A pretty short story I wrote

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"But why.... even a woman?" the doctor sobbed. His brow furrowed once more as he laid his tired head upon his guilty hands.

Replying at first with only a sigh, the woman next to him began upon her brigade of soothsayer's facade as she relayed the answer he sought to him for perhaps the five-hundredth time.

"A maiden, Jake. Specifically. You read the documents, didn't you? Remember, even this place isn't exactly a build-a-bear workshop from hell. We have an opportunity, here. One that may not come again. And at all costs, we must seize upon it." Her sympathies evaporated as he cautiously sought to her face for a sense of approval, and she instead emanated a harsh glare.

He gulped, and admitted to himself that his emotions needed to be placed aside, that his fleeting attachments to the girl - no, the husk - that was once his daughter were becoming a serious threat to the future of all mankind. He couldn't look in the mirror without seeing someone sick and perverted; all this fuss over a body with no thoughts, no consciousness, no feelings.... no soul?

Almost in-tune with his most frugal chagrin, she hissed: "The commander was right about you, Jake. And admitting that you're a filthy little pig won't get you your funding back once this clears. Might keep you outta jail, though."

She sneered as a sensation of a warm wave of relinquishment of his mental burdens washed over him; a sense of relaxation that seemed to penetrate the depths of his frazzled yet still very brilliant brain. He stood up, looking his colleague in her green-ringed-hazelnut eyes, and with a rekindled mad scientist's zeal aglow as a flame in his eyes he practically barked at her: "Genieve! We will ready the equipment at once and strike the first of the target dates. There's no need for hesitation, it's through our hands that God's work is done!"

She stood up straight and nodded. "At once, doctor."


The machine was truly the pinnacle of mankind's development. The building housing it stood over three hundred feet tall and spanned a thousand feet by seven thousand feet. It consumed the majority of the energy mankind was able to produce, and it had already been used in the conquest of the inner Earth, claiming for mankind at long last his own planet, and without claiming any more human lives.

And yet, what we had sought merely stood and stared in mocking, for with the loss of an intelligent race so too the inner Sun seemingly lost its will to sustain any more life; it began to cast only a harsh, burning spectre that while beautiful to behold, caused our crops to turn pale and fold after a week as a sickly-looking seedling. So too after just a week did the same fate befall the lush rainforests of every nook and cranny of the subsurface abode; with no food or cover, so too the fauna knew death's knell. The carnivores fed on the herbivores before turning upon each other in a desperate bloodbath as strongest fought meanest fought sharper-toothed still.

Some even learned to wield the cast-aside relics of the technology of their former stewards, yet as the tainted inner Sun above them continued its burn, the biology of the underdogs, so to speak, would change.... very rapidly. Formally diminutive creatures born after the event grew at an impossible rate and with impossible vitality, seemingly converting their kills to caloric fuel at a supernatural rate. Those that managed to actually get close enough to each other to mate (though we never observed the act, thank God) would produce young drastically different from their parent. Seeing what championed the bunch after a few dozen generations is, well.

It's why we don't go down there, any more.

Regardless they are far beyond our concern at this point, and I've diverged from the topic at hand. The machine. It is composed of twelve chambers each containing a single point of resonating light, suspended in stasis by a massive electrical field that is bridged with that of neighbouring chambers.

A particle called a 'monolith' is placed in the 'lowest' (first) chamber, the only one with just one neighbour. The machine is activated, and the particle begins orbiting the point of light in the first chamber at an ever-increasing speed. At a speed just below the speed of light, a conversion of the monolith particle into one permeable to light occurs and the monolith is thereafter annihilated by the convergence of minute forces arising from the even more minute disturbance of the monolith's orbit.

So complete is the annihilation of the particle, its bare electrical components become transmissible through the conducting bridges between the chambers, and through a poorly-understood mechanism, the outpacing of radiating light within each chamber by the electrical pulses derived from the abrupt annihilation of the accelerating monolith from the first chamber, causes each point of light to split into two points locked in counter orbit, and rhythmically recombine again in a fraction of a second.

To maintain this action over the span of more than a second is to gain control of God-like power and omnipresence; through the massive resonance a man at the controls of the machine may directly effect the properties of the Universe around him; the difficulty is within the coordination and the targeting of the things in one's interest to manipulate. Every precision must be impeccably calculated; and precaution hadn't failed us yet.


The doctor's rambling internal monologue was interrupted as another of his colleagues spoke, the excitement she felt clearly audible in her tone.

"The extraction is complete, doctor Jacob. .... all systems have been initiated."

He stood up promptly, and straightened his glasses. "Then it's time."

Whether precision and calculation could aid us in this endeavour, he sighed as he again considered. Humankind had only downhill to go, he often thought. And what's the worst that could happen? Better a big bang than a petering flame anyhow.

"But...." he said aloud as he stood before the control panel that would transform his will into God's.


"....will I hear her,

if she screams....?"

....

:D thanks for reading