"Do you mind?" a woman who was a short bundle of energy with dark skin and hair that would scare Medusa (really, Medusa - look her up on Farcebook and ask her yourself if you don't believe me, but, uhh don't look at her directly) asked.
The tall, elderly man who could be described - with all due love and respect - as a fire hydrant with dark glasses and limbs - shook his head amiably. "Nope," he replied. "Don't mind at all..."
When it became clear that he had no intention of leaving the immediate vicinity, the woman said: "We're trying to have a private conversation, here."
"Oh, umm, well, mumble mumble, air conditioning," the old man responded.
"I'm sorry?"
"Air conditioning is best in this spot of the bullpen," the old man claimed. "Don't want to get overheated - an old body like mine has trouble maintaining homeostasis, don't you know."
"It's the middle of January!" the woman protested.
"Bertrand," the mid-thirtyish fire hydrant with dark glasses and limbs with the sandy brown hair and winning smile with whom the woman had been attempting to converse, stated, "I assure you that what girl investigators talk about is exactly the same as what boy investigators talk about."
"Didn't say it wasn't," the old man huffed. "I surely did not say that at all."
"I also happen to know," the younger man vamped, "that the coolest spot in the room is by Barack Bowens' desk." He swept a hand towards a desk on the far side of the bullpen, where a short black fire hydrant with dark glasses and limbs guiltily averted his attention away from them.
"Awrighty, then," the old man tried to be gracious but ended up sounding like he had just swallowed a butterfly. "Thanks for the tip." He walked away from the man and woman's desks. You might think that the slowness of his gait indicated a reluctance to move away from the strange attraction of the exotic, but, since the narrative has barely begun, let's be generous and say it was merely a symptom of his advancing decrepitude.
"So," Noomi Rapier said when the old man was out of earshot, "what were we talking about again?"
Before Crash Chumley, her partner at the Transdimensional Authority, could answer, they were called into the office of their boss, Albert Abrachnel, and given a new assignment.
"Have either of you ever heard of a drug called Transdimensional Joy Joy?" Abrachnel asked.
They thought they had heard him wrong, but that was not possible: a strange quirk of Albert Abrachnel's voice (which he had cultivated for decades) was that it became more audible the quieter he spoke. "Transdimensional Joy?" Noomi asked.
"Joy," Abrachnel corrected her.
"That's what I said," Noomi stated.
"No," Abrachnel insisted. "You said Joy."
"Isn't that right?" Noomi, thoroughly confused, asked.
"Transdimensional Joy Joy," Abrachnel, whose patience for comic dialogue was unusual for a man in his position, stated. "Double Joy. Do either of you know what it is?"
"A phone app the Transdimensional Authority created to try and get three year-olds interested in joining the service?" Crash suggested.
"Three year-olds," Abrachnel almost smiled. "Nice callback." "Thank you."
"Unfortunately, no. That's not it."
"A Japanese girl band?" Noomi tried. "Didn't they have a hit a couple of years ago with a song called 'Yummy Yummy Yummy I Got Love and It's Gummy?'"
"Thank you for trying," Abrachnel said. "But no. Transdimensional Joy Joy is a new drug that has hit the streets of Montreal. Reports are that it allows users to access multiple realities at the same time."
"How is that possible?" Crash asked.
"Doctor Alhambra could explain it to you," Abrachnel told him, referring to the Authority's foremost scientist and recreational pottery smoker, "but you would need sick leave for at least two weeks, and I need you on the case right now. It's very scientific - that's all we laypeople need to know."
"Is it dangerous?" Noomi wanted to know.
"Not at first," Abrachnel answered. "It begins with a high similar to that of LSD, but without the high-pitched screeching or scent of madeleine cakes. Users slowly lose the ability to tell which physical reality they actually inhabit. There have been incidents involving people who thought they were eating breakfast when they were actually walking down the street, or believed they were reading a book when they were in reality in the middle of pitching a no-hitter, or, in one especially unfortunate case, a man thought he was making love to his three husbands when he was actually giving a lecture on particle physics to a graduate seminar."
"Ouch!" Noomi said.
"Precisely," Abrachnel agreed. "Ouch."
"What do we know about... Transdimensional Joy Joy?" Crash asked.
"Local law enforcement..." Abrachnel paused for a few moments so that they could all sneer derisively, "started hearing about a new drug about roughly six months ago. It started with posters around town - at first, they thought they were for a new kind of pyjama party - Quebec culture really is different from that of the rest of the country. The posters had pictures of shattered mirrors and the line, 'Decuple the realities, twice the joy!' After a couple of months, hospitals around Montreal began noticing strange, delusion-based accidents. It only took local law enforcement..." Abrachnel paused for a few moments so that they could all sneer derisively, "until last week to make the connection.""Sounds like a local problem," Crash commented. "Why involve the TA?"
"This is all in the file," Abrachnel pointed out. "However, since I am well aware that investigators reading files is a pleasant fantasy that helps Transdimensional Authority bureaucrats sleep at night, I'll give you the short, unnuanced version: local law enforcement..." Abrachnel paused for a few moments so that they could all sneer derisively, "started working its way up the food chain. Unfortunately, they only got one level before they found out that the drug was being smuggled into the city from another universe. That is where we become involved."
"Did local law enforcement..." Noomi paused for a few moments so that they could all sneer derisively. Unfortunately, Noomi did not have enough seniority to trigger the 'all sneer' response, and the few moments were filled with an awkward silence. "Uhh," she eventually continued, "did...they figure out how the drug was being transported into their universe?"
"Mules," Abrachnel replied.
"Well, sure, that's what they're called..."
"I wasn't being metaphorical," Abrachnel cut her off. "Joff Gomez, Ambassador from Earth Prime 5-0-3-4-6-8 dash epsilon to Earth Prime 7-4-3-9-0-1 dash iota, uses the mules to transport official diplomatic communications. He rotates members of his herd every two weeks, so they are constantly travelling between universes. Unfortunately, the mules have diplomatic immunity, so there's nothing we can do about them."
"What kind of a sick bastard concretizes a metaphor so casually?" Crash asked.
"That's what we need you to go to Earth Prime 7-4-3-9-0-1 dash iota to find out," Abrachnel told him. "As well as who is bankrolling the operation. The Dimensional DeloreanTM will be ready for you in five minutes. Any questions?"
"Sure," Noomi started. "What -"
Holding up a hand to stop her, Abrachnel said, "Could you please humour an old man and read the damn file?"
Noomi and Crash looked at each other. "Uhh, yeah. Sure," Noomi said in a voice that wouldn't have fooled a lobotomized Mother Teresa.
"You're not going to read the file, are you?" Abrachnel asked, his voice dipping ever so slightly in disappointment.
"Regulations require that we read all relevant documentation before going into the field," Crash assured him. "We would never -"
"Of course you wouldn't," Abrachnel agreed with Crash to stop him from being too dishonest. "Only, I was a field agent myself, once, and I know that regulations come in two flavours: by the book, must follow vanilla; and slow you down, get in the way of capturing the bad guy chocolate. Did you know that the active ingredient in chocolate, the thing that actually makes it sweet, is vanilla? That's why gourmet chefs and Transdimensional Authority senior management recommend vanilla for...uhh...everyday use in...in..."
"Union rules forbid us from discussing our choice of sweets with management," Crash pointed out, preventing Abrachnel from getting too deeply lost in his metaphor.
Abrachnel raised an eyebrow slightly. "Oh, yes?"
"For your own protection," Crash assured him. "In case we do something against regulations. And get caught. And face disciplinary action. And are subsequently fired, fined, jailed or forced to watch thirty-six straight hours of Law and Order: Tuktoyaktuk in order to be rehabilitated. If you weren't aware of what we were planning, you could be fired for not having better control of your subordinates, but at least you wouldn't be subjected to any Dick Wolf marathons!"
Abrachnel smiled with his eyes, which sounds like something grotesque out of a Sandman comic, but which poets assure us is actually quite charming. "Good of your union to be concerned for the welfare of somebody in management."
"It's very progressive that way," Noomi told him. She had been a Transdimensional Authority investigator for such a short period of time that she actually believed it, too.
"Well, just in case you...don't have the time to read the entire file before going into the field," Abrachnel stated, passing a newspaper clipping across his desk to them, "you might find this useful."
Taking the article, Crash said, "For your benefit, we make no promises..."
by HAL MOUNTSAUERKRAUTEN, Alternate Reality News Service Crime/Court Writer
University of Wallamaloo graduate student Jeffersonian Quartzman was running a tutorial on the morality of peat moss when reality fractured around him. At the same time as he was quoting Kant on the impossibility of earthworms, he was tossing his laser pointer on the table and admitting that none of this would help his students get a job after they graduated. While he was doing those things, he took his shirt off and showed his undergrad students his non-existent duelling scars. Meanwhile, another version of him broke down and admitted that he was addicted to krill soup. Simultaneously, he led his tutorial group out of the building and, waving his arms towards the city, encouraged them to go on, go on, now, be free. Be. Free. In synchrony with these events, he turned off his PowerPoint presentation and asked, "Have you ever considered the poetry of concrete? I mean, really considered the shit out of it?" As more and more different versions of him did more and more outrageous things, a detached part of his mind was thinking, "Well, that's interesting..."
Quartzman was under the spell of a new drug called Transdimensional Joy Joy.
Transdimensional Joy Joy is most often found in the form of a little pink pill with a pattern that is difficult to make out, but which most users think looks like a butterfly with skulls on its wings (lest users think it is Alec Baldwin having a really bad hair day). It has also been known to come in the form of a pink powder that the user could pretend was an off-brand form of Metamucil and mix with water to drink, and an aerosol to be sprayed directly into a user's eyes.
The effect of the drug is to give users access to alternate realities.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa," whoa whoa whoaed world-renowned television medical busybody Doctor Wizard of Oz. "There is some debate about whether users of Transdimensional Joy Joy actually access other plains planes of existence, or whether their brains just fancy that they do."
Does this actually make a difference to users of the drug?
"Well, no," Doctor Wizard of Oz admitted.
"Alright then," said local businessman Andromeres Grebe, who wanted to assure us that he was most certainly not a drug dealer, but he did know how to get certain products for discerning clients, if you know what he means. (We don't, but we were trying to project an air of pretentious hipness in the hope that he had access to free samples, so we just nodded our heads in enthusiastic agreement.)
"Look," Grebe pointed out. While we were looking at the spot on the wall to which his finger directed our attention, he said, "There is no reason for Transdimensional Joy Joy to be illegal. Using it is just like using a Home Universe GeneratorTM, but without the sullen neediness. Or, the tremendously energy-inefficient and costly technology."
Hmm.
It takes four to seventeen-and-a-quarter hours for Transdimensional Joy Joy to take effect; the drug appears to have been designed with a built in delay. Why?
"Well," sniffed Grebe, "I could spin you some clever-sounding medical bullshit about absorption rates into the bloodstream, but the truth is simpler: nobody wants to use it in clubs because then everybody's experience would be the same. Hitting on the person next to you and getting rejected. Hitting on the person next to the person next to you and getting rejected. Hitting on the person next to the person next to the person next to you and getting rejected. Hitting on the bartender and getting ejected. And so on.
"Honestly, who would want to experience that level of humiliation, even if they knew everybody else in the club was experiencing it, too?"
Early reports are that Transdimensional Joy Joy can be addictive. When you reach a decision point in your life, Doctor Wizard of Oz explained, you are tempted to use the drug in order to explore the consequences of all of your choices. At first, these may be life-altering choices, such as whether to get married, take a job or buy your son a pony. Over time, you might use the drug for less and less important decisions. Whether to dye your hair fuchsia. Whether to watch the TV series as each episode is aired or wait for the DVD. How to justify eating another plate of French fries. Eventually, some users will take the drug to help them with trivial decisions, like whether to get out of bed in the morning and who to vote for. At that point, they are clearly hooked.
Does that make Transdimensional Joy Joy dangerous? "We don't have enough experience with it to be able to say for certain," Doctor Wizard of Oz allowed, "but, when dealing with drugs, I usually err on the side of panic, so I'm going to say that if you take enough of the drug over a short enough period of time, you may end up with what I am about to call Reality Disaffection Syndrome, or RDS. There. I called it. This is a diagnostically unsound medical judgement that you can no longer distinguish between this and other realities."
Doctor Wizard of Oz stroked the beard in his left nostril thoughtfully and added, "Yes. Yes, I think expensive medical interventions will definitely be required if we are to find a cure for RDS. And I assure you, they won't involve little pink pills!"
There is no evidence to prove one way or the other that Crash or Noomi read the entire article. Union rules...