Dr. Elizabeth Russell's lab coat weighed heavily on her shoulders but not nearly as heavily as the foreboding silence within the chamber.
When she showed new interns around the part of the lab she was in now, they always, without fail, asked if the lab used to be a bank. The chamber was sealed with what looked like a vault door but she assured them that it had never been a bank. No, it was custom created and far beyond a financial institution's specifications.
She stood in dim lighting in the inner ring, facing the chamber at the center of the lab. Two large mechanical arms hung from the ceiling over a small metal ring in the middle of the open room. Bulky black boxes, each one a high powered laser, surrounded the metal ring. Cameras lined the ceiling of the room. All were focused at the center.
A wide table lay before her, just inside the chamber. A light brown cylinder sat on the table and she watched it warily. She'd helped develop the material the cylinder was made out of as well as the lone crystal contained inside. The cylinder took two weeks to develop and the company was already shopping it around to the government. Mostly the military but she didn't care about that.
The crystal was the important piece. It took twenty years, two months and 13 days to make. Over eighteen of those years were on the theoretical side, sixteen of them before she joined. She'd taken the existing research, spent two months on it and saw what they'd done wrong. The time and resources needed to actually create the crystal almost bankrupted the company but, if all the calculations were correct, they'd make it all back and so much more.
Her company had funded the Artemis-P13 spacecraft after finding a unique energy signal from an asteroid while sifting through petabytes of public data. They'd almost lost the spacecraft twice - once on landing and once during recovery and the CEO had had his first major heart attack during the mission. But it was worth it. Would be worth it.
She slid her arms into the control sleeves and the articulated arms awoke. Elizabeth ran through the checklist for the controls before bringing them over to the table. With expert control, she held the cylinder with one arm and activated the rotation with the other to unscrew the lid. She placed it carefully beside the container.
The warm white light within the chamber seemed to melt away to a pale green, as if the crystal within the cylinder was eating away at it.
"Easy now," the scientist whispered. The monitor showed a view from the fingertips of the arm. She thumbed the dial to lower the sensitivity of the arms and then reached in slowly to retrieve it. She ignored the frantic echoes at the back of her mind, reminding her that she held nearly a hundred billion dollars worth of research in her remote hands.
Elizabeth squinted behind her glasses when the crystal came free. Even when the windows dimmed, the vivid green light shined like an emerald star.
She brought the crystal to the center of the chamber and lowered it. As she did, a padded clamp rose to meet it. Elizabeth sighed and stepped back, disengaging manual control as the computers finished placing and holding the crystal in place. She drank from a nearby bottle of water with shaking hands and breathed deeply until she felt calm. Or as calm as she could be considering the circumstances.
With a flip of a switch, the lasers began to power on and she thought she could almost feel the amount of energy they were pulling. The computer spun the clamp holding the crystal, raising and lowering it almost imperceptibly. Finally, a soft ping announced optimal alignment.
It all came down to this moment. This one single moment.
Dr. Russell took a key from the console in front of her. She inserted it into a lock and rotated. With a silent prayer, she pressed a large red button three feet away from the key.
To the visible eye, nothing happened. However, immense amounts of data was being logged on their servers as the lasers fired through the crystal. She eyed the gauges and began to smile. The readings were phenomenal, beyond even what they'd-
A low thrumming filled the chamber. She felt the floor vibrate under her feet.
Her eyes went to the monitor.
Her hand shot out towards the red button.
A fissure appeared within the crystal.
She pressed the button as the fractured crystal refracted all of the six of the surrounding lasers into a pure green beam that pierced her skull just above her left eye. The crystal shattered with a loud 'thump' as Dr. Russell crumpled to the ground.
Elizabeth woke seconds later to static at the back of her skull and the repetitive blare of the alarm. The red emergency lights were active and the entire chamber was filled with a sickly yellowish haze. She pressed her fingers to her forehead, sure she'd find a gaping hole where the beam struck her. Instead, she felt cold, clammy skin. She could hear a faint clicking sound and she wondered if it was the chamber's fume hood trying and failing to work.
Dr. Russell pulled herself up and fell against the console. She focused on the screens until she found the intercom. Pressing the switch caused the speaker to make an electronic squeal that pierced her head.
"H-hello?" she said, massaging her temples. She tried to remember the emergency protocols but the alarms and the static were making it difficult to think straight. "Can anyone hear me?"
The air was humid and her throat burned every time she inhaled. Elizabeth leaned over the console, pressing the intercom again. Her glasses slid from her sweaty face, clattering on the computer desk.
"Hello?!" she yelled and, for a brief moment, she thought she heard a voice through the squealing. The young woman slammed her hands down on the desk, shattering her glasses beneath her palm. "Dammit!"
"Alright, Elizabeth, calm down. You've got this. You're okay," she reassured herself, stepping back. Looking around the room, she oriented herself and made her way to the exit. She grabbed the lanyard on her coat, extending it on the retractable cable to press it against the door's sensor. The panel's light was out; it didn't even flash a red light to show a mis-read. She tried once more and then again and then she snarled, letting the lanyard snap back to her chest. "Fucking work! Goddammit!"
Elizabeth found herself hyperventilating from stress. The alarm drilled into her head and she felt the panic rising deep within, mixing with the anger caused by the noise and failure of the system around her. A large handle lay within a recess in the wall, covered by a plastic cover. She lifted the cover and slid it back into the wall.
Sweat dripped from her body, soaking her clothes. The strange yellow mist enveloped her, reminding her of another failure of their systems. She shrugged out of her lab coat and stared at the handle.
Over a decade of lab safety training echoed in her mind. She'd had monthly meetings on what to do in various circumstances and then weekly meetings as the day approached. With the gas filling the room, the exotic crystal exploded into a million fragments and god knew what else happening in the room, she
knew
she should just stay where she was and wait for the retrieval team.
And yet, the alarms continued to scream in her ears. The ocean-like static at the back of her mind was turning to a dull roar and the mugginess was nearly drowning her. Every breath burned. She felt like she couldn't take a lungful of air and the
GODDAMN
lights were blinking as if keeping time with the pounding headache building inside of her. She grabbed the handle with both hands and pulled, screaming when it barely moved.
"Fuck you!" the woman screeched. She yanked at the handle again and again, trying to force it down but it sat there as if mocking her. "Fucking work, damn you! Just! Fucking. Mo-"
The thick metal handle snapped in her hands and she fell backwards on her ass, feeling the jolt along her spine. She stared dumbly at the end of the handle in her hands and then up to the fragment jutting from the wall. A thick vein stood out over her left temple, running down to her neck. It throbbed with her heartbeat.
"Fuuuuuck!" Elizabeth screamed, hurling the handle. It whistled through the air, embedding itself in the inner ring's wall. Her long sleeved button-down shirt clung wetly to her, the white material nearly transparent with her sweat. The folds in the loose shirt smoothed as her forearm expanded.
The woman's eyes were wild. She pressed her hands on the ground and pushed, launching herself into a standing position. Her straining sleeves split to show hardened muscles on her thin frame. Dark veins stood out on her body and the skin around seemed to leech the color from them, giving her a faint green tinge. She stalked to the door and pounded on it.
