Cedar Sanderson is doing N'inktober, so I'm going to follow along and do what I've been trained to do by the Raconteur Press Postcard books: come up with a story to match her visual prompts. I can't guarantee that I'll have a complete story for every image, but I'm going to at least try to come up with a scene, a start, or an idea!
Freeze Prison
They had ended up calling it The Machine. Carl had wanted to call it an inertialess frame adjustor. Abahjit insisted that made it sound like a carpenter’s tool. Wu had argued with one side, then the other. He’d started calling it The Machine just so they could talk about it without getting into an argument, and the name had stuck.
Ironically, it really was an inertialess frame adjustor. Sort of. Carl and Abahjit had handled the math. Wu had sprinkled in some physics. Stir, let sit for a decade, then call in your old buddy Tom to put the damn thing together a mile underground at the bottom on an abandoned mine.
Phrases like “Nobel prize” and “paradigm shift” were thrown about freely.
The plan was simple: Place a small cube of carbon on a pedestal. Hook up The Machine. Turn it on. If it all worked out, the cube would be immediately shifted into an entirely different frame of reference.
“A inverse relativistic frame!” Carl had insisted.
“A curled-up temporal dimension!” Abahjit had countered.
Wu had rolled his eyes.
He’d ignored them all, calibrating connections and debugging circuits. All he knew was that when they turned it off, he’d have to measure the carbon-14 ratio in the sample to determine the time difference between the frames. They weren’t quite sure how big a difference they would see. A hundred? Two Hundred? A thousand? Whenever he asked about it, Carl would hem and haw, saying, “The math’s tricky.”
Tricky for them, maybe. All he had to do was turn it on, then turn it off. Simple.
Something had gone wrong. Maybe Carl or Abahjit had flubbed the math. Maybe Wu had rounded up when he should have rounded down. Maybe he had crossed some wires somewhere. He flipped the switch and was immediately hurled to the ground.
He thought there had been an explosion of some sort. The lights strobed like he was at a rave, then everything went black. He’d shouted, rolled over, then bounced off of something rubbery and resilient that made his teeth ache.
When he’d scrambled away from it and picked himself up, he noticed a flickering light illuminating an oversized whiteboard. The words on it were printed in Carl’s careful block printing.
Tom. We’re not sure what happened. We can see you, but you’re frozen.
He blinked. The message was gone. A new one was in its place.
Wu says your personal frame is running at 100000x ours. One second of your time is one day for us. It’s been two months. We’re working on it. Wait.
Wait? He’d barely had time to register what was going on before the sentences disappeared, replaced by another and then another, a slow series of words flickering by.
We can’t get you out.
We tried. We really did. Believe me.
The frame gap keeps widening.
The whiteboard went blank, flickering in imaginary light before words reappeared.
It’s been a year. Wu killed himself. He couldn’t live with it.
The sign disappeared. His heart pounded as he waited for the next. Gray velvet textures rippled across the darkness. After what seemed like an eternity, new words appeared.
Abahjit’s funeral was last week. Heart attack. Worked himself to death trying to comprehend you. He would come and watch you, sitting and thinking for days. Years.
He read the board once, twice, three times as he slumped to the ground.
“What…” He shook his head.
The whiteboard disappeared. In its place was a granite wall that sparkled and glinted like diamond dust, dark words etched deep into the stone.
I worked it out. Why Wu killed himself, I mean. You’re a bomb, Tom. Relativity. The gap’s still widening. By the time you finish reading this, you’ll have accumulated an immense amount of energy in your frame. If I disrupt the field, you’ll leave a hole. A big one. Maybe punch all the way to the core of the Earth.
So I’m sealing you in. It’s either you, or the world.
God forgive me. I don’t expect you to.
By the time you finished reading this, I’ll be long dead. Civilizations will have come and gone. But not you! There’s a chance you’ll still be around when the sun goes nova. That should be a show. I can’t guarantee it, though. You know why.
He couldn’t help himself. He laughed out loud at that, then laughed some more as he realized he was getting the literal last laugh. He laughed at the absurdity of it all; laughed until he cried, until he was curled up on the floor, gasping for breath, until he uttered what would perhaps be the last words ever spoken by I man:
“The math’s tricky.”
He wiped his eyes and sat back to wait for the end of the world.
Wow. Just wow!