Inception (Pt. 2)

A makeshift, custom setup of tubes, pipes, and wires roared to life before calming to a faint hum. It groaned loudly, pushed to its limit, though from his view, no catastrophic failure yet.

“What the hell is this thing?” Ken asked, watching as a section near him spun up to blurring speed.

“This thing,” she began, glaring at him, “is a small-scale accelerator.”

Ken stared at her. “That’s all I’m getting?” Ken had to assume she meant a particle accelerator, but he couldn’t be certain. It seemed a likely candidate, given that it could trigger atomic events otherwise exceedingly unlikely on Earth.

Irina stared blankly back at him for an uncomfortably long while. With a sigh and a shake of her head—but no response—she turned to the machine and knelt down to calibrate it.

At least, that’s what Ken assumed she was doing. He didn’t know. That she didn’t explain confirmed, though she was irritated he didn’t understand without asking, that he was correct: it was some kind of particle accelerator.

“I mean, an accelerator isn’t something to take lightly,” he noted under his breath. If it even works. He turned his gaze from her to get a better look at it.

It consisted primarily of a large loop of thick metal that extended past the edges of the square table, held up by a set of shoddily welded joints connecting it to the table. An array of panels of buttons, sliders, and knobs dotted the surface, though even with his out-of-practice experience he could see that most of them weren’t connected to anything.

After a time of fiddling with the various controls on the underside of the setup, Irina stood back up and dusted herself, righting her lab coat and pushing her hair out of her face. She looked at him, and nodded, turning to the machine.

“Uh, before you start,” he said, holding his hand out, “shouldn’t there be some more…” He trailed off, looking around the run-down, makeshift laboratory. “Safety? Maybe some preamble?”

She didn’t respond.

“Hello?” he asked, stepping closer to her.

She banged her head on the edge of a monitor hanging from the table's edge, cursing in Russian. Rubbing the spot she’d hit, she clicked her tongue and said, “We’re outside the radius.”

Not reassuring. Ken took a couple timid steps back, hoping to recede among the shelving at his back, but he remained pressed against it instead. “Have you tested this thing?”

She paused, thinking. “Once.”

Ken was too aghast at the word to reply.

“And, as for ‘preamble,’” she continued, disdain clear in the last word, “I won’t go into a lot of detail right now. But know that it is possible to generate cold dark matter through the collision of superheated deuterium or tritium nuclei.”

Cold dark matter, Ken thought. He’d long heard about it in part of the theory of the universe: that cold dark matter particles clumped together into invisible clouds that held together the fabric of our galaxies. But that rudimentary understanding did him no favors here.

“This accelerator affords the particles massive energy, and then slams them together under the influence of—”

“If I may,” Marcel began, cutting her off, standing perhaps a foot away from Ken’s shoulder. Ken jumped at the realization of his proximity.

Irina nodded at him, turning back to her machine.

“It may be smart to skip too-detailed description of the machine’s workings. That can come at a later time.”

Irina grunted what Ken assumed was her affirmation.

Ken just stood there, looking passively over her shoulder as she tweaked various parts of the machine. She fiddled with gauges on it, checking readouts on a pair of screens that hung off its edge.

But after a while, she straightened up suddenly. “It is ready.” She took out a stuffed animal from inside her lab coat, placing it on a steel plate elevated above the ring of tubing. It flopped limply over, as if playing dead in hopes it could survive what followed. Irina turned, locking eyes with him. “Are you ready?”

Ken found his mouth bone dry. He couldn’t muster any words, and a pit formed in his stomach as her words hit him.

Without waiting for a response, she flipped a plastic cover up, revealing a button underneath. It glowed faintly against her fingers. And with a click, she pushed it.

The machine whirred to life. And in a moment, his mind was jarred with a cascade of sensation.

The sound washed over him first, shaking him to his core and making him cover his ears at the sharpness of its droning tone. His body rumbled with the rhythm it beat into the walls and floor, setting the shelves behind him rattling too. The light itself warbled, shook, and fragmented, ripping itself apart at the accelerator’s influence in a brilliant ball of swimming energy. He even found that the air itself had a different taste as he breathed it.

It was a synesthetic assault on his senses—almost too intense to withstand.

So this is it, he thought, an extirpation…

He couldn’t help the thoughts of his children that arose the longer he looked upon it—felt its damning shiver. He saw their faces. Memories of them each as girls, playing with him. It crumbled as he clutched it, falling like dust through spread fingers at the grand display of destructive power before him.

His instincts screamed that death was what flooded that room—that this shimmering marked his doom. It was the rift that would tear him from his children.

And as the mounting energy rushed past him in a burst, he looked at Irina, the panic painted on his face.

But she simply stared at the machine.

And, to Ken’s horror, she was smiling. In utter bliss.

He couldn’t help but wonder if she’d lost her mind. Or perhaps, he’d simply been blind to it, and this was how her genius manifested. In this manic glee. Whatever the case, it overcame her now, as she invoked a world-ending calamity.

She must have been insane.

But, a moment later, just as Ken’s fear and survival instinct reached their peak, all of the sensations flooded back over him in reverse, and collapsed down to form a dense ball of that vibrating space. It twitched and flickered in the uncertain light of the lab, casting faint rainbows on the surrounding steel pipework. For perhaps five seconds, the ball hovered there.

It shimmered so… harmlessly. So peacefully.

Familiarly.

A memory surfaced from a few days prior, hazy now, but clarifying with time: May had shown him this, exactly. She didn’t know just how much she knew. How smart she was.

He filed the thought away. I’ll apologize later.

And then, with the briefest amplification of its vibrations, it was gone.

In its place was just… nothing. Just like the extirpations. The stuffed animal had disappeared, along with the platform upon which it had rested.

Irina was still giddy, but it seemed she was descending from her high. Ken could practically feel the dopamine radiating from her skin, but it did feel like it slowly subsided. .

However, he felt nothing but dread. A pit in his stomach, out of which nothing but questions bubbled into his mind.

They could all be neatly synthesized into one.

“What the hell?” Ken whispered, looking at the machine. It whirred and clicked as it slowed to dormancy again. But it made Ken no less frightened of it, and he kept his distance.

For a while after he asked, Irina just kept staring, and he could see her brain overloading with the information it’d just received. But that wasn’t going to work now. He needed answers.

“What was all that?” he asked again. “Irina!”

She frowned as if he’d just pinched her awake from a daydream. “That was the energy released by triggering one. The ones outside… have some kind of resonant—”

A loud crack, followed by shrill hissing, cut her off. The machine cracked, revealing its red-hot innards. After that, a cascade of other failures caused the machine to collapse completely in on itself. Irina jumped back as a piece of near-molten metal landed next to her foot.

Ken was sure now that she'd lost her mind. 

The machine was clearly untested, and extremely unstable—its spectacular failure was a testament to that. Ken took a few steps back, looking at Irina.

She scrawled notes into her notebook, having set up on a table far too close to the collapsing, melting accelerator, at least from where Ken stood.

One thing was for certain, though: she was a genius, and humanity’s best hope.

His daughters’ best hope.

She didn’t even flinch as the plastic and metal internals of the machine shot molten shrapnel out across the floor. She was possessed entirely in her writing—feverishly taking notes about everything she’d just heard, felt, and seen.

Ken dropped back another step as some shards of glass bounced off the leg of his jeans.

He had to believe she could do it—that they could, together.

But as he looked upon the scene before him, he wasn’t so sure how that would go.