Chacklovitch's Question: Ce Faci?

The chill in the air was welcome as I stepped out of my house. Chacklovitch was already waiting for me. His family had a tradition of naming their children based on what their names sounded like when said in Portuguese. He was the only one that spoke the language, however, and with his accent, it made things quite confusing.

I began walking towards him, shaking my head at the thought of the many nicknames I had given to him over the years: Suchluckovitch, Cack-o-luckovich, Schmatz...

He nodded at me and we began walking down the road. The sun was just starting to rise, so there wasn't very much traffic on the roads yet. We turned onto a path that ran along a river and headed towards our destination: a small coffee shop just around the bend from my house.

"How are you feeling?" he asked me after we had gotten our drinks. He always drank coffee with cream and sugar--I could never understand how anyone could drink coffee like that--while I got black coffee.

"I'm fine." I lied.

He sighed and stared into his steaming cup. "What do you think?"

I shrugged and sipped on my coffee. "Just another day," I said quietly. We were both silent for a few moments before he finally asked me if I would check out something at his place later today. He began explaining the device to me but I quickly tuned him out and studied my surroundings instead --the shop was mostly empty, save for one other customer who, like us, had taken up residence near the window facing the river outside. They were staring silently at the water in a way that seemed almost melancholic --but then again, most people did look at water like that when they first woke up in the morning so it could have been just that simple observation that caused me to assume such a thing about them rather than them actually being melancholy. Why were they looking at water this late in October? Where did they live? What were they doing here so early? Questions flooded my mind but I quickly forced myself to ignore them and focus on Chacklovitch's explanation of what he needed help with --something about nuclear reactions or waves or something or other --and tried to pretend like nothing else existed around me except for him talking nonsense about physics and whatnot. Eventually he finished talking and we returned home where I immediately retired to my bedroom, slipped into bed next to my wife (who was sound asleep), and tried very hard to get some sleep of my own; but between her snoring, thoughts of work interfering with my goal of getting some rest, and images of Chacklovitch's device flashing through my mind every few seconds, I failed miserably at trying to get any shut eye that afternoon.

 * * * * *

The next day Chacklovitch woke me up early as usual by pounding on my door repeatedly until I eventually stumbled downstairs groggy-eyed from lack of sleep; but his energy level was unusually high this time around as he practically skipped around my house while searching for various devices (which seemed random and overly specific) throughout the kitchen and living room areas until he finally decided on one which he waved excitedly in front of me while shouting something incoherent about nuclear waves or some such nonsense... Whatever it was it must have been important because suddenly everyone in my household was frantically running around trying to find anything even remotely related to science; everything from books on quantum mechanics to chemistry sets used during middle school (my wife) was dumped unceremoniously onto tables all over our house as everyone searched furiously for whatever device would help us figure out how exactly this machine worked before Chacklovitch lost whatever sanity he still had left--if indeed that ever happened; it might be more accurate to say he had lost whatever sanity he HADN'T already lost yet--and went berserk destroying everything not tied down in our house... But after several hours of panic induced chaos we managed to deduce what exactly these thrumming machines were supposed to do (though none of us understood HOW exactly they did it)--to make copies of things (i.e., molecularly identical replicas).

"But why?" My wife asked him after we had finally managed to calm down after realizing how close we came to being killed by an angry physicist earlier today.