Читать книгу Game of Tag. Fantasy - Julia Syanova - Страница 11

It was very cold in the basement of the building. The staff had to warm up, drink hot tea and put on “underpants’. This winter, as forecasted by the meteorological satellites, was the coldest one in a century.

Nechesov Aleksandr had been the Head of the laboratory for five years. And only the last eight months he had been really enjoying the process. He and his six subordinates managed to derive “living water’ and reproductive nanorobots in it. The robots were made on the basis of a genetic engineering and the new discovery, known as “celestial metal.” A unique alloy with special properties, the one of which is self-replenishment.

At the beginning of the work, there were ideas about an eternal engine, about self-replenished sources of energy.

But now all these ideas have become secondary. Today, Aleksandr managed to give a steady shape to the material for as much as three minutes and eighteen seconds.

Now he was standing in the corridor, smoking his smelly cigarette, thinking that something was missing, something that would allow nanorobots to act more efficiently and keep the form for a necessary, infinite time.

“Most likely, I had mistaken at the very beginning. Choosing not a living bacterium, but mechanical robots. But working with a living tissue is dangerous and pointless; we finally do not receive a new kind of contagious diseases, but create technical materials.” Reflecting on that, it seemed to him that he had almost found that eternally elusive truth. He looked at his watch – it was half past two. Today he should not be late. Irishka was waiting for him at their home, the institute allocated one-room apartment, as soon as he brought the old man a certificate of his wife’s pregnancy.

He threw the cigarette butt into a bucket and headed to the sanctum sanctorum – to the second laboratory. He could not wait to check one of his many guesses.

If in the corridor there was a bitter cold and twilight, then in the laboratory itself, thanks to the warm floors and human breathing, it was warm and, of course, imported lamps that worked better than domestic ones.

“Lenochka, have you wrote a report on the fixation of stasis substance from the test tube no.17?”

“Yes, Aleksandr Nikolaevich, but I must admit that the effect lasts only for zero point three percent longer in mineral water, in contrast to a simple chlorinated one’, the lab assistant was clearly disappointed.

“You cannot be optimistic, Lena, for progress sometimes lies in billionths of the whole. So we need to keep working. Have you already had tea?”

“No.”

“Then I will start boiling the water. Do we still have your jasmine tea from the Celestial Empire?” saying this, he was already pouring water into the kettle. Put the kettle on, put it in the socket, pressed the button – that is all the work. He wished that everything was so easy.

Lenochka flew into the cubbyhole for the tea.

Aleksandr could not tear his eyes from the bubbles in the kettle. He felt that only a little bit separates him from the touch of something great, a little more is needed, perhaps, something was just preventing this, something was unwilling to open the door for him, behind which his, Aleksandr’s, discovery was hiding.

Lenochka, young and, undoubtedly, the most talented student of the group, brought the tea leaves.

“Ah, here is the tea! I took cookies and sweets.”

The kettle already boiled water, and he began pouring boiling water into the glasses. Because their white uniform was very old and burnt, no one was afraid of making it dirty, his laboratory was known as “piggy-wiggies’ among the colleagues.

At one point a glass of boiling water slipped from his hand and fell on a metal table. The chips flew through the laboratory and hurt his forearm. There was a deafening sound of the breaking glass. From the waist down, everything was filled with hot water. It is good that his trousers and uniform saved him from burns.

Lenochka squealed and instinctively covered her face with hands and pulled back, afraid of chips falling into her violet eyes.

“Ah, damn! So burning!” Aleksandr screamed.

“You are bleeding! Need to stop it, is it very painful?”

“No, Lenochka, it is all right, I just did not expect,” clamping the cut, Aleksandr was trying to stop the bloodshed. Blood dripped onto the floor, it was on the table, and blood drops were on test tubes with “dry’ nanorobots.

“Lena, we need to clean up here,” he said as calmly as possible. “Bring me a bandage and a sterile cloth for flasks. Hurry up! Do not stand there without any movement! That is what we got for drinking tea’

They debrided and bandaged the wound, washed the table, the floor and all the drops on the flasks.

They spent then another hour to wipe everything over again with a special solution.

But it was too late. Space scales have already shifted from spiritual development to technology. Their movement was incredibly large-scale, thundering lightning in the eternal emptiness of the cold faceless something.

Megatons of gas were scattered throughout space with the size of millions of light years away. And all because in the test tube no.36 9/1 microscopic nanorobots absorbed life-giving moisture – human blood with an unidentified mutation.