After the smoke cleared, Zach took
stock of his surroundings. The pressure gauges showed no obvious malfunction,
though he always had to be wary of bugs in the sensing software – no matter how
much the programming disciplines advanced, there was always a bug lying in wait
to ruin your weekend. He checked the monitor below, and tried not to get his
hopes up at the words “Test completed successfully,” green and flashing in a
non-offensive font. At least they didn’t
use Comic Sans, Zach mused, this is a
scientific establishment, not a lemonade stand.
Still
actively tamping down his excitement, Zach entered the retraction command for
the lead shield between him and the observation area. Theory said it wasn’t
necessary – the inch-thick safety glass should have been more than sufficient
for this experiment – but OSHA had different ideas of necessary than the
scientific establishment. With several loud clunks and the whine of a motor,
the heavy shielding began to retract, glacially creeping up towards the ceiling.
Up, not down – if the motor failed, they needed to rely on gravity to keep the
shield deployed rather than cause it to retract. Had it come from the floor,
they could have used a hydraulic system and saved a few thousand dollars of the
taxpayer’s money, but no amount of historical data would overcome the desires
of regulators with a paycheck from a subcontractor with a manufacturing
subsidiary.
Zach
checked the lab log, making a few notations marking the time and parameters of
the experiment. So much time wasted
already on a pipe dream. How long are we going to beat our heads against this?
He idly flipped through the prior entries in the book. Hundreds of tests,
thousands of parameter changes, and no results. Increase frequency here,
decrease ionization there, perform this experiment in a vacuum, perform this
one in a magnetic field, and still they were no closer to developing the
theorized element. Elerium-115 - or Ununpentium in the uninventive language of
the IUPAC, which refused to name an element based on a reference to an obscure
science fiction video game - was supposed to be some kind of energy panacea,
doing for society what the vaporous cold fusion of decades prior was believed
to have made possible. Cold fusion had of course never proven fruitful,
researchers never able to cross the break-even point of energy generation. Of
course there were still those researches spending time with the now-fringe
idea, but they didn’t get as much funding as they used to.
Many
scholars pointed to cold fusion as a cautionary tale against cure-alls, calling
the current quest a pursuit of energetic snake oil. Zach didn’t think they were
very far off in their estimation, but as a lowly doctoral student he had to do
as he was told, or else he might lose his research fellowship and the
associated funding. With most of the funding coming from an oblivious
government, the department used this lab as a cash-cow – and also a convenient
way to dispose of mouthy physics students. Sure,
I probably shouldn’t have spoken out so strongly against string theory, but
it’s codified voodoo! Zach kicked himself yet again, doodling on a notepad
to distract himself.
Due to the
height of the console, it took a minute for the lab to be visible from an
observer in the laboratory chair. It was the soft green glow that caught his
attention first, his eyes snapping to the window with magnetic force. No fucking way. He quickly flipped
through the prior experiments, and searched through the more exhaustive logs in
the lab’s database, but none mentioned any kind of emission on the visible
spectrum. He looked up, still disbelieving as the shield finished its slow
climb to the heavens, and saw the glowing green lump sitting upon the concrete
pedestal in the test chamber. No.
Fucking. Way.
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