Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 86 - Doomed to Repeat It

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There was a reason why ENH had established checkpoint protocols for milestone experiments - the groundbreakers and world changers — and why it was prohibited for anyone to break rank and bypass expected sign-off from peers before launching any enterprise within a specific pre-defined risk assessment parameter.

Becca knew this, but why could she not adhere to this? Just as before, when she’d started this whole mess, Becca was again besieged with doubt at the very moment when it all seemed too late. And once again, no one else was there to save Becca from herself and her recent proclivity for bad mistakes, her risky and impetuous need to go rogue, and her embarrassing need to claim all the spotlight.

Was that it? A spotlight? Something as inane as simply wanting attention like a spoiled child on Christmas morning who got everything she wanted except one insignificant gift and acted out in rebellion rather than thanksgiving for what she’d already received?

No, that wasn’t it. She wasn’t in it for a vainglorious cause. She didn’t need the collected praise of boorish colleagues.

But still - she wanted it all for her own. To say it was her that succeeded, that she was the victor in overcoming scientific impossibilities if only to say it to herself. It was all her.

Had she let someone else be part of these last experiments, gaps in protocol would surely have been discovered. The required safety net would not have been provided, generator power-down conventions would have been ignored, and the emergency EMP pulse generator would have been in place.

And maybe it was puerile, her behavior, selfish perhaps, after all. She had not received the one thing she wanted, the one thing she demanded, that brought her to this place time and again. Somehow, it was Frankie. But at the same time, not.

This was the perpetual proverbial wrestling match of Dr. Becca Watts: being the one to transform history through her scientific breakthroughs or save their enfeebled marriage, which for years was hobbled, limping, and stumbling —stumbling, always stumbling.

“Stupid, stupid woman,” she muttered to herself once more. “You’ll lose it all and have nothing. So stupid.”

Panic was not a reaction she often allowed herself. When she’d first conducted a similar break in protocol just weeks before, before the time shift, clearing out the laboratory to perform her secretive experiment of generating the second black hole, she stood firm and resolute, like a captain going down with the proverbial ship. As the two black holes had pulled apart the fabric of time and space, revealing before her a wormhole that sucked in everything, everyone, and every instant of time before instantaneously spitting them all out except for younger people like those naive yet competent lab assistants Sam and Drake, and anyone else outside the unintended forty-year parameter of time in which the entire world then traversed, Becca was confident in her decisions, even when she quickly realized her choices were all mistaken.

Resolutely, she’d known then without hesitation the immensely catastrophic mistake she’d made. Still, she owned it, took hold of it, closed her eyes, and allowed herself to be pulled into the gaping mouth of her disastrous, prideful gaffe. She stepped into it, even resigned to embracing the consequences of all that she’d wrought.

Yet now, despite her earlier reasoning that this new experiment would either allow her to traverse back to the same original place and time held in stasis by this very room or else witness the final destruction of all creation, she instead now decided to do what she’d been doing all along. She was a woman who threw herself into her work and hurtled headlong night after night down a seemingly inescapable abyss that rescued her from conflict with Frankie, which only amplified the ongoing strife of her marriage. In doing so, she always refused to acknowledge the damage she caused and her guilt.

Except now it was inescapable, just as this all-new floating black orb in the center of the room would soon reach out with invisible tentacles, grasping and pulling in some unseen gravitational field, pulling everything inward.

So Becca did what she always did.

Becca fled.

She fruitlessly slapped her hands over the control panel of switches — which just minutes before had sent a surge of electricity coursing through the room — knowing internally that removing the flow of electrical current would not have the same impact as somehow snuffing out the electricity itself. And as she hypothesized, rather than shrinking, the floating ball of blackness through the glass wall that looked into the adjacent room continued to float and pulse. And, while not quite doubling in size, it was perceptibly growing and expanding uncontrollably, a failure repeated because of the lack of lessons learned.

In the back of her mind, Becca then recalled one of the many passing conversations she and Gordon had with miscellaneous gas station attendants on their cross-country trek.

“Sometimes they go away,” that one attendant had said. “But sometimes they don’t.”

Looking over her shoulder through the glass partition one last time as she backed out of the room, Becca felt a remorseful sense of abandonment as she left her post, combined with a strange love for the monstrous, consuming black lesion she’d generated. She shook her head at the preposterousness of her emotions and her inability to bring them into any sensible level of control.

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