Episode 19
“It’s a success!”
“Can you believe it?”
“Yeeeeessssss!!”
“We have a wormhole!”
“I’M STILL IN HERE!” Sharp shouted as he tried the door handle again
Although the safety klaxons had ended, the air was still filled with pandemonium as the geeks in the room beyond bounced and jumped around their computers. Sharp stared at their antics with a look of open disgust.
Have they lost their minds?
He was still locked inside the WMD lab, and the wormbox was quite busy doing something that was, if not dangerous, at least extremely unhealthy for him to be around.
This was a lot closer to the wormhole tech than Sharp had ever planned on getting. He was hoping to kick the tires a bit, take a look under the hood—be dazzled by the new technologies—but not be stuck inside it when somebody turned it on.
From what Sharp understood from his earlier conversation with Isabelle, the team had used high powered, plasma infused, room temperature, rare-earth magnets to create a wormhole, something that had been done before. That didn’t worry him. What did cause him a bit of pause was that they injected the wormhole with gravitons. That, and the wormbox was smoking.
In point of fact, Sharp could feel a gentle yet steady pull towards the wormbox generator all the way from the door. It felt like standing at the top of a sandy slope and feeling the ground softly give way underneath, a thoroughly unnerving feeling considering he was on a flat surface and not standing anywhere near the wormbox. The door behind him began to give off heat, causing him to step away from it. He felt the gravity pull from the machine fade as he stepped out of its direct line between it and the metal exit.
That’s weird.
Giving the door one last wary glance, Sharp headed over to the observation window.
“I hate to interrupt the party, but any chance you can let me out of here?”
A few of the lab workers had the decency to appear sheepish because they had forgotten about him, but most were still too overjoyed to notice he was there.
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“Sorry, Sharp.” Isabelle walked over to the window. “We saw that you were alright, and got lost in the moment.”
“Alright?” he said in disbelief. “Yeah, okeh, sure…” The left side of Sharp’s mouth took a scornful dip. “So…unlock the door already. It’s giving off heat, and its a little early to test this on human subjects, right? I mean, you’re a li’l too casual with my life here. Is that a side-effect of working for Wudgepuck?” Sharp rolled his eyes and sighed.
“Wait, the door is giving off heat?” Isabelle interrupted. “That shouldn’t be happening.” She frowned, then turned to a lab worker to her right and asked them to release the door lock. Sharp heard a buzzing hum from the door, but not the sound of the door unlocking. Then motion in his peripheral vision caught his attention.
“Uh…this is a pinhole wormhole, right? So I shouldn’t be able to see it, right?” Sharp leaned on the safety railing under the window while looking over at the wormbox generator.
“Right!” Kyle joined in. “We can only detect it on our monitors using the sensors on the wormbox, which is why we needed your help. You did great! I don’t know why the wormbox fired up, though, but I’m glad you’re OK. We’ll look into…”
“So I shouldn’t be able to see it?” Sharp interrupted.
“No, I just said you can’t see it. It’ll only show up on our monitors.”
“But I can see it.”
The cheerful jubilation that had filled the lab moments before stumbled to a silence as the entire WMD team gazed up from their workstations towards the wormbox to see the magnetic bed throwing its own celebration with what appeared to be embers that floated upwards. Inside the clear box of transparent ALON sheets, a pinhole the size of a baseball hovered within. Dark tendrils of energy undulated from the “pinhole”, attaching and detaching to the walls that confined it, like a Van de Graaf generator spitting out black lightning. Splashes of deep purple, midnight blue, and burgundy spluttered around the forming wormhole. Sharp might have otherwise found them beautiful if he hadn’t been preoccupied with a nagging fear of death.
“Uh, guys. We’ve got to get Sharp out of there…,” Kyle stated almost to himself, as if distracted. Coincidentally, Sharp was distracted by the same thing.
“I’m not going anywhere near that thing until the door is unlocked!” Sharp looked to his left for an escape. Two storage closets and a restroom were all he could see.
“The door lock is not responding!”
“Shut off sequences are not responding!”
“All monitoring stations reported a pinhole wormhole, then stopped sending data. There’s something wrong,” shouted Syd, backed up by a chorus of agreements.
“I think I see your problem!” called out Sharp. Smoke was now billowing from the bed of magnetic coils, and the network cable bundle had caught on fire.
“I thought you fixed this!” Syd called back. For a moment, Sharp felt stunned. Then surprise made way for irritation, and he was back to his usual self.
I’m not going to die in here so they can hang this on me.
He wildly looked for an escape. There were the doors on the left, but the only one he knew for sure was unlocked was the restroom all the way in the back of the room and currently behind an aerial lift. If Sharp skirted around the center of the room by hugging the wall, he could give the wormbox generator a wide berth, but was there clearance to swing the restroom door open? He had no idea.
All the frantic shouting coming over the intercom didn’t drown out a new hum in the air. It was low and on the edge of the audible spectrum. The sound vibrated deeply in Sharp’s body, making him almost nauseous. Then an arc of energy flashed to the exit. There, just beyond the wormbox and its now basketball-sized wormhole, the one and only exit from the lab began to glow.