Portal

A Story by AlphaGemini

Two scientists make a horrific discovery during an experiment

Portal

The lights dimmed inside the testing chamber. The high arching ceiling was lost to shadow, recessed halogen light thunk-ing off one by one to plunge the vast space into perpetual twilight, lit only by a faint blue glow. Power indicators.

“Our job is to literally break the laws of physics, and you're worried about the rules set by a decaying old fart?”

Voices in the dark. Hushed and hurried. Vandals of a purely scientific nature.

“I'm just saying man, ol’ Doc Boros finds us in here we're dead. Or worse, fired.”

“Whatever Clark. Go if you're such a p***y, either that or help me with this.”

Light. Brilliant and white stabbed out from the center of the blackened room.

“Good, now we're in business.”

The illumination originated from a small windowed cubicle in the exact center of the chamber. It threw enough of the rest of the gloomy interior into view for the vastness of it to be appreciated. As large as an aircraft hangar, test site 34b was massive. And for the most part, empty. It was a false assumption, however.

A titanic hoop of tubular construction ringed the space. It was thicker than two men abreast, coated in solid matte white paneling. It was held aloft by thick metal pylons positioned every few meters along its length, to allow for total freedom of maintenance around its fat width. Directly in from of the small-seeming cubicle there was a hatch mounted on the side of the thing, along with several stubby, thick protruding housings both circular and angular. Housings and hatch both were held fast by large, strong looking bolts. It was the collision chamber.

“Alright, power feed looks good. Help me set the acceleration parameters up, would you?”

Back in the cubicle, two white lab-coated figures moved about, adjusting the various dials and switches found on tall metal stacks of machinery inside. Young, both of them. One was lanky and tall with a shock of black hair, his bony nose sporting thickly rimmed glasses. It was he giving the orders, grey eyes alight with equal parts irritation and eagerness. His partner was less so enthusiastic.

Clark was dark skinned young man of middling height, his ebony skin stark against the white sterile environment of the chamber. His eyes were wide with apprehension and worry.

“Set to thirteen tetravolts?” he queried nervously.

“Yes, yes of course, we've been over this, hurry up.” replied the other, annoyed.

“Come on Charlie, I'm just trying to get it right the first time.”

The one called Charles winced.

“Don't call me that. Please. Sorry, you're right, I just want it to work. We'll only get one shot before they find us, so it better damn well work. Set it to the new frequency right off the bat and we'll get her started.”

Clark nodded, some of his nervousness lost. He bent and adjusted a large dial. Charles plugged in a power lead and a computer monitor sitting on the low desk to the fore of the observation room blinked to life.

Both men walked over to it, one more hesitantly than the other.

“The gear in here… it's dinosaur level. No wonder the old kook hasn't had any luck” whispered Charles.

He stood before the monitor and clacked in a few commands through the mechanical keyboard in front of it. A distinct electric hum sprang into being throughout the room as the particle accelerator was brought to life. The electro-magnets encasing the tube of the accelerator were now live, their pull strong enough to crumple a car. The two scientists paused expectantly and turned to each other.

Charles held out a hand.

“This is it bud. Either we're about to become very, very famous and obscenely rich, or jobless. See you on the other side.”

Despite his butterflies, Clark chuckled.

“Just remember me in your Nobel acceptance speech.”

They shook, the excitement and tension in the small space palpable. Charles held a hand poised above the keyboard for a moment, then typed in a command which scrawled along the monitor screen in glowing white script. He hit enter. Execute.

The pitch of the light background hum increased, becoming a pervasive whine. It built for a few moments before it plateaued to a perceptible vibration within the cubicle.

“Acceleration complete. Initiating collision.”

Again Charles’ fingers danced upon the keyboard. He hit enter.

With a bang, the lights shut off. All of them. There was a strange gush of cool air too, though the chamber was hermetically sealed. Neither of them noticed.

The test chamber was plunged into a murky impenetrable black. Not even the glowing blue power lights along the accelerator showed in the darkness.

“S**t! Did it work?”

In the dark Clark groped for his smartphone and dug it put from his labcoats breast pocket. The bright torchlight he activated lanced through the gloom, illuminating the cramped cubicle once more. Next to him Charles winced at the sudden light.

“Guess we'll have to reboot to find out.” he said.

“Quickly, they could be on their way.”

Spinning to the switches behind them on the myriad of silvery machine stacks, Clark chose two of the heftiest looking and threw them back and forth with resounding thunks. Nothing happened. The dark around the cubicle remained solid and absolute.

“Crap!” hissed Charles in frustration.

“There must be something wrong with the main powered interchange, wait here.”

With that the skinny scientist left the confines of the booth, out into the void of dark.

Strangely, Clark could still make out his accomplice as he moved across the empty space of the chamber, feet echoing loudly on the white concrete floor. His white lab coat was plainly visible as he made his way through the depths and towards the edge of the accelerator where the collision chamber was housed. Behind it upon the wall was the large box-like cabinet containing the main fuses and transformer for the labs separate power grid, to prevent fluctuations mid-experiment. It almost seemed as though the large room wasn't as dark as it really appeared.

Clark watched Charles pass halfway through the intervening space.

A tendril blacker than the deepest obsidian lashed down from somewhere above. Leg thick, it whipped around the walking figure in deathly silence and then in a blink was gone again. It had been the fastest flicker, like living lightning. His friend was simply not there anymore. Clark blinked, confused.

“Charles?” he called faintly.

There was no response. He strained his ears as hard as possible, the silence ringing in his ears. And then he heard something that chilled his very soul. What sounded like muffled, gurgling screaming.

Clark hit the floor. He was breathing hard, trying to make sense of what he'd seen. A thick black tendril from the roof? It seemed impossible. It was impossible. What then? His overexcited brain had imagined it. The stress and strain of sneaking in here, risking everything, had him seeing things. But the scream. That he'd definitely heard.

Clark propped himself up, raising his eyes gingerly above the rim of the desk where the powerless monitor still lay dormant. He could see just over the lip of the window and into the night-dark chamber beyond. Totally and utterly empty. He sank back down.

Security guards then. They must have mistaken them for actual intruders what with their skulking around, and seized and restrained his friend.

There was still a chance he could get out of this. The next obvious place for them to look would be right here, in this cubicle. He had to get out of the test chamber without them noticing him. And without Charles talking.

Clark got up, he quickly moved to the door of the blocky booth construction and peered out. To his eyes, the vaulted chamber around him was empty, dark and uninhabited but for him. But they were out there somewhere.

He broke into a slow run, keeping low to the ground, hunched over as if the murk itself could provide him cover.

Meters of the concrete passed beneath his feet as Clark made a beeline for where he guessed the door would be. He prayed the guards would be stupid enough not to have posted a man at the entrance.

His foot scuffed on something wet, then snagged, sending him tumbling to the hard ground. The concrete was cold. Much colder than it should have been in the temperature controlled chamber. He struggled up, casting around for what had tripped him.

The white lab coat sleeve caught his eye nearby in the gloom. It was still wrapped around a length of arm that led to a bloody stump where the limb had been severed, torn messily from the elbow. Around the severed forearm a wide pool of blood congealed, black in the dark.

A stab of blinding panic at his mistake jolted Clark’s heart as he took in what he was seeing. Security guards wouldn't have done that.

There was the faintest slither of sound from above him and his head jerked up.

The entire ceiling in a wide circumference was laced in thick tentacle of various sizes. Some rippled and swam, large trunks of grotesque grey muscle through smaller bands and vines of the thinner cords.

Clark reeled. The great maw of writhing biomass seemed to begin and end at the termination of the accelerators edges. The huge circle of slippery tentacles above the chamber had been formed because of them. Because of their experiment. No one would ever know so, nor ever find their bodies. Whole. The strange, eldritch gateway formed through the fabric of reality by the exotic matter and energy combinations birthed by the accelerator would never be linked to the otherworldly mass above.

A thick, curling tendril from the hundreds above, wide as a man lanced down with lightning speed. Like a retreating python it wrapped around the struggling form of the surviving scientists, harder and tighter until once more a gurgling scream undulated against the hard white walls and floor of the chamber. Then, silence.

With a blink of the naked eye an observer would have missed it. The gargantuan rippling tide above seemed to vanish in an instant. Simply gone. For a moment the clear, cold room was utterly silent. With a loud chunk, the single halogen light from within the cubicle in the center of the chamber blinked on, buzzing electrically.

Its fringe of illumination touched the fingers of a severed arm laying in a pool of congealing blood, some meters away.

© 2018 AlphaGemini

My Review

Would you like to review this Story?
Login | Register

Reviews

Delmar Cooper

A lot of good story here, suspense, super science, bad boys playing with adult toys - all compelling elements. There are also some cliché elements, but it kept me reading and that’s pretty much what I hope for in this sort of story. Thanks.