Here & There (22 page)

Why did Reidier delete the footage from his hard drive? Although it was a record of a personal, not professional, exchange, it was anomalistic for Reidier to excise it. There is not a single other instance where this occurs (at least as far as the records show). Something significant motivated this decision.

Was this act his own rudimentary attempt to erase the past or was it something more?

A

TITLE CARD:
GALILEE 6:21

TITLE CARD:
EXPERIMENT 47

CONTROL ROOM, GOULD ISLAND FACILITY - 2007-10-26 12:34

Dr. Reidier, sitting at console, tweed sport coat on chair behind him. He goes back and forth reading/mumbling notes from a spiral notebook and then typing into the console computer.

IS1 O’Brien enters from transmission room.

IS1 O’BRIEN

All set.

DR. REIDIER
(nodding)

Almost . . . and . . . done.

Dr. Reidier finishes at the computer. From off, the HIGH PITCH of the Quark Resonator WHINES.

DR. REIDIER (CONT’D)

Ok.

IS1 O’Brien takes his seat. Dr. Reidier addresses the camera.

DR. REIDIER (CONT’D)

Take Umpteen with the ever-elusive, Citric Devil. All calibrations have been uploaded and recorded.

(makes contemplative raspberry noise with lips)

Quantum chromodynamics are in the
██
█████
range, and we are piping in
██████████
electron volts from the
███████
█████
Ok. Here we go.

(beat)

Again.

Dr. Reidier double taps his lapel pin, flips up his Plexiglas cover over Contact Button Alpha. IS1 O’Brien does the same at Contact Button Bravo.

DR. REIDIER (CONT’D)

In three, two, one, go.

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 Six
⁶³
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 Montreal 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