1

August 16, 2024
8:29 p.m.
Boston, MA

He leaned over the railing, examining each component for stability. “Check, 1A,” he called down. “Check, 1B,” came the reply from the floor below. Across from him, on the other side of the room, he heard the confirmations from the second unit. He hesitated, savoring the excitement that accompanied each new run. There had been dozens at this point, but he still felt the same mix of fear and ecstasy. A madness glowed in his bulging eyes as his mind raced. Could he be forgetting something? Could there be some unforeseeable instability? Could this be the breakthrough he had been working so hard to achieve?

“Set.” He silently counted down three seconds. “Execute!”

The familiar hum rose from the ground level, echoing off the concrete walls. His heart hammered in his chest as a flash erupted beneath him, pink and purple and white, filling the dark room with fantastical daylight. His eyes burned, but he could not tear them from the sight. He stared at it, transfixed. An instant later, it was gone.

Darkness. Silence.

He stood in a stupor, his senses still reeling from the spectacular brilliance of the light. Slowly, his faculties began to return. He shook off the reverie and shifted his focus back to the matter at hand.

“Unit 2! Report!”

“2A, Clear!”

The mechanism was still intact. He wiped the sweat from his brow as he waited for the second confirmation.

“2B... Clear!”

He nearly leapt with joy. The test had worked. He raced down the metal stairwell, beside himself with nervous energy. He tried to stifle his elation, reminding himself that nothing was certain, that it could have been a fluke, that Emery may have been mistaken. He could not know for sure that anything had worked until he saw the outcome with his own two eyes.

In seconds that felt like lifetimes, he reached the opposite side of the laboratory. His team was already there, staring on in dumbstruck awe. He cautiously shifted his gaze to look upon the results of the experiment. He felt like a child on Christmas morning, so giddy with anticipation that he could hardly bear to peek. And then he saw it.

Wrapped in a sheet of transparent plastic, little more than the size of his head; the most precious and beautiful thing he had ever seen; a small grey rabbit.

“You did it,” he heard Phillips whisper. “I can’t believe you actually did it.” All Wilkins could muster was a quiet “Wow.” No verbalization from Emery, though he supposed she was busy searching for some fault in the parameters of the procedure.

He stepped forward, his eyes fixed on the modest beast before him. Its nose wiggled furiously as it tried to escape its plastic prison. It was alive. He reached out to touch it.

“No! You can’t! It will interfere with the measurements!” Emery’s voice floated past him. He was aware of her objections, but they only existed in his periphery. He stretched his shivering fingers toward the latch.

Emery rushed up to stop him but she was too late. The empty vessel had already been opened. He cradled the ball of fur in his arms, rocking it back and forth like an infant child.

“It worked, Em,” he uttered, beaming down at the rabbit.

“This may have compromised all of our research! This success means nothing without the proper measurements!”

“It worked,” he repeated, this time looking up at Emery with pleading delight.

Phillips stepped up onto the platform and stood by his side. Her eyes lit up as she examined the fuzzy lump. “He’s right, Dr. Emery. It did work.”

“You can’t know that yet. We needed those logs! Sam, back me up on this.”

Wilkins shifted awkwardly on the floor below. “I do not have any opinion about this.”

“Stop squabbling. It worked.” Silberman held the creature up. A happy, healthy rabbit. Even Emery could not help but marvel at the miraculous animal. It was completely extraordinary, measurements or not. The team gawked at it wordlessly, joined in wonderment for one brief moment.

Then, suddenly, the beast began to change. Parts of its body disappeared and reappeared; its center bulged and then shrank, eerily cycling between the two states. It looked like the image from a worn-out VHS tape, its entire being shrouded in strange oscillating static. Silberman’s smile twisted into a horrified gape as he watched the rabbit become something else entirely; a monstrosity, an abomination.

“No! This can’t be!”

He fell to his knees, still clutching the thing, pleading for it to stabilize. It expelled an otherworldly squeal, struggling for one last moment before falling limp in his arms. He relaxed his grip and the lifeless blob that had been an animal dropped to the floor.

Phillips hunched down and grasped at the degraded creature in a futile attempt to revive it, but it turned to dust in her fingers. It was gone. She looked up at Silberman with mournful eyes.

“I’m so sorry...”

“It... it worked...” Silberman lifted his head and glared at Emery. She was trying to hide a self-satisfied smirk under a facade of grief, but he knew she was glad to have been right. “This is all your fault, Emery. Your scanning code must have malfunctioned.”

Emery’s eyebrows furrowed. “My code? It was clearly the re-integration that failed. And if we had waited for the measurements, we might have been able to fix it.”

Phillips stood up and adjusted her glasses, taking a moment to compose herself before speaking. “It doesn’t matter whose fault it was. We’ll find out what went wrong when we run it again in the morning. There’s not much we can do until then.”

The red rage in Silberman’s face slowly subsided. He knew she was right. They would have to try again tomorrow. “I’m still going to look at Emery’s code and see if there are any blatantly obvious bugs.”

Emery rolled her eyes. “You’re not going to find anything, William. We should wait until tomorrow.”

From the floor below, Wilkins sheepishly approached the group. “Does this mean we can go home for the night?”

“Yes, you can go home, Sam,” Emery said, rolling her eyes again. “Get some sleep and be back here early tomorrow.”

“I’d like to stay and work with Dr. Silberman,” said Phillips.

Emery rolled her eyes a third time. “I don’t care what you do, Julia. I’m going to go home, take a bath, and watch TV until I fall asleep.”

Silberman recoiled at the thought of Emery’s home life. He never understood why she wasted her time on banal pleasures like television. He half-regretted choosing her as his partner for the project.

“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow then,” he said, making his way to his workstation and logging into his computer. He hardly noticed Emery and Wilkins gather their things, put on their coats, and exit up the stairs. Phillips lingered behind. She approached him cautiously, trying to enter his field of vision without interrupting him. Finally, he noticed her standing there.

“What is it, Phillips?”

“I want to help. I can debug too, you know.”

“No, no, it’s Friday night. Don’t waste your youth toiling away in a lab like I did. I’ll be fine alone.”

“Are you going to sleep here again?”

“Sleep? Oh, yes, I suppose so...” He trailed off, his focus drifting back to the blue light of his monitor. He was already in his own world, digging through files upon files, lines upon lines, trying to find what had caused the catastrophic failure. He cracked open an energy drink from his fridge and gulped it down without tasting it, his eyes glued to the screen. Phillips slipped away quietly, not wanting to disturb his state of flow. She ascended the metal stairs and walked through the doorway, leaving him to it.