The first time I used the machine nothing really happened at first.
I just stepped out of the pod a minute or so after the lights shut down and everything seemed the same. I mean, I didn’t really know what to expect. I was just curious. But when I woke up the following morning I was two inches taller and almost twenty pounds heavier. All muscle. I didn’t know what to think but I definitely got some strange looks when I arrived at work that day.
It’s not a coincidence that I took the janitorial job at CalTech. For some strange reason I was always good with math and science growing up, but heavily misguided, and after I pulled a 46 month stretch at Folsom (that’s a long story) I had fairly limited employment options. When my PO handed me the list of current job openings for parolees in this area I circled the CalTech job right away. It just seemed natural.
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The second time I used the machine I was transported to some other place. I think it was maybe another time as well. I don’t really know. I was only there for about a minute or two, I think, before I was back in the pod as the lights slowly faded.
I did some research when I got home and I am pretty sure I was somewhere in Cambodia, but I can’t say when. Sometime in the last 100 years is my best guess. The ancient temples looked familiar but I could hear the sound of automobiles somewhere in the distance.
The next day I woke up and my left ring finger was missing.
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The third time I used the machine I visited ancient Rome and stood beside Cassius and Caesar and heard them speak. I don't speak Latin so I do not know what was said.
When I returned I had an identical twin brother. He couldn’t speak at all, but he clearly understood my words.
“Follow me,” I said, and he followed me down to where my car was parked. We drove back to my place and I turned up some heavy metal on my stereo system and then I went to the bedroom and wrapped up the muzzle of my little .22 caliber pistol with a thick wet towel and then came back and shot him in the chest just once, hoping the neighbors wouldn't hear. He looked at me in confusion and fear just before I pulled the trigger. Then I rolled him up in an old tarp, cleaned up the blood and waited for nightfall to drag him out to the parking lot downstairs to dump him into the bed of my Ford F-150 before driving out to the lake.
I can’t have two of me walking around here. One who can’t even speak? What would people think? It’s just not tenable. What was I supposed to do?
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I intentionally timed my cleaning of Lecture Hall 208 until Professor Hallison was scheduled to teach his class of engineering students again that afternoon. I rolled my mop and bucket in towards the end.
“Recently, through the successful research and development of new technologies that we have labored over for the last two decades, I am very proud to announce that we have achieved a breakthrough achievement, one which will fundamentally alter the world as we currently know it.”
And that was all he said. I was hoping to learn much more than that but he offered no further details. He just muttered something about a non-disclosure agreement and a pending announcement.
For just a moment, I thought about beating him to death with the wooden handle of my mop.
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The fourth time I used the machine was an experience that is very difficult to explain. I basically just found myself in a white space. No walls, no floor, no ceiling. Just an empty white space. I shouted out but there was no response. I didn’t know what to do so I just started jogging through the endless void.
When I returned and the lights in the pod died down, I realized that I was now blind in my left eye.
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When I got Professor Hallison back to my apartment a week later I kept the duct tape over his mouth at first and showed him the boxcutter. I explained the consequences of any verbal outbursts that might alert my neighbors and then, when I was confident that he understood everything, I cut a small slit in the tape, trying not to cut his lips. There was a little blood but not much, and I had a baseball bat and another strip of duct tape hanging from the arm of the chair that I had tied him up in, just in case I had miscalculated his sense of self-preservation. I had the boxcutter too. He surely wouldn’t scream for very long.
“What is it? The machine?,” I asked.
He stared at me for a while.
“So you’re the one who has been using it late at night?”
I wasn’t expecting that.
“What are you saying?”
“What I am saying is that we have a log that digitally records all of the details of the machine’s usage. You were fairly clever in your usage of coveralls and baseball caps and sunglasses and Covid masks. That much fooled the security cameras anyway. But we knew someone was there. We reported it to campus security yesterday. There will be a guard outside of the door from now on.”
I thought about this for a moment and then showed him the boxcutter again.
“You didn’t answer my question. What is it?”
He looked at the boxcutter and took a slow, resigned, breath.
“The truth is...we just don’t know yet. That’s why there has been no public announcement. We know we have something, we just don’t really know exactly what it is yet.”
“When will you know?”
“It is impossible to say right now.”
“Well, how can we undo the things that it has done?” I pointed at my milky white left eye, intentionally using the middle finger next to where my ring finger on my left hand once was. It was not meant to be a subtle gesture.
“It is impossible to say right now.”
I used the boxcutter and I cleaned up the blood and then I got the tarp and waited until sundown before dragging him out to the bed of my truck. I had a headache and a nosebleed. I had not eaten anything or slept a wink in the last three days.
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The fifth time I used the machine was the last. I had to kill the security guard just outside of the doors to the lab first. I really didn’t want to do that.
I ended up here in this strange unknown place and I have not returned. Swampland. I have no idea where I am or even when I am but I think I saw a small dinosaur running through the woods this morning.
My left leg was gone below the knee when I arrived here, so I have mostly just been sitting with my back pressed up against this tree. I really don’t know what else to do. I cannot walk.
They say Curiosity Killed The Cat.
I am the cat.
THE END
Bio:
Thomas Wetzel is a writer of short fiction with an interest in exploring the liminal space where things exist on the edge of reality, or just across that dividing line. He mostly writes horror and science fiction. Loves punk rock music and French Bulldogs. Not a real big fan of great white sharks.