A Beautiful Woman of Science and Other Absurdities | ✔️ [COMPLETED]

Chapter 19 - Unwanted Attention

Inside a large, dark, underground room, a heavy machine occupied the entire back wall from floor to ceiling. An equally tall and impressive power source connected to the machine with thick cables which snaked along the ground. The power source emitted an eerie, alien throbbing sound while it glowed an unnatural shade of green. A radiation warning sign affixed to the front of this power source warned that it was nuclear. In front of the machine, two chambers, each large enough to hold a sofa or a refrigerator perhaps were labeled "source" for one and "target" for the other. Inside the source chamber hovering within a force field was a small, but perfect cube of pure, single-isotope gold weighing exactly 1 Kilogram. Cables wound around and around each chamber, which threw off sparks of electricity causing shadows to flicker in and out of existence as the darkened room was illuminated by flashes of light.

Without warning, the floating gold cube began blurring and stretching. Then it started to break up and dissolve. In a final shower of yellow glitter, it faded away and disappeared entirely. The source chamber de-energized and went dark. A few seconds later, the insides of the target chamber began to glow with a soft, golden light. On a large, table-top, touch-screen control panel in front of the chambers, a status indicator with a bar graph that had reached 100%, the words below the graph read: "Entanglement complete." Another bar below the first one crept upwards toward 100%. Below it was the words: "Transmission in progress."

The light within the target chamber became brighter when a burst of yellow particles exploded from the center of the chamber. The yellow particles flew around but soon coalesced into a blurry six-sided shape. Not long after the six-sided shape came into focus, the object hovering inside the target chamber took on a cubic form, yellow in color, and floated in mid-air. The second bar on the graph reached its upper limit and the words below changed to: "Transmission complete."

The entire teleportation machine powered down after the successful transmission and the alien sounding nuclear power source beside it ceased making its unnatural noise and its glowing aura disappeared. The lights of the laboratory switched on now that there was sufficient power for them and a shapely figure with orange-sienna colored hair approached the target chamber wearing large, protective eye-goggles. She removed her goggles and revealed herself as Viviane Fox, the brainy and beautiful female researcher of the National Laboratory. As she examined the floating gold kilogram cube, another researcher joined her and also removed his safety goggles. It was Kylian who helped her with this experiment.

Viviane turned her attention to the table-top touch screen control panel and read the initial data collected.

"The scan of the gold sample has detected stray atoms of Platinum, Iridium and Lead in the teleported sample as well as a handful of missing gold atoms from the lattice. According to preliminary estimates, the teleportation of the sample was 99.999999999% accurate," said Viviane.

"Is that percentage better than before?" asked Kylian.

"Not really, but I'll have to crunch the numbers some more to get a fully accurate count of all the atoms in the sample. Some of the atoms may be isotopes which we won't know until later. I'll stay up late tonight to get the answers," said Viviane.

"Even though I've lived here for only a month, I'm still amazed that I was finally accepted for a position here at the National Laboratory to conduct my postdoc research. The Transportal in this lab is so much more capable than the simulations we used where I came from. Capital City is so urban, so modern, so beautiful, sophisticated and clean. It was a bit of a culture shock when I first arrived," said Kylian.

Viviane shrugged her shoulders. "I've always lived here for as long as I can remember, so I don't know anything else." She smiled at Kylian as if to say "sorry" for not understanding how he felt.