Kreative Randomnezz: Marian

They say the best things – yada, yada, yada! I’m sorry for keeping people waiting but sometimes it’s good to take a minute or two to get something done. This is just one of those times. Plus I’ve had quite an emotional week and took some time away from everything ‘network related’.

This is another Facebook prompt from another Facebook friend ………….

The prompt is: Common sense would have told you that. It came from Rosalind Ming and might not be what she expected to read, but it’s where the sentence took me and I couldn’t control the genre of the piece.

Let’s see how I got on below …

Marian

Dr Marian Noel looked out on the desolation and ruins a few feet from her laboratory window. Apart from a few sections of the once titanic facility, all that was left were the armoury and science block where she stood on the 15^th floor.  

Taking off her white rimmed oval glasses the sharpness of what her spectacles delivered became dull, hazy; maybe this was a good thing? She thought. Her eyes immediately began to sting with the strain and she placed the glasses back on, bringing back the vision she could do without.

A lot of the destruction was her fault. Knowing that there was a window of time where all of this could have been prevented made her feel several times worse than knowing so many lives were snuffed out on her watch.

The lab had no edges or corners and its shape made it ideal for several teams of scientists to work in clusters without running into each other. The layout made her feel dizzy for the first time since working in the sci-block for 12 years. The white and grey sphere of a room felt lonely in the way a hospital would if you woke up on a ward to find you were the last person on Earth.

Dr Noel looked down at her lab coat, the blood was still there, and it wasn’t hers.

The workstation she usually occupied was covered with inconsistent results and failed clinical trials printed out, for her own personal torment. She had persisted in light of the glaring facts, the multitude of reasons not to advance, and she had done so knowingly.

Pushing the boundaries of science was something regularly done in the sci-block but not by her, she was the careful one, the one who towed the line, kept to the rules. Got teased about her OCD when it came to discussions on quarantine procedure and yet, the blood on her lab coat was still there.

A coffee stain reminded her how powerful the blast was. She resisted the urge to clean it off. The cup had been a few feet away but its contents had leapt out and splashed over the screen positioned nearby. That was the only thing she’d seen before losing consciousness, a perfect stream of black/brown steaming liquid flying in mid air and stopping for the briefest of moments then continuing on its predetermined arc.

What bothered her almost as much as the whole debacle being avoided was the moment where time appeared to pause and then as though it hadn’t … carry on.

No one else was in the lab, an eerie silence loud enough for her to worry filled her ears. Where had the blood come from? Where was the rest of the science team? Dr Jerrod, and his group, Major Dunkley and his personnel that doubled as an elite group of soldiers as well as scientists, an often arrogant group of individuals acquired as a security team by the E.D.G.E Corporation.

Dr Noel pushed stray bits of paper off her workstation, they appeared to move a fraction slower than they should have but she failed to notice and began tapping on the keyboard until the on-screen display changed and what appeared like random code flicked across at high speed, her eyes keeping pace with strand by strand of letters, numbers and symbols until she found what she was looking for and hit the space-bar. The strands stopped abruptly like a kid running down a corridor that’d suddenly been told off by a teacher. Noel pushed her glasses further up her nose and gazed at the obvious discrepancy in the format of the encoded set of instructions. It would have taken moments to rectify, seconds to change and would have spared so much destruction had she not completely missed it. Not missed, she thought – totally glazed over like it was unnecessary.

Her actions had proven fatal, but for who? All she knew was everyone in the lab had disappeared, fled, died, vanished; who knew? Most of the city had been levelled and somewhere along the line someone had been injured inside the lab but it wasn’t her, that - she did know.

A sensation she wasn’t prepared for cradled her in its embrace. The computer screen blurred for a moment even though her specs sat neatly on her face and a noise like a massive generator filled the spherical space she was occupying. The stain on her lab coat began to grow as the sound got louder. Voices could be heard as though they were in the room with her. A dizzying feeling gripped, took hold. She leaned back in the chair trying to figure out what was happening.

The noises got louder, closer.

Labs were built for various reasons often unbeknownst to the people that worked in them and this one began to spin, slowly at first then kicked itself up a few gears until the walls became a blur of grey and white. The centre of the room remained still. Dr Noel lost consciousness.

"She's back!" Major Dunkley said to Dr Jerrod. Both men looked at their colleague suspiciously, having materialised right in front of them.
"Is she d- ?" Asked Jerrod as Major Dunkley cut in.
"Well her wound looks fatal. It must have happened when she set off the device and vanished."
"Where did she go?"
"I'm the head chief of security, I also do a bit of thinking but you're the smarter one here, Dr Jerrod. Hazard a guess?
"It looks as though she ordered the mainframe to shunt 200% more power down the spatial conduit, see the break in the code there and there?” The doctor said pointing at Noels workstation. "That's why she appeared to vanish, although she didn't go anywhere if you can think four dimensionally?"
"She ripped a hole in time?!"
"Theoretically yes but, more of a cut than a rip. Her equations were precise enough for it to be smooth sailing, that is, apart from these two strands here and here. The event was localised to three inches either side of where she is now."
Major Dunkley looked closer at the sequence Dr Jerrod was referring to and, not a man 'engendered' to being surprised and showing it, he sucked in a breath of air as his brain did the math. “If this formula anything to go by, wherever she went, she disturbed not only the timeline but may have destabilised gravity within a 300 mile radius.”

Dr Jerrod had been working out the results as Dunkley verbally put it all together. He surmised that the nuclear reactors some 150 miles away must have been damaged with such a sudden gravitational shift and caused a massive explosion, maybe minutes in their future. Dr Noel had suffered an injury in the process. He lifted her lab coat and found a small piece of shrapnel sticking out of her upper abdomen. On further inspection it wasn’t a small piece but part of a longer pipe that hadn’t completely gone through and left an imprinted bruise at the base of her spine.

Noels workstation went blank.

“What’s happening?” Major Dunkley asked anxiously. A command prompt appeared on the screen reading: ‘Y/N’.

“I didn’t get a chance to complete the equation to reverse whatever she’d put into motion,” Jerrod said staring at the workstation, “I can’t be sure which command is the right one, yes or no.”

“We have to make a decision don’t we? So let’s make it, and hope we don’t make the same mistake she did.” Major Dunkley offered, the soldier in him speaking finally.

Dr Jerrod’s hand hovered over the keyboard just as Dr Noel regained consciousness and made the decision for them.