The Movers
Cutting edge technology isn’t always ready for every use case.
Author: Michael Allen Rose
Michael Allen Rose is an award-winning author, musician, and performance artist based in Chicagoland. His books include JURASSICHRIST and THE LAST 5 MINUTES OF THE HUMAN RACE among others. He enjoys tea and cats.
Narrator: Eddie Knight
Eddie Knight has been a technical leader in organizations ranging from financial services to software security, enabling him to gain the wealth of experience and insight that he brings as a speaker, author, and strategist.
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My first mistake, surely, was hiring a moving company that claimed to specialize in quantum entanglement. Nobody specializes in quantum entanglement. Or, if they do, they don’t claim to have such a working understanding of them that they can use them to cut your moving time in half.
I had considered not hiring movers at all. There’s still a part of me that wishes I had just rented a truck, and bought whatever friends I could con into helping me a bucket of beers and a few pizzas. But, I decided, my back and my legs would thank me if I hired someone to move my heavy shit for me, all the shelves and furniture and mattresses.
The guys showed up in what seemed to be an ordinary truck. There were three of them, all with massive beards. Burly men. The kind of men that wrap plastic around two bookshelves
at a time and trot up the stairs to the third floor with a look of grim determination plastered on their bearded faces.
–So, quantum entanglement, huh?
–Yup, that’s right.
–Hope you don’t get anything tangled in those beards, huh? Heh.
–Hm.
–Right. I’ll let you get to it, then.
Two of them walked into the front room, while another grabbed a small remote control from inside the cab of the truck. He nodded at me, and then pressed a button. A shimmering, blue light shot out of the thing and burned an oval into the air above the front walk. He punched a few buttons, tapped the thing on the side, and then turned a little knob while the circle in the air focused and became crisp and sharp looking around the edges.
His partners came thumping out of my house, each carrying a pretty big box, and before I could say anything, they each took a turn chucking the box into the blue circle. Both boxes vanished without a trace.
–Hey! What the hell?
The two men were already walking back into the house, ignoring me. The one with the remote turned to me with a clear look of forced and practiced patience on his face. –Perfectly standard procedure. Your stuff is safe.
–You threw it into a glowing hole in space and time!
–Yeah, basically that.
My couch came flying through the door as though two large men had hurled it in the style of a Scottish caber toss, and it too vanished into the portal.
–Now, just hold on a minute.
–Buddy, just stay back and let us do our jobs. This stuff is dangerous, okay? Relax. If you don’t know quantum physics, they’re best left to the professionals.
The bearded man marched back into my house, and I felt red heat rise into my face. I hired them. I should be able to know what I paid for. I marched up to the rear of their truck to look into the hole. It was green, and swirling, and filled with sparkles. Certainly nothing that would have been approved by any homeowners association or better business bureau I knew about. I turned to say something to these bearded weirdos, but as I opened my mouth, the credenza came rushing through my front door and into my face, knocking me backward. –Hey, buddy, get out of the wa–
I was floating in a weird, emerald glowing warehouse, so vast that the walls didn’t really appear to be something I could reach, even by swimming through the air, as I seemed to be effortlessly doing at the moment. Numbers floated by, winking as they blazed vapor trails through the glittering fog of cosmic energy. I simultaneously knew everything and nothing, and at least five unknowable things, which made my head hurt and my knees bend backwards. After a few very long and immeasurable moments of this, I was unceremoniously spat out into what appeared to be my driveway, only instead of on top of it, I was somehow under it, as though I had clipped through the bottom of the world like a video game character. I looked up through the solid concrete surface to see the bearded men, all peering into the portal. One of them was yelling something into the phone, but I couldn’t tell what it was, because everything sounded like muted trombones.
Nearby, I suddenly spied a box that was mine, recently packed with collectable figurines. It was pulsing, and I slid a fingernail under the tape to make sure it was mine. There was a huge,
echoing burst of sound, and I found myself pulled into the box, and suddenly the flow of time was reversed, and everything changed colors to what seemed to be their polar opposite. Black was white, up was down, and my move was going poorly.
I struck out and kicked against what seemed to be a solid section of glowing matter, but to my chagrin, it grew in size and kicked back, sending me flying through space. I flipped head over heels out the back of the truck, once again. This time, I was back in my driveway, but the bearded men were gone, and in their place were particles of light that looked very upset with me.
–I’m sorry, but look, you really should provide some kind of brochure or something on the dangers of–
The three lights pulsed angrily. I backed away and before I knew it, I had fallen back through the portal again. Everything went black, and then slowly, I felt my body. It felt mechanical.
The driveway is hard against my tires. I feel full. My own belongings are somewhere inside of me, as is the equipment. The bearded men are opening my sides and climbing into me, and I am annoyed. I can hear them talking about the idiot who jumped into their portal, and how they wondered if they should file a report. Yes, it was decided, they should go back and ask their boss about bringing someone back through a moving portal. They call them moving portals. Such a mundane title for such a grandiose concept. I rev my engine, and they seem slightly startled, but don’t suspect the strange changes in their truck. All I can think is that on the way back to their office, I’m going to intentionally hit every pothole I can find.