The Science of Crystals
Sitting back against her chair, Avery tapped her pen against her clipboard in a steady beat. The rhythm calmed her mind and helped her to concentrate. It was how she came up with all her best ideas.
“Stop that, you’re going to give me a headache,” Simon muttered.
She ignored him and continued tapping. There it was- an idea; small and fragile yet growing sharper and stronger in her mind. If she could just figure out the mechanisms of how to…
“I said shut up.” Simon towered over her now, holding the pen in place. Ruining her beat and her idea.
“No, you said stop that,” Avery quipped back to him.
“Well, it became shut up when you clearly chose to ignore me.”
“I’m not ignoring you. I’m thinking. There’s a difference.”
“Hmmpph.” He slouched back down into his chair next to her and rested his head in his hands. “It’s no use. Even with the crystal functioning at the rate it is, eventually there will be malfunctions. Breakdowns in the machinery, corrosion of the mind. Heck, we don’t even know that the stuff we’re taking isn’t killing us.”
“Speaking of.” Avery waved towards the door as an orderly entered carrying a tray full of medicine cups.
“Snack time kids.” The orderly placed a cup in front of each of them. It was filled halfway up with a crushed violet powder.
“Can I have an apple instead?” Simon asked, his eyebrows raised warily at the substance in front of him.
“No but you should drink some water with it,” the orderly instructed.
Simon looked as if he was about to argue again but Avery quickly interrupted. “Thank you. Same time tomorrow?”
“As always.” The orderly nodded, eyeing Simon with distaste as he left the room.
“Do you always have to argue with him?” Avery asked. She dropped the powder in her mouth, nearly gagging from the taste and washed it down with a swirl of water. Whoever thought a deep purple would make the medicine more
enjoyable was very, very wrong.
“No but it makes things more entertaining,” Simon looked up, quipping a smile at her.
“You mean more difficult.” Avery started drumming her fingers against the clipboard, desperate for this half-idea to fully form.
“How much longer do you think the crystal can function at the capacity it is before we start finding bugs in the malware?”
“I don’t know. It’s run pretty fine for the last six months.”
Avery stared through the window of their office into a central oval dome where the crystal sat, surrounded by a complex system of wires and amplifiers. Crystal was a generous word really for the oversized boulder rock. Nobody knew where the thing’s powers came from but with the right programming and command issues along with a lot of experimentation, the government were able to create the ultimate system they had always wanted. A command console to keep humanity in perfect order.
“Gack.” Simon choked back the powder and started coughing like his lungs were trying to break free of his body. “It gets worse every time,” he wheezed.
“Well at least it’s keeping you conscious,” Avery muttered.
“Yeah, well, if it didn’t do that, I wouldn’t take it,” he grumbled.
“Right.” Avery nodded at him solemnly as he sulked into his water.
The truth was, they needed the damned medicine in order to keep up with their work practice. Without the stimulant they’d fall into the same unconscious state as the rest of the human civilisation outside of this lab. In order to create the perfect world, the big bosses had to take away humanity’s illusion of free will. Everyone else outside their little bubble was like a walking, talking zombie. Subdued into thinking they’re awake and human when really they were the puppets of their greatest invention. On weekends, lab assistants like herself were trusted to control their own dosages but the longer time dragged on, the more Avery found herself staying at the lab. It was the only place she could be surrounded by consciousness anymore.
“All hail the mighty crystal, saviour of civilisation,” Avery muttered, beginning to tap her pen again.
“More like bouncer to the government; overlord of humanity,” Simon responded.
Avery resisted the urge to smile.
***
It was late. Avery should have left hours ago, but she liked to check the status of all humans in experimental pods before she left the lab at night. She tapped at their screens, checking their fuctionings, rhythms and even their brain sound waves.
She wasn’t supposed to feel sympathy for them, these people had volunteered to become lab rats into order to aid the new world that was being created and to also compensate their families in the process. But Avery had always felt that if they had known the truth of what they were signing up for they would have felt much differently. Unlike the rest of civilisation, these people were subjected to daily experiments, testing them to find the limit of the crystal’s influence.
Avery had been carolled as one of the original scientists on this project and to begin with, she had really believed in the cause. But now she missed her regular snipes with her old, batty neighbour, the gentle flirting she used to do with the barista at her local coffee house. She even missed her dad’s constant condemnation, as if nothing she ever did was good enough. Now when they spoke, they always circled the same topics, like a robot stuck on loop.
Away in her thoughts, Avery tapped distant-mildly at the screens. Her mind barely registering the same standard diagnostics. Everything was always the same now. At least she thought.
The screen bleeped loudly in alarm, startling Avery into awareness. Functionality, rhythm, movement, they were all low. Dangerously low. Almost as if…
Avery turned and gasped. The pod was empty. How could she not have noticed it was empty? The human egg-shaped incubator was cracked open and in its space was nothing but still air. What the hell had happened? How could the subject get out? They were supposed to be tranced like the rest of humanity. Worse, they were supposed to be in coma-like conditions.
Panicking, Avery started combing through the pod’s records, searching to see when the software had failed or if someone had let the subject out. The tablet beeped at her furiously as she typed and swiped through every technical issue she could think of.
“Excuse me? Could you tell me where I am?”
Avery turned to see a woman, similar age to her own, looking around the lab in confusion. Her clothes were a plain faded beige, similar to what the orderly’s wear, her hair a tangled nest around her head. Her face was dazed, a startled confusion painted her features.
“How did you get in here?” Avery demanded, anxiety filling her voice. “Nobody below a level 6 clearance is allowed in this section of the labs. Who let you in here?”
“I don’t know.” The woman stared at her, her eyes nervous and darting around as if she was afraid she had done something terribly wrong. Little did she know, she had done the worst thing of all. “I just woke up.”