All that could be heard was a gentle humming. The cameras rigged to every corner of the Doctor’s laboratory perceived only one being, that being the Doctor himself. Slaving away at his iron table, he tinkered with the innards of a laser-pistol while humming to himself.
The audio-receiving bugs that were planted under desks, inside of comfortable synthetic leather office chairs, and everywhere else reported that the rest of the laboratory was quiet. The sound-deadening walls encasing him ensured that.
A clink. The Doctor prodded the inside of the barrel of his laser-pistol with a thin rod. When he pulled it out, it shined with the red-hot glare of molten metal. “Perfect.” That was the single utterance detected by the microphones.
The Doctor’s behavior was well within standard ranges at the current time. Logs studying his behavior indicated that a trance-like state was to be expected during the creation and maintenance of his ‘psi-tech’.
The Doctor ran a scanner with a glowing pink interface over the gun. Structural scans indicated that the laser-pistol was fully functional. The temperature of the grip was in suboptimal ranges, but prolonged exposure would not cause harm. Only discomfort.
The Doctor was not a traditionally intelligent man. Despite the technological development inherent to psychic inventors of all castes, safety procedures and forethought were not always included.
And so, when the Doctor peered down the barrel of his gun to observe the visual indicator of energy projectile production, he was blinded by the concentrated light. His system was shocked, his hands clenched, and his eyes screwed themselves shut. Normally, this would not prove a setback to the doctor. Energy weaponry of this scale did not produce light at severity high enough to impair vision permanently or semi-permanently.
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But in a way, the Doctor was still killed by his vision. His vision of a better world, with technological advancement derived from the psychic trances induced by innovation using his abilities.
After a moment, the Doctor fell limp on the ground. Between his nose and mouth was a hole. A hole rimmed by cauterized, charred flesh. There was no splatter. No stain of blood on the ground. The only sign of the Doctor was his corpse, his laser-pistol, and the burnt mark on the wall.
And yet, the Observational Recording Machine still sat. Receiving input, visual and auditory alike. It learned a fraction of what the Doctor had created it to learn, but it learned more than he ever intended. It studied the maggots that infested his rotting flesh. It studied the ants who walked in uniform lines to disassemble his packaged protein-bar. And last, it studied the creatures not unlike the Doctor himself. Their many-colored chassis sparked the Machine’s algorithms with their variety. Dyed, woven clothes made of wool and cotton. Metallic exoskeletons with glass protecting an inner core of meat. Strange, fully-garbed multicolored creatures producing anomalous readings of energies unknown to the Machine.
The Machine’s core, embedded deep within the chambers of the laboratory, hummed the Doctor’s tune.
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Psi-tech is known to be… fickle, at the best of times. As an ego-derived ability, it depends heavily upon the cognition of its creator. While it is functional, it can act strangely and bend reality itself. But broken psi-tech… is much, much worse. There are three ways psi-tech typically malfunctions - the death of its creator, sabotage, or being broken by an outside force. A shattered piece of psi-tech is manageable. It will only degrade its function. A device that stops time in a bubble will have a smaller radius when damaged, or only slow time instead of stop it. Sabotage is more dangerous, but restricted to behavior close to the original function of the device. But psi-tech that manages to persist after its creator’s death… is incredibly, incredibly dangerous. Not because of an explosion or combustion, but because of the twisting growth that ensues.
* Dr. Finch, ‘Psychological Inventions’