Extracted - Chapter 1 – I Was Just Joking

 

Extracted

By Karen Singer

 

Chapter 1 – I Was Just Joking

 

(Five Years Earlier)

 

The first time was an accident.  Their process had proven to be far more dangerous than anyone had considered.  Afterwards, it had taken three months of careful scientific study before anyone came up with the slightest clue as to what had happened…not to mention achieved.  Even then, the solution had been made in jest.  It was nothing but a small joke.  Until they had tested it.  No one was jesting about it now.  No one!

The system was supposed to be the most advanced water treatment process on the planet, and it was certainly that.  It not only worked, and well, but the entire development team now wondered if maybe it didn’t work a bit too well.

They tested the system with all types of water, mostly seawater, but hundreds of tests had been done on dirty and contaminated water of all types and from all parts of the world.  Each time, the process quickly pulled out every single contaminated particle, separated and collected those particles, and then spat nothing but perfectly clear, clean, drinkable water out the other end.  What’s more, those collected contaminants from the original water could often be kept and either used for something else…or sold!  It’s amazing how many different elements are dissolved in seawater alone, including very minute trace amounts of gold and rare earth elements.

Substances like common salt were easy to extract and the process didn’t even break the salt down, it simply pulled the sodium chloride particles out of the water and collected them.  The salt was pure enough for your kitchen table.  From there the water went through a series of other chambers, each time subjecting the water to the altered frequencies and magnetic fields that made up the process.

The treatment chamber of their development model was basically a large pipe about thirty inches in diameter, allowing huge amounts of water to be treated quickly as it passed through the various chambers.  In each chamber the water was subjected to not just a specific soundwave frequency, but also a massive magnetic field.  The combination of the two powerful forces was enough to break down anything.  The process simply changed the wave frequency the water was subjected to as well as made slight variations in the magnetic field to target the combination of desired molecules and elements that could possibly be in the water.  One by one, those elements were pulled out and transferred into collection chambers for each of the targeted processes.  The final process targeted those elements that were the most rare, usually collecting nothing at all, or almost nothing.  Still, it was part of the entire process, guaranteeing pure, clean, drinkable water in the end.

The problem with the system didn’t show up until there was an accident.  A very unforeseen accident.  Hector, one of the developers, had crawled into the pipe and was working on the final chamber, trying to make some last-minute adjustments that would pull any possible gold or rare earth molecules into the collection system, which in this case was the smallest collection chamber in the entire system.  He finally finished installing a new, and hopefully improved sonic wave generator into the chamber.

“Okay,” he yelled.  “Switch it on.  See if it works.”

As he laid in the pipe, one of the other team members turned the system on, activating the entire process.  It was something they had done not just hundreds, but thousands of times before.  Nothing was different, except the new wave generator.

Judith, the leader of the team and the woman at the control panel, saw the LED lights come on indicating that everything appeared to be working perfectly.  Two seconds later she heard a short scream.  Not knowing what had happened or what the problem was, she looked around.  The other team members appeared to be just as confused.  She quickly shut the machine down to check further.  It took them only seconds before they discovered that Hector, inside the pipe, was unconscious.  Nothing they could do seemed to bring him around.

Hector was taken to the hospital, where eventually the doctors declared him to be in a coma.  They ran test after test on his unconscious body, but never once found anything the slightest bit wrong with him.  All tests showed him to be physically in perfect health, except he was unconscious, and it looked like he was going to be staying that way, possibly for the rest of his life.

The team fretted horribly over the problem.  What had gone wrong?  They had all been inside the pipe many times at various stages of the development, including doing exactly what Hector had been doing.  But what had gone wrong this time?  Nothing at all that they could see.  Since the final section where Hector had been only targeted gold and a few rare earth elements, nothing should have happened to Hector at all.  It didn’t make sense!

The strangest thing however was that close examination of the system showed that something had been pulled out and stored in the collection canister for that final extraction chamber.  However, all measurements of that something indicated that whatever was in there was nothing at all.  The spectrometer sensor inside the canister was completely flat showing that there was nothing at all there, yet the pressure had gone up indicating that something was there.  But what?  Until more testing could be done to figure it out, the collection canister was left sealed and simply removed from the machine.

The new sonic wave generator was removed and tested, and found to be defective.  The signal that it emitted wasn’t what they had programmed it to put out.  The generator was emitting a much higher frequency than it was supposed to, and the wave was completely out of phase with the rest of the wave generators in that section.

A new wave generator was installed and tested, and the defective one was put on a shelf and carefully marked as defective.  Now they were left with a machine that could do exactly what the world needed, yet they didn’t dare put it on the market or do anything else with it until they solved a few problems first.  One, since that chamber only targeted gold and rare earths, what exactly had happened to Hector in there?  The second thing was something that really confused them all.  What had they extracted when Hector had been injured?  Nobody still had a clue.  And finally, why was Hector still in a coma when the doctors could find nothing wrong with him?

They worked and studied everything they could for three months, finding nothing that could give them any answers at all.  And that’s when the jest was made.  The joking comment that not only solved it all, but sent shivers of horror through each one of them.

The joke had suggested the impossible.  Yet as time went on, all five remaining members of the team began to wonder if it was indeed possible.  Had they done that?  How?  The existence of such a thing had never been scientifically proven.  It was one of the world’s greatest debates.  But had they now actually solved that debate and come up with proof?  If so, it would radically affect every known fact of mankind’s existence.

But they were scientists, every last one of them.  They had to know.  No one wanted to believe it was possible.  It didn’t even make sense, yet they had to test it to find out.  But how?  How do you possibly, scientifically, test for such a thing?

There was only one answer to that.  It was the only experiment they could conceive of to find out.  But if it worked, they would have their proof…without a doubt.

What they proposed to do was illegal.  No doctor, lawyer, or anyone else would condone such a thing, but they saw no other way.  The implications of what they might discover, or not discover, were simply too huge for any of them to ignore.

The first step was to carefully measure once again everything they possibly could.  But it was the second step that began to move them into illegal territory.  In the dead of the night, a plan was implemented to smuggle Hector’s unconscious body from the long-term care facility he had been placed in, and bring it back to the lab where they were working.

Most of the team had doctor degrees, PhDs, but none of them were medical doctors.  Still, they checked Hector as thoroughly as possible.  As a final safety precaution, Hector’s hospital gown was removed along with all the wires and tubes that had been attached to him to help keep him alive.  Hector was as naked and pure as they could make him.

Very carefully, they placed his body in the center of the final chamber of the pipe.  To further help the process, both ends of the pipe were sealed tightly.  The team had made two other changes to the process.  The original defective wave generator had been put back in place to duplicate the original wave signal, and the final piece of the puzzle was that the magnetic field that was generated in that chamber was reversed, so that instead of pulling at the desired particles, it would remove them from the collection canister and insert them into whatever was in the pipe instead.  In this case, Hector.

When they were ready, all five team members looked at each other.  Nobody knew what was going to happen.  Would they cure their beloved friend and colleague, Hector, or would they kill him instead?  Or…the most likely outcome…would nothing happen to him at all?  That’s what they all expected.  That’s what they all hoped would happen.

With one final prayer, Judith, the head of the team, turned to the control panel and switched it on.  Five seconds later, she switched it off.  As soon as the rest of the team deemed it safe, the end of the pipe was opened and all five of them crowded around.  Hector’s body was just as they had left it.  Unchanged.  Just what they all expected.  For a moment, they were all silently relieved…until Hector let out a small moan.  They all stared in both wonder and horror.  But the body in the pipe continued to lay there, completely unconscious.  Hector appeared to still be in a coma, yet they had all heard him moan.

As carefully and quickly as possible, Hector was smuggled back into the facility they had taken him from only hours earlier.  The ones who carried him back into his room didn’t see any sign that anyone had even noticed he had been gone.  As they laid him in his bed however, Hector let out another slight moan, yet he didn’t wake up.  Frightened, the men left him and hurried out, reporting the second moan to the others as soon as they were safely away.

The care facility discovered that something had happened to Hector when the morning shift came in to check on him.  They discovered that the wires and tubes had been removed from his body, but more than that, the moment they began hooking him up again, Hector moaned a third time, and then opened his eyes, scaring the workers.

“He’s awake!” one of them shouted.

Hector was immediately transported back to the hospital.  Several hours later, the doctors declared that the only thing wrong with him was that his muscles needed a bit of exercise to get them going again.  The three months of coma he had been in had weakened them somewhat.

Hector’s entire family was ecstatic.  The entire scientific team that he had worked with was ecstatic as well, although not one of them let anyone else know what they had done, even though they had done the absolute impossible.

What was that absolutely impossible thing?  Something no one had ever imagined could be done.  They had not only proven the existence of the human soul, but they had captured that soul, stored it, and then put it back where it belonged.

The implications of such a thing were incomprehensible!

But more than that, those implications were nothing but frightening.  So frightening that they all had to wonder, did they dare tell anyone?  To a person, they all decided that for now the answer had to be no.  No one else in the world could be told anything at all about what they had done.  They would all have to discuss it for a long time before they even dared let any such knowledge out.  The implications of such a thing were simply too staggering.

To capture a human soul and return it to the body.  It was a godlike process.  What dangers could it possibly bring?  The answers to that were too numerous to count.

The very idea of it was…frightening!