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