Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Julia's other senses slowly returned, along with the pain. The smell in the air was acrid smoke that choked her body. There was a painful ringing sounding in her ears. She tasted coppery blood from a cut on her lip. Pain from the explosion and impact wracked her body in waves. She sat leaning against a splintered door, trying not to feel anything at all. Others started to dimly sit up and she heard quiet yells and shocked, estranged voices over the ringing fading in her head. She wanted to get up and start helping people, maybe see if the person with their arm crushed was still alive, but her senses were still being totally assaulted and there was so much pain she couldn't bear to move a muscle. In all of the noise a single thought rose to clarity "Someone will be here soon. People in 1A would know what had happened because of the constant communication kept up between bases and even if they were too far down to hear the explosion the smoke would soon drift up and out of the hole. Any second now the elevator was going to undock from the relatively untouched elevator platform and shoot upwards, then filled with people that could help them. Any second now. Just wait."


- By Ashton

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

After a few hugs between her coworkers and watching the audience cheer Julia went back to the console and activated a stabilizing field that should keep the Dark Node safely in place inside the cube until research begun.
"Ladies and gentlemen you have now witnessed the first containment of a Dark Node." She said with a smile.
"Are there any questi-" Julia's words trailed off as her gaze wandered back towards the tank. The blue-white patches on the Heliogel had started to pulse and brighten again. Julia looked once again at the console and was getting strange readings. The pulsating started to give off a low vibration each time, like letting a pencil hit the blades on a fan. It started to increase in volume, frequency, and brightness each time. The crowd started looking at the tank with puzzled, slightly worried faces and began to back away. Samuels spoke up.
"Don't you see what's happening we need to get everyone out of here now!" His face was frantic and he backed away from the tank and ran to the door, starting to open it with the small handpad. Julia kept her cool and spoke into the mike at the desk.
"Everybody please calmly and orderly line up behind-" It was a useless effort the group of people was already swarming towards the opening doors. Julia started to follow them at a jog and she looked back at the tank. It nearly blinded her with its intensity and she could feel the vibrations in her torso. She new something was about to happen. Everybody crowded into the hall and started running up the main staircase, trying to reach the elevator. It was utter chaos. People were tripping, alarms were firing, there was yelling and screaming. Scientists and administrators emerged from offices, some of them trying to calm the crowd and some joined them. Even from here the noise was deafening. KRACKOOM. A wave of light and sound hit her like a ton of bricks and she hit the ground hard. The world started to turn to black.

She woke up slowly like she was a creature finished hibernating for the winter. The first thing she saw was darkness. Lights still flickered on and off from the walls and ceiling of the building but she could already tell it was in ruins. A gaping hole was above her head in the ceiling, giving her a view of the elevator that was surrounded by the darkness permeating The Hole. Because the half a year night had begun the only light coming from above were small pinpricks dotting the sides of the hole and running up getting fainter and fainter. She thought it looked like one of those eels that live in the deep ocean, covered in bioluminescence. She groaned and sat up. It looked like she had been blown into an open office room from the hall, she could see a few other bodies lying on the ground in the dim light, motionless or just starting to stir. Her eyes followed a metal beam behind her that one end had fallen from the ceiling. She followed it to the floor where there was only a patch of blood and gore. An arm twitched on her side and she could only assume the rest of the body was on the other side of the beam. She tried her best not to throw up all over herself and wondered. "What the hell just happened. That shouldn't of happened there's nothing about Dark Nodes we know of that could have possibly have caused and explosion like this." She shook her head in disbelief and thought again "We were in uncharted territory. We thought we knew what we were doing. We thought we were safe. We were wrong."

Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Julia pulled herself out of the nausea and slight headache from returning to her body and peered at the computer monitor in front of her. The group, for the first time since the tour began clapping and cheering, crowded around the tank and watched the Heliogel form around the cube on the pedestal. It formed relatively fast, making different three dimensional matrixes around the cube composed of more two dimensional polyhedrals. It continuously built more and more onto itself and thin, ribbed, structure tubes began to sprout towards the roof and sides of the tank. As the Heliogel formed a black-grey shape around the size of a beach ball and several supports of varying sizes had been created it slowed down and the monitor in front of Julia lit up. The data was very promising as the conditions in the tank neared perfect.

Two of her closest friends, Samuels and Kate came up behind her. Samuels was an engineer and worked closely with Julia to develop the testing room and tank capable of utilizing the Heliogel; he's always been very quiet and rather secluded but after working so closely with Julia he had started to come out of his shell and quickly became part of Julia's group of friends, herself, him, Kate, Sarah, Bentley, and a few others. The group was much like a band of friends in high school and when worked to keep each other sane, lessen each other's workloads, work towards deadlines, and went why had time off, just have fun. Kate is technically the head of the project being performed at the station but after Julia's miraculous discovery of the Heliogel the position has been rather contestable. Kate was not EXTREMELY competitive but there had been slight animosities coming from her direction after all the attention Julia's gotten from the invention. Despite that minor conflict right now both of her friends looked excitedly on at the experiments progress and congratulated her intermittently. Sam gave her a thumbs up and started speaking into the microphone attached to the console.
"As you can see ladies and gentlemen the Heliogel is creating an ever growing-matrix around the containment receptacle, making perfect conditions to attract a Dark Node."

Suddenly the status bars on the screen lit up and shot up and down across the screen; the number indicating overall status slowly centered on extremely close to perfection. The Heliogel began to pulse and patches of it started to turn a sickly-pale blue that was almost white and it changed texture into something akin to fragile, burnt food. The pale blue patches glowed, pulsating, and the once rigid, patterned shapes, began to randomize, melt, and rapidly grow into something more similar to spiderwebs or crystals. The cube inside was now completely out of sight. Without any warning at all the numbers on the screen reached the peak conditions and the Heliogel glowed extremely bright. The audience was silent and as the gel began to settle on this brightness, the monitor made a sound in front of Julia. They had captured a Dark Node. They may have captured the secrets to the universe


- By Ashton

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

The elevator steadily zoomed downwards into the icy rock. The Antarctic sunset giving light above slowly became a pinprick above them with only large porthole-like white light embedded in intervals into the rock and blinking red lights in the elevator cart. For around 5 minutes the elevator whirred away and every so often Julia would pinprick the silence by droning on about the experiment. Finally the elevator lowered itself onto a metal platform that was the roof of a few floors above the experiment room and the bottom of The Hole. A door opened a few feet away from the elevator and a new group of her fellow co-workers accepted the group inside, and Julia was every grateful not to have to take care of the sheep anymore. After entering the cold white floor Julia went over mental notes on how the experiment would run and took an alternate staircase to enter the experiment room. She had a few minutes to get everything set up while the group was being shown what little was interesting outside the experiment room.

The room was laid out like an amphitheater with a tall ceiling and dark grey paint. A crescent moon shape for people to watch surrounded the tank where the Dark Node would be caught. The tank was a smaller circle than the room itself pushed up against the back wall. Inside the tank was a pedestal with a transparent cube on sitting empty on the small grey platform. Inside the cube was a transparent coolant and the last defense they had against penetrating radiation, the other two being their location and the tank itself. 4 large enormous mechanical arms were attacked the tank and a console and a neuro-seat was up against the front. The mechanical arms while being controlled by the neuro-seat user would draw Heliogel from 4 large tanks of it across the room and swing back and lock themselves inside the top of the tank. From there the user would further insert the arms into holes in the floor of the tank and the Heliogel would inject itself into the floor mechanism and out of a large grate underneath the pedestal. From out of this grate the Heliogel would emerge and matrix itself around the cube on the pedestal and fill most the tank, penetrate the cube, and create perfect conditions for a Dark Node to be captured.

Julia sighed and smiled, feeling more confident of the experiment's success every second. She sat down in the neuro-seat and the group began to file in. They all looked in awe at the clean splendor of the large room before their gazes rested on her in the chair. All of them expected her to speak but instead she just smiled and leaned back, letting the neural connectors against the base of her skull load her brain scan into the computer console. A few unsettling moments went by of trying to adjust her brain to the thought that her body was indeed not floating in the air where the cameras were but was indeed still in the chair and she was occupying a machine, but she quickly got used to it again. Through loudspeakers across the walls of the room she could speak to the group of people and because it was her own brain scan in the computer it even sounded like her own voice. She explained to them the procedure and lifted her heavy four arms out of the casing around the tank. She stretched them towards the tanks of Heliogel and pierced the syringe-like endings into the receptacles. After a minute of extracting the required amount she moved the arms back to their original position and swung them up so that they poised over the roof of the tank, like venomous snakes ready to strike. The group looked on in awe, even the investors, and she slowly inserted the arms into the tank. They appeared inside the glass and the tank roof sealed around them. Julia moved the arms into the four holes at the tank bottom and she pushed the Heliogel out into the apparatus. At this point Julia was done and everything was self automated so, shaking, (even though technically she wasn't, a machine for God's sake), she separated herself from the computer and let herself flow back into her body. Opening her eyes Julia saw the Heliogel, appearing as a black-blue-green, shiny ooze, rise up out of the grate and form complex shaped and wiring around the cube. What might be the most important experiment in the last century was beginning


- By Ashton