The Love Machine & Other Contraptions

by Nir Yaniv

  “Induction. Heightened sensitivity. I’ve already explained that. It’s like Pavlov’s cat: you don’t know whether it’s alive or drooling until you’ve opened the box. This device opens the box—to use a very simplistic metaphor—and—”

  “Yeah,” said Johnny. “Great. So this thing analyzes something in my brain, somehow, and then sends it to you, right?”

  “Precisely,” said Galileo, and took the second half of the love machine out of the cart.

  “Couldn’t you have built something a little more... aesthetic? It looks like a bicycle chain.”

  “That’s exactly the kind of chain I used as a model.”

  Johnny had known Galileo for many years now, and knew that attempting to inquire why a chain of all things would result in nothing but a headache. Therefore he decided to return to his previous line of questioning, which seemed to him to be slightly safer.

  “So,” he said. “You’ve analyzed and received. What’d you get out of it?”

  “My piece does a superposition of the signals originating at your end over the electromagnetic activity, sort of, of my own brain. Not constantly, of course; single pulses. What happens then, according to the Schrödingerian Principle of Reaction—you’re heard of Schrödinger’s Dogs, right?”

  “Never mind,” said Johnny, accepting, not for the first time, that he would never understand what his friend was trying to accomplish, any more than Galileo could grasp the meaning behind his whimsi-mathematical rhymes. “For you, my dear, I am all ears—and if my rear—”

  “Excellent,” said Galileo, and put on his own chain. “If you’ll just let me turn on the machine—”

  “Go ahead.”

  Galileo pulled a switch out of his pocket and flipped it.

  Nothing happened, of course.

  ~

  “Perhaps,” said Galileo after some time has passed, “this needs a bit more work. Just don’t take the chain off, okay?”

  “Okay,” said Johnny.

  “Not even in the shower,” said Galileo.

  “Fine.”

  “Not even if she and you... well... you know...”

  “What?”

  “Well, er...”

  “Are you mental? Having sex while wearing a bicycle chain? What do I look like to you?”

  “Look,” said Galileo. “It’s a scientific experiment. You can’t be allowed to bias the results!”

  Johnny mulled it over. “You’re right,” he said eventually. “Okay. I can’t promise anything, but if that happens...”

  “I owe you,” said Galileo.

  “It’s okay,” said Johnny. “I know you’d do the same for me.”

  ~

  Ada was making another espresso in the poorly lit club kitchen, when suddenly she felt someone watching her.

  “You!” she said. “You ain’t tryin’ to sneak in again, are ya?”

  “Just to look at you!” said the redheaded semi-geek peeking out from behind the stove.

  “Getouttahere, ya freak! I dunno why I let you into the club yesterday, but it ain’t gonna happen today. Out!”

  “But why?”

  “Why? Whaddahelldayamean, ‘why’? You following me around all the time, distoibing clients, screwing up oiders, and you’re asking me why?!”

  She’s so cute when she’s thermal, thought Johnny.

  ~

  Meanwhile, a tiny thermostat broke down and silently turned off the air conditioner in Galileo’s apartment. In the basement, Galileo felt pleasant warmth spreading through his body. “It’s working!” he said aloud, wrongfully. “At last!” He hurried outside. With a little luck, he’d fall in love with the first girl he’ll meet. Or so he thought.

  ~

  “—and you have no idea how my boss flipped after that,” said Ada, who, in spite of everything, enjoyed the attention. “Believe me, I’d love to woik in hi-tech instedda this stinkin’ club—”

  ~

  On the stairs, Galileo met a downstairs neighbor whom he had always ignored, stepping out of her apartment.

  “Good evening,” he said politely. “How do you do?”

  The neighbor, who was thin and somewhat mousy, though not uncomely, stared at him suspiciously.

  “All right...” she said cautiously.

  She’s cute, thought Galileo, it’s working!—and politely introduced himself: “I’m Galileo, from upstairs. Are you new in the building?”

  “I’ve been living here for two years,” said the neighbor, offended.

  “Oh,” said Galileo. “How is it then that we’ve never met before?”

  The neighbor had no polite answer to this question, and so remained quiet.

  “Well then,” said Galileo. “So... I’m Galileo, and you are...” he glanced at the sign on her door, “... M. Curie?”

  “Mariah,” said the neighbor reluctantly.

  “Pleased to meet you!” said Galileo, who had every intention of expanding further on the subject, but just then remembered that he had to tell Johnny about his success. “Well, I must be going, so... I’ll meet you... you can come over for... uh... if you need any sugar or something... I live upstairs.” Then he left hurriedly.

  M. Curie went back to her apartment and took two radium pills for her headache. What was that all about?

  ~

  “So tell me,” said Johnny. “When do you get off? Maybe we can...”

  “What?” said Ada, who suddenly remembered that she was supposed to be angry with the (admittedly cute) redheaded guy. “What the hellerya talkin’ about? Getouttahere!”

  “Look,” said Johnny with an expression of sincerity (or so he believed—to Ada it seemed as if he was trying to check for something in his teeth), “it’s just that, er, I like you, and I thought, you know...”

  “I don’t know nothin’,” said Ada.

  Johnny looked at her quietly.

  “You know what?” she said. “Fine. Woist case, I punch yer face in, right? I get off at—”

  “There you are!” said Galileo, strolling in gaily. “It works!”

  “What woiks?” asked Ada.

  “It works?” asked Johnny.

  “It works! I met a girl, my neighbor, and the love machine... it’s amazing!”

  “It does?” asked Johnny.

  “A love machine?” asked Ada.

  “It’s unbelievable! I suddenly felt, you know, kinda hot, I went downstairs, and the neighbor... her name is...”

  “?” asked Johnny. “I didn’t believe it would work...”

  “A love machine?!” asked Ada.

  “Yes!” said Galileo.

  “Where, if the twoayoos don’t mind, is this... machine?”

  “Right there,” said Galileo innocently, and pointed at the chain on Johnny’s neck.

  “You!” snapped Ada at Johnny, “You bastard! Comin’ to me with a machine? You think a machine would make me to fall for you, you mangy little piece of—” And slapped him.

  “Oy!” said Johnny, astonished by this new development, and touched his stinging cheek.

  “Owwwww!” said Galileo, and fell in love with Ada on the spot.

  ~

  How could such a thing be explained? On reflection, Galileo probably would have used Bell’s Law of Noble Gases or the Boltzmann’s Inequality Principle as illustrative examples, citing the probability collapse of identically-charged photons emitted from an atom with lowered... and that’s as far as he’d get before being interrupted by whoever he’d be talking to. That would, at least, be the most probable scenario.

  At any rate, it happened: a slap, Johnny’s chain transmitted a sudden pulse, Galileo’s chain made its superposition-or-something-or-other, and Galileo found himself head-over-heels in love with an irritated waitress.

  ~

  Galileo stood there astounded, as his heart pounded.

  “You don’t understand,” said Johnny, “It’s not what it looks like!” And he reached for Ada, who promptly smacked his hand away and roared “Don’t touch me!�
��

  Galileo stood there astounded, as his heart pounded, his mind floundered—

  “Not what it looks like, eh?” said Ada. “What is it, then?”

  Johnny explained.

  “You see,” he said, “If ...”

  “You wannanother smack?”

  “Huh? No, no! All right, then...” And he explained, this time in people-speak, what little he knew about the operation of the love machine.

  Galileo stood there astounded, as his heart pounded, his mind floundered, his essence empowered—

  “And this friend of yours,” said Ada.

  “Galileo,” said Johnny.

  “Whatever. So this friend of yours built this thing and put it on you because you... fell in love with me?”

  “Yes,” said Johnny, blushing slightly.

  “That,” said Ada, “is the stupidest line I ever hoid in my entire life! Get the hell outta here, the bothayews! Out!”

  And thus she banished them.

  ~

  Galileo stood there astounded, as his heart pounded, his mind floundered, his essence empowered, his sanity disemboweled—

  “Why did you cut in?” asked Johnny angrily. “Just when I finally managed to start up a conversation, almost got a date, you had to... Galileo?”

  Galileo stood there astounded—

  “Uh-oh,” Said Johnny. “Come here. Sit down. Relax. What’s the matter?”

  “Her,” Said Galileo. “She’s... I... I have no words...”

  “What?”

  “Just... amazing... beautiful... smart... Oh, God...”

  “Who, your neighbor?”

  “Who?” asked Galileo. “No, not her—her!” And he looked forlornly at the door through which they had both been kicked a moment ago.

  A long silence ensued.

  “Her?”

  “Yes,” said Galileo dreamily. “Her.”

  Stillness.

  “You,” said Johnny, “Are going home. Now. This experiment is over.”

  “No!” said Galileo. “You don’t understand! This is my first time! Please!”

  “It’s definitely my last time!”

  Silence.

  “Well,” said Johnny after a while, “Okay. Don’t look at me like that. Stop it.”

  Galileo was smiling with the corners of his mouth. “I promise to reverse it as soon as I can,” he said. “This isn’t how I planned it. We must find out the reason. Given the strength of the pulse...”

  “Of course,” said Johnny, “the pulse, absolutely! But before that, why don’t you go home, get some sleep, think it over, measure something—”

  “Measure!” said Galileo, and started marching purposefully away. “Perhaps changing the matrix model... transformation... an imaginary Cartesian coordinate system...”

  Johnny watched him until he disappeared down the street. Physicists are the strangest people, he told himself with a sigh. This would never have happened to a mathematician.

  ~

  M. Curie had reached a decision. The odd neighbor from the attic, she told herself, is simply shy. People like that can sometimes take years to get over it—if ever. At least he was trying to be pleasant. Mariah felt a bit badly that she had not been nicer. The effort is probably taxing him quite a bit, she thought. Very well, then. She would be ready next time they met. She would manage a nice, friendly conversation, and, well, who knows?

  And then, just as she had finished checking her mailbox and was mulling over the best topic to discuss (Sports? Cars? Certainly not homemade cybernetics), the shy neighbor appeared in the entryway and passed her with complete indifference.

  “Hel—” she said and was cut short by the slamming of the foyer door.

  M. Curie went back to her apartment and took a lithium tablet for her headache. What was that all about?

  ~

  “I love!” said Galileo, if only to hear the sound of these two words coming from his own lips. “I... Love! I...”

  He became dizzy. He tried to picture the object of his affection and failed.

  “Love?”

  He remembered that he had not slept since the morning of the previous day.

  “I? Love?”

  He collapsed on his bed.

  “Love?”

  Galileo dreamed.

  And who can tell what the machine was doing at the same time? A man may dream of a love machine, but does a love machine dream of a man?

  ~

  Galileo dreamed.

  And in his dream, seven fetching women were cleaning a dirt-encrusted kitchen, and all seven had the face of the waitress of his dreams.

  “Screw love,” said one, “I’d rather have a dishwasher.”

  ~

  At the end of her shift, Ada grabbed her purse and went out to the street, where she stumbled over Johnny’s outstretched body.

  “You!” she said angrily. “Whadyathink yer—”

  “I’m really sorry,” said Johnny. “I never meant... Galileo didn’t mean... look...”

  “Getouttahere!”

  “Please, hear me out! Then, if you tell me you don’t want to see me anymore, I’ll...”

  “Then you’ll getouttahere, and I won’t see ya no more. Fair enough. Spill it.”

  Johnny spilt it. He told her of Galileo’s problem and how, being his friend, he had become an accessory, of the nature of motion in emotion, of the resolution of sciences through appliances—

  ~

  In Galileo’s dream, the seven pretty maids melted into a single, wizened old woman, who hung laundry on a high voltage line while reading from an equally decrepit copy of Romeo and Juliet.

  “Oh, my torment!” he said.

  “You,” said the old woman. “What do you know about it?”

  “I’m in love,” he said.

  “It is but one more step on the road to death,” she said.

  “True,” he said, “But so is birth. Love, at least, is a pleasant step.”

  “If that is so,” said she, “Then what are you bitching about?”

  ~

  Johnny kept talking, telling Ada about his affinity to infinity, about how fractals are rascals, about how functions malfunction, and about how strange attractors make strange bedfellows—

  ~

  A voice came forth from the tool shed. “I do hereby take your hand in holy matrimony!” it said.

  Galileo stirred in his sleep. The dream was beginning to disturb him.

  ~

  —taking a can of spray paint from his pocket, he etched in graffiti on a conveniently placed billboard a poem for her right there and then:

  “What’s that?” asked Ada.

  “A love poem,” said Johnny.

  “Oh.”

  ~

  Refrigerators roared over his head, robots sounded calls of hunting; a herd of rampaging washing machines charged him to the ends of the Earth.

  “Surrender!” roared their leader in an axle-grinding voice.

  “Never!” he shouted. “Not now, not when I’m in love!”

  “Love?” the machines chuckled. “Better use soap—it’s cleaner!”

  They surrounded him, lids banging up and down, their great wheels set to spin, humming, rinsing, buzzing, knocking.

  Hum hum hum buzz buzz knock knock knock.

  Galileo shuddered, and awoke.

  A knock on the door.

  Then another.

  “Come in,” he said groggily.

  The door opened slowly, revealing the hesitant form of M. Curie.

  Galileo glanced quickly back toward his washing machine, fearing this to be merely a continuation of the dream. It wasn’t. The machine was simply standing there, as silent as ever. That is, since he’d removed its bearing, as part of an attempt to construct a cyclotron in his bathtub.

  “What... ” he croaked.

  Mariah was beside herself with embarrassment. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that, we spoke earlier, on the stairs, and then, when you came back—”

>   ~

  A long silence ensued. Johnny watched Ada. Ada watched Johnny.

  “Well,” she said. “You definitely ain’t no regular Joe.”

  Johnny remained quiet, his face reddening a bit.

  “I’d be willing,” said Ada, “To give it a chance. You doofus couldn’t get any sillier than this anyway.”

  ~

  “... And that’s it,” said M. Curie. “I had to find out why you’ve been ignoring me.”

  Galileo, also embarrassed, and still somewhat fuzzy, stared at her.

  She was looking around at the contents of the room—resistors and mirrors, computer parts and shooting darts, clock-wheels and dried-up meals, a random number generator and a worn-out old defibrillator, a bicycle chain...

  A dented metal box in the trash bin caught her attention. “Say,” she said, pointing, “that thing, in the can, isn’t that an electric shrink?”

  “Eh, yes,” said Galileo, cursing himself for not having thrown the useless thing away. “I... I make experiments.”

  “Really?” she said. “Do you mind if I take a look?” She pulled a Phillips screwdriver out of her pants pocket, and in ten seconds the shrink was disassembled on the worktable.

  A great light surrounded Galileo.

  “Eureka!” he roared, as Pythagoras had in his bath in the days of yore. “Eureka!”

  ~

  At this or another point in time two random functions flew together and merged—

  —separated momentarily, gazed at each other, and returned.

  The second kiss was much longer.

  Johnny looked at Ada and was happy. A tiny voice in the back of his mind told him that Galileo probably shared that feeling, if the love machine was still activated. He ignored it, of course. Who cared? That tiny voice, incidentally, was correct. Almost.

  ~

  “What have you found?” asked M. Curie.

  He had found of the secret of Love (Machine, the?), but even the twisted logic of a Backyard Scientist—one of the last ones—was enough to tell him that there was no point in explaining that to his interlocutor. Had he tried to do that, the explanation would have probably sounded something like this: “Say that h(t2) = ½ Fourier, but when Pavlov y*dx = F(x) and Planck tangents infinity F (ty2), then what about Fermat times the square root of M. Curie?”

  The actual explanation, of course, is much simpler, and can be summarized by the formula L = (t*dv/dT2) B, where t is time, dv is the difference of velocities, dT is the temperature difference and B is the constant for relative Brownian motion (named after the infamous Doc Brown, of course) regarding the two bodies involved.