Chapter 4: 2:00. Guerilla Science (pt. 2)

Tammy and I sat there in silence for a minute before she finally spoke. "What's with that, anyway? Is that a thing with guys, or is it just some dumb frat thing?"

I shrugged. "Beats me. There's definitely people out there who are into that, but I'm not sure there's a connection. I think it's more the dumb frat thing. Like they think it's a 'conquest,' some kind of dominance display or something."

She shook her head. "Friggin' weirdos."

I nodded. "It's bizarre alright."

"Honestly, it'd probably be less disturbing if it was just some creepy fetish thing." She frowned. "I mean, only a little, but still."

"Maybe so," I said. "I don't get that either, why they're more obsessed with the wrapper than the candy, but at least it's probably something weird about how they're wired and they can't help it."

Tammy looked a little put-off by the metaphor, but shrugged. "I s'pose the behavioral-science folks would say it's all just something in the wiring, but...yeah. Not givin' the creepers any passes on self-control."

I nodded, thinking to myself: maybe it was all in how we were wired. Maybe I was just here because I was destined to be; maybe my entire life was all just a confluence of factors, a sequence of external stimuli triggering predictable...no, predetermined responses from my own...what did Gil's crowd call it again? "Wetware?" Maybe "I" was really just-

"Hey, Earth to Stuart," Tammy said. "The hell're you spacing out over?"

"Huh? Oh, uh, nothing," I said. "Just...stuff."

"Uh-huh." She didn't sound convinced, but before she could say anything more there was a chime from the elevator, and a moment later Emma burst through the door with a small plastic cage in hand.

We both stared at her, then at the cage, then back at her. "You, uh, you were serious about the rat, then?" Tammy said.

She nodded. "One of the bio students slipped it to me for a quart of tequila yesterday. I named him Lucky."

I cocked an eyebrow. "You named him and you're...I mean, obviously you're going to use him as an experimental subject?" I had plenty of questions, but somehow this seemed like the most blatant absurdity.

Emma shrugged. "My family names our cows, too, and they're still delicious."

Lucky, for his part, seemed confused and distressed by the rocking of his cage as Emma shifted her weight from one foot to the other. "Hey, ease up, there," Tammy said. "You'll make the poor li'l guy seasick. Here, gimme."

Can rats even vomit? I wondered; but Emma handed the cage over, and Tammy checked to make sure the bottom was solid before setting it on her lap. She wasn't eager to get rodent poop on her skirt, but otherwise she didn't seem to have any issue with Lucky; of course, the way she told it, she was used to dealing with rats.

I turned back to Emma. "So...you're really doing this."

She nodded with a conviction rarely seen outside of war movies as the three of us set off down the tunnel. "Fate has handed us this opportunity on a silver platter," she announced melodramatically. "It'd be a crime not to take advantage of it."

My eyes narrowed. "I'm not convinced it isn't a crime to take advantage of it."

She laughed, and the light caught her glasses in that unnerving way again. "Seriously? The lab's still open to students, and the only official rules are that we stay out of locked areas and listen to the supervisors. If the supervisor happens to be engrossed in a hockey game a half-mile away, that's not our problem. Besides, I doubt he's even locked anything."

I wasn't really convinced, but I inevitably found myself following along anyway. Why did I do this? Why did I let everyone around me make my decisions for me? Was it really always the easier course to just go along with what other people wanted? Was I secretly desperate to please, or was I just a passive entity, eternally following the path of least resistance? Was I just "wired" that way?

"Hey, you're doing it again," Tammy said. "If you need to have deep inner thoughts that's fine, but keep your eyes on the road. Or let me go in front of you."

"Huh?" said Emma, from up in front. "Oh, is he brooding again?"

I frowned. "'Again?'"

She cocked her head back toward me with a curious look. "Wait, were you not aware that it's written all over your face when you do that?"

"Honestly, you could just talk to us about it," Tammy added. "Or to somebody, anyway. The whole semester you've kept looking like you're halfway to having a nervous breakdown sometimes, but you never say anything."

I pulled as much of a full-body cringe as was possible while walking. I thought that I'd managed to keep my inner angst to myself... "I-look, it's just...I'm fine," I sputtered, my face turning red. "It's nothing major, just...stuff. Stupid stuff. And I didn't want to bother anybody with it."

"Well that's obvious B.S. if I ever heard it," Tammy said. "Listen to you. You don't even believe what you're saying. Okay, fine, maybe it's not important. But if it is, we're here, okay?"

I nodded, biting my lip, and we walked on in silence until Emma came to a stop in front of another double door. "And here we are," she said, barely able to hide her excitement.

Unlike the women's dorm, the science building had a sub-basement, so the tunnel access opened directly onto a hallway rather than a stairwell. The new lab area was on the ground floor, though,^* which meant another cramped but uneventful elevator ride before we came to our destination. And, fatefully enough, it was in fact unlocked.

^* (Not being heavy equipment per se, and also being multi-million-dollar toys that the administration was doubtless eager to show off to prospective donors and promising students-to-be.)

We entered the outer chamber of the lab, a plain room with just a couple workstations on the desks that lined the walls and a central table with a couple binders of documentation, a cup of cold coffee, and a half a bag of stale "Sweet 16" chocolate-covered mini-donuts on it. Below the desks, however, were multiple very chunky double-wide computer towers that just barely fit underneath. The room was pretty toasty thanks to these, and I noticed that the outside of the bag was covered in chocolate smears; probably the remainder were fused into some kind of Cronenbergian mass of donut flesh and melty chocolate coating.

The only other features of note were the door and windows in the wall adjoining the test chamber proper; they were lined with a metal grille like the one on the door of a microwave, but with thinner metal bits and larger apertures, so you could actually see into the chamber reasonably well. We went inside - or rather, Emma and I did; the control room was a bit cramped for Tammy to navigate.

The setup was large in overall footprint, but not actually that massive; there were a couple metal cabinets holding the heavier-duty electrical guts at one end of the room and a marked area of flooring on the other end with a movable pedestal set on it, but the business end was was the two looming, ominous-looking devices next to the power cabinets - high-energy electromagnetic field emitters, commonly used in metamorphic experiments. (To the layman, they looked a lot like a curvy, futuristic version of a dental X-ray camera.) The only other thing in the chamber was a stand in the middle holding what I assumed was the device in question.

The probability exciter itself was...well, I didn't know what I'd expected, but this was as appropriate as anything: a large metal box with an aperture at one end that was closed by a shutter, locked to the pedestal by heavy brackets and entwined with all manner of wires connecting to various...I'll just be honest and call them "doodads." I grasped the concept fine, I thought, but I was a math and physics major, not an electronics engineer, and my only thought was that Kenneth Strickfaden would be proud.

"So, uh, do you actually know how to work this thing?" I asked. It was all very impressive, but I was more than a little nervous about actually doing this. It didn't help that the storm had turned into a proper heavy-duty lake-effect thunderstorm while we were underground, and the rain was lashing against the ground-floor windows in sheets; the mood was just a tad foreboding.

Emma shot me a Look. "Of course I do. I've probably read up on this more than the actual faculty. I am a highly-trained..." She paused. "...non-professional."

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I bit my lip to stifle a laugh, but she wasn't exactly filling me with confidence. "I'm just not sure this is a great idea, is all."

She put her hands on her hips and arched toward me. This shouldn't have been as effective as it was, since she was a full head shorter than me, but for a diminutive she-nerd, the girl had presence. "This is a rare opportunity for us!" she said. "Who knows how long it'll be before we have another chance like this? And you want to back down? Come on, Stuart!"

I sighed and shrugged. This wasn't a good idea, I was sure of it; but then I was someone who just did what people expected of me, wasn't I. How could I let down the person who was relying on me to help her with some ill-thought-out stunt with highly experimental equipment she wasn't even supposed to be using? "Fine, fine. Where do we start?"

Emma smiled. It was surprisingly genuine, considering she'd just been trying to cajole me into this after half-tricking me into coming here in the first place. "Well, if you'd be so good as to bring the specimen into the test chamber, you can set 'im up right on that pedestal there, and I'll get the control sequence prepped."

I said nothing, and we went back into the control room. I looked at the cage, which Tammy'd set on the table; Lucky was sniffing around curiously, blissfully unaware of whatever fate awaited him. Meanwhile, Emma was tapping away at the main workstation. "Okay, seriously," she said after a moment, audibly on the verge of breaking into laughter. "His password is G0Husk13s!"

Tammy snorted. "Really. I think it might've been worth coming here just for that."

Emma chuckled. "Hey, Stu, pick a number."

"Any number?" I asked.

"Well, a large-ish number."

I thought for a moment. "I dunno, maybe the date of the moon landing?"

She looked at me curiously. "Any particular significance?"

I shook my head. "You said a large number, not a significant one. If you want, I can get my roommate to give us a nice long power of two."

She shrugged. "Okay, just curious. That was, um..." She frowned. "It was 1969, I know...?"

"July 20th," Tammy interjected, looking up from her phone.

"Right," Emma said. "Probability of 19,690,720:1, then. Get our boy in there, wouldja, Mr. Freeman?"

I picked up the cage, took it into the test chamber, and set it down on the pedestal. "Well, I hope for your sake that your name is prophetic and not ironic," I told the rat. A heavy gust of wind and rain rattled the outside window with unbridled fury. "Well, okay, for our sake. But yours too, I guess."

I could hear Emma muttering to herself in the control room. "Boost that to 105%, we want the extra resolution...bring this up to 80%, we can hold it there until we're ready...power to stage-one emitters...yeah, predictable phase arrays, that's good." She spoke up, craning her head back to call through the doorway. "Hey, Stu, might wanna get clear. Pre-charge capacitors for the emitters are holding steady at 105% of what they're rated for, but we don't want to keep them there for too long. Make sure the door's good and shut too, okay?"

"Right," I said, making a hasty exit and starting to pull the heavy chamber door back into place. I did not have a good feeling about this, for multiple obvious reasons as well as an unshakeable gnawing feeling in my gut that something was going to go haywire. But then, here I was, doing it anyway...

It was at that moment that two things happened: the lights in the building suddenly cut out, and an enormous crash of thunder accompanied a blinding flash of lightning so closely that it had to have struck somewhere on campus. Between the sudden shock, my caffeine jitters, and the accumulated tension, I completely freaked out. "Jesus Christ!" I yelped, jumping back from the outside window and banging my shoulder on the doorjamb.

In a moment, the lights flickered back on. "Hey, hey, easy there," Emma said. "And that was Zeus or Thor if it was anybody."

"You okay, Stu?" Tammy asked.

"I'm..." I paused, breathing heavily, feeling my heart race. "I'm...alright. But look, this really isn't a good idea, Emma. I'm not sure it would be wise even if we weren't risking interference from a power surge."

She chuckled. "It's not a problem," she said. "This thing is on a totally separate circuit. It has to be, with the load, plus it's way too pricey to risk. They've got generators running down in the sub-basement and it's totally isolated from the rest of the building. Look, the computers didn't even go down." She shrugged. "Besides, the countdown's already locked in; I hit the button by reflex when you let out that banshee shriek. Too late to call it off now."

I glanced at the screen; sure enough, the timer was showing 00:23. There really was nothing for it, then... I took a couple of deep breaths, trying to calm myself. My heartbeat slowed back to something approaching normal, and the adrenaline surge faded, but the lingering unease remained.

00:15

I thought about Lucky, and wondered what was going to happen to him. Well, it probably would be better than being a lab rat, anyway, but it wasn't like I had no sympathy for the little guy. Transformations are never harmful, I told myself. Of course, they weren't always desirable, depending on your point of view, but a rat's capacity for existential crisis was probably pretty limited.

00:10

I looked around the control room. The other workstation was showing a whole array of fluctuating graphs and indicators on the half-dozen monitors that were hooked up to it. I wondered if Emma had any idea what they meant; I certainly didn't. But Emma was peering intently into the test chamber, totally fixated on what she was finally going to attempt.

00:05

I glanced over at Tammy, who was looking at me with concern. I gave her a weak smile. I wasn't thrilled about this, I wasn't convinced this was a good idea, but we were already here, and there was nothing we could do but follow through with it. If there was one thing I was accustomed to, it was going with the flow...

00:02

I looked back to the test chamber, curious to see what happened when the moment finally came. But as my gaze traveled along the wall to the window, I caught sight of the door, and my eyes went wide.

The door was open.

Not much, just cracked a bit. But I realized in a split-second that I'd never pulled it all the way shut - I'd been interrupted by the lightning strike, and I'd probably bumped into it when I leapt away from the window. The door was open, and the field emitters were about to fire. The bottom fell out from my stomach, and I was filled with pure, unfiltered, triple-distilled dread.

Before I could say or do anything about it, there was a sharp crackle, a bright flash, the smell of ozone, and a jolt as the entire universe blinked.

00:00

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