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