Power Surge
It was a hot, uncomfortable day, but Dr. Kimberly Harlow entered work in the morning with a fresh sense of resolve. She knew, of course, that biotech is where the real money is these days--everyone racing to be the first to map human DNA or clone this and grow that. Laser technology--fifteen years ago considered essential to scientific advancement--now seemed like a joke as pranksters used five dollar pointers to intimidate rock stars and politicians. However, the re-evaluation that accompanied every setback had somehow steeled itself into the belief that today (yes, today) would be the day to break it all open and turn laser optics into a tool far beyond targeting systems and wrinkle removal.
She walked proudly past the lone security guard and pushed the up button on the elevator. The guard, barely conscious on a good day, was having a bad one and he snored loudly. Harlow tried not to wake him, but the chime of the elevator caused him to crack one eye to assess any threat that might require him to open the other. Seeing none, he was asleep before the doors closed behind her.
The elevator was empty, but she was used to being alone. Eighteen hours a day at work had not afforded Kimberly Harlow the luxury of companionship. The last relationship she had allowed herself was with a lab assistant in graduate school a couple of years ago, but that was more out of convenience than anything else. Her colleagues, before they began to scatter to other, better-funded programs, considered her asexual--an unfair assessment of a beautiful woman who just had different priorities for her time.
Five floors up, the elevator came to a stop and the doors opened on Dr. Harlow’s lab--the last lab in the building, actually, and one scheduled to close as soon as her grant money ran out at the end of next month. She walked over to the main power grid and, using her palm, pushed the breaker into place, causing the room to hum with activity and light.
While waiting for the computers to boot up, Harlow looked at her agenda for the day. It looked familiar, as it should have. She was trying to use a barium isotope to stoke a portable laser powerful enough to cut through steel and brick, and she wasn’t even close. The ray gun, it seemed, would have to remain science-fiction while she looked for new funding.
At the other end of the room, an optical mirror swung into position to direct the beam at a target in a safe room, built exclusively for the purpose of being unsafe. The laser, however, remained here, large and unwieldy and totally unremarkable. Harlow went to work--adjusting the barium mixture, setting the focus collar, and making sure her car wasn’t being broken into (since the exodus of funding, it was an island in a sea of parking lot asphalt).
Over and over again, the laser fired, bouncing off the mirror into the safe room, hurting nothing. The steel target remained as pristine as the day it was milled, save for a small brown mark where it seemed the forty million dollar laser had succeeded in giving it a tan.
Lunch went quickly (a turkey sandwich left in the ‘fridge from yesterday), and sixteen hours after Kimberly Harlow had walked into work, the only thing burning was her last nerve. Her morning’s good mood had evaporated at mid-day and she had now finally had enough. She simply wanted to go away. To home. To bed. Away. Far away.
Away, however, was a process that was not as easy as she wished. She had to shut down each system individually after first checking it for bugs or anomalies. This usually took upwards of an hour and the prospect of even another five minutes in the room made her queasy. She opened a nearby window for some air, but quickly regretted it--the heat wave had continued past the onset of dark and a wet, sticky warmth entered the room. Closing the window, she looked at the laser and remembered. Away.
She diligently debugged the first system, then reached for the power switch to shut it down. Her fingers just grazed the switch when the lights flickered. She noticed that all the systems flickered, really, which wasn’t supposed to happen. Even if the whole city grid shut down, her building had emergency generators to prevent surges. As Kimberly thought it through, though, it wouldn’t have surprised her if the generators had already been turned off to save a few bucks. Now the entire city had its lights on, and its air conditioners, too. A brownout was not only to be expected, it was inevitable.
Kimberly went back to work closing up shop for the night, interrupted by a couple more flickers that annoyed her, but did no damage. She still had the final array up, though, when the big one hit.
The surge hit the building hard, sending sparks flying across the room. Gauges spiked and the monitors blew. A panel flew off the wall from a circuit box, hitting the back of the optical mirror and sending it spinning. Trapped between a pair of consoles, Kimberly covered her eyes to protect them from the sparks. Still, they stung the back of her hands, ten at a time, and she swung herself around in pain, knocking her elbow against the focus ring on the laser. It clicked a few notches counterclockwise before Kimberly’s reflexes kicked in. Keeping her eyes closed, she stabbed out with her arms to orient herself, hitting nothing but air until the very last blow.
Kimberly had pushed her hand onto the console to her right--central control. The laser sprang to life, heating up almost instantly before firing a long blast against the back wall. Kimberly opened her eyes in time to see a diffused light come off the mirror and straight at her. It covered her in a pale blue tint from head to toe, its focus gone but still providing a warmth that wasn’t painful, but prickly.
Frozen in place, she remained in its glow for a full five seconds before the power in the building finally gave out. The intense din of a moment ago gave way to a pure, dark silence that to Kimberly was even more frightening. She stood alone trembling and unmoving for a moment before the emergency lights kicked in. They were dull, but provided enough light to see the devastation around her. The monitors and computers were totally fried, the laser smoking. A small shower of sparks still fell from the ceiling lines. The damage was total and irrevocable. Funding or no funding, her research was over.
Kimberly stepped through the lab, carefully trying to make her way to the exit. She walked deliberately to keep her shaking legs from collapsing under her, with each step surveying the wreckage around her. To her left, more smoking terminals and gauges. To her right, the optical control and the mirror and--what was that?
She turned to take a closer look at the mirror, one of the few pieces of equipment that remained improbably whole. The light was dim, but she could track her movement in it, and something in its image wasn’t right. She walked closer to it, regaining her energy with the sheer force of curiosity. Kimberly Harlow was only a couple of feet away from the mirror when she realized what was wrong. She was gone.
Kimberly stared into the mirror and was amazed to find that absolutely nothing stared back at her. Her lab coat seemed to be hanging off of a silk blouse that was hanging off of...nothing. Straining her eyes in the dim light, Kimberly could clearly read the label on the back of her shirt collar. That was when she began to throw up.
She bent over and heaved the contents of her stomach onto the floor, shutting her eyes tight but still seeing the hem of her skirt floating a few inches above her shoes. Her vomit, which she felt, tasted, smelled...it was nowhere to be seen. She reached to to touch the floor, but the sight of an empty sleeve reaching down just made her feel sick again, so she withdrew it.
Taking a deep breath to prepare herself, she looked at the ends of her arms again, horrified, gingerly moving one cuff toward the other until she could feel her hands meet. Then she ran her left hand up her right arm. The lab coat rippled with the movement of the left sleeve, and the pressure was unmistakable. Her hand was invisible. Invisible. She was invisible. She looked at the handprint on her sleeve and began to cry. She sobbed heavily, with tears she could feel running off her face, but couldn’t see.
After a few moments, she stood up straight and tried to wrap her mind around what was happening to her. A shock-induced hallucination became the best case scenario, which was of little comfort. Worst case was clearly her current situation, which had to be dealt with now. Her equipment was destroyed, along with the data from the surge and the last of the barium isotope used to power the laser. If there was a way to reverse this, it wasn’t in here anymore.
Suddenly, the idea of detection overwhelmed her, and it occurred to Kimberly that if her solution wasn’t in here, she shouldn’t be either. The power was still off, along with the backup generators, so chances were that any alarms that might have gone off were disabled--and even if they weren’t, response time was probably running high in the blackout. A power surge of the magnitude of this could probably be counted on to fry surveillance cameras, too. The night guard, however, was a different story. He was probably on his way up right now, checking each floor as he went. That didn’t leave much time.
She ran to her locker as fast as she could. The latch proved incredibly difficult to work with--she couldn’t see her fingers and ended up just dragging them across the flat surface of the locker until they were able to catch it. The locker swung open and she brought out a large wool scarf that had been there since February. She pulled her sunglasses out of her coat pocket (again with more difficulty than she expected) and carefully put them on before wrapping the scarf around her head and face. It was unbearably hot, but she tolerated it as she ran down the fire stairs, hands in the pockets of her lab coat.
The emergency lights in the stairwell were even worse than in the lab, and she felt confident that only a close encounter with the guard would give her away. As she reached the first floor, she heard a door above her creak open.
"Hello?"
It was the night guard, Clarence or something, and as she looked up, she could see he had a flashlight. Kimberly ran under the stairs and held her breath as the beam cut across the floor in front of her.
"Dr. Harlow? That you? You okay?"
She heard his boots clang against the stairs, coming down for a closer look. The flashlight beam moved back and forth inches away from her until finally, it stopped and the footsteps started to get softer instead of heavier. She cautiously edged back out from under the stairs and listened for a door upstairs to open and close. A moment later, it did and Clarence was gone.
The instant Kimberly heard the door close, she bolted out the first floor stair entrance and into the lobby. Clarence, bless him, was still upstairs looking for her, so she had a clear path to the door, and that’s all she needed. She ran out of the building in dead sprint, sweating like mad under the wool scarf, but not even noticing. She ran to her car (still there, thank God) and stubbed her fingers a few times trying to jam the key into the lock.
The engine turned over on the first turn of the key and she drove into the night, leaving her lights off until she was well clear of the building she knew she would never enter again.
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It was a short drive to her house, which Kimberly was extremely thankful for, both because she was still reeling from her ordeal and because the sight of her steering wheel turning by itself in front of her empty sleeves wasn’t helping matters any. She parked the car quickly and ran inside. The first thing she grabbed was a pair of gloves and a large suitcase which she desperately filled with clothes and sentimental items. She did this with incredible haste, but paused on a photograph album which Kimberly suddenly felt was extremely important to keep. It might be a long time before...she put it out of her mind.
She threw the bags into the trunk of her car and drove quickly to a motel on the opposite edge of town from her home. Her face still swaddled with the heavy scarf, the desk clerk looked at her like she was obviously a loon. The hottest night of the year, and she’s wearing a scarf and sunglasses. She even had the damned thing tucked in around her sunglasses. She did have cash, however, and she paid for four nights in advance, so loon or not, she was his guest. He handed her the key to the room farthest from him and went back to his television.
Kimberly parked the car behind the motel, away from the road, and took her bag into her new room, making sure to lock the door and close the shades tightly. Finally, she took a look around and realized she could stop. It was the first moment of peace she had had in the two hours since the accident, and now she felt it was time to take stock. There was a large mirror hanging over the bureau at the front of the room, and even through the dark tint of the sunglasses, she could tell what a strange sight she was.
"Well," she thought, "I’m about to get a lot stranger." She took off her gloves, still amazed to see nothing underneath. She raised her sleeves and the glasses lifted themselves off her nose and flew onto the bed. The scarf around her head unraveled, and when Kimberly saw what she didn’t see, she started to cry again. It was time, she decided, to find out just how extensive her invisibility was.
Her lab coat came off her shoulders quickly and fell to the ground. Her hands fumbled with the buttons of her blouse, but one by one they undid themselves, revealing a little more each time. When the last button pulled away, the blouse fell open and Kimberly gasped. She could see the back of the blouse clearly, but what truly stunned her was the sight of her bra hanging in mid-air, fully filled out. She looked down and stared impossibly at the impressions her nipples made on the inside of the cups. The inside of the cups, she thought to herself. Her tears kept flowing uncontrollably, not out of sadness or anger, but simply because she didn’t have the will to stop them.
Kimberly’s arms pulled themselves out of the blouse and it fell in a silky pool on the floor. Small sections of her skirt pulled away from either side as she stuck her thumbs in and pushed down. It peeled off her body, thick with sweat, but where her legs should have been, Kimberly saw only the foot of the bed. She looked up and saw what was left of herself. A bra and a pair of panties, suspended in mid-air. By now, of course, it was obvious to Kimberly that she was entirely invisible, but something drove her to reach behind her and unclasp the bra. She watched in amazement as the hook and eyelets separated. The bra loosened, and the bumps her aureoles made in the cups disappeared. It fell to the floor with the rest of her clothing.
The panties swayed from side to side for a moment, and for a second Kimberly realized that it would be easy to think of herself as being the lingerie instead of simply filling it. This was, after all, all that remained of her. She ran a thumb along the inside of the waistband, and watched the tautness travel along her waist. After this, she slid her fingers down into her hair, amazed at how she could see them pushing against the inside of the empty fabric. Her fingers danced in there for a few seconds, but with another second’s thought, she grabbed at the sides of the panties, pulled down, and she was gone. Really gone.
She was totally invisible, and while the thought excited her with all of its possibilities, more than anything she was terrified that it could be permanent, and that survival suddenly just got a lot more difficult.
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