FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #8

"Wish You Were Here," Part One
written by Simon Oliver
art by Robbi Rodriguez

The strangest, most alien things can become ordinary if exposure is prolonged.  Even moose.

"Wish You Were Here" bookends two excellent character scenes with its finest physics puzzle yet.  As Cicero puts it, "Cutbacks.  The only certainty the FBP has left" (FBP #8: 8).  In yet another round of federal budget cuts, Agents Hardy and Reyes are dispatched to Nakeet, Alaska, to dismantle some of the more sensitive technology at an FBP base there.  What could have been a routine assignment is transformed as soon as they catch sight of Professor Sen's "can-opener".

Just how much time has passed since Rosa's arrival at the FBP and the events of "There's Something About Rosa" remains unstated, but Adam and Rosa have established an easy, often flirtatious even, but still inquisitive rapport.  Adam shares his suspicions about his father's disappearance and all but acknowledges he maintains the possibility that his father is still alive somewhere.  Rosa explains, however briefly, her birth in another dimension.  It's still unclear how much of these details are public knowledge, known for instance to their employers, but they understand one another, and now they trust one another.  That ease is matched by Cicero and Sen, former college friends and now FBP colleagues.  Sen's sex change (most interesting because it is so unobtrusive) may incite Cicero's curiosity about her and her perceptions of him then and now, but it does nothing to interrupt their casual Platonic—in more ways than one—conversation.

It seems the partners have landed in a bit of a "mystery spot," though they're probably more and more common as the physical laws of the universe continue to unravel.  Things at high or accelerating speeds disappear and reappear, as though through seams in space.  Rosa is a little more keen about it that Adam, who nearly had a falling machine dropped on him more than once that day, and she uses it to her full advantage to help them both escape a bar brawl with local goons by sending pool billiard balls pinging around the dive.  But it's the issue's final revelation that re-casts the entire issue.  Just how long have Adam and Rosa been in that tank?!

The physics in FBP is more fanciful than theoretical or speculative.  Physics and mathematical theories—even some more widely accepted but impossible to observe—are given fictional life, a thoughtful but still whimsical imagination in a world falling apart at the quantum scale.  Physics, philosophy, poetry all in an adventure package.

Rodriguez' artwork, if anything, has improved.  His command of the physics bizarreness was always strong, a captivating, dynamic energy of an unraveling world, and his collaboration with colorist Rico Renzi is inspired.  As FBP's characters begin to ease their guarded, stoic façades, the expressiveness Rodriguez gives their faces is beginning to equal the visual articulateness of their body language.  This issue, in particular, belongs to Adam Hardy, whose expressions (normally shaded by his ball cap) range from impish to feisty to alarmed.

[May 2014]