Heisenberg Switch (part 3)

Click here for Heisenberg Switch (part 2) or Heisenberg Switch (part 1)

His shift ended late, as usual, but he was happy because that meant he was one day away from Friday, which meant only a few hours’ work in the morning. He sighed as he got home, and dropped the extra bag of trash he’d been able to collect at work. He told himself he was not going to obsess over this, and that, even with his curiosity gnawing at him, he would wait until Saturday in order to have enough time to figure out how the garbage got whisked away so quickly.
From outside the window, that green glow caught his eye, and he knew he had to find out. This time he was not going to take his eyes off the platform for one second.

He was going to camp on it.

Armed with an old sleeping bag, the trash, and the first things he’d found in the fridge which seemed eligible for dinner, he propped himself up on the platform, near the pole. The light turned red.

Two hours later, the light was still red and Luke had finished all the food except for a bag of chips. These were “El Arrojo del Sal” chips… “salted on the surface and also in depth” the red package said. Luke knew he’d made a mistake as soon as he bit into the first one. He didn’t have any water. He’d be damned if he was going to go into the house now. He caught his hand reaching for another chip. He shot stern warning glares at it as it defiantly brought it to his lips. They were so good! They tasted like some kind of roasted Tex-Mex spice mix, sprinkled on a thin, brittle wafer of salt crystal, served on a pile of smoked wood, surrounded by kindling, in the middle of the Atacama desert in an afternoon in July.

Halfway through the bag he started getting really desperate for a drink. The watering hose was in the garage…too far. Luke rummaged again through the items he’d taken from the kitchen. The lone plastic water bottle had been long since emptied. His reddening eyes scanned the garden for anything which might contain a liquid. He caught the red light of the pole reflecting off something on the ground under the bushes which lined the wooden fence which enclosed his back yard.

Carefully, always looking at the platform and glancing at the sky for the pickup drone, Luke backed towards the object. Without daring to avert his gaze, he felt about blindly with his hand. It was a bottle. Grabbing it, it weighed enough to give him hope. He brought it to the front and realized he knew exactly what it was. It was one of the bottles that had come out of the bag he’d tossed into the yard. It was the only one he hadn’t opened, for the simple reason that it was a gift from his brother Ed, who didn’t even have to buy it because he ran a liquor store downtown. Ed always waited three days before “remembering” Luke’s birthday had passed and inevitably got him the same thing, every year, to apologize. He and Ed were twins.

And every year, Luke just couldn’t bring himself to tell Ed he hated tequila.

He climbed back into his sleeping bag, eyeing the bottle balefully. His hands were already unscrewing the cap before he could ask himself whether his thirst was actually that desperately urgent.

The first sip wasn’t good. The second one was a bit better. It blended well with those Mexican spices….Luke realized he’d eaten another chip and cursed himself. He remembered what his grandmother used to say about drinking: “Never, ever drink alcohol for thirst. Always for pleasure.” To which she would then cackle and add: “And it is such a pleasure to quench your thirst!”

“That’ll quench it,” he said to himself, taking a nice long swig.

Twenty minutes later, the neighborhood was silent. Luke was sprawled across the platform, halfway out of the sleeping bag, spooning the garbage bag and breathing regularly in a gentle tequila-induced temporary coma.

Whup.

There were sounds. Bubbly squeaking sounds. There were two sources, bubbling and squeaking at each other. They seemed agitated. Luke groaned and stirred. The squeaking grew more intense. “Please,” he moaned, “I have a headache.”

The squeaking stopped. Somebody did something to his left ear. He felt a cold liquid slide into it and clawed at the side of his face. He sat up, alarmed. “Hey!” he shouted.

“Pop squeal blubble skree better now, person?” said a little man with a large, bulbous bald head. His skin was very pink, and he seemed to be wearing overalls. The overalls seemed to be unfashionably rolled up, and the design was horrible, because they had a third leg.

Luke froze when he realized it was occupied by a third limb.

“Hello, I am Bob,” said the little man. “Why did you offer yourself to us?”

“Offer myself? What? No, wait where am I?” Luke realized he was sitting on a large table in a big, circular room. The walls were white, with a pearly sheen to them. “You’re not Bob, you’re an alien!”

“I am an alien with a person name, which is Bob. That one behind you chose the person name Phil. You are a person with a person name…” Bob looked at a piece of paper he was holding with his three-fingered hand. It was the pamphlet. “Liew-keeh”

“It’s pronounced ‘Luke’.”

“Very good. Luke. You are on our vessel. We are Blopsqueelians. I am sorry, there is no translation for that in your language, and the fluid matrix translator is doing the best it can. Why did you throw yourself away with the trash? And, more importantly, how did you manage to trigger the transport?”

“Throw myself away?” Luke looked around and saw that together with him, on the table, were his sleeping bag, the garbage, including the now empty package of “El Arrojo del Sal” and the bottle of tequila. “I am not trash. I didn’t go on the platform to throw myself away. I just wanted to know how it could be possible for you to collect stuff so quickly.”

“You mean you still don’t know?”

“Well, no. I think I missed it.”

The alien nodded. “When you got here you were in a…catatonic state. You brain functions were at minimum. Well below the usual threshold of sleep for your species. How do you manage to reach such a state?”

Luke looked at the bottle again. It was half empty. “Ah, well I think I was drunk.”

“…drunk?”

“I had too much alcohol and passed out.”

“Oh, good, that is very good!”

“No, bad, that is very bad! This hangover is the pits!”

“I mean this explanation means that the platform did not malfunction. We do not need to fear more of you getting taken from the surface of your planet.” Bob made a gesture towards the alien behind Luke, the one he’d called Phil, who also wore three-legged overalls. The gesture was strange, but it looked very much like a ‘told you so’.

It took Luke a few seconds to process the last phrase. “What? You mean I am not on the surface now?”

“No. We are in stationary orbit around your planet. Over your country.”

“Can you land?”

“I am sorry, we can’t do that,” Bob said.

“Oh…are you going to take me to your planet, put me in a zoo and perform all sorts of probing experiments on my body?”

“We would love that, but sadly we can’t do that either.”

Luke felt the need for more tequila. “You would love that?”

“The going to our planet bit. We have not taken the rest into consideration, really. Would you want us to probe your body?”

“No, hell no. No thank you.” Luke inwardly sighed with relief. “So, what keeps you here?”

“We cannot leave,” the alien named Phil said.

“We must collect your garbage,” Bob added.

“I see,” Luke nodded, “You need to let that first year pass, so you can get to the point where it’s time to pay.”

The two aliens seemed to be troubled by his words.

“Ah, yes…payment…” Bob ventured, “we are a little worried about that bit. You see, we had not really given it enough thought, but it turns out that a full year of, well…that…” he pointed towards the black bag of trash. A mechanical arm dropped from the ceiling and grabbed it, carried it over to an opening in the wall and dropped it inside. It made a loud fuzz and gave out a flash of orange light. “…that will probably be way more expensive than we thought.”

“Damn…Sandra was right,” Luke muttered to himself. “Listen,” he added, “one thing I know about humans, er…being one, is that we take money questions very seriously. You might want to think twice before pulling a trick like that.”

This seemed to cause even more agitation.

“This is all your squeeb fault!” the alien behind Luke said.

“We would have been able to quantify the ngzeeblub parameters if you had calculated the squip coefficients correctly!” Bob shot back. Some more words which were, evidently untranslatable.

“It’s not my fault if their waste is beep’qweegh!”

“You’re the one who’s beep’queeegh!”

“Sneeq you!”

In the meantime, the mechanical arm came round for a second load. It paused over Luke’s sleeping bag, but he quickly grabbed it before it could get incinerated. The arm paused for a minute, gave a small shrug and grabbed the bottle instead.

“Excuse me,” Luke said, “I’d still like to know how it works.”

“How what works?” Bob said, still glowering at his colleague.

“The platform.”

“The platform is a teleportation device.” Bob replied.

“But I was never able to see it at work. Is one of you monitoring all the time?”

“No, no, that would be impossible. We have a p’queeek…sorry. There’s a word, or rather a name you human persons use for it, after the person who theorized…”

“Heisenberg,” the other alien said, flatly.

The mechanincal arm dropped the botttle in the opening. Fizz. Flash.

“Yes. Heisenberg. a Heisenberg switch. Sorry. We’ve been studying your science, but there’s so much…most of it quite wrong.”

“What’s a Heisenberg switch?” Luke asked.

“Oh dear. Well, simply put, it is based on the principle that an observed quantum phenomenon will not yield the same result as an unobserved one. By linking the color of the light to the state of a quark, we can activate the transport automatically when the interference is below a given threshold.”

“Huh?”

“The switch knows if you’re watching,” Phil said.

“Ah! Cool! Except your switch had no power over my keen investigator senses!”

Bob shook his head. “You were, what’s the word…Sneeq-faced…no, that’s not it.”

“Breeelleeeq!” the other alien said.

“No,” Bob replied, “We use that to express great surprise…”

“Breeelleeeq!” the other insisted, pointing at the controls. “We got a full ‘smeebloop with that last load!”

“What? How is it possible.”

The alien tapped some panels. “The liquid. What was the liquid in the bottle, Luke?”

Luke blinked, taken aback by the sudden, urgent tone. “Well, that was tequila…”

Bob looked puzzled. “T’queeel? That means ‘head injury’ in our language.”

“Close enough. It’s the beverage that knocked me out.”

“Where can we procure more?”

“Any liquor store. I’m glad you like it.”

“We like it so much that we will be happy to leave immediately…before the payment. But we need more.”

“Sounds good. Wait. How much do you need?”

Phil tapped the panel a few times again. “Five hundred times the quantity we just received.”

“That was half a bottle…two hundred and fifty? That’s a lot…but I think I can get it for you if I can borrow one of your Heisenberg thingies…”

Moments later, Luke walked into his brother’s store, casually strolled down the aisle to the door to the back where Ed stored the crates,and found the pallet with the tequila. It had over three hundred bottles. Luke placed the device which Bob had given him, It was much smaller than his platform at home, and consisted of a small black box with a light on top.

The light went from green to red,

He was about to reach the door when a forklift skidded to a halt in front of him. “Bro!” a voice shouted.

“Uh…hello Ed.”

“What are you doing here?” Ed said, putting the forklift into neutral before climbing out.

“I was…looking for you. I…mmm…finished the tequila and wanted to buy a new bottle.”

“Oh, you really like that stuff eh? Well, lemme get you one straight from the latest shipment…I think they’re back over there…hey where’s that light coming from?”

Luke quickly rushed ahead and turned to face his brother. “On second thought…uh…maybe I could try…”

“Try what?” Ed said, still trying to see past him to catch a glimpse of the red light which was seeping from behind a stack of bottles.

“Try, uh…hey! Is your forklift rolling into that rack of Vodka bottles?”

“Oh no! Not the vodka!” Ed said, spinning around. “Wait,” he added, “it isn’t moving you silly.”

Luke shrugged. “Oh, it must have been my impresswhup!”

“Your what?”

“My impression. Listen. I’ve just decided I don’t want that tequila. In fact I absolutely loathe it. I prefer Italian wine. Let’s go pick one from the ones on display in the store. I wanna celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?”

“I think I’ve just spared everyone one hell of a garbage collection bill.”

***

Phil eyed the indicators with satisfaction. “We have more than necessary. Recall all teleporters.”

“Yes,” replied Bob. “How nice of that person Luke to allow us to discover the high-energy fluid. I just hope the humans are not angry, if what he told us about their relationship with money is true.”

“Well, they’ll need to come all the way to our planet to file a complaint.”

“Still, I feel a bit guilty,” said Bob, “I mean, all that garbage for free…”

“Well, it ought to teach you to check the fuel before we leave. Next time we might not be so lucky, and then we’ll have to honor the contract and pay for it.”

***

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