American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  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 so, yes. The most interesting thing we’ve found from the lens is that it suggests our own experience of reality is myopic. It is a bit like… I don’t know, like an ant crawling along a string stretched across a large room. The ant’s experience is largely two-dimensional. It only cares about what’s happening along the surface directly in front of it or behind it in a straight line. That’s us. We’re the ant. But the lens allows our perspective to expand outward. Our perspective gains more dimensions: there are things below us, above us, to our sides. There is an enormous, unexplored gulf of existence, of realities, all around us; we simply can’t experience it because our perspective is a bit nailed down. You see?

  MICHAEL DERN: Hm. Well…

  RICHARD COBURN: What’s wrong?

  MICHAEL DERN: I… don’t think this metaphor is a good one.

  RICHARD COBURN: Why not?

  MICHAEL DERN: Because he’s gonna ask—what’s in the corners?

  RICHARD COBURN: The corners of what?

  MICHAEL DERN: Of the room. There’s this big huge room. Maybe there’s something in the corners.

  RICHARD COBURN: Well, we just don’t know. That’s the curious thing about it.

  MICHAEL DERN: Ehh. I’d leave it out. These types of guys, they tend to fixate on stuff like this. It’s the war mentality, I guess.

  RICHARD COBURN: I can almost guarantee that there are no Soviets in the corners of this metaphorical room.

  MICHAEL DERN: You know what I mean.

  RICHARD COBURN: Well… well then, if it comes to that, I will just say to him that, that… that we just don’t know. And… and that’s why we need money, Mr. Senator. We need lots of it, all of it. In big bags. We need it to figure out what the fuck is going on.

  MICHAEL DERN [LAUGHS]

  RICHARD COBURN: Did you like that? It was rather good, wasn’t it.

  MICHAEL DERN: You say that and Laura will kill you.

  RICHARD COBURN: I’ve no doubt.

  [STATIC]

  TRANSCRIPT OF PROGRESS INTERVIEW

  c10.37a-jc

  CONDUCTED BY MICHAEL DERN, CHIEF OF STAFF

  JANUARY 3RD, 1974

  : So it’s one hundred percent necessary that this is taped.

  MICHAEL DERN: One hundred percent.

  : Why? Who’s going to listen to this?

  MICHAEL DERN: Um. Not many people.

  : How many is not many?

  MICHAEL DERN: One?

  : One? One person?

  MICHAEL DERN: They get played, once. Then they get stored. Safely.

  : Come on, Michael.

  MICHAEL DERN: You’re awful curious about this.

  : Yes, I am awful curious about what happens to tapes made of me, of me talking. How would you like it? Wouldn’t you be worried?

  MICHAEL DERN: I have been taped so many times, I don’t even notice anymore.

  : But you do know what happens to the tapes.

  MICHAEL DERN: Yes. The tapes get transcribed.

  : Okay. Then what?

  MICHAEL DERN: Mm. Probably shouldn’t. But. Then the transcriptions get circulated to a committee—a really important committee—with your name removed.

  : What? Why the hell would they do that?

 
MICHAEL DERN: Because there’s always a chance that someone—I don’t know who, but some asshole—could leak the interview.

  : Ah. Because we do such [singing] topsecret work.

  MICHAEL DERN: Yeah. You do. You do, you know.

  : Yeah. I know all about that.

  MICHAEL DERN: Still, they want to hear, you know, thoughts, opinions, et cetera. They want to hear it out of your mouth. But not, you know, your mouth.

  : Is your name redacted?

  MICHAEL DERN: Nope.

  : Well aren’t you special.

  MICHAEL DERN: My name is a matter of public record. So yeah. Yeah, I am special. Not as special as you, though, but

  : You sure know how to sweet-talk

  MICHAEL DERN: I do. So how’s it going?

  : That’s it? Just how’s it going?

  MICHAEL DERN: We’ll start there, sure.

  : Seriously?

  MICHAEL DERN: Seriously.

  : Not good.

  MICHAEL DERN: No?

  : Yeah. Not good. And I’m saying that knowing full well that I could lose my job, and the job of everyone else here. It’s not good.

  MICHAEL DERN: What’s so not good about it?

  : The results we’re getting. is excited about them, sure. His but you’ve got to understand that… like, think of looking at a dark room. You see a flash on one side. Then you see it again on another. What’s the guarantee that it’s the same light? Isn’t a much more practical explanation that it’s just two different lights that appear similar?

  MICHAEL DERN: You know I’m a physicist too, right?

  : Yeah, but you went to Stanford, so.

  MICHAEL DERN: Very cute. So you’re saying you disbelieve

  : hypothesis about the photon tracking.

  What I will say is that I think we’ve made more progress exploring photon signatures than we ever have on cosmic bruising. If there’s one great contribution we’ve made to science, it’s that.

  MICHAEL DERN: What do you feel is the problem?

  : It’s the math. Listen, I… I know this theory is popular. The multiverse theory, or what have you. Of course it is, it’s dippy and crazy and fun. But the math isn’t right. They can always adjust for whatever results they get. Nothing can get disproven. And if nothing can get disproven, nothing can get proven, Michael. And while I think is making progress in a lot of fields, they’re not the ones we’re supposed to be making progress in. We have not found any evidence that we are anywhere close to simulating suspended bruising. Nor have we found any evidence—hard evidence, mind—that the phenomena we’re witnessing, if we could call them that, are a result of bruising. which I know is just his absolute baby, is an impressive device that has led to remarkable breakthroughs in particle physics. None of which he was looking for.

  MICHAEL DERN: None of which you were looking for either. You helped design it. A lot of this was your idea.

  [PAUSE]: Yeah. Yeah. But. I mean, eventually you have to grow up, don’t you?

  MICHAEL DERN: How do you dispute the photon signature?

  : I dispute it because the two signatures—which appear to be the same, but, again, they can prove anything, because of how they’re fiddling with the math—appeared an insignificant distance apart. I saw nothing suggesting transportation. It’s not what we wanted to see.

  MICHAEL DERN: What you wanted to see.

  : No. No, it’s not what I wanted to see. I wanted to see something much larger. I don’t know. I wanted to be talking nanometers, not Planck’s lengths. Millimeters, even. Fuck, centimeters.

  MICHAEL DERN: That’s… extreme.

  : Well, we wanted extreme. What we were first shooting at—when we were using solid numbers, I mean—was something extreme. If we could honestly induce subatomic aphasia—really, really create our own bruising—then we would be seeing something extreme. Significant displacement. Indisputable duplication. I don’t know. That’s the thing. We just didn’t know. And here we are. Now, I know are all excited over this. But they have their own club, and, you know, they all get together and titter over things. And yeah, it’s not fun that I’m excluded from that group just because . But I’m being impartial here. I really am. I don’t think they’re right. Even if they’re using my math, my research. And the fucking competition…

  MICHAEL DERN: You think it’s harmful?

  : Are you stupid? Of course it’s harmful! We’ve got all these people who do essentially the same thing, many of whom have been rivals for a damn long time, all cooped up in the desert spending their time inside a fucking mountain not getting the results they wanted. It’s shark-infested waters here, Mike. Even if the sharks are wearing… what’s that sweater that wears?

  MICHAEL DERN: Alpaca.

  : Yes. Fucking alpaca sweaters. Jesus Christ. You want us to lay aside our differences, sit down, create something great. Like they did at Los Alamos. But this isn’t Los Alamos. There isn’t a war going on, or at least not a real one. And we’re not Oppenheimer, or Bohr, or Feynman, or any of the rest of them. Just a bunch of assholes in the desert gnawing their arms off.

  MICHAEL DERN: And do you think they treat you differently? Even from the others?

  : What, because I’m or because I’m a good-looking

  [SILENCE]

  : That’s very tactful of you, Mike. To answer your question, yes, I think they treat me differently. I think I’m excluded from a lot. But it doesn’t stop there. The town treats us differently.

  MICHAEL DERN: You think the problems extend to Wink?

  : Not these exact problems. And they’re not overt problems. It’s a… sense. A way they look at us.

  MICHAEL DERN: Wink was built to support you all.

  : And you don’t think that pisses them off? Christ, I’d be disappointed. I mean, have you met us? They don’t even have good television out here. They only broadcast shows from, like, fifteen years ago. The Ozzie and Harriet reruns… I’m surprised we don’t have any suicides. But what’s really bad about it is that we all know, somewhere in the back of our heads, that this is all supposed to be perfect. This place is supposed to be…

  MICHAEL DERN: The future.

  : Yeah. Yeah, the future. We give a little to the town. The streetlights. Power. Other little innovations. But they know, deep down, that it’s not a real place. It’s… invented. It’s fake. Like Las Vegas, but worse. At least Vegas makes money.

  MICHAEL DERN: What makes you think this facility doesn’t make money?

  : I guess that’s a good point. We could be shoveling out patents and they’d never tell us. I guess could have cooked up a whole lot of patents and they’re just waiting to get out and… well. That would never happen, would it.

  MICHAEL DERN: No. There are a lot of eyes on you all.

  : You mean us all.

  MICHAEL DERN: Right.

  : For now, yeah. If we don’t make more progress, I’m sure the eyes will look at something else. And the funding will go there too. Listen, I’ve said what I came to say. Anything more you want to ask me?

  MICHAEL DERN: Relationships.

  [SILENCE]

  : Yeah?

  MICHAEL DERN: Are you involved in any?

  [SILENCE]

  : No, Mike. No, I am not.

  INVESTIGATION OF EQUIPMENT MALFUNCTION

  DR. RICHARD COBURN

  AUGUST 13TH, 1975

  It is important to note when considering this case that the equipment involved (the Suspended Bruising Lens, or simply “lens”) has so far functioned without issue, or noticeable issue, for the better part of half a decade. I have personally never witnessed any error with the equipment, and though our reports show what they show, I have some reason to doubt them, for reasons that will be made clear. But for the moment I would ask all of you to remember that thus far the lens has given no hint of genuine anomaly in its performance, or at least not one on this scale. In short, I believe my testimony below will lead you to believe, just as I do, that the issue is likely one of personnel, rath
er than an error in equipment, equipment maintenance, or data input.

  Some background:

  Steven Helm is our chief lab assistant, and while previously his record was without blemish I must report that he has voiced some (unfounded, in my opinion) concerns regarding the lens with increasing frequency. These were never voiced to me directly, nor have they ever been reported on record with Michael Dern (COS), but his issues have filtered through to me mostly from Eric Bintly and Laura Alvarez, who are, as you no doubt know, our primary researchers on staff. I did note some curiosities in Mr. Helm’s behavior, but I chalked it up to simple laziness or restlessness, which is, I feel, quite a reasonable assumption considering our location, our seclusion, and the high-pressure nature of this work.

  The greatest symptom of Mr. Helm’s suspicions was his reluctance to enter the testing chamber, which was of course quite an obstacle. Whenever someone needed him to enter the chamber, Mr. Helm was either not to be found or he would formulate some elaborate task that had fully engaged his time and efforts. Thus we, the project manager and primary researchers, would have to do his duties for him, which often consisted of adjustments, measurements, and other tasks that required little to no education. This went on for about a month before the incident. I suppose it is my fault that I allowed this behavior to continue; we have been working on this project together for so long, and have become so familiar with each other, that our strictures may have become a bit lax.

  The second symptom is one I did not witness myself, for I was never present. (I assume the relevant testimonies are being presented to you independently—at least, I hope they are.) But on the rare occasions when Mr. Helm could be coerced to enter the chamber to do his work, he avoided the lens plates. Specifically, he avoided looking into their reflective surfaces. It was Dr. Bintly who first noticed this behavior, and he treated it with great levity (so I understand), making the usual comments one can expect about vanity, fixing one’s hair, checking for food in one’s teeth, etc., but Mr. Helm was not at all receptive to such humor, and I am told his reaction was quite rude, shocking both Dr. Bintly and Dr. Alvarez. Dr. Alvarez later confronted Mr. Helm about his comments, and Mr. Helm admitted he did not feel “all right, at all” around the lens. His reasons for this were vague and unclear, but if I may be honest I believe he thought that when he looked into the lens plates he imagined seeing something. I even believe he thinks he saw someone in the mirror who was not himself, i.e., a reflection of someone who was not there.