Fourierflies

"What the hell is that?" I asked.  Something fluttered through the air, hard to focus on.  It had wings, but there seemed to be streamers or tendrils somehow attached to the wings that moved more slowly, slipping past, or perhaps through, things.  Dark shadows like cracks in reality.  Its wings were hazy and blurred, I got a sensation of greyness but there was nothing I say for sure that I'd seen.  It's body was somewhere between the wings, and I was even less sure I'd seen any of that.
"It's a Fourierfly," said Jacques, nodding his head to the beat of some music from his headphones.  The white cable stretched down his torso and disappeared into the pocket on his jeans.  I frowned and gestured at him, my hands flipping away from my ears.  He frowned back, and reluctantly removed his headphones.
"Thanks," I said, insincerely.  "What's a Fourierfly?"
"What you get when you apply a Fourier transform to a butterfly," said Jacques, deliberately unhelpful now I'd made him pay attention to me.
"I see."  I didn't.  "And why is an experimental creature loose in this room?  I know the red light wasn't on when I came in, and I'm also sure that you didn't have a form-12 stuck up outside either."
"Yeah, well...."  Jacques suddenly looked a lot more alert, aware that he had broken lab protocol and annoyed me.  He was probably worried I'd report him, and I was definitely considering it.  "They keep slipping out of their cages," he said.  I wondered if he was lying.
"Build better cages," I suggested.  "Ones that are Fourierfly proof."
"We're trying," he said, and now it sounded like I was getting closer to the truth.  He sounded worried at last.  "Only they keep slipping through the mesh, and we can't work out how they're doing it.  Well–" he sped up to stop me interrupting, "– we think we know how they're doing it, but we don't know how to stop it."
"You'd better tell me all about it then," I said.
"Well, the problem is the Gibb's phenomenon, we think," he said.  "It gives them nearly 10% wiggle room at the edges, and they keep using it.  They fly close to the mesh, and one time in ten they just pass straight through it.  It's kind of like quantum tunnelling, only on a macroscopic scale."
"Does this just apply to mesh?" I asked, feeling a familiar cold shiver run down my spine.
"Anything, really," said Jacques.
"Including the walls, doors, and windows of this room?"
"Oh yes.  Oh.... oh no."
"Do you count them?"
"Ye–... not often enough?"
"Probably not," I said.  "I wonder how many have escaped already.  But you still haven't explained to me what a Fourierfly is."
"It's the Fourier transform of a butterfly," said Jacques.  "You know that Professor Albert figured out how to perform a physical Fourier transform, and move things between Phase Space and Frequency Space?"
I just nodded, as Jacques appeared to have forgotten that I'd been Professor Albert's collaborator on that paper and had done most of the theoretical maths.  "He applies it to group of up to eight atoms, cooled to close to 0 Kelvin," I said.  "They have slightly odd properties when he does that, and his current research lab is trying to work out what all the properties are, and their ramifications."
"Yeah, well we did the same thing to a cage of butterflies for a bit of a joke," said Jacques.  His face clearly showed that he no longer thought it was a joke, and was pretty certain I wouldn't either.  "They all transformed."
"You weren't expecting that?"  Now I'd put him in a quandary.  Either he said he was, and looked careless and irresponsible, or he said he wasn't and looked like he didn't have the ethics to be trusted with lab animals.
"I was," he said eventually.  "But not all of them."  I nodded, it was probably the best answer he could give me at the moment.
"What did they transform into?"
"Still some kind of butterfly," he said.  "But they... I don't know how to describe it. They seem to have access to another dimension or something, so they can sometimes oscillate perpendicularly to... well, the real world.   And when they do, they can bypass things in their way."
That was the shadows I'd seen then.  Not fractures in reality, but new directions, new dimensions for light to fall into.  Of which we knew nothing, including if there was anything else in those dimensions, and if was safe to input energy, even in the form of light, into it.
"You'd better tell Professor Albert," I said.  "This is beyond us now, we need some seriously clever thinking applied to the problem."
Jacques looked as relieved as if I'd turned up with a reprieve five minutes before he was due a lethal injection.  "Thank-you," he said.  "Thank-you so much–"
"Yeah," I said, interrupting his frankly embarrassing effusion of thanks.  "Let's just get the mess sorted out and cleaned up before anyone else finds out about it."
I stood up and left, feeling an immense relief myself.  If Albert could find a way to undo the Fourier transform for the Fourierflies then perhaps I could use it myself and get my daughter back.

Necrobot

"The Necrobot 2000," said the salesman proudly, "does all your dying for you!" Then he sneezed, spraying the Necrobot with a fine mist of saliva, mucus, and germs.
"When you say dyeing," said my wife in a tone of voice I mentally thought of as uh-oh, "you do mean that it'll take clothes, hair, and other suitable textiles as instructed and change their colour on as near a permanent basis as current mordant technology will allow?"
The salesman's eyes bulged slightly at the half-way point of her sentence, and by the end he looked like he had high blood pressure and was making an attempt at a stroke.
"Uh... mordant?"
"Yes, you know, such as tannic acid."
"Uhh... you could certainly feed the Necrobot tannic acid," said the salesman. I folded my arms and smiled inanely, refusing to help him. His eyes darted around.
"And that would help him with his dyeing?"
"I should think anyone would die after drinking tannic acid!"
"Hmm, I wonder if you're being deliberately obtuse," said my wife. Her tone was gradually shifting towards pedantic. "You told me that the Necrobot ca–"
"Necrobot 2000!" The salesman looked both pleased and desperate at the same time as he interrupted.
"Whatever," said my wife with withering scorn. "You nevertheless told me that this... thing... is capable of dyeing, and I asked for corroboration of the implications of your statement. I suspect that your levels of comprehension of my interrogation were as acute as they are of the wherewithal of this sentence."
"...mu?" said the salesman, and I laughed. My wife half-turned to me, a questioning look on her face.
"It's the most intelligent thing he's said," I said to her. "He doesn't know it of course, to him it's just a random phoneme escaping his lips in lieu of anything with semantic content, but it's the Buddhist refutation of your point."
"I don't hold with Buddhists," said my wife, which fact I already knew. "They keep reincarnating. They're a bugger to eradicate."
I nodded, and looked at the salesman who had clearly given up following our conversation and was now on full-random mode.
"The Necrobot 2000 is perfect for Buddhists! If you never die, you never need reincarnate!"
"How does that help?" I said. "Part of the reincarnation cycle is to learn from the actions of one lifetime so as to improve the next, and thus ascend gradually from this plane of existence to a better one. If I never get to reincarnate, how can I benefit?"
"No-one wants to die!" said the salesman, though the look on his face gave the lie to his words.
"How about the terminally ill in chronic pain?" asked my wife. I thought she was being a little cruel now, but I still couldn't bring myself to help the salesman out.
"The Necrobot 2000 can die for them?"
"Can it feel the pain for them instead?"
"Uhh...."
"Why are we looking at the Necrobot anyway?" I asked my wife, rapping my knuckles on its shiny surface. "What's the point in a robot that takes away death from a person?"
"I actually want to know how it works," she said. "I suspect that there's a small thanatophage inside it, and I checked the other day; they're on both the endangered species list and the forbidden-to-export list."
"I didn't know there were any thanatophages outside of the laboratory," I said. "Aren't they difficult to look after?"
"Quite," said my wife. "So that's why I want to know how these things work."
"Right." I looked at the salesman, wondering how they'd managed to find someone so clueless for the job, and said, "We'll take one. There's no need to wrap it, we'll just take it out to the car-park and extract the bits we're interested in."
"Bleh?" said the salesman, and a thought struck me. I looked at my wife, and said,
"You don't suppose they've just put a mnemophage in there do you? So that people who attempt to use it end up so mentally deficient that they believe it's died for them?"
"It's always possible," she said with a half-smile.

Biorythyms

Dr. Silvera sighed, and tapped her pen against the chart. It was pinned up on a light-board so she and her assistant could both see it.
"I just don't get it," she said. She pointed with the pen. "This is supposed to the peak of his emotional cycle, and yet last night he was as cold and distant as he's ever been. I even remembered to take my lab-coat off when I got in, and I said thank-you for the dinner he'd cooked."
"What was it?" Tammy was sitting on a lab-stool at the bench.
"Ummm... there was meat in it..."
"Not that good then, huh?"
"Oh no, it was excellent, it just wasn't very, uh, well, interesting, I suppose."
"Probably needed a woman's touch."
Dr. Silvera didn't appear to hear her, but tapped the chart thoughtfully. "His physical cycle was down, so I suppose that would explain him going to bed early, and his mental cycle -- ah! His mental cycle was post-peak! Perhaps he simply wasn't in a place to pick up on my signals!"
"Signals?"
"I took my lab-coat off when I came in."
"Ah. Yes, that would do it for me."
*
Dr. Silvera was leaning over the bench tinkering with some boxy electronic equipment when Antonio tapped on the door. He looked serious, with a hint of sadness around his eyes. In one hand was a plain white envelope.
Tammy jumped; she had had her back to the door and was watching Dr. Silvera, admiring the way her lab-coat revealed her legs when she leaned over like this.
"Oh, Tony," she said, just a trace of dismissiveness in her voice. "I don't think this is a good time really--"
"I invited him," said Dr. Silvera straightening up and shaking herself, a little like a damp Yorkshire terrier. "He's here to help me with this little experiment."
"About that," said Antonio. "I don't think I have time after all."
"Nonsense, darling, it'll take less than fifteen seconds. Sit here."
Antonio let her lead him into the room and to the lab stool. She took the envelope from him hand and put it on the bench, then picked up a metal circle with wires attached to it and set it on his head.
"What's this?" Antonio's hands twitched and started to raise to take it off again.
"A brain-wave reader." Dr. Silvera waggled her fingers behind her back, and Tammy interpreted this as 'turn the machine on.'
"This reads your brainwaves and determines what your biorhythms are. I think yours might be out of sync slightly."
"Biorhythms? Discredited New Age rubbish?" Antonio didn't sound angry, just serious and sad.
"Probably less discredited soon," said Dr. Silvera. Smoke start to rise from her husband's scalp. "Oh crap, not again! Turn it off!"
Tammy was engrossed in the letter from the plain white envelope though, and not listening. Dr. Silvera turned to race to the machine, but something inside it went pop and all the lights went out. More smoke rose, this time from the machine.
"Tony?" said Dr. Silvera, staring at the blank eyes of her husband, who was rocking very gently backwards and forwards.
"He was leaving you," said Tammy, waving the letter.
Dr. Silvera turned to her, still not hearing her. "I reset his biorhythms back to zero," she said. "Did we ever do any tests to find out what that meant?"