Free Fiction Friday
Well what do you know - its a Free Fiction Friday on a Saturday.
This story is a recent one albeit based on an idea I've had for years. It's the closest I've come to writing hard sci-fi.
Rose in Stasis
It was with barely suppressed triumph that Dr Harrison watched the flower, his distorted reflection warped across the glass dome that covered it. He stood over it, motionless, as his heart careened about his chest. It must have been more than five minutes before he could look away from the florid petals, the bright green stem, un-wilted and strong despite having been his captive for over a week. The rose did not have any roots, Harrison having cut it with surgical precision the Monday previous. Fine filaments of wire suspended the delicate floral specimen so that it hung at the centre of a chamber a meter in diameter. In turn the chamber was housed inside a larger device which focused the stasis field inward.
He knew that he would spend the rest of his lifetime trying to understand what he had achieved, to break it down and build it back up again. His would be the first of thousands of similar attempts to reproduce what he had done today. He dare not say the words out loud even though he was alone in the lab for fear of--what? Jinxing it? Making real what had for so long been mere speculation and now at this moment of success had become open to failure? If he put the name to it, it would become vulnerable. He'd become vulnerable. There would be scrutiny now like never before. People would try to disprove what he had done despite the evidence before them. Here was a flower that had not decayed, or even lost an millilitre of moisture in over a week, and why? Not because of some radical horticultural feat. Not some revolutionary step in preservation or genetics.
His voice sounded small and flat in the large empty room. It was at odds with the importance of the event. "Dr Harrison, you have stopped time."
And yet he could see the flower. All rational thinking would suggest that light itself would too be stopped in its tracks by the stasis field. Indeed a project in the very same building had succeeded in halting photons. The thought made Dr Harrison let out a bark of laughter. There was nothing in the history of human achievement that rivalled what he had done here, and, save for a few assistants, one or two interns and lab technicians, an achievement that he was proud to call solely his own.
There was no end to the applications of this discovery. Transport was the very first application that came to mind. Anything moved from one location to another would arrive in exactly the same state as when it left, whether it was fruit, ice, livestock. Even troops.
This was just the beginning however. The potential was unlimited. The medical applications alone would justify its existence. One day it would be possible to literally halt the progress of a disease, isolate it, then remove it. In a way this was the cure for cancer.
The subject of military applications had been at the forefront of Dr Harrison's mind too. He was working for a laboratory funded in part by the military.
He couldn't let this be used by the military though. This was the ultimate weapon. A deterrent certainly, but open to abuse like everything else. Would it be considered wrong to put an entire invading army in chrono-stasis. A foreign government?
A country?
If light survived the field could it be that a person frozen in time still witnessed the world around them? A tantalising hell that would be.
Dr. Harrison shut down the stasis field, the mechanical parts coming to a slow whirring stop. He had to destroy this monster before it was unleashed. Sure there would be regulations, and in general a desire to use it benevolently. But all it took was for it to be misused once and that would be the end. This was no mere atomic bomb.
The rose drooped slightly to the left.
If anyone was going to use this discovery it would be someone with impeccable morals. Someone who understood the consequences of its effects and crucially who knew when to not use it. There was only one candidate that Dr Harrison could consider. He caught his reflection in the glass dome once more and grinned, his smile stretching wide over the convex surface.
From that day on the machine didn't work.
It took months for the techs to take the field generator apart, inspect every single element and then put it back together again. Once initial experiments with the device were unable to be reproduced the entire team decided to start from scratch. There must have been something that they had over-looked and the only way to find it was to head back in with a blank slate. While prototype two was being constructed Dr Harrison undertook his own parallel project.
Using parts from the first supposed failure he set about constructing his own field generator in the seclusion of his personal laboratory at home. This version would be different. It would not have a glass dome in which an innocent flower could be preserved like amber in the flow of time. Dr Harrison's device would be inverted. The observer would be in the centre and the field projected outward. It would in essence be a suit with which the wearer could explore a frozen world. Although his intentions were nothing less than ethically robust, Dr Harrison could not shake the thought that his first act as an adventurer in the space between moments would be a mischievous one. DeNarry, the head of the R and D department, was a buffoon without vision. He was uniquely a man without elan, a bureaucrat in a role that required a visionary. In addition he was rude, which in Harrison's eyes was unacceptable. If he acquired a felt-pen moustache suddenly one morning as he arrived for work then he might well have deserved it. Dr Harrison would treat it as a low-scale test in to what was possible in a world held in chrono-stasis. Or at least that's how he would justify it to himself. A simple prank that was in fact the very first step in a much larger plan he'd devised. There was no practical difference between applying ink to the top lip of an idiot than say disarming a nuclear warhead or two. He could go further than that and destroy all weapons, though this wasn't his goal. But knowing that, should he need to, he might. There were a million injustices he could either prevent or undo. Even Superman didn't have all the time in the world. With his reversed chrono-stasis suit that was exactly what Dr Harrison had. In a blink of an eye the world would find itself in a much better place. It wouldn't be immediately apparent but soon enough they'd notice changes. They'd notice a new equality, a fairer world, one where despots were suddenly removed; murderers and worse would puzzle how they had become locked up, and those wrongfully imprisoned would marvel at their new freedom.
All this and more he would do, and he would do it now.
The suit was bulky, ungainly and ugly. Around the transparent sheath that covered Dr Harrison like a tight fitting bubble there grew an array of electronic branches of thrumming machines en-meshed in a web of cables. Through the thicket of wires Dr Harrison's face could be seen as he sealed the personal enclosure. To activate the device all he had to do was clap his hands and buttons on each would start the field projection, and then again to stop it.
He clapped his hands.
At first he didn't understand what was happening or why. He couldn't move and initially thought that the bulky suit was simply too cumbersome. He went to clap his hands but his arms were stuck. Stuck in the air that itself would not move. The entire atmosphere was like concrete, solid except that it allowed light to pass through it.
Dr Harrison was not stuck in time, he was buried in it. Entombed. Within the confines of the suit he could move a centimetre in each direction, but beyond that he was a prisoner to a world in stasis.
It took him two days to die a slow agonising death that tortured him more mentally than it did physically. Once he was dead his body decomposed eventually filling the suit's legs and abdomen with slush. Hundreds of years later his skeleton, which had remained upright in a caricature of the man it had once been part of, crumbled to dust forming another layer on the organic pulp.
The last thing that Dr Harrison saw, something that he could not look away from for the duration of his slow demise, was the rose bush in his garden. The stem he had cut had begun to regrow but now would never bloom.
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