The laboratory was dark, lit only by the glow of the solid streams and a throne of fiber optics, crystal drives and nano-fabric. Several shadows were standing around the throne like chair; a few others are sitting at consoles looking at three solid streams each. The right streams displayed a program going through lines of code written in Cryptic very rapidly, while the middle stream displayed a loading bar at ‘99%’.
Solid Streams are a form of screen with a high level of interactivity. The stream itself is made up of millions of nano-emitters that, as the name suggests, emit light. The nano-emitters can also detect when they are being displaced by an object, sending details of the interaction back to whichever piece of hardware has been determined to handle the interaction. Many solid streams allow for three dimensional interaction, those most on only for a limited distance.
Crystal Drives are a form of storage device similar to the 21st century Solid State Drives. Crystal Drives use a specially developed memory crystal the lattice of which can be altered using a discrete frequency beam. This molecular level storage allows for large amounts of data to be stored in a comparably small volume.
Cryptic is the most widely used form of writing in the world, mainly having replaced the Latin characters as well as Cyrillic and several others.
As the loading bar reached ‘100%’, the shadow sitting at in front of the stream turned towards the throne. He was a young looking man with short light brown hair, wearing a completely white outfit bearing the Atlantis University logo on the left side of his chest. With a broad smile on his face he relayed to the figure standing in front of the chair, “The program is built Dr. Talemir.”
Atlantis is one of the three oceanic cities. The city is renowned for housing the largest technology companies in the world. The university is most famous for the science and engineering disciplines as well as having the most advanced medical facilities on the planet. Virtually all scientific developments of the 23rd century have occurred on Atlantis. For this reason it is said to be the capital of scientific research and knowledge of the world. Located in the Atlantic Ocean it was the last of the three cities to be completed mainly due to it being the largest of them. It is named after the legendary city written about by Plato.
“Let’s not get ahead of Rowen, I’m not a doctor yet,” responded the man with grayish-silver hair, wearing a similar outfit, laughing off the remark.
“Semantics my dear Corren, mere Semantics,” replied Rowen still grinning.
Still laughing at his friend and colleague’s remark Corren asked, “Are you planning on running the program or should we pack up?”
“Just waiting on your orders boss,” replied Rowen his smile somehow now even larger than before.
“Then run it before we all die of suspense,” joked Corren. Rowen in mocking dramatic fashion moved his finger towards the execute button on the solid stream. He turned his head back towards Corren to see if he is would get a response. Corren looking slightly annoyed at this point taped his wrist as though pointing at a watch. Rowen taking the hint touched the solid stream.
The chair powered up almost immediately, “Crystal Drives Online,” announced the shadow sitting at the second set of streams. “External Synaptic Sensor Array Online,” announces the shadow further.
“Begin the calibration process,” ordered Corren. The shadow at the second console taped the solid screen on his right, at the center of the image of the chair. A ripple moved from the touched area to the edges of the stream. A loading bar appeared on the middle stream reading ‘Calibration in Progress 0% Completed’.
A high pitch sound began to emanate from the headrest area of the chair. “What’s that sound?” Corren asked the others. The others just looked at him puzzled. Rowen turned towards Corren once more.
“What sound? I don’t hear anything, you sure it’s not just you?”
“It’s getting louder. Where is that coming from?” Corren began walking towards the chair. The volume of the sound increased with each step. “Shut it down, quickly!” Corren shouted realizing that the noise is coming from the chair.
“What are you talking about Corren?” responded Rowen with a worried look on his face.
“The noise is coming from the chair. Turn it off before something happens.”
“What could possibly happen?”
*Crack*
The sound echoed through the room. One of the others hit a kill switch next to him. The power to the chair was cut. “What the Flux was that?!” exclaimed Rowen. Corren walked up to the chair’s head rest and saw that a crack splitting it down the middle.
Running a finger down the crack in the headrest he answered, “That was sthe sound of nano-fabric being split apart. It’s a good thing we caught that now, instead of when someone is in the chair. The whole head rest is toast though, I’ll go get a new one.”
“So that sound was…”
“Probably a frequency you can’t hear, all that clubbing really did some damage huh?” Corren joked.
“It’s more likely that that is was a frequency above 20 kilohertz, I mean half these guys have probably never even been to a club,” Rowen retorted.
“In any case I’ll go get one of the spares from storage.”
“While you’re at it you should probably have the programmers look at the code again to see if anything in there could have caused this.”
“Good idea,” said Corren making his way over to Rowen’s console. On the surface of the console was a fourth solid stream with an octagonal shaped disk on it about the size of a large coin. There was a glow around the coin displayed on the solid stream with several options linked to it. Corren picked up the disk and put it in his coat pocket. As he walked towards the door he turned to the group and said, “Could you begin dismounting the broken headrest, we can save time that way.”
Walking down the hallway towards the programming center Corren took the disk out of his pocket to take a look at it. The resin colored storage device sparkled slightly in the lighting of the hallway, the university logo imprinted on one side. “750 Terabytes. So much code to be able to complete the project. Seems a bit much, but what needs to be done, needs to be done.”
Corren stopped at a door with ‘Programming Center’ written on it in Cryptic, slipping the disk back into his pocket. Corren stuck out his arm and waved his hand past the black, half cylindrical ID scanner. The words ‘Access Granted’ appeared on the door, and it slid into the wall on the left. Corren entered the lab to see that a lecture was in progress. He quietly walked along the back of the class to the large booth at in the corner. He opened the door to find five men dressed in black with the university logo on the upper of their sleeves. “Hey guys. You busy?”
“Corren!” exclaimed the man at the back of the room getting up from his chair. The man was wearing the same as his colleagues, his eyes were sky blue with a cloud effect moving through them, and his hair was carrot orange.
“You’ve changed it again, you just love hacking your gadgets don’t you, Aims?” Corren said trying to suppress his laughter. The man looked at Corren with a combination of an irritation and confusion.
“So I suppose you want me to believe that your natural hair color is silver?”
“Alright so I’m a hypocrite, but Orange?”
“Did you come here to make fun of my choice in hair color or do you want something?”
Walking over to Aims, Corren took the disk out of his pocket handed it to him. “I wanted you to take a look at the code again. The head rest of the chair cracked while we were running the calibration.”
“Okay, but that sounds more like a hardware problem.”
“I know, and I’m going to storage to pick up one of the replacements, but in the mean time, could you take a look, see if we missed something?”
“Sure, but you owe me a drink.”
“Understood, I’ll leave it to you then.” Corren exited the room back into the class. He noticed that the lecturer was glaring at him on his way out of the Programming Center. “Must have been laughing quite loud if he heard me,” thought Corren.
The hall was empty with the exception of the occasional grad student, as Corren made his way to the storage room. Once again with the wave of his hand the door slid open. Corren entered the room to see many projects he remembered from both previous years and the current one, a few of them only half completed. After a few minutes of walking through shelves of parts and tools he reached the head rest replacements. He grabbed one and began to walk back towards the exit of the storage room. Swiping his hand across an ID scanner once more, he exited the storage room.
Coming down the hallway to his lab Corren noticed that the door was closed. “That’s odd,” he thought to himself, “there is no reason for the door to be closed, if all they are doing is dismounting the head rest.” He walked up to the door trying to look through the transparent section. Puzzled that the transparency of the sections seemed to have been disabled he accessed the door’s control panel. “There is no reason for the transparency to be off. Just what is going on here?” Corren changed the transparency parameters in a matter of seconds, closing the control panel he looked through the transparent section.
A film of red covered the section he was looking through. He could make out three figures in different positions around the chair, a forth was standing over what could only have been one of his colleagues with a long curved sword in its left hand and a handgun in its right hand. No sounds could be heard from behind the door, looking up at the ceiling of the roof he saw a sphere where none had been before. Shifting positions he further saw that there were several figures lying on the floor, lifeless. Dread filled his mind; those could only be his remaining colleagues. “Are they dead?” he asked himself, “is this their blood on the door? Why? Who?” A thousand questions raced through his mind each receiving no answer.
A fifth figure appeared on the other side of the door, apparently facing the opposite direction. Suddenly the figure turned around to face the door.
