Run Like Hell

Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer

How does hell run? If it’s moving as fast as your legs can carry you without thought for obstacles or turns, then I’m doing it. Bruised from hitting lamp posts, walls and other things that help you turn at full pelt. I’m bleeding and half-blind but so far I’m ahead of it.

It? Sorry, I have no other words to apply. We led this scientific field for years, having used the one thing our competitors did not: we looked back at the Victorian inventors and went through their work with a granularity never before applied. We used our research grants not for the latest technical advances, but to pry long unseen manuscripts from private collectors.

[ Please excuse the pauses in updating this blog, but the concentration needed to hurdle or scramble around things means I have to resync my headwear after each lapse. ]

We found a notebook written by Tesla, something thought to be non-existent. In there, we found the missing pieces of his wireless electrical field work, along with some vague notes regarding his decision to abandon it due to ‘unexpected phenomena’.

So we got busy and pretty soon had the bugs ironed out, or so we thought. In a world where access to webinfra was key to getting anywhere, having the power to run your latest device is essential. Mobile gadgets have been on the bleeding edge of battery technology for years. Our little (re)discovery meant that you could use them all, anywhere where a Colorado Field was operating. We named it after a Tesla test site, yet never noticed that he ensured all tests after the first were always staged far from population centres.

So after a couple of demonstrations, we had investors and media attention. That led to the usual safety and licensing rigmarole, but we had enough funds in discrete places by then to sidestep the slow grind of authority in the accepted ways. Sunderland offered us the best incentives and had an established technology base. It only took a year to establish broadcast towers, several of them built inside the old box frame electrical pylons, giving us plentiful power and established security perimeters at minimal outlay.

Media attention was focussed on this innovation, so we scheduled the startup for just after dusk on a Friday evening. People could party all night and update the world and their less fortunate friends in the newly battery-free city of Sunderland as enhanced reality projections lit the streets.

The bulbs flashed and the cameras panned as the Minister for Energy pocketed his expenses, made a speech and flicked the switch. The lightshow was everything we had predicted. The hum faded to silence as predicted. Then the screaming started.

Tesla’s phenomena had been transient and caused nausea with rashes on prolonged exposure. We amped the field up by a thousand percent and distributed it over ten thousand acres populated by a quarter of a million people. The phenomena we manifested were full blown entities, composed of charged particles and attracted detritus around a core that originates from somewhere I have no idea of. Some reports put the initial manifestations around graveyards, which makes me think of non-scientific explanations that terrify me despite my scepticism.

If you’re still seeing feeds from Sunderland, trust me when I say it’s worse than it looks.

I insisted on the control room having a manual kill-switch. That room is three blocks away and I am sure the phenomena are aware, somehow.

Signing off as I need to concentrate on running like hell.