Misapport
CONTENT WARNING
GORE AND TERRIBLE (BUT SURVIVED) INJURY
In the flickering light of the transmission bay, Birgit reached up and ran her fingers along Roda’s outstretched arms, checking the straps on her suit and the sensors they held. She stopped at a wrist, and examined Roda’s palm: Its pale pink pads reflected thin lines of light, shining like cat’s-eye crystal.
Sometimes it still caught her offguard, even though they’d looked like this for years. Reinforced for extreme forces, absolutely vital to their work. She pressed her similarly-modified thumb into the gleam on Roda’s hand, dimpling it and deflecting the line into a circle.
Birgit’s flavor of engrossed distraction was familiar to them both. When she realized Roda had been staring, she froze!
Roda sputtered and laughed first, then over both their giggling managed to ask, “Am I good?”
“Yeah, everything’s running,” Birgit confirmed.
“You sure there’s nothing wrong with my hand?” she teased, holding a paw out, limp at the wrist.
Birgit grinned, and pat Roda’s shoulders before gently shoving her toward the platform. “Get up there.”
While Roda climbed into position in the center of a glittering array of reflectors and antennas, Birgit rushed back to the shielded control room. From the high window, she waited for the signal, and threw the switch.
Cables to the antennae lit up, and the whole building hummed. Roda’s floating halo lit up and drifted lower. Birgit watched closely as, up on the plinth, she blurred.
The main reflector behind her rattled like a great gong, each blow shaking her constituent particles further out of place, and into two places- Their probability fields stretched into the macro-scale, with one node gradually moving away. It took great focus to think – let alone aim – while half-disintegrated, but the ghostly line Roda was blurring out into stayed mostly straight. At first.
Birgit noticed the problems first, by the barely-visible spindly fog coalescing on the reflector dishes that had portended the last few failures. She grimaced and ducked halfway under the window. Roda aimed her best, but past some critical point in the sphere of manipulators, her bent wavefunction snapped back and split and flew into shatters.
Most of her was turned to hydrogen and helium immediately, electrons and nucleons fed up with being shuttled around and picking dislocated points to stay. But her stabilizer halo flashed white-hot, dragging her most important parts out of what was quickly becoming primordial chaos.
So a rosy crystal skull and most of a spine dropped to the floor with an unpleasant scraping thud, and Birgit ran out. Sighing, she knelt and pulled her tail over to brush the glitter and shatters of crystal-flesh off, debris of whatever was caught only partway in the stabilization. This really only disturbed her the first few times. There was even enough animate crystal muscle left for Roda to emote with the remains of her face! Or… Mouth unvoiced curses at the mishap, apparently.
“Hey, at least you stayed inside the building this time,” Birgit muttered. She picked the head up, leaving the burnt-out halo on the ground and heading out to the hospital.
While a reconstruction chamber put her body back together around her, Roda’s disembodied voice reached Birgit’s ear over radio, breathless with excited epiphany despite currently lacking lungs.
“I saw everything. I know what we have to do.”
Birgit smiled. There was a reason they wanted to experience their experiments.