20070309

Nuclear Physics Nightmare

by Rod Drake

Clive was, as usual, in over his head, but this time, he was in over everyone else’s head in the whole Cambridge LINAC Center as well. It had seemed like a neat idea initially, popping a microscopic piece of silly putty into the linear particle accelerator to see what would happen. But somehow it had all gone wrong, horrible wrong. Something in the putty, maybe a smudge of Clive’s DNA, had combined with decaying ions and developing antimatter in the accelerator, and the result wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t anything remotely from this earth, solar system or galaxy; it was a totally new life form, if that’s what it was, growing geometrically in size and appetite, absorbing everything in its path like a black hole. As Clive and the lab staff were stretched out and sucked into the dark matter center, he wondered if maybe he had gone too far this time.

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Rod Drake, author of Sex or Syntax, lives in over-the-top Las Vegas and has decided that work is less fun than it was advertised as being in college. Check out Rod's longer stories in Flashes of Speculation, Fictional Musings, Flash Flooding, Flash Forward and MicroHorror.