Arse & All - Charlie's Last Adventure Read online

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  From the glaring heat of Arizona in July, we entered a lobby that was air conditioned down to the temperature needed to freeze ice cream. The guards on either side of me wore black T-shirts with a logo that read “Backwater” under crossed machine guns. They made quite a contrast with Rosnikov, who wore all white. I imagined that he had closets of white clothes, a new set for every day. He strode ahead and applied his card and palm to a security lock on the far side of the lobby. We marched through into a long cement corridor on the same hyper refrigeration system as the lobby. At the end of the corridor was a guard. He consulted a log, checked everyone’s ID’s very carefully, made a call to an inner guard and opened the security lock with his palm print.

  Inside was a circular arena with central pit. The pit held a dentist chair with oversized arms. I didn’t like the scene at all. I ran through several escape plans, or at least ways to throttle Rosnikov before the guards got me. A man in a lab coat and thick glasses came up out of the pit and shook my hand, “Pleasure to meet you, Sir, you are a very fortunate man,” and, “Good to see you again Doctor. We’re ready.” The Backwater guards were dismissed. I put away the images of my hands around the neck of the Good Doctor.

  “Do you mind if I call you Charlie?” Rosnikov said. “My associate here, Meier, will explain the nature of the gift we are going to give you. I assure you the procedure is simpler, and probably a lot less painful, than the explanation.” He nodded to the lab fellow. “Proceed.”

  “Yes. Mr. Charlie, we are going to install a hyper dimensional portal on your body. We call it an HDP. It starts as a line, like a zipper. When it unzips, it reveals a completely isolated little universe that we make here in the lab. That universe is just like this one, but it has a soliton Higgs particle. The vacuum state is therefore at zero energy, not like our space. Because there is no Higgs process, nothing in that space can have mass. So, whatever we load into that space weighs nothing at all and has no inertia either. It’s still solid and has form, but there is a lot of room in ten dimensions. You could put three buildings in there at right angles to each other and they would not touch. That is, if we could fit them through the opening. The opening is the real trick. It has to allow the ordinary stuff in our space to cross over into that space. It has to transform them back to our space when you remove them. That’s what we have invented here. Do you follow?”

  “Hell, no, I don’t follow. Got any aspirin for a headache? Just tell me how to work it, like getting photos on my cell phone. I don’t know how the little pictures get pulled out of the air either.”

  Rosnikov took over. “Let’s see that tattoo - that’s a beauty. We’re going to put a zipper in that line there,” he traced a path from my wrist to my bicep along the peacock’s neck and back, “and attach a string to whatever goes in there to one of the feathers here,” he pointed to the feathers on my shoulder. “You open it and close it by pushing here and here and here,” indicating spots on the bird’s head. “We will put that,” he pointed to a pile of cylinders about a meter in diameter, ”in there and off you go. Got it?”

  “Uhmm, if you say so, Doctor. That pile must weigh a ton. Are you going to carry me around on a forklift?”

  “As we said, it won’t have any weight once it’s inside, in that HDP.”

  “Well, what about side effects? Can the, er, cargo survive in there?”

  The lab guy looked at Rosnikov. “You know we can’t determine the entropic coefficient.”

  Rosnikov suddenly looked tired. “We had life forms in there before. They survived.”

  “Sharks have no natural life span. We don’t know what it experienced in subjective time. And we only recovered one of them.”

  “One is all we needed.” I was trying to remember how many sharks I saw in Rosnikov’s pool aquarium. One, I think. I may not be a quantum physicist but I can count that high.

  Rosnikov turned to me. “The bugs are tough enough to live at the bottom of 10,000 foot oil wells, and they have been around for a few billion years or so. That’s why they’re called extremophiles.”

  Meier, the lab guy, added, “Those genetically modified archaea can digest any hydrocarbon in any environment. But in the HDP...” He shrugged his shoulders. It made me glad I wasn’t any kind of hydrocarbon. Of course, neither were those little sea creatures before they got turned into crude oil.

  In an hour I had an, a, uh, HDP in my arm. I pushed there, there and there on the peacock head and it opened into a weird, twisted gray space, just like he said. My arm felt normal. I put my fingers in the opening, slowly. They disappeared, they felt a little cool, but they were OK. I still had the same number of fingers when I pulled them out.

  “What’s the gray stuff?” It looked like a half-formed crystal, but it felt like cool liquid. Meier answered, “The proto-matter in the HDP cannot form atoms in the HDP universe because the essential force symmetries remain unbroken. But quantum mechanics still applies. The proto-matter forms a Bose-Einstein condensate. It’s like a big liquid crystal. Of course, if anything happens to break the symmetries, the HDP will go through a hyper expansion phase, just like our universe did. ”

  I looked at Rosnikov, “Was that English?” I peered into the foggy crystal. “How in hell do you find anything in there?” Rosnikov shrugged his shoulders. “That’s why we tie a string to the stuff we put in now.”

  A small crane loaded in the cylinders. Each one held one thousand vials. Each vial was labeled, “AZ4N9 10,000,000 I.U., 100 CC IN NUTRIENT” I guessed that was a lot of mojo per vial. I supposed the bugs were going to be dumped into a lot of oil wells. It was none of my business. I zipped up the peacock. I stood up. I felt normal. That was my business. I had a delivery to make.

  “Charlie, here is a book you might want to read if you are curious about the HDP.” He handed me a small volume, “Adventures in Flatland,” by A. Square. I was sure it was no substitute for Playboy Magazine.

  Miami International airport was routine. All I had was a backpack and a USA passport. I didn’t need a visa for Saudi Arabia. Riyadh was 14 hours away. I had a frankfurter, lots of sauerkraut and beans with a good German beer in Frankfort. I hoped the fellow in the seat behind me had a poor sense of smell. I resisted playing with the peacock that peered out from under my nylon travel shirt. I resisted, unsuccessfully, thinking about it. Eventually, my curiosity got the better of me. I started to read the little book Rosnikov gave me. It was actually not too bad. I never was a reader, but I was good at high school geometry. This was easier.

  It turns out if you draw a circle around a little two-dimensional critter, that critter is in a can. It can’t get out. But me, a mighty three-D critter with godlike powers can just reach into that circle and pluck the critter out. The extra dimension does the trick. Now if you take a real 3-D critter and seal it up in a jar, no matter how strong that jar is, a 4-D critter can just reach in from the new direction and pluck him out. I tried to imagine how many ways something could leak out of a sealed container in 10 dimensions...especially when there was no such thing as gravity. I sure hope the Good Doctor had a way to keep those bugs inside their cans.

  But I’m a practical type of guy. I mean, can you believe what this kind of invention means to international commerce, most particularly my kind of international commerce? No more cargo inspectors to be bribed, no more double blind switched trucks, no more hidden bottoms on railroad cars full of coal. I went through all the tricks of the profession, and they all came up zero. I didn’t need them anymore. One or two more jobs like this one and I can buy a nice little house on the beach with Aroyal.

  Of course there’s always the human element. Someone on each end has to know something about the load. There is always some risk, or we would all be using UPS Overnight Delivery.

  We were the last flight to Riyadh that night. There was supposed to be someone holding a placard with a silh
ouette of a horse. I came down the escalator into the customs area and saw no such person. Suddenly a tall, bespectacled fellow in a blue Nike running suit jostled me. “Clumsy idiot!” I said, and checked my wallet. The man bent his head for what I thought was going to be an apology, but instead he whispered in a garlicky breath, “The police are looking for you and they have your description.” The accent was Russian.

  Before I got to the line that said “FOREIGN VISITORS ONLY”, moving slowly along in a sea of caftans and veiled women, I saw a whole lot of uniforms. The man in the blue running suit was down on the ground with a uniform kneeling on his back.

  The uniforms had machine guns and they were looking at the people coming down the escalator. I gave a little thought to braving it out, letting them look for contraband in my knapsack. Nope. If someone gave the game away, why would they stop with just my description? How many Western passengers had a gaudy peacock on their arm?

  Then I had one of those strokes of genius, that inspiration that only seems to come to me when I’m in really deep shit. I worked my way through the tail end of the crowd, keeping my hat on and my face lowered, until I found a rest room. It was also crowded.

  A heavy man in a dark suit went to the urinal. Every man knows it takes two hands to unzip a fly. He had to put down his suitcase, a nice Samsonite type of thing. I kicked it into the nearest stall and put it up on the seat. It wasn’t a very big suitcase but it was well made. I hauled out all the clothes and threw them wherever it didn’t show and cleaned out the case. It lay open on the toilet seat.

  I peeled back the sleeve of my shirt and opened the peacock. I wasn’t sure there would be room in there with the cylinders. I thrust my left arm in as far as I could and fished around. The cylinders were out of touch, tied to the first feather. I began to think this could actually work.

  I had to take off my boots and even the jeans were too tight, so I took them off as well. I picked up one foot and slid it into the opening. It was like putting on a pair of pants, almost. I sat on the floor and put both feet into the opening. I squirmed and pushed and slid my right arm up as far as I could. It felt cold, like an unheated swimming pool. I looked down and saw my body end just under my left armpit. Unbelievable. With my one good arm I pulled the suitcase onto the floor, levered my way into the suitcase and pushed it part way along the bottom of the stall. I had bet the heavy guy would pick it up and take me out of there, past the uniforms. After all, I couldn’t have weighed more than 20 pounds at this point. Then, in the privacy of a luggage room, I would free myself and go back on mission.

  As I pushed with my free arm, the lid of the suitcase caught against the bottom of the stall door. It slammed shut on my arm. I uttered the usual expletive, fitting for this location, and withdrew my arm. The lid closed. The damn thing latched shut.

  I try to force it open. I have nothing to brace myself against - there is no bottom in the HDP. The suitcase is made to take a beating from a gorilla. No one seems to hear me. That may be a good thing. I don’t think I can run in this position.

  I am now in the suitcase, trapped, arse and all, into some protomatter hyperspace universe. It is total, pitch dark. No one has come to pick me up. I hear voices fade as the flight empties into the streets of Riyadh and leaves me alone. The urinals flush every few minutes on timers. No one comes.

  I’m trying to find something pleasant to think about: The paycheck from Rosnikov? Nah, there is no way he could pay enough to have me turn myself into his high-tech mule. The beach house with Aroyal? Much better. She had that sweet mischief, but inside she was a good and loyal person. I wondered how much Sandy was getting for her cut. There was no question she was getting paid. I thought about all the good times Sandy and I had together. Unfortunately, that was it - good times. She was not into sharing anything else but the good times. Sandy and I never really had a breakup. I just found Aroyal, and magic happened. I still don’t understand why Aroyal tolerates Sandy, but that’s the way she is. My friends are her friends, no questions asked. I swore I would get out of this mess and marry that girl.

  I was never into philosophizing. That sort of thing leads to thinking about what I do, which I try not to think about at all. But, trapped here as I am in some twisted fate, I can’t seem to help thinking about it. What I do is illegal, sure, but if smuggling were an evil criminal activity, than the founders of our country, hell, even old Joseph Kennedy, were all evil criminals. I don’t commit murder, perform torture, subjugate populations or practice “ethnic cleansing”. I’m actually a rather nice guy with maybe a character weakness for women and a nice life style. Yesterday, that would have been enough. I could live with myself.

  My legs are cold and they are going numb. I can still fell my toes. I’m not too worried - someone cleans this place every day, I’m sure. It’s actually funny, being just a head and one arm, stuck in a suitcase in a crapper in Saudi Arabia. I would laugh, but I am worried. The sauerkraut and beans are still doing their thing in my intestines. That’s a good sign, I suppose. I’m trying to remember whether the canisters of extremophiles, the super fast oil-eating bugs, were in any special containers. And what would happen if they leaked into an HDP?

  Here I am arse deep into a man-made universe. A universe those guys made in a lab. My hind end is the god of this virgin universe. Who knows, maybe the frank farts will trigger some kind of a change. What did he call it - hyper expansion? Can you imagine a whole universe with me as the creator? “And the Odor wafted on the face of the Deep.” It’s one thing to think of yourself as a selfish little atom, where your puny crimes are simply a matter of personal emotional adjustment. It’s quite another when those traits are magnified to cosmic proportions as the creator of a universe. Now that I dwell on it, it’s a real bloody crime, isn’t it? Yup, right now it bothers me a lot.

  Something is bumping up against my toes. I try to kick it away. Oops, I think I kicked it too hard. I just kicked through something. Now my foot seems to be trapped in it. Whatever, I can’t get loose of it and my foot is being burned off. It really hurts, and it’s going up my leg. Wait a minute, there seems to be some light coming from down there. There’s a bluish glow spreading out under my crotch. I’m burning up. Is it possible jamming my foot into the canisters triggered some kind of reaction… with those bugs? After all, farts are mostly methane and methane is a hydrocarbon, right?

  It occurs to me that human body cavities are also quite open in ten dimensions.

  Would I hear a Big Bang?

  Dear Reader,

  If you like this story, you will LOVE “The Sage of Saggitarius”.

  Zila, an inexperienced diplomat, is sent to negotiate a contract with the Sage, a strange ancient creature no human has ever met. She, her molecular biologist husband and her two kids are sent on a mission to find the root of all life. What she finds is life’s perpetual nemesis, a six dimensional creature that may be as old as the universe itself.

  Can Zila and the Sage defend Earth against an enemy that exterminates other sentients as if they were vermin?

 

  Thank you!