They’ve done it.
It's been a week of nearly round-the-clock tests, failures, and really messy clean-ups by Your Humble Narrator, but Black Project 9 has successfully teleported a hamster named Arthur.
After my near-miss kiss with Doc Hotness -- sorry, Claire – she threw herself back into her work, doing calculations for nearly two days straight. At the end of it, it only took them imploding a dozen or so small mammals before they worked out the kinks.
And at 9:15 PM last night, they teleported Arthur. He’s a cute little guy with tan and white spots, and I was already envisioning sponging his adorable fur into a bucket when this test failed.
Claire placed him gently in a little car seat thingy with a harness, and turned on the teleporter. (I think they’d realized I knew what was going on, so I was allowed to watch.) The teleporter itself is a metal cylinder about 15 feet wide and 20 yards long. It’s wrapped in power cables and ends in a six-foot-thick titanium plate. The labcoats have nicknamed the plate “Splat City,” because when a test doesn’t work, that’s where the subject ends up in a Jackson Pollock-esque puddle of gore.
Again, I’m fuzzy on the details, but the general idea is the cylinder opens a wormhole in the titanium plate, the subject steps through, and comes out the terminus of the wormhole on the opposite side of the room.
That’s if it works. When the calculations are a teensy hair off, the subject is simply sucked into the event horizon, turned inside out, and flattened at a sub-atomic level. It’s a hell of a diet, but you won’t look very good in a bathing suit.
I’m sure all this was going through Claire’s head as she strapped little Arthur to his car seat. But she came back into the control room looking very professional, and ordered the team to power up the machine.
The cylinder started to spin, drawing power from the dark matter reservoirs on the other side of the bunker. Within minutes, it was rotating like a nuclear-powered carnival ride. Arthur’s car seat was suspended in the middle by a gimble, and a monitor showed that he was pretty calm despite the incredible noise.
A black spiral appeared in the center of the titanium plate. The labcoats started to get excited. This had happened a couple times before, but it had never stabilized. This time, however, the spiral grew and grew.
Suddenly, the titanium plate was sucked down an endless funnel. The scientists all held their breath, and Plankton punched a button labeled “Release.”
Arthur’s car seat unhooked, and he rocketed down the metal cylinder, vanishing into the wormhole.
A millisecond went by. Then two. The silence was deafening, especially considering the teleporter was making an awful racket.
Then there was a huge flash of blue light, a deafening crack like thunder, and a second miniature wormhole opened across the testing room. Arthur’s car seat shot out of the funnel, was caught by a sling contraption, and with the reflexes of a much younger man, Professor Plankton killed the power.
The cylinder stopped turning and the wormholes vanished back into nothingness. Still, the labcoats held their breath. Arthur could look like a microwaved can of Spaghetti-O’s for all we knew.
“Claire,” the professor said, and she quickly made her way into the testing room to check the hamster.
“He’s okay!” she shouted, and the scientists erupted into cheers. Champagne corks popped, Fred and Barney kissed like high school kids, and even General Hard-Ass allowed himself a thin approximation of a grin.
Claire came back into the control room, cradling Arthur and beaming at me.
“Simplicity,” she breathed before being surrounded by the other labcoats.
And sure, the little tan-and-white furball’s insides are being dissected and probed as we speak, but he’ll always be remembered as the first living thing to travel 50 yards in two seconds. And I, the lowly janitor, was there to witness it.
Now the real fun begins. Once the tests are done and a couple more hamsters are sent through, BP9’s moving on to the main event:
They’re going to teleport a human.
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