FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics #9

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

Instead of answers, Part Two of "Wish You Were Here" presents an equally plausible alternative "reality," a counterbalance to Part One's experiment with Adam and Rosa.  After their bar brawl, the two increasingly friendly FBP agents are arrested, interrogated, and released, but it's their return to the Nakeet Bureau facility that sparks the intrigue when they find Cicero and Professor Sen submerged in a sensory deprivation tank, a mirror of their own discovery in the closing page of the previous issue.

The "experiment" alluded to so often by Professor Sen, it seems, is the elaboration of a "reality" by only two minds, whose willful influence on their surroundings is proportionately increased as the number of dreamers is limited.  The discovery of the other tank merely casts into question which two are the dreamers and which remain in reality, at least as we recognize it.

Rosa and Adam's adventure is certainly more thrilling and colorful.  Jailed for their antics in the local bar, each agent envisions a way out, perhaps only by the sheer force of their imagination:  she sees a portal to the universe of her happier, anomaly-free childhood appear in her cell; he imagines escaping by his charm on a handsome police officer whose name he is improbably, but not impossibly, able to guess.  It just might be that the "magic" Adam speaks of (FBP #9: 4) is the real thing, the inexplicable dominion of volition over one's universe.  The ultimately harmless and unsettlingly beautiful rain of Newton's Gulch balls approaches something like fantasy.  Theirs is a world of wonder and excitement and, for Rosa, unease.

Cicero and Sen converse, though minds like theirs, perhaps, would imagine precisely conversation and Chinese take-out, a universe of their own making and desires, in which philosophy, physics and tasty spring rolls are the magic du jour.  In which case, Groucho might have gotten wrong:  a decent meal might perhaps be found outside reality.

But FBP #9's finest mystery—one that I admit overlooking at first—is the interest shown in Nakeet by Professor Hardy.  The creation myth and associated commentary comes from his notes.  Whichever Nakeet, that of Rosa and Adam or Cicero and Sen, turns out to be the "real" one, it's a strange one, one that generated a mythology of creation bound to imagination.

[June 2014]