Project Alexandria

Chapter One

    As the lever was pulled, sparks flew from the circuit box. The whole room was dead silent. Doctor Chance Bowen's whole career depended on this moment. The creation of ALEXANDRIA started as a mere idea, but only a year later it developed into something quite real. The calculations were all precise. Doctor Bowen's brilliance was by far unmatchable by any other human on the face of the earth. In fact, the whole laboratory would be surprised if the creation of ALEXANDRIA was a failure.

    The room hummed as the machine slowly brought ALEXANDRIA's processors to life. There was a panel of four lights labeled respectively as: Initiating, Processing, Finalizing and Online. The light labeled "Initiating" was blinking slowly and slowly turned green after about a minute.

    When this happened, a whole row of ALEXANDRIA's computing components started to hum. And then, almost miraculously, an alto voice with an electrical edge spoke throughout the lab.

    "Initiation complete. Processing stage commencing."

    As the voice said this, the processing light on the panel began to blink and slowly turn to green. When the voice finished speaking, all the scientists in the lab looked at Doctor Bowen with looks of impressed envy for his intelligence and expertise to bring this dream to reality.

    The light turned green and ALEXANDRIA spoke once more.

    "Processors are stable and running, the Finalization stage shall commence momentarily."

    What was to happen next was unknown, for the trials before this one had only reached the end of Processing stage, and then crashed. This was the last trial that his company could afford to fund. The Treasurer of Bowen Technologies insisted that the next trial for the ALEXANDRIA project would be the final trial, and if no success was found, funding would be completely cut from the program.

    For the first time in his life, Doctor Bowen was worried. He grew anxious as all of the faces in the room stared his way. It was at this moment that Bowen's subconscious drifted off into a flashback of all his great achievements. Receiving his several doctoral degrees, his first program he wrote, his first computer, even the first time he used a computer. As all these things were going through his mind, he became unaware of what was going on in the room.

And this was likely a good thing that he was unaware of the chaos erupting from that laboratory.