Chapter 1: EMI
#1 of Outer Reaches Exploration Outfit
Here's a go at story number one. I have the day off, and I got my vehicle running, so I have the rest of the day to work on this. Enjoy
Chapter I: EMI
It was three in the morning, when Mark was awakened by a loud buzzing noise, emitting from the Droid 2 which sat on his bedside table next to the alarm clock, charging on an induction pad. He groaned when he read what number it was, and pushed the answer button. "Mark, we need you to get down to the office posthaste," the white male practically shouted. Mark sighed, and sat up, taking the phone with him, and leaving the last vestiges of sleep behind. Three minutes later, after hastily pulling on a pair of jeans, and a green flannel shirt, Mark padded down the steps, trying not to wake the other inhabitants of his apartment.
A little information about Mark seems to be in order here. At twenty years old, six foot two, 200 pounds, he was the only wolf who had ever attended MIT. Furthermore, he scored a perfect 2400 on his SAT in high school, the only non-human in the world to do so, and got enough scholarships to attend MIT and pay twice. He was a dual major, Mechanical Engineering, and Electrical Engineering, with two minors, Biology, and Toxicology and Environmental Health. Whereas everyone else was supposed to finish their major in four years, his would keep him there at least one further. Needless to say, he was smart, but, having come from such humble beginnings, you would never guess that this black wolf was a genius, as well as he chose to keep it concealed.
The "office" was not really an office, but Mech. Eng. Lab 01, a large room that Mark spent approximately five hours a day in, when he wasn't in class, studying, or eating one of the few meals he took. As he padded down the steps, he failed to remember the squeaky one, and his left paw landed on it, eliciting a squeal loud enough to wake even his soundest sleeping roommate, a human named John. He would catch hell for that, later. He swung open the front door, and walked out onto the cracked concrete sidewalk. Their shared apartment, they being Mark and the three other humans who he convinced to live with him, (not an easy task, considering two of them initially thought he was going to eat them in their sleep), was a block away from the main Engineering building. After two years of practically sleeping, sometimes literally sleeping, in Mech Eng Lab 01, prompting a score of complaints from the original lab attendants at having to stay awake all night while Mark worked, and a host of background checks and applications, the college gave Mark a key to the lab, and made him an unofficial lab attendant, keeping the original paid lab attendants in the room until everyone but Mark left, with the instruction to he who was left to lock up and shut down all the equipment if he left before the next attendant showed up the following morning.
That morning, one of his close friends, James, also a roommate, was logging some late hours, on a joint project he and Mark had been working on for close to a year, while a bored lab attendant sat idly, checking his E-mail. When Mark showed up, the lab attendant asked if he could head out, and Mark nodded, trotting over to the raised table that James was working at. "What's wrong with it?" Mark asked, raising an eyebrow at the hunk of electronic parts that had been sitting there when he left the evening before for his Student IEEE meeting, of which he was the president.
"It's picking up some electromagnetic interference that shouldn't be taking place in here, seeing as how the walls are shielded to prevent external radiation from getting in, or internal radiation from getting out." Mark growled.
"You dragged me out of bed on Tuesday, my one sleeping night out of the week, because this thing is beeping? Oh well... I would imagine that it's a badly calibrated sensor. I've had my phone in here enough to know that there's no cell service or Wi-Fi in here, and I sincerely hope that with lead lined walls plus whatever shielding they installed post-1973, higher frequency radiation won't get in or out. Infrared is out, because I purposely got a sensor that didn't pick up IR, since we'd have to be near it to operate it. You've been here since five, let me take care of it. Go get some sleep.
James left, and Mark lowered the table so he could work on the object while sitting down. He wheeled the mobile Oscilloscope cart over, and pulled a screwdriver from the third drawer, before twisting the hunk of wires and cards to face him. He popped the primary sensor card out, and found that the screwdriver he had was too big for the transistor, so he placed the card on the table, and turned to grab a smaller from the drawer. He turned around, and an alarm was beeping on the main alarm card. He pushed the reset button, wondering if he had somehow tripped an overload protector when he pulled the card, even though the power was off. The beeping continued, however, so Mark flipped the main power switch to the on position, and power began to travel to the various cards.
What sat before him was a prototype for a ridiculously high range radio frequency transmitter and reciever, which had been entirely designed and constructed by himself, James, and two Electrical Engineering Students. Permits had been acquired from the FCC, and, due to the potential for danger, the project had to get approved by the MIT board of directors. It was approved, but the students working on it were required to do so in a radiation leak-resistant room, and advance notice was required before they began to emit any electromagnetic radiation. Therefore, the primary Emitter card was installed, but intentionally disabled.
Tracing the Alarm back with his paw, Mark found that it was set up to sense incoming electromagnetic radiation, indicating that the problem was with the secondary Collector, and not the primary, which he had pulled. Therefore, he reinstalled the primary collector, and pulled out the secondary collector. On the small screen sitting by the machine, a light blinked on, and one off, showing the switched cards. The alarm silenced for a few moments, and then started back up. At this point, Mark growled, and pushed the secondary Collector card back into the panel, before pushing the PanelView button to the EMR Collect Screen. The IR section was blank, and the visible section was picking up the lights overhead, but a curious spike took place between Gamma and X-Ray on the spectrum.
Mark was slightly alarmed. He may have been exposed to radiation, and didn't know it. He reached into one of the larger drawers on the mobile cart, and pulled out a geiger counter. He swept it around the area, and picked up no signs of harmful radiation. With a sigh or relief, Mark put the counter down on the table, and activated the shutdown sequence on the PanelView. A message popped up, which indicated, "Activating Output."
Mark expected the machine to shut down correctly, and didn't notice the warning message until the three cooling fans started blowing over the emitter to keep it from overheating. "Oh Shit!" Mark shouted, frantically pushing the shutdown button, but alarms continued to go off, indicating on screen that shutdown could not happen while the output startup was in progress. He finally gave up hope of being able to shut it down conventionally, and he flipped the main power switch. That was a bad idea.
The output had just begun to energize when Mark pushed the E-Stop, and an accidental power surge from the various capacitors flooded the emitter with energy. Had he been able to see it, he would see that for less then a second the geiger counter picked up an intense burst of radiation, the needle spiking up as high as it would go, before settling down where it belonged at zero a moment later, but all Mark saw was a bright flash of super white light, which, had he been looking directly at, would have blinded him, possibly permanently.
The power to the machine cut off, and the fans stopped suddenly, allowing the output card to completely melt as the heat generated was too intense to withstand. As soon as the event happened, it ended, and then something even more unlikely happened. Three seconds later, Mark felt someone lift him up, and squeeze him in a bear hug. He didn't know who it was, and, being temporarily blinded and deafened, Mark could do nothing other then wait for whoever it was to put him down. Approximately thirty seconds later, Mark felt the person drop him, onto something that felt a lot more squishy and rug-like then the linoleum floor of Mech Eng Lab 01.
As the ringing in his ears stopped, and his vision began to return to normal, he heard shouting, and someone rolled him over, so he fell on a slightly lower, hard concrete floor. He began to see blurry shapes, and someone dressed in white ran up to him, and stooped down beside him. He felt what seemed like a bee sting, and then the world went from white to black.
When Mark woke, he had a headache that felt like his skull was cracked open in four places. He could see once again, and he found himself in a room with no windows, and only a single door leading God only knows where. The room was empty except for some beeping medical equipment, the screen facing away from him, the examination table he was on, and a single chair, in which sat a bronze colored fox.
"What the hell? Mark said, looking down and seeing himself completely naked. "What the fuck is going on here? Where the hell am I?" He tried to sit up, but got dizzy as soon as he did so, and had to lay back down. The fox looked over with disdain.
"You're in the Medical Bay of an outpost of the Outer Reaches Exploration Outfit," he said, in English.