TF (atoms)

This is my final hour. I don’t know when the end will come, but soon. Without warning, I’ll be gone. There will be no corpse. I’ll pop like a soap bubble, leaving no trace. No more Dr Ann White. I’ll be there, and then I won’t be there, leaving my molecules to … what? Become something else, I suppose. Nothing can be destroyed, only transformed. As a scientist I know these things, of course.

***
It’s fitting that I’m trapped in this place, the place I spent so much of my time and effort. The lab.

We’d been working on the project for many, many years. Instantaneous transportation, via folding space. Like something from Star Trek — or, no, not something but that very thing. (Professor Towers, the team leader, once confessed to me over drinks the old TV show had inspired him way back when.)

I’d come onto the team about three years ago. I’d been working in theoretical physics and had been head-hunted. Oddly enough, we were the top secret research arm of a major transport conglomerate. I guess they thought it would be the future of moving freight.

Over time they’d inched from instantaneous transportation being impossible, to being theoretically possible but physically impossible, to pretty much impossible, to almost possible.

And then one day, we did it.

We’d been using tiny wooden boxes. A thousand times, a million times, we’d placed one in the first tube and tried to move it to the second tube. A thousand times, a million times, it hadn’t moved.

And then one day, it did.

The champagne flowed but the celebrations were brief. The question “could we move this?” was followed by “how far can we move this?” to “what else can we move?” to “can we move a living thing?” Ants, mice, rabbits — they all vanished from one spot and then reappeared in another, with no ill effects.

And eventually the question became “can we move a human being?”

And then that question became “which human being can we move?”

And the answer to that, was me.

***

I volunteered. I have no regrets about that. I lived for science. I was intensely curious about what would happen. Besides, I was the newest member on the team. The most disposable if something … happened.

I was fairly confident as I stripped naked, taking out my earrings too. The living things we’d moved had all been fine. Still, I won’t lie — I was nervous as I stepped into the testing ring. Hell, I was scared.

I’d watched as the other members of the team had been at their stations just as I’d seen them so many times before, albeit from a different perspective. My perspective this time was as the test subject.

“Initiate sequence on my signal,” Professor Towers had announced. “Three … two … one … now!”

And everything went black.

Or no, not even that.

Everything ceased.

***

Everything started again.

At least, I assumed it did.

“Did it work?” I blurted. “Wait, of course it did, because I’m here … or did it? What happened?”

Then I saw their faces. The horror. The pity.

Professor Towers stepped forward.

“Ann, my dear,” he said gently. “Something went wrong.”

***

No one was sure why. Why our test animals had been fine, but me …

Humans were too complex. There was a power surge at exactly the wrong second. Solar storms affected the space-folding. Who knew?

But when I’d been moved, my very atoms had been changed. They’d become unstable. My very structure was fragile.

“You understand, we’re doing everything we can,” Professor Towers had said. “But …”

But.

They estimated I had about an hour before I simply popped out of existence.

They’d given me this room. You’ll want privacy, they said.

I knew what they really meant. Let it happen away from our eyes.

***

I popped.

The end.

***

Not the end.

I’d thought that once I had no form I’d be gone. But no.

My consciousness … it survived. It survived and spread.

I felt my mind expanding, racing around the world, seeping into the earth, reaching into space. Part of everything and everyone.

I am the universe itself.

Not the end.

A beginning.