2:00. Guerrilla Science

It was, as they say, a dark and stormy night. In fact, it'd been a fairly dark and stormy afternoon – the sky overcast, towering black thunderheads visible in the distance, over the lake. The rain hadn't arrived yet, but it would soon, and the wind was whipping across the quad like crazy. I'd had dinner and settled in with tea and music, glad to be indoors and out of the weather. Gil was off at the LAN party, so I had the room to myself; I turned the lights off, curled up in bed, and cued up Equinoxe – dark and moody, I thought, but not tense or unnerving.

Which was good, because I managed to give myself caffeine jitters again. So much so, in fact, that I actually started a little just from having my phone light up and vibrate with an incoming message. Shaking my head, I grabbed and opened it.

Emma: I need you

I stared at it for a moment, before another message popped up.

Emma: *I need your help

Emma: stupid phone

I smirked, then tapped in a reply.

Stuart: What's up?

Emma: No time to explain, just come here ASAP

Emma: Meet me at the library

I hesitated. I wasn't in the mood to leave the dorm room, and I had a sneaking suspicion that this probably wasn't worth it. On the other hand, she made it sound urgent, and I couldn't just ignore that, could I? And was I doing much else at the moment?

There was a crash of thunder and a rush of rain, and it took me a moment to realize that it was the album and not the storm outside. Well, come think, if she did seriously need help, I'd much rather get there before the rain set in. I got up, threw on my windbreaker, and rummaged through the little coatrack Gil and I shared, trying to remember if we had an umbrella. We did, and I grabbed it just in case.

Stuart: On my way.

Crossing the campus at night, through what was threatening to turn into a severe thunderstorm real soon, was a bit unsettling. Normally it was still pretty busy at this hour, especially on a Friday, but the ominous weather had almost everyone hunkered down indoors. The only other people in the quad were a couple obviously-hammered pledges trying to navigate the front steps of the student union.

I covered the distance to the library at a brisk but controlled stride; I didn't want to run and risk getting knocked off-balance by a sudden gust of wind. The wind tore at my jacket and sent a handful of dry, sharp-edged leaves slicing at my face; luckily, I caught them with my sleeve.

Even the library was nearly deserted; the lone late-shift librarian manning the front desk was the only figure in sight. I ducked inside and looked around, but I saw no sign of Emma. Great; this had better not be a prank. I pulled out my phone.

Stuart: Here now. Where are you?

There was a moment's pause.

Emma: In the back, by the AV rooms

Emma: but keep quiet

I went to the far end of the building. The staff had turned most of the lights off, and it was dim and shadowy in the stacks. Other than the light filtering back from the front-desk area, there was one source of illumination: the soft, flickering glow of a TV in one of the three little viewing compartments, visible through the window in the door. It was just light enough for me to make out two figures outside of the room: one bent down by the door, as if trying to keep a low profile, the other in a wheelchair.

"Jeez, Emma," I said, walking up to them, "did you drag Tammy out here for this, too? In this weather? What even is this?"

"Shhh!" she said, putting a finger to her lips. I shrugged. "Relax, these are soundproofed. What are you spying on, anyway?"

She motioned for me to take a peek into the room. I glanced through the narrow window at the screen. "A hockey game. Really. That's…hey, is that Dr. Curtis?"

I looked closer; it was him, alright. Most of his gangly 6"4" figure was slumped into the little couch, but there was no mistaking his hair, which hit the most remarkable midpoint between Larry Fine and a pharaoh's headdress; it was going grey from his original auburn, which made it look like he had a full head of copper shavings. He didn't see me; the couch was perpendicular to the door, and in any case he was laser-focused on the TV.

"Okay," I said, "but what of it? Guy's got as much of a right to use the facilities here as anybody."

Emma turned her head toward me, and her glasses glinted in the dim light again; she grinned. "Yeah," she replied in a low voice, "but we're not supposed to be minding the labs in the science building tonight."

I stifled a laugh. "Hah, okay, he's skipping work for this? Seriously."

She nodded and stood up, quietly stepping away. "First game of the season; I guess he couldn't bear to miss it. C'mon, this way." She slipped back into the stacks and motioned for us to follow her.

I glanced down at Tammy, wondering if she could even fit between the narrowly-spaced bookshelves. "Seriously," I said, "did she drag you out into a storm to show you this?"

She chuckled and shook her head. "Nah, I was already here. Difference between you and me is, I would've told her to piss off if she'd done that."

I shrugged. "Well, she made it sound like it was something important that she needed help with, not…whatever this is."

Tammy nodded as she took off after Emma. As it turned out, the stacks were navigable for her, barely. "Same here," she said. "I guess I'm not as bothered by it since I didn't have to go out in the—oof!"

She came to an abrupt stop, and I nearly stumbled into the back of the wheelchair before catching myself. She looked down and sighed. "Oh, for God's sake. Sorry, hang on a sec."

She bent forward, reaching for something. I looked over her shoulder; someone had left a chunky hardcover on the floor next to the shelf rather than put it back. The casters on the front of the chair were set closer together than the big wheels (for maneuverability…?) and had missed it, but the left wheel had gotten hung up on it; the chair was tilted and the handle on the other side was jammed into the bookshelf, so she couldn't easily back off it.

After fumbling with it for a bit, it was clear that Tammy couldn't dislodge the book. She'd hit it open-side first, and the spine had skewed back so that a bunch of the pages were partly exposed and the wheel had climbed right up the resulting slope. The whole thing now made a pyramid that the wheel was set almost directly on top of, but not quite far enough to go over the peak; it was wedged in there pretty good, alright.

She started swearing under her breath. I knelt down and reached under to see if I could get to it; nope, I couldn't get a purchase. Cautiously, I got down on my hands and knees and slipped underneath. This got me access to the book, but it was impossible to remove it with the pages all spread out underneath the wheel. I could grab the free end and yank it out, but that'd wreck it completely. (But then, the spine was probably already shot…)

As I pondered this, I caught sight of her lower legs, just a few inches from my face. She wore a skirt that stopped at mid-calf and relatively thin stockings, so I could see the shape pretty clearly. I was a bit surprised; they were atrophied, but not as frail and spindly as some handicapped people I'd seen. I thought back to what she'd said at lunch the other day; did she spend much time exercising them?

I wondered why she bothered, if her goal was to fix this by therapeutic transformation. Though if it was hard to predict outcomes, it was hard to say for sure that you might not correct paraplegia without actually changing or regenerating the affected limbs, so maybe she was taking care of herself just in case…?

"Hey, dumbass, quit breathin' on me and get up here and pull me off this thing already."

I started, and my head hit the underside of the chair. Thankfully, I was under the seat and not the metal frame, but there was a yelp from Tammy as I accidentally head-butted her butt. I scrambled out from underneath her and stood up, clunking my head on one of the handles in the process. "Ow," I groaned.

After taking a moment to collect myself and make sure I wasn't bleeding, I took her wheelchair by the handles. I had to lift the right side away from the bookshelf in order to be able to back it off the book, but in a moment she was free and clear. "Um, sorry," I said sheepishly.

She shrugged and reached down for the offending hardcover. "Selected Works of Charles Dickens," she said. "Well, at least I don't have to feel bad about it."

I laughed. "Not a fan?"

"Oh, don't get me started. It's all bleak miseryguts nonsense with one contrived tragedy piled on top of another, except for the Christmas one where the morality pet is a dumb little crippled kid who somehow dies of being crippled in the bad ending." She reached up and set the battered book on the shelf, not bothering to find where it actually went, then glanced back at me, looking a little embarrassed herself. "Um, thanks."

I nodded. "No problem."

She wheeled her way out of the stacks and we looked around to find Emma, who was standing by the little service elevator at the very back, looking annoyed.

"What took you so long?" she said, as she punched the call button. "C'mon, we only have so much time!"

I could hear Tammy's teeth grit from several feet away, but she kept her mouth shut and contented herself with a shrug and a Look fired in Emma's direction. "You wanna explain what we're actually doing here, Em?"

"Guerrilla science. Now come on, guys!" The elevator door opened right on cue and she ushered us in. It was only just big enough for the three of us to fit inside, but we did fit, albeit squashed up against each other just a little too close for comfort. Fortunately, the ride down to the basement wasn't a long one.

To my surprise, though, we actually went past it. I glanced at the panel. "Wait, I didn't know this building even had a sub-basement."

Emma nodded. "They built most of the campus back in the '50s, when everyone was putting bomb shelters in. These days it's mostly just extra storage, but the neat thing is that it has access to the steam tunnels."

I stared at her. "The what now?"

"Utility tunnels for heating and water and stuff," Tammy said. "Most of the buildings here are connected by them. I actually came that way tonight, what with the weather. It's one of the things I liked about the school – come winter, I won't have to deal with snow and ice for the most part."

I was a bit surprised, I had to admit. I hadn't even heard about these before. "Seems like it'd be simpler to just go to college in a warmer state."

She shrugged. "Maybe, but this way I'm still day-trip distance from my family. Plus, the nice thing about a place where spring is just cold and muddy and wet is that all the idiots go somewhere else for spring break." She frowned. "Well, most of the idiots. My roommates are planning to host a workshop out of our dorm room. Fortunately, I'm gonna be back home."

Emma and I chuckled, but before either of us could say anything, the elevator car lurched to a halt.

---

The elevator chimed and the doors opened onto a large, high-ceilinged storeroom filled with yet more shelves, filled with stacks of filing crates rather than books left out for browsing. Following Emma's lead, we made our way to the far corner, to a door leading to a long hallway. It was surprisingly ordinary; wide enough for two people to pass, with a ceiling that wasn't too low. (Though the dense cluster of pipes and conduits running overhead did lend it a certain ambiance.)

"Alright, let's book it," Emma said. "Gotta make one stop before our destination, but it's on the way."

We took off down the tunnel at a brisk stride. It seemed to stretch on for roughly forever, mostly because there were no points of reference. Normal hallways have side doors and junctions to mark the distance by, but an underground service tunnel doesn't exactly bristle with attractions. We did pass one intersection leading off to the left someplace, but Emma breezed past it without a second look.

I was impressed by how well Tammy kept pace; her legs might be atrophied, but a glance at her toned arms showed that she still got plenty of exercise moving around. I wondered why she didn't just get an electric wheelchair, but that was probably the answer right there.

After some ways – three hundred yards? A quarter-mile? I couldn't tell – we reached an intersection with another hallway leading off to the right and a doorway to the left. Emma signaled for us to stop. "This is the women's dorm," she said. "Back in a minute; just gotta grab something." She turned to me. "Oh, and if you ever want to do a panty raid, you gotta find another entrance. The door to the dorm proper has a keycard lock."

"It wasn't exactly on my bucket list," I said, a bit miffed at the assumption; but Emma was already gone. I heard the chime of another elevator being called, crossed my arms against my chest, and leaned back against the wall. "Geez."

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, though."

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."

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. There're 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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