Free Spacetime Donuts by Rudy Rucker

machines and workbenches scattered all around it; books everywhere, usually open to some valued passage; mounds of notes; used foodtubes and dirty clothes; and crates and crates of supplies for Professor Kurtowski and his machines.
    An area near the far wall was the present nucleus. The density of books and supply crates increased as one approached it, and many cables led there. This was where Kurtowski was building his new large-size Virtual Field Generator.
    "Ja," he said as they approached the main work area. "You are walking through my life here. This," he slapped a loaded workbench affectionately, "is where I tamed my little neutrinos. Over here," a panel of dials loomed over them, "was my listening machine." He stopped. "Listen, Vernor."
    He handed Vernor a pair of earphones and began adjusting controls on the panel. A rapid, articulated sound chirped from the earphones. Vernor put them on.
    There it was before him. But what was it? Laughable to force its magnificence into human words, human concepts . . . only float closer, closer, ahhhhh. Warmth and light enveloped him, and his body outline began a dissolve. He was a cloud. There was clear ether in between his particles . . . the particles were thoughts, and the space between his thoughts was black was white . . . no space, no thoughts, inside, outside—CLICK.
    Someone had turned the phones off. The energy field in front of Vernor's eyes arranged itself into the basement of a plastics factory, into Mick Turner's face. Kurtowski explained, "That's the center of the galaxy, Vernor. The treble is the neutrino flux and the bass is the gravity waves. Pulsars and singularities on miscellaneous percussion." He smiled. "When I use it I generally set a timer to turn it off—"
    "Put me down for a half hour," Mick said, taking the earphones. He tapped his head, "I'm down to summer reruns in here." The Professor tuned the machine in again and Turner sat down with a happy expression, his eyes open but not looking.
    "I get a lot of good ideas listening to that," Kurtowski continued. "The problem is remembering them, eh?" He led Vernor on through the lab. "Controlling the virtual electron field's interaction with the neutrino flux was all I had to do to get my machine going. It was not so very hard once I realized that neutrinos don't exist."
    "How do you mean?" Vernor asked.
    "It's like the coast. There is a coast because there is land and ocean. Neutrinos are the coast between the regular particles and the tachyons. There is no thing you can point to and say, this is part of the coast. When you point, it is at land or at water. The neutrino flux is just . . . the erosion of regular particles by tachyons."
    "Tachyons? The particles that go faster than light? I thought that since they're undetectable they don't really exist."
    "Exist for who, Vernor?"
    He didn't attempt an answer. They had left Mick Turner with the earphones and were now in the main work area. There were several lights, littered workbenches, and two roughly conical assemblages, similar in appearance and separated by about ten feet. Large wave guides led to the cones—apparently they were powered by radiation from the hulking transformer behind the workbench, which in turn received its power through thick bus bars leading up through the ceiling into the humming factory above.
    Professor Kurtowski placed a chair in the space between the two parts of the Virtual Field Generator. On the chair he put a large clock with a second hand. "Watch closely," he said, turning on the machine.
    The power switch was a dial. As the intensity of the field was turned up the chair began to be affected. The top of the chair's back was approximately level with the poles on the top of the VFG cones. The effects were strongest there. In a few seconds the back of the chair had shrunk to the size of a ping-pong paddle. The shrinking effect was weaker down by the chair's legs, so the whole chair seemed to taper towards its top.