The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing Atom Mass

The night that the Frenchy called me I didn't have any plans. Susan took the day off for shopping. Something about new stockings. I said yes. She never seemed to have enough of those. I never had enough of her in them either. Taking her down to the club for the usual bourbon and dancing was out of the question. Maybe that's why I said yes to Lellouch. I never was fond of the froggies. Not even while I was shooting Nazis in Normandy.

Laurent Lellouch. That was the name. I liked it as much as the sound of the case he wanted me to take: Nothing at all. Something about a war between gangs of Prussian gangsters, the Neutrons and the Protons. I didn't know them. It was all weird and related to that stuff they did at Los Alamos and then dropped in Japan. I knew Uncle Sam wasn't going to be far behind this one, but Louis said he was ok to trust him. A bit. I didn't have anything better to do, anyway. Pork chili down at George's while listening to what Lellouch had to tell me was a better plan than going with the boys to the 42nd. I looked out the window and saw it was still raining nails. Hot chili was it.

When I arrived, Lola nodded behind the bar and looked to the table where the guy was waiting. She rolled her eyes and shouted the usual order to George at the kitchen. The Frenchman was nervous, mumbling something about international conspiracies and computers and that guy from Germany who turned everything inside out with his theories. That equation. E=mc2. The told me about the protons and the neutrons. While I was downing my chili he went on and on about it. Inside those families there were quarks, which are bound by gluons. I didn't have a clue what he was talking about. The mass of a gluon is zero, he said, while the mass of the quarks is only five percent. So, where is the missing 95 percent?

Maybe he was onto something. I finished my chili, dropped a couple of Washingtons, and went on to see Janos the Hungarian. He wasn't going to talk. Fortunately for him, I'm a reasonable man. It was nothing that a simple knuckle kiss couldn't fix. Ten minutes and three teeth later he spilled. The key is in the quantum chromodynamics, something about equations running at the sub-atomic level. More gibberish, but I know he was telling the truth. I left him trying to fix his bloody nose and went to meet the Germans. I knew that if anyone had the answer, it was going to be Otto.

I was right. He knew about Janos, so I didn't have to get nasty again. Too bad. I was thinking about how much I wanted to see Susan in her new stockings. Wasting my time listening to this was making me angry. Otto said that the unaccounted mass came from the energy from the movements and interactions of quarks and gluons. The computations involved envisioning space and time as part of a four-dimensional crystal lattice, with discrete points spaced along columns and rows.

I still didn't know what the hell he was talking about, but I crossed the street to call the Frenchy. I had his answer. When he picked the phone he was excited like a little girl in her first date at the back of the movie theater. He wanted to meet right away. Get all the details. I just wanted to get my money and go meet Susan at her place. I told him to meet me at the park, on the corner of Fifth and 64th.

He was there when I arrived, sitting on a bench with a stupid smile in his face. He'd had a lead overdose. Someone got him before I could tell him that Einstein was right. E=mc2 was corroborated for the first time thanks to those computers they stole from the Germans and the Hungarians. I don't know who killed him. Probably the CIA. Or the KGB. Maybe the Italians. Or all of them. I knew it was time for some silk and alcohol. I took the envelope he still had in his coat and I closed his eyes. There are things that mere mortals don't need to know. And none of them were Susan's legs. [AFP]

Previously, in the last episode of "Burn iPhone Burn!": anonymous Cupertino-area man going by the pseudonym of I'm Just Going to Make Up Some BS, So There!™ He Who Shall Not Be Named™ declared to Ars Technica that "Apple had 50 OS engineers working around the clock in Taipei to make sure that this shipped on time." He argued that the problems were with Q/A and the software. Meanwhile AT&T COO Randall Stephenson said that everything was A-OK for an oh-so-great iPhone launch and J.R. discovered that Sue Ellen is really Steve Jobs' daughter. Today, Gizmodo's own Deep Throat in the Infinite Loop campus spills the beans about the not-really-MIA Apple gang.

Discover the thrill and suspense of the missing 50 OS X engineers and much more in the all-new-but-sightly-stale-and-corny episode of our Gizmodo Series... RIGHT AFTER THE JUMP!

When I read the rumors of the 50 teamsters shipped to work in Taipei from Cupertino I was sceptical. Never trusted the rags. Never liked the rats who wrote them. Something in my head was still rumbling like the boys' bowling balls at Joe's. They didn't buy it either: how was Big J going to hide it? Fifty of his top OS X engineers couldn't disappear into thin air for such a long time. Impossible, they said. Just the missing cars in the parking lot was going to make it obvious.

They were right. Too many people, too many days, too many questions. It all seemed obvious and stupid, but I never trusted easy cases. I was running short on time. I needed a drink and an answer. I knew I could find one of them at Lola's Bar. There was Jimmy T. on the corner. If someone had what I needed, it was going to be him. Like every time I found him, he was drowning his money and liver with the two Jacks. I told the bookie from Mason to get lost and got myself a glass of the one from Tennessee.

I cut the crap and asked directly. It was too dangerous, he said. Big J's people were everywhere, nobody was going to talk and risk get killed. Another clue about why the rags' rumors made no sense. He told me to meet at Catalina's. Good fish and crabs restaurant across the Bay. I wasn't interested in the fish but the seafood was probably going to enjoy Jimmy: He never arrived and I never heard from him again after that day.

I started to wonder if there was more than meet the eye in this case. There was. Or were. Two more eyes, big and blue behind a dirty martini at Catalina's cocktail bar. The curves in her satin dress didn't leave much to the imagination. Her first words didn't leave much either. I got what you want, she said. I knew she did and I took it straight away. And also all the information I needed.

She gave me everything: alcohol, lipstick, French perfume, Italian lingerie and at the end, she couldn't hold it any longer: yes, the 50 engineers weren't in Taipei and they never were there. A few went and came back, mostly hardware engineers. She knew it because her brother worked closely with the OS people. Fifty engineers were just too many not to notice. For him or anyone else. And besides, they already had plenty of prototypes of Big J's new secret weapon at his underground quarters. More kept coming regularly on secure shipments. No need to send the boys there, no need to risk the whole operation on stupid trips. It was simple. And it all made sense.

I left her in the motel room and went back home. On the corner with Logan there was again that John D. tramp calling for attention, his lips wrapped against a dirty brown bag. The old man started shouting at me. Big J's new stuff was flawed because nobody wanted a "convergence device," he said. I didn't know what he was talking about, but obviously he was drunk and alone, desperate to get hits, love or both. Nobody cared.

I didn't give a damn at first but then I just gave him a few bucks so he could get a couple of Mickey's Big Mouths and sleep it off somewhere else. I didn't need his usual crazy babbling next to my window that night. After that lady, God knows I needed a good rest. – Jesus Diaz

iPhone Coverage [Gizmodo]