Previously on Haverbrook [read the full episode here]
…the door opened. On the other side was an enormous room. The ceiling must have reached the top floor of the building. Red emergency lights were the only light in the room. It was an uncanny hellish glow. Within this room was a smaller square structure, as big as our house. It only had one entry that I could see, a windowless door with no handle.
Marcus offered me a seat next to a desk stacked with various mechanical parts. I sat, not feeling anything. I had decoherence vertigo without the teleport. I was existing in a void. Marcus moved a seat to face me and began to explain why I was there.
"I'll try not to get too technical. If you don't understand something, stop me and ask me to clarify," Marcus started to talk.
"Just get on with it," I snapped. From somewhere, there was anger.
"The project we were working on was a next-gen teleportation technology," Marcus explained. "Current max teleport range is about a hundred miles. This project was attempting to extend the range. And not just travel further distances on this planet, but potentially moving almost instantaneously to other planets or a space station."
"We were in the testing phase this past year. First sending objects, small animals. But we had progressed to the stage where we needed to test with a human. John volunteered. He had complete confidence in the machine. I wanted to go in his place, but he said he wanted to be the first. So I agreed. I shouldn't have let him; I should have pulled rank and gone first," Marcus' voice was angry too.
"The team is still not 100% sure what when wrong. Maybe a misalignment of the buffer modules or a data mutation in the transportation matrix."
I started to open my mouth.
"Regardless of the error," Marcus moved the explanation along, "The transportation sequence never completed its cycle. John should have reemerged at our facility in the European Zone. But he didn't."
"So, where is he?" my mouth was dry as I spoke.
"We’re still looking,” Marcus said as everything about him shook. “We could still get him back. We haven’t stopped trying.”
At the time, those words were comforting. I believed the hope that John would come back to us. Bradley or Marcus or Devon would have an ‘aha’ moment, and John would reemerge from the test chamber. Then I could have ended this story with John back home.
The longer you hold on to a particular hope, the more it becomes an anchor.
Was John still here? He wasn’t in a coma in some forgotten wing of the hospital where I could visit him every day. At least then I could have talked to him, seen him. I could hope he hears me. To bring him back somehow.
He was pieces now; what could I say to bits? How would pieces comfort me? Charlie couldn’t grow up with fragments. At first, I didn’t want to take Charlie with me when I visited the Outer Frontier. But as he got older, his curiosity became persistent, and my resolve weakened.
Little Charlie and I would sit facing the last place our John existed. Then it was medium-sized Charlie and me. Then me and big Charlie. Our once-a-week pilgrimage. Early on, we talked about John, but eventually, Charlie and I would talk about his school, friends, or girlfriends. We were filling John in on our day-to-day lives so he wouldn’t be left out.
For years, the Gen4 team, as they were known, searched to solve John's problem. As much to save him as to continue progress on the project. I suppose it was a small comfort that their work couldn’t continue while John was still trapped in a void.
But the Gen4 team’s hope was not inexhaustible. They build a new research facility at another site and left John to decay. And Charlie grew up and left Haverbrook to build his own life. Without Charlie, I stopped visiting John too. I accepted that John was gone. It wasn’t the release that I’d hoped for. It was more like hope had been taking up space that was now empty.
Once I stopped going to the abandoned lab on the Outer Frontier campus, they sealed it up. No one could tell me if John was still trapped there. Would I have felt better if I had physical remains to cremate and set on my mantle?
I started to wonder about the other labs in those corridors of John’s building. The other buildings on the OF campus. How many of those were sealed up with a forgotten consciousness decomposing inside.