The Post Sunday Experiment | COMPLETED 2020

Chapter 33

"One, two three..." Ody counted just before he and Penny pushed with all of their might on the large concrete wall. The door swung cleanly inward.

Stepping inside, they hesitated. In the dark space, they could hear their breaths be carried by an echo down the walls of a room that seemed to reach on forever.

Ody pulled out the flashlight from inside his pocket and turned it on. The dim light shone just enough to find a light switch on the wall. Ody knew that if he ever made it home, he would need to replace the batteries in the old thing.

Just as his fingers flipped the switch, he and Penny inhaled at the sight. One by one, the lights from the very far end of the room flickered on to reveal a warehouse-sized space.

The children could barely see the end of the expanse. Inside the vast space there were rows upon rows of books, papers, dissection workspaces, microscopes, machines, and a strange section that pushed to the side and had cardboard walls to keep it from sight.

Ody wanted to cry at the sight of it all. He'd had no idea that a place like this existed. The boy had been mind-blown at the sight of the small underground lab in Cazenovia, but it paled in comparison to this. This... it was beyond spectacular.

Climbing down the stairs before him, Ody went directly to the first table covered with chemical diagrams, photographs, and notes. Penny headed for the blocked off section and slipped behind the cardboard without fear.

Behind that was something Penny hadn't seen before. There were large posters of the brain and models with a shelf covered with human brains for dissection. Penny straightened up to avoid vomiting at the sight of them.

Continuing to survey the space, Penny noticed that there were two tables covering up the section. First there was the brain section. The second section contained things that didn't make sense.

On the other table were... cell phones, a laptop, and disassembled tablets—all in pieces. The pieces were divided up into quadrants. There was a Geiger counter, a tool that measures measure ionizing radiation on the table as well. Turning it on, Penny held it over the pieces of electronics. The readings were very low.

She found another cell phone on the other side of the table still in one piece. Penny turned the phone on and then grabbed the monitor. Holding it over the phone, she found the readings moderate as well.

"Ody!" Penny called. Her brother sighed as he put a paper down and came over.

"Yeah?"

"Do ya remember that science fair thing ya did back around Christmas?"

"Yeah, of course. How did you remember that?"

"Pa showed the pictures,"

"Hm, what about it?"

"Wasn't there somethin' to do with radiation in the experiment? Do ya think ya could do that to this—" she held up the monitor, "and then try this cell phone?"

Ody took the monitor from his sister and opened up the back of it to examine the wires and the circuit board.

His last Christmas at Lake Ballard High, Ody had wanted to find a way to detect radiation without having the clunky equipment. He'd borrowed pieces from the school and pieces he spent his birthday money on to buy online. He'd built his own Geiger counter without knowing it already existed. When he presented it at the fair, he'd blown the judges away. However, that wasn't all he'd learned during those sleepless nights he'd stayed up to figure it all out.

In the radiation, there were certain wave patterns which posed more of a threat to human health than others.

For Christmas that year, Mae had been able to scrape up enough money to buy him a professional Geiger counter. He'd used the parts, to Mae's great disappointment, to build something else.

He'd put the pieces of the monitor together to assemble this screening device that wouldn't only scan for radiation, but also reveal the appearance of the waves. The closer he'd gotten, the easier it was to distinguish the patterns in the waves.

Comparing different objects, he'd found out how objects with more radiation weren't the most dangerous. In fact, objects with tight, angled waves were the most dangerous because they caused headaches and fevers. Ody couldn't find anything more on the topic. However, it shouldn't have conflicted with the readings on the counter... It didn't make sense, so he'd packed it all up in a box and stuffed it under his bed.

Now, he rearranged the pieces and messed with the circuit board, Ody used fragments of the dissected cell phones to assemble the same device under his bed back at home.

Penny held her breath as Ody turned the thing on and it buzzed to life with a strange whirring sound. Carefully screwing the back up, he returned to the phone. He took the monitor and then held it over the object.

Mr. Aldrich, who had been watching them and hardly pausing to blink, strained his eyes as Ody hovered the strange monitor over the table. Aldrich did his best to zoom in closer and read their faces on the monitor. He truly didn't know what it was they were doing.

Waiting a few seconds before the monitor beeped, Ody looked down at the screen. As soon as his eyes looked at the monitor, he froze.

The radiation wave on the screen was so tightly coiled, it nearly appeared to be one, thick line.

Not taking his eyes off the pixelated screen, Ody reached over and grabbed a magnifying glass. He held it over the screen, scrutinizing it with a furrowed brow only to find those very same angles he had seen back home.