand. He said I could stand anywhere I liked.

He hit a few keys and opened something up on the computer. The interface seemed extraordinarily crude, no more than a few menus, but then again I had no idea what I was seeing. The screen went black and there was a small progress bar with a percentage in the right corner. Then Dan turned and looked at the machine with a patient, resigned look on his face.

I expected lights or maybe a few arcs of electricity or something similarly goofy, but none came. The little pump kept humming along, the progress bar slowly turned green (very slowly – about ten minutes or so), and then there was a sharp click, like a breaker being tripped. I started a little, but Dan seemed unworried. Then the bar hit a hundred percent and the screen changed over to a new bar, this one now in the left hand corner.

“Now it’s trying to find it again,” he said. He sighed again. “But it won’t.”

We waited for a good ten minutes, maybe twenty. The bar on the screen froze, then blinked steadily every couple of seconds like it was trying to refresh. Then it went black. Dan went to the back, flipped the breaker, waited for the machine to power down, and then he unscrewed the shutter on the box.

The apple was gone. There was no smoke, no nothing. It was just an empty box. Dan grimly stared into it and nodded. I suppose I was a bit rude then and said at least he’d made a very impressive way to make apples disappear. He said that was true, very impressive, and also very expensive and time-consuming.

I said then that surely even this was grounds for celebration. No one had ever done what he did, correct? Couldn’t he get published and win fame that way?

“Oh, probably,” he said. “But I want it to work. It’s mine. And I want it to do what I set out for it to do.”

I recognized in him then the familiar signs of obsession. There was a hollowness about the eyes that grew each time he glanced at the components on the card table. I nodded, a little sad for my friend, and then asked what his power bill was like. He laughed, and said it was astronomic.
I went home and watched some reruns of 30 Rock on my computer, as my wife had a meeting for her charity group. Then when she came home I realized I should have mentioned something to Dan about the watch.  But he probably knows.