ABSOLUTE ZERO AT TACO BOB

An Essay on How Everyone Everywhere is Terminally Confused

by TIM COOPER

The entire conundrum began at about 8:04 antemeridian Eastern Standard Time when I went to retrieve the food left over from the previous day at Taco Bob. These leftovers were logically contained within the walk-in refrigerator, a small room of the Taco Bob fast-food joint that I was displeased to enter due to its rather chilly atmosphere. Opening the heavy aluminum door and progressing inside, I was amazed to discover that I could not see the freezer door at the other end. The cart holding the large tubs of leftovers was near the back of the walk-in, and it seemed to be cut neatly in half by an infinitely dark shroud. That shroud had never been there before, and it was obscuring the innermost third of the walk-in as well as the freezer door.

I left this oddity and checked the door frame of the walk-in, upon which the temperature gauges and light switch were mounted (on the outside of the walk-in, in the eighty degree temperature of a fast-food kitchen). I toggled the light switch a few times. The red 'active' light followed suit, informing me that the incandescent lighting system was fully operational. I scratched the back of my cap and walked back in.

Deciding that some silly black shroud wouldn't keep me from my work, I tugged on the handle of the leftovers cart. The half of the cart not obscured by the darkness came effortlessly towards me. Finding that two wheels out of four was an inherently unstable situation, the laws of gravity reasserted themselves, causing the half-cart to tilt and dump the half-tubs and half-leftovers all over the floor.

I was, quite frankly, perplexed. Only half of the cart remained extant, while the other half was lost in the dark shroud undetectable to my vision. The cart, tubs, and even the food were neatly sliced in a perfectly level line. At least that is what I deduced while examining the tilted carcass of the cart and stomping through sludgy thermostabilized 'refried beans' and rehydrated 'chili.'

I left this strange location and, leaving a trail of goo and grime behind me, went to find my manager, Beth. I located her in the dining room mopping the floor. Turning to see me, she was first annoyed that I wasn't doing my job and then angry that I was tracking beans and chili and nacho cheese all over her nice mopped floor. Before she could begin berating me for that, however, I announced that the cart was cut in half.

"What?" was Beth's incredulous reply.

"The cart's cut in half." I responded meekly.

She told me to stop talking nonsense but followed me back to the walk-in. I opened the door and showed her the slowly spreading forty degree Fahrenheit mess. I indicated the clean edge of the cleaved cart and restated my observation that the cart was cut in half. Beth only muttered something about food gone to waste and red ink in the ledger book and left me with a mop and an order to clean up this mess. I started to oblige, but the jet-black shroud perplexed and quickly captivated my attention.

Sitting down, the condensation in my breath sending up puffs of steam with each exhalation, I looked into the inky void and thought. Black means a lack of light. Black objects absorb a large amount of light and reflect only a small part of it. Therefore, if the blackness is a physical object, then it must be absorbing a large amount of light. To test my assumption that the shroud was physical, I picked up an empty box of rice and tried to push it through the black terminus. It went through. When I tried to pull it out, only the part not swallowed up by the void returned. It was as if I had dipped the cardboard box into acid, but with a cleaner edge.

I finally realized what that strange inky absence must have been. Absolute zero, zero degrees Kelvin, two-hundred seventy-five degrees below zero Celsius, loads of degrees below zero Fahrenheit. All movement on the subatomic level stopped. No heat, no friction. A dream to many theoretical physicists, and here it was in the walk-in refrigerator and freezer of Taco Bob. Goodness. I then finished mopping up the coagulated foodstuffs. To make sure that I was correct in my assumption, I checked the freezer thermometer on the walk-in door frame. Its red lines assembled and displayed '-275'. I was surprised as the thermometer was only designed to display two digits. I then proceeded to call the Cincinnati Science Society.

The scientists arrived at 8:56 AM while I was adding a powdered substance akin to a thousand tiny twigs to a rectangular pan of water in order to make rehydrated, irradiated, thermostabilized Advanced Refried Bean Substitute. Beth introduced me as the person who discovered it, but the scientists had to read my name tag to discover that I am commonly known as 'Tim.' They introduced themselves as Doctors Fleming and Jacobsen, both having degrees in physics and other less interesting fields. After much shaking of hands, I opened up the door to the walk-in and presented the scientific marvel to the scientists. They walked in, said many things that I failed to understand, and then turned to me.

"Tim," they asked, "would you have any idea why its so dark?"

I replied to the effect that I suppose the conditions of absolute zero (being lack of movement) would keep photons, the quantum particles of light, from zipping around. Inside that darkness, I mused aloud, is probably a timeless state of stasis that contained some shelves, green onions, and lettuce as well as various meats and several cartons of milk I was quite honored to be talking with such distinguished (?) scientists about things I really am only slightly aware of.

When they asked what may be the cause of such an occurrence, I shrugged and noncommittally responded that I didn't know, that I thought such things were impossible. They concurred.

I continued with my work, mixing up various so-called food items, cleaning up the lot, taking down the chairs, taking out the trash, and finally settling in for a well deserved unpaid half-hour break at 10:45 AM. That was when the fun truly started.

Every physicist worth his weight in low-grade boilerplate in the Midwest filtered in within that half-hour, all of them wanting to test and monitor and argue about absolute zero in Taco Bob. Mostly, however, these social inepts were getting in the way of Mike, Shannon, and Carolyn, who were working food line that day. It is very hard for a restaurant like Taco Bob to be both the center of the most important physical discovery of the year and also deal with drive-thru orders. I had no fears, as I was assigned, as always, to front cashier.

That, at least, was my assignment. It was a rare chance to actually do my job that day, as scientists kept calling upon me in order to meet the first person to discover absolute zero. Customers were getting angry because they were not being served efficiently. (I didn't mind much, because it has been my experience that most of Taco Bob's clientele expect the employees to read their minds, spontaneously generate the product instantaneously, and teleport it into their hands. I apologize, but if I were omnipotent, I wouldn't work at Taco Bob.) Beth was getting angrier as the customers got angrier. The people on the food production line were irritable because Beth continuously snapped at them. I didn't really care because I had scientists with doctorates on my side. That is why, I assume, that Beth didn't yell at me.

At 12:20 PM, the news media arrived. Looking outside, one could recognize transmitter vans from CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. I stopped enjoying myself around this point due to the fact that a bunch of newspapermen, reporters, correspondents, and television personalities kept searching me out to ask me the most banal questions. I discover absolute zero, and they ask me about my sexual orientation and conjugal history, drug use records as well as whether or not I am a Wiccan. For the record, I am straight, rather prudish and therefore a virgin, my drug use is limited to the occasional consumption of lemon-and-poppy seed muffins and I am an Episcopalian, which is rather distinct from Wiccanism in my view. One reporter (who was obviously out of place, and rather dazed) derided my fashion sense and then complimented me on my English. I looked at her and asked her, rather snidely, where she thought she was. She thought she was in Paris. I informed her, none too gently, that Paris was on the other side of the world.

At 1:30 PM, the military arrived. Large green and brown forest camo trucks, unable to enter the parking lot clogged with media vans, simply stopped in the access road and disgorged several squads of troopers. I'm not really sure whether it was the Army or the Marines, but I assume Army. Steel-helmeted troopers in flak jackets and toting M4 light assault rifles came in and rather politely told all nonessential (read media and customers) personnel to clear off. The media put up the good yet overused argument that the American people needed to know. The troopers shrugged and said that they were locking down the place for national security reasons. I raised my hand and, once called upon by the lieutenant in command, quipped that if an absolute-zero stasis field appeared in our walk-in, it's a sure bet that the Russians and Chinese have absolute-zero stasis fields in their fast food restaurants. The statement was quickly ignored.

One eight-man squad was assigned to guard the place. I took the sergeant around, showed him all three possible entrances (at each he assigned one guard), the walk-in with its absurd black oddity inside (somehow, the sergeant managed to fit three more soldiers into a gaggle of scientists), the drive-thru window (the last trooper was assigned there) and the sergeant himself stood guard over me. Discovering natural phenomena that become matters of national importance apparently made me a hot commodity. I had no work to do, there being no customers to serve, so it was kind of annoying to have a four-striped staff sergeant follow me everywhere.

Looking outside, I saw that the big Army trucks had been parked, and the second ten-man squad (led by the previously mentioned lieutenant) was painting a large circle with an equally large 'H' within it. We were being turned into a helipad.

At 2:37 PM, a brown Army UH-08 "Huey" helicopter (the kind you always see in Vietnam movies) landed upon the freshly-dried helipad. Asking my guardian-angel sergeant for details, he informed me that they sent in some big-shot eggheads from the Los Alamos research facility to make up a research crew. As the squad responsible for painting the helipad sat in the dining room munching on tacos and burritos ("beat the hell out of K-rations" they said) the massively important and importantly massive head scientist waddled in through (both) the double doors leading into the dining room. The guard nonchalantly picking his teeth with a spork raised an eyebrow on the corpulent brainiac. I had seen people that large before, such as my grandfather, but they were usually dependent on wheelchairs for locomotion.

The very large man interviewed the scientists collected in the back. It doesn't seem like much, until you realize that there were thirty-odd scientists, three soldiers, and one really huge guy stuck into an area three meters by five meters. The scientists were whittled down to six, the rest being told to leave and forget that this ever happened. The walk-in fridge and the preparation area adjacent to it were cordoned off and put under heavy guard as the ten-man squad (remember them?) hauled in bulky, heavy, expensive equipment. I informed the sergeant that it seemed the lieutenant's squad got stuck with the hard work. The sergeant responded that guard duty wasn't much fun either. I replied that I was also rather bored and couldn't wait to leave.

As the sergeant and I leaned on the counter chatting, Beth walked up and asked why I wasn't working. I answered to the effect that there was no more work to do. Is the soda machine clean? Spotless. Is everything stocked? Full. Are the bins of sauce packets loaded? To the top and then some. Do the napkin dispensers have napkins? Yes. Are the bathrooms clean? Yes. Are the tables wiped? Yes, yes, for crissake, can I go now? Are the floors mopped? Crap.

Hundreds of people, several of them in combat boots, had made the floors an ungodly mess. Scuff marks and tracked dirt was the order of the day. Grumbling, I went to the back, sergeant in tow, to get the mop. I was stopped by the cordon and the lieutenant. To Beth's dismay, the dog-tired lieutenant had impressed her office into service and was using it as a personal command center. The lt. informed me that, even though I had discovered it, I didn't have enough clearance to actually enter the restricted area due to the highly advanced and really secret stuff inside. I peered over the line and said that I could see aforementioned stuff from here. The lieutenant was firm. I sighed, went out the front door, went around the outside of the building and knocked on the resupply door, locked from the inside, that led into the far-back storage area of the Taco Bob building. The PFC inside flipped up the security window, looked at me, and closed the window without opening the door. I motioned to the sergeant to pull rank. The sergeant knocked on the door. Security window opens, door follows suit. I get the mop, dump out the bucket, fill it with water, add soap, put the mop in the water, roll the bucket back outside while the PFC holds the door, roll the bucket around the outside of the building, into the dining room, and start mopping.

I clocked out at 3:04 PM. The really odd thing was that the drive-thru was operating throughout this entire shenanigan.

I still work at Taco Bob, but in secret now. A chain-link fence with a barbed-wire top was constructed around the building, and a heavy wooden fence was constructed just inside the chain-link one to conceal the operations inside from passerby. There is a gate, with a guardhouse, that I have to pass by every day and show the guard my military dependent's ID. I then mop the floors, clean the tables, and prepare for a normal Taco Bob day. But it doesn't work, you see.

Thanks to the super-secret site by the walk-in (I now have clearance to go in there and I help the scientific staff sometimes), we cannot access the sink nor the steam cookers. We can't get to the fryers, we can't mix up beans without the hot water dispensers, and we no longer store foodstuffs in the walk-in (obviously). However, we all pull in paychecks from the NSA that easily cover all possible living expenses as well as paychecks from Quadcon, Taco Bob's corporation. I theorize that the Quadcon paychecks are subsidized by some government program, so I can't complain. I make $75,000 a year ($10,562.50 from Taco Bob and $64,437.50 from the NSA), have a bodyguard, and know more national secrets than you do.

That makes it all worthwhile.