Author's Note: The following story will be a rather long narrative, in a series. Nothing in this series is fully as it seems, so please bear with me until the end. It's my dream to become a full time novelist, so I'll be writing further chapters of this, and another story.
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Life was always complicated, it seemed like many events in my life were tests. My name is Jules Stevenson, my mother apparently loved reading Jules Verne novels. I've always been brilliant, I would see answers around me where others didn't even see the questions. Questions about my destiny plagued my parents minds as I grew up, although I always knew what I wanted to do. From a very young age I wanted to expand the frontiers of human knowledge. By age sixteen I had graduated from MIT and was on the fast track to a high paying career in a laboratory outside of L.A.'s city limits. By the time I was twenty I had my own lab and was dating an intern at the facility.
Celeste, who later became my wife was enchanting. Her family was from France but became citizens in her highschool years. Long, blonde hair went down to her shoulder blades and she has bright, green eyes that seemed to dance in my mind whenever she smiled. For a long time, life was good for us. She got a well paying job in human services at the laboratory and I had several patents for my inventions with the company, so money was never a problem. That didn't stop Celeste from leaving me however, she said the fire went out of our marriage but I really knew that she was having an affair. Still though, I gave her a generous amount of settlement money and in return, I got to have custody of our fourteen year old daughter, Amélie.
Amélie was always more like me in personality. Oh, her mother was intelligent, but looking back on our marriage made me realize that Celeste used her intelligence to be manipulative. My ex-wife often would turn conversations to her benefit, and had a way of convincing people to do things they would rather avoid. Our daughter Amélie had Celeste's beauty and charm, but she used her beautiful mind to understand the world around her, much like myself. By the age of eighteen Amélie had already spent one year at a prestigious college for botany, she always had a love of things that grow and need to be nurtured with time, what I didn't know however was that she was also studying to learn how to alter plants to make them better vegetables and fruits for planting.
When my sweet Amélie left for college a year ago, I was proud but lonely. My work was lenient enough that I could start doing most of my work from home, and that was when I started working on -the- project. The one project anyone famous will be best known for, for the rest of their lives. This invention would send my name down in history forever. You see, I was developing a technology that would make moving cargo by freight or plane obsolete, people could ship items or even themselves in moments from one part of the planet to another. Folding space would be my ticket to immortality.
Ever since the divorce I hadn't dated much, Amélie urged me to go out there and date again, she worried too much about me. Then again, after the divorce I had custody over her and we always were close, to be honest though I was always worried about her dating. I know that most fathers are worried when it comes to the boys that their daughters end up dating, but Amélie was gorgeous. She inherited her mothers beautiful body with luscious DD breasts and a beautiful ass lending her a lovely hourglass figure, add to that her mothers beautiful blonde hair and my electric blue eyes. Sometimes I wished she inherited my black hair because her golden hair seemed to grab the attention of anyone she was around. Summer vacation had arrived for Amélie and with her rigorous college routine she was going to be coming home in a couple of days to spend her summer home relaxing with me.
We had made plans of what we'd do, we'd start spending just a month doing nothing but relaxing by the pool to start. Then, we'd spend the rest of her summer break going to Hawaii, New York, and finally Paris to take in all of the sights and relax. We never had much chances to take vacations together, she took her education seriously as I took my work seriously. Amélie thought she would have to twist my arm to convince me to go on this vacation but truth be told, I had been planning to do something like this with my daughter for years and now was the perfect opportunity. I was close to finishing my work and this summer would also be a celebration, I would no doubt get a Nobel prize as well as a vast fortune for my work. I decided that I'd finally be able to take things easy for once and probably spend at least a decade spending time with my family and relaxing. All of this is why it was crucial for me to get my research completed before Amelie came in a couple of days, all I had left was a few last calibrations and some final testing to perfect my system, all of which I planned on doing tonight.
That's why I found myself in my private laboratory in the house, it was a fairly large home, but inherited. My grandfather was a stock broker and gave the home to me as a wedding present, over the years I had turned a room in the east wing into my lab. It was beautiful, something like a dome with glass windows all along the walls and ceiling, with several purple and red leaved trees blocking the sunlight from making it unbearably warm. Early on in our marriage Celeste wanted to claim this room for herself but I convinced her that it would be of better use with my work, I needed a place at home that not only could I work but feel at peace, a place to work in comfort.
My lab at home was actually better equipped than my laboratory at the company as some of the devices in my home were actually designed by myself and were better in form and function than most commercial lab equipment. I'd spent the whole morning and early afternoon preparing for the final test, and it all came down to this moment of truth, soon everything would change. I flipped the switch just as I heard my Amélie calling out to me from the front door, "Dad, I was able to catch an earlier flight!" The machines fired up and the test cylinder disappeared successfully, I looked into the camera feed for the other part of the house where cylinder should have arrived but nothing was there.
A deep sigh left my lips as I realized I might as well take a break for now to welcome Amélie home, I could figure out what went wrong later, but that didn't stop my mind from going through calculations and variables while I went through to the front of the house. I was in my own little world when I kicked a suitcase, looking down I saw all of my daughters things sitting on the floor. Even the clothes she was apparently wearing as I even found a black bra and panties in the small pile.
I froze in abject fear for what felt like an eternity but was only a few minutes most likely and after my few moments I began to call out to her and search through the house to no avail. I eventually found myself on a balcony on the third floor which was set up with a telescope for star gazing, I looked through it and my mind reeled as the images before me. Cars crashed into other cars or lamp posts, clothes and personal items abandoned on the sidewalks or in the road, and in the distance I could even see a radio traffic helicopter crashing to the ground, sans pilot or passengers.
This justified my fear when I saw my daughters possessions on the floor, I'd made seemingly everyone in the city disappear, possibly even the whole world. Days, weeks, and eventually even months began to pass as I went over everything. I had no clue how to bring them all back but I got an idea for the moment on how to bring my daughter back for now. She was my priority anyways. I'd realized that the power source from the machine with my final testing settings had caused the problem. The device was powered by energy found in the atmosphere: radiation, radio waves, even cosmic energies.
I could bring my daughter back by sampling the energies left in stasis where her clothing was. Everyone had been transformed into a type of energy and sent into a sort of pocket dimension, a plane just beneath our own, and time would stay standstill for them until brought back. The only downside to this process is that I could only bring back one person at a time for now, a long and grueling process considering the whole world seemed to be gone. In all these months there had been no new broadcasts of any kind, no search and rescue, and no signs of any life including animals.
I found myself in remorseful solitude yet again, the only thing that seemed to drive me forward now was a desire to save my daughter, but now that my permutations and calculations were all completed I was hesitant to flip that switch yet again. It was only natural, given the last time that I did I made all life but myself disappear. The only thing that prevented me from joining all other life on the planet was the fact that I had shielded my console area in case of such a mistake. Early experiments made random objects disappear and reappear in unprogrammed locations. I'd try to move a test cylinder and my coffee mug would disappear only to reappear inside the wall, or in another case my computer chair appearing in the water of the pool. I'd dedicated most of my waking time for the past five months though to solving this one small issue, saving one person, and my daughter would be the one to benefit first.
She was the light of my life, the only good thing to come from my marriage to Celeste and so I summoned my courage and my wits and activated the machinery and set it to bring her back. Everything came to life around me, machines hummed and lit up and as soon as it was done I ran and left the safety of my laboratory to the hallway, looking for any sign of Amélie.
Naked, bewildered, and totally gorgeous stood Amélie, perplexed and looking around worriedly. I ran up to her and embraced her before she could even say a word, it not even clicking in my mind that I was holding my very nude eighteen year old daughter tightly against my own body, though my penis did register this fact as it hardened when I held her naked flesh tightly against my own body, her ample bosom pressing to my chest.
Tears fell in streams unbidden from my eyes and she finally spoke, ".. Father? Where are my clothes and my suitcases?"
I pulled my head from her shoulder and looked into her eyes and she could see the joy and relief in them and on my face, "You've.. been gone, everyone's been gone for almost half a year. It's been five months, I've spent.. all this time trying to figure out what went wrong and how to get you back."
