An old saying suggests that great advancements in understanding are heralded not by cries of success, but by mumbles of confusion. If you're looking for the moment of discovery, don't wait for the chemist or physicist to shout Eureka. Instead, listen carefully for a scientist to quietly utter these three magic words:
"Huh, that's odd."
"What's odd?" David asked, raising an eyebrow.
Gary held his hands in front of him, fingers splayed, looking from one hand to the other with a puzzled expression on his face.
"This." Gary replied, as though that were a perfectly satisfactory answer.
"What are you looking at?" David prodded. "Do you see something I don't?"
"Huh?" Gary glanced fractionally at David, and back at his hands. After another moment he finally started talking, but he kept watching his hands like they were about to perform a neat trick.
"This... substance," he muttered, "there's a faint vapor of some sort, a deep violet blue, almost invisible. Slightly heavier than air, it seems. It appears to be condensing from my skin, almost like the fog you see from dry ice. Curious."
"Is it dangerous?" asked David.
"No, not in the slightest," confirmed Gary, "it should in fact be beneficial."
Gary paused and considered, "Actually, I don't have any evidence to support that assertion. How odd. There are certain... convictions that I feel strongly about with respect to this substance, ways in which it could be useful, almost necessary. And yet, I have no basis for those conclusions. That is possibly more intriguing than the substance itself."
"So, is it dangerous?"
"I can't know for certain," Gary began, finally tearing his eyes away from his hands. "But traditionally when scientists discover a new form of matter that glows in the dark," he paused, giving David a serious glance, "it turns out to not be healthy."
"You're saying it's radioactive or something?"
"No." Gary frowned, "No, again I am confident that it is safe, but for the life of me I don't know why. It seems to affect my thoughts or memory somehow. It's oddly familiar; I can't shake the feeling that I remember something about it from a long time ago."
"So, does that mean we should at least assume it's dangerous for now?" David asked.
"Ultimately it doesn't matter if we can't avoid it anyway," Gary observed. "Yours is a different color from mine, but I think it's the same stuff."
"Wait, what? A different color?" David stepped back looking at himself. "Where?"
Gary partially closed the blinds, darkening the room a bit. And indeed, a similar sort of luminescent smoke gently flowed from David's skin, primarily from his palms. But unlike the deep violet-blue glow pouring off from Gary, the vapor surrounding David was white, and would have been nearly invisible in the midday sunlight.
David waved his hands in front of his face observing the tendrils of energy as they drifted and dispersed. If he moved his hand quickly enough, the white streamers it left behind briefly separated out into a rainbow of colors that swirled and mixed and faded.
"What is this stuff?" David whispered to himself as he watched the smokey vapor, dumbstruck by the beautiful oddness of it all.
When David looked back up, Gary had produced a pencil and paper and was furiously scribbling notes of some sort. David let him be; it seemed like Gary was concentrating on something important.
The silence of the moment was soon broken by the noise of David's phone having the digital equivalent of a stroke. His phone's notification sound was cut short, with part of the bell repeating in an ever shortening loop. The bright "ding" sound was replaced instead by "di-di-di-di-di-di-di-di .. d-d-d-d-d-d .. bzzzzzz .. pop!" By the time he got the phone out of his pocket, the screen had gone black, and the phone felt hot in his hand.
Around them, the various pieces of computer equipment started shutting down, one after another. Some went quietly, others with a beep or a buzz, and a few powered off with a quiet bang that suggested that something expensive had just happened. Gary hurried over to a cabinet in the corner of the office and, digging around inside, began unplugging things.
David's phone continued to heat up and started to bulge like it contained an inflating balloon. And then without any other warning, flames rocketed out of it toward Gary. Gary quickly, wordlessly pointed at a metal bin near the door. With all the presence of mind he could muster, David threw the cell-phone-turned-flamethrower across the room into the bin.
"Battery," said Gary dismissively, as if this type of thing happened all the time.
"What th--"
"Duck." Gary ordered without bothering to raise his voice.
David hopped backwards, getting out of the firing line between Gary and the newly designated fire containment bin. That same instant, half a dozen objects flew across the room from Gary to the metal bin, three of them trailing multi-colored flames. The last one burst alight mid-air, scattering plastic debris around the trash can.
Five minutes later they had all the dangerous devices contained and the upstairs windows all open. The acrid smell of burning electronics was finally starting to dissipate. After those several minutes of frantically hurried quiet, David eventually spoke first:
"Well, do you have any ideas?"
"Hmm," Gary wrinkled his brow and stroked his short beard. He paused for a moment to consider before he eventually answered, "I think we really need to finish those notes."
"What?" David was expecting some sort of explanation of what just happened. Or if not an explanation, at least a guess.
"David, how long do you expect this effect to last?" Gary asked, indicating the vapor still cascading from his hands, "Don't think about it rationally, just give me the answer that feels right."
"Honestly, I have no--" David began, but then he stopped himself. Mid sentence, he began to consider it on a purely emotional level; he obviously didn't know the answer, but he had an opinion anyway. It felt obvious. The feeling wasn't something he could defend, but he felt like he shouldn't have to, as though the whole concept was self-evident.
"Actually no," David corrected, "I think I understand what you're saying. There's too much of it, right? Whatever is happening with this smoke stuff, it can't last for very long."
"Exactly," Gary lit up, pointing at David with curious excitement in his eyes, "Some part of this effect will continue indefinitely, but what we're experiencing now will be short-lived. I believe the very same thing, quite strongly. It's so specific and yet I have no evidence to support it at all. Isn't that odd? We both think the same things about this stuff, but neither of us knows why. And more importantly, we both are convinced that the effect is going to end soon. I think this substance is expanding our memory or understanding somehow, and soon we will no longer have access to all the information it provides. That is why I want us to write it all down. Both of us, as quickly as we can."
"But what about that computer stuff that just exploded?"
Gary shrugged, "Lithium batteries. It happens. Apparently they all went 'bang' at the same time. I have no idea why."
"Anything to worry about?"
"Well yes, it clearly was," he shrugged, "but apparently not anymore. There are a few people I wouldn't want to be right now, but there's nothing preventing us from finishing those notes."
David knew he wasn't going to get a more satisfying explanation right now from Gary about all of this. And honestly, Gary was probably right about the notes. David might not agree with him about sitting around and writing, but he had to acknowledge his friend's perspective and experience. If anybody in this entire world had a chance of figuring out what was going on, it would be Gary.
For the next fifteen minutes, the two of them quickly wrote down everything they could think of about the strange essence, the more speculative the better. They made several discoveries along the way, but spent the majority of the time simply scribbling into their respective notebooks.
David honestly wasn't a fan. It felt so academic. And in a world where new and odd things were happening, he felt like the best use of his time would be in some sort of action. Gather enough information to make a plan, and then go forward without further delay. On the other hand, if David were making plans right now, he'd have no idea how to account for this strange phenomenon. If pressed, he'd just ignore it and hope for the best. Even now, he had no idea how the notes he and Gary were taking might prove even remotely useful. But knowing Gary, he'd probably come up with ways to use it to save lives within the week. David had committed so thoroughly to following his friend's instructions that it turned out to be Gary who brought their attention back to the moment.
"David, should we be worried about Evie yet?" Gary asked, still writing away.
David checked his watch. It had apparently stopped back when his phone blew up. Looking around, he discovered that all the other clocks had stopped as well. He didn't know how long it had been, but it felt like around a half hour or so.
"Possibly so, but I'm not sure," he said, "how long has it been? All the clocks are stopped."
Gary scowled, "All of them? Even your watch? Did they all stop at the same time?"
"Yeah, it was when all the stuff exploded."
"That's... concerning," Gary muttered to himself, putting his notebook aside.
He rummaged through a few drawers and pulled out an old flashlight. Then he grabbed the clock off the wall, and using a few wires he connected the clock's battery to the flashlight bulb. It lit up.
"The battery is still good, but..." he put the battery back in the clock, but nothing happened. "The clock itself is dead."
"So, what does that mean?"
"I'd like to rule out one more possibility first, one moment please."
Gary repeated the same experiment with fresh batteries and two more clocks, including one that hadn't ever been used. The battery worked, but the clocks did not.
"This is bad, David. These cheap clocks are extremely simple machines. No matter what the problem turns out to be, if they all broke at once it would be a very bad sign."
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
"Bad in what way?"
"This calamity is going to turn our entire world upside down. Permanently, I think. But more urgently, it means that Evie is on foot right now. She's been walking home this whole time. Either that, or she's injured."
"Injured?" David looked puzzled.
Gary raised an eyebrow, "You've seen the way she drives."
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Evelyn pulled onto the main road and got up to speed. She didn't think she was driving excessively fast. But she definitely wanted to get back to the house before anything unusual happened. Everything just felt wrong. The air, the sky, the sound, something. Something was different, something made her feel uncomfortable. As she started up a hill, the dashboard lights flickered briefly off and on again. The engine stalled for a second before roaring back to life.
Evelyn briefly panicked imagining what would have happened had the car stalled out completely. She would have been stuck here, having to walk the remaining 12 miles back to the cabin, with god-knows-what going on with the world around her. She crested the hill and headed down the long winding slope on the other side. She was well over the speed limit and having some difficulty with the turns. She sped up even more, just in case. She was absolutely not going to let herself get stranded out here.
The whole situation was getting more and more unnerving by the moment, and she just wanted the ordeal to be over. She wasn't cut out for adventures. Adventures happened to other people. Like David. Adventures definitely happened to David. He had practically been a magnet for adventures when he was her age; his stories were epic. But the one thing all of his stories had in common was that Evelyn was glad she wasn't in them. Evelyn knew exactly what kind of lifestyle she preferred, and fighting for her life was absolutely not part of it.
With a click, dashboard lights all turned off again, and a second later the engine violently shuddered and went still. The car was still tearing down the hill going well over 60. After the engine died, the brakes felt mushy and unresponsive, and the steering became suddenly more difficult. She could still control the car, but it was taking much more effort and more concentration than she could spare. This was made all the more frustrating by a suddenly loud hissing sound that she didn't recognize but also didn't have time to identify.
She was going far too fast now. Signs along the road reminded her to slow down to 35 for the intersection around the bend, but putting all of her weight onto the brake pedal barely made a difference. Worse still, pushing like that on the brakes gave her less leverage on the steering wheel, making control even more difficult.
At least now she would have a story of her own to contribute when David started talking about his thousands of brushes with death. Bright side, right?
And then her hands started to smoke.
Not quite smoke, but something like it. It was a deep red vapor that was absolutely pouring off of her hands and arms. No, it was actually pouring off her entire body, as though her skin was steaming. It twisted through the air and pooled at her feet. This wasn't the sort of distraction she needed right now, given how fast she was going in a car she could only marginally control. Especially considering the other car she had just caught sight of, which was--
Fire. Right there, inches from her leg. An actual flaming fire. With flames.
She finally found out what the hissing sound had been when it suddenly stopped. Apparently it was her phone, which now started blasting a pinpoint flame at her pants. She picked up the phone and then immediately dropped it, cursing herself for even touching the stupid thing. Now it was blasting its tiny flame at her foot. But as blazingly important as this new problem was, there was that other car to worry about.
Evelyn belatedly looked up again, mere seconds away from a collision. The other car was one of those fancy electric ones, and Evelyn's phone problem was amplified a thousand times over in the other car's battery pack. Gigantic flames of entirely the wrong color erupted in massive gouts from beneath the other car as though the vehicle was attempting a career change into rocketry.
Evelyn swerved to the right to avoid the other car. Even with all her strength, she couldn't turn fast enough. They were going to crash unless the other car swerved too. She looked up and briefly locked eyes with the other driver. In his eyes she saw absolute terror. She watched the other driver crank the steering wheel to avoid the crash, and she finally understood the other driver's horror and panic when, despite his efforts, his car didn't actually turn.
There was nothing Evelyn could do. In the last half-second before impact she realized that the front corner of the approaching car was going to hit her driver's-side door at stupidly high speed and absolutely wreck her in the collision. She turned away and braced as best she could for impact. The fire from her phone, having started only seconds earlier, was still raging like a blowtorch and tearing into her foot. She had kept her foot on the brake this whole time despite the pain, but given that slowing wouldn't actually help anymore, she started to pull away. The car was now full of red vapor that glowed with some sort of otherworldly light, a fact which under any other circumstances would have been the most important thing happening. But right here and now, it hardly mattered.
The impact would arrive any moment now. And then what? Would there even be anything else after that? The moment that Evelyn spent braced for collision stretched on forever as she waited, waited, waited. And then, suddenly, it had all passed in a blink.
Crash.
The sound of the collision rattled in her ears, but Evelyn had no memory of the crash itself. No memory of crumpling metal, of tumbling, of foreign objects puncturing her flesh, the entire disorienting ordeal was over and past before she understood what had happened. Now her face was bleeding into her eye, and everything, literally everything hurt. Her ears rang, or buzzed, or hummed, or something; she couldn't tell. She couldn't think. The fire wasn't at her feet anymore, but the directions were all wrong. Down wasn't down anymore. Right was down now, with the car up on its side. A small fire now sputtered against her passenger-side window. Probably her phone. Or at least, the plastic and glass that used to be her phone. It wasn't a phone anymore. Holy nuts she was tired. She blinked slowly, but it didn't get better or clearer. Everything hurt and she didn't want to move. She was just so, so tired.
A small part of Evelyn, the part that was a third year med school student, knew that she needed immediate medical attention if she was going to survive. She had minutes, probably. More than just seconds, perhaps even hours? No, definitely not hours; minutes was the best she could hope for. She just wanted to sleep, but she knew she wouldn't wake up if she gave in and dozed off. So took hold of her thoughts and forced herself to do an inventory of her situation.
Her biggest problem was that she was pinned to her seat, literally, through her left leg. Some long, thin piece of metal had gotten propelled through the door or windshield or something and then right through her thigh. If it had gone through her femoral artery then she'd be in serious trouble. There was blood all over, soaked through her clothes and pooling on the seat. Too much of it. Presumably it was hers, which meant her chances of surviving the blood loss were not good. Not good at all. She probably didn't have long. Minutes.
Still, Evelyn was just so, so tired, and doing an accurate assessment was too exhausting to even contemplate. So she tried to just visualize the injury instead. The idea of analyzing her injury simply by picturing it with her eyes closed was just plain stupid. It doesn't work like that. Nothing works like that. But she was so tired, and in the moment the stupid idea was all she had.
So Evelyn tried to picture the insides of her leg. She decided to compensate for the obvious idiocy of the whole concept by being more thorough about it. Muscles, nerves, bones, blood vessels, skin, everything she could remember from her classes. And in that image she could see the puncture wound, with a piece of metal still embedded. There were other injuries too, but the puncture wound was her main concern. She could see that her artery had, in fact, been cut open. With her image as a guide, she used her right hand to apply pressure to slow the bleeding, and her mental visualization reacted accordingly. She needed the artery to seal itself, so she mentally prodded the cells along the puncture to pull the hole in the artery closed and seal itself shut. It was a lot easier to do when she was squeezing it closed with her hand, which seemed to make sense to her. Well, if she was honest with herself, it was all in her head and therefore a comical waste of time; she was just entertaining herself while she slowly bled to death. Still, it was something to do, and she kept up her visualization game.
A few moments later, the bleeding in her imagination had stopped, and she thought it should be safe to pull the debris out of her leg. Well, sure, it would only be safe in theory, based on the fantasy that she'd actually healed herself. But again, she was just so stupidly tired, and for the moment this little farce was all she had. So, she gripped the hunk of metal and slid it out of her leg. This action did a lot of damage, but she'd kept it away from her artery so it was manageable. With the foreign object gone, and thinking of nothing better to do in her state, she brought back up her visualization of her leg and began to close the entire hole. She thoroughly knit the muscles and blood vessels together, tracing the bundles of fibers to match up correctly across the gap. There was a lot of tissue missing entirely, so she couldn't fix everything, but she sealed things up well enough to make it functional. It would ache for a while and she wouldn't want to run on it, but it was fixed enough.
Except, no, she had only fixed the wound in theory. In her head. She had pretended to fix it. It made sense to her, but that didn't make it real. With a sense of resignation, Evelyn lifted her hand to look down at the real puncture wound in her leg. The skin was closed. It was soaked in blood, but it was definitely closed. Not scabbed, but closed entirely, complete with the scar tissue pattern she had imagined for herself. Well, that sort of made its own weird kind of sense too, right? It just didn't make sense in the real world, that's all. Apparently, in order to survive, she would need to be careful to avoid going sane.
In for a penny, Evelyn figured, she might as well hallucinate her way to repairing her burned foot. A quick visualization showed the damage was mostly superficial. Again, there wasn't much she could do to replace lost body mass with the tools she had on hand, but she could move things around, and maybe grow some scar tissue to close up the wound. She also nudged the nerves around so it wouldn't hurt quite so much.
A lot of her smaller injuries were gone, she noticed, including the cut that had been bleeding into her eye. She had some minor bone fractures to fix still, but for the most part her major injuries were immediately manageable. Her only life-threatening concern now was all the blood she had lost -- that plus the fact that she was still hanging by her seatbelt in a car that was flipped up on its side.
Evelyn couldn't do anything about the blood loss. Not right now, because... because... because red was the wrong color? How did that make sense? She was just so tired, and thinking was hard. It seemed right, it felt like it made sense, but she didn't understand it at all. Evelyn assumed she would understand why yellow was a more appropriate color once she got some sleep. She could at least get out of the car, though. Red was definitely the right color for that.
The window on the driver door had already shattered, so she unbuckled her seatbelt and pulled herself out the broken window, onto the car, and dropped unsteadily down to the ground, bringing her survival backpack with her. As she moved, the red smoke cascading off her skin briefly solidified around one or another of her limbs, seemingly giving a quick boost of strength or stability to the part it highlighted. Evelyn was largely oblivious to all of this, it just all made sense in the moment and she carefully refused to think about it.
Her car had ended up off the road and down in a shallow gully full of thorny bushes, while the car that hit her was still on the road. The occupant had apparently survived, since the door was open and there were no human remains left in the car. The car itself had been entirely destroyed by the fire.
All of this together meant that there was only one pressing problem for Evelyn to solve. She needed to do something about her blood loss. She was having a lot of difficulty even standing up in her current state, and kept fighting the urge to just lay down and take a nap. She was pretty sure she could fix it, but for that she'd need yellow. She started looking around for yellow things, but none of them were right. She found a piece of yellow glass off a tail light, but glass wouldn't work. There was also a broken reflector on the road, but that was synthetic; plastic was no good. She needed it to be real. Was that right? Did "real" even make sense?
Evelyn swayed slightly where she stood, trying to figure out what "real" actually meant. Rocks were real. Glass was only partly real; not quite real enough. She noticed the yellow petals of a flower at her feet. Were flowers real? No, plants were entirely the wrong kind of real, the backwards kind. Rocks -- she'd been on the right track with rocks. She needed a yellow rock. And clear? Yeah, clear sounded right; clear and yellow. Orange would work, too, but yellow would be faster.
That settled it, then.
But where would she find a clear, yellow rock? Evelyn looked down at herself, and saw the red smoke pouring out of the ruby pendant on her necklace. Huge amounts of the stuff exited the gemstone and pulled into her chest like her body was vacuuming up the misty substance. Once her body was saturated, it poured back out of her skin; she was completely full of "red". She had so much "red" that it was influencing her thoughts, and even allowing her to do some pretty powerful stuff. That seemed like an accurate assessment as far as she could tell in her tired state. She had been absurdly inefficient in her use of the substance, but that didn't matter since she had so much of it.
Unfortunately, this wouldn't last for very long, and Evelyn was pretty sure this huge burst of energy she'd taken advantage of would never happen again. It was like a clogged pipe had been opened, and years worth of "red" was flowing out all at once. It would slow down pretty soon. She'd been lucky to be carrying a clear red stone with her when it happened, but now she urgently needed to acquire some yellow right away, before the flow subsided.
Evelyn limped lightheaded back to her stricken car to leave a note card telling her dad and David where she was headed. She leaned against the bumper to stop from swaying as she wrote. It was really obvious where she'd be going next. It was so obvious, in fact, that she fully expected to find the two of them already there waiting for her when she arrived. David had been adamant about the note-leaving rule though, so Evelyn grudgingly complied. That didn't stop her from feeling salty about it, though, so she decided to also mention in her note how obvious the plan was.
She looked it over. It was a bit... extra. Had she written too much?
"Jewelry, dumbass."
Nah, it was fine.
That finished, she shambled like a confused, drunken zombie back to town to go commit a felony or two.
Finally, stuff was making sense.