Chapter 1
Look, here’s the deal. If you’re just tuning into the world of Jon and Loxy for the first time, there can be some initial confusion. This is just par for the course, part of life, the way it is, the same way dreams are different every night, and sometimes even from dream to dream within the same night. It’s full of anachronistic anomalies, contradictions, hyperboles, and even grammatical errors, mostly unintentionally, perfectly planted in order to wake people from this to dream so they emerged into their own dream. It’s what happens when you let a six year old write a book. Not that I am six, I don’t think I am six, but I was hired by a six year old to tell you this story, and we’re doing the best we can. Part of the problems is labels in general. Who am I? Who are you? Am I a boy or am I a girl, all these choices we have to make before we can even get the good part of the story. What am I wearing, what do I look like, yada yada yada. We all just want to jump to the good part, but that’s just not how life works. Mostly. We always have to be inserted into a story already in motion, like in the back of a moving truck, chaos, and boxes all around. We’re always born into a world with players having already made some hard decisions that impact are game. But I am going to do you a favor and fast forward over that, fast forward over the fact that we are starting with Jon. Jon, perhaps at the age of ten, maybe older, maybe younger, because what is age, really? And, never mind the hint of music that isn’t music. Maybe it’s a heartbeat, maybe a shamanic drum, or maybe it’s the garbage truck setting a large, empty container down so hard that the waters in a street puddle that reflected the moon and Jon’s face as he slipped up to the trailer were wiped out by ripples. And definitely ignore what looks like Jon breaking into an RV, because, he’s is only slightly embarrassed by everyone knowing it, even though it was no secret, because the owner caught him red handed leaning into the small refrigerator. Jon had that feeling that someone was looking at him, and closed the refrigerator door just enough to confirm his suspicion, but was startled none the less.
“OMG!” Jon said, nearly jumping out of his skin. “You scared me.”
“I scared you?” the owner of the RV asked, incredulously.
“Yeah,” Jon said, as only a six or ten year old boy could say. “I didn’t think anyone was home. I knocked first.”
“Well, I am sorry I didn’t answer. I was on the toilet,” the RV owner said.
“Oh, well, that makes sense,” Jon said. “Are you going to kill me?”
“Sit down at the table,” the RV owner said, pointing to the half bench seat.
Jon complied, resigned with his fate. He put his head down on the table, waiting for the mercy killing. The RV owner put together a plate of food, chili over hot water cornbread, and brought it to the table.
“Sit up,” he directed, and put the food in front of Jon after compliance. He sat down across from Jon and poured a glass of tea for Jon, and then for himself.
“I am confused,” Jon said.
“So am I, most the time,” he said.
“You’re going to kill me with poison?” Jon asked.
The RV owner sighed heavily, leaned into the table. “You break into a black man’s home and just naturally assume he is going to kill you?”
“Yeah, pretty much,” Jon said.
“OMG, son, we are so past the sixties. What would happen if I broke into your home?” the RV owner asked.
“My home, or a black man breaking into a white man’s home in general?” Jon asked.
The RV owner nodded appreciatively. “Nicely sorted. Your home.”
“You don’t want to break into my home,” Jon said.
“Just how old are you?” the RV owner asked.
“How old do I look to you?” Jon asked.
“Everyone looks and sounds like babies to me,” he said. “Eat.”
Jon took a portion of the chili, found it was actually pretty good, and began to shovel it into his mouth as fast he could, as if he had never seen a meal before. The RV owner sipped his tea, examining the boy. He observed the black eye, and stitches over the eyebrow, and couldn’t leave it alone.
“What happen to your eye?” he asked.
“I fell off my bike,” Jon answered with his mouth full.
The RV owner appraised the response, finding misplaced loyalty, discernment, and flat out lying. “Do you even own a bike?”
“Not since I fell,” Jon said.
The RV owner pursed his lips in consternation.
Jon swept his tongue over his teeth to break free some cornbread, and asked: “Has anyone ever told you that you resemble…”
“Stop” the RV owner said, using a flat hand before pointing. “If you say I look like Morgan Freeman, I am so going to…”
“Wait wait wait,” Jon interrupted. “I break into your RV, you feed me, but if I tell you that you resemble a particular celebrity, you’re going to kill me?”
“I was aiming for slapping, but okay,” RV owner said. “You seem obsessed with being killed. Do you want to die?”
“Better than hanging around this place,” Jon said.
“Are you sure?” RV owner asked. “I mean, think about it. You got forever to be dead, and what, a blink of an eye to live, to dream?”
“Are you one of those preacher types, like from the Blues Brothers?” Jon asked.
“OMG, I know you did just didn’t compare me to James Brown,” the RV owner said.
“I am emotionally stunted at 6, give me a break,” Jon said. “So, not a preacher then, what are you?”
“Is my career relevant?” the RV owner asked.
“Might be,” Jon said.
“You’re going to define my entire personhood based on my career?” the RV Owner said.
“Isn’t that what people do?” Jon asked.
“You broke into my RV, should I make that the entire basis of how I relate to you?” the RV owner asked.
“Good point,” Jon said. “So, what do you do?”
“I am a physicist,” the RV owner said.
“Oh,” Jon said, sorting. He came to a curious conclusion. “What’s the difference between a physicist and a preacher?”
“In today’s age? Not much,” he answered, musing. “I suppose the difference would be that if you were to report seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, I would ask you if it were a particle or a wave.”
They both laughed. It was a good laugh, growing in depth, each enjoying it, until the RV owner stopped laughing and brought his hand down hard on the table.
“What the fuck are you doing breaking into my home?” he asked.
Jon was on the verge of crying, but was trying to fortify defensiveness. “I was hungry,” Jon admitted.
“You could have knocked,” he said.
“I did knock, the door opened, I came in,” Jon said.
“Oh, okay then,” he said. “I have been meaning to fix that. What’s your name, son?”
“Is it relevant?” Jon asked.
“You learn fast. It could be,” the RV owner said. “I could just call you Up, or Down, or Charm, or Hey You. That was a particle joke if you didn’t get it.”
“I got it. Wasn’t funny. You can call me Jon,” Jon said.
“Jon it is. I am Doctor James Gate,” James said, extending his hand.
Jon hesitated. “You mean, you’re for a real physicist?”
“No, I just play one on TV,” James said. “Are you going to shake my hand?”
“If you’re that good at physics and all, why are you living in an RV park in a beat up, old bus as oppose to some University boring students or smashing atoms?” Jon asked.
“I am physicist,” James said, withdrawing his hand. “I like living simply and off the grid.”
Jon nodded. “I so wish I had a magic bus and could get off the grid.”
“Learn physics,” James said.
“Please, cosmological theory today is whacked. I have dabbled in numbers, and magic, and philosophy, and the only thing I have found to be true is Einstein observation that illusion of reality is doggedly persistent, not verbatim.”
“How old are you again?” James asked.
“Again, how old do you think I am?” Jon demanded.
“I think you’re a baby and don’t have a clue about anything,” James said.
“Well, maybe if I wasn’t having to spend all my time hunting for my next meal and avoiding getting my butt kicked by family and the other hungry peers I might have time to actually sit down and do some math,” Jon said. “Next time you’re at the University, look up Maslow. Or maybe, here’s a novel idea, running around and getting into mischief is the way boys learn. We muck things up, the same way you like smashing atoms. Constructive deconstruction. But no, you adults just want to label that as an illness and then zombify us with medication.”
“Is that what happened to you?” James asked.
“I escaped the drug part. My mom did get me the DX of ADHD because the state sees it as a disability, so she gets a check from the state, and free amphetamines, which she then sells on the street for more than what the state paid. And in truth, no one really notices the difference in school because no one is aiming at teaching us kids anything but compliance and regurgitation, if they’re paying us any attention at all,” Jon rambled on. “They also gave me a DX of ODD, too, but I don’t understand how refusing to walk into traffic is a sign of opposition as opposed to intelligence. Did you know less than 12 percent of the teacher population is male, and that females tend to grade male students down, as opposed to female students who get rewarded for just showing up and looking cute? And did you know, both males students and females students do better when they are separated by gender? The girls are less focused on looking cute, and the boys are just, well, less stupid, but you adults are so determine to make us the same, as if we come off some cookie cutter, conveyor belt system, because, I don’t know, you like mediocrity or the elite need a population of zombies to maintain their status quo. Yeah, cosmology is whacked, the school system is whacked, but quite frankly, the school system is whacked because the parents are whacked, and we can probably trace all this whackedness back to the garden and the fall of man, which squarely places the responsibility on God for allowing the miscreant into the garden in the first place.”
“Wow,” James said. “You’re from Texas, aren’t you?”
“Safe bet, seeing how we’re presently in Texas,” Jon said. “Welcome to the ‘pull yourself up by your own bootstraps’ state. Might be nice if someone handed out some boots with straps.”
“So, you have developed a pretty sophisticated theory of why everything is whacked,” James said.
“Got a better one?” Jon asked.
“I do agree things are whacked,” James said.
“So, what’s your theory?” Jon asked.
James put his elbows on the table, clasped his hand, steepled his index fingers, touched them to the lower part of his lip, and contemplated his response. He stared into the depth of Jon as if Jon was a crystal ball and he was looking for clarity. “You really want to know?”
“Enlighten me,” Jon said.
“Extremely dangerous words,” James said.
“Danger is my world,” Jon said.
“You understand, being enlightened doesn’t mean things necessarily get better, right?”
James said. “It just means you’re awake and aware.”
“I am more likely to buy into it if you’re not pushing puppies and sunshine,” Jon said.
James nodded. “Excellent point. Very well. My theory of everything: The underlying, mathematical description of reality appears to resemble computer code. A specific kind code, a series of ones and zeroes you might find in an internet browser. More specific, it contains error correcting algorithms, just like internet browser codes, analogous to RNA and DNA correction algorithms.”
“Oh,” Jon said. “You’re one of them.”
“Clarify,” James said.
“You’re either about launch into a metaphysical tangent that incorporates the law of attraction, or you’re going to go into this whole spiel about how we live in the matrix and we’re all waiting for a superhero like the Neo-Jesus-freak to break us free.”
“I don’t see those alternative explanations as mutually exclusive,” James said.
“I don’t suppose you can prove it to me?” Jon said.
“How good is your math?” James asked.
“Sucks,” Jon said.
“So, you’d make a great theorist,” James said. “Here’s the deal. I found a secondary code while smashing atoms. I literally smashed up against the membrane of reality and found an oscillating echo from another Universe and tapped into someone else’s computer system. I travel around in an RV looking for hotspots to reconnect to that Universe.”
“What’s in this chili?” Jon asked.
James was not offended. “Let me show you something.”
James got up from the table and went back to his computer alcove. Jon found it impossible to determine if he was a Mac user or a Windows user, or that other operating system that no one talks about, as the system itself was a unique, hybrid with glowing peripheries and outlines. The monitor displayed a number of opened windows, some showing code, some showing digital outlines of anomalous creatures never before seen by Earth in its entire history.
Creatures came to the foreground, stats were assembled, and they shrunk back as another became prominent. Foreign script described attributes of the creatures. There was also data that described a technology, what might be a storage and transport system, very similar to Star Trek beaming things up by converting things directly to energy and moving them about virtually before reanimating them. This was ‘Alienware’ before there was even an Atari, but somehow it was all working without question and or even reel to reel and punched data cards. James sat down at his chair, put on his glasses, mumbling something about an update having finished. There was a red and white ball sitting in the cradle, very shiny, with its own internal, recessed lighting which absolutely screamed for Jon to touch it. Jon reached for it. James slapped his hand.
“Don’t touch,” James said.
“I think Uhura is calling you,” Jon said.
“Ha ha,” James said.
“Seriously,” Jon said. “If that’s your starship calling I want to go.”
“Son, this technology comes from a different world, probably from a different universe, and it’s taken all of my saving to build this one, tiny sample of transportation tech, and getting the code configured to work within our technological framework has been a living nightmare, and, well, I don’t have a comparison, unless you want to borrow from Star Wars, Harrison Ford’s line, traveling through hyperspace is not like dusting crops…”
The monitor went black.
“What?!” James said, panicking. He looked over his glasses and read the power meter.
The batteries were charged and the solar collector on top of the RV was producing. It wasn’t a power problem.
James looked back at the screen, touched the keyboard.
Letters appeared on the screen, one at a time, until the following questions were completed: “Who is this? And why are you hacking my system?”
James tried to type a response but his keyboard was disabled.
“Try talking to him,” Jon said, pointing to the mic. It was the same microphone that the agent in Ultraman would use to become Ultraman.
James looked to Jon crossly, as a physicist and computer expert, he knew better. “That won’t work.”
“What won’t work?” appeared on the screen in response. “Who is this? What’s your name?”
“I am Doctor James Gates,” James said.
“Why are you hacking my system? It’s public domain. You can get it for free at any tech shop?”
“Who are you?”
“I am Professor…”
James turned to slap Jon’s hand, because again, he had reached for the ball. James hitting Jon’s hand caused him to hit the ball, dislodging it from the cradle. It rolled, fell to the floor, directly square between his feet, depressing the button.
There was a huge flash of light and then Jon was gone. The ball squirmed, as if struggling to digest something, oscillated to a stop, and the light’s flashing yellow became a steady green.
“Oh. So, that’s how it works,” James said, as cool as Willy Wonka after a kid had been sucked through a tube, blown up like a berry, dropped down the garbage chute, or teleported through wonkavision. He remained as calm and cool as a Scientist gathering data.