Neither Here nor There Read online

  Neither Here nor There

  Mackey Chandler

  Cover by: Sarah Hoyt

  Chapter 1

  It wasn't quite sundown. The last few shafts of weakened sunlight peeked through the gaps between the campus buildings, and were losing ground quickly to the lengthening shadows. Here and there lights were starting to show in windows. The day had been so hot it wouldn't get cool even overnight. The scene captured that surreal golden glow of a Maxfield Parrish print that happens for a moment when the sun touches the horizon.

  The old-fashioned windows of the original Chemistry building were gone and a small modern window had been placed in the center of each replacement panel. The modern design was more efficient, but the mismatched additions ruined the classic architectural style of the limestone building. It was a wonder the older building hadn’t been razed, and one of those modern boxes inserted like a mushroom, suddenly there one morning. The massive old hall was just too solidly built to afford them any excuse to do so, and would cost a fortune to tear down.

  Being older, it was considered a good enough home for the Physics and Chemistry departments, because their courses were just prerequisites, a quick foundation to be laid for one’s real course of study. The college didn’t support research in the basic sciences, with the attendant big money grants and futuristic machines. It prided itself on a more 'practical' offering of courses.

  The work day was long over for the support workers who punched a time clock. Most of the students and professors were gone too. To be here this late you had to be obsessed with your work, or avoiding going home.

  Jay was obsessed, but not with his official duties. Those had long been satisfied, and now he was playing with one of his personal projects. He had the boyish enthusiasm of a middle school student doing a science fair project, and had no one to rush home to, not even a cat. The small lamp on his desk was the only light in the huge room. Even that had the shade turned to throw the direct light against the wall, making an island of light around his desk. He laid his hand on the sensor pad on his desk, unlocking it, and pulled out the larger bottom drawer.

  The square frame he pulled out didn't betray its function to a casual glance. It looked like one of the metal detectors you had to walk through at the airport, but sized more for a small dog than a man. It was laminated and reminiscent of a transformer core, about a half meter square inside the opening. The crude base plate for it was simply a small piece of plywood he hadn't bothered to paint, and the upright metal frame was held on it with simple hardware store brackets and big thumb nuts. Picked not for their holding power, but for ease of use bare handed to mount it upright. The real art was in the mosaic of tiny optically modulated lasers, all the way around the inside of the square opening. They were a double dark line around the center with them turned off. Lit, they barely leaked any light to the side unless you looked across the frame almost flat. If they did what he wished, you wouldn’t see them at all, but so far that had frustrated Jay.

  Bruce Templeton, also known as Buddy, and occasionally Bubba, taught automated manufacturing technologies. He'd made the frame for Jay in the school's automated prototyping machine. The device was printed of layers of exotic materials, including semiconductors needed for the many micro-lasers. It had been a good exercise for one of Buddy’s classes, and Jay had only needed to pay for the materials. Two fairly substantial buses powered the tiny lasers, each controlled by a single hair-thin fiber optic cable, all of the glass fibers merging with its neighbors like fine hair gathered in a ponytail, until it grew into a cable as fat as a garden hose. That merged into the slim box of an optical transducer, which served as a termination that fit the data port in the side of his laptop computer.

  The computer open on Jay’s desk was his own, and represented a sizable chunk of his yearly salary. It was the main reason he was driving a battered old Toyota truck, with the stuffing held in the seat by geological layers of duct tape. His salary at the Portland Institute of Technology didn't allow for both the laptop and the new Honda he'd like. However, the freedom he had to pursue his hobbies and friendships after hours made up for his smaller pay. Jay didn’t have the killer instinct and political drive to have survived at a big school, with a much higher level of competition. The whole idea of being adversarial with all your peers, and watching constantly for a knife in the back from two-faced associates, held no charm for him.

  Jay placed the plywood base at the near corner of his desk, with the outside edges exactly matching the desk edges. He plugged the thick bundle of fibers in, and squeezed the catches on each side until they locked it in with an audible snap. He sat his coffee mug at the opposite corner of the desk, exactly in a circle drawn right on the desktop. The black line, faded to gray and overlapped with coffee stains, testified that was not the first time he'd set this up. The black magic marker circle was precisely one meter from the opening in his device.

  After plugging the parts together and each of them into power, Jay opened the program. He spoke to it, in the slightly different voice he assumed when talking to computers or classrooms full of students. “Run number seventeen, of modified software, June 12, 2058. Attempted image detection at one meter, foreshortened to one hundred millimeters.”

  Jay sat patiently while a program on his computer compared the interactions of light across the planes defined by the frames of lasers. It was a fast computer, and the active field was only about two thirds of the physical opening, but it sampled a lot of interference patterns over and over. It inferred which events did not result in a collapsed state, since the detected events would be altered by the measurement. At least, in his mind, that is what it should do. It hadn't worked yet.

  Jay was excessively neat for so late in the day. His trousers were still unwrinkled, and his hair was still brushed just so. He was young and fit enough some people mistook him for a student instead of a professor. Jay was a bit obsessive-compulsive. Just borderline, to where nobody could insist he seek treatment. He liked the feeling of order it gave him, but regularly self examined his life, to ask himself if the tendency was creating more stress than satisfaction. If he ever found himself repeating meaningless rituals, like his mother had, he vowed he'd get medicated. When he placed his device on the desk he positioned it just so, but did not allow himself to yield to the urge to recheck and fuss with it.

  Pulling a pen from his pocket, Jay stuck it in the opening to confirm both bands of lasers were firing. Near the edge there were two lines of scintillating light drawn on the barrel. Satisfied, he replaced the pen carefully against the right edge of his pocket. The computer screen showed a graphic bar counting the sample loading, which had paused when he inserted the pen. The opening through the frame started displaying an area in the center, which winked with little subtle pinpoints of light. The area around this still showed the normal view through the frame out to the corners, but the center filled with flickering pinpoints until the center was completely obscured.

  The door to the hallway opened in a bright splash of light that blotted out the faint effect building up inside the metal arch.

  “Hey Jay, I'm going over to Mitch's to get some supper. If you have any sense at all you will come along, before the cleaning 'bots give up. I don't think you've given them enough time to clean the whole floor in months,” Buddy said.

  “It's dirty again every day because my students are pigs. They grew up in self-cleaning homes, and can't understand why anyone would object to just dropping your nasty tissue or pizza crust on the floor. After all, it magically disappears when you leave the room.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean,” Buddy agreed. “I can always tell the really poor kids because they toss stuff in my wastebasket. I had one affluent girl, wh
o honestly asked why I had the funny can by my desk. She'd never seen a wastebasket. I can only imagine what my place would look like if my students borrowed it for a week. The crap would probably be knee deep, and they'd never figure out the purpose of the broom propped in the corner.”

  He ambled in slowly from the door, which closed itself silently behind him, and flipped a chair around. Straddling it backwards, Buddy crossed his arms on the back. He was a tenured professor, but his dress made him look like a member of the maintenance crew. He wore a dark green work shirt, with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows and simply his name – Buddy – embroidered in straw colored stitches above the pocket. He was as messy and rumpled as Jay was neat, restoring the universal balance of such qualities to an equilibrium.

  “Hey, that's the laser frame I grew for you. Let me guess. It's a better mousetrap. You herd the little buggers through, and they are zapped and vaporized sanitarily in the arch,” he guessed, demonstrating with sprayed hands making little jabbing motions at each other.

  “If the silly thing doesn't work pretty soon that's what we'll convert it to,” Jay agreed. “There’s no danger of the world beating a path to my door for it so far. Actually, it’s supposed to generate an image in there where you see it sparkling.”

  “An image of what? Does it do a holo-image? Can you watch discs on it like a monitor?”

  “If it worked, I would see the coffee cup there, a meter away,” he pointed.

  “Too late,” Buddy informed him, holding his index fingers and thumbs tip to tip to make a rectangular frame, as close as he could get to the device’s square shape. “I have this perfected already. I call it Bubba-Vision.” He made a show of peering at the mug, through the frame of his fingers.

  “Yes, but if it worked right it won't look like a meter away when you look through the arc. The way it's set now, it should look like a tenth of that distance.”

  Buddy looked uncomfortable and said, “Jay, finish telling me about it when we're at Mitch's, OK?”

  He was so earnest Jay just nodded agreement, though he couldn't see why Buddy was first interested, and then suddenly so uncomfortable. The bar on his computer had filled up, and the screen announced; MATCH – ESTABLISHED. But it was a lie. The square was still filled with snow, like a video display full of static instead of a coffee mug.

  “Damn thing doesn't work anyway,” Jay informed Bubba. “Terminate, and save bad run,” he instructed it. He closed the computer and unplugged the cables. Two wing nuts spun off, the frame could lay flat on the base, and he slid the machine back in his desk drawer. He carefully wound the cable around it neatly and palmed the lock to set it. “Now we can seek some sustenance,” he declared, “and perhaps a wee libation with it, if you're man enough.”

  “Ohhhhh, no” Buddy groaned, at this usual joke. “I don't want to have to carry you home again.” Jay was known for falling asleep face-down on the table, if he exceeded two beers.

  They walked out the main entry, waving to the familiar guard in the booth as they left the building. He knew them by sight and the door lock clacked as they approached. He had the discretion to do that without checking ID, and it was all on video if questions arose later.

  It was that bright gray stage of dusk when there was a broad contrast across the sky. The glare of mid-day was gone well past glow to gloom. The west horizon was still bright where the sun had just ducked out of sight. At the other extreme, the eastern horizon was already showing a few bright stars. Jay could see a Security drone floating along to the east of them, a couple hundred meters up. The bright underside was still illuminated to match the sky directly over it, but visible from the side at this tricky time of day. If one was over them, he considered, glancing up, it would still be invisible from directly underneath. Later, the low ones would be easier to track in a cloudless sky, when they hid the stars behind them.

  Mitch's was about a hundred meters off campus, just across a street that was closed to heavy vehicular traffic, with stout bollards blocking where the public street entered the campus. The blue painted curb on their side served warning to the public it was a Federal Security Zone. So far they had avoided the bad image of enclosing the campus in a security fence, with gates. That didn't mean there was no security.

  If someone crossed the apparently unguarded lawn without an ID badge such as they wore, the intruder would be examined on camera before reaching the locked side doors. If there was any concern, a guard would be waiting at the inside of the door before the intruder could reach it. Such an uninvited guest was very rare. Everyone with any sense knew not to mess with a Federal Security Zone.

  This late there wasn't even a bicycle or scooter in sight along the road. The restaurant had two entries, one facing the school, and one on the other side, letting out on a parking lot and public street. If they ever did fence the campus it would probably put the eatery out of business, as its profits were dependant on a busy lunch trade that was mostly walk-ins from the university. The outside was lit brightly enough to show the cream colored brick and green shutters, around the signature bay windows. The protruding windows gave the building an odd lumpy look instead of flat sided.

  Buddy led them in, and although the place was near empty he walked across to the far side, and picked a booth in one of the bays that didn't look out on the school. The place had a hundred forty-nine seats, one less than what would require them to install security and scan ID cards to let customers in. Buddy pulled out a small case about the size of a phone and sat it on the table. When he pressed a button it beeped, and a grid of amber LEDs lit up. They flashed at various rates until they all turned green, but one.

  “Since when do you worry,” started Jay, but Buddy held up a restraining single digit to cut him off.

  “Do you have a phone on?” he asked Jay.

  “Yeah, but it's my private phone,” he objected.

  “Would you pull the battery out please?”

  Jay pulled a block about the size of a thumb drive out of the small phone, but the amber light stayed on. Buddy walked over to a table that hadn’t been bussed, and pulled a foil liner out of a French fry basket, and came back. He carefully wrapped the entire instrument in the foil, and the light turned green. He smiled then, and slipped the detector down on the seat beside him, because the waitress was coming.

  “Good evening, I'm Helen, would you like a drink first?”

  “Two draft Killian's, and a basket of chips and hot salsa. Then we'll be ordering dinner,” Buddy told her. “You're a student across the street aren't you?”

  “Yeah, and I've seen you, but I don't have any of your classes,” she confirmed, before leaving to get their drinks.

  “I'm bugged?” Jay asked in dismay, once she went away. “Who would bother? And why?”

  “That's what I was asking myself about a month ago, when I figured out I was bugged too. I was entering a program in the old Cincinnati CNC, and it would not accept it. Turns out there was a spy program installed, and whoever put it there was not familiar with how small the memory is in older machines like that one. If it had been in a modern machine I'd have never seen it, but I needed almost all the memory, and it was occupied.

  “Not only are they tracking what I do with the machine, it made me look and discover I’m being personally watched several different ways. I suspect, I assume, there are other ways I’m watched, but I’m not knowledgeable enough to detect them.

  “After considering all the possibilities, I have to conclude it is our esteemed employer, the college itself, that is snooping on us. As to why – they probably are encouraged to do so by Homeland Security, and even offered funds to help do it, because of all the foreign students we have. There aren't many schools left that have so many non-citizens, like we do, you know. My understanding is Security tracks everything they can now about foreign students. One fellow told me they even track them on break, to see where they go skiing, and what movies they go see.

  “But the college would benefit from a good surveill
ance package covering staff, to make sure nobody withholds any commercially useful ideas. Especially with somebody else footing the bill for their own purposes. It happens a lot more than you might think. Someone has a good idea and sees some money in it, but they don't want to give it away, so they work on it in secret, and quit before they publicly document getting the idea. Then they are free to own it unencumbered by their contract.”

  “OK, I can see where they'd do that with you,” Jay said. “You are working to create processes for industry. But I'm an instructor of underlying theory. Not a designer.”

  “What about this optical gizmo I just saw? And that's not the first odd piece of equipment you've had me make on your own nickel,” Buddy reminded him. “I hope you haven’t used your phone for searches or ordered parts for these projects? If you use your phone for anything connected to them you better learn to buy throw-away phones.”

  “I’m actually pretty paranoid about my phone,” Jay admitted. “I never ever access my financial accounts, and I’ve never used pay apps. But I guess now I’m going to be even more untrusting. But as far as this machine… what it should do, you can do cheaper and easier with a telescope – a very mature technology. I just want to prove out an idea about quantum theory. I don't see any commercial application at all. I've done this with other pet projects, and then abandoned them. What possible commercial use could it have?” Jay asked.

  Buddy thought about it a minute. “You say this will let you look at an object and bring it closer like a telescope. Could it be adjusted to make it look like it was further away instead?”

  Jay got a surprised expression, and said, “Yeah, but why would you want to do that?”

  “Let’s say you are an architectural photographer. If you want to take a pic of our building there across the street, but you can't get far enough back from it to get the right perspective. Then instead of shooting it, and processing the shot later on your computer, you could change to your patented Jay Coredas Infini-Zoom lens. It would let you shoot it from an apparent distance of another hundred meters away, and you are done. No muss no fuss,” Buddy said.