The most successful ever escapee of Dead Donkey was a man named Karenval Hooke, who realized that he could leave the city by simply driving the wrong way down the in road into Dead Donkey, because no one in their right mind ever came into the city and the in road was therefore almost entirely clear. Local legend insists he is still serving the jail sentence he received for reckless driving once he made it to Las Vegas.
“Tricky,” the bartender repeated. “The nearest settlement from here is - oh - a hundred miles away, and everything from here to there is unforgiving desert. Just vast endless sands, cactus, and roadside McDonalds, as far as the eye can see. You’d have to be crazy to try. Have you tried riding out on horseback?” He suggested. “The horse would have to be bribed, of course, but you might be able to convince it to make the attempt.”
Nathan was still staring at his drink; he’d hadn’t tasted it yet, but the fumes were causing his nostrils to bleed.
“I have been killed by a serial killer twice and died in a plane crash once, and I still haven’t done my laundry,” he complained. “Bureaucrats are after me and all the riding in the firetruck made me feel carsick. That’s why I felt I needed a drink.”
Travis ignored him.
“When I was traveling in Africa,” he said, “I learned that I do not get along very well with horses.”
“How can you tell?” Nathan asked.
“Mainly because they kept walking off the road and taking me into graveyards. I got the message after the twentieth time it happened.”
“What did you do to make the horses so mad at you?”
“I think it probably has to do with my smell,” Travis said with a shrug. “And because at the time I was working as a glue salesman.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in money.”
“I don’t,” Travis said airily. “I still believe in work. That is the point.”
Nathan didn’t entirely follow, but then again he had taken a sip of the Dead Donkey ale, and everything had gone quite hazy.
“Why is the room suddenly so foggy?,” he asked Travis. “Did you turn on a cloud machine? Please stop it.”
Travis ignored him.
“Is there any other way out of the city?” he asked.
The bartender thought about this, and then shrugged his shoulders.
“If you can’t drive - if you already tried flying - if you’re not willing to ride - there’s only one way out of Dead Donkey.” He leaned in confidentially. “You’ll have to go to a travel agency. They’ll work in an emergency. But it’ll cost you.”
“That’s alright,” Travis said. “I don’t believe in money.”
“And I don’t believe in drinking, but I still work here,” the bartender said with a shrug.
Nathan had taken another sip of the ale and staggered. He pushed it away, deciding it was not to his liking.
Brian stirred groggily.
“Oh no,” he said, looking around. “Why am I awake? I preferred things the other way.”
“Drink this,” Nathan advised him.
He took a sip and immediately jumped up as if he’d sat on an angry cat. Travis hauled Brian to his feet, thanked the bartender, and went to leave - Brian in tow.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to pour the rest of this out,” Nathan advised the bartender.
The bartender shrugged and poured it down the sink. The sink melted.
They walked back outside into the late afternoon cool.
“You know,” Travis commented suddenly, “Dead Donkey is a very violent place.”
“Is it?” Nathan asked as a car bomb exploded in the distance. “I’ve never noticed.”
“Yes, it is,” Travis affirmed. Just across the street three masked men had confronted an old lady in a flagrant mugging in broad daylight. It was over in a heartbeat; the three masked men were left unconscious on the roadside and the old lady walked away whistling, their wallets clutched in her gnarled hands.
On the street corner, a disgusting hobo was sitting surrounded by filth, clad in scummy gray rags. His gnarled hands grasped a cardboard sign that said, “please help,” in permanent marker. Despite the apparent direness of his situation, he was laughing, periodically taking a few swigs from a steel flask of ale. His dirty face glowed with delight as he did this and he muttered nonsense words, his wild eyes jumping between pedestrians.
Brian stopped to stare at him.
“Look at that man,” he said, indicating the hobo.
Nathan briefly glanced at him and nodded thoughtfully.
“You know, I think that’s the happiest I’ve ever seen the mayor.”
Chapter 27
The Dead Donkey City Council has long since decided that they’re going to be damned if they let anyone improve the city of Dead Donkey more than they have. Since they have never succeeded in improving the city in any way whatsoever, the business of the Dead Donkey City Council now consists mainly of denying building permits (as indeed does the business of most city councils). Like all city councils, they have a vast array of political weasel words that they can use to deny a building permit. If a site is dilapidated and ugly, they can call it “historic.” If it is undeveloped and ugly, they can call it “natural.” If it is overbuilt and ugly, they can call it “urban.”
If, on the other hand, it is beautiful, they can call it “marked for demolition.”
Using these clever weasel words, the city council has managed to table all motions for useful construction for the past three decades.
(Coincidentally, owing to the undue influence of vast Swedish furniture cabals in government, all parliamentary procedures are named after types of furniture. A motion is said to be “tabled” if it has been postponed, a committee is said to be “chaired” by its leader, and an elected lawmaking body is said to be “Ottomanned” if it has recently been sidelined by the growing influence of Janissaries. This is also the reason that virtually all lawmaking bodies have suspiciously nice furniture, regardless of how small or irrelevant they actually are.)
This explains why there is only one road going into or out of the city of Dead Donkey, and the outgoing section of this road has a traffic jam that is entering its sixth decade and will shortly become eligible for social security benefits.
The total lack of city development and infrastructure spending means that a tremendous number of people want to leave Dead Donkey, but no one actually can. This has itself contributed to the rise of travel agencies in Dead Donkey.
Travel agencies in Dead Donkey run a business that consists primarily of luring people into the city proper with promises of free transport (there is no traffic jam coming into the city since no one ever wants to come in) and then charging them through the nose to leave. Most are willing to pay the exorbitant prices that these businesses require. If their fee is met, the travel agencies will then transport the traveler in question out of the city with all due haste - no questions asked - though how they go about this is so heavily privileged information that it puts the Colonel’s secret blend of spices to shame. Supposedly only one man knows the method by which travel agencies spirit people out of the city, and he is constantly being watched by an assassin whose orders are to shoot him if he ever tells anyone. He lives a rather tense life, as does the assassin, since she herself has another assassin waiting to kill her in case she fails to kill the man with the secret.
Nathan was not thinking about any of this. Rather, he had just seen a piece of thin, bendy plastic sheeting by the roadside and pocketed it, deciding it would be nice to have for later.
Meanwhile, Brian was being brought up to speed.
“So what are we doing now?” he asked.
“Leaving,” Travis said matter-of-factly.
“Oh good,” Brian said brightly. He was already looking forward to filling out the necessary paperwork to authorize his departure from this wretched hellhole.
Nathan frowned. He quite liked this wretched hellhole.
“I don’t really see why I have to go,”
he said.
Travis raised his eyebrows.
“Someone is trying to kill you in this city.”
“But that’s not so bad, is it?”
“And Director Fulcher is trying to put your file in order.”
“I won’t let him.”
“Given how close you have already come to letting him trick you...”
“I won’t let it happen again.”
“Regardless, we need to get you out of here. If our information is correct, the people here should help you to do that.”
Travis stopped in front of a heavily fortified metal door. A sign on the front said “Travel Agency.”
He knocked on it. A little window slid open in the door, though it was no larger than a slit.
“What’s the password?” the man behind the door demanded.
“We want to get out of Dead Donkey,” Travis said.
The man blinked at them.
“Password?” Nathan suggested.
“Eh, close enough,” he said, and opened the door. “It was hxfpnszumb.”
“That’s basically the same,” Nathan agreed as the bulky guard stood aside to admit them.
Inside, there was a counter much like one would find at an old airport ticket desk. A young man sat behind it.
“Can you take us to Albany?” Travis asked the man.
The man frowned.
“Can I interest you in a trip to Australia?” he asked.
“No. I’d like to go to Albany.”
“It’s just that I could offer you a very good deal for Australia right now,” the man advised them.
“It’s got to be Albany,” Travis said insistently.
“Albany, Australia, what’s the difference?” the man said urgently. “They’re practically the same. Why not go to Australia instead? Who will know?”
Travis raised his eyebrows.
The travel agent misinterpreted this as a positive sign and pressed on.
“You could explain away your tans by saying that you’d visited a tanning salon,” he said zealously. “And you could take a picture of yourself in front of the Sydney Opera House and tell your friends it’s the New York governor’s mansion.”
He paused to collect his thoughts.
“You could tell your friends that kangaroos are native to New York.”
“I am not going on a vacation,” Travis said firmly. “I do not believe in vacations. I must go to Albany, New York, and not to any other place however similar a name it might have.”
Not to be deterred, the travel agent said, “Ayer’s Rock is basically the same as New York City.”
While Nathan was slightly impressed by the zeal with which the man had advocated Australia, and was even starting to come around to his viewpoint a little, Travis held his ground.
“Albany,” he said.
“Fine, fine. But I’ll have to check with my supervisor. I can only authorize trips to Australia.”
“Then please fetch your supervisor.”
The young man retreated into the shadows.
There was a reason he had been so insistent about sending them to Australia.
Australia is not, as is commonly believed, a vast, wealthy, and extremely happy country in the southeastern corner of the globe settled by ex-British convicts who mellowed out considerably and built a fancy opera house once they’d gotten a bit of sun. First of all, globes do not have corners. Second, Australia is in reality a crazed anarchic hellscape where machine-gun toting grizzled Australian troopers are deployed alongside eyepatch-wearing koala infantry to battle ferocious emu warlords and their kangaroo allies. Control of the continent regularly shifts between dictatorial factions as they battle for control of the continent’s precious metal and Vegemite reserves.
However, the Australians are extremely concerned that all this fighting and looting of natural resources for obscene profit will damage their reputation internationally, so they have gone to great lengths to pretend otherwise. They have heavily subsidized visitation to their country so people can come to tourist destinations like Sydney (in local language the treaty-town of New Wartopia), where tourists wander around and visit the Opera House (the New Politarmy’s Conquest Headquarters, on the days when there are no tourists around) and spend money on overpriced souvenirs and then go home and tell their friends how marvelous Australia was. Australia’s international reputation is therefore preserved and people don’t think of Australians as criminals anymore. Since the man at the counter in the travel agency got a sizable kickback for every person he sent to Australia, he was very well incentivized to make a convincing pitch to that effect.
Travis did not know any of this. He did not believe in Australia.
The first travel agent returned shortly.
“My supervisor says that it’s alright, but we don’t allow people to travel in groups. I’ll have to admit you to the next room one at a time.”
Travis bowed his head in agreement.
“I will go first,” he said.
And the man led him away.
Chapter 28
A few minutes later, the travel agent returned and led Nathan deeper into the bowels of the travel agency. Nathan was ultimately deposited alone in a very dark room.
“Hello?” he said.
Dim lights flickered on around him. He was standing in the center of a gunmetal gray platform. A nearby massive shadowy object was looming over him, and just beneath it was a tall man in a nice suit.
“Are you the supervisor?”
“I am,” the man confirmed.
“Where’s Travis?”
“We have already sent him on to Albany,” the supervisor said coolly.
“You have? How?”
The supervisor gave him a cool smile. The dim lights in the room flickered, then suddenly jumped from soft to radiant. The shadowy object in the center of the platform was bathed in light. Nathan squinted at it through the glare. The nearest part of the object seemed to be some kind of pointy, shiny tube that narrowed near the end. The tube was linked by way of a large metal arm to a vast sort of chrome crane-like-structure, coated in wires and antennae, which was itself connected to a customer satisfaction survey.
Nathan stared at it.
“What is that?” he asked uncertainly.
“That,” the supervisor said cheerily, “is how you are going to get to Albany. I take it that you don’t know what it is?”
Nathan did not know what it was, because he had never seen a teleportation device before.
Quantum physics holds that it is possible for particles to teleport, to diffuse through solid objects, and do a whole lot of other wacky things that most scientists hope they won’t have to think about because of how confusing it is. In fact, most scientists secretly think that the quantum physicists belong in the same category as the molecular biologists, cosmologists, and deep sea oceanographers - which is to say that they suspect the quantum physicists have been pulling their legs this whole time and the entire subject is just a scam for grant money. Unfortunately for those scientists who want to have a deterministic view of the universe, the quantum physicists are not in fact pulling their legs and uncertainty is the rule, not the exception.
The gist of quantum physics is that matter’s sense of self is all a bit wobbly when you get right down to it. Things aren’t really at places, there are only places that they might be (which is the reason you can never find your keys when you are late for work). So long as no one has thought to look, you might be sitting in your chair at home or you might be at work, or you might be somewhere else entirely - say, Albany. Some things are so hard to look at that they are really nowhere at all. This is called the uncertainty principle.
While this was all very exciting, unfortunately it cannot, unto and of itself, be used as a teleportation device, because despite all of the excitement around uncertainty-based revelations, after all the math was done, it turned out you still needed to be moving to go somewhere. This was deeply unfortunate for the community of en
gineers trying to develop teleportation, but another physics revelation soon brightened their day.
After building a lot of monolithically huge and fantastically expensive atom smashers, which allow particle physicists to slam the foundations of reality together until they break, particle physicists realized that particles are not really particles at all - they are, sort of, waves. This distinction is very difficult to explain to a layman, but basically think of it in terms of tennis balls.
If a particle is a tennis ball, and you are a tennis player, you can hit the particle/tennis ball and it will bounce off your racket, and off the other player’s racket, and off the floor and sometimes hit the net and the game can be played as normal.
A wave is like a particle, except sometimes the ball goes through the racket without explanation.
It turns out that particles are not particles at all but rather kinda sorta also waves, which means sometimes they can go through the racket too.
If a person could be turned into a wave, they could travel to say, Albany, very very fast because they would not have to fuss with all the solid objects (traffic jams, mountains, particle colliders, etc.) in between. If they could be accelerated to near the speed of light, this would functionally be teleportation. Unfortunately, there is no known process for turning people into waves.
The critical revelation came when these two ideas were put together, and someone realized that if you were kinda-sorta a wave, that means you might be a wave, in which case the trick was to do the opposite of what the particle physicists were doing and pointedly not look at you. If no one was looking at you, then you might be a wave, and if you might be a wave, you might be wherever you wanted to be, say, Albany.
They simply had to guarantee that no one would look at you. So they had constructed a device that relied on the power of the one object that no one ever looked at: an eighty-four page online tiny screwmaker’s customer satisfaction survey, which renders the target of the device effectively invisible to the human psyche and indeed the psyche of most higher mammals. It is the greatest source of boredom and indifference that man has ever known, and it forms the core of teleportation technology.
You Are Dead. Page 15