If you look through the famous scientists and inventors of the early twenty-first century, you will find a long list of names. This woman studied coding; this man created controllable lasers; this woman found a new way to look at fish. The one name you will not find is Isaac Whitney. Dr. Whitney — never “Mr.” or even “sir,” he’d earned his doctorate and he’d be addressed as so, thank you very much — graduated Oxford and lived in London. He owned a firm on a wide street and a laboratory on a slim one, and he had scientists working day and night to find a formula he thought could very well fix the earth. --- It was a cold December afternoon when he secured the fate of the world. Cold December afternoons rarely occurred anymore. “Cold” had become the kind of word that still held a place in the dictionary, but was never properly used. Like “decimated.” It was still a common practice to complain “It’s so cold!” and “I’m freezing,” but neither was ever true. Dr. Whitney considered this in his cab to his laboratory. Humans are idiots. They’d been given the warnings and hadn’t heeded them. --- He walked into his laboratory with quick steps. The receptionist looked up from her phone and waved him in, pursing her cherry-red lips in a frown. Dr. Whitney seemed fairly hurried today, she noticed. A strange occurrence — not that he was often late, but he was usually calm, collected, perfectly businesslike at all times. Dr. Whitney took the lift up to the fourth floor, and opened a large door. A man greeted him. Dr. Whitney couldn’t for the life of him remember the scientist’s name, because there was no need to know your inferiors by name in this line of work, or any, for that matter. The man handed him a pair of standard blue latex gloves, which Dr. Whitney slid on to his hands. The scientist nodded sharply, and brought Dr. Whitney into a large room with a dark rock on a table. A woman stood by the wall, and Dr. Whitney couldn’t remember her name either. She picked up the rock and handed it to Dr. Whitney, who held it up to the light and admired its shiny black facets. “This is it,” the woman said softly. Dr. Whitney’s head turned to her sharply, and she gestured to the rock in his hand. “This is what you asked for,” she added. A preposition at the end of a sentence, Dr. Whitney chided in his head. “Hm,” he said thoughtfully, and walked over to an adjoining room. It was much smaller, with only a singular square window facing a chipped desk. The desk held a sleek computer screen and a white keyboard, and there was a slightly lopsided chair pushed up to it. Dr. Whitney snapped at the male scientist, and he darted out of the room to fetch a glass box with a slim cable attached. The female scientist plugged the cable into the computer, and the glass box lit up in blue. She slid open the top of the box. Dr. Whitney placed the stone in the box and closed it. The lid made a little, satisfying thunk. Dr. Whitney turned on the computer and typed in a few lines of something. He clicked a few times. The scientists leaned in. If this worked the way Dr. Whitney thought it could, the world would be changed forever. If it didn’t… well, the scientists were disposable. At first, nothing happened. The woman tapped her foot quietly against the white-and-blue tiled floor, and the man looked up at the fluorescent lights on the ceiling. Dr. Whitney tapped an impatient, gloved finger on the side of the desk, in time with a song that had been stuck in his head for a week. He couldn’t remember the name of it, but it had been on the radio station he listened to twice since last Thursday. Suddenly, the box’s light flickered in a similar tempo, and Dr. Whitney frowned in an anticipatory way. He heard one of the scientists whisper “Come on…” And then everything went grey. ---- Downstairs, the receptionist’s phone buzzed. She turned it over and read the text from her boyfriend: <<Pizza for dinner?>> The receptionist smiled a small, red smile and tapped in a response. <<Sure.>> Then a charcoal-grey light washed over her vision.
hello! so this ^ is the new prologue for my novel. PLEASE do not steal it. you will probably NOT get the rest of the novel. I'm sorry. it's for SWC! ^^