Basement

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

I was ecstatic that I could create this kind of complexity in a chain-reactive static chemical crane array. The underchains made a little room between the different string permutations when the time came. It was the moment I’d been waiting for. The oven timer went off with a ding.

Seconds before the oven mitt caught fire, I let the retractors go and turned the electron ginny to six. With a little wiggle and a snap down to the quantum level, the lattice formed. It was perfect.

I’d made a fourteen-molecule high exact replica of my living room. It was there. I’d routed my electron microscope through the projector so that I could see it. The image of tiny green-tinted chairs and a coffee table was projected there in monochrome perfection on the pulled-down screen. I even managed to recreate the broken lampshade with a salt bonder, revised electrolyte silver off of a fork of my mother’s, and just a little monomole.

Light even streamed in through the basement windows. It was perfect.

I sat back to watch the show.

I had made her from pure electricity and wound her cored skeleton up from polymer attractors. The barest sheen of flattened oak protons and a hexideximilliliter of her own blood coloured her hair. She walked into the room, a little unsteady on her feet, and looked around in confusion.

I could actually see her hesitancy. The resolution wasn’t high enough in the scope’s view but it if was, I’m sure I would have been able to see a scurry of electrons form a sparking furrowed brow. She knew this room but she seemed to suspect something. She held her hands up in front of her. If she noticed that they were made of kaleidoscoping cohesive energy waves, she didn’t show it.

Barrelled underwards and hidden side-by-side on a level of predictable uncertainty in between this universe and the possibilities of our nearly identical neighbours, I’d stored the entirety of her mind in a recording.

She was almost pure theory based on a shrunken cascade of concatenated decision processes mapped out at the moment of transition as she fell asleep. She’d fallen asleep because I had drugged her hot chocolate before I let the nanotech do its work and transfer her consciousness to her tiny doppleganger.

Her macro-world body lay unconscious on the work bench behind me. Her breathing was steady. She’d be fine. I’m no monster. She’d have no memory of the last hour, though. I wanted no trouble.

Soon she’d wake up on my mom’s couch upstairs and assume that she’d had a little nap. I’d be there in her groggy state to back up that assumption and make it fact that would be seamlessly woven into reality by tomorrow. She’d have no idea about the copy of her that the boy in the basement next door had stolen.

I couldn’t wait to make the adjustments tonight and put a copy of me in there as well.

Time to see if she meant what she said would happen if we were the last two people on earth.

I believe in science. I believe in love. I believe in controlled conditions.