“Quinn? Wake up!” A rough pounding on a door drew her mind back from dreamland. The world was blurry, nearly impossible to see anything at all. All that she could see was the blurred colors of her office. Quinn fumbled around her desk with numb arms as she searched for her glasses. Her hand, red as blood began to pump back into it, latched onto the frames and she quickly put them on, brushing back her curly hair as she did.
Standing in the doorway to her paper-smothered office was her coworker, Daniel Green. His hair was slicked back and he wore nice clothes underneath his white lab coat. Daniel had always been good to her, so she wasn't surprised that he was the one waking her up.
“It’s time to go,” He glanced down at his watch. “It’s past time. We can’t keep the generals waiting! The rest of the staff are already headed that way.”
Quinn rubbed the sleep out of her eyes as she stood up. “I-hhhhawww… I’m coming. Just give me a second.” She grabbed some files off of her desk and snatched her lab coat as she walked through her cluttered office. Just as she was about to reach the door, she slipped on a piece of paper. Daniel caught her before she fell too far and stabilized her by the shoulders.
“Thanks.”
“Yeah, now let's go. We’ve got less than five minutes! The generals are already waiting.”
The duo began to run out of her office and into a long white hallway with several other offices along it. A thin strip of crimson paint ran along the top of the wall, only interrupted by the occasional 23 painted in black.
They ran through several intersections of hallways, narrowly missing groups of scientists and armed escorts going about their day. It wasn’t long before they reached several elevators with four armed guards standing outside of the closed doors. Daniel flashed his ID at the guards, and Quinn followed suit just seconds after him. The guards moved out of their way, one of them opening an elevator as he did.
Quinn stepped into the elevator, panting for breath as she did. The elevator was rather large, with room for several dozen people or a couple of gurneys. Two more guards stood inside the elevator.
The one nearest the control panel nodded to us. “What floor?”
Quinn tried to answer, but couldn’t get even a word out through her rasping lungs.
Thankfully, Daniel was in slightly better shape than her. “Twenty.”
The guard pressed the button and the doors closed. Quinn could see both of the guards smirking as she and Daniel tried to steady their breathing. She didn’t need to see their smirks to realize that she was horribly out of shape, but it did help drive the point home.
The elevator was silent as it slid up the shaft, causing Quinn to stumble slightly as the sudden motion jarred her weakened limbs. It only made a noise when it reached its destination. A mechanical voice came across a speaker in the elevator that grated Quinn’s ears. “Sub-level 20.” The doors slid open, revealing an entirely different look compared to sub-level 23. Level 20 has walls made from dark mahogany. A line of panels near the top, similar to the stripes on floor 23, was painted a deep green with the occasional 20 on it.
She saw four more guards standing outside of the elevator doors. These were even more heavily armed than the others. Although she didn’t quite know what the weapons were since she never had much interest in guns, she could tell that the guards wielded automatic machine guns of some kind. They looked to be more frame than moving parts and oddly had the magazines on top instead of from the bottom like she was used to seeing.
Daniel rushed out of the elevator, heading down the hallways without even sparing a glance at the guards. Quinn quickly followed him as he led her past several meeting rooms until they reached a door on the far side of the floor.
“Are you ready?” He asked her as he put his hand on the door.
Quinn brushed her curly brown hair out of her face and smoothed down her lab coat. “As I’ll ever be.”
He nodded, trying to look calm, but his knit eyebrows let Quinn know how he was really feeling. “Remember, no pressure. This only dictates the rest of our future with the project.”
“Yeah, ha ha… right. No pressure.” Quinn clenched her fists several times as she tried to calm her nerves.
Her colleague opened the door and stepped into the room. Quinn took a deep breath and then followed directly after him.
The room was fairly big with a long table taking up most of the space. Several imposing figures sat around the table, each sporting shiny medals on their military wear. Every single one of them looked up as they entered the room, causing an almost invisible pressure to weigh on Quinn’s shoulders. The most pressure came from a grizzled man with salt and pepper hair at one end of the table.
On the side of the room opposite the door sat a viewing window looking out into a massive cement room. Several pieces of circular machinery sat on one side as lab technicians and several other assistants ran around making sure everything looked right.
She and Daniel walked towards the opposite head of the table where a whiteboard was set up. Several complex equations were written out on the board, causing one to have a headache just from looking at it. After putting down the files on the table, she moved to the opposite side of the board from Daniel.
Just as they reached their spots and turned to face the people around the table, the man at the opposite end spoke up. “Ladies and Gentleman,” he paused and looked around the table, “this is Quinnzel Nightingale and Daniel Green, the leaders of the project. Take it away.”
Daniel was the first to speak. “Thank you for coming to see our project. As you can see,” he pointed out the window, “we have prepared a demonstration of the project. As I’m sure most of you are aware, we are currently researching space and matter manipulation based on the laws of-”
The older man interrupted Daniel. “Please, skip past the scientific mumbo jumbo. Most of us here won’t understand it.” Several people around the table nodded in silent agreement.
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Daniel looked a little putout, so Quinn stepped up to bat. “Basically, we are researching portals. Using s-several recent innovations regarding light and energy manipulation, we have managed to teleport objects a short distance.
“I-I’m sure you can see why this is an important scientific discovery. The ability to teleport can help in everything from transportation to supply c-convoys in areas where more mundane methods won’t work.”
The man at the head of the table, who was acting as the leader of the group, raised his hand. “We can all see the pros, but tell us the cons. I’ve already read a report that outlined a few of them, which is why we are having this meeting to begin with.”
Daniel motioned Quinn to a door leading into the testing room as he began to speak. “Before we get to that, we understand the doubts some of you have about teleportation. My colleague will go ahead and run a short demonstration.”
Quinn missed the rest of the conversation as she walked toward the technicians. “Is it all setup?”
“Yes, ma’am.” One of the technicians replied as he checked off several things on a clipboard. “We just finished our final check-through.”
“Good. Then you lot go ahead and take a break. I’ll call you back if I need you.” Quinn directed them to another door leading to a separate room. The technicians and assistants briefly saluted her before leaving her all alone with the machine.
She took a minute to observe the machine she had spent so much time creating. Although Daniel had been quite helpful, she had come up with most of the designs and innovations that led to the teleporter.
It essentially consisted of a ring with special kinds of pistons stretching into the middle of the ring from the edge. Several wires connected the pistons and fed around to even more complicated parts. Tubing dangled from each piston leading to individual chambers near the machine. The entire thing was essentially duplicated a few feet from where Quinn stood.
She looked up to the viewing window slightly over her head and saw all of the people standing up and watching her. Daniel pressed a button near the window and his voice spoke through a speaker in the room. “Whenever you are ready, Quinn.”
She made herself busy as she started to press a bunch of buttons on the control panel. Almost instantly, a bright light began to fluctuate in the middle of the rings. The light immediately turned to complete darkness as the pistons began to pull back. The small blackhole, for lack of better words, began to stretch out with the pistons until it filled the entire ring. Both rings held small spots of absolute darkness that seemed to devour the nearby light. A funnel slowly grew out of the sides facing each other as a thin strand of darkness connected both portals.
She approached the portal closest to her and picked up an apple from a nearby cart. Although she was several steps away from it, she could feel a slight suction on her body as if the portal was trying to pull her in. Without much ceremony, she lightly tossed the apple through the black gate. The lights in the room dimmed for a moment as the apple disappeared, instantly appearing at the other portal. Something was wrong, however. The apple was moving at several times the speed that it was originally tossed in. In an instant, the apple flew through the rest of the empty room and smashed into the floor.
Quinn looked up to see several impressed faces as they looked at the slowly fluctuating portals.
“Right.” Daniel pointed to the portal. “As you can see, the portal is fully functioning and capable of teleporting organic matter. And you asked about the problems? Basically, the biggest problems right now are the cost of maintaining the portal as well as the distance and speed. It takes a ton of energy to open a portal, and since they are so unstable they tend to break the machinery. This requires a fairly high upkeep fee to replace degraded parts.
“The range is also something we are working on. Currently, we can only teleport things several feet without the portals becoming too unstable to work. We have a couple of ideas on how to improve them, but none of them are good.
“Final issue is that objects moving through have something weird happening to their kinetic energy. From our tests, we have figured out that their kinetic energy is multiplied over a dozen times as they move from one space to another. We have no idea why this happens, but the use of cushions does help alleviate this issue.”
“You said you have a fix for the range?” One of the generals asked.
Daniel frowned. “Yes, but the issue is the material. We’ve found a special kind of crystal that is capable of bouncing the ‘signal’ of the portal further. We have yet to test it with an actual teleportation, but it has worked in preliminary work.”
“What's the issue then?” Another asked.
“We don’t really know what the crystal is. We got it from the IRA research facility. They claim to have recovered the crystal from a fallen meteor. Only a couple of crystals were found and we only have one here. The material was named Galacius after its lead researcher at the other facility.”
The important figures all began to talk by themselves before the salt-and-pepper-haired man asked a question. “Can we see the effect of the crystal?”
Quinn instantly felt her heart flutter. She hadn’t truly tested the effects of Galacius on her machine and she wasn’t quite sure if it was ready. She was about to voice her concerns when Daniel spoke, “Yes, sir. Quinn?”
She froze for a second. Although she knew it could be dangerous, they really needed to land another investment. They were nearly out of money for the project. What to do, what to do? Quinn finally spoke after a long moment of hesitation, “Yes, but the crystal is in my office. I’d have to go get it.”
“We can wait.” One of the generals said as he headed back to his seat. The others followed along with him.
Quinn had a bad feeling about where this was headed but ignored it in favor of landing the investment. She walked out of the room, her shoes clicking on the cement ground as she went. She entered the other room where the lab technicians were. “Alright,” she grabbed their attention, “go set up the machine for the Galacius trial, please.”
“Yes, ma’am.” A few of the techies said as they passed by her. Quinn walked out of the room and headed back down to floor 23. The trek was less eventful than the last since she wasn’t running to save time.
Once she arrived in her cluttered office, she walked behind her desk to a small floor safe. She inputted a code and scanned her finger to open up the safe. With a click, the lock released and revealed the contents of the metal box. Inside were several documents as well as a small metal case. Quinn grabbed the case and walked back to the elevators after making sure the safe was closed.
By the time she returned to the testing room on floor 20, the technicians had already spaced out the machine to fill the entire room, making the potential teleportation area three times as large as the initial test. Quinn grabbed a small stand near some of the other equipment and moved it to the center of the two portals. She then opened up the metal box she was carrying, revealing a small cylindrical crystal. She placed the crystal on the stand and rebooted the portals.
This time, instead of connecting to the other portal, the rapidly fading beam laced through the crystal, seemingly becoming more vibrant, before heading to the other side.
“Ready when you are,” Daniel said.
Quinn took a deep breath before picking up yet another apple. Although she was nervous, she tossed it through the portal and it disappeared. Nothing happened. It didn’t fly out the other side. She frowned as the control panel started blinking red lights and an alarm began to go off. Before she could go see what was wrong, the machine started shaking violently.
“Quinn? What’s wron-” Before Daniel could finish his words, the suction force of the portal grew exponentially stronger as it began to expand. In a brief second, the portal imploded with a near-silent hum. Following the implosion, everything in the room was sucked into the black gateway, including parts of the floor and walls. Quinn herself was pulled into the portal before she could so much as scream.