Watching Improbabilities

Watching Improbabilities It must be bad for some sort of karmic energy to have too exact a routine. Every day at precisely five o’clock I darken the fluorescent light, grab my jacket, and shut the door to my office behind me. I know this because I am usually staring at the clock on the wall waiting as the plastic red second hand closes the gap with the minute hand and slowly, interminably overtakes it. The second the two join in commingled quitting-time bliss, out I shoot like a cannon. It occurs to me, each day, usually Wednesday, that I am probably occupying the same space as I was occupying the previous day at the same time. Of course, that’s relative to the surface of the earth, since our collective ball of rock has hurtled some one and a half million miles since the last time I quit. Or so. Higher than the present mileage on my 1978 Cadillac, and that’s saying a lot. I almost feel that I’m going to brush up against my past or future self, the imprint of my passing is so close on both sides of time. It’s like I’m describing a linear function in four dimensions, my path like one of those fancy holders for five chalk pieces scratching an arc across a cosmic blackboard. Anyway, I never do. Brush up against myself, that is. Humans only travel in one direction along that fourth dimensional line, and for me to encounter myself, I’d have to be in the same place in all four dimensions, and the laws of physics frown on things that try to do that. Conservation of matter and all that jazz. So probably, some days I walk more slowly, some days I’m hurrying, some days I’m happy, sad, angry, what have you, but I’ve been working at SDI for eight long years now, and I’m sure that the average has balanced out, so that there’s one long streak of me-leaving stamped on every weekday. I can’t be sure, but I think I can feel the streak continuing for awhile in the future, too. I don’t really want to keep working here, but I can’t see myself doing any active job hunting any time in the near future. Not with my skill set, anyway. SDI stands for System Diagnostic Initiatives, by the way. The reason I’m still at my job is because I’m not sure what I do, and that requires a very ambiguous skill set which I happen to possess exactly. I was hired to do simple clerical work – which I am middling at, anyway – and somewhere in the beginning of my first year, the company went through a major management upheaval, and before I knew it, they had moved me into an office, desk, stapler, ficus plant and all, and apparently also a large promotion. Those of you who are familiar with desk jobs will either be completely skeptical or completely with me. Some of you have gotten stuck at jobs that are mostly real corporate America, and you know who you are. Business suits, meetings with agendas, company objectives, and a very definite vacation-days-per-year scale. But the rest of us, we’re just a paltry shade of imitation. (Imitation is a color that’s almost harvest yellow, but fell short. No one has ever coated their kitchen appliances in a sheen of imitation.) Our conferences might as well be circus acts, our chain of command looks like a ball of yarn after the cat got at it, and the only objective anyone has is to bet on whether the cleaning people will take a quarter left in plain sight on a desk. The wager, by the way, is a quarter. In my world, a guy like me can continually hide and the paychecks keep coming. So you can see why I don’t have any plans to look for another job. Coming to work each day is sort of like waking up on an iceberg. Will it melt today? Will it hold solid? Will it ram into a giant cruise liner and crack in half in a

spectacular pyrotechnic display? I usually suppose the second will happen, since that’s what’s been happening for the past seven years. I’ve had a few close calls, though. Julie, who is the head of marketing, called me up and asked me what I’d been working on. Technically, marketing would be my department, but usually I’m pretending to work in research, so they leave me alone. Of course, the head of research usually assumes I’m working on a marketing project. Anyway, when I told Julie I’d been working on a research project, she commented that I would definitely have seen the new file, then, and she seemed to think I had been up to something. So I just said I had been sick, and prayed she wouldn’t look it up. Meanwhile, I maneuvered my cell phone out of my pocket and used it to dial our main line and her extension. In a few moments, she said she had another call and had to go. Luckily, I had distracted her enough to keep her from checking. But I have no doubt that one day someone will note all the little discrepancies and put it together. I’m not worried, though. I figure I’m smarter than the penguin on the iceberg who figures nothing will ever happen, just before getting impaled on the prow of a luxury liner. I bet I’m smarter than most penguins, even. But not that smart. Smart people have real jobs. Anyway, that explains why I leave at five every day. And you were probably thinking that if I had an office, why didn’t I have to stay late some days with important work? The answer is that I don’t ever have any work. Of course, I have idled on occasion if someone who might observe a pattern is walking down the hall. And I never come in late or leave early. Ducking out early is the quickest way to employee evaluation I’ve ever seen. And before you ask, I’m not bilking SDI out of that much money. I can’t afford a new car, and I make coffee every morning, just to be friendly. In fact, I do lots of token work when people come to my office and ask. And I have never, not once, not even halfway, used the copier to copy my butt. That’s another quick way to employee evaluation, plus, do you know where that copier has been? This particular day was Thursday. As quarter to five rolled around, I was on the phone with my bookie arguing about the odds on Bet Your Bottom Dollar, the second-tonone favorite in this weekend’s races. “Look, Carl, it’s three to one. I was just down there last night to look at the boards.” “Yeah, and I’m not your bookie or anything. Two to one. I don’t know who you were looking at, but it sure as hell wasn’t Bottom Dollar.” I sighed. “Fine, whatever. So who is three to one?” “Davy Jones’ Locker.” “No way. Forgive me for being superstitious, but I think you can guess where I think he’s going. I’ll stay out of this weekend’s mess.” “Suit yourself.” A click from the receiver, and then silence. Carl hadn’t been so genial recently, but then again I hadn’t exactly been lining his pockets, either. Gambling’s a nasty addiction, which is why I’m trying as hard as I can not to indulge in it. I’ve never been bored enough to copy my butt, but getting in touch with Carl is a different story. I spent the last ten minutes of my day looking at our office phone list and trying to add all the extension numbers in my head like a list of sums. I had gotten to “Roberts, Ron” and a figure of 2387 when I noticed it was 4:59:30, and I whiled away the last thirty

seconds performing my daily ritual. Tick. Click. Zip. Go. Sounds like a funky postmodern TV commercial for some lesser element of technology’s recent progeny. I sure didn’t feel as high-flown as describing a cosmic arc as I left the building and emerged into a blustery autumn day. My past self sure had the good end of the deal today – it had been a good fifteen degrees warmer the day before, and somehow it didn’t seem quite as bright as it had either. I hurried to the car. When I turned the key in the ignition, the engine made a stuttering sound like an underwater machine gun, but wouldn’t start. I cursed under my breath and turned the key with a little more force. Nothing. I sighed, and beginning to shiver a little now from the cold, I pulled the key out, re-inserted it, and threw my weight into the rotation. Rat. Rataratarataratarataratatat – tat tat. Nope. Squirrel in the gears. It was then, or perhaps a few seconds later, that I realized my car was no longer on the ground. I realized this when I opened the door and began to place my foot outside the car, only to find that it was dangling in mid-air about five feet off the ground. My foot, listening to reality over rationality, quickly retracted. My jaw, however, which had dropped sometime during this affair, unsurprisingly did not. Well, I thought. It is five o’clock, and plenty of other people will be leaving now. If they don’t notice that my car seems to be performing a Siegfried and Roy act, then I’m certifiable. My guinea pig was Peg, who came into sight from the front entrance about twenty seconds later. She was wearing a white dress with red tiny red polka-dots that would have looked perfect on a secretary for some head engineer at an important firm – circa 1983. She walked down the pathway with her surrealistic apparel swishing about her to the parking lot. She began to head down the aisle my car was to hers, about five rows further away. As she passed me, she cupped her hands to her mouth, looked up at me, and shouted. “Have a nice evening!” she said as she approached her car. Her keys jingled in her outstretched hand as she waved. Bewildered, I could do nothing but reply, “You too!” I wasn’t sure she had heard me through the closed car door, so I opened it and repeated my wish. I realized I had missed my chance. So had she noticed, or not? It seemed like she had, because she had taken the trouble to shout up to me, but then again, she hadn’t seemed perturbed. As I pondered this, Bill from accounting pushed the front door open and came hurriedly down the path, clutching his briefcase. He was a short man with rimmed glasses and a huge perch for them to rest on. His ears stuck out from the side of his head. For his part, he ignored me entirely, but he had a habit of doing that to most people. I think being a CPA is probably even more boring than my job. (Probably more difficult, too.) Five feet isn’t that far off the ground, so I figured that if my car were suspended indefinitely, at least I could free myself. Then I could go call, aw, hell, Triple-A or something. They're car people, I was sure they’d dealt with mysteriously floating Cadillacs before. Piece of cake. I swung around to the side and dangled my legs out over the ground and prepared to slide off my seat onto the ground. Luckily I caught myself before I did, because now I was a good fifteen or twenty feet off the ground. Should have done it when I had had the chance.

A gentle gust of wind rolled over the car, causing it to sway a little from side to side. It made me feel uncomfortably like I was on a airplane in turbulence. Fun in amusement park rides, not so good in transportation. Just for kicks, I turned the key again. No dice. (Which is good, because I really do need to cut down on gambling.) As my interior monologue changed in tone from bemused to frantic, the car rose even further off the ground. I was high enough now to look down out the window and see most of the parking lot, with industrious little ants climbing into their ant-cars and driving to their ant-houses with their ant-wives…. okay, so the metaphor doesn’t work. This whole process did have the effect of obliterating my routine, though. I was charting new space in four dimensions – I’d certainly never been this high on the Y-axis in my car before. As in, Y the hell is my car hovering a hundred feet off the ground? I also noticed that I was picking up vertical speed. The higher I got, the faster I went, so that within another minute I was a good five hundred feet off the ground. By this point, I had given up on trying to get back to the ground, and I was doing my best to enjoy the ride as the Earth dropped away from me. After a few more minutes, my radio suddenly clicked on. This was a good trick, because my radio had a habit of not running off the battery. “Eric.” came a tinny voice that sounded like it was being broadcast from inside a trashcan. Eric is my name, by the way. I don’t think I mentioned that, and neither the bookie nor Peg bothered to call me that in the only external dialogue I’ve had so far, so you’ve probably been wondering. Or then again, maybe not. You certainly didn’t care what I do for a living. Tentatively, and not used to talking to my radio – “Yes?” “Hi.” Definitely a period again. I might have been confused, but I certainly wouldn’t expect any more from the voice after it spoke with such finality. “Um, hi,” I responded. “I’m not an alien,” it said, after what had evidently been a period of deliberation. The voice was laden with some heavy foreign accent that didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard on Earth, though. I should note that in between these communications, the radio alternated between periods of silence and static, as if the operator couldn’t quite figure out how to keep the thing activated for very long. “I’m not accusing you of anything,” I said, unsure of what sort of tone of voice I ought to be cultivating. The thing didn’t sound threatening, just awfully confused. I began to wonder if someone had drugged my Amstel Light at lunch, and that this was just some horrible hallucination that was going to end in an employee evaluation and my butt out on the street. (But on the copier, first. Or is that butt on the copier, first? No matter.) Another long silence. Then, “I’m Fred.” Well, it certainly didn’t sound like a Fred! “Nice to… er… meet you, Fred.” This was bordering on the absurd. Bordering, as in, five hundred miles past the border and wielding a green card and a social security number. “I’m bringing you to my home.” “It’s not on Earth?” “No, it is far from Earth.” Hm. Well, Fred seemed friendly enough. “That would make you an alien, Fred.”

If Fred had antennae, he was certainly wiggling them about in vexation. (He didn’t.) “I’m like you!” he insisted. “All right,” I said, relieved that even saying something to provoke him had only resulted in petulance on his part. Then again, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it again, since he was probably the one who was fishing for my car with a giant invisible rod and a heck of a lot of strength to reel it in with. Trying to think of something to lighten the mood, I asked a question. “So could my coworkers see me suspended in the air?” A pause. “They did not notice,” Fred replied. “It seemed normal to them. Anyway, soon you will be out of the atmosphere, and then we can propel you more quickly. You will be here in no time,” said Fred. His tone of voice was emotionless again. “Have you given any thought to how I’ll be breathing out there?” I asked. I was beginning to panic a little as adrenaline pooled in my bloodstream. It had nowhere to go, though, since I was trapped in a car. I realized I was still facing out, and the air was getting a little thin. I wormed my way back into a forward-facing position and slammed the door. The car wobbled a little bit. “Air bubble,” said Fred, and with that a little soap-like film began to coalesce outside the car. Grim thoughts flitted across my mind about the internal structure of bubbles and their readiness to pop at the slightest irritation, but I ardently hoped that this non-alien technology was reliable. If they’re taking the trouble to drag me away, I’m sure they care about my life. Certainly they have ray guns, otherwise. Fred hadn’t said anything, and the alternation between silence and static was beginning to get on my nerves a little bit, so I reached out to fiddle with the tuning dial. Static, static, and a country station playing some Lyle Lovett song that I wouldn’t have been able to handle on a good day. I wished for a book. The car was accelerating fast enough now for me to feel, and the sky was slowly approaching black. I looked down to see a sight that only astronauts and a few rich civilians have ever seen, except in photographs. Let me tell you, the photographs don’t do justice to it. I suddenly felt no desire to see “brave new worlds.” “I would be content just to explore my own,” I said out loud to no one in particular, being as there was no one, in particular or otherwise, to talk to. “That’s the spirit,” came Fred’s voice, adopting the slight twang of a southern country singer. Except Fred. I guess I’d been foolish to think I could have tuned him out. “Wouldn’t it have been faster, Fred, to take me in one of your own conveyances, instead of wasting all this energy moving mine? It doesn’t even have any engines, aside from the one that moves the wheels,” I said, just to make conversation. With a non-alien on my radio! “No.” he replied. That period again – not in annoyance or anything, just that apparently that was all there was to say. I began to wonder if I’d ever read a science fiction book with a picture of the earth, a little starburst trail, and a 1978 Cadillac embossed on the front. Probably. I’m sure there’s a children’s book called “The Cadillac That Went To Space.” I rubbed my nose, wondering if that particular Cadillac had made it back. Everything outside the air bubble abruptly went black. “Hey! I was enjoying that! Where did the stars and the Earth go?”

“Too fast for human eyes,” said Fred, and with that I was thrown back against the seat. Ever seen Apollo 13? It was like that. Gravity pushed against me fifteen times worse than the Gravitron had ever done to me as a kid, way past the point where even Hoagy, the big fat bully who had whaled on me countless times, began to cry and scream for his mother. I heard some story once about a kid who got pressed up against a screw behind the back of his head while he was on that ride and had to struggle to keep his head as far up as he could to keep the screw from piercing his head. Anyway, if there had been a screw on the back of my chair, I’d have been unconscious. Unconscious and bleeding something fierce, but I meant because of the pain. I’m not an Air Force pilot, either. I certainly wasn’t trained for this – Gs were what we talked about on the racetrack, not in the air. I was beginning to get nauseous. Just as suddenly as the whole thing started, it stopped. The black around the bubble oozed away like an oil spill, and I became aware of an entirely crystal sphere the size of a planet floating in front of my car, clearly visible in the front windshield. It glimmered with the light of an alien – screw it, it wasn’t non-alien – sun, and tiny crystal lattice structures protruded from every point on the sphere, all of them catching the light and reflecting it through the film of my bubble, making countless rainbows. It was breathtaking. In the beauty sense. The bubble was doing its job, still. Fred’s voice came over my radio again. “We are here,” he said, with what I took to be a sense of pride, since it was definitely an excited sort of emotion, and he hadn’t expressed anything prior to that – well, except for when I got him annoyed. The car hovered gently before the sphere and then began to descend towards it. Within a few minutes it had drifted down towards the surface and came to rest on a circular, white platform. This would make another great TV commercial, I thought. Lots of people would suddenly be buying 1978 Cadillacs if there were scenes like this. Look, I’ll level with you. We’ve all seen computer graphics animation replicate anything our minds can think of, so it’s probably dulled the experience of the description for you. But I promise, the real thing is nothing like you might have been assisted in imagining by a bunch of geeks with computers. Forget what a crystal planet would look like on TV and imagine it in your own head and you’ll be a lot closer to what I saw. The bubble evanesced with a soft sound that resembled silk rubbing against itself, and I opened the door tentatively. The air smelled like vanilla soap and the humidity was high, but the temperature was comfortable. I got out of the car to discover that the platform felt like thin Chinese porcelain. Seeing as it was holding the car, though, I gathered it was something much different. Fred’s voice came from the radio in the car. “Right in front of you,” he said. “The big tower.” I looked right in front of me, and sure enough, there was a big crystal tower. I walked towards it. I walked right off the edge of the platform and onto the crystal landscape, which was gray and had tiny faceted stones strewn across it as if a small boy had been skipping stones on a lake for millennia, and the lake had just dried up. The tower was not so far in front of me, and as I reached it I became aware of a small opening about my height in one of the side facets. I entered. Inside it was dark and clammy, and as my eyes adjusted, I noticed three figures standing in the corner. They beckoned to me, and when I reached them, a thrumming sound began and a pale yellow light seemed to come from everywhere at once, making the figures visible.

They looked human, exactly. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth, one ear on each side of the head, fiber on the top. What else are we, anyway? Lots of different colors and shapes and sizes, just like these figures. They were standing in a row, looking back and forth between themselves and me. “I’m Fred,” said the one in the middle, who was wearing an emerald-colored toga. It wasn’t quite a toga, but it was a simple garment with a tied piece of cloth, so I’m comfortable with that terminology. “Good to see you at last,” I said, not sure if it was an overture at friendship or a relief. He ignored my comment and gestured at the other two figures. “This is Dave, and Steve.” They both nodded. Steve looked away quickly. Dave stepped forward. “We have brought you here to discuss your… spatial habits.” “My what?” “Your spatial habits. The space you occupy.” I furrowed my brow. This wasn’t particularly coherent. “You want me to go on a diet?” I asked. “No, we want you to stop wearing the fabric of the universe down. You’re about a week from ripping a hole,” said the one called Steve, in a shy, quiet voice. “I’m what? Huh?” I couldn’t believe I’d been dragged x light-years away from my world to be told I was misbehaving. Fred spoke as if lecturing a child, and with about as much patience. “Okay, you know how when you walk back and forth on a carpet, eventually it wears down?” I nodded, suddenly painfully cognizant of where this was going. If you’ve forgotten, refer to my opening sentence. Here, I’ll repeat it: “It must be bad for some sort of karmic energy to have too exact a routine.” “Well, you’re doing it with your life. We keep track of this stuff as Regulators.” He went on to explain the function of Regulators. Ever wondered about Big Brother? These guys don’t have a political affiliation, but you can be sure they’re watching you. The Regulators all live on this crystal planet – well, not all of them, but the Abuse Department does – and they check out to see if there are going to be problems with the fabric of time-space caused by various things. See, usually they deal with more important things, crazy scientists with too much plutonium, people trying to enter nonEuclidean space, where time travel is possible, and then cross back to our universe (maybe I’ll tell you that story sometime), and so on. Mostly nefarious stuff. But somehow I had attracted their attention by simply not attracting attention – by keeping so exact a schedule at work that I was in danger of giving my own Local Group a nasty case of destruction. That’s one question down. So how come the Earth hasn’t blown up yet, with all these ant-people with the exact same routine going to work and leaving work every day at the same time? Well, it turns out I was wrong. There are actually five dimensions – that’s an oversimplification, because there are quite a bit more than three spatial dimensions, but we live in three. But there are two more dimensions that aren’t on the same plane, but are just as important. Time isn’t the fourth dimension – that’s hyperspace – but it is a fourth dimension, being a companion dimension to our three dimensions. Of course, time has multiple dimensions too, but I don’t really understand that, and if anyone ever tries to

explain it to you, they’re full of it, because it’s not comprehensible in this universe. At least, that’s what the Regulators told me. Anyway, the third class of dimension is thought. So not only was I constantly in the same place at the same relative time, but I was thinking the same thing constantly too – nothing. That’s like pouring coffee into an empty stomach repeatedly. Eventually you burn a hole. All right, so now you’re satisfied with why I attracted the attention of the Regulators, and who they are, and maybe the part about how I got back from the crystal planet was just a little fuzzy, and what’s this got to do with my bookie anyway, but I told you that the Regulators said they weren’t alien, and what’s with that anyway? Well, among my surprises that day I learned that we’re the aliens, and the vast majority of intelligent life in the rest of the universe is all of one primary species. For some reason, life on Earth developed on its own, which is why we do everything there so strangely. Even though their DNA – or whatever these other people have – has evolved bipedal organisms that look like us, we’re really the ones that are unique. So it’s largely semantic. I’m sorry to debunk all the mysteries of the universe all at once so unceremoniously, but that’s how it happened for me, so I may as well just pass it on. You don’t believe me anyway. The Regulators insisted I cease and desist in my “destructive practices.” I don’t know why they couldn’t have just served me with a letter to that effect, but you’re probably right, I wouldn’t have taken it seriously. I would have just thought I was being stalked. So I worked at SDI for a few months longer, keeping irregular hours and actually actively trying to get assignments for work now and then. It worked out all right, because there actually wasn’t all that much for me to do anyway, and once SDI realized I wasn’t really serving a purpose, I was laid off with a juicy severance package for my trouble, which I’ve been using to tour this beautiful planet and all it has to offer. When that runs out I’ll get another job, but I will never settle into a routine again. The stakes are just too high – and I don’t plan on gambling anymore.