Part 2: Professor Einstein’s Light Machine (a short story)

This is part 2 of Professor Einstein’s Light Machine (a short story). There was enough interest in part 1, in fact it was the second most listened to short story of ours (the first being The Beardless Jesus Series) to release part 2. Not to gloat or brag. We are a small book club, a niche of readers, and we like it that way. We don't have to conform to anyone telling us how or what to write. We have our own standards, but freedom. IntroTime and Space, however actual they may appear to us in the affairs of daily life, are, from the meta physical point of view, merely modes and conditions under which our intelligence functions. They are part and parcel of our limitations as finite beings; but in attempting to postulate the existence of the Infinite we must assume a state where neither Time nor Space have place or meaning. In such a condition we cannot admit the reality of past, present, and future but only the truth of one all embracing eternal NOW.Chapter 1The Device Existed.The Light Machine.It sat in a secured lab on the north side of campus, wrapped in plastic and bureaucracy. Without Professor Einstein, it was motionless and cold. Dead in every way that could be measured.No matter how many technicians, mechanics or physicists that rotated through the room, no matter how many senior faculty members were “consulted,” it refused to do anything at all. Not a glow or a projection. Not even a hum. It did not even pretend to cooperate.Princeton brought in a private forensic engineering firm out of Chicago. Along with them came a small militia of lawyers from one of those big law firms that specialized in corporate intellectual property disputes and crisis containment. The official explanation was “non-destructive testing.” They disassembled what they could without cutting into the core structure. Scanned the lattice. Mapped the circuitry. Logged every material. Ceramic composites. Rare-earth alloys. Optical channels so precise they bordered on absurd. Everything was cataloged and photographed.They wanted to know what it had done and if they could replicate it. But they couldn't. And they were frustrated. What they learned was inconvenient.The hardware made sense in pieces. The optical compression frameworks were a decade's old technology. The interferometric chambers sold on ebay. The AI-assisted signal processors were state of the art, but accessible. The whole thing seemed experimental maybe, and far fetched certainly, but not impossible. Clunky though. It was a patchwork job, obviously built by a professor, not an engineer.But what they could not reproduce was activation.There wasn't a trigger sequence or noticeable boot protocol. It didn't come with a manual or intuitive ignition switch. The machine sat there like a locked door with no handle.Three weeks later, Princeton released a statement.It came out just after noon, carefully worded and aggressively calm.