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

Chapter 3

Bentley, are the sheep ready to come over?” Julia radioed over to her friend in Installation 1, referencing the investors and tourists to see the experiment.
“Yeah Julia, they’re heading off in a tram right now.”
Bentley laughed into his radio. Julia confirmed they were ready to receive them and started walking down the cold hallway towards the tram station. She was nervous of course and the cold fluorescent lighting and grey walls didn’t do much to soothe her, but she was confident in the Heliogel and confident in her ability to operate the machinery with a brain scan. Julia walked down through a few corridors to the ground floor and finally used a small hand pad to open the large bay doors to the tram station. A black tram materialized out of the darkness and slowly stooped on the track next to the platform. Julia stood atop a flight of stairs and gazed at the people milling out of the tram. There were about fifty of them that she could easily separate into three groups by looking at their faces. One group of men and women in business attire stood away from the others and wore no smiles; those would be the investors. The tourists were all people that obviously had a lot of money and milled around aimlessly with dumb, excited looks. The group of people that would keep her sane, that she felt like she could actually talk to, were fellow international scientists like her that were genuinely curious to see the outcome of the experiment.

“Everybody please follow me, My name is Dr. Summers and I’ll be your guide into The Hole, our creatively named experiment site, and also the main conductor of the experiment using advanced brain scan technology.” She nervously lead the group through a few halls and down a few flights of stairs in order to get to the basement level used to descend into The Hole. The basement level had large windows in the exterior wall so that you could gaze across the entire pit and see the ring of 1A around it. Walkways like the one her and the group were in front of extended from the other 3 cardinal directions out to the central elevator leading into The Hole. They passed a rack of emergency climbing suits and tools and she rambled on about the basement, the suits, and all the safety precautions. As a speech filler and to appease the tourists she also explained how polar night was coming, a period of six month darkness that occurred in the south pole due to Earth’s tilt.
“Do you all really deal with half a year of night down here?” an old tourist in a coat and a baseball hat spoke up from the crowd.
“Yeah it can get pretty depressing sometimes, and today happens to be the sunset, but we tough it out. It’s just another part of the job after a while and six months of night means six months of day too.”
Julia was only slightly annoyed that were more questions about night and day then a dark node experiment. Julia walked over to the left and re-briefed her friend, Sarah, on the details of their trip into The Hole and gave her a few tips for using the brain scan technology to pilot the elevator for the group. Sarah nodded, seemingly confident, and Julia opened the door leading outside. The group donned light jackets once they stepped outside due to the dome over 1A keeping it livable, but near constantly cold. It was eery walking over this enormous dark pit, with the dome riddled with hexagons above and the setting on the arctic expanse. Julia and the group reached the elevator and after radioing Sarah they were ready, began their descent into The Hole.



- By Ashton

Chapter 2

In the year 2063, much had changed about the world. We thought that new planes or ships would be the modes of transportation that would rocket us into the future of fast travel but several innovations in hydropower and engineering has led us to trans-continental hydro-dependent bullet trains or TCH trains. TCH trains run on an extremely cost efficient, energy efficient tracks that run just over the ocean's surface. Large hydro-energy factories run on either side of the track. Imagine a long string with a bead attached to it and 2 large flywheels attached to either end. If you turn one flywheel on and the other on reverse the bead will move to the flywheel pulling it extremely fast. That's the basis of the TCH trains both hydro-energy factories work together to move the train extremely fast by pulling and pushing. The base consists of 7 installations surrounding The Hole, a few miles from the South Pole. You could travel between the installations in trams running in above ground tunnels, there were multiple trams and the tunnels run like highways so as to allow transport back and forth frequently. TCH trains run from coastal installations to major cities like New York City, London, Sydney, Barcelona in Spain, and Nagasaki in Japan as well as trains to Russia and Africa. The TCH trains connect the whole world these days and the ones running here to Antartica transport scientists and investors to the installations to see all the work being done here.

Today, March 13 2063, a large group of investors, world renowned scientists not working on the project, and rich tourists were visiting the international base to see the first Dark Node capturing test in The Hole. Julia was in building 1A, an offshoot of Installation 1, the building surrounded The Hole where she did most her work. Compared to the real Installations it was rather small. It formed a ring around The Hole, being about a half mile in diameter and in some places 3 stories tall as well as a basement. Four large sturdy walkways connect across The Hole leading to a very large utility passenger elevator.

Like most the large equipment at the base the elevator was powered by neurotechnology, also an innovation that took place in the last 10 years. All the staff at the base has brain scans in the computer database, letting them access different levels of security. Being stationed at 1A Julia's brain scan had access to the elevator but she really abhorred using her head like that to operate anything at the base. She done it with the elevator a few times before. You sit in a chair next to a small console with a chair back that goes right up against your head and upper neck. With the chair Julia could access the elevator with her brain scan. Because it's an actual scan of her brain while she's using it she has all of the same perception and even some senses. While using it she can "feel" if there's a structure flaw or knot in the rope and "see" through cameras in the elevator and along the elevator shaft. If you use it since it's a perfect copy of your own brain you're using all the same "neural equipment" your brain has so it gives an extremely eery feeling while you're using it; like you know logically that you're an elevator right now but every instinct is telling you you're a human because you can see and feel. Julia had read about experiments with this technology where people had been operating machines with their own brain scans and not realizing that they weren't currently strictly "human." Every console chair where you could operate something with a brain scan were covered in warnings not to use something like that for more than 24 hours. It had never happened before but it was theorized that using it for too long or being interrupted after using it for a long time could result in going... Too far. It wasn't very clear but Julia believed a separation of consciousness was possible where your original self would live on in your body but a separate consciousness, a separate... You... Would be trapped forever in whatever machine you were operating. It had never happened before and Julia was often made fun of for her beliefs but something about that Idea of being trapped, of their being more than one "you" bothered her to the core.

The elevator shaft is constantly shooting out supports to the sides of The Hole and the chances of it going down or being damaged is extremely small, however advanced climbing tools, equipment, and even bulky climbing suits are located at the top and bottom of The Hole. A low dome covers The Hole and 1A protecting from as much excess radiation as possible for the experiment. It also keeps the winds out and the temperature up so it's only slightly chilly; Julia felt it was still too cold and was the major reason why she would get so homesick.


- By Ashton

Science fiction horror story

Here's the introduction to a science fiction horror story I'm gonna write in a few chapters. I haven't titled it yet but I probably will when it's finished.

She'd found it. The Dark Node. In a remote research facility in Antartica her, Julia Summers, and her team had been searching for a notorious type of Dark Matter particle called a Dark Node. A Dark Node is significantly easier to detect and capture due to its size and ability to withstand the low levels of radiation that are present almost everywhere in the universe. Luckily, Dark Nodes are hypothesized to solve even more problems in physics then regular Dark Matter.

It was Julia's own brilliant invention that allowed them to capture the Dark Node, a chemically created substance she called "Heliogel." Heliogel was really just a lucky accident but Julia DID discover it so she tended to brag about it to her fellow co-workers quite often. She was searching for a substance that could send extremely low frequency audio throughout itself, blocked as much radiation as possible, and that was also self-structuring. The self-structuring properties she instilled in it would be capable of creating its own matrix in a large room that would attract and hold Dark Nodes. She was searching for any chemical combination or solution that would have these qualities and after a few months of research she stumbled on the Heliogel. The substance had everything she needed and despite knowing its formula and ingredients, she knew she had only barely scratched the surface of what it really was but after 3 years of searching for Dark Nodes the team's funding was running low and there was no time for further research into Heliogel.

Radiation is so ever-present, especially on Earth that cosmic rays are constantly bombarding everything and even humans give off some radiation. They were already in Antartica which was one of the most secluded places on Earth from human contact and machines that would cause disturbances. Capturing Dark Nodes required such extreme isolation that an enormous... "Hole" for a lack of a better word, was dug into the ice and rock. At the bottom of the miles long hole was one of the coldest, deadest, quietest, most inhospitable places on Earth. It was at the bottom of the bottom of the world that the secrets of the universe would be unlocked.

There's the end of the introduction, I'll write more next Sunday. Bye.


- By Ashton