“How much more will this machine take?”

“Time or space?”, Aldrin nonchalantly asked, bending over to check the tightness of all the connections in the sector ‘FUEL’.

Checking the tightness of all the connecting points took almost the entirety of morning and afternoon, for the capsule required tremendous amount of energy, be it from the thermal and nuclear reactors under his family’s possession or the newly improved power plants for harnessing energy using the waste products bought from every corner of the corner of the world.

“Seriously, they should call you ‘the Scavenger’ instead of calling you the ‘Mortician’, it sounds too pessimist.”, her words filled with false fury stirred by amusement whilst she watching the dull screen light up.

“Sector ‘LINKAGE’ in working.”, the robotic like sound indicating that the machine was in process to start functioning.

“Last days of our work Professor?”, Lukas asked with a deadpan expression.

“Last day, it is.”, Aldrin replied washing his hands with olive oil and then with water before finally drying them.

“These past 4 years have been the most boring year of my life, what did I even learn from you?”, Eliz sarcastically asked Aldrin when he was talking to Lukas about tomorrow’s preparations.

“Certainly not a lot from me, but you sure did learn a lot of other things in 4 years!”

Lukas could not help but sigh on seeing the teacher student interaction.

“Like what?”

“How to fuck a man properly, how to embezzle the research funds, how to steal materials for your own personal research and list goes on!”

“How nice of you, keeping track of all my activities!”

“And this is why I won’t share my life’s work with you miss Eliz!”

“I can figure it out all by myself!”

“Figure out your jokes first for good start.”

“They aren’t that lame old man!”

“I am the ‘old man’! Thank you for giving me this piece of information Miss Elizabeth!”

Enraged, Eliz walked out of the lab as if she had lost a game.

‘What a phenomenal act, everyday something new!’, Aldrin thought. Having known his students’ true intentions for past 4 years. He in fact was acting as the old man, getting emotional over small things, picking fights for no reason with Eliz, giving too much to practise for Lukas and still they never complained.

“Let it be professor, she will be in a better mood tomorrow.”, stopping Aldrin from speaking further knowing well enough about her personality, hiding his baleful smile as we walked faster to catch up with Eliz.

“Thieves have really evolved these days.”

He walked back into the lab to plan his final day on the planet before he uses the soul transfer machine.

“These kids are good at putting up an act, I will them the credit for that.”, smiling gleefully as soon as he discovered one of his less important files having been duplicated and then later deleted from the system.

“They did a good job of deleting these files from the severs but alas there are sectors other than ‘MEMORY’ that store duplicates in their servers.”

He rummaged through every file that was duplicated finding the last duplication done yesterday.

“Can’t blame them for not remembering all 26 sectors and their functionalities. it took almost 3 years for me remember them all by myself.”, laughing hysterically as he checked all the files one by one.

“It’s hard to mentally harass our professor, Luke.”, Eliz whispered to Lukas as both were steeping down the stairways into the dark and gloomy place which was their lab.

The lab was no different from a basement built to hide secrets that were not meant to see the daylight, filled with the redolence of degrading and freshly prepared grease that was applied to the inner machinations of the capsule. The place surprisingly was roomy and comfortable to stay, probably because it had once been used for special occasions such as marriage of Aldrin’s younger brother and elder sister and for various other miscellaneous reasons, naming a few; grim activities of torturing people until they confessed their reasons behind their harmful existence to the Klassen Family or till the poor soul made the error of trespassing into the Klassen property, causing their bodies to be beyond human help due to the ill experiments conducted down here in this very lab by his father and him. It was also a site of historical importance to the Klassen Family that were once a ruling family in the Renaissance Age before his Great-great Grandfather paid a price for the madness of colluding with the devils of those age and commit atrocities in this very place for the church supporting the emperor of that time, though he got away with only his title being confiscated.

There were portraits on the left wall from the entrance of all the family heads upto date of the now renowned family Aldrin was a part of. Aldrin was the 16th head 5 years back when he had to give up all his power in the name of science, the very thing that the Klassen family were known for past 2 centuries had produced some of the world’s greatest known scientist which included his brother and him.

This was all that he was provided from his inheritance, to feed his madness for experimenting.

The right side of the wall was covered with large chunks of wires narrowing near the capsule in the centre, connecting to it from below. This capsule had taken his father a lifetime to complete before he passed away the same year when Aldrin denounced his role as the head. No one knows how a healthy man in his late 50’s who had no previous history of any medical emergency suddenly, passed away. His four children were all beside his bed when he took his final breath.

“The basement… the…”, were his last words a day prior to his death after which is mouth shut forever.

“Don’t worry father I will take good care of the place where I was brought up.”, grinning whilst his siblings looked at his eccentricity. Was he a maniac? Was he a lunatic?

His father sure gave that look of him being one before he took his last breath with tears of regret pouring from his eyes.

The wires connected to individual sectors, half of which were already developed by his father and to be of use to his children while his younger brother helped him develop the other half of the sectors, connected to some or the other power supplier to supply the necessary energy for the capsule to work.

And on the wall in front of the door lay the blackboard covered in scientific artwork which in a nutshell had the calculations on the energy to be reached the drive a soul through an imaginary hyperdrive connected to the wormholes that had transfer the soul from lower dimension to a higher dimension and back to the lower dimension. The real reason behind the research was to determine location of other lower dimensions across the infinite stream of the cosmos which was discovered to be continuously expanding along the line of the fourth dimension. It was still unknown in what container the cosmos was expanding but an explanation was theoretically derived by his father for which his father won innumerable awards, the best known one to be the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovery of Hyperspace.

While he discovered the fifth dimensions, which he was never felicitated for and the awards that were once given to him for his discoveries were all taken back for the destruction and devastation he later caused in his life.

The wall in front of the blackboard had bifurcated stairways the left and right straight staircase leading to other sectors of the lab and the wide and longer straight stairs that lead to the outside of the lab through which both Eliz and Luke entered into the lab.

“I just cannot let go of this ominous feeling whensoever I see empty walls down the stairs painted in black.”, Eliz complaining every now and then about the renovations made by Aldrin all over this place.

Turns out Aldrin was the one who did all the renovations so as to not let any information be leaked outside of the manor where all three were currently living in.

“Can you stop complaining for once, he is will be physically dead by today, have at least a pinch of respect for him.”

“Could have worded that better, Luke.”

“English is not my first language.”

“Same goes for me, Luke. You were always filled with contempt for the English language that you didn’t dare to study it even after getting a beating for skipping your classes. Blame yourself.”

“That isn’t even the point of our discussion. Eliz stop changing the topic!”

“Both of you, walk faster down the passage!”, roared Aldrin from below.

“Why is this passage so long!”, softly wailing to herself as Lukas reached the last few steps.

“Probably because you talk to much.”, Lukas commented as he pushed the papers into his face studying all the final calculations made by the capsule that was rendering the location input into it.

“Eliz please go and check the sectors 5, 10 and 13.”

“Why 13? Isn’t that the deadliest sector where none of us should even peek?”

“I have taken in account for all the possible dangers that you might encounter and have cleared it beforehand so that we can make the final preparations for my peaceful passing.”

“I guess that is the last thing you would want to do for yourself did.”, Eliz muttering to herself as she took the left staircase out of the room.

“Some of the calculations don’t make sense.”

“What isn’t it making sense Lukas?”

“According to the probability, you have one in ten chances to land in the right wormhole and on the right planet, but it doesn’t consider the fact that you could either get into the wrong wormhole or land on the wrong planet. This also doesn’t account for the total energy required to push the soul out of your body and into hyperdrive, all it mentions is the energy the capsule is sucking in to keep the process of death being extended till you are physical and biologically dead.”

“The energy it mentions here is the amount of energy required for my soul to split from my body. This energy is actually is taken from the hyperspace causing a shift in the balance of the energies at a point forcing my soul to get detached due to the force that the hyperspace is applying to gain back the energy that we forcefully took from it.”

“We are supplying energy from our end, just to get more energy from the hyperspace?”

“The energy supplied to the capsule will be used to stir my path to the correct location. Here is where the geometry plays a role. I should be travelling beeline to my destination but due to unknown and theoretical weird geometry of space and time causes a paradox or a casualty in the known laws of the universe which we need to avoid and to also rupture a tiny needle-pricked hole the capsule is supplied with massive amounts of energy.”

“You see Lukas my dad has already tried this machine, yet he failed. I want to finish what my father started.”, and also find him and make his life as miserable as possible for the monster he has made out of me is what Aldrin continued thinking in his mind.

“And what about the space and time problem, professor?”

“We don’t even know if this experiment will be successful and you are already worrying about a theory that could most likely be wrong.”, Aldrin tilted his head towards the screen that read,’ Machine online.’

“Asking me the questions from my works that you stole, just to make yourself look like a genius. Good, very good of both of you to pry more into what exactly the research was about.” Aldrin nodded to himself in the back of his mind.

“And sir how will you jump from our planet’s hyperspace to some wormhole and back to the correct hyperspace of the destination you have put in the program of the capsule?”

Aldrin was taken aback. He now had a gist of all the research materials his ‘students’ might have looked through. This was not a question he expected from Lukas since this question could not have been asked unless they had read the unpublished research materials which he had taken out from his locker that was locked inside a vault for a day to let his imagination run a riot to find more possibilities in his father’s work for the capsule to work.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

‘I underestimated their swiftness at collecting data, but why ask this question now when we are about to conduct the experiment.’

Keeping a warm smile on his face,” May I ask why you are asking this question when the experiment is about to begin.”

Luke shuddered when he heard the question. He instantly realized he should not have asked such a specific question from professor’s research paper. Keeping his cool, he tried to be as calm as possible during the debate, trying not to falter.

“Why, Professor Klassen I am your student so I thought I could ask you this question related to your work.”

“And did the work ever talk about wormhole?”

“A few instances, yes.”

“Such as?”

“Page 10 of derivation of energy relation for an object at a theoretical speed of light here your father’s statement uses…”

“Blackholes and not Wormholes. There are equations for describing the wormholes and their relation with space-time graphs which my father did give but not in any of the research paper I gave you”

‘And to Eliz, plus it is only in one study that I had done before when my father was alive.’

“And how did you conclude the relation of wormhole, hyperspace and space-time change using so little information?”

“And why do you need this information my dear boy?”, Aldrin’s smile had gradually turned from a warm, smile of comfort to a cold, murderous smile.

Right then Eliz walked into the room, feeling the tension between Lukas and Aldrin. She knew she had walked in at the wrong time.

Her gut feeling was spot on. They had finally been caught in the act of selling professor’s research papers, although they only managed to sell a few of them. They knew they had to escape this situation unless they wanted die in the manor or in the basement.

“You two seriously, how can you sell out the priceless knowledge I have been giving you from past 5 years.”, Aldrin spoke pretentiously whilst raising his voice with every word that he spoke.

“Don’t look at Luke like that, we both did it for money.”, Eliz spoke in a lower voice

‘So I was almost correct, they are not madmen like me or my father when it comes to knowledge!’

‘It’s not like I could have done anything to prevent this from happening, dammit Justin, you sick bastard. You really made that contract with the government, stabbing me in the process!’

“Here are the keys for the vault and the password for the locker is 120699 remember it. You will find all the research papers and the blueprint to build another capsule like the one in the back. Remember one capsule per person.”

“Now then the least you could do is to help me conduct the experiment.”, making a slightly disappointed face Aldrin proceeded to give them all the instructions on how to start the experiment, make the calculations on the tab of the capsule and all the safety they needed during the experiment warning them of all the possible outcomes and side-effects if not performed properly.

‘This can’t be the professor I know, wasn’t he supposed to be ruthless and calculative when it came to saving his own life’s work, he is just giving it away like that?’, Luke believed that something was horribly wrong with this situation, there were no ammunitions or any other weapon that professor could use to overpower them and then they had the advantage of being young.

Being young also meant they were inexperienced. Even after being under the tutelage of Aldrin, Luke could not believe that Aldrin just gave up like that.

Perhaps he saw them as his own students?

Perhaps he had developed some attachment to them?

He had heard all sorts of story about him.

How his ideas to create a new problem resulting in world’s population to decrease by a fourth of what it was and how his papers resulted sped up the war to control the materials on the planets of Venus and Mars.

“I call it population control.”, Aldrin replied nonchalantly when he was asked about his involvement in the God Particle project. Although they still failed to discover the god particle, they managed to harness the energy of the dark particle with only 2 bombs resulting in deaths of about a half a billion people all under Aldrin’s supervision.

This also made the House of Klassen too powerful as they made money through harnessing this power and a name through Eldrin, the younger brother of Aldrin who also participated in the Politics of Science by allowing the law of experimentation on dead bodies that lay bare in the wake of the chaos their ideas had caused, that same Aldrin was willingly giving away his life’s work to the two us.

“Something is wrong Eliz, something is definitely wrong.”

“I am just as shocked as you are Luke, there has to be catch if he is giving away all his lifelong work for free. What if he is trying to kill us?”

“But how Eliz? That is the important question. Professor is already in his early 50’s while we are at least 20 years younger than him, what does he have prepared to kill us?”

“Both of you go in Sector 4 and execute the experiment the way I had instructed you during our practise.”

The uneasy feeling of death had been tied around their necks. They were hastily trying to cut off the noose that was nimbly tied around their neck but time was not in their favour.

‘Lukas is a cautious and observant kid, he must have noticed my words to be laced with poison, but alas is there an antidote for it?’

“Alright, last minute discussion, what this capsule is meant to perform is soul transfer or universally called Reincarnation. There are many side effects that were neither tested nor… stop being so obstinate you two, I’m not going to murder you two ‘right now’. Yes, I do have the data for all the things you did behind my back at Fordwich does not mean I will you straight up confront you, ‘because I am not that dumb’. Yesterday when I was saying all those things to Elizabeth, you thought I was exaggerating the troubles she caused? I was merely telling the truth.”

Aldrin smiled at them like a parent would when they are feeling proud of their children’s achievement,” We spent 5 years together and we are about to achieve something that neither the previous two Nobel Laureates could have ever dreamed of achieving, at least let me die in peace as we perform this breakthrough together.”

His hauntingly perfect smile had warmed the hearts of the two even if it were by a little. They knew him too well and they knew all the mess that he had left behind for the future generations to clean.

But they were here for money not justice and caring about others was never ingrained in them or was naturally there in their genes. All they could do now was pray for the best. They could neither run out of here since the Government would want them dead for not bringing back almost all the papers that Aldrin Graham de Klassen had to hide nor could they escape this man known who was known to have killed and exterminate his cousins and even his own father just to achieve his goals of scientific advancement in a new direction.

No matter which path they choose, death was certain if they didn’t comply.

“Now where was I? The side effects, you see have not been proved to be fatal or nonfatal you might wonder then if we don’t know all the possible damages it can do to our soul in the process of transformation then why are we even doing this in the first place? Well three experiments have already been performed and I won’t tell the results of those experiment but all of them have been deemed successful. The last one was adroitly performed under my own watch.”

“The person it was performed on was my dad’s dead body. How did I get away with it, you ask? New laws were passed by my eldest brother, Justin as iou call him. He managed to impose the in the International Court of Scientific Regulations and Research and fortunately, it was accepted in our country by feeding the then government, some stash if you know what I mean."

Lukas could not believe what he heard. The same government who paid for all the education he has ever received and all the support he ever needed to have committed this dirty deed.

“ Oh and I almost forgot to give you the keys for the vault. How about this, you take the papers from the locker and learn the information you deem necessary from the research papers and then burn them immediately instead of giving it to the Government?”

Lukas knew that he won’t understand a shit about those papers. He hardly managed to guess the intentions behind the use of the capsule that made him make the mistake of believing that it was the knowledge that was published before. Aldrin was surely irritated and acted hurt when Lukas ignored his advice.

His pained voice pleaded to Lukas who was behind the observation windows of Sector 4 ‘MIND’, begging him to not take his invaluable research work to the Government.

Pearls and Tears dripped from his eyes when time and time he spoke about his last days as a researcher in his father’s lab before he was excommunicated to England and about his discoveries that he was able to simplify with the help of his father’s unpublished work.

“Is he acting to stall time?”, Eliz finally decided to speak up her mind.

“His psychotic brother sold out their father’s work so it cannot be him. His relation with his only sister is just as bad as his relation with his father, could possibly be an overstatement and The Klassen Company wants him dead so I believe they won’t be sending any help.”

“The manor has always been empty other than occasional visits of the milkman and the chef and there are no guards…then why stall time?”, Lukas began to question the sanity of the old man, feeling the age of Aldrin.

“Can we just please begin the experiment, Prof-essor?”, Eliz trying her best to stay composed.

Aldrin face was mentally drained, he had to keep giving the impression that he was tearing from inside to divert their thought.

‘They probably think that I’m trying to keep them imprisoned in sector 4, age does mature your expressions.’

‘There is something more he is hiding in the vault than what he states.’, Lukas was adamant that he was not stalling time but rather distract them from finding the real decade old works.

‘He is taking precautions, I tell you but being rash here might be beneficial.’, Aldrin was impressed by their tardigrade but cautious approach to the current situation.

“Let’s just get done with this!”, Eliz was trying her best to be in character waiting for Aldrin to step into the capsule and be put to sleep for eternity.

‘She still wants keep up her façade, not bad. Lukas is good at observing and taking action in any given circumstance while Eliz is good at hiding her real face and collect information for Lukas to analyse. Looks like she was doing more than just having sex outside the manor.’

‘Both are raw talents that still need plentitude of effort to develop further. Alas, they have to die here to extirpate my life long work. I just cannot let anyone touch that.’, these were the last thoughts of one the greatest scientists of his time Aldrin Grahams de Klassen as he plugged his headset to the capsule,’ Seelenfänger Version 5 is online.’

Putting on small, surprisingly robust headset, Aldrin made himself feel comfortable when he laid down inside the capsule. His world had completely shut down as a consequence of being paralysed by the machine.

Immediately when the start button turned from red to green, Eliz pressed the button.

The current flowing through the insulated wires had a sudden surge through the large boxes of two convertor transformers as high volts of current was passing towards the fairly large capsule which had various power generating outlays, converting the electrical energy to mechanical energy blotting the inner machination of the capsules with rays of blinding light that pierced an inchoate area around the capsule, gradually increasing in size and increasing in noise creating an illusion of an earthquake while both Eliz and Luke took cover under the command desk near the observation window when the light finally gave up, disappearing into thin air, perhaps the boiled grease from the machine.

They checked on to see the body of their professor which was shockingly in one piece, no burn spots, no cloth on flames, no headset frying his brain.

He felt alive but was no different from dead.

Professor Aldrin, aged 53 was physically dead and spiritually alive, travelling through time and space to other dimension while keeping his soul intact.

“So this is soul transfer. I wonder where he must have gone.”, Eliz sighed, letting go of her mask.

“All of it sounds wrong, like how can you possibly transfer your entire soul, with your memories and experience intact to other dimensions?”

“Maybe we can find that out, let’s check all the documents inside the vault.”

They sprinted all the way to the vault, wanting to get out of this hellish place that had nightmarish memories.

“What was the passcode again?”

“120699”

“How do you only remember these things?”

“Because you are always nervous and try to act calm and composed that you forget to remember important details.”

Luke was a bit embarrassed. Nevertheless, they opened the vault with minutes and the locker in seconds.

“That is one huge stash of published along with some unpublished works! It will take a whole day arranging all the important files.”

“Check his last research paper.”

A letter slipped down onto Lukas’ lap.

“Let me read that, could really be important.”

To my dear students,

I understand your respective family situations and I do also know about your greed and hunger for power. You chose the believe in the fear spread by the Government i.e, my reputation instead of believing me as a human. You two are not technically wrong that by colluding with me would result in hanging of your families as traitors to the government saving your own skin in the process.

You should have just chosen that. Saving yourself rather than your family. MY DECADE OLD PAPERWORK IS NOT SOMETHING THAT THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD POSSESS. IT WILL MAKE THEM THE GODS OF OUR GALAXY. IT WILL CREATE UNIMAGINABLE DESTRUCTION ACROSS THE WORLD. I cannot let you hand it to them. I care more about work than your family. Blame my father for turning me into an emotionless asshole. I deserve it I will not deny that.

I have also equipped the vault with self-destruct system. If anybody basically enters the vault twice it will lockdown all the sectors and blow up this one within a minute. Suits you for being paranoid. I did guess that you will check once before entering again. Yes, I have disabled all the voice prompts following the initiation of self-destruct code, if you are perchance wondering. By the time you read this you have probably been blown up in a small room locked inside this basement.

Yes, I was trying to divert your attention by saying random nonsense that sounded important. You probably checked the entire vault in a hurry, failing to notice that you had initiated this sequence, dying in such a horrible fashion.

Meet you in the after-life ‘students’.

P.S. I have paid your Families enough money to last them for a couple of generations so don’t worry about them, worry about yourself.

“Quite unlu-“, these were the last words of Eliz as the insides of the vault ruptured into a volcanic eruption.

-Boom, the flames tried to escape through the only door, but to no avail. Wails drowned in the sea of pain as both of them got caught in the explosion as their bodies crumpled and folded like a piece of paper right before they were torn apart into many pieces that flew all over the small room inside the locker, splashing their blood red colour all over the white canvas of the concrete wall that survived the explosion.

The papers were all burnt. The letter was burnt. Someone’s lifelong work extended the flames life as it slowly began spreading through the ginormous maze that was the lab

“Did you find his body?”

“Yes but you are not touching it.”

“I am the Eldest!”

“And the greediest.”

“Shut up, stupid white supremist.”

“Says the guy who accidently took part in a rally for supporting the LGBTQ community.”

“It wasn’t that bad, ok!”

“I will be needed to take over his laboratory. Send me a team of dad’s researchers.”

“Why only dad’s?”

“ ’Cause they are more trustable than the fools you signed up to work here.”

“They were the best students of the 44’ batch.”

“CHOSEN BY THE GOVERNMENT DUMBFUCK.”

“They paid 2.58 billion dollars to have those two working under him.”

Eldein was annoyed at Justin's so called 'nonsensical' talks.

“Justin, you planned this out, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t expect him to burn down the entire place!”

“So you knew that he will do something with those god forsaken pages.”

“Eldrin, the day he stepped down, I was always in control of things he did.”

“You do realise that the papers you have with you are mostly fake right? Or the fact that those don’t even contain the real thing that both father and he discovered?”

Justin’s face turned pale. He had gotten tricked into believing that the stored papers in father’s locker was of value.

“Aldrin really played you well into his trap, he managed to finish this experiment.”

Eldrin turned his head away from Justin, taking a quick peek to see if he could notice anything across the debris scattered throughout the basement.

“Unfortunately we found his capsule with his body intact.” Justin smirked as colour began to reappear on his whitened face.

“Yeah, we just need to pull it off, to escape the sanctions and a trial.”

Justin rolled his eyes away. He was used to paying a visit to the court.

“This was all contractually done, so they really can’t do much to us.”, Eldrin’s blithe attitude took Justin by surprise.

“You are finally caring about your family!”, Justin screamed in jou.

“Of course, dumbass! You are my only sibling protected from the door to heaven!"

"..."

"..."

Both went quiet. They were thinking on how to keep the conversation going.

“You know, we can use this experiment to our advantage, Justin.”, Eldrin spoke up, giving his mind a bulb to make an effort to dullen the awkwardness between the two as the both enter the lab with their respective team of researchers.

" By the way shouldn't it be version 3 and not 5?"

"That, only father knows Eldrin.", Justin whispered to him while they tried to open up the tightly shut capsule.