Stories across the Abyss

A step into The Abyss

"Essia, you're not going to believe this!" John yelled as he rushed out of the laboratory, heading to the lounge where he thought Essia would be, he turned down the corridors that he'd memorized after basically living here for the past ten months. He passed labs, dorms, and trophy cases in a frantic half-stumble, half-sprint, while trying to round one of the corners he knocked down one of his PhDs but he didn't have time to fix that with what he had just discovered. He burst into the lounge of the lab block where he saw Essia filling up two mugs, one covered in pink unicorns and rainbows, the other a solid white with text in small, black helvetica font simply reading "Don't". Essia's dress was far different from John, she simply wore an oversized t-shirt with the name of her old university on it, a pair of pajama pants with little white unicorns peppering the fuzzy pink pants, and to top it all off some massive plush Hobbit feet slippers. John looked like he climbed directly from a stock photo of a scientist wearing a white lab coat, black undershirt, and brown khakis.

"Essia, I did it!" He paused for a second, "I mean... We did it," Essia peered at John curiously, finishing the pouring of her coffee.

"The last time you said you 'did it' you actually just fell asleep for twenty minutes when the machine misfired, so I recommend taking a drink of this," she said handing him the white mug, "Now let's get back to the lab and see if you were actually able to cause something to travel at faster than light speeds, or if you just had another dream."

John reluctantly took the coffee and took a drink, then sighed, "I swear this time I saw it happen, no dreams, no falling asleep. Just a hunk of silver moving faster than light."

"Well no reason to stand about here talking about whether or not you did it. Let's get a move on," Essia shuffled past John, sipping her coffee motioning for him to come with her. John jogged slightly to catch up with Essia and they walked down the corridors leading to the main lab. They had been given a massive grant for about six billion dollars to research ways to get materials to travel at the speed of light, which they had already done, but the new challenge was going faster than light speeds. The method that John and Essia had been testing was charging up a fusion reactor then storing the energy for a while then focusing all that energy into an object and firing it with a two foot thick carbon fiber wall there to keep the object from destroying any part of the lab. The problem had been figuring out how to get the energy output just right so that it wasn't too high that it'd instantly vaporize the materials and so that it wasn't too low that it wouldn't move fast enough. John believed that he had finally found the perfect amount of energy to get it to work.

"You mind explaining why you executed a trial without me?" Essia said with just a hint of frost coating her words as she reached blindly into a dorm and donned the lab coat she took from it.

"I wasn't expecting it to work quite honestly, I wanted to test the fusion reactor to make sure it was working and then I performed a trial just for the hell of it, you know? And of course the one time I do that it decides to work!" John said in a manner that felt like his tongue was a four year-old trying to play jump rope at recess but just couldn't quite do it fast enough for her liking. Essia passed by the fallen PhD, paused for a moment then stepped back to pick it up and set it upon the wall again and continued walking to the main lab.

"It's fine, if we can't get it to work again then it wasn't really a success, so let's go do this," She said taking another drink of her coffee and entered into the lab with John in tow. The lab was a long white room with various scattered tables that had papers and empty fast food bags on top of them, along with a not insignificant number of blackboards and whiteboards covered in various equations and furious scribblings accumulated from the past ten months. The centerpiece of the lab was a long plexiglass tube, about fifty feet long at one end there sat a fusion reactor, glowing a warm and healthy orange, at the other end was a thick wall of a black mesh like substance which at the current moment had a molten ball of silver stuck inside of it that had almost blasted through to the other side.