Or, investigate the Kitchen ON PAGE 139
27
You descend into darkness. Penny follows.
Jay climbs halfway down the ladder, then pulls the hatch closed behind him with a loud clang. You hear--but don't see--him twisting the wheel on this side to lock it into place.
For a long moment the only sound is your breathing.
There's a flick and a hiss, and a single flame appears in front of you. Jay is holding a flip lighter up. Its tiny flame barely illuminates the room: it's a small cube of metal, with enough room for maybe a dozen people. There's some bottled water and canned food stacked in the corner. There aren't any chairs.
"This room should withstand the blast of a meltdown," Jay says. His voice echoes in the tiny space. "Young mister Heller, why didn't you listen to me?"
The metal vibrates underneath your feet like an approaching freight train. The sound and shaking grows until you fall to your hands and knees. Penny falls next to you. The light disappears and you hear the lighter bounces across the floor.
The shaking goes on forever. Penny grabs your arm and squeezes it so tight you begin to lose feeling in your fingers. After several minutes, the shaking stops.
"That had to be the big one," you say. "Right, Jay?"
Silence answers you.
"Jay? Are you okay?"
Penny fumbles around on the floor for the lighter. It flicks on a few feet away, casting an orange glow around the shelter. Jay is nowhere to be seen.
For a moment neither of you understand. You look all around, but it's a small room and there's nowhere he could have gone. And the hatch door is still firmly in place.
"Where'd he go?" Penny asks, panic in her voice.
You never end up finding out what happened to him. Perhaps he was warped somewhere in time? But why didn't that happen to you and Penny?
The two of you hunker down and wait things out. You drink some water and split a can of cold tomato soup. You share a blanket and fall asleep hunched against the wall.
The hatch opens the next day, and search and rescue teams pull you out. You survived! That's all that truly matters, even though the facility is destroyed and Jay is gone. All things considered it's a success, even though this is...
THE END
28
You rush into the Engineering Bay, feeling more frantic than ever. You have to find the final piece of the sequence!
The room is a disaster, with half of the ceiling collapsed and debris and electronics everywhere. "Pick a pile and start looking," you say.
Penny takes the debris pile on the left, so you go right. You grab random pieces of electronics and toss them over your shoulder. There's just as much solid rock to sift through too, from the solid mountain on the other side of the ceiling. It's a reminder that you're deep underground, a long way from safety. If you can't find the last step to the sequence...
"I FOUND IT!" Penny cries.
She's holding a piece of paper in her hand. You read it:
...FIFTH, AND FINAL STEP IN THE SEQUENCE, IS TO PERFORM A FULL COOLANT DUMP. WHEN THIS IS DONE...
"This is one of the steps we already have!" you blurt out. "We need step two, not five!"
Penny's face goes blank. "Oh. I got so excited..."
"If that's here, the other steps might be too." You begin digging at her pile, pulling out huge stapled stacks of paper. A lot of papers are too dirty or torn to read. Others have nothing to do with the sequence, and instead focus on the machinery in the Engineering Bay.
"Come on," you mutter as you use your hands as shovels, digging through the rubble. "Where is it?"
You both groan as the PA cracks on. "Do you have it yet?" Jay asks.
"No. But we're close, I know we can..."
"Out of the question. Your time is up. Get back here now!"
You want to ignore him, to keep searching, but you know he's right.
Time's up. RUN BACK TO PAGE 82
29
"Okay. Let's go rescue Penny."
Jay nods. "Couldn't have said it better myself. Now, which way do we go?"
There are two ways to the Observation Lounge. One way, the most direct way, is through the main door in the Control Room. That door leads to a tunnel underneath the particle accelerator, where it splits off toward the reactor core and the Observation Lounge.
The other way involves cutting through the Engineering Bay, then the Particle Beam staging area.
"The direct way would be easiest," Jay says, "but that takes us directly underneath the large loop. Since the Causality Neutrino went haywire there it might have messed up the tunnel, or created some other space-time tears."
"Space-time tears?" You don't like the sound of that.
Jay swings his head up and down. "Uh huh, young mister Heller. Space-time tears. You don't even want to know. Hopefully we don't encounter anything like that."
"If we go through the Engineering Bay we need keycode entry," you say. "I'm just an intern; they don't give me that kind of access."
"I think I can remember them." Jay grabs the side of his head. "My memory is slowly coming back."
"So which way is it?" you ask.
"Hey, you're the one who decided to help Penny first," Jay says. "And I'm still not feeling optimal. So you can call the shots, for now."
To go through the main tunnel, TURN TO PAGE 15
If you'd rather cut through the Engineering Bay, GO TO PAGE 31
30
You travel down the hallway and reach the back of the bathrooms. "I'll search the men's room, you search the women's."
Penny arches an eyebrow at you. "Scared to go into the women's restroom? Nobody's here, you know. You won't get in trouble."
"Hey, let's just focus on our task, okay?"
You approach the door. Unlike most of the doors in the facility, which are electronic and open sideways, the bathroom doors have a more conventional handle and lock. You give the handle a turn and yank...
It doesn't budge.
You pull again, and then bend down to peer at the lock. The deadbolt is in place, locked from the inside. Darn!
You walk into the women's room and Penny smirks. "Not afraid to come in here anymore?"
"Men's room is locked."
You search the room, but there's not much to see. Four stalls, all of which are empty. One of the toilets is missing, carved out in a sphere with part of the wall, most likely by the Causality Neutrino. Water dribbles from the exposed pipe and covers the floor.
"Let's backtrack," you say, realizing you're making no progress in there. "Maybe if we go check the--"
The PA in the hallway cuts on, faint but recognizable. "TIME IS UP, I repeat, time is up. Have you guys found the missing sequence?"
You and Penny walk into the hall. "No, we haven't," you tell the ceiling.
"Then there's nothing for you to do but get back here. Better run, you don't have much time to get to the surface!"
There's nothing to do but RUN TO PAGE 84
31
You travel down the short hallway until it ends at a metal door without any windows. Jay scratches his head, glances at you, and then punches in a code onto the keypad.
The door beeps, and then with the loud ka-chunk of disengaging locks it swings open.
The Engineering Bay is a mess. Fluorescent lights hang from the ceiling by their wires, flickering on and off. The workshop benches on the right side of the room have been turned over, and machinery is scattered across the floor. Part of the ceiling has collapsed in the center of the room, almost splitting it in two.
"Look at this," Jay says. He guides you to the left wall, where the metal covering is gone, revealing the rock of the mountain behind. You lean in and examine it; it's almost a perfectly circular hole. No, not a circle. A sphere. A half-sphere is missing. It's as if someone took a giant melonball tool and scooped out a section of the wall.
"What could cause that?"
"I'm afraid I know the answer," Jay says. "The Causality Neu
trino is so unstable it's flickering in and out of existence throughout the laboratory. It has probably caused more damage elsewhere."
"Is there anything we can do about it?" you ask.
Jay gives a thoughtful look. "Maybe. We'll worry about that later. For now, let's focus on helping Penny."
You turn your gaze to the other side of the room. Since part of the ceiling collapsed, there are essentially two pathways to get to the far door. The right side has a thick power cable exposed on the floor, with naked wires sparking and crackling in the semi-darkness. But the left side isn't much better: although the pathway is mostly clear, the ceiling above is leaning precariously. It looks like it could collapse at any moment.
To go left, TURN TO PAGE 42
Or, take the right path ON PAGE 56
32
"Red's hot," you say, "which mean the black wire is safe."
Jay frowns. "Are you certain?"
"I'm pretty sure."
Jay opens his mouth to say more, but you're already turning away from him. Just to be safe, instead of jumping straight in you bend down and touch the water with the tip of your--
BZZZZZZZZZT
All the muscles in your arm go tense as they're blasted with electricity. There's a loud pop and you're thrown backwards away from the puddle.
For a long while you simply lay on your back, staring at the ceiling. You were so certain the black wire would have been safe! You don't know how you went wrong. I guess that's why you chose to study physics instead of electrical engineering.
Jay's face appears as he stands over you. His grey hair is standing on end strangely, and he holds up his hand to his face. The finger is black on the tip, with a tendril of smoke coming off. He must have gotten shocked too, somehow.
You'll probably end up being fine, but you're definitely too woozy from the shock to continue now. And that means this is...
THE END
33
"It's gotta be THREAD," you say.
Penny bobs her head. "I think so too."
You click on THREAD and wait. There's a long pause on the screen, and the click of the computer's hard drive.
INPUT ACCEPTED
NETWORK: ONLINE
SECURITY: ONLINE
REACTOR: ONLINE
ALL SYSTEMS: ONLINE
You throw your hands in the air. "Woohoo!'
Penny slaps you on the shoulder. "Nice going!"
Jay smiles and bends to the computer, typing furiously. Data flies across the screen in numbers and characters, too fast for you to see. "Well," he says slowly, "there's good news and bad news. Here's the good news." He points at the screen:
...FIRST STEP IN THE SEQUENCE IS TO DISABLE THE SAFETY SYSTEM, WHICH WILL OTHERWISE ATTEMPT TO HALT THE...
"Awesome!" you say. "But what's the bad news?"
"The bad news," Jay says ominously, "is that the reactor core is indeed close to meltdown. And we still don't have all of the sequence steps."
You now have PART ONE of the shutdown sequence! Be sure to write it down.
Listen to Jay's explanation by FLIPPING TO PAGE 34
34
Jay pulls up the reactor core monitoring program. It's a series of bars and percentages. Jay points to one of the bars. "The reactor internal pressure is at 92 percent. If it reaches 100 a meltdown occurs."
As you're watching, the number iterates up to 93. A few seconds later it hits 94.
"We've gotta get out of here!" Penny says. "It's about to blow!"
"There's one trick I can try." Jay begins typing furiously again, opening new programs and entering custom lines of code. You watch as a warning message pops up, which Jay closes. He punches in another command, and a different warning comes up. He closes that before you have a chance to read it.
He hits the enter key emphatically, then pulls up the reactor core monitoring program. The internal pressure is at 97 percent, and still rising.
Your immediate impulse is to bolt. You have to get away! Why isn't Jay panicking?
The bar stops rising, hovering around 97.5 percent. It stays there for a few seconds, then rapidly drops:
95
92
84
81
77
75
It hovers around 75 before stopping completely. "Jay, you did it!"
He shakes his head. "I only delayed it. I released the emergency steams valves. That should buy us some time."
"How much time?"
"I don't know. Half an hour, at least? It's tough to know for certain." As he says this, the number creeps up to 75.1.
"So now what?" Penny asks.
"Well," Jay says, "that depends on how many steps in the sequence we have so far..."
If you have four out of five steps, HEAD TO PAGE 87
If you have fewer than four steps, TURN TO PAGE 132
35
"Animal Enclosure?" Penny says warily.
"Yeah, we use them for some of the secondary testing that occurs in the Laboratory. Nothing bad, just harmless stuff. Measuring blood count after electromagnetic tests. Long-term effect of constant radio wave bombardment. That sort of thing."
"Uh huh." Penny looks into one of the cages. "Aww, it's just a cute little bunny!"
"We have rabbits, mice. Even a few cats. I named that guy Thumper." You smile, but Penny just gives you a blank look. "You know, the rabbit from Bambi?"
"Never seen it."
"You've never seen Bambi? Wow, we need to change that. I have to show you Bambi, it's a classic. Err, I mean, if you want to."
She gives you a coy look. "We'll see."
Something past her shoulder catches your attention. "Uh oh."
"Uh oh?"
You rush over to the cages on the far wall. Four of them are completely empty. "There should be mice in these cages. A few dozen of them."
"Jeremy... what's that?"
You follow her pointing hand and see something weird between two cages. The space is only two inches wide, but there's something glowing inside.
Before you can guess, a trio of tiny Phase Beings come scurrying out in your direction. They're hardly bigger than your fist, but they're fast little guys.
"The mice," you say. "Their Causality Neutrinos are out of whack too!"
The mice are training to be affectionate towards people. They're coming straight for you.
To try shooting with your CS Rifle, AIM FOR PAGE 21
To run for the Maintenance Room door, DART TO PAGE 43
Or, climb onto the nearest cage ON PAGE 96
36
With Penny gone, there's nothing to do but get to work. You examine the room. Already the air is filling with the excited chatter of technical speak as the physicists go through their pre-test checks, led by one of the senior techs:
"Proton source?" he asks?
"Proton source: active."
"Klystron generators?"
"Klystron generators warming up."
"Superconductive electromagnets?"
"Electromagnets A through J powered on, K through T standing by."
"Reactor coolant levels?" A pause. "Reactor coolant levels?"
It takes you several seconds to realize he's talking to you. "Oh, sorry sir!" You turn back to your computer terminal and examine the data. "Reactor coolant levels are stable."
The tech moves on without skipping a beat. "Diagnostics?"
"Diagnostics are nominal..."
You slump in your chair with a sigh. That was the extent of your job, until they run through the mid-accelerations tests. Just a verbal acknowledgment of the reactor coolant levels, and then monitoring the overall generator drain. Penny was right to think your job was boring.
Why couldn't anything exciting ever happen?
The door leading to the observation lounge opens, and Doctor Kessler strides into the Control Room. He's already balding in his forties, and his white lab coat hangs off his thin frame.
He raises his voice to address the room. "Okay, everybody," he
says in his German accent. "I do not need to inform you how important today's test is. We have many prestigious investors in the lounge today. If we fail to impress them, we may as well close the doors on this laboratory for good."
He looks around the room, which has grown silent except for the sound of the computer fans.
"The goal of this test," he says ominously, "is to find proof of the existence of the Causality Neutrino, a sub-atomic particle never before discovered. If we are successful, today will be one of the greatest days in the history of physics."
He takes a deep breath and claps his hands together.
"Okay," he says. "Let us begin."
Begin the test ON PAGE 52
37
You aim the rifle in shaky hands. Ugh, why couldn't Jay be here to help you? You're just an intern!
You're wasting time, and Penny is counting on you. You take a deep breath, exhale slowly, and pull back on the trigger.
PA-TEW.
The shot rings out with a flash of light. You miss the Phase Being's center torso, but it hits one of the arm-like extremities, and apparently that's good enough. The Phase Being begins flickering in and out of existence, blue and red and purple, before becoming the image of a kindly old man wearing thick work gloves and a veterinarian jacket. Then he's gone completely.
"That was Bob," you whisper. "He's the animal handler."
"Animal handler?"
"Yeah, we have an Animal Enclosure just down the hall. Mice and rabbits and a few cats, for testing some of the effects of our electromagnetic research."
The Strange Physics of the Heidelberg Laboratory Page 3
