Down in the Steam Tunnels

The Shameful Eugenic Secret Buried Beneath the University

¹
“What is nothingness? Can you show it to me?” More irrelevant questions. I was beginning to regret answering his email. The portly, withered old man with the severe dowager’s hump sitting opposite me in the stately little office identified himself when we met as Professor Heironimus P. Travigan. Ogled me through a little pink monocle, invited me in, then began this bizarre spiel.

“Your email said that you knew something about the university’s steam tunnels that wasn’t in my article.” He shifted anxiously in his seat. “In good time, my dear boy. I assure you, this is all related.” I couldn’t see how, but that didn’t seem to trouble him. “You know, these days we’re meant to believe that the universe sprang from nothing.”

I braced myself for a religious diatribe. It turned out to be stranger still. “In truth, Our universe exists due to an act of separation. Two substances, divided by some unknown force, which some understandably deify. When those substances are together, there is nothing.

But because they are divided, you and I can be sitting here talking about it. The Biblical ‘waters above and below’. Matter and energy, negative gravitational energy. Pleasure, and suffering. Yin and yang. Light and darkness, life and death, good and evil!”

He waved his arms about for effect. I stared for a moment, then challenged him. “Alright then. Can YOU show ME nothingness?” He flashed a devilish grin and withdrew a strange leather case from under the desk. Once open, it revealed a set of five syringes filled with some sort of black syrupy fluid. I protested. “That’s clearly oil, or ink of some kind. Don’t waste my time.”

“Not so! A stable liquid suspension by all appearances, I will give you that much. But whereas any other liquid is comprised of atoms, this stuff simply continues to appear as it does to you now, however small a scale you examine it at. Which is to say, it isn’t made of anything.”

He then withdrew from the desk drawer a jar of blue luminescent gas. Not so easily identified. As he slid the jar near the syringes, both rattled subtly and the glow of the gas wildly fluctuated. They settled down once he restored the distance between them. “Magnets” I uttered, deadpan. “Are we done here?”

He released a quiet sigh. “You’re quite right to be skeptical. I sensed that quality in your writing, it’s why I contacted you. The proof’s in the pudding, isn’t it? Here, take this.” He handed me an unfamiliar device consisting of two glass chambers, one containing the black fluid, the other containing the glowing blue gas. Between them, an ordinary electrical outlet.

“What is it?” I queried, studying the weird little mechanism. “A battery! But then so is the universe and everything in it.” I continued searching the gizmo for any signs of a hidden pair of double As or something that would explain the blue glow. That’s usually how it works. So called free energy magnetic motors, or perpetual motion machines of any kind always conceal some conventional means of motivation.

“A battery, when charged, is simply maintaining a chemical imbalance. Allowing that imbalance to slowly equalize, re-balancing itself, is what generates the current. Like a wind up toy, the weight in a grandfather clock, or any other method of storing energy.

Our universe also exists in a state of imbalance which equalizes as the energy supplied at the moment of the big bang very gradually depletes. The whole mess is slowly running down, lad! And every little thing in it.

Stars will some day burn out. The molten core of the Earth will go cold long before that. And of course, the finite quantity of Orgone you were infused with at birth slowly depletes with every breath you take, your body deteriorating along the way.”

I chose that moment to pick a nit. “I’m sorry, did you say Orgone? As in, the pseudoscience of Wilhelm Reich?” Not at all put out, rather, he seemed delighted I knew something of the matter even if I deemed it baloney.

“Indeed! That’s what the blue stuff is in the trinket I’ve just given you. Highly concentrated primordial energy, not very far removed from the original form. You couldn’t look at the truly pure stuff without the brilliant white light it emits destroying your retinas and roasting your skin!

So for practical purposes, most in my line of work subdivide it according to the light spectrum into a variety of less potent but more manageable varieties. You’ve seen Orgone, the blue stuff. There’s also a golden substance called Vril, and so on.

The higher the concentration, the warmer the color temperature, the more energetic reaction you get when you recombine it with the black stuff. There is of course just one variety of that, as nothingness cannot be subdivided for obvious reasons.”

Oh, that’s nice, I thought. Thank you for sharing an insight into the severity of your dementia with me. “You write for the university paper” he continued, “so you must have one of those portable computers they sell nowadays.” At times like this, his age seemed to exceed even what his appearance suggested.

“Plug it into the device I’ve supplied you with. Use that alone to charge it. Even just with the orgone it would take at least a week to run out. But because it’s reacting with….the other stuff….the amount there should last you no less than a month.”

I made a point to scrutinize the petite, fragile vials. Each the diameter of a pencil and perhaps two inches long. “Yeah, whatever. I’ll give it a shot. Don’t contact me again unless you’ve got more info about the tunnels.” Day wasted, I thought to myself. At least now I know where the administration stashes their fruit loops.

On my way out, some hippie with blonde dreads, a sacred geometry t-shirt, khakis and sandals burst in through the front door. “I came as soon as I heard!” The geezer appeared behind me. The two embraced, then shook hands. “Zachary, m’boy! No doubt you enjoyed having this place to yourself in my absence!” professor Travigan wheezed.

“Zachary” gives him a dubious look. “Please. You’re a fixture here! I managed without you, but only that. You look great, all things considered! Those two were as good as their word.” I began backing towards the door. Neither noticed, just continued catching up. “Indeed. But there’s been somewhat of a...hostile takeover since then. I’ll need your help securing a new supply of...medicine.”

Once back to my apartment I threw my notebooks on the bed, then myself. I’d really hoped this lead would go somewhere. Ever since learning of the urban legend surrounding the network of corridors under the school, service access for pipes carrying steam to heat various buildings, I’ve been obsessed with discerning how much truth there is to any of it.

The story goes that during the tail end of the 1940s, William H. Shendon and Ernest A. Horton undertook an experiment requiring all incoming freshman at Ivy league schools to be photographed in the nude, with a set of metal pins in their spine. Purportedly to study posture. Some say they favored eugenic theories involving the posture of “higher” and “lower” orders of people.

Still others say it was nothing to do with either, but a ruse to gather blackmail material for use at a future date against students who went on to high ranking positions in government. I have my own ideas. What all sources agree on is that some, but not all of those photos were shredded, then burned by 2001.

As for the rest? Available on the black market supposedly. Or exclusively to initiates of the Skull and Bones society. But again, my own research indicates otherwise. One by one over the past two years I tracked down everybody who claimed at one point or another to be in possession of even a single photo from that collection. Mostly cranks, out for attention.

A few of them really had the goods, though. And, once convinced I was sincere about getting to the bottom of the matter, all shared with me details not found in any mainstream article or documentary. Details which, to my surprise, more or less lined up. Even more tantalizing, one of them claimed to have scanned many of the photos which were later shredded and burnt.

She’d provided me only with a cryptic clue as to their location: “You will find what you seek in the book of the all-seeing eye. It’s closer than you think.” I’d have dismissed her as one of the cranks except that she still had one of the deadtree photos to show me, and her story matched up with the others. So began my quest for the ‘all-seeing eye’.

I’m no good with riddles. Even simple ones. As a consequence it took me months before I figured out the intended meaning. In that time most of my focus was on the all seeing eye depicted on dollar bills.

They are after all quite close most of the time as I carry cash on me for emergencies. But no, complete dead end. As often happens, what I sought turned out to be hiding someplace I’d already ruled out.

My university has a long and storied history of controversial behaviorology experiments. Primarily done with animals. Pigeons, chimps, rats and so forth. But also the human animal on occasion, these being the studies which drew the most ire.

Regulations concerning human participation in such projects were not always so stringent. The sixties were a particularly permissive decade for this kind of research. It saw landmark experiments such as the Stanford prison study, the Milgram experiment, and various attempted implementations of Panopticon. It’s that last one which drew my interest.

She’d mentioned a book, after all. The closest repository of those I could think of was the university library. Searching their computerized catalogue for “all-seeing eye” produced a dizzying list of books about the Illuminati. That might’ve sent me down yet another dead end had I not noticed the odd book out.

Just one book in that list wasn’t about conspiracy theories concerning the Illuminati. Instead it concerned Panopticon, a type of prison designed by Jeremy Bentham, a social theorist who thought to improve the efficiency and efficacy of prisons by designing them such that every inmate could be monitored from a central observation tower enclosed with one-way mirrors.

Although of course a single guard could not watch every cell simultaneously, prisoners could not tell whether or not they were being watched, and so had to operate at all times under the assumption that they were.

Given the sociological significance of the project, and the similar nature of the photographs I was searching for, I followed my hunch and soon located the dusty leather bound book on a shelf buried deep in the recesses of the library. Removing it from the shelf, I heard and felt a weight shift within it. Could it be?

In fact, there was something inside. The recluse who’d sent me on this cryptic scavenger hunt, or someone she knew, must’ve hollowed out the book’s interior. When I opened it I found a water tight case of the sort you might carry your camera or phone in while boating. Inside of that, a stack of 3.5 inch diskettes.

How long had these awaited discovery? Evidently the book was sufficiently obscure that nobody else had checked it out in all that time. Nor did I, simply tucking the case of diskettes into my bag and hurrying home with it. I wound up having to buy a USB external floppy disk drive to read them. Luckily, a few manufacturers still make such a thing.

Jackpot. Only a few photos would fit on each diskette due to their limited capacity. But, strewn across the lot, I found a wealth of photos from the notorious collection I’d never seen before. On the final diskette, a document time stamped 1995. It read “You will find the rest in the steam tunnels.”

The steam tunnels are another oddity my university is famous for. Locked up to prevent access for many years now. Finally, I had some concrete sense as to why. What better closet to stash your skeletons in? Aside from the difficulty of access, the heat, humidity and occasional bursts of steam make it dangerous to spend any substantial amount of time in.

When a trio of curious students set out to map the tunnels in the late 80s, one went missing, the body never recovered. That’s the official reason for the chains and padlocks sealing every entrance I know of. It was clear that if I wanted to poke around in those tunnels, I would need clearance from the administration. At a fairly high level, too.

This is what led me to follow up on the email sent by Professor Travigan about my article on the history of the tunnels, published in a recent issue of the university paper. He identified himself as someone who was around during the timeframe of the Ivy League posture study, and one of the few faculty able to access the tunnel network.

It’s difficult to express the disappointment I felt when he turned out to be a nutcase. Because everyone else with the sufficient clearance either didn’t return my calls or advised me to discontinue my investigation. Citing the incident in the 80s, which I gave every appearance of accepting as a sufficient reason.

Sniffing around where you’re not wanted is a good way to make powerful enemies. The simplest precaution you can take is to always behave as though whatever line of BS they feed you has completely satisfied your curiosity. It’s only if they think you’ll continue to pry that they take severe action to prevent it.

I received an email from my editor recommending alterations to the article I’d submitted about the annual canned food drive just a few minutes before the power went out. I was sitting in my bedroom, typing away in the darkness as usual such that I didn’t notice there’d been an outage until I went to the kitchen in search of a snack.

At times like this I’m glad I’ve furnished this place so sparsely. It still looks more or less as it did when I moved in, as I only unpack things from the stack of boxes by the door when I actually need them. My reasoning is that this way it’ll be less work when next I move.

“Fuck!” I shouted, hopping about on one foot as I struggled to cradle my stubbed toe without falling over. A storm last year knocked out power for a solid three days, inspiring me to buy a small folding solar panel to keep my phone charged. I knew it wouldn’t begin to suffice for the fridge. I’d just been grocery shopping too.

That’s when I remembered the professor’s trinket. After deliberating for a while, I decided it was worth a shot, and plugged the fridge into it. Impossibly, it appeared to work. Even more impossibly, it was still working an hour later when my laptop ran down enough that I sought out someplace to plug it in.

I wound up digging a power strip out of one of the boxes, plugging that into the device, then plugging both the fridge and my laptop charger into that. A gift horse scenario. Who cares how it works so long as my groceries don’t spoil, and my laptop doesn’t die? I sat crosslegged on the cold kitchen floor, finishing up the alterations to the article before calling it a night.

When morning came, the fridge was still running. My laptop’s battery read full. “Alright”, I conceded. “Whatever’s in there, it’s not double As”. I turned the device over in my hands, again looking for some fraudulent gimmick and again finding nothing obviously amiss.

I gave up on it for the time being, showered, ate a hastily prepared breakfast of cold pizza and cereal, then biked to class. A physics lecture really should be an evening affair. The brain is never as inelastic as it is during the early hours of the morning. I rubbed at my eyes soon after taking my seat, becoming self conscious about the dark bags under them in the process.

Near as I can tell, those are permanent. If ever you wreck your sleep cycle, even once, racoon eyes stay with you forever. Someone like me, an incurable night owl with a penchant for obsessive investigation, never stood a chance.

I looked around at the sea of macbooks, my own laptop one of the few PCs present. It’s as yet unclear to me how spending twice as much on a computer with the same hardware specs aids the learning process. My eyelids fought every effort to keep them from sliding shut.

How are we meant to absorb such esoteric material while struggling to stay awake? I’d once stocked up on those five hour energy dealies only to discover they really supply about fifteen minutes of wild, manic wakefulness followed by a devastating crash. If that isn’t liquefied meth, it’s got to be something chemically similar.

“-In fact, as the COBE, WMAP, Herschel and Planck probes all confirmed, the quantity of matter and energy in the universe precisely equals the quantity of negative gravitational energy.

That satisfies the chief prediction of the zero energy universe theory. It is the only way we know of that a universe could spontaneously come into being without violating the law of conservation.”

I quite like this professor and would hate to disrespect him by falling asleep in his class. Where other professors come highly recommended if they jazz up the material to make it more approachable and engaging, he delivers only the relevant facts in as concise and clear a manner as I’ve ever encountered.

He won’t bring the beauty of physics alive for you, whatever that could mean, but he does let us know specifically which chapters to study in advance of tests and recommends exercises which promote the retention of what we’ve read. At least in my opinion, everything teachers should be and nothing they shouldn’t. We’re not here to be entertained.

But in this condition, his droning monotone only exacerbated my craving for sleep. I half wished he’d deliver the rest of today’s material through a megaphone. My ears began to perk up, nonetheless, as I recognized parallels between the lesson and the subject matter of the discussion I’d recently had with professor Travigan.

“Now, the mechanism responsible is thought to be particle pair separation. We’ve observed this happening constantly at the very smallest scales, a sort of existential static. Commonly called quantum foam, particles and their antiparticle equivalents spontaneously separating out of apparent nothingness, then annihilating when they collide soon after.

You can get something from nothing, it seems, so long as the debt is eventually repaid. I often liken it to digging a hole in flat ground. You now have a hole, and a pile. Or, just as you can add one and negative one to get zero, you can likewise carry out the operation in reverse.”

He dimmed the lights and turned on the projector. An artist’s rendition of a black hole filled the screen. “So, how was this discovered? As it turns out, there is a specific distance from any given black hole where, as particle pair separation events occur, one of the particles, ejected towards the black hole, is drawn in by its gravity while the other, ejected away from it, escapes.

This accounts for the constant emission of particles and antiparticles from black holes that we now call Hawking radiation. It was quite perplexing before the cause was understood, as of course, nothing is supposed to be able to escape a black hole.”

I felt my mind drawn inescapably towards the black hole of unconsciousness. Regretting, mildly, that I’d turned down a former roommate a week prior when he told me he’d found a reliable hookup for adderall. All too common, particularly in STEM programs.

“The collapse of our universe into existence by this mechanism is thought to have been driven by entropy. Nothingness, or whatever you’d like to call the state preceding the big bang, is perfectly uniform and therefore maximally ordered. Some theorize it was an endless sea of Higgs Bosons.

By contrast, the present state we colloquially refer to as existence is far less ordered if you think about it. And the distribution of that order is anything but uniform! Someone with a naive perspective might look at the high degree of order on Earth and wrongly infer the rest of the universe is equally ordered, in the same way that a child living in a luxurious gated community might wrongly extrapolate from his or her surroundings that the rest of the Earth is an equally lavish utopia.”

He’s a real downer when he talks about this stuff. Seems to delight in it, though. “What are you here for” he once asked an offended evangelical student, “if not to have your illusions destroyed?” No doubt the life of the party, if by some miracle or mistake he’s ever been invited to one.

Today’s afternoon class was literature. Even more tiresome if you can believe it. The sort of people who self select for the course are commonly motivated by the desire to impress one another with elaborate, unorthodox interpretations of works in which, more often than not, the author was perfectly frank about his meaning. As the professor of this course is relatively lax, I finally allowed myself to sleep.

When I got home, against my expectations, the fridge was still running. I checked the little vials, finding that the level of the black stuff had been reduced noticeably while the glow of the blue gas seemed somewhat diminished. Fuck me, I thought. It actually does something.

Not hard to guess his game, though. Casually hand off the device, let me try it out on my own and be fooled by whatever trick it employs. Then I return to him a true believer, eager to gormlessly lap up whatever line of BS he means to sell me. Somewhat more sophisticated than a worm on a hook, but same basic principle.

I set about reviewing the pictures. The cache hidden in the book yielded forty photos, all told. Which were exactly what I’d been let to expect. At first. I admit it was slightly titillating to view nudes of average people, who believed these photos would never be seen by anyone except the scientists carrying out the study.

It was also surprisingly troubling. The mild guilt I felt must be what makes voyeurism exciting for a certain crowd. But for altogether unrelated reasons, the feeling of unease only intensified as I progressed through the images.

No longer simply demonstrating posture, some now depicted the subjects connected by countless long, thin wires from the pins in their spine to an odd machine about the size of an old timey radio, with all manner of analog gauges, knobs and dials on the face. The edges appeared riveted together, the housing made from rough steel.

Through an open service panel in the side I could see row upon row of what I initially thought were vacuum tubes. But, looking more closely, they were instead full of a hazy gas of some kind. I wondered if, were the photos in color, that gas would be a certain shade of luminescent blue.

No. Full stop. Now he’s got me playing along with the delusion. Had the woman who pointed me to these photos done so under his direction? I could see no other plausible option besides folie a deux. All this effort to steer me towards these doctored photos, for what? So that I would come to believe in Orgone?

An investment scam? But I’m as skint as any other student. Recruitment into a cult? I’d seen no other potential members except the unkempt blonde hippie. He’d at least succeeded in arousing my curiosity. What could still be hidden down there? In the humid, dark labyrinth of steam tunnels.

It’s all I could think about during classes. The pitch black, hissing, pulsating web of corridors beneath me. Spreading out organically, like cracks in a window as a stone impacts it in slow motion. Somehow growing, new tunnels sprouting off of existing ones, serpentine concrete pseudopods burrowing relentlessly outward into the cold, dead soil.

It gnawed at me. Every effort to bury it in the back of my mind thwarted as time and time again it clawed its way to the forefront. What’s down there? What could be down there still? What the fuck is down there, hidden in those tunnels? I gave up fighting the losing battle to focus on the lecture and instead left early. For the steam tunnels, of course.

The most well known entrance isn’t difficult to get to. Down a flight of stairs which also leads to the room that the backup generators are kept in. That’s through the door to the right. The double doors straight ahead, however, lead to the steam tunnels. Hence the heavy loops of chains and locks.

Nothing like a deadbolt however. So it was possible, with some grunting, to open the doors just far enough to peer through the crack. That proved to be the limit of what the chains would allow, but it was enough. If only the tunnel on the other side weren’t so dark.

My phone! A millennial’s answer to every problem. I activated the light widget and pointed it through the gap between the doors. On the screen, though grainy, I could make out perhaps twenty feet of tunnel as well as the nearest intersection. Rusty steel pipes snaking down the ceiling and walls, emitting periodic puffs of steam from leaky fittings.

Then, in a flash, I glimpsed a silhouette dart through the tunnel juncture ahead. It was over so quickly I couldn’t convince myself I’d really seen it. My heart rate increased. “Hello?” I called out through the gap. It echoed uselessly down the concrete passage, eliciting no response.

I did, however, hear a faint metallic screech. Like the audio feedback you hear when you place a microphone too close to the speaker it’s connected to. As I strained to hear, I realized it was getting closer. My heart now beating so hard I could hear it, I found I could not make myself run.

I don’t know when the curiosity consumed me. Just that it was now firmly in the driver’s seat and would not allow me to retreat as any sane person would. Instead, I called out again, then put my ear up against the gap, waiting for any reply.

Instead, a hot breath in my ear. This time I did recoil. Nothing visible through the gap except darkness. Over the sound of my pounding heart, I heard the metallic screech recede into the distance. Accompanied by the sound of hurried limping, one foot dragging behind the other.

What was that? Wandering those tunnels, peering out at me through the gap? What the fuck could still be in there? With all other avenues of investigation closed to me, although it frustrated me that he’d succeeded in arousing my curiosity, I returned to professor Travigan.

“Knew you’d be back. Knew it!” he cackled maddeningly. I’d played right into his hands, but could see no other possible direction left to go in. He could get me into those tunnels, and seemed to possess an understanding of their nature I would not find in any book, article or documentary.

“Orgonic null reactor’s still going strong, isn’t it?” I hung my coat on the rack inside the doorway and took a seat before his tremendous polished oak desk. “I just want you to know”, I sternly began, “that I don’t believe a word that’s come out of your mouth since we’ve met. I’m all too familiar with your type.”

He scoffed. “I very much doubt that. Even by my own standards I’m a rather unusual person.” As if to underscore the statement, he withdrew one of the syringes full of black syrup, rolled up his sleeve, then proceeded to inject himself with it. I gaped.

“Oh, this? Never you mind. Just a little something to keep me going.” Drugs certainly would explain a great deal about this guy. “Seems like half the campus is on uppers of some kind” I muttered. He puzzled over that before I spotted a flash of recognition.

“Yes, I suppose you could say that’s what it is. I’d certainly not be...up and about, were I to skip a dose. Zachary sees to it that I don’t forget.” As I studied his wrinkled face, I began to notice something off about his skin. Entirely without color. I could understand why he was pale if he spent all his time holed up in here, but not even his tear ducts or lips were pink.

“Can you get me into the steam tunnels?” I’d wasted enough time indulging his eccentricity. Time to get down to business. He raised his eyebrows. “Is that all you need? Of course. We can go right now if you like.” What? Too easy, I thought. Not like him to be so straightforward. There’s gonna be some kind of ridiculous-

“We’ll go by subway.” Ah, there it is. “You’re confused. There’s no subway that links up with the steam tunnels.” A wry little smile crept over his face. “You’re certain about that, are you? Absolutely, one hundred percent?” I mulled that over, wondering what he could possibly be getting at.

“If you mean in a philosophical sense. I suppose not. I haven’t personally checked, so technically, there exists some infinitesimal possibility that without my knowledge, a subway station was constructed there.” I imagined I felt some distant vibration, and wondered at the source.

He clapped. “Very good!. And are you absolutely, positively certain that the subway in question does not have a stop in the basement of this building?” Had I been drinking milk I would’ve done a spit take.

“Come on now. What’s your game?” He only doubled down. “Can you honestly say, with no caveats, that it is absolutely impossible for there to be a subway station beneath us right now?”

I agonized over how to answer in a defensible way, but finally gave up and rolled with it just to see where it was leading. “No, I guess not. I haven’t been down there to look, so I guess there’s a remote possibility that-” I was cut off by a sudden earthquake.

Or what I mistook for one, anyway. The curios and various glass labware on the shelves rattled as did the entire building around me. “Excellent!” professor Travigan exclaimed. “We’ll use that one.”

“That one”? He hurried me down the stairs to the basement where, to my absolute astonishment, there actually was a subway station. Not one like I’d ever used, though. All of it decorative tiles, polished brass and oak paneling. Stylistically resembling professor Travigan’s office, and the house itself for that matter.

The train itself consisted of a single car with no obvious motor. The exterior was as elaborately decorated as the station, every polished metal surface imprinted with reliefs depicting scenes from mythology. “How? How is this down here? I didn’t think you were serious. When was this built? It must’ve cost a fortune.”

I staggered about, taking it all in, still struggling to believe it was real. The inside was like a Victorian livingroom with plush leather seating, oil lamps and even floral wallpaper. “How can this exist?” I demanded. Professor Travigan, content to hang back and watch in amusement during all of this, shrugged. “You weren’t sure that it didn’t. That’s good enough.”

As if that explained any of it. Zachary descended the stairs behind us, seemingly irate. “We’re going right now? Seriously? Maury is on. They’ve got a guy with a cotton phobia, Maury’s gonna come out wearing a cotton monster costume. Then when he runs backstage, they’ve covered every surface in cotton balls. That’s must see TV!”

Professor Travigan beckoned to him from within the train car. “No time like the present, m’boy! Whatever ‘present’ means, of course. You can resume viewing your frivolous picture radio programs upon our return.”

The two really are a matched set. While taking my seat in the train, I wondered if eccentric little old weirdos like professor Travigan are just what hippies like Zach eventually turn into.

The door slid shut with a solid, reverberating ‘kerchunk’. Zachary turned levers at the corners to tightly seal the door shut, though I couldn’t imagine why such measures were necessary for a simple train ride. “He should really be blindfolded for this”, Zach called out from the rear as he completed preparations. Who, me?

“No need. I’ve vetted him thoroughly enough by now to know that his skepticism is ironclad. There is nothing he could see or hear, I feel, that would diminish his negation potential.” Listen to them, talking about me like I’m not even here.

I felt some odd tension around Zachary. Couldn’t determine the nature of it. Not that I felt threatened, but that the way he speaks about pseudoscience and every other manner of transparent fraud as if I were the idiot for not buying into it makes me desperately want to punch him.

The professor is the same way. Worse, even. I just can’t stay mad at a feeble little pensioner. Who now hobbled excitedly about the train car, lighting the lamps, although they seemed to be included only for decoration. Electric lights lining recessed parts of the ceiling already did a serviceable job of illuminating the interior.

“You know”, the professor warbled as he began firing up whatever sort of engine propels this hulk, “skepticism and credulity are also antipodes. They react just as energetically as any other set of opposites. We just don’t commonly think of it that way because to us, that reaction looks like simple argument. But as ever, it’s really the equalization of a built up differential.”

I glanced over at Zach. Taking bong rips while reading a worn paperback titled “The Cosmic Serpent”. Rang true enough. I’ve learned to get along professionally with these kinds of people, but the way they carry on believing in the most absurd things truthfully does irritate me in the worst way.

Professor Travigan carefully slid the weighty throttle on the brass console before him, and the train lurched forward. “With that, we are off!” I smiled. He’s crazy as a shithouse fly, but his excitement is contagious. Across from me, Zachary continued taking hits from what I now recognized was a bong shaped like the head of Skeletor, from the old He-Man cartoon.

There was no motor sound I could discern. Whatever propelled us was not steam, and perhaps not electric unless especially silent. Nonetheless, we were moving. I resolved to figure out how it all worked at some point. Just another elaborate trick of course.

“Tell me something about yourself” Zach plied, through a growing cloud of fragrant smoke. “Were you always like this? Can’t believe in anything that doesn’t agree with what you already know?” I took exception to that. I’m entirely able to integrate new knowledge, providing it wasn’t obviously some sort of magician’s stunt.

“I dunno. I guess I was never much fun to tell ghost stories to. I remember my first camping trip as a boy scout. We’d gathered around the fire, savoring its warmth and light with the mysterious, dark woods at our backs. Following a particularly spooky tale, they began daring each other to make the dash through the woods back to the van, to get some sodas from the cooler.”

Zach did seem to be listening, although on account of the weed, he was no longer properly sitting in the chair but had instead assumed its shape like a soft putty. “Then suddenly they looked up and there I was with the sodas. Amazed, all of them. As if I’d actually done something brave.”

He began to softly chuckle. Each laugh barely escaping his lips before trailing off into the next one. Something like “ehmmhemehehhemehe”. How much was getting through to him in this state? “Anyway, one of them pointed out I’d brought my knife with me. As if to prove I was not so brave after all. “Ghosts aren’t real”, I told them. “But wolves are.”

He was really a good deal less irritating like this. Much of the tension now gone, and apparently with a ways yet to go until we reached our destination, I continued to share memories from my childhood.

“I remember this one time my sister set up an owl statue to scare me. It was on the porch outside my bedroom window. You could make its head turn with an included remote. Only, I didn’t know it was anything but a normal statue. So while I lay trying to get to sleep, I noticed its head was in a different position. I thought, surely I imagined it. But then, slowly, it turned to look at me.”

Zach now appeared enraptured. Still the weed at work, presumably. “I immediately got up, walked outside and picked up the statue to inspect it. Once I turned it over I found the little door in the bottom for the batteries and the jig was up.

Really disappointed my sister, she’d blown her allowance on the prank. When she asked why it didn’t scare me, I answered “A living statue is impossible.” She was cross with me for the rest of the week, as if I’d done something wrong.”

“Hold on” Zach murmured. “I’m gonna need to bring out the big guns for this.” He stashed his bong in a cabinet under the seat, and from the same cabinet withdrew a helmet with a pair of bongs, one mounted to either side. Their outputs led to a medical respirator style mask by a pair of flexible transparent tubes. “Alright, fool. Proceed.”

He’s really got the world’s most punchable face. I doubted that was a real thing until recently. “I get that many want to believe in the fantastical. It’s a normal impulse. But it’s unfair to dump on people who are just wired such that they can’t humor that sort of thing. I don’t mean them any harm, I wish they’d just-”

Zachary tugged at the window cover behind him. It retracted, and I found myself at an abrupt loss for words. The scenery outside was the void of space. An unfamiliar green gas giant loomed large, with a pink nebula behind it. I just boggled, struggling to string words together but failing.

“Almost like you don’t have it all figured out” he suggested, muffled by the mask. With great effort he pulled himself to his feet and headed up to the front to speak with the professor. 3D screen, I thought. Has to be. There’s still gravity, after all. What a cheap trick! But the clarity is amazing. It’s just like looking out a window.

Zachary returned and slumped back into the plush, beautifully hand carved seat. “You don’t believe that shit either, do you.” He gestured to the window behind him. I shook my head. “That’s impressive, though. The train works like a motion simulator ride, doesn’t it? Hydraulics underneath. I bet we’re still in that station now.”

He issued a disgusted sigh, plumes of wispy weed smoke billowing out the edges of the mask, then pulled the shade back down. After a time, I grew restless. “How much longer until we get there?” The professor called back “It will continue until you decide it’s gone on for an implausibly long time.” So I did. Just like that, the train stopped.