Here & There

by Joshua V. Scher

  Dr. Reidier and IS1 O’Brien simultaneously press Contact Buttons Alpha and Bravo.

  CUT TO:

  MIRROR LAB - SAME TIME

  SPLIT SCREEN, RIGHT SIDE, CLOSE-UP: an empty reinforced-acrylic sphere over target pad.

  LEFT SIDE, CLOSE-UP: orange sits inside reinforced-acrylic sphere over the transmission pad.

  Orange remains perfectly still.

  At 2007-10-26 12:35:22.00300454 a quiet THRUM coincides with the inside of the transmission acrylic sphere being suddenly filled with a heterogeneous dust [atoms and molecules ranging from Mg to Sr]

  NOTE: at 200 picoseconds prior to transmission, on the left side prior to transfer, the orange tessellates.

  RIGHT SIDE, at 12:35:22.00300454, the orange appears on the target pad. Intact. On the outside of the acrylic sphere, frost immediately accumulates.

  CONTROL ROOM - 12:35:30

  Dr. Reidier and IS1 O’Brien exchange a look.

  DR. REIDIER

  (sighs)

  All right. Promising, but we’ve been fooled before. Rock, paper, scissors?

  (off IS1’s look. Eye roll)

  Ok. I’ll go. Like I always do.

  TARGET ROOM - 12:36:28

  Dr. Reidier pokes the orange. The HIGH-PITCH of the Quark Resonator fades out.

  DR. REIDIER

  Feels solid enough.

  Dr. Reidier pokes it again, harder.

  GEARS SPINNING NOISE ramps up and down as the Boson Cannons and Pion Beams retract.

  DR. REIDIER (CONT’D)

  Good resistance.

  Dr. Reidier picks it up and squeezes it.

  DR. REIDIER (CONT’D)

  Firm. With a juicy push back. Let’s check inside.

  Dr. Reidier peels the orange.

  DR. REIDIER (CONT’D)

  (as he peels)

  Looking promising, pith, segmentation, and everything.

  Dr. Reidier finishes peeling and holds up to O’Brien what, for all intents and purposes, resembles a “normal,” peeled orange.

  DR. REIDIER (CONT’D)

  Not bad . . .

  Dr. Reidier separates the orange into two halves. He sniffs one half.

  DR. REIDIER (CONT’D)

  Aroma seemingly . . . well, slight. But then I guess it’s always like that. Sort of. Smell’s never been my thing . . .

  (shrugs)

  Taste test.

  Dr. Reidier tears off and pops an orange section into his mouth. He masticates it around his mouth with the concentration and consideration of a food critic.

  Dr. Reidier swallows and tilts his head slightly to the side.

  DR. REIDIER (CONT’D)

  I dunno. Texture is right, but it tastes . . . strange. Maybe you should try it.

  Dr. Reidier heads toward control room.

  CONTROL ROOM - 12:38:55

  At the console, IS1 O’Brien chews his orange slice. He swallows.

  IS1 O’BRIEN

  Yeah, I see what you mean. But for all we know, it could’ve been a bad orange. Not ripe yet maybe . . .

  Dr. Reidier, who stands next to him, nods.

  DR. REIDIER

  That’s not a bad idea. Ok, so for #48 we’ll cut an orange in half. Keep half in here with us as the control group. Teleport the other half. And then I’ll run a blind taste test on you. Sound good?

  (Before O’Brien can protest, shouts off)

  Another orange. We need another one!

  INT. MIRROR LAB - CONTINUOUS

  The circling indicator lights surrounding the Entanglement Channel orbit to a standstill and flash green.

  VIII

  The Spirit of the Lord caught away Philip . . . But Philip was found at Azotus.

  ~Acts 8:39-40

  “Can you conceive a process by which you, an organic being, are in some way dissolved into the cosmos and then by a subtle reversal of the conditions, reassembled once more . . . How can such a thing be done . . . save by loosening of the molecules, their conveyance upon an etheric wave, and their reassembling, upon exactly its own place, drawn together by some irresistible law?”

  ~Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Disintegration Machine”

  Mostly in this book, I shall specialize upon indications that there exists a transportory force that I shall call Teleportation.

  ~Charles Fort, Lo!

  The key to answering any questions about Reidier lies in his work. It is work, specifically his accomplishments, that not only defines him, but renders him exceptional.

  The idea of matter winking out of existence in one place only to wink back into it in another has been around almost as long as we have. Ghosts and spirits have haunted civilization since its history began.

  The phenomenon has been called by several names over the ages. Apport was the paranormal transference of an object from one place to another or the mysterious appearance of some object from an unknown source. Bilocation was another popular mystical occurrence that allowed someone to be in two places at once. Numerous Christian saints were adept at this, according to David Darling.61

  Various cases of teleportation can be found throughout the Bible. One of the most popular tales of this is in the Book of John (6:16-21). The disciples are caught in a storm roughly three to five miles out at sea when they see Jesus walking on the water toward them. The moment Jesus steps onto the boat, they immediately find themselves and their ship on the shore. Another incident is described in Acts (8:38-40). Philip, the apostle, rides with a eunuch on the eunuch’s chariot. Arriving at a small body of water, the eunuch asks Philip to baptize him. Philip does so, but when the two come out of the water, the Lord snatches Philip away. The eunuch sees him no more, and Philip finds himself in Azotus.

  One of the most famous accounts of teleportation in history is that of Gil Pérez. He was a Spanish soldier in the Filipino Guardia Civil. While on sentry duty at the Governor’s Palace in the Philippines, Pérez suddenly appeared in the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City on October 24, 1593. While he was aware he was no longer in Manila, he refused to believe he was now in Mexico City, asserting that he had received his orders on the morning of October 23, and it was therefore impossible to be in Mexico on the 24th. He also went on to explain that the Governor of Manila, Don Goméz Pérez Dasmariñas had been murdered. The Mexican authorities placed Pérez in jail as a possible deserter or minion of Satan. Two months later, the Manila galleon arrived, confirming the assignation of the Governor two months prior, and one of the passengers recognized Pérez and swore he had seen the sentry in the Philippines on October 23.

  More recent accounts were recorded by Charles Hoy Fort in the 1930s. Fort traveled all around New York collecting testimonials of bizarre materializations. He came to believe that “teleportation was the master link that underpinned this arcane world of incongruities. It was nature’s trickster force . . . Nothing was solid in Fort’s view: our present surroundings are a mere quasiexistence, a twilight zone between many different layers of reality and unreality.”62

  Science fiction writers took the concept and ran with it. Orwell concocted “matter banks,” A. E. Van Vogt dreamed up three-dimensional faxes, Alfred Bester divined an entire culture built around a type of teleporting he called “jaunting.” Marvel Comics even conjured up Nightcrawler, a character who could “bamf” over short distances by slipping through dimensions. The concept was finally brought to mass market in the 1960s by Star Trek and its transporter machine.

  In March 1993 the Montreal Six63 published their paper, “Teleporting an Unknown Quantum State via Dual Classical and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Channels” in Physical Review Letters. In it, this group of computer scientists and physicists concerned themselves with a few very small questions: “How can information be handled at the smallest level of nature? How can messages and data be sent using individual subatomic particles?”64 In layman’s terms, what’s the smallest bit of information that an object can be divvied up into, and how can we transmit those bits in tiny quantities?

  The Montrea
l Six understood that they had to focus on the quantum scale. Only by working at the quantum level is it possible to make an exact and perfect copy of the original. As Darling points out, it wasn’t about streaming atoms or anything physical, like in Star Trek, but rather about transferring information without sending it. Accomplishing this required tapping into one of nature’s most mysterious phenomenon: entanglement. This is the core of teleportation, as well as the burgeoning fields of quantum cryptography and quantum computation—the very fields Reidier pioneered.

  Over the next decade various teams all over the world have delved into the questions and ideas set forth by the Montreal Six. The most they could accomplish was the teleportation of light beams, subatomic particles, and quantum properties of atoms.

  None have considered attempting, nor come close to what Reidier was working on. While some scientists in this field did know of Reidier and some of his early papers on quantum cryptography, none were aware of how he was tying the fields together. His working in virtual isolation makes his accomplishments all the more impressive and presumably frustrating.

  Still the question remains, how did Reidier do it? Or perhaps more aptly put for our purposes, why him?

  While Reidier might not have set out to accomplish feats of apport, it is unsurprising that he ended up doing just that, at least from a psychoanalytical point of view. Very early on, Reidier exhibited intellectual gifts. He began speaking at six months old. At the age of three, he corrected, in his head, a calculating error his father made while balancing the family checkbook. According to his second grade teacher at Williamstown Elementary in Massachusetts, Allison Hubbard, she realized he was a unique student one afternoon when she tried to busy her class by having them add up all the numbers from one to one hundred. Within seconds, Reidier raised his hand and provided the correct answer of 5,050.65

  Neither of Reidier’s parents was scientifically oriented. His father, Kaleb, grew up outside of Chicago, with a struggling artist (teacher) for a father and a curator for a mother. Kaleb was a fairly successful theater director, who became popular in avant-garde circles, pioneering multimedia theatrics. He appears to have been an erratic individual whose professional success lay in how he brought out the best in others, primarily as a Socratic guide. He channeled the talents of his colleagues: part diviner, part medium, part harvester. By focusing his attention completely on his cast, designers, and techies, Kaleb got his attention off of himself, which facilitated a freer form of thinking. It was this that helped him conjure and construct a series of theatrical moments that an audience would never consciously tie together, but on a subliminal level connected seamlessly and logically.66

  His approach to childrearing was similarly heuristic. When a three-year-old Kerek asked about elephants, Kaleb simply took him to the Bronx Zoo and let him walk around taking in the creature. He apparently felt that it’d somehow spoil both the elephant and Kerek’s understanding of an elephant to tell him anything about it. “I wanted to make sure he had no preconceptions in his head about it. I mean if I had told him it was a big animal . . . well in relation to what? It’s only big next to something small. I didn’t even tell him that it had a trunk. Preconceptions can too easily become limitations.”67

  His mother, Emily Hahn, third-generation German and Irish, was raised in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Emily was an actress who, along with her husband, founded the MiST (short for MultImedia Synthetic Theater) Company that briefly collaborated with The Public Theater. Early on in her career, she had done some work as a model and even acted in several national commercials. Once she found Kaleb, however, she let those pursuits drop away. In fact, even in the theater, Emily primarily worked only with her then future husband. The impulse was shared and explained by fellow actor Marc Cohn, “It’s something about the way he focuses on you, finds your insecurities and then teaches you to exploit them . . . Obviously we all love the vivacity of working in live theater, but with Kaleb, it wasn’t just live, it was alive and guzzling adrenaline. After working with him, other projects somehow felt flat, two-dimensional; like you were performing in black and white. We all felt that way. Emily just refused to settle.”68

  If Kaleb was Kerek’s gateway to the world, Emily was his portal into the imagination. Together they would lie on the grass during the day, anthropomorphizing the insects they counted, making up stories about their lives. They’d stare at wall mirrors and try to catch their reflections getting lazy. At night she’d read fantastical stories aloud to him, or sometimes even make them up. However, as Emily’s sister, Abi, noted, “Sure, they were happy as two clams in a pod. Still, you couldn’t help but feel, every now and then, it was less about being a mother to Kerek and more about performing the role of the perfect mother for Kaleb.”

  Reidier’s early childhood was bucolic. By the time he was born, his parents had relocated from New York City to Williamstown, Massachusetts. Kaleb had been offered a position to help run the Williamstown Theater Festival. He and Emily also expressed to friends how once they found out they were pregnant, they were suddenly overcome by Norman Rockwell–esque dreams of raising their child climbing old oaks and launching off of rope swings.

  These were their public reasons.

  Their private rationale was much less idyllic. Earlier that very same year, Kaleb had been diagnosed with cancer. A tumor was growing in his brain and applying bilateral pressure to the motor cortex area that controlled his legs. As the tumor grew, Kaleb became less and less ambulatory, until ultimately he became paraplegic.* Moving to Williamstown provided the couple with a calmer and easier environment to physically navigate, and it put them much closer to Dr. Peter Black, a neurosurgeon at Massachusetts General and aggressive trailblazer in experimental techniques.

  * * *

  * How did she do it? Honestly, how could she stay so clinical getting all this down? All of her sporadic interjections, comments about process, volleys sent at the Department for its withholdingness, and not one sentence, not one phrase or even just a goddamn ellipsis about my father?

  Guess we all have our defense mechanisms. But I mean, Christ, there’s no way she couldn’t have been channeling memories of him. It’s too close. Too much of an echo; sure it’s been drawn out, disfigured and Dopplerized, but the origins still match up. Devoted wife and mother, young boy, and a man being eaten alive from the inside.

  In our case, though, it was much quicker. A few months only. No time to consider. No thought to shield. No opportunity for distance, separation, and sanctuary. She was a therapist after all. Death was a part of life after all.

  So there I was, sitting by her side, sniffing in the antiseptic hospital smells that have the faintest odor of stale talcum powder and lye. Watching plastic-tinted tubes pump sun-sensitive poison into his circulatory system as his body desiccated before our very eyes. And yet, no mention of any of that. Or the aftermath of absence, in all its therapeutic glory. Separated by several city blocks, she and I sat in different therapists’ offices, making sure to cope correctly. No mention of that at all. Not even my accident.

  Why Reidier? Why me? Why am I tucked away in this shitty carriage house, with no insulation, unpacking a briefcase full of empty words?

  Obviously it’s Toby’s fault. Drink addled and angling as always, he blurts out the brilliant idea to transform my mom’s absence into a loft in SoHo.

  I mean, yeah, it’s never that simple. I’m sure it somehow plays right into my own issues: control, intimacy, self-worth, honesty, you name it. Still, Toby’s a convincing guy, and he always sees the angle. No joke, when we were still adolescent prep-school kids, he saw the market opportunity for selling candy and single pages ripped out of Playboy and Penthouse. He made a killing and knew how to keep his customers quiet.

  Toby has a sixth sense for seeking out someone’s insecurities. He always jokes about how he likes to “find someone’s weak spot and then jump up and down on it.” It’s kind of fascinating, almost hypnotic to watch. It’s what makes him such a good lit
igator.

  It’s only terrifying when you take a step back and think about it. Which I rarely do. I just let my own sixth sense of self-preservation guide me, which might be why I’ve stayed friends with him so long. I feel safe as long as he’s on my team. I don’t know, our friendship goes back too far to open up to any type of analytical etymology. He made me laugh and as we grew up and his tongue sharpened, I was just glad as all hell that I wasn’t at the business end of it.

  His sense for weak spots lets him see the angels. And it’s those angles that work magic on bouncers, party promoters, women, you name it. (And before you start going back and double-checking and getting all proud of yourself, yes I’m fully aware of the angels/angles mix-up at the beginning of this paragraph. I thought about changing it, but somehow it seems to work.)

  I think this is the part about my personality that draws Toby to me. My yarn-spinning instincts. Knowing how to take the truth, take a moment, and just bend it a little to make a better story. Kindred spirits, him and me, who can go on ad nauseum about the crucial differences between legal and ethical, and justify each other’s shortcomings with semantic distractions. We blur the lines for each other, always moving the benchmark when the other one isn’t looking.

  It’s almost a sport, really. How close can we get to shining a light on the God’s honest truth, but bend it through a prism of savoir faire?

  “So there he is,” I tell whichever group of girls have grown bored with the posse of frat boys turned investment bankers chasing them. “About to start his closing argument for his first murder trial. He doesn’t even look at his notes. Nope, he just launches in apologizing to the jury. Saying he’s sorry that he, the DA, and the system have wasted their time with this murder trial.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I catch Toby assuming a humble smile as he listens. “He charges ahead with his closing, announcing, ‘The fact is, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, there hasn’t been a murder at all. How could there have been one, when the man my client is accused of murdering is about to walk through that door right now.’