Author’s Note: This is the fifth part of an on going series called Infinite Library. If you’re not caught up these are links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. I’ve gotten positive feedback so far about running an ongoing series so there will be more of these in Step Into The Road’s future. However, I still enjoy the stand alone flash fiction pieces so those will be coming your way in the near future. Hope you enjoy the fifth and final (for now) part of Rodney’s Journey to the Infinite Library!
Rodney sat up on the cot where he had spent the night. His eyes were level with his desk. He stared at the piles of papers that had piled up over the past weeks. The young professor stood up and stretched out his back leaning and pushing on it with his hands making him look like a chicken. He stopped his alarm, the only sound in the whole building and looked at the clock, 5:03 AM. Only slept through three minutes of the alarm this time he thought, I must not be as tired as I was yesterday.
He went to the public bathroom outside of the lab and washed his face. Then he found his was to the lab to get back to work. Ever since an Overwatcher terrified Rodney by perching itself on the lab bench, he had been working double time in the lab.
He wanted to decipher the book, fix his machine, get the dean to quit lecturing him and most importantly not disappear off of the face of the earth like every previous owner of the book. It was a laundry list of desires, and to fulfill them Rodney chose to sacrifice his commute and most of his time in bed. He took short naps in his office multiple times a day so he could be close to the lab and do as much work as possible.
Rodney knew an Overwatcher would show up for him soon. Then he would disappear without a trace. His life would end just like Dr. Carrus, Stanley Hastings, and every other person who had gotten ahold of the book. But Rodney was the only one of them who was close to figuring it out. At least that’s how he reassured himself.
Rodney sat at his workbench and fiddled with his machine. Thanks to Maria’s suggestions and research he had all the info he needed to summon new atoms from other worlds. But according to his calculations if he did it, then he would blow up most of his city. At least then the dean wouldn’t have to worry about the school maintaining a reputation or future funding.
He thought back to the Large Hadron Collider and how people thought it was going to create a black hole in Sweeden. Every honest physicist knew that wasn’t going to happen, or at least the odds were slim.
Looking at his machine and his notes Rodney had a good feeling that if he succeeded in summoning and sustaining matter in this universe, he would have to have a regulator on his machine, something that would protect him and the rest of the town.
Rodney had been designing the regulator for weeks. The dean was less excited about the regulator and suggested that Rodney prove that he could make power before he tried to limit it. Rodney disregarded his boss and worked on the regulators and bore the lectures that earned him. He also footed the bill with the last of his saving. He could probably stop paying rent if he had to, his new home seemed to be the lab. God only knew where it would be after the Overwatcher showed up for him.
Rodney affixed the final component of the regulator onto his contraption. The contraption Dr. Carrus had convinced him to make for his thesis. The device that tied his fate to the book, and the past owners of it. Rodney sat down at the computer and started to configure everything. The process was not quick.
After hours of working on the software for the regulators and multiple interruptions from grad students during the day, he felt finished and prepared to test. He also felt ready for a nap. Rodeny checked his watch. It read 8:45 pm. That meant the time to take his afternoon nap had passed. He knew his body would make him pay for it by sleeping through his next alarm.
Rodney pushed the thought aside and began to test his new and improved science experiment. He started it up, calibrated it to the coordinates he had been translating from the book and began to connect between the universes. Rodney watched his readings improve, and it looked like the machine was about to dial into the universe Rodney wanted. And for a split second, he had it, a blip of energy that proved he had brought something into his world. Then it disappeared. Thanks to the regulators, his machine hadn’t taken any damage.
He looked at his watch, and it was almost time for him to take a nap. But before he got to bed, he decided to capitalize on his results and try one more test. This time tweaking some of the code for the regulators and allowing it to let more energy pass through. With more power the bond between the atoms might be stable enough to be maintained, he thought. The code wasn’t as easy to adjust as he thought but after forty-five minutes of tweaking, he had something that might work.
He began to dial up another atom starting the process. Rodney turned to look at the machine. When he spun his chair to face it, he felt his heartbeat slow down.
Three black figures were looming around his metallic contraption. Unlike before they were not interested in him. Instead, they were inspecting his machine. There were three of them instead of one, and they moved fluidly through the solid object. They looked like shadows dancing on the light except every once and awhile he would see a glimpse of their beady red eyes. He considered letting out a sound, in an attempt to shoo them off but he knew they weren’t like dogs and the lab door wouldn’t be opening until morning.
Maybe it takes three to take me away, and that’s why they’re here, he thought to himself. However, they seemed to have no interest in him. He watched them look at each other and inspect parts of the machine. The shadowy black bodies seemed to be conversing with each other, but he could not hear them. Not that he would have understood what they were saying in the first place.
Then they began to touch the machine. The Overwatchers had moved in and out of it without affecting the device. What the three did now was different. Rodney watched parts of his machine move. The Overwatchers fiddled with the regulators that he had so carefully designed, adjusted and calibrated. One of them, Rodney thought it might be the tallest, but maybe just been the closest, looked at Rodney as the others messed with his delicate experiment.
Rodney tried to call out, but his throat caught the words. He needed to scare them away or fight them. They were going to ruin his machine he knew it. But Rodney was helpless, he was trapped in a staring contest with the tall Overwatcher and couldn’t move. He couldn’t even focus on what they were ruining.
Rodney woke up with a cramp in his back. He stood up not sure where he was. After looking around and taking in the familiar sights, he realized he was confused because he had never seen the lab from this point of view. He got off the ground and used the desk as a crutch. He gracelessly landed in his desk chair. It took him some time to remember what had happened.
As soon as the nightmare came back to him, he ran diagnostics on his machine. The results were clear. The Overwatchers ruined his regulators. Everything he had worked on over the past few weeks, his savings and his only hope for being able to understand his research safely, was destroyed. Rodney couldn’t fix the machine.
Rodney felt his eyes droop and he yawned. He didn’t know when he passed out last night, and he had woken up hoping the Overwatcher’s destruction was a dream, but the diagnostics proved otherwise.
He poked at his keyboard without any hope of fixing the problem. His idle attempts were luckily cut short by Maria who walked into the lab and smiled at him. She was bright-eyed from a full night’s rest. That would change if I cursed her with the book, Rodney thought. She greeted him with a cheery good morning, and it didn’t take any energy for Rodney to figure out she was excited about something, which was good because Rodney had no strength to use.
“I’ve figured something out. I know you’ve been going lone wolf on this project, but I kept working on my side project. I don’t think I could focus my thesis on it. There are not enough published papers behind it yet. However, I might get a short paper out of it, something I could refer to later. Of course, I would need your help on it.” Her words were bubbling full of energy and Rodney blinked slowly to keep himself awake through them.
“You look tired. Are you okay?” Maria said.
Rodney replied in a dry tone, “no, I’m not okay. There was an accident last night, and my regulators are ruined.”
“The ones you’ve been working on for weeks? The ones the dean has been fighting with you about?” She asked as if she needed clarification. Rodney knew she didn’t and nodded. “Oh man, that’s bad. What happened?”
Rodney imagined a reality where he went into detail explaining the book, the Overwatchers, and their sabotage and saw it ending with him in a straight jacket. Instead, he responded with an empty “There was a bug in my code, and I didn’t account for a scenario that blew them out.”
“Probably because you’re exhausted. You should have had me, or someone, look over it.”
You don’t want any part of this project, he thought. “I need to get back to work on them before my meeting with the dean this afternoon.” He said hoping to end the conversation about his previous failed attempts.
“Um, I actually had an idea about them, that’s why I came in early. I had this strange dream, I can’t remember much of it,” Maria shook her head to dismiss it. “Regardless, I woke up thinking about the amount of power you’d be releasing. I’ve looked back at your equation multiple times and can’t find any issues with it. But I thought there was a better solution. I imagined you could move the energy into connecting the atoms, strengthening their bond. Have you…” she started, but Rodney cut her off.
“I can’t control that,” Rodney pointed out.
“Well, yes I know that.” Maria said looking hurt, “It’s just theoretical. But it would get around your issue of needing regulators.”
“Are you suggesting that I run the tests without any safeguards? Do you know how dangerous that would be?” Rodney was starting to become irritated, and he couldn’t keep it hidden.
“I am just saying that if you had the right pair, it would probably connect more naturally. I have notes,” Maria pulled out some papers from her bag and set them on his desk. They were composed of complicated equations and marked up research papers.
“The right pair?” Rodney continued being irritated, “And which one would be right. I’m trying to do research here not magic. Do you even know what the right pair looks like? What’s even a mathematical way to quantify that?”
With those comments, Rodney saw Maria switch to the defensive. She replied with the quick quip of “Any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic Rodney. I thought that was the kind of science you always dreamed of doing.” She stood up and marched out of the lab leaving her notes on his desk. He proceeded to ignore them for the rest of the day.
In the early afternoon, after not making any substantial progress on his destroyed regulators he marched up to his office to meet with the dean. He didn’t bring any papers or even try to hide his cot. Usually, he folded it up, he didn’t know what the rules of faculty sleeping on campus were, but he didn’t want to find out. Rodney wasn’t even worried about being on time anymore.
When he got to his office, the dean was already there. The man had let himself into Rodney’s locked office. To make matters worse, the dean was sitting in Rodney’s office chair, leaving Rodney to take the guest chair he kept near the door.
“It’s about time you got here.” He said. Rodney looked at his watch it was only five minutes past the hour.
“You’re literally never on time.” Rodney retorted. He was too tired to deal with the dean’s crap.
“I’m on time this time, and I expected you to be too. Not to mention, what is this thing doing in here?” He said gesturing at the green army cot that Rodney had left out.
“It’s not important. What are you lecturing me about this week?” Rodney countered.
“I’m about to lecture you on your attitude if you don’t change it.” The dean scowled at the young man and continued. “today I want to hear about what progress you’ve made with these regulators you’ve been working on.” The dean spat the word regulators at the young professor.
“I got them to work for a little bit last night, but then they blew out. Not sure why.”
“They were a waste of time and resources, I knew it. That’s why I didn’t insist on them. Or even invest in them.” the man quickly remarked, “I hope you’ve learned your lesson and decided to do things my way. Now what you need to do is just run the experiment as you designed in the paper you showed me a few weeks back.”
“The one with the unfathomably large output of energy?” Rodney said sarcastically.
The dean didn’t catch it and responded with, “Yes, that one, just run that and see how much energy it outputs. Put it behind some protective shielding and see what happens.”
“We don’t have shielding that strong,” Rodney said without emotion.
“Don’t be ridiculous just borrow some from one of the engineering labs. Surely they have something.”
Rodney repeated the number that he had calculated, adding emphasis to how big it was. “That is an incredible amount of energy.”
“It’s unbelievable,” The dean retorted.
“Exactly,” Rodney agreed.
“No, what I’m saying is it’s unbelievable. Your math was wrong.” The dean said dismissively, “I’m sure any other professor around here would be happy to explain why it’s wrong but you simply can’t create that much energy. So do the experiment, get me some results, and I will begin to pass them around other colleges to see if anyone wants to bite on buying the rights to your research.”
Rodney threw his hands in the air, “is that all you think about? How to make a profit on other professor’s research. You don’t even care to look at my work. You haven’t visited a lab in years, and all you do is try to turn a profit. Do you think that has something to do with why the school needs so much funding? Obviously, you’re not doing your job correctly.”
“I have far more important things to do than come to the lab and check your work. I’m the only one around here trying to make sure that you have a paycheck next week and you seem ungrateful to pull your weight.” The dean stood up to leave. He ended the conversation with, “Run the test, Dr. Brown. If you don’t, you’ll be placing your cot under a bridge instead of in this office.”
Rodney finished his afternoon nap and woke up around six. After the conversation with the dean, he was exhausted. All he could think of was how hopeless everything was. He had no money, a failed research project, he was about to lose his job if he didn’t get results. If he did get results it would most likely end in an uncontainable explosion and to make matters worse, shadow monsters were haunting him and sabotaging his work at every turn. He sat at his desk and flipped through the book that started all of these problems.
He stared at the worn pages and the foreign figures that didn’t make sense to him. The squiggly letters didn’t come together to form words like every other book he had read. He looked for something that would stick out, but he knew nothing would. The book had over 400 pages, not that any of them were labeled.
The paper glided through Rodney’s hand, and it felt familiar like every other page he had felt, but it was also silky. Not in a brand new textbook or a light sheet out of the Bible way. Instead, it felt soothing like leather or cloth.
Rodney continued to flip through pages, feeling the material and repeating the task in a kind of meditation. He lost track of time, and before he knew it, he was almost at the back of the book. He looked down surprised by how much time had passed and then saw the page he had stopped on.
There were two symbols that he understood from that page. One was a circle around squiggly letters that he couldn’t translate. The ring seemed to be made after the original print.
The second, and spookiest thing he recognized was a picture. One that had been printed in the book initially. It was a black and white drawing, but unfortunately, it was done so well it looked realistic. The only thing it was missing was beady red eyes.
He copied down the circled information and closed the book quickly. He cross-examined them with previous notes he had taken. It didn’t take him long to translate since the circled symbols were more initial conditions. He didn’t know what they were initial conditions to, but he had a guess. Hopefully, it was the Infinite Library that everyone had been talking about. If Rodney was unlucky, and that seemed to be the prevailing theory, it would be to whatever demonic world the Overwatchers came from.
Rodney got to the lab and calibrated the machine to the new initial conditions. He took the regulators offline per everyone’s suggestion, even the Overwatchers. Right now Rodney had nothing to lose. He began his initial test confident it would fail like everything else he had done.
If he was lucky, it would fail. If he was unlucky, the dean would be right, and energy would be released. Additionally, if Rodney were superiorly unlucky, he would blow himself up along with the school.
However, there was a slim chance that something else would happen. Rodney might get the results that Carrus had hoped. That scared the young professor more than anything else. But he was a scientist and fascinated by the idea of finding the truth.
He started up the machine, and it warmed up. The contraption began its tests and then started to dial in the atom from the other universe. The unknown world. The place Rodney didn’t even believe existed.
The machine beeped a warning and continued to incessantly beep. Damnit, Rodney thought, I forgot to turn off the reactor’s fail safes. They were warning him that the machine had too much power going through it. I’m sure it will blow any second, Rodney thought.
Then he was blinded by a flash of lightning. He shielded his eyes and let his pupils adjust to the new light. There goes my machine and my job, he thought as he took down his arm.
In front of him, his machine stood in one piece and not on fire. Above below, in front of and through the device was a bright orb that was white, purple, blue and green. The sphere seemed to be oscillating on its surface. It took up the same space as the machine but moved through it. Much like the Overwatchers had the previous night.
The experiment had worked. Rodney’s machine blew a hole through the universe. The scientist began to consider the implications, but before he could look at the computer to check its readings, he was frozen still.
On the left and right side of the oscillating ball were two shadowy Overwatchers. They stared at him with their red eyes. The orb shone brilliantly. But despite the light, the two Overwachters weren’t lit up. They merely stared at him with their piercing red eyes. Then they nodded in tandem.
Suddenly Rodney felt an icy hand on his back. It was as if the hand had reached through his clothes and under his skin to move him. He was falling forward, but he couldn’t move his muscles to catch himself. Instead, he felt himself falling towards the orb in front of him. He couldn’t stop himself. He fell through the hole in the universe and into an unknown world.
Seconds later the orb lost its energy and disappeared out of the lab. Its exit was followed by the three Overwatchers that had guided Rodney towards discovering the gates of the Infinite Library.
Author’s Note: That’s the end of this series… for now. I have a feeling we will be seeing Rodney, the Overwatchers, and even Maria in a future series on this blog. But for now I’m going to take a break from this story, let it breathe, and most importantly listen to some feedback from y’all. I’m curious, where do you think it will go next? Was there anything that you want me to explain more of? Less of? I’ve enjoyed writing this and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it. Drop me a line on my Contact Page or email me. Thanks for reading!
Photo Credit: starsandspirals, markhillary, VisualHunt, seier+seier, INPIVIC, Internet Archive Book Images, matsuyuki, Image Editor,
Stay in the Loop
I regularly publish new short stories and updates about my work(s) in progress.
If you're interested in keeping up to date, join dozens of other fans who receive updates whenever I release a new story by signing up here!
