A subsidiary of Quantum Loop Enterprises
Theorizing that one could time travel within their own lifetime, Doctor Sham Breakit stepped into the Quantum Loop accelerator… and vanished. He awoke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mere images that were not his own, and driven by unknown source code to arrange history for the better. His only guide on this journey is Hal, an observer at run-time, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sham can see and hear. And so Dr. Breakit finds himself looping through life after life, striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that his next loop… will be the loop $home.
“Sham, we got problems,” Hal Calalilli asserted as he entered the imagine chamber.
“No kidding!” replied Sham. After dispensing with Elly by sending her on her rounds, Sham had spent the last hour looking about the l’Hopital. “Hal, everyone here is talking in math riddles or doublespeak!”
“Sounds like the joy of lex.”
“Hal…”
“Sham, you’ve handled worse,” Hal said. “Now, back in Stall-Eons Gate, New Mexico we’ve got real trouble! Your parallel hybrid computer BigE is having a mental breakdown. Sushi and Xina can’t fix her, so it’s up to… er, Dr. Geeks.” Hal caught himself before mentioning Sham’s wife Drawna WeeBTree, or Sham’s daughter Shammy Pro Filer.
“So I guess you don’t know why I’m here,” Sham sighed.
Hal tapped at his TI-85 calculator. “No, but we know the woman in the fating room is Dr. Waterson,” he offered.
“Doctor! Doctor Waterson!” called out Electra Lysis as she rejoined her associate. “Sir Cul wants to transcend dental work and eat pie. There’s also trouble with Jacob, Ian and May tricks. Oh, and Zeke wants help tracking down new classical records, but I just told him ‘Stop playing Haydn, Zeke’.”
Sham winced. “Stop speakin’ like that,” he pleaded.
“Like what?” Elly inquired. “I didn’t mean to go off on a tangent. Though I often strike a chord when not aligned with the story arc. But my maxim is, ‘If you’re cut, seek aunts’!”
“Sham, I was wrong,” Hal sympathized. “No matter what it takes, we’ll get you out of here.”
*
However, it was a few days before Hal could return with good news. “You won’t believe this, Sham,” he revealed at last. “The underlying situation here is a peculiar punctuation problem.”
“You positive?” Sham mused. “Because the Hopital logs show even their elementary operations involve calculations that are way off base.”
Hal flinched. “You’ve been here too long, Sham.”
“The trouble is I can’t project the point of origin for these errors!” Sham looked up. “Uh, Hal, can’t you wear proper ties?”
“Sham, what you need to do is make sure Dr. Waterson and Elly Lysis team back up with Max Value and his wife Ana. Elly’s presence is necessary to crack this missing punctuation case.”
“But what about the stats here? The error vectors on this scale are—”
“Stop it, you’re going dotty!” Hal interrupted. “Just get Elly to the Fourier Factory!”
“Wait, that’s it,” Sham realized. “Decimals and periods are both dots! There’s the connection, it even explains the missing cases of colon cancer. Brilliant, Hal!”
“Oh. Well, it was adjoint effort—” Hal stopped himself. “Anyway, just get that clique of people I mentioned back together so you can loop out of here.”
Sham quickly co-ordinated things. “But Hal,” he realized even as he left for the Fourier Factory. “I haven’t im-parted any mathematical information yet, like how there are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible positions for a Rubik’s cube. How can I loop?”
Hal shrugged. “General l’Hopital is just less educational.”
Indeed, Sham did loop upon his arrival at the factory. However, the story did not end there.
*
Still going…
-Greg “hologrami” Taylor
[Was this worth it, to hear about Shammy ProFiler? Or about Hal's properties? Well, here's something more random: Sham's "stop speakin' like that" line was a direct reference to FASS 2001, the February 2001 show for which I was CSW (chief scriptwriter). I'd written in a character who constantly spoke in music puns - a role I was ultimately cast into. In Act II scene iv, s/he was told to "stop speakin' like that". Weird that I still remember that 20 years later.
Anyway, that concludes Quantum Loop's bonus episode of 2001. Two more parts remain in the Hopital!]
