Basement

Turning around the center of the bonding element was a jeweled molecule of hydrogen winking at me with sheer delight.

I hadn’t realized that I could create this kind of complexity in a chain reactive static chemical crane array. The underchains would make a little room between the different string boards when the time came. It was the moment I’d been waiting for. The oven timer went off with a ding.

Seconds before the oven mitt caught fire, I let the retractors go and turned the electron ginny to six. With a little wiggle and a snap heard only on a quantum level, the lattice formed. It was perfect.

I’d made a fourteen-molecule high exact replica of my living room. It was there. I’d routed my electron microscope through the projector television that I usually played old-school fighters on. The image of tiny green-tinted chairs and a coffee table was projected there in monochrome perfection on the pulled-down screen. I even managed to recreate the broken lampshade with a salt bonder, revised electrolyte silver off of a fork of my mother’s, and just a little chocolate.

Light even streamed in through the close-to-the-ceiling basement suite arrow-slit windows. It was perfect.

I sat back to watch the show.

I had made her from pure electricity and wound her cored skeleton up from polymer attractors. The barest sheen of flattened oak protons and a milli-milli-milli-scenter of my own blood coloured her hair. She walked into the room, a little unsteady on her feet, and looked around in confusion.

I could actually see her hesitancy. The resolution wasn’t high enough in the scope’s view but it if was, I’m sure I would have been able to see a scurry of electrons form a sparking furrowed brow. She knew this room but she could recognize that something was wrong. She held her hands up in front of her. If she noticed that they were made of kaleidoscoping cohesive energy waves, she didn’t show it.

Barrelled underwards and hidden side-by-side on a level of predictable uncertainty in between this universe and the possibilities of our nearly identical neighbours, I’d stored the entirety of her mind in a recording.

She was almost pure theory based on a shrunken cascade of concatenated decision processes mapped out at the moment of transition as she feel asleep. The solenoids and smallfarms I’d put in her hot chocolate had run rampant and reported back as her eyes fluttered closed.

Her thisworld body lay unconscious on the work bench behind me. Her breathing was steady. She’d be fine by nightfall. I’m no monster. She’d have no memory of the last day and a half, though. I wanted no trouble.

Soon she’d wake up on my mom's couch upstairs and assume that she’d had a little nap. I’d be there in her groggy state to back up that assumption and make it fact that would be seamlessly dreamwoven into reality by tomorrow. She’d have no idea about the copy of her that the boy in the basement next door had stolen.

I watched her tiny sparking soulcopy make herself comfortable for hours in the tiny molecular living room before carrying her awakening realword meatself back up the stairs.

I couldn’t wait to make the adjustments next week and put a copy of me in there as well.

Time to see if she meant what she said would happen if we were the last two people on earth.

I believe in science. I believe in love. I believe in controlled conditions.



tags