Athyyah

Chapter Five Power

"What've you got?" asked Garrett as he stepped into the control room.

"Well, for starters we have a theory as to what happened to them." Answered Higgins, surrounded by all sorts of gadgets and screens.

"And what would that be?" asked Garrett just wanting him to get to the point.

"Well, you said that perhaps we may have vaporized them, so we were trying to figure out if it was a weapon of sorts, but one, that doesn't make sense as there is no way to restrain the prisoners, they could just run off and two, if we did vaporize them, there would have to be some residual residue, a pile of dust somewhere in here. There was none, or any dust at all. No matter how efficient you burn something, there is always some ash left. I'm guessing it either teleported them away or slipped them into a different reality. Multiple universe theory stuff."

All of this was not making any sense to Garrett. He just had five people disappear, one a friend, now only to be told they're alive, as far as they could tell, which was not very far, just not anywhere where you could talk, see, or call them. They essentially died, but they could come back any minute. The purgatory machine... That thought made him cringe inside.

"I see, both those don't seem to likely. Was there any footage of what happened, and does it have anything interesting on it?"

"We do have footage of the incident, but there was a blinding flash of light in there just before they disappeared," answered Higgins, quite frustrated. He had been working at this mess for hours it seemed, slowly making his way out of nowhere.

He replayed the footage on one of his screens for Garrett to see. All you could see was how the walls radiated with light, how it all started sparking, Valerie flying after getting struck then the screen went all bright for a second or two, after that static. Nothing you could deduct from that that hadn't already been mentioned.

"You think you can undo what was done?" asked Garret.

"Sir, I'm guessing that the power source was depleted since the lights have shut off. So even if we could find a way of adapting our technology to this, we would not be able to match the power requirements. Not to mention we have no idea how any of this works, we might end up teleporting more things only making the situation worse."

Higgins had a good point. Garrett started to hate this project. This was not supposed to happen. He should have told the crew to not start screwing around with any of it until they had a good idea what it did. Now they knew, but the problem it solved created a bigger problem in its stead.

"Just how much power are we talking about?" he asked trying to keep his voice calm.

"Well sir, even if we hooked up all our generators, the batters from the vehicles, and the individual power sources from all our equipment, we wouldn't be close."

"How much power?" Garrett asked again, his frustration only getting worse. He was going to have to write a novel by the time he got back up to his shack.

"Well, fortunately we had our equipment setup to monitor such things, and, well, why don't you look for yourself." Higgins answered as he adjusted his glasses, something he did when he was about to give bad news and turned his laptop around for Garrett to see.

The laptop showed a graph that slowly built up, and suddenly exploded upwards exponentially, ranging in the 250 to 260 million kilowatt-hour levels.

"Put it in terms I can understand. How much is that exactly?" Garrett asked rubbing his temples. He did not like things that ranged in millions, especially when it came to power consumption. He knew his home power bill ran in the thousands, but that was in a month, he couldn't quite wrap his head around millions in a matter of seconds.