tekkie
Smash Master
“Got it?”
“Huh?”
“I said, you got it?”
“Oh, yeah. Sure.”
“…what the **** are you looking at?”
Garry looked at Alton, tracing his vacant line of sight to Johnson Hall where three girls approached the front door on their way to class. The colorful fabric of their clothes fluttered in the wind. A blonde with a red headband. A brunette strutting in high heels. Another blonde in athletic shorts. Sunlight shined in their hair, boosting their gentle walk with its soft brightness.
“My girlfriend has the hottest ***,” uttered Alton, as if hypnotized.
Garry furrowed his brow, looking at Alton. “Shut up and listen. Are you in?”
Alton turned, his head jerking towards Garry, turning away from the girls with some effort. “What was the plan again?”
Garry sighed and leaned in conspicuously. He repeated, “We sneak into Johnson’s basement and sneak out with some chemistry equipment. Just a hundred dollars’ worth, or two.”
“Oh, yeah. Right. Why would you want to do that?” Alton’s attention drifted back to the girls.
Garry paused, glancing around. “I’m going to make drugs.”
Alton answered as if he was half asleep. “Uh, like pot? Is it safe? What’s in it for me?”
Garry ignored him. “If you come and stand watch for me, I’ll give you fifty bucks.”
Alton continued staring at the girls as the last one stepped inside the building. “Yeah, sure, whatever. Text me.”
Garry grabbed his backpack and stood up. “Fine. And tell me when you want to get physics done. I’m free all night.” He took a step through the grass towards the student center, uninterested in any reply from Alton. He knew Alton would show up. Fifty dollars is a lot of money.
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The clock that hung from the wall struck one just as Garry turned a page in a novel sitting on his lap titled, “Fahrenheit 451”. He lay extended on the lavender-colored couch, feet crossed, facing the clock, eyeing the time every few minutes. Two students sat at the table in the corner, working on homework, papers sprawled over the worn table surface.
Alton barged into the common lounge. “Hey, Garry!”
Garry, startled, nearly dropped his book. “What?”
“We should go now.”
Garry looked at the students hunched over the table in the corner. He stood to his feet and moved swiftly towards the doorway, motioning for Alton to follow.
The two stepped into the corner of the dark hallway underneath a crimson “EXIT” sign. “What do you want?”
“Let’s just go now. It’s quiet, everything’s locked up, and I have class tomorrow.”
Garry peered along the hallway at the lights glowing from underneath the cracks of closed doors. “Plenty of people are still awake.”
“Nah, we’ll be fine. No one’s gonna be around the school buildings except campo, and they’re going to be around all night anyways. Let’s get this **** done with. I have class in seven hours.”
Garry shrugged in defeat. “Fine.”
Alton added, as an afterthought, “Oh, and I texted my girlfriend. She wants to come.”
“WHAT?”
“Yeah, she’ll be fine. She’s not that ditzy. She can help out or something.”
Garry, feeling his emotions boil over, stopped in his tracks before yelling at Alton and thought. Honestly, she wouldn’t be a problem. She’s just a girl. And that meant…
“Just don’t let her distract you. You two can stand watch while I get what I need. Alright?”
“No problemo!”
Garry sighed, on the inside at least. This was an ordeal, even if he was making it one himself. He walked with Alton to his own dorm room, placed his book on his dresser quietly, and shut the door behind himself. His roommate didn’t stir. The two young men walked across the ugly stained carpeting towards the exit nearest Johnson Hall.
Alton pushed the worn metal door open into the fresh night air. Dust swirled under a nearby lamp post while the two boys stepped lightly across the cement sidewalk. Lamps lined the way to Johnson as they strode past an empty street and wandered up a set of concrete stairs. More yellow lights along the way turned the night sepia. They wandered past the student union building, making their way towards Johnson Hall.
A big pile of dirt poked out of the earth a dozen feet from the right side of the building. Garry pointed to it. “That’s our point of entry.” Construction workers were rebuilding a portion of the Johnson ground floor and replacing some of the old dilapidated pipes. “There’s a hole that leads right in.”
“Really? Just like that?”
“This school doesn’t give two ****s about security.”
Footsteps echoed from around the corner of the building, piercing the silence of the night. Garry turned quickly like a wild animal after hearing a twig snap. Campus police was going to bust them before they even got in.
Wait, no. This was a girl. Blonde, with a red headband.
“Hey, baby!” Alton smiled wide as Tara approached and gave him a big hug.
Garry tried to slow his breathing. “****ting ****,” he muttered. The coast was clear. He stepped over to the hole, quickly stepping in and leaning down inside. He looked towards the bottom of the building. Only a few feet of clearance, but enough to wiggle inside. He leaned down and began crawling, dirt covering his clothes before he found himself inside a tertiary room clearly under construction. Insulation and boxes were scattered all around the dirty concrete floor. “Get in here, and hurry up before the cops see.”
Garry stepped out of the dirt hole as he heard Tara get to the ground with a soft “oof”. She squirmed and crawled as Alton whooped, softly, “Go, go, go!” He checked around for the campus police vehicles. None were in sight. He dropped as he saw her stand up, crawling quickly after her and getting to his feet inside the dark building. Garry waved a flashlight all around. “I think the coast is clear.”
With a click, the flashlight was turned off and shuffled into Garry’s hoodie. Garry turned to Alton, looking through the pale gray darkness at his friend. “You two stay here and look out for any problems. I’ll be right back.” With that, he stepped past some blue plastic tarps and walked through the doorway to the next room.
A dark hallway with interlaced red and white-colored tiles stretched out before Garry as his shoes tapped a rhythm towards a door a few dozen yards away. He peered around the open doorway, knowing fully well that it was the intended target of his robbery. “Lab 01”.
The door was held open with a raw misshapen piece of scrap iron on the floor. Garry walked casually towards the storage room in the back of the laboratory past slate tables and stainless steel sinks. The door to the lab storage room did not have a lock. Garry looked at the racks along the walls covered in test tubes, flasks, stirring rods, clamps, Bunsen burners, graduated cylinders, bottles, beakers, pipettes, wire gauze, crucibles, stoppers, clay triangles, ring stands, spatulas, and droppers. Oh, and some cobwebs, too.
A laundry list of the necessary implements ran through Garry’s mind like the credits reel of a movie. He swiped each of his planned targets one by one, placing them quickly, gently, and unceremoniously into a duffel bag he carried loosely over his shoulder.
Headlights turned a corner around a building off in the distance as Alton looked outside through a dusty window. He held still. Of course there are headlights; the police patrol through here all the time. He felt Tara grab around his arm, clutching it like a child. She murmured, “Mmmmmm, feels all dangerous, doesn’t it?”
“Shush!”
Alton held his stare at the headlights as they cornered around the building again and disappeared into the darkness. He turned and looked at Tara, barely able to make her figure out in the darkness. Damn, he thought. Still smokin’ hot. Still, fifty dollars wasn’t worth risking getting caught. He supposed jail time wasn’t really worth it either.
“We need to keep completely under the radar, babe,” he said.
“Awww, I wanna go explore.”
Alton thought for a moment, quickly deciding to play hard-to-get. Stay responsible and tease her at the same time. Win-win. “We could take a quick look around.”
Tara gave him a sly look. “All this crime ‘n stuff is turning me on.”
Alton grinned, dragging his arm as he took a step forward, forcing Tara, still clutching, to follow. “We could find a lab to make out in. I’m pretty sure Garry will be back any minute, though. Let’s not subject him to the horrors of our copulation.” Tara let go and followed him, closely, as they stepped past a few big items on the floor covered in what looked like brown sheets.
Tara noticed a light flickering on the other end of the hallway. Her concentration broken, she stumbled over a large heavy form covered with a blanket on the ground. “****—“ she made out, catching herself before falling. As a safety measure, Alton grabbed her in a bracing hug. “You okay?”
She grinned. “Yeah.” She hugged him back. She felt like she was gaining ground on her boyfriend.
“Hey, hey, focus. What did you trip over?” Alton made sure not to give her too much slack to advance.
Underneath the heavy metal object that stopped Tara’s foot, a light turned on.
“I dunno. Something big and heavy. Probably made of metal or something.”
The light blinked, unseen under the heavy sheet covering.
“Whatever. There’s more construction in the other room.” Alton took a look through the broken door frame. Wood splintered away from the wall and a piece from the top hung down from the construction. “Nothing really interesting, though.”
A soft whirr, a slight whisper, slipped unnoticed from the blinking machine on the ground.
“Let’s go take a look!” Tara smiled, doing everything in her power to maintain her boyfriend’s attention. Her roommate was gone for the night. She would get Alton back to her room if she had to knock him over the head with a club and drag him.
Garry stepped back through the doorway just in time to see the couple peering off through the fractured door frame. He whispered loudly. “What are you doing?” Both turned, instinctively. Alton almost had a heart attack.
“Jesus ****ing Christ you scared me!”
“Shut up! We need to get out!” Garry paused. The slight noise of the machine, now a moderate wheeze, emanated from the machine. “What’s that sound?”
“Huh?”
“Did you guys do something out here?” He looked around, screening the room and following the noise until he stood over a big mysterious object covered in a thick sheet. It was the object Tara tripped over.
Garry pulled the sheet from the object. A dull metallic cylinder lay beneath. The light flickered on one end of the large cylinder, grounded with a few metal facets welded onto the side to keep it from rolling. Garry stared at it. “What the **** is this thing?”
Alton answered reflexively, “I don’t know!”
“Is it an alarm?”
“It’s a ****ing piece of machinery! We’re in a lab building you idiot!”
Garry fumbled and looked over it. “Well, how do we turn it off?”
“I don’t know!”
Garry threw the sheet back on over the machine. “**** it, let’s get out of here before something else goes wrong.” He swiftly made for the dirt entrance, taking noticeably more time in avoiding the other scattered items around the floor. He knelt down and began crawling, poking his head out on the other side to look for the police. The campus was dead silent. Garry stood up and to the side to allow the other two to crawl out shortly after. Not a single car passed by as the three began walking back to the dormitory cluster not too far away. Meanwhile, the machine in the lab kept whirring, gaining pitch slowly as it spun faster.
As the trio neared Garry’s dormitory, he pulled fifty dollars from his pocket. Two twenties and a ten. “Here. Now get out of my sight.” The harshness of his words was false and Alton knew it.
Alton grabbed the money, preparing to respond when Tara seized his hand firmly in hers. “Come on.” She pulled him towards her dorm. Alton turned to look at Garry and shrugged before turning his attention back to Tara.
Garry shook his head, dismissing the couple with ease. He had to get to sleep.
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Several hours passed uneventfully as Garry slept in his bed through the snores of his roommate and Tara slept through the snores of her boyfriend. The snores of the machine in Johnson Hall, however, went unheard for a long time. The machine whirred, slowly gaining momentum before it finally ran its luck out. The blanket covering the machine whooshed as it was pulled underneath the machine and shredded to bits inside the large metal cylinder. An alarm was tripped by the loud sound, and campus police was on its way shortly.
Not only were the cops notified by the incident, but the man in charge of the laboratory equipment, a professor named Dr. Bensch, was also notified by the alarm. He had made sure that the alarm would page a beeper kept with him twenty-four hours a day. He wanted to make sure that he was notified immediately even in case of the smallest problem. There were sensitive materials and equipment in that laboratory.
As a matter of fact, the old professor was nearly there before the police arrived. The police responders, a man and a woman, watched as a dull gray van pulled violently into a space and braked in a flash, tires inches away from the concrete sidewalk. The professor, wearing a light jacket over a button-up shirt, peered through glasses at the police. “Is it safe? Is everything alright?” His frizzy white hair bounced as he spoke. His mustache flapped like a bird.
“Professor Bensch. We just arrived. Let’s go.” The male police officer was prodding at the door with a single key isolated from a key ring containing dozens of others while the female police officer spoke. In short time the door was opened and the professor urged the officers inside.
The two police officers stopped inside the lobby, looking around nonchalantly while the professor scurried quickly to the laboratory under construction, his heart racing as he nearly tripped over a stray piece of scrap wood. The professor paused when he caught his footing. A noise was floating through the hall. A whirring. Machinery. His mind raced as he neared the room, heart sinking as the miles and miles he felt like he was traversing wound themselves along the soles of his sandals before finally making it to the laboratory and meekly poking his head in.
The machine, he thought. Yes, yes, it’s on. The device is on…
Miles and miles between the professor and the lobby made it an ordeal for the man to return to the entrance where the police officers stood. His thoughts were mired in nervous anxiety. “The machine… we have to get out of here. We have to evacuate.”
---------------------------------------------
Garry sprang awake as the fire alarm droned through the hallways, demanding that everyone get out of the building immediately with its screech. He leapt out of bed and slipped some flip-flops over his bare feet, scurrying out the door behind his roommate a few seconds later. Athletic shorts waved around his legs while he stepped out into the cool night air, looking for Alton.
Dozens of students swamped the grass outside the dormitory and Garry had to push his way through towards the girls’ dormitory to find his partner in crime, wanting questions answered. Surely Alton would be headed his way. He stepped across fissures in the concrete, meandering around students and lamp posts as he made his way to a crowd of girls standing on the lawn outside of the girls’ dorm. Garry singled out Alton and approached him.
“What the hell is going on?”
Alton, clutching his pajama-wearing girlfriend, nodded towards a police cruiser with blinking lights. “Cops are waking everyone up. They say one of the professors declared some sort of emergency. Equipment gone wrong.”
A loudspeaker poked out of one of the police car windows as Garry stared at the colorful lights, pondering what happened and, in the back of his mind, morbidly curious if they were involved. A gruff voice blared through the device, hovering over the ears of the crowd, something about being organized. Something about leaving immediately, evacuating. Carpooling.
Alton, still gripping his girlfriend, stared at the cop car, wondering about the implications of what he was hearing. There was no way they destroyed some equipment or something with their break-in. They hadn’t touched anything. He turned to Garry, his manner suddenly grave and serious. “Let’s leave. We can make it to my parents’ place in Hampton in an hour.”
The trio made their way with haste towards the gravelly torn parking lot skirting the pool. Alton held his girlfriend’s hand, bringing her in front of Garry towards a green SUV parked in front of the pool entrance. “Whatever the hell this is, let’s get the **** out and wait at my place. Class had better be cancelled.” He fumbled in his shorts pockets for his keys. “And I forgot my ****ING keys!”
An old man in sandals, shorts, a button-up shirt, and a light jacket came half jogging, half stumbling towards a dull gray van parked two spots over from Alton’s green SUV. It was the sprint of an old man, and this one indeed had frizzy white hair and a wild mustache. A cooler he carried slapped against his left knee as he headed for the van. He keyed into his car quickly before he noticed three young students staring at him, as if he was interrupting something secret.
The old man stared blankly at the young group for several seconds before the awkward moment passed. He opened his mouth to speak at the same moment Alton bleeped, “Where are you headed?”
The man looked at the door handle and searched for some words. “Eh, herm, uh, north.” His accent was thick, mudded down with the density of German heritage.
Alton looked at Garry and shrugged. “Towards my place.” He looked to the old man. “Can you give us a lift?”
The old man shrugged. “Yes, yes, of course. Hop in.” Garry was only a few steps from the passenger seat. Alton tore the side door open and escorted Tara inside. The old man connived his body into the driver’s seat, deposited the cooler in between the front seats, turned the key in the ignition, and shifted just in time to peel out of the space while Tara tried to shut the side door, almost flying across the van in the process. Alton helped her steady herself as they buckled in. No one had any commentary for the old man as he popped over a speed bump at thirty miles per hour, speeding up to sixty along a residential street on the way to the highway.
As the van sped right through stop signs and red lights Tara asked, “Hey, shouldn’t you, like, slow down and stop and stuff?”
The old man made a noise that sounded like a short, stuffed “harumph” and posed, “This is an evacuation, isn’t it? We need to leave as quickly as possible.” He sped onto the on-ramp and the van’s hood ornament soon pointed north.
“What about the police? We’ll get pulled over.”
“They know what’s going on.” He responded quickly and automatically. He looked over to Garry and lightened up significantly. “What’s your name? Are you a freshman?”
“Yes, and Garry.”
“Nice to meet you, ‘Yes’. What’s your name, back seat?”
“I’m Alton.”
“Tara.”
“Well, it’s nice to meet you all. I’m Professor Bensch. Any of you mechanical engineers? You’ll be taking my finite element analysis class in a few years if you were.”
Alton, a mechanical engineer, was about to speak up when Garry interrupted. “Would have been?”
The old man paused. “Reach between the seats here, in that cooler. Open it up.”
Garry reached over, straining his seatbelt, and yanked the lid open. Inside, clustered among a sea of thawing ice, was a small armada of brown beer bottles. Bensch grabbed one and used his shirt to tug at it. It had a twist cap and popped off easily. He took a chug.
Tara leaned forward. “Jesus, are you drinking?”
Bensch pulled the drink away from his old lips. “Certainly. Go ahead, take one. The police aren’t around.”
“Christ, you’re gonna get us killed!”
Bensch pulled the bottle away from his face, interrupting a second chug. “Oh, right that. Garry, hold the wheel. Garry did as he was told, quickly grabbing the wheel with his left hand lest the car drift off the highway as Professor Bensch unbuckled his seatbelt, stood up hunched under the roof, and forced his way towards the seats in the far back. “Tara, take the wheel.”
With obvious panic, Tara clicked the button to her seatbelt and awkwardly shoved past the left armrest. She tossed herself down in the driver’s seat while the van slowed from the lack of pressure on the gas pedal and Garry awkwardly leaned over his own armrest to hold the wheel steady. After only a few moments, Tara settled in and Garry released the wheel, stepping back through the van towards Tara’s former seat. “Alton, join your girlfriend.” Alton made the switch soon afterwards, Bensch moved forward to the middle row, and the trade was complete. Bensch continued drinking his beer, nearly finished by the time Garry situated himself. Garry spoke up. “Care to explain?”
After he asked his question, Garry watched as Dr. Bensch held up a finger and gave his drink a few last chugs, sighing in satisfaction as he tossed the empty bottle on the floor.
“This isn’t an evacuation from a normal emergency. An experimental device that would act as a power generator, converting matter directly into energy, has been accidentally activated in its preemptive stages. It is devouring all of the matter around it and cannot be stopped.”
Garry blinked. “What do you mean? What are you trying to say?”
Dr. Bensch leaned forward to grab another beer. “Something terrible is going to happen.”
Garry stared, still expressionless, searching for useful words that seemed to escape his grasp like fireflies. “Like what?”
“I cannot be sure. We’ll see for ourselves soon enough.”
Garry hesitated before daring to venture further. “…just like that?”
“Yes. Just like that.” Fizz formed as Dr. Bensch twisted the cap off of his next victim.
Garry felt a quick relinquishment in his heart. He suddenly didn’t care anymore. He leaned forward and asked, “May I?”
“Be my guest.”
Garry grabbed a beer, twisted it open, and took a few eager foamy sips, joining Dr. Bensch in his preemptive overture to the end of the world.
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“So, you’re 100% sure about it?” Tara drove straight ahead for Hampton while Dr. Bensch worked on his third beer. Garry popped open his second.
“Completely sure. We had our calculations cross-checked by institutions across the world. This was going to be some of the most important new technology of the millennium. Keep going at least a hundred and ten if you don’t mind. The others might catch on soon and we don’t want to be caught in traffic.”
“How does it work?”
“It’s a very difficult concept. Certain rearrangements of subatomic particles tend to have sort of a chain reaction, rearranging the particles next to them, and those particles rearrange the ones next to them, and so on.”
“Like Ice-nine.”
Dr. Bensch stopped. “What?”
“Ice-nine. A fictional seed crystal that solidifies at body temperature and freezes the world’s oceans.”
“Well, yes. A chain reaction, except this one will turn all of the world’s matter into energy. The energy is stored inside the generator, at least until it hits a certain capacity, at which point it will simply spew out electromagnetic radiation through the release on the side. In just a little bit, we should be seeing the radiation on the horizon behind us. It should look like the Northern Lights.”
Tara shook her head, watching the road. “Why the hell was something like that just sitting on the floor in a construction zone?”
Dr. Bensch stopped drinking for a moment. “What? What do you know about the device?”
Tara paused, reluctant to continue but resolving to go on anyways. “We broke into the lab earlier tonight. I tripped over a big piece of machinery and I think it started making noise.”
Dr. Bensch took a few more gulps during an awkward silence that followed. Several seconds later, he broke the quietude. “I told Professor Nityana that we should have made the release mechanism completely safe. They started the construction on the building right in the work room against out wishes. I was threatened over my job if I pushed the issue of moving the device to another research institute. It’s too important and too valuable for us.”
Tara nodded. “Sounds like a cluster****.”
“Eh. In a few billion years the sun will expand into a red giant when it runs out of hydrogen to burn, enlarging to hundreds of times its size and engulfing the Earth, boiling the biosphere and searing the hydrogen straight into space.”
He paused and sipped his beer. “Now the sun will have less fodder.”
Alton spoke up. “How was something so powerful and unstable just sitting in a chemistry lab on a campus like this?”
Bensch was readily prepared to answer. “You know all sorts of small research projects are funded by the government and undertaken here. We are remote and small, but the school is an intense think-tank of some of the brightest minds in the world. There’s probably more research going on here than you know. Everything we do is low-key, conducted by only a few professors, and run completely on our own. We are paid to create great things here, but the school buildings are still sort of… how do you say… dinky, and insecure.”
Tara checked her mirrors and saw a faint glimmer of white light flutter in the black sky behind them. “What’s that? Is that the radiation?”
Dr. Bensch, Garry, and Alton turned around to look. A wide iridescent rainbow of colors was streaming out over the horizon, ejecting itself into the deep vast void beyond. Gentle waves of greens and blues interspersed with the bold hues of reds and yellows, all dancing and meandering carelessly towards the end of the universe.
“It’s beautiful,” said Tara.
“That it is, Tara. It has probably swallowed the entire building by now. The campus will be next in just a few minutes. Keep that gas pedal down. Others might be catching up and we don’t want to congest the road.” Dr. Bensch turned on the radio. Static and strange noises resounded through the car’s tinny speakers. “The radiation is just unconcentrated energy. It’s going to span all wavelengths – light, radio, microwave, ultraviolet, infrared, even gamma. We’d be getting cancer if this lasted for long.”
The haze of ethanol in his brain prevented Garry’s interest in exactly what was going to happen to the campus. He popped open his third beer and handed Dr. Bensch his fourth. Dr. Bensch nodded. “Thank you.”
“Well, what’s gonna happen? What’s the machine gonna do?”
Bensch had begun another chug before Alton interrupted him. Beer spilled on his shirt, though he paid it no attention. “I don’t know.” He resumed unabashed.
Alton grabbed his first beer. Tara peered into the rear view mirror. “The rainbow is getting larger.”
Dr. Bensch turned around to gaze at the marvelous spectacle. “It is gaining more energy.”
A slight, subtle jostle resounded through the hearts of the passengers as the van tilted ever so lightly. Garry asked, “Did you all feel that?”
Through the dim light created by the energy beam the van passengers saw that the ground was lowering, sinking as if the Earth was nothing but a giant blanket being sucked through a small hole.
Dr. Bensch finished chugging his beer and unbuckled his seatbelt, no longer showing any restraint as he turned around completely. His eyes stared with the curiosity of a child in a candy store. “Look! Something’s happening!”
Garry and Alton finished their drinks in response, turning around just as Bensch had done to get a good curious look. Tara, firm and resolute in her focus, did not want to watch it happen. It was the same reaction one might have to a needle in their arm. She didn’t want to watch. She wanted it to be over with, and afterwards for someone to say, “There. That wasn’t so bad!”
The highway, a straight shot towards the school lined with faint yellow lights, began to bend and curve inwards towards the central point off in the distance where the planet was being destroyed. “The machine is starting to absorb the matter from the Earth itself.”
The lights bent and lowered themselves into the dark, slowly at first but gaining momentum in the dark of the night. “Now is the time for any last words,” said Dr. Bensch.
A burst of blinding light seared the sky and all of the van passengers could see, through mirrors or windows, that a faint wave was coming through the air towards them, darkening the lights as it reached them.
Only a dozen lamps stood between the wave and the van, even as it sped at over a hundred miles. The passengers sat in silence until Garry spoke up.
“Buttpaste.”
Alton snickered, choked air through his sinuses, and finally burst out laughing. His laughter was contagious. Garry cracked up in a drunken stupor immediately after and Dr. Bensch smiled and chuckled under his breath, some part of his mind tickling the notion that an esteemed scientist wasn’t supposed to laugh at something so immature. Tara smiled sheepishly, nervous tears slithering down her face as the energy wave shattered the last glowing yellow bulb behind the van to a million glittering pieces. Diamonds of streetlight glass drifted through the air in the reflection of the vehicle’s silvery mirrors before the wave blew past the travellers and disintegrated the van into dust.
“Huh?”
“I said, you got it?”
“Oh, yeah. Sure.”
“…what the **** are you looking at?”
Garry looked at Alton, tracing his vacant line of sight to Johnson Hall where three girls approached the front door on their way to class. The colorful fabric of their clothes fluttered in the wind. A blonde with a red headband. A brunette strutting in high heels. Another blonde in athletic shorts. Sunlight shined in their hair, boosting their gentle walk with its soft brightness.
“My girlfriend has the hottest ***,” uttered Alton, as if hypnotized.
Garry furrowed his brow, looking at Alton. “Shut up and listen. Are you in?”
Alton turned, his head jerking towards Garry, turning away from the girls with some effort. “What was the plan again?”
Garry sighed and leaned in conspicuously. He repeated, “We sneak into Johnson’s basement and sneak out with some chemistry equipment. Just a hundred dollars’ worth, or two.”
“Oh, yeah. Right. Why would you want to do that?” Alton’s attention drifted back to the girls.
Garry paused, glancing around. “I’m going to make drugs.”
Alton answered as if he was half asleep. “Uh, like pot? Is it safe? What’s in it for me?”
Garry ignored him. “If you come and stand watch for me, I’ll give you fifty bucks.”
Alton continued staring at the girls as the last one stepped inside the building. “Yeah, sure, whatever. Text me.”
Garry grabbed his backpack and stood up. “Fine. And tell me when you want to get physics done. I’m free all night.” He took a step through the grass towards the student center, uninterested in any reply from Alton. He knew Alton would show up. Fifty dollars is a lot of money.
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The clock that hung from the wall struck one just as Garry turned a page in a novel sitting on his lap titled, “Fahrenheit 451”. He lay extended on the lavender-colored couch, feet crossed, facing the clock, eyeing the time every few minutes. Two students sat at the table in the corner, working on homework, papers sprawled over the worn table surface.
Alton barged into the common lounge. “Hey, Garry!”
Garry, startled, nearly dropped his book. “What?”
“We should go now.”
Garry looked at the students hunched over the table in the corner. He stood to his feet and moved swiftly towards the doorway, motioning for Alton to follow.
The two stepped into the corner of the dark hallway underneath a crimson “EXIT” sign. “What do you want?”
“Let’s just go now. It’s quiet, everything’s locked up, and I have class tomorrow.”
Garry peered along the hallway at the lights glowing from underneath the cracks of closed doors. “Plenty of people are still awake.”
“Nah, we’ll be fine. No one’s gonna be around the school buildings except campo, and they’re going to be around all night anyways. Let’s get this **** done with. I have class in seven hours.”
Garry shrugged in defeat. “Fine.”
Alton added, as an afterthought, “Oh, and I texted my girlfriend. She wants to come.”
“WHAT?”
“Yeah, she’ll be fine. She’s not that ditzy. She can help out or something.”
Garry, feeling his emotions boil over, stopped in his tracks before yelling at Alton and thought. Honestly, she wouldn’t be a problem. She’s just a girl. And that meant…
“Just don’t let her distract you. You two can stand watch while I get what I need. Alright?”
“No problemo!”
Garry sighed, on the inside at least. This was an ordeal, even if he was making it one himself. He walked with Alton to his own dorm room, placed his book on his dresser quietly, and shut the door behind himself. His roommate didn’t stir. The two young men walked across the ugly stained carpeting towards the exit nearest Johnson Hall.
Alton pushed the worn metal door open into the fresh night air. Dust swirled under a nearby lamp post while the two boys stepped lightly across the cement sidewalk. Lamps lined the way to Johnson as they strode past an empty street and wandered up a set of concrete stairs. More yellow lights along the way turned the night sepia. They wandered past the student union building, making their way towards Johnson Hall.
A big pile of dirt poked out of the earth a dozen feet from the right side of the building. Garry pointed to it. “That’s our point of entry.” Construction workers were rebuilding a portion of the Johnson ground floor and replacing some of the old dilapidated pipes. “There’s a hole that leads right in.”
“Really? Just like that?”
“This school doesn’t give two ****s about security.”
Footsteps echoed from around the corner of the building, piercing the silence of the night. Garry turned quickly like a wild animal after hearing a twig snap. Campus police was going to bust them before they even got in.
Wait, no. This was a girl. Blonde, with a red headband.
“Hey, baby!” Alton smiled wide as Tara approached and gave him a big hug.
Garry tried to slow his breathing. “****ting ****,” he muttered. The coast was clear. He stepped over to the hole, quickly stepping in and leaning down inside. He looked towards the bottom of the building. Only a few feet of clearance, but enough to wiggle inside. He leaned down and began crawling, dirt covering his clothes before he found himself inside a tertiary room clearly under construction. Insulation and boxes were scattered all around the dirty concrete floor. “Get in here, and hurry up before the cops see.”
Garry stepped out of the dirt hole as he heard Tara get to the ground with a soft “oof”. She squirmed and crawled as Alton whooped, softly, “Go, go, go!” He checked around for the campus police vehicles. None were in sight. He dropped as he saw her stand up, crawling quickly after her and getting to his feet inside the dark building. Garry waved a flashlight all around. “I think the coast is clear.”
With a click, the flashlight was turned off and shuffled into Garry’s hoodie. Garry turned to Alton, looking through the pale gray darkness at his friend. “You two stay here and look out for any problems. I’ll be right back.” With that, he stepped past some blue plastic tarps and walked through the doorway to the next room.
A dark hallway with interlaced red and white-colored tiles stretched out before Garry as his shoes tapped a rhythm towards a door a few dozen yards away. He peered around the open doorway, knowing fully well that it was the intended target of his robbery. “Lab 01”.
The door was held open with a raw misshapen piece of scrap iron on the floor. Garry walked casually towards the storage room in the back of the laboratory past slate tables and stainless steel sinks. The door to the lab storage room did not have a lock. Garry looked at the racks along the walls covered in test tubes, flasks, stirring rods, clamps, Bunsen burners, graduated cylinders, bottles, beakers, pipettes, wire gauze, crucibles, stoppers, clay triangles, ring stands, spatulas, and droppers. Oh, and some cobwebs, too.
A laundry list of the necessary implements ran through Garry’s mind like the credits reel of a movie. He swiped each of his planned targets one by one, placing them quickly, gently, and unceremoniously into a duffel bag he carried loosely over his shoulder.
Headlights turned a corner around a building off in the distance as Alton looked outside through a dusty window. He held still. Of course there are headlights; the police patrol through here all the time. He felt Tara grab around his arm, clutching it like a child. She murmured, “Mmmmmm, feels all dangerous, doesn’t it?”
“Shush!”
Alton held his stare at the headlights as they cornered around the building again and disappeared into the darkness. He turned and looked at Tara, barely able to make her figure out in the darkness. Damn, he thought. Still smokin’ hot. Still, fifty dollars wasn’t worth risking getting caught. He supposed jail time wasn’t really worth it either.
“We need to keep completely under the radar, babe,” he said.
“Awww, I wanna go explore.”
Alton thought for a moment, quickly deciding to play hard-to-get. Stay responsible and tease her at the same time. Win-win. “We could take a quick look around.”
Tara gave him a sly look. “All this crime ‘n stuff is turning me on.”
Alton grinned, dragging his arm as he took a step forward, forcing Tara, still clutching, to follow. “We could find a lab to make out in. I’m pretty sure Garry will be back any minute, though. Let’s not subject him to the horrors of our copulation.” Tara let go and followed him, closely, as they stepped past a few big items on the floor covered in what looked like brown sheets.
Tara noticed a light flickering on the other end of the hallway. Her concentration broken, she stumbled over a large heavy form covered with a blanket on the ground. “****—“ she made out, catching herself before falling. As a safety measure, Alton grabbed her in a bracing hug. “You okay?”
She grinned. “Yeah.” She hugged him back. She felt like she was gaining ground on her boyfriend.
“Hey, hey, focus. What did you trip over?” Alton made sure not to give her too much slack to advance.
Underneath the heavy metal object that stopped Tara’s foot, a light turned on.
“I dunno. Something big and heavy. Probably made of metal or something.”
The light blinked, unseen under the heavy sheet covering.
“Whatever. There’s more construction in the other room.” Alton took a look through the broken door frame. Wood splintered away from the wall and a piece from the top hung down from the construction. “Nothing really interesting, though.”
A soft whirr, a slight whisper, slipped unnoticed from the blinking machine on the ground.
“Let’s go take a look!” Tara smiled, doing everything in her power to maintain her boyfriend’s attention. Her roommate was gone for the night. She would get Alton back to her room if she had to knock him over the head with a club and drag him.
Garry stepped back through the doorway just in time to see the couple peering off through the fractured door frame. He whispered loudly. “What are you doing?” Both turned, instinctively. Alton almost had a heart attack.
“Jesus ****ing Christ you scared me!”
“Shut up! We need to get out!” Garry paused. The slight noise of the machine, now a moderate wheeze, emanated from the machine. “What’s that sound?”
“Huh?”
“Did you guys do something out here?” He looked around, screening the room and following the noise until he stood over a big mysterious object covered in a thick sheet. It was the object Tara tripped over.
Garry pulled the sheet from the object. A dull metallic cylinder lay beneath. The light flickered on one end of the large cylinder, grounded with a few metal facets welded onto the side to keep it from rolling. Garry stared at it. “What the **** is this thing?”
Alton answered reflexively, “I don’t know!”
“Is it an alarm?”
“It’s a ****ing piece of machinery! We’re in a lab building you idiot!”
Garry fumbled and looked over it. “Well, how do we turn it off?”
“I don’t know!”
Garry threw the sheet back on over the machine. “**** it, let’s get out of here before something else goes wrong.” He swiftly made for the dirt entrance, taking noticeably more time in avoiding the other scattered items around the floor. He knelt down and began crawling, poking his head out on the other side to look for the police. The campus was dead silent. Garry stood up and to the side to allow the other two to crawl out shortly after. Not a single car passed by as the three began walking back to the dormitory cluster not too far away. Meanwhile, the machine in the lab kept whirring, gaining pitch slowly as it spun faster.
As the trio neared Garry’s dormitory, he pulled fifty dollars from his pocket. Two twenties and a ten. “Here. Now get out of my sight.” The harshness of his words was false and Alton knew it.
Alton grabbed the money, preparing to respond when Tara seized his hand firmly in hers. “Come on.” She pulled him towards her dorm. Alton turned to look at Garry and shrugged before turning his attention back to Tara.
Garry shook his head, dismissing the couple with ease. He had to get to sleep.
---------------------------------------------
Several hours passed uneventfully as Garry slept in his bed through the snores of his roommate and Tara slept through the snores of her boyfriend. The snores of the machine in Johnson Hall, however, went unheard for a long time. The machine whirred, slowly gaining momentum before it finally ran its luck out. The blanket covering the machine whooshed as it was pulled underneath the machine and shredded to bits inside the large metal cylinder. An alarm was tripped by the loud sound, and campus police was on its way shortly.
Not only were the cops notified by the incident, but the man in charge of the laboratory equipment, a professor named Dr. Bensch, was also notified by the alarm. He had made sure that the alarm would page a beeper kept with him twenty-four hours a day. He wanted to make sure that he was notified immediately even in case of the smallest problem. There were sensitive materials and equipment in that laboratory.
As a matter of fact, the old professor was nearly there before the police arrived. The police responders, a man and a woman, watched as a dull gray van pulled violently into a space and braked in a flash, tires inches away from the concrete sidewalk. The professor, wearing a light jacket over a button-up shirt, peered through glasses at the police. “Is it safe? Is everything alright?” His frizzy white hair bounced as he spoke. His mustache flapped like a bird.
“Professor Bensch. We just arrived. Let’s go.” The male police officer was prodding at the door with a single key isolated from a key ring containing dozens of others while the female police officer spoke. In short time the door was opened and the professor urged the officers inside.
The two police officers stopped inside the lobby, looking around nonchalantly while the professor scurried quickly to the laboratory under construction, his heart racing as he nearly tripped over a stray piece of scrap wood. The professor paused when he caught his footing. A noise was floating through the hall. A whirring. Machinery. His mind raced as he neared the room, heart sinking as the miles and miles he felt like he was traversing wound themselves along the soles of his sandals before finally making it to the laboratory and meekly poking his head in.
The machine, he thought. Yes, yes, it’s on. The device is on…
Miles and miles between the professor and the lobby made it an ordeal for the man to return to the entrance where the police officers stood. His thoughts were mired in nervous anxiety. “The machine… we have to get out of here. We have to evacuate.”
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Garry sprang awake as the fire alarm droned through the hallways, demanding that everyone get out of the building immediately with its screech. He leapt out of bed and slipped some flip-flops over his bare feet, scurrying out the door behind his roommate a few seconds later. Athletic shorts waved around his legs while he stepped out into the cool night air, looking for Alton.
Dozens of students swamped the grass outside the dormitory and Garry had to push his way through towards the girls’ dormitory to find his partner in crime, wanting questions answered. Surely Alton would be headed his way. He stepped across fissures in the concrete, meandering around students and lamp posts as he made his way to a crowd of girls standing on the lawn outside of the girls’ dorm. Garry singled out Alton and approached him.
“What the hell is going on?”
Alton, clutching his pajama-wearing girlfriend, nodded towards a police cruiser with blinking lights. “Cops are waking everyone up. They say one of the professors declared some sort of emergency. Equipment gone wrong.”
A loudspeaker poked out of one of the police car windows as Garry stared at the colorful lights, pondering what happened and, in the back of his mind, morbidly curious if they were involved. A gruff voice blared through the device, hovering over the ears of the crowd, something about being organized. Something about leaving immediately, evacuating. Carpooling.
Alton, still gripping his girlfriend, stared at the cop car, wondering about the implications of what he was hearing. There was no way they destroyed some equipment or something with their break-in. They hadn’t touched anything. He turned to Garry, his manner suddenly grave and serious. “Let’s leave. We can make it to my parents’ place in Hampton in an hour.”
The trio made their way with haste towards the gravelly torn parking lot skirting the pool. Alton held his girlfriend’s hand, bringing her in front of Garry towards a green SUV parked in front of the pool entrance. “Whatever the hell this is, let’s get the **** out and wait at my place. Class had better be cancelled.” He fumbled in his shorts pockets for his keys. “And I forgot my ****ING keys!”
An old man in sandals, shorts, a button-up shirt, and a light jacket came half jogging, half stumbling towards a dull gray van parked two spots over from Alton’s green SUV. It was the sprint of an old man, and this one indeed had frizzy white hair and a wild mustache. A cooler he carried slapped against his left knee as he headed for the van. He keyed into his car quickly before he noticed three young students staring at him, as if he was interrupting something secret.
The old man stared blankly at the young group for several seconds before the awkward moment passed. He opened his mouth to speak at the same moment Alton bleeped, “Where are you headed?”
The man looked at the door handle and searched for some words. “Eh, herm, uh, north.” His accent was thick, mudded down with the density of German heritage.
Alton looked at Garry and shrugged. “Towards my place.” He looked to the old man. “Can you give us a lift?”
The old man shrugged. “Yes, yes, of course. Hop in.” Garry was only a few steps from the passenger seat. Alton tore the side door open and escorted Tara inside. The old man connived his body into the driver’s seat, deposited the cooler in between the front seats, turned the key in the ignition, and shifted just in time to peel out of the space while Tara tried to shut the side door, almost flying across the van in the process. Alton helped her steady herself as they buckled in. No one had any commentary for the old man as he popped over a speed bump at thirty miles per hour, speeding up to sixty along a residential street on the way to the highway.
As the van sped right through stop signs and red lights Tara asked, “Hey, shouldn’t you, like, slow down and stop and stuff?”
The old man made a noise that sounded like a short, stuffed “harumph” and posed, “This is an evacuation, isn’t it? We need to leave as quickly as possible.” He sped onto the on-ramp and the van’s hood ornament soon pointed north.
“What about the police? We’ll get pulled over.”
“They know what’s going on.” He responded quickly and automatically. He looked over to Garry and lightened up significantly. “What’s your name? Are you a freshman?”
“Yes, and Garry.”
“Nice to meet you, ‘Yes’. What’s your name, back seat?”
“I’m Alton.”
“Tara.”
“Well, it’s nice to meet you all. I’m Professor Bensch. Any of you mechanical engineers? You’ll be taking my finite element analysis class in a few years if you were.”
Alton, a mechanical engineer, was about to speak up when Garry interrupted. “Would have been?”
The old man paused. “Reach between the seats here, in that cooler. Open it up.”
Garry reached over, straining his seatbelt, and yanked the lid open. Inside, clustered among a sea of thawing ice, was a small armada of brown beer bottles. Bensch grabbed one and used his shirt to tug at it. It had a twist cap and popped off easily. He took a chug.
Tara leaned forward. “Jesus, are you drinking?”
Bensch pulled the drink away from his old lips. “Certainly. Go ahead, take one. The police aren’t around.”
“Christ, you’re gonna get us killed!”
Bensch pulled the bottle away from his face, interrupting a second chug. “Oh, right that. Garry, hold the wheel. Garry did as he was told, quickly grabbing the wheel with his left hand lest the car drift off the highway as Professor Bensch unbuckled his seatbelt, stood up hunched under the roof, and forced his way towards the seats in the far back. “Tara, take the wheel.”
With obvious panic, Tara clicked the button to her seatbelt and awkwardly shoved past the left armrest. She tossed herself down in the driver’s seat while the van slowed from the lack of pressure on the gas pedal and Garry awkwardly leaned over his own armrest to hold the wheel steady. After only a few moments, Tara settled in and Garry released the wheel, stepping back through the van towards Tara’s former seat. “Alton, join your girlfriend.” Alton made the switch soon afterwards, Bensch moved forward to the middle row, and the trade was complete. Bensch continued drinking his beer, nearly finished by the time Garry situated himself. Garry spoke up. “Care to explain?”
After he asked his question, Garry watched as Dr. Bensch held up a finger and gave his drink a few last chugs, sighing in satisfaction as he tossed the empty bottle on the floor.
“This isn’t an evacuation from a normal emergency. An experimental device that would act as a power generator, converting matter directly into energy, has been accidentally activated in its preemptive stages. It is devouring all of the matter around it and cannot be stopped.”
Garry blinked. “What do you mean? What are you trying to say?”
Dr. Bensch leaned forward to grab another beer. “Something terrible is going to happen.”
Garry stared, still expressionless, searching for useful words that seemed to escape his grasp like fireflies. “Like what?”
“I cannot be sure. We’ll see for ourselves soon enough.”
Garry hesitated before daring to venture further. “…just like that?”
“Yes. Just like that.” Fizz formed as Dr. Bensch twisted the cap off of his next victim.
Garry felt a quick relinquishment in his heart. He suddenly didn’t care anymore. He leaned forward and asked, “May I?”
“Be my guest.”
Garry grabbed a beer, twisted it open, and took a few eager foamy sips, joining Dr. Bensch in his preemptive overture to the end of the world.
---------------------------------------------
“So, you’re 100% sure about it?” Tara drove straight ahead for Hampton while Dr. Bensch worked on his third beer. Garry popped open his second.
“Completely sure. We had our calculations cross-checked by institutions across the world. This was going to be some of the most important new technology of the millennium. Keep going at least a hundred and ten if you don’t mind. The others might catch on soon and we don’t want to be caught in traffic.”
“How does it work?”
“It’s a very difficult concept. Certain rearrangements of subatomic particles tend to have sort of a chain reaction, rearranging the particles next to them, and those particles rearrange the ones next to them, and so on.”
“Like Ice-nine.”
Dr. Bensch stopped. “What?”
“Ice-nine. A fictional seed crystal that solidifies at body temperature and freezes the world’s oceans.”
“Well, yes. A chain reaction, except this one will turn all of the world’s matter into energy. The energy is stored inside the generator, at least until it hits a certain capacity, at which point it will simply spew out electromagnetic radiation through the release on the side. In just a little bit, we should be seeing the radiation on the horizon behind us. It should look like the Northern Lights.”
Tara shook her head, watching the road. “Why the hell was something like that just sitting on the floor in a construction zone?”
Dr. Bensch stopped drinking for a moment. “What? What do you know about the device?”
Tara paused, reluctant to continue but resolving to go on anyways. “We broke into the lab earlier tonight. I tripped over a big piece of machinery and I think it started making noise.”
Dr. Bensch took a few more gulps during an awkward silence that followed. Several seconds later, he broke the quietude. “I told Professor Nityana that we should have made the release mechanism completely safe. They started the construction on the building right in the work room against out wishes. I was threatened over my job if I pushed the issue of moving the device to another research institute. It’s too important and too valuable for us.”
Tara nodded. “Sounds like a cluster****.”
“Eh. In a few billion years the sun will expand into a red giant when it runs out of hydrogen to burn, enlarging to hundreds of times its size and engulfing the Earth, boiling the biosphere and searing the hydrogen straight into space.”
He paused and sipped his beer. “Now the sun will have less fodder.”
Alton spoke up. “How was something so powerful and unstable just sitting in a chemistry lab on a campus like this?”
Bensch was readily prepared to answer. “You know all sorts of small research projects are funded by the government and undertaken here. We are remote and small, but the school is an intense think-tank of some of the brightest minds in the world. There’s probably more research going on here than you know. Everything we do is low-key, conducted by only a few professors, and run completely on our own. We are paid to create great things here, but the school buildings are still sort of… how do you say… dinky, and insecure.”
Tara checked her mirrors and saw a faint glimmer of white light flutter in the black sky behind them. “What’s that? Is that the radiation?”
Dr. Bensch, Garry, and Alton turned around to look. A wide iridescent rainbow of colors was streaming out over the horizon, ejecting itself into the deep vast void beyond. Gentle waves of greens and blues interspersed with the bold hues of reds and yellows, all dancing and meandering carelessly towards the end of the universe.
“It’s beautiful,” said Tara.
“That it is, Tara. It has probably swallowed the entire building by now. The campus will be next in just a few minutes. Keep that gas pedal down. Others might be catching up and we don’t want to congest the road.” Dr. Bensch turned on the radio. Static and strange noises resounded through the car’s tinny speakers. “The radiation is just unconcentrated energy. It’s going to span all wavelengths – light, radio, microwave, ultraviolet, infrared, even gamma. We’d be getting cancer if this lasted for long.”
The haze of ethanol in his brain prevented Garry’s interest in exactly what was going to happen to the campus. He popped open his third beer and handed Dr. Bensch his fourth. Dr. Bensch nodded. “Thank you.”
“Well, what’s gonna happen? What’s the machine gonna do?”
Bensch had begun another chug before Alton interrupted him. Beer spilled on his shirt, though he paid it no attention. “I don’t know.” He resumed unabashed.
Alton grabbed his first beer. Tara peered into the rear view mirror. “The rainbow is getting larger.”
Dr. Bensch turned around to gaze at the marvelous spectacle. “It is gaining more energy.”
A slight, subtle jostle resounded through the hearts of the passengers as the van tilted ever so lightly. Garry asked, “Did you all feel that?”
Through the dim light created by the energy beam the van passengers saw that the ground was lowering, sinking as if the Earth was nothing but a giant blanket being sucked through a small hole.
Dr. Bensch finished chugging his beer and unbuckled his seatbelt, no longer showing any restraint as he turned around completely. His eyes stared with the curiosity of a child in a candy store. “Look! Something’s happening!”
Garry and Alton finished their drinks in response, turning around just as Bensch had done to get a good curious look. Tara, firm and resolute in her focus, did not want to watch it happen. It was the same reaction one might have to a needle in their arm. She didn’t want to watch. She wanted it to be over with, and afterwards for someone to say, “There. That wasn’t so bad!”
The highway, a straight shot towards the school lined with faint yellow lights, began to bend and curve inwards towards the central point off in the distance where the planet was being destroyed. “The machine is starting to absorb the matter from the Earth itself.”
The lights bent and lowered themselves into the dark, slowly at first but gaining momentum in the dark of the night. “Now is the time for any last words,” said Dr. Bensch.
A burst of blinding light seared the sky and all of the van passengers could see, through mirrors or windows, that a faint wave was coming through the air towards them, darkening the lights as it reached them.
Only a dozen lamps stood between the wave and the van, even as it sped at over a hundred miles. The passengers sat in silence until Garry spoke up.
“Buttpaste.”
Alton snickered, choked air through his sinuses, and finally burst out laughing. His laughter was contagious. Garry cracked up in a drunken stupor immediately after and Dr. Bensch smiled and chuckled under his breath, some part of his mind tickling the notion that an esteemed scientist wasn’t supposed to laugh at something so immature. Tara smiled sheepishly, nervous tears slithering down her face as the energy wave shattered the last glowing yellow bulb behind the van to a million glittering pieces. Diamonds of streetlight glass drifted through the air in the reflection of the vehicle’s silvery mirrors before the wave blew past the travellers and disintegrated the van into dust.
