Kitman Versus The Squirrels

A novel. With some squirrels in.

<< Chapter 7 >>

In Which Our Protagonists Boldly Go...Somewhere.

At the indecent hour of six the next morning I was awakened by a Kitman pounding on the guest bedroom door. He had hair like Feynman and a piece of paper, the latter in his hand.

"You may find this hard to swallow," he said, "as the mother bird said after bringing home the boa constrictor, but I've invented a new science of hypo-homeopathic electronics." He held out the paper, and snatched it back before I could see it. This was not intentional rudeness; he was just antsy. He was displaying a tendency to glare suspiciously at random bits of the atmosphere.

"Hypo-homeopathic electronics," I prompted.

"Yes. Very much so. A device that, very literally and very dynamically, does nothing. Want to help me build it?"

"Build it?" I said. (Normally I don't echo, but I'm never at my best in the early morning, i.e. before noon.)

He held out the paper again and this time I snagged it. I gave its contents a careful examination and knew immediately that it was a circuit diagram by the way that Kitman told me it was a circuit diagram.

"It's a circuit diagram," said Kitman. "I had another epiphany, but this one came with directions. I call it a vacuum oscillator. Could be quite interesting."

"What is it? Your instantaneous space travel thing?"

"Umm...no. Yes. Maybe, yeah."

As I say, Kitman has had peculiar ideas before — but this one was A) a bit much and B) a bit familiar.

"Kitman," I said, "did you ever see a movie called EXPL—"

"—Yes I did, and it was terrible, " he said. "The Phantom Edit version was much better. But I recognize my own thought processes. You may recall that when I qualified for my electronics merit badge the phrase 'Kitman logic' was invoked by the examiner?"

"Um," I said. "Yes." It had been a badge given under duress.

"Well, this —" he took the diagram back and waved it in the air — "is unquestionably my own work." He looked at it a while, turned it upside down and looked at it again, then turned it ninety degrees and stuffed it in his pajama pocket. "Possibly an inspired design — but my design nonetheless." He pulled it back out of his pocket and traced its pathways with a finger (I didn't notice which one).

"It's the simplest thing imaginable, really — it's nothing, literally nothing — the vaxillator pulls the zero through itself, you see — I mean, technically it performs a Sokal-Derrida transform on the Planck-level vacuum and creates a transitional fractal, fractional void, which in quantum hermeneutics is called a transic space — did you say whether you'd help me build it? I need you to design the case."

"Do I get a cut of the fabulous proceeds?"

"The more fabulous they are," said Kitman, with nigh-English-major precision, "the higher the percentage."

"Deal," I said.

 

•

 

And so we went to Electronics Trash Hut.

The best reason for cities is that if you get enough people into a small enough space you'll have enough demand for almost anything to sustain a business specializing in it — Viking clothing stores, Vegan bookstores, Jain delicatessens, radio and television repair, you name it.

Electronics Trash Hut in Abelton mainly focuses on equipment you would think people had lost interest in when Marconi died, with a hefty side order of surplus sold out of barrels.

It had a bell hanging on the inside of the door, with a taped-up clapper that went bunk when we stepped inside, and for some reason most of the ceiling lights were burned out.

As far as what was under the lights went, it actually held a candle to the Kitman basement, but Kitman did not waste time boggling; he went straight for the counter and asked the man behind it if he had any Edisonic Model IA Vacuum Tubes.

The man behind the counter boggled.

We could tell he was boggling by the way his gold pince-nez fell from his nose.

"Good heavens and earth," he said. "Edisonic? I haven't heard that name in sixty-two years —" he looked at a clipboard on the counter — "eight months and five days."

"But do you carry them?" said Kitman.

"Carry them?" expostulated the man behind the counter. He arose and tottered toward a door in the back of the store, which he unlocked and opened to reveal shelves stacked ceiling-high with vacuum tube boxes. "I can't get rid of 'em! I've been waiting sixty-two years for someone to come in and ask for some! Take 'em all!"

(Kitman explained this later. As is well known, Thomas Edison's first light bulb never burned out and is still working today. The Edisonic Vacuum Tube is of the same design. Once you buy an Edisonic Vacuum Tube, you never need another, which of course was a significant flaw in Edison's business model.)

We didn't take them all, not even for free, but we did fill a shopping bag out of basic human compassion. Only then did Kitman start barrel-digging, something he was quite good at due to his basement experience, and eventually surfaced with two smallish, blackish devices with grayish, computerish displaysh.

"Whoa," said Kitman.

"What are those?" I said.

"Wozboxes," he said.

"What are those?" I said.

"Wozboxes!" he said.

"Imagine," I said, "that you have deja vu."

"PDAs of a very limited production lifetime. Not unlike the modern pocket computers, but to the untrained mind utterly useless because they won't run applications for Windows, Linux, PalmOS, or anything anyone is currently familiar with. Worthless to most people. To me —"

"To you, $9.95 each," said the man behind the counter.

We eventually escaped Electronics Trash Hut with exactly enough money for the bus ride home, and returned to the tree lab.

 

•

 

"What's so great about the Edisonic Vacuum Tube?" I said.

Kitman was sitting cross-legged amid his newly acquired jumble of electronic equipment, pressing one finger to his upper lip while pointing with a pen at item after item. He hummed to himself while doing so, possibly performing the vaxillator equivalent of the Head Bone song.

When he was done he said "Aside from never burning out, the Edisonic contains the most perfect vacuum available outside of intergalactic space. Nobody knows how they did it. It was the last thing Edison and Tesla did together before that elephant broke up the team." (Kitman has a framed newpaper page commemorating the event. EDISON SQUASHED BY ELEPHANT is the headline. The accompanying photo is of an elephant with a smirk on its face. You can't see Edison as he is on the far side of the elephant.)

"And?" said I.

"Well, you'll see," said Kitman. "Pass me the soldering iron and the glue gun, please."

I did, and he quickly and assuredly assembled two vaxillators.

Each began with a breadboarded circuit, several artfully deployed vacuum tubes, alligator clips, a battery casing, and finally an RS-232 port for connection to a Wozbox.

"There," he said. "All done but the software." Sensing my disappointment, he quickly added "But I can test the basic functionality."

He wired the two systems together. "One positive and one negative. If they're both working properly, nothing will happen due to the mutual cancellation effect." He pressed buttons on each machine simultaneously.

Nothing happened.

"Oops," he said. "Wait a minute. I forgot." He installed a pair of triple-A batteries, and then pressed the buttons again.

Nothing happened.

"Success!" he said.

I gave him a bland look. "What," I said, "would have happened if they hadn't been working correctly?"

"Well, nothing, only more so. The non-working one would have had its existence suppressed until I turned the other one off."

"Oh," I said. "Kitman, what exactly do these things do, again?"

"Um..." He scratched at an ear (his own). "Instantaneous point to point travel, based on Fourier-Heisenberg derived ontological signatures."

"Hah?"

"For example, I can take a reading of any location, save it as a bookmark, and return to that location from anywhere else I happen to go, instantly."

"Really?"

"Pretty sure."

"Cool."

"Now, the hard part," he said, pointing at the vaxillators. "That's your job. —Make 'em look good."

 

•

 

And I did.

I mounted the electronics on insulated oak slabs, which slid into hand-tooled, hand-polished matching oak cases.

The Wozboxes fit into slots in the front and were secured in place with latching mechanisms of smoked ABS plastic that had started out their existences in electric hot dog cookers. The RS-232 ports I set into recessed holes behind the Wozboxes. The battery compartments were spring-loaded pop-outs on the sides. They ended up looking like cases for really expensive binoculars. I burned my signature into the backs and gave them a coat of lacquer.

After they'd dried I brought them into Kitman's room to show them off. He was tick-tacking away at the keyboard of a leftover Apple IIgs, which as it happened was software-compatible with the Wozbox.

"Nice?" I asked.

"Steve Jobs couldn't have asked for more," said Kitman, nodding with approval. "I can face aliens with style-conscious confidence carrying a box like that." He pressed a key and the computer went beep. "—There. All done but for the testing and debugging."

"You really must tell me sometime, Kitman," I said, "exactly how you managed to codify this existential bookmarking business into a mangled heap of Applesoft BASIC with a shim of 65816 assembler code."

"I owe it all to the excellent I/O port design on the WozBox, " he said. "When it comes to low-level interfacing with reality, there's just none better."

And of course it was at this point that the, for lack of a better word, reality of the situation struck me.

"Um," I said. "Is this going to be safe?"

"Absolutely." And he explained.

 

•

 

Consider it this way: the set of particles that constitutes "you" can be considered to have a unique probability of continued existence associated with or derived from the conditions that obtain around that set.

This is your negative-entropic stability indentation in space-time.

This indentation is of a distinct multidimensional shape, which of course defines and is defined by "you" .

Each particle in your set exists in a given place only statistically, in the form of a bell-curve distribution of probability.

For every point in the universe there is a small but finite chance that, at any given moment, some given particle of your body will actually start existing there.

Your transic delta is the probability of all the particles in your set spontaneously starting to exist at said other point, en masse.

And the probability that you will cease to exist, having started to exist there, is your positive-entropic instability indentation.

If you run a transform of your negative-entropic stability indentation by way of any given transic delta and its corresponding positive-entropic instability you can determine how likely it is that, should you spontaneously start existing at that given point, you will stop existing.

Much as light always takes the shortest possible path, or geodesic, by taking every possible path and then retroactively cancelling the less efficient paths, when the vaxillator cancels the entropic stability indentation of "you" in one place and asserts it elsewhere, "you" will settle into all possible slots in the target range, and then choose an entropic stability geodesic by retroactively cancelling all the incompatible matches. You might even "skate" all the way back to your origin point, if that was the safest place for you. Simple physics.

 

•

 

"So what you're saying is that, if we're transported across the universe to a given target point, we'll automatically and unavoidably be relocated from that target point to a point, or rather the point, where we would most likely already be existing and most likely to continue existing, had we not been already been existing where we were existing originally?" I said.

Kitman looked at me a while, his hands immobile above the keyboard.

"Um," he said, "I hope not..."

 

•

 

"If I hadn't just seen my house devoured by phantom squirrels," said Kathleen, "I might find some of that less than credible."

"You wait, it gets worse," I said, and silently cursed my own honesty.

"How could it?" she said.

"Tell her about Noel," said Kitman.

She looked at me expectantly.

After a moment she said "That's your cue. Who's Noel?"

"He's a friend of ours," I said, "who, uh —" and I stopped after the dash because I didn't know how to proceed.

"A friend of yours? That is strange," said Kathleen.

"A friend of ours," said Kitman, "who happens to be — how shall I put this? — of the avian persuasion."

"He's a duck," I said.

"Ah," said Kathleen. She smiled and nodded. "You're right, it's getting worse. What kind of duck?"

"Oh, a big one," said Kitman. He waved his hand in the air at about chest height, and then stood up and did it again.

"Anthropomorphic?" said Kathleen, with a slight hesitation after the second syllable to indicate that, all else notwithstanding, talking ducks were a bit much.

"Not in his opinion," said Kitman.

"Technically," I said, scratching my nose, "he's probably got Indian Runner duck ancestry, since they walk upright. Although he's green, and I haven't seen any green Indian Runners."

Kathleen gave us about a half-degree's worth of nod, and fixed her gaze on the back patio of the Cape Hatteras below us. "Kelly green? or grass green?"

"More of a lime sherbet," I said.

"And you met him...?"

"In the other universe." I hesitated. "He looks a little like Roddy McDowell."

"It's all horribly, horribly true," said Kitman.

Kathleen looked at us over the tops of her sunglasses, and then reached up and moved her sunglasses further down her nose to give us the sort of look you need to move your sunglasses further down your nose for. "Can I get some extraordinary evidence on that extraordinary claim?"

Kitman countered the over-the-sunglasses look with a tilt-of-the-head move, followed by a drumming-of-the-fingers on the top of the travel chest.

Overhead, the branches of the tree rustled due to wind or squirrels or possibly nothing at all, and acorns pattered down on the tree lab's tin roof, tapping out shave-and-a-haircut.

Since there's no passing that up, Kitman did a two-bits on the travel chest with his heels.

There was a click, and a drawer slid open out of its bottom front.

"I thought you said there was no secret compartment," said Kathleen.

"There isn't," said Kitman, bending down to reach into the drawer. "In a formal sense, this drawer doesn't exist." He unbent and held up a hand-tooled oak box, or rather a handsome hand-tooled oak box, which he turned over to reveal my signature, burned into it.

"Behold...the vacuum oscillator. You wanted evidence, here it is."

Kathleen, with as much skepticism as could be mustered under the circumstances, took the evidence out of his hands and popped it open to get a look at the circuitry inside.

Inexplicably, Kitman had not been anticipating this.

"Do you mind?" he said Kitman. "It's the only one we have, so kindly refrain from the finger-poking." He tried to grab it back, but Kathleen leaned out of the way.

"Why isn't the vacuum tube connected to anything?" said Kathleen, turning away from another grab.

Kitman stood up and repossessed his property with prejudice.

"Duh, " he said, and latched the case shut with a gesture that condensed whole realms of suppressed grumpage into a small movement of the thumb. "That's the whole point. If it was connected, it couldn't very well do nothing, now could it?"

Kathleen looked down at her shoes, clicked the heels together three times while whispering something under her breath, and finally pushed her sunglasses back into place before looking up again. "Um...yes? actually?"

Kitman gave her the eyebrow raised and fixed.

"Could it do nothing like this?" he said. And he pressed the Go button.

Nothing happened —

 

•

 

— and we were standing — not sitting — in a very dark pine forest.

"Now that is some kind of nothing," said Kitman with considerable self-satisfaction.

A wave of disorientation swept over me; being rendered momentarily nonexistent can do that to a fellow. When I had gotten over it, Kathleen had removed her sunglasses and was looking around with an unreadable expression on her face.

Finally she said, "Well, that didn't help," and put them back on.

This was quite reasonable, because we were also standing in broad daylight; it just wasn't immediately obvious due to the unusual darkness of the trees themselves. They were almost black; tall and twisted, their branches intertwined to the point that if there were any squirrels around they they could easily go about the adorable fuzzy affairs of their verminous lives without ever touching the ground. The air was filled with a cold and slightly disturbing scent that was only mostly pine.

Kathleen sniffed the aforementioned air. "Is that...ammonia?"

"Yes," said Kitman. "Interesting forest, isn't it?" he added with a sort of restrained pride.

"Why are we standing? We were sitting."

"Entropic continuity. If we had been here to begin with, we would most probably have been standing. — Interesting forest, isn't it?" he added again.

Kathleen took a few steps closer to the nearest tree, and looked up at it thoughtfully. "There are no branches close to the ground," she said. This was true: there were no limbs within fifteen feet of the ground as far as we could see.

"And where are all the needles?"

The forest floor was bare except for mosses and heather and assorted bracken.

"This is clearly not a normal forest," said Kitman. "Notice anything else?"

Kathleen put her hands behind her back and walked a slow ellipse of some thirty feet in circumference, carefully examining her surroundings.

"Stone vents in the ground?" she said.

"Not vents," said Kitman. "Exits. And...entrances."

Kathleen looked at me. "I can tell by the ellipsis that he's going to explain."

I nodded sagely.

"Fine," she said. "Where are we and why?"

"This," explained Kitman, "is the first place we came after I got the software up and running. As to the grotty details, I will allow Williams here to give you the precis, if you're going to be casting aspersions on my didacticism." And he stalked away up the hill. "Better come along, " he called over his shoulder. "You don't want to be caught out here after dark, and darkness falls at inconvenient times here."

"Splendid," said Kathleen. She took her sunglasses off and stuck them on my face. "Lay on, MacFudd!"

"What am I explaining, exactly?" I said as we chased after Kitman.

"How and why," said Kitman over his shoulder. "Take it from the bit where I announced my greatest epiphany."

"Which one was that?"

"The tuning fork. You remember that, surely?"

 

•

 

"Ouch!" I said, on account of Kitman had just struck me over the head with a tuning fork.

It was a few uneventful days after he'd finished building the vaxillator prototypes. He'd spent all that time in his room writing and debugging code; I'd spent it in the auxiliary library downstairs reading through the Recent Acquisitions shelf. I had just reached the W's and something titled TEAPOTS ON STUN when Kitman came into the library and struck me over the head with the aforementioned tuning fork.

"It works like a tuning fork," explained Kitman.

"What does?" I said, rubbing my afflicted area.

"The universe. Actually," he said, "it doesn't."

I looked at his hair, which was standing on end.

"Don't tell me," I said. "You had another epiphany. You always get incoherent when you've been hanging upside down."

"Yes, yes I did. If you strike a tuning fork, you get a note, right?"

"An A note, generally — ow! Stop hitting me on the head with a tuning fork. It's highly distracting."

"440 cycles per second, yes," said Kitman, holding the freshly restruck tuning fork to my ear. "But it's not really 440 cycles per second, because the tuning fork is a composite object. Display this waveform on an oscilloscope and you'll see that due to variations in the composition and density of the metal it's actually producing a subtle chord — a complex superposition of frequencies, some higher, some lower, and of different amplitudes. No two tuning forks are completely identical, so no two tuning forks produce the exact same tone. Given a sufficiently accurate recording of the tone, you can identify the fork that produced it."

"I'm with you so far," I said, to avoid being hit with the tuning fork again.

"I apologize profusely, " he said, and left the room.

Eventually he returned with one of the vaxillator prototypes, and proceeded to attach its alligator clips to my earlobes. "Ask me about the particles," he said.

"Tell me about the particles, Kitman," I said. "Ow!"

"It's a fundamental principle of physics that all subatomic particles are identical," he said, pressing buttons on the Wozbox keypad.

"Is it."

"No." He fiddled with the buttons on the Wozbox a bit more. "But close enough. A little inaccuracy saves reams of explanation. Anyway, there's a basic philosophical principle stating that any two objects that are wholly identical are necessarily the same object. — If two particles are identical, how do they avoid getting confused?"

"Do they avoid—?"

"So far. Anyway, the answer is — probability vibrations." He turned the vaxillator toward me. The screen of the Wozbox was displaying what appeared to be a happy little cloud of the Bob Ross variety, pink subdivision. "Every particle has its own unique ontological oscillation, except that instead of moving back and forth like a tuning fork prong it moves multidimensionally in and out over the curve that constrains its potential locations. Particles play notes, and sets of particles like you, me and this room play chords. This —" he indicated the screen — "is a live concert recording of your basic existence."

"Gosh, I'm handsome," I said.

"It's your good side." And he left the room again, taking the vaxillator with him.

I was about to return to my book when he returned — by which I mean appeared out of thin air.

He took a deep breath.

So did I, but he got more use out of his.

"Using vacuum oscillator technology and Fourier-Heisenberg analysis," he said, "I decomposed your ontologically unique existential chord into a resosignature¹, and then used that resosignature to identify and locate you and return to your side simply by generating a transic space and vectoring down the entropic stability geodesic. The entropic stability principle's automatic adjustment for the kinetic energy differential, of course, is almost lagniappe."

I applauded.

"Thank you," said Kitman modestly. "Now this is where it gets interesting."

I stopped applauding.

He showed me my pink-cloud image again. "This, as I say, is you. This —" he pressed a button and displayed an almost wholly identical image — "is the television set in my room; and this is the kitchen sink." He showed me another image that looked almost identical to the first two. "No two particles are the same color, because they're unique, but you can't really tell because they aren't unique enough. The color variations are minor because the differences in location are minor. If I had a resosignature taken on the other side of the universe it would show on this display in a rather fetching shade of violet. Now look at this."

He pressed the button (again) and the screen shifted (again).

"This is the resosignature of the keychain." It was a happy little pink cloud — filled with boiling blobs of black and white.

I tried to think of something to say and failed.

"And this is just the fob." Solid black outlined with white.

I tried to think of something to say and failed again.

"I'm glad you asked me that question," said Kitman, walking around the room randomly and staring at the ceiling beatifically. "My hypothesis is that certainly the fob, and possibly the keychain and the travel chest, which I've already established to contain a surfeit of nothingness, are from somewhere else in capital letters."

"Somewhere Else?" I said.

"Mmm...add italics. Did I say 'this is where it gets interesting'?"

"Yes."

"I was wrong. This is where it gets interesting. If I generate a transic space and vector myself through the resosignature of the fob," said Kitman, "I'll appear next to the fob, upstairs in my bedroom. But if I exclude the bedroom area from the search function —" he pressed buttons on the Wozbox — "where will I go?"

I waited.

"Nowhere?" I said.

"Maybe, but I think I'll be taken to the next closest match. Which would be...somewhere in the fob's universe of origin."

"Oh," I said. "Somewhere where, exactly?"

"Somewhere perfectly safe, of course. I explained that earlier."

He leaned down to look me in the eye, striking me in the head with his head in the process, and said "Want to come along?"

 

•

 

"How was that, Kitman?" I asked, as we approached a break in the forest.

"Perfect! I didn't recognize a word of it, but you really got the feel."

"Wait a minute! " said Kathleen. She ran around us and blocked our path, arms spread wide. "Under the possibly paranormal influence of an inexplicable object of unknown origin, you invented a gadget whose operational principle is beyond all known physics, and then used it to punt yourselves into an entirely different universe on the basis of questionable data and wild speculation?"

"Um," said Kitman, "yeah."

"Why?"

Kitman opened and closed his mouth a few times and finally said, "Do I criticize how you spend your summer vacation?"

Kathleen looked at me, hoping for a dose of sanity.

I scratched my head. "It seemed to make sense at the time. Kitman's enthusiasms are contagious."

"Okay," said Kathleen, dropping her hands. "I just wondered."

We emerged from the forest and found ourselves on a curving path.

"Left, wasn't it?" said Kitman, looking up and down the path. "Yes, left is right."

"Where are we going?" said Kathleen.

"You'll see, he said mysteriously," said Kitman.

Kathleen looked at him, then looked at me, then took her sunglasses back. "Go on. You were just about to go jumping blindly into the unknown without adequate preparation."

"Certainly not!" said Kitman, striding forward. "You go too far. We're scouts, remember?"

I jogged ahead of Kitman and started walking backward, as I like to see my audience.

"We loaded our backpacks quite carefully with all the necessities," I said. "Clean underwear, food, water, a book, collapsible fishing poles. Only then did Kitman press the button — and lo, we were in the tree lab next to the travel chest.

"This was a considerable disappointment even if it did sornewhat confirm Kitman's notion about nearest matches. So he excluded all of Abelton Park from the search set and pressed the button again."

"And you were in a forest unknown," said Kathleen.

"And we were in a forest unknown. And the first thing we heard was—"