“So here’s the situation.” Anthony Kirk, UBC’s Dean of Science, shined his slowly dying laser pointer at the grimy projector screen. Three months ago one of our colleagues, Dr. Lisa Ruth, had a stress-fueled nervous breakdown-”
“-oh come on!” That was Dr. (the real sort of doctor) Martin Luis, hailing from the pile of rubble that was once the UBC medical school. “Are you still sticking with that line?”
“A stress fueled nervous breakdown,” Anthony repeated more firmly, “during which she appears to have created a flying radioactive monster, affectionately termed ‘Clarke,’ that escaped early this morning and is now destroying our university. Typical lab accident, you know.” He laughed nervously, “I’m sure we’ve uh… all done something similar.”
‘You’d think,’Anthony thought to himself, ‘that the news of a superpowered, radioactive monster destroying a multi-billion dollar campus would draw a little more interest.’ But the assembled crowd continued to watch him with cold disinterest. He felt like he was back in front of his first year class- at least those kids had the decency to pretend to be listening.
This crowd, the men and women sitting in cheap folding chairs in front of him, were the last of a once great faculty. The only remaining bastion of hope. A more emotional man would’ve cried, but Anthony hadn’t become the Dean of a major university through emotion.
The bunker they were in trembled slightly, a loose stream of dust falling from the new crack in the concrete ceiling. A woman glanced up from her laptop, taking another swig of coffee, “There goes the business school.”
“Good riddance,” muttered the man next to her.
Anthony heard a faint sob from beneath the table that the structural engineers had chosen to hide under.
“You lot,” he called to them, “you can come out you know. This thing was built to survive a nuclear blast.”
The lead engineer shook his head slowly, “No. No it was not. That’s just what we told you.”
“Wh-”
“Budget.” A bespectacled Sauder professor poked his head out from beneath the table. “We didn’t think we’d ever reallyneed it.”
“ARE YOU HONESTLY TELLING ME-”
“Anthony,” Martin got to his feet, staggering slightly as the bunker rocked from another blow, “we can fight later.”
“GODDAMN ENGINEERS, ALWAYS THINKING THEY’RE SOOOO MUCH BETTER THAN-”
“Right now we need to come up with a plan of action.”
“GET MORE FUNDING, BETTER JOBS, LOWER GRADE REQUIREMENTS-” The vein was throbbing in his forehead now and Anthony found himself wishing he’d brought along that supply of blood pressure pills his wife kept trying to shove down his gullet. He opened his mouth again, ready to launch into the second half of his well-practiced rant- he had some good bits about mindless robots and grease monkeys- but at that moment another shower of dust fell from the ceiling, coating his designer suit in grey powder.
Anthony, Martin, and the rest of the assemblage looked up in horror. The crack across the ceiling was even bigger now, small slivers of sunlight beginning to filter through.
“It’s almost through.” Martin’s voice was hoarse.
A woman next to him burst into tears, “I was so close to tenure.”
Anthony frowned, drawing himself up to his full height. “No. No we’re not dying like this.”
Martin pointed up to the ceiling, “You wanna tell it that?”
“We have the world’s greatest science and engineering minds in this room. We can come up with a solution. We can defeat this thing.” Anthony looked desperately around the room, “Some of you must have ideas.”
There was a long, uncomfortable silence. Finally, an older woman in the back of the room raised her hand.
“Yes. Dr. Gordon, please. What’s your idea?”
“Well,” she offered, “I came up with a theory a little while back that allows me to collapse anything into a disc two feet wide by one inch thick. We could collapse the monster and use that as a means to cage or transport it?”
“Perfect!” Anthony clapped, motioning for her to take a spot at the room’s only blackboard, “Give us the math. Do we need any specialized equipment?”
“Oh no,” Dr. Gordon said with a smile, beginning to write arcane looking equations on the board, “this equation needs no external factors.”
Martin was frowning now, “Seems a little extraordinary.”
“Oh not at all!” Gordon grinned back at him, “There’s only one tiny little catch.”
“Which is?”
“It only works with a spherical monster in a vacuum.”
Anthony’s palm collided with his forehead. Martin sighed and slowly erased the equations from the board. Dr. Gordon stalked back to her seat, muttering under her breath about being a theorist, not an engineer.
“What about the chemists?” Martin asked, scanning the crowd of scruffy, singed scientists sitting clustered around the lone Bunsen burner, “Any of you have an idea?”
The chemists exchanged looks. One of them started scratching hexagons into the cement floor. Finally the head of the department cleared his throat, “We could generate hydrogen gas, fill the bunker with it, then set it on fire?”
“We… we’re in the bunker Dr. Wong.”
“Well…”
“Other ideas?”
“Oooh! We could make thermite!”
“Next!”
“TNT is quite easy to-”
Martin took a deep breath, glancing over at Anthony, “Did you hire any chemists who aren’t pyromaniacs?”
“It… pyromania was practically the job description.”
“Okay.” Martin grabbed a handful of his hair and gave it a good tug, glaring balefully at the strands that came loose in his fingers. “What about the biologists?”
He and Anthony looked at the other corner of the room where the few biologists were gathered around a rat. One was poking it repeatedly with a stick while the others took detailed notes. Another team appeared to be slowly roasting ants with a magnifying glass.
“… Nevermind.”
Another tremble, and the crack widened even more. Now an enormous red eye was visible through the gap, glaring at the people inside. Martin felt his stomach clench and immediately regretted his morning cup of coffee. Anthony was screaming at the engineers again. The sound was surprisingly comforting, a sense of familiarity here at the end of things.
The roof crumbled in. The late Dr. Ruth’s creation squirmed its way through the hole- an enormous, mottled monster with glowing red eyes and a radioactive green body. ‘Clarke’ had already claimed most of the university’s staff and students. Tonight, she would complete her mission.
The young woman in the front row sighed, took another gulp of coffee and got to her feet. She adjusted her glasses and proceeded to pull a long cable out of her backpack, plugging one end into her computer and jabbing the other into the monster.
Clarke let out a loud, guttural croak. Martin’s coffee evacuated his bowels.
The woman scowled at the monster, then hit three keys on her keyboard.
Control. Alt. Delete.
A click, and the monster vanished. The creature that had destroyed one of the world’s foremost institutions, that had claimed thousands of lives, that had ruined the newly installed Shadow Tree… was gone.
The computer scientist looked around at her colleagues and shrugged, collapsing back into her chair. “Task Manager. Works every time.”
Tapestry of Tales 