Human Error

I don’t have a lot of time to post this.

There’s been a bad accident, really bad, and the whole bunker’s been placed on lockdown. There’s no getting in or out, and I may not even be able to send emails soon, so I need to get all this down in case I don’t make it out of here.

Okay. Calming breath. Let me back up and explain.

Like I said last time, we’d proved teleportation could work. After a week of checking Arthur’s remains for abnormalities (there weren’t any), the labcoats sent about 20 more small mammals through the teleportation wormhole, and they all came through fine.

So this morning, they decided it was time to move on to humans. I guess usually they’d usually do a few thousand more tests before making that leap, but the top brass has been threatening to shut down the whole project, so Plankton decided he needed some definitive results.

The soldiers drew straws, and three of them were selected to go through the teleporter: let’s call them Wilbur, Neil, and Gus. They all put on a more streamlined version of spacesuit, complete with air supply, video recorders, and a couple defensive weapons. (In case of what, I don’t know, but it’s the military. They need their guns.)

All three were strapped into the seats, and Plankton started up the teleporter. The wormhole appeared just like it had for the last week, and the army guys were sucked inside the funnel, disappearing.

That’s when everything went to hell. The second wormhole appeared, but when the seats shot out, they were empty. A whole minute passed. Still nothing. General Hard-Ass suggested sending a camera in, but just as he and Plankton started to argue over the merits of this, an explosion ripped out of the second wormhole.

It wasn’t your classic, Hollywood-action fireball, either. It appeared to be made of translucent green plasma, coating the lab equipment. Directly following that, one of the soldiers appeared out of the wormhole: Gus.

His face was streaked with Mountain Dew-colored plasma, and his suit looked like it had been through the Hundred Years’ War. He was pulling himself out of the wormhole by his hands, when his lower end appeared to catch on something. He screamed.

Claire was the first one to react. She ran out of the control room, not even bothering to put on a contamination suit. When I saw she was going to help Gus, I ran down after her.

Gus was scrabbling at the ground, eyes horse-wild behind his slime-covered visor. Claire and I pulled on his arms, but whatever had his other end wasn’t letting go. A hulking shape started to appear in the dim murk of the wormhole.

“Hold on to him!” I yelled, and grabbed a fire axe off the wall. The thing was in the wormhole was getting closer. I still couldn’t see what it was, but I sure as shit didn’t want to find out.

I brought the axe down on the dark energy supply hose.

Time and gravity seemed to suspend for a long moment. As the axe split the hose, a purply-black substance floated into the room, cascading over my chest, causing everything it touched to float lazily into the air. It was actually a pretty peaceful, if you took away the whole “abandoning the laws of physics” terror that latched on to my brain.

I looked around, seeing Claire almost had Gus’ entire body through the wormhole. Only his legs were still inside, just below the knee. I wondered briefly why they had chosen to make the teleporter suits that exact shade of grey, and then the contamination mechanism kicked on.

The dark energy was sucked from the room, everything around me crashed to the ground, and without the power to sustain it, the teleporter folded in on itself, crushed within the first wormhole. The second wormhole closed too, neatly severing Gus’ legs.

There was a second explosion, this one completely silent. A ring of blue energy shot through the room, and as it passed through me, the lab, the people, even the machines seemed to break into their primal components and be spread out along an infinite spectrum. Maybe it was the shock, but for a second I thought I could see everything at once – the individual hairs on Claire’s head, the cloven marrow in Gus’ leg bones, the rivets in the screws of one of the seats.

Then everything snapped back into place, skin upon muscle upon bone, and I locked eyes with Claire. She looked just as shocked as I felt.

“You’re so pretty,” I blurted, then blacked out.

And I woke up here, in the sick bay. No idea how long I’ve been out or even if I’m still alive in the traditional sense. Thankfully, they left my phone in my pocket, so I was able to get all this –

I can hear them at the door. This may be the last thing I write. If it is, make sure my story gets out. Don’t let them cover this up. Tell everyone –