Chapter 1 - Departure

Three months earlier, an eclectic old man published his life's work shortly before his death. This man, previously unknown to the entirety of the scientific community, had begun to work on something only detailed in movies, books, and other fantasies: a teleporter. He never finished it, but the idea behind it was genius!

The collective scientific and business community had a metaphorical heart attack. Other than those who started work on it immediately, the funding for most transportation companies dropped drastically in sync with their stocks, and the funding for those who people thought capable of producing the first working model skyrocketed.

We are currently the leaders. We have mastered the base concept and even entered alpha testing! We, the Telenaughts (corny name, I know), are those who have been blessed with the privilege of conducting the tests, and we will eventually be the first ones to enter human testing!

This prototype, having never been tested before, is considered extremely dangerous, but to make advances, we must take risks. It is currently the first day of our segment of the telenaught's testing, and I begin to run through a mental checklist of what I should do during it and what might go wrong as we don our obnoxiously orange protective suits. It's the only thing that keeps the anxiety at bay. We all enter the testing chamber and are introduced to our supervisor.

"Hello, I am Mr. Thompson. My assistant and I will be recording any and all results of today's testing. It is a pleasure to meet you all." Mr. Thompson is a thin, old, British man with large, round glasses. Something about him makes me feel like he might hatch an evil plan to forcibly depopulate a city after the testing is over. Especially his pointed nose that droops so much that it nearly covers his mouth.

As per protocol, I, the segment leader, introduce myself and my segment immediately after. "It is a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Thompson. I am Segment Leader Simon Pharrell, and this is segment A.T.4.3. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance."

He nods and continues in his annoyingly British accent. I don't know what it is about it, but it rubs me the wrong way. "As you all may know, today is the day that we begin alpha testing for our latest prototype, D.E.M.E.T.E.R. As with all of the earlier models, we plan to begin testing on inanimate objects, and then proceed to organic objects, plants, animals, and when our work is complete, we will test it on you all."

My heart begins to beat at that last sentence. "Our first subject is this cube." he says as he places what looks to be a rather hefty aluminum cube on the table. I had seen the footage of the earlier prototypes already, so this is nothing new to me, and I suspect that it is nothing new to my team either.

He tells his assistant to "Go get it.", and she retrieves a team waiting outside of the testing chamber. They wheel in a rather large device that looks like the top of a silo. This one looks much bigger than the ones from the tapes, but I can still recognize it as the D.E.M.E.T.E.R.

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is the D.E.M.E.T.E.R. As I said before, it is our newest prototype, and we have very, very high hopes for this one. We believe that we have fixed every issue that the earlier prototypes possessed, and have fixed some that weren't caught by testing. By comparison to the earlier models, this one is the safest by far, and you have virtually no need to worry."

I heard a sigh of relief from one of my segment members, but I don't know who it was. He dismisses the guards and tells his assistant to seal the chamber. "Normally, we would do this behind safety glass, but we've decided that it would be better to do it in person so that we can do this unhindered and try to achieve results faster and with greater accuracy."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That was the beginning of my new life and the beginning of the journey that led me here, to you. Shortly after the beginning of testing, the display told us that there was an issue with the power supply. Our mistake was believing it and upping the supply without more precautions. I have no idea why Thompson ever allowed it, but it caused the very next test to go awry.

That is how we ended up here. I don't know how it happened, but instead of affecting only the test subject, it affected the entirety of the lab. My entire segment, Mr. Thompson, his assistant, and a tech are those that we know were affected by our mistake. We know that there were more, but there was a reason that we started testing on inorganic objects first.

At first, it didn't look like much had changed other than simply being disoriented and the grey matter, but it was so much more than that. Most of those in the suits survived, but everybody affected that didn't have one had been killed, eviscerated, or simply liquefied. The room that we had been in had been affected as well, so we had no idea that everything had changed, but it certainly had.