Disintegration

At 11:11 PM Greenwich Mean Time at the bus stop on the corner of Carver Avenue in the sleepy British market town of Cloverton, a disembodied hand, severed cleanly at the wrist, complete with a white lab coat sleeve cuff, appeared, held in the air, suspended within a blue sphere of mysterious energy.

It was hovering for a moment, outstretched in pain, materialised in front of the contorting faces of two shocked and mildly drunk teenager boys, before falling gracelessly to the pavement. The fingers curled inwardly so the upturned hand resembled a monstrous dead spider in the darkness. One of the boys poked it with his trainer and without overthinking the implications, he quickly tossed it into the nearest letterbox street bin. They made a pact, there and then, never to tell anyone, fearing they would become targets of suspicion with a story so bizarre.

Roughly two years earlier in a tightly sealed cleanroom, deep under the hot dirt of the Mojave Desert, the brilliant Siberian-born scientist, Dr Yuri Lenov had been writhing in agony on the metal floor to the sound of loud electronic alarms. Of course, he had no idea at the time, that his experiment with interdimensional transportation had been a partial success. The mouse in the magnetically charged chamber hooked up with electrodes, and harnessed into position on a platform, twitched its pink whiskered nose at him with indifference and felt disturbed only at its immobilisation and the loud sounds that had filled the room.

His hand had been outside the metal containment device, yet the dark energy fields he created had latched onto his limb unexpectedly, as he backed away from the big red button he had just pushed.

Yuri had been looking for the missing parts of the Universal truth for so long, it was all he could remember. Every particle physicist he knew was working on strong nuclear forces, postulating ideas to extend the Standard Model, the model of all matter. They were all looking in the wrong place, he was sure of it, it was the weak nuclear forces they should have analysed. He had been frustrated at the priorities at CERN with the projects assigned to the giant particle accelerators.

When the Pentagon approached him with an unlimited budget, a house and car, and his own facility, he was on the first plane out of Switzerland with a badly stuffed suitcase and a feverish feeling in his guts, that he was destined to do something spectacular.

Experimental science, particle research, it was his life, it transcended all other pastimes, including his estranged British wife and two young daughters whom he had somewhere along the line completely abandoned, or they abandoned him, either way, they were there and then, they were not.

“Why does mum cry all the time?” his youngest had once asked him on his rare return home for dinner. He had smiled a lot instead of answering such questions, not really knowing the equations and formulas of family and parenthood.

There were times he had to think hard about how that had happened but then the Universe began to speak to him again, lure him, bait him, whisper to him and his mind would lock in, like a beast prowling in the low fauna. He had travelled the world, dedicated all his thinking to it and he would not change.

When his severed flesh hand reappeared that damp May Friday night, at the very same moment in time across the Atlantic Ocean in the US, Yuri’s relatively new prosthetic hand burst into flames, as he watched the tail end of the news in his large sprawling, government-paid-for, home.

“What the fu….” He yammered, waving his melting plastic fingers about in confusion. He ran to the kitchen sink, knocking over the bottle of 30-dollar Merlot on the coffee table and within a few moments was staring down at the charred, blackened clump that he had dumped in the sink.

“Greta…” he said to the device on his kitchen wall, with a nervousness he rarely experienced, even since the accident that day under the desert, “Call General Sears on the emergency line at the Pentagon.”

“Authorisation Code?” it asked.

“Nine Alpha Charlie Tango.”

“Calling General Sears… Now,” it confirmed calmly.

The sound of ringing didn’t take long, just long enough for Yuri to fumble the cold water tap harder, so it caressed his singed stump. He noticed some of the water particles seemed to peel off from the flow and float away sideways. There was another thing, the room lighting, the walls seemed to begin to glow, become brighter somehow.

“General Sears here, what is it, Lenov?”

Yuri had turned to the circular mirror above the shelf on his kitchen wall and felt sick with the vision he confronted. His lips had vanished, revealing two rows of unloved, yellowed teeth, like a feral creature, or the victim of some flesh-eating disease.

He found words, but it was hard to talk with missing lips.

“Ojec Instella… It erked….”

“What? Project interstellar? You sound different?! What’s wrong with you?”

At that moment, with a sharp slurping noise, his left eyeball sucked back into his face, it seemed to wobble in the orbit in his skull, fizzing with electricity, then shrink down into the cavity of his mouth. He trembled, gasped and stumbled backwards. Some kind of chain reaction was happening, some kind of rip in time and space. Dark energy was one of the constants of the Universe, and he had unpicked a tiny seam in it, apparently unravelling into a larger, unstoppable tear.

Yuri’s ribs began to vaporise. At first, it made him feel light yet breathless, then his entire torso collapsed into a messy soup of organs and he began the ruthless process of dying, whilst squirming and shrieking on the kitchen floor.

As he writhed, part of his mind flashed to the fate of Louis Slotin, the scientist working on the Manhattan Project in 1942, who accidentally triggered a fission reaction in a plutonium core. Since that eerie, plumb-coloured flash of radiation, Slotin’s cells disintegrated and his internal organs lost integrity over the days that followed, as he lay helpless in a hospital bed. There was something similar happening here but worse, it was a demanded ritualist sacrifice for daring to probe for secrets.

Before Yuri’s remaining eye followed the disappearance of other painfully vanishing body parts – the pattern of his demise – it caught the sight of his kitchen worktop prickle and slide and then smelt into the door. His tiled kitchen floor swirled and sparked with radiant lights. Spikes and pools of weird energy were dancing about the house in a violent, vibrating visual concert.

It was in that final moment of realisation when he got it, and part of his panicked brain was even a little excited. His house was ensnared by the growing tentacles of a time-space collapse, and just seconds before his heart imploded, he assumed, he had for a brief moment at least, witnessed the beginning of the end of the Universe.

The End