by Adam Moon
This experiment we have been conducting does not comply with our current laws and therefore, based upon your recent behavior we are forced to end the study. It is with great reluctance that I say this, but you have left us with no other choice. We have monitored you through hidden cameras located throughout your living quarters. We have viewed and studied the mating ritual and natural human interaction and to be honest, although we found much of it fascinating, it was also highly disturbing to us. We viewed the birth of your son and were quite surprised at this unexpected arrival. Your parenting behavior was also quite interesting; especially the mammary secretions as food, and the bonding between parent and offspring.
The childbirth was the deciding factor when it came time to discuss the future of the study. We had not foreseen such a thing. We reasoned that since we had failed to foresee something of this magnitude, we may miss something even more dangerous in the future. After all, if caught, we face termination ourselves. Had the experiment run its course and proved us right about the potential of natural humans we would have lobbied the government to review our findings. Of course we would have done this anonymously. Unfortunately, it seems the experiment was an abysmal failure. Neither one of you has ever shown any signs of the greatness that is necessary to live in our society.
Although we could not set up cameras in the lab because of the energy fields being generated, the staffers acting as technicians reported that nothing but run of the mill experimentations were taking place.
Your transporter was developed and perfected almost a century ago James. I’m sorry to say that even with the education we provided and the technical support on hand you failed to create anything that is current. This only proves that genetics surpass environmental factors as far as directing our potential. This proof was quite contrary to what we had hoped to see through our study. There were just too many variables to allow you to continue making a mockery of our study. Our hand was forced as a result of…….”
James stood up shakily. He spoke over Nigel, “You’re telling me my entire life is a charade; an experiment. Why didn’t you just tell us the truth in the first place? We’d have followed the rules. We certainly wouldn’t be where we are today.”
"Actually James,” said the senior board member, “that is not true. Telling you the truth would have caused you to rebel against the study. We have samples of your DNA and it's obvious from your genetic make-up that you would not sit around and let us test you willingly. You would have escaped and most certainly been detected for what you really are. I know you think that our society is overly strict and sterile but what you’ve seen in here is but a shadow of the real world. In the real world you wouldn't have made it to your teens; neither of you.”
“Have you seen the new applications I’ve come up with for the telescope?” yelled James, “I refuse to believe that my new ideas are not ahead of the times.”
One of the female board members spoke. Her name was Jessica. She said, “We monitored your progress long enough to establish that your thought processes are nothing short of mundane. I’m sorry to hurt your pride like this but we are not interested in anything that comes from your primitive mind. Your DNA told us as much before we even began the study but we gave you a chance to prove it wrong. You received the highest form of education available and you were equipped with a state of the art lab and you came up with absolutely nothing. You are more than merely a disappointment. You are an embarrassment.”
James felt his face heat up and tears began to form in his eyes.
The senior board member spoke once more. “Your response to hearing the truth is unacceptable. Much of your behavior is unacceptable. You have set our cause back. In fact it may now be a lost cause. I disagree with Nigel. I feel that the blame lies with both you and Margaret. Your behavior is so outlandish that we would never have been able to convince the upper tiers of government to allow further research. Nothing positive has come from this study and it is with great relief that I now conclude this appalling failure of an experiment.”
Margaret had listened silently to everything and trembled uncontrollably. She finally spoke. “Everything you have said here today is completely unfair. James is a great man. He is a strong father and I am a strong mother. You have lied and misled us at every turn and now you tell us that we have failed you. You have failed us. We aren't zoo animals. Had you told us your intentions from the beginning perhaps you would have been given the results you desired. If you’d told James his invention had already been invented, he could've moved on to something else instead of spending two years on a purposeless project. Had you revealed yourselves you could have helped me through childbirth. I almost died as you stared at me through your monitors. You people are the disappointment, not James or I. My child is but the byproduct of your study and now he has to die because of your mistakes. I hope the main governing body finds out about this study and you each die an excruciating death.”
The board member, Robert, now spoke. “Yes, yes, the typical emotional response. Your son should've never been born in the first place. His genetic make-up is as flawed as both of yours is. He will die because it is necessary; because society deems it so. Your deaths are long overdue in my opinion and the sooner it's done the sooner we can all wash our hands of this stupid mistake.”
He looked over their heads at the men at the back of the room and said, “Officers, please terminate this experiment at once.”
The panel stood and walked from the room, exiting through a side door.
Two officers roughly grabbed them and led them back to the elevators. One of the officers pressed the button for the basement. The elevator began to move.
The senior officer addressed James and Margaret although he didn't look directly at either of them.
He said, “The terminations will take place in the basement. I am hopeful that the termination chambers still work properly. We haven’t had to use them since they were installed. I’d hate for you to die slowly. I’ve seen it happen before and it appears to be painful. If everything works accordingly, none of you will feel a thing. The death is immediate and humane.”
James realized that the others he'd seen marched towards termination over the years hadn't actually been terminated. Maybe they'd just been reassigned. Maybe the charade was to try and keep James in line through fear. That explained why the two scientists he'd thought were dead were amongst the others upstairs moments ago. He couldn't dwell on it though. He had other things to worry about, like imminent death and the deaths of his loved ones.
The elevator door unexpectedly opened on the fourth floor. A sanitation technician stood before them. He had obviously summoned the elevator, not knowing what was going on.
James’ lab was on the fourth floor. This was his only opportunity to save his family. He punched the closest officer in the face and as the officer buckled from the impact, he turned to the two remaining officers. They looked absolutely shocked. They dropped their weapons to the ground and cowered before him.
Hand to hand violence was unknown of these days.
He grabbed Margaret by the shoulder and rushed from the elevator as the sanitation tech stood rooted to the spot. Immediately, the alarm sounded and the corridors filled with a blinding fog.
James said, “Cover the baby’s eyes.”
He stood behind Margaret and shielded her eyes from the fog. He inched them toward his office blindly. He heard yelling behind him and heard the sound of a weapon discharging. He saw the wall to his right evaporate instantly. They reached his office and once inside James closed the glass doors. He pulled the emergency lock.
The emergency lock locked down a room in case of catastrophic failure. Some experiments James had worked on in the past had been highly dangerous. If something were to go wrong, the emergency lock could be implemented to contain the impending disaster. The room was now surrounded by a force field.
This was perfect because James needed at least a couple of minutes in his lab, uninterrupted.
The officers reached the door and discharged their weapons in vain. The blasts simply fizzled out at the force field.
A moment later several panel members arrived. Robert was the first to reach the door.
He said, “What are you doing? You’re just delaying the inevitable. The locks activate sensors which monitor the room. Once they fail to detect an imminent catastrophe the room will automatically go into safe mode. This will happen in about three or four minutes. All you’ve done is bought yourself a few extra minutes of life.”
“A few minutes is more than enough time,” said James. “We’ll be gone by then.”
“And how do you think you’ll accomplish that?” yelled Robert with just a hint of arrogance in his voice.
“You’d never understand if I explained it to you ten times. I doubt any of you would,” James yelled back, barely hiding his own arrogance.
Margaret whispered, “He’s right James. There’s no way out.”
James looked into her eyes and said, “You’re about to see genius in action. Don’t be afraid. If I’m right, this should work. If I’m wrong, we will die. Either way, it is worth the risk.”
Margaret nodded and went about soothing the baby.
James uncovered the telescope and the transporter.
He spent only a few seconds at the transporter and then quickly turned his attentions to the telescope.
As he did this Robert said, “You’ll die if you try to transport yourself. Organic matter can’t handle the jump.”
“It can now,” James replied.
Robert scoffed.
One of the other panel members turned to Robert and said, “Let him do it. We were going to destroy the childish experiment anyway. This will kill two birds with one stone.”
Robert shouted through the door, “Just out of curiosity, where would you go? There is not a single planet that is perfectly suited for human life. You’d last less than a year. Your son would die within a week. We’ve mapped the entire universe. There is nowhere to go.”
The panel members watched with an acute curiosity. None of them had actually seen a human attempt to teleport. Some of them had seen what happened to rats and they had all read the horror stories about human testing but none of them had actually seen the horror in person.
Nigel smiled sadistically but he quickly regained his composure.
James beckoned Margaret into the telescope. They just barely fit inside the instrument housing.
Robert yelled to an officer, “Cut the power. If they die I want to make sure it is as humane as possible.”
James shut the access door.
The lights went out. The power had been cut. They were now awash in a faint, blinking red emergency lighting.
“A few seconds and we’ll be in,” Robert said. “It was a foolish idea anyway James.”
The door opened and just as they surged forward the telescope simply vanished, silently.
“What in the world?” said Nigel. “That’s not how it’s supposed to happen.”
Jessica ran to the transporter. She said, “He didn’t even use the transporter. How the hell did he do that? Where did he get the energy from, we did cut the power, right?”
Robert said quickly, “Get a tracking system in here at once. I want to know what he did.”
The telescope appeared directly above a blue planet.
James said, “I think we made it. The seals are airtight and we should have more than enough oxygen to last us until we land.”
Margaret looked out the view port and then eyed him curiously. “Where will we go? That's Earth down there. There's not a single place where we'll go undetected for very long, especially carrying a baby.”
“It is not our earth,” James replied. ‘It's an alternate earth. This is an alternate dimension.”
She looked at him incredulously. “You must be wrong. Inter-dimensional travel's impossible.”
“”Transporting organic matter used to be impossible too,” he said with a glint in his eye.
She looked out the view port at the planet. “Is it safe for us? According to theory, there are an infinite number of dimensions. How do you even know this earth supports life?”
“I saw it myself just this evening. There are people down there; all kinds of people. The odds of finding another universe that even supports our type of physical matter was a long shot. I found one that not only supports matter and life but has an earth almost identical to ours. I think this is somehow our destiny. It can’t be any more hostile than our earth is anyway.”
“Let’s find out,” said Margaret as she started to smile.
James oriented the telescope just right and then programmed the coordinates so that they would be put down neatly on the ground of their new home.
Nigel stared at the readouts in disbelief. The tracker could sense every type of energy emitted in an area within the past 24 hours.
It could also follow that energy in a manner of speaking. That is to say, it could tell exactly what purpose the energy was used for.
Robert shook his head. “This can’t be right. It indicates that an inter-dimensional bridge was opened on this very spot. It also shows energies that I’ve never seen before. Inter-dimensional bridges are useless to us aren’t they? We can only open them for nanoseconds and they are so small that nothing can pass through them. The energy required to do even this is greater than the energy we can generate. What did he do? To travel to another dimension he would have had to come up with a revolutionary new form of energy and harness it just right. It’s absolutely impossible, not to mention that organic matter can't survive within a transported object. How the hell did he manage it? The man is an evolutionary throw back. This shouldn't be possible.”
Nigel said, “Perhaps this means our study was a success. This result alone might be enough to encourage the government to attempt natural human mixing. For a man as genetically restricted as James to come up with this is nothing short of a miracle.”
Robert said, “The government will never go for it. They will deem this entire operation reckless. They will say he jeopardized the fate of humanity when he opened the bridge-way.”
Jessica spoke up. “This is absolutely outstanding. He achieved things that we regard as impossible and he did it all in just two years. Discoveries this profound come about after centuries of attempts and failures. Who on earth achieves several scientific breakthroughs at once without failing. He has achieved something that is, most likely, centuries away from becoming a reality for us. This is encouraging enough to warrant at least another round of testing.”
Robert replied, “I agree. We can use their most recent genetic material, clone them from it and age accelerate them. We need to reset this facility exactly as it was; get a cleaning crew in here. We need to duplicate the results of this test. Society deserves the technology discovered by James. We need this technology for ourselves.”
Nigel interrupted. “Can’t we try and rediscover his experiments ourselves?”
Robert replied, “It would take generations or even centuries working constantly just to rediscover even one of James’ breakthroughs. It will be much faster if we duplicate our study and monitor James more closely this time.”
Jessica walked to the transporter and said, “If he equipped the telescope with its own transporter and power supply, then why did he keep this thing around?” She switched it on and immediately they all knew something was wrong. The building rumbled and the lights flickered.
Just then Robert remembered the events he’d witnessed only moments ago within the lab. He remembered seeing James working at the transporter for a few seconds before spending the remaining minutes programming the telescope.
What had he done?
“Oh no,” whispered Robert.
In the next moment every one in the room and even the room itself disappeared. It was transported. Had any of them survived the transportation, they would have been the first humans to view the event horizon of a black h
ole…...up close.
All that was left was a gigantic gaping hole where the lab used to be and the usual rippling effect that came with typical transportation.
Margaret, James, and their son were seated upon a park bench on their new world, basking in the warmth of the sun. None of them had ever been outside the corporate compound or the children’s camps back on their home planet and so the breeze and the scents and sounds exhilarated them. Passersby were evidently unperturbed by the sight of their child and some even approached them to get a better look at him. They smiled broadly and cooed for the baby’s attention, congratulating Margaret and James in the process.
They would have to learn to let go of everything they'd been programmed to think of as ordinary and right in order to fit in on this earth and both of them were anxious to do just that.
Margaret gushed, “This place is amazing. I would've never believed such a paradise existed.” Her smile slowly faded and she said evenly, “What are the chances of the panel members recreating your experiments and tracking us here? They would ruin this place. They could actually destroy all of reality if they don’t get it right. Tell me they aren’t capable of finding our new home.”
James replied, “They’re not smart enough to duplicate my findings but just in case, I rigged up something special for our benevolent creators. If I’m right, no one will be hearing from them ever again.”
Margaret smiled and put her arm around his shoulder. He stifled a smile. He smiled broadly.
The End
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