1 - TransmittedThey had told her that it would hurt. There was no lie, deception, or euphemism for it. It was a promise from his colleagues who simuted the nervous system's reaction to the process, and a repeated warning from his director, who had her sign an impossibly long document that indicated she was pcing herself inside the machine, and, by consequence, under extreme amounts of pain, willingly. To this date, no natural means have been discovered, and no feudal torture devices have been machinated that generate as much pain as the machine she was inside.
They machine in which she now id had been monikered "the Undoer" for a reason. It was also created to muffle all screaming from she who was now inside it.
"STOP IT, PLEASE. STOP IT, STOP IT! GET ME OUT OF HERE. GET ME OUT! ABORT, ABORT. ABORT — !!"
She had not been given a 'safe word', or a way to 'abort' the operation, as she so naively attempted to do. If she had been given such a word, she would have used it seconds into the undoing. But she already had signed the stack of papers that made her the first tester of her own creation. That is to say: it was too te. Interrupting the process here and now would not only leave her body irreparably damaged in most senses of the word, but it would also mean about a thousand million rubies and five (total) years of work lost forever. Her undoing couldn't be rushed, either. Making the process one second faster would increase the chances of failure by 0.7%, a number far too significant to ignore. It had to st the full forty-three minutes. There was no other way.
"Please... PLEASE!!! I'm begging! I'm begging. I'll — I'll do ANYTHING. Just GET ME OUT. I made A MISTAKE, I MADE A MIST —"
Those present at Laia Laboratories' main research room could only watch. They had each been prepared to see this, and simply couldn't avert their gaze. Compared to the total body of employees at Laia Laboratories, few decided to be present from the transmitter's (i.e. Undoer's) side of the process, as most did not want to see such suffering. Suffering for the sake of science and progress, but suffering nonetheless. The only opportunity they had to see anything other than their tortured colleague screaming in the devilish-looking machination was when tears clouded their sight, each blink taken as a mercy from the Gods of tears.
"Is she going to d-die?" Asked Hummulin, the newest intern. Likely the least useful scientist in the whole room. Some watched him and secretly wished it was him that was strapped to that thing over there. He just seemed like the test-subject type. Thin, of average height for his region (about 167 cm), anaemic, and fairly untalented when it comes to the sciences, his presence was only thanks to being nephew of an oligarch, making his nepotistic presence an annoyance to everyone else.
"No, Hummulin." Responded Doctor Muias, managing director of Laia Laboratories, standing straight, stoic in spite of non-tallness, as any leader-in-charge should when the true leader is absent because they are inside a machine. He is taller than the intern he chastises, has a square face, carries still the remnants of a muscur early adulthood as he nears the forties, and makes evidence proof of his overworked nature starting by the messy, curtain-style brown hair he wears over his tanned head. Simirly, some beard had grown around Muias' characteristic moustache, as shaving was put to the side in the st few weeks of the machine's development. The room is vast and mostly dark, illuminated only by the lit computer screens and the inside of the machine itself, so his expression is mostly concealed.
He had asked everyone present to stay quiet during the forty-something minutes of Liya Merebold's pain, but his answer was redirected to the room, still, as they all likely had that same question lingering in their mind. And they're not to bme for their pessimism: any sane individual would think this project would fail. Trekkos Muias kept himself together, but behind the square gsses and the unusually good posture was the earth-shattering grief of a man who'd put the most brilliant woman in the world in a machine to die. "Everything is going fine on our end." He spoke. "The crew over at the Redoer don't seem to be having any tech issues, either."
And he was not sugar-coating it for their sake. On moments of silence, he retrieved his 'work phone' (a device of communication, far more exclusive than his 'personal phone', which was pgued in missed calls for some reason), and communicated with his peer over at the receiving (i.e Redoing) end.
== LOG 29-01-794 02:32 PM ==muias: running. muias: [DISCONNECTED]muias: [CONNECTED]muias: 14% in. all is good.heggard: [CONNECTED]heggard: yes, the scanners are still working over here, everything's ready.heggard: my radio team is listening to your feed. they seem shocked.heggard: i told them it would be a rough listen, but stillheggard: sheesh.heggard: i'd never really heard liya scream like that.heggard: is sheheggard: okay?muias: as okay as she could be.muias: if anything, her pain only indicates that things are going -well-. she shouldn't fall unconscious until the st few minutes.muias: keep watching the percentages, and make sure the synth is running once we're at 89.43%muias: most importantly, NOBODY outside the team can hear her scream.heggard: gotcha, boss. so far so good. in that regard.heggard: how are you doing by the way?muias: [DISCONNECTED]heggard: [DISCONNECTED]== EOF ==What the Redoer team could be gd of is that they were allowed (or perhaps explicitly ordered?) not to televise the video cameras within boratory at Laia. The scene wasn't pretty, thirty percent in. What remained of Liya Merebold id inside the machine, as if in a diagonally-oriented bed. Where once her arms were strapped to the machine by metallic rings on her wrists, now was nothing: her torso had been deprived of those extremities, and a drill-like engine now moved to dig into her left foot, starting from her toes, who once wore white delicate socks and had been since decimated to dust. Soon her legs would be gone, too. And then, whatever remained.
It was near the thirty-percent mark of her undoing that her convulsions became less of an instinctive act of unbridled screaming and more of these erratic pulses of pain and calm. All yelling would cease suddenly — and the room would flinch as if it was a person's reaction, fearing she had finally succumbed and passed away. But then, her brown eyes would snap open, twitch a few times and the screaming would resume, perhaps with a slightly more irritated throat, and a dying hope that she would be saved.
Many parts of that fateful day have become the subject of intense, multidisciplinary concern, which were never truly resolved. Any attempts to replicate the experience had been shut down either by either local, federal, or social authorities, the tter always present with pamphlets and roars of discontent by the hundreds, the scientific martyr having become arguably a political icon more so than a scientific one. And not for small reasons, either.
On the months following the incident, she was mostly discussed as the evergreen example of the brilliant's greed. The funding required for this project was beyond what they could afford — but the team of scientists at Laia Laboratories certainly wasn't short for money. Less than three years prior they had developed, after a year of engineering (and many, many more of senseless conceptualization, before Liya was hired...), a simple-in-practice material teleporter named Telemate, a revolution of what was thought to be science, limited by resources and energy but the first step in what would be the future of transport and trade. Many assumed that Liya would 'deem it insufficient'. She took on the Telemate when it was at its most dire point and helped it return to force. In a year it went from a technical impossibility to a working prototype celebrated as her life's achievement, earning her endless headlines and rumbling recognition throughout the scientific world.
Ultimately, the device currently being tested was considered the answer to a simple question: If Doctor Merebold had resurrected a project in a few months and made history with it, why wouldn't she try to start one of her own, and take it to the skies herself from the beginning?
Of course, such characterizations of Liya Merebold, as an ambitious, reckless scientist are uncreative at best and a btant dispy of ignorance in average. It suffices to hear the final coherent words she screamed while being undone for it all to lose credibility.
"Sal—i—h... gnngh... Salih..."
Because while arguably one of the greatest minds in Miralian history (perhaps surpassed only by the Zeni brothers), Liya Merebold had grown to take her personal life before anything else. So recognized and respected was her individuality as woman beyond the b coat, that when she yelled "Salih" forty-one percent into the procedure, everyone knew exactly to whom she was referring.
Salih Pannek, who then had been married to Liya for a little less than a full year, confided in her own diary on the days following the incident. She refused to trust any other kind of therapist or counsellor. On the incident's day, she wrote:
Liya refused to acknowledge the risks reted to the bio-teleporter. She listened to me when I told her about it, and yet kept that optimism of hers clear and promised everything would be alright. I can tell she is afraid. I can tell a part of her, concealed well enough to be minuscule, does not want her to be the one testing that machine. I don't know why she signed, then. And I fear I might never know. I feel like I should have expressed my objections louder. I just feared. I just feared she would be mad upset sad? She probably would not have been. She would have understood. I am almost sure of it. She would have understood why I wanted her alive and well more than anything else. She would have understood I wanted her forever. That no invention is worth her life. The life we had been pnning until that day. The ... [...]
Salih had been gratuitously offered the possibility to be present during the transmission part of the Bio-Telemate's inaugural test alongside the scientific team. She refused of her own accord, not wanting at all to see her wife in such pain, preferring instead to, hopefully, hopefully see her alive, and well, on the receiving machine, from which she was supposed to come out, proving the two-end device's capability of transferring a living entity from point A to point B.
Those with knowledge of the device's strange and advanced bio-physics might be reluctant to call it a "transfer of living matter"— and they would probably be right. A number of schors have made the argument that the bio-telemate's design is more-so a cloning device split in two— where the original "copy" of the user is read and destroyed to atomic information in point A (colloquially known as the 'Undoer'), to then be reproduced in point B (the 'Redoer'). In theory, the time between the user's forty-three-minute molecur decomposition and its synthesis is small enough that this "cloning" is one-to-one identical, and that no split consciousness can exist between both ends of the transaction.
The only memories and biological data lost are those produced from the moment the machine is running, i.e, what Liya is experiencing right now. One of the bio-telemate's key functionalities is that the brain and heart are the st parts to be removed from the user's body— and timing is key to ensure there is no neurological damage.
The one confident way Laia Laboratories had to verify the proper functioning of their teleporter before pcing Liya Merebold in it was with the noble sacrifice of maximum five street rats that had to have failed a psychological screening so that their hypothetical passing would not be a great loss to the rodent community. Leaks from the Laboratories' records show exactly fifteen teleportations being made, all of which were successfully passed: All rats were teleported thrice each, with a survival rate of one-hundred percent, and with total reconstruction integrity, meaning not a single cell of the rat was mispced or lost in the process. The five rodents were abundantly compensated with cheese for a lifetime and all returned to their former activity without any issue. None of the rats suffered from any long-term consequences whatsoever.
In any case, the retive difficulty between teleporting rats and human beings between two points comes down to, evidently, the size difference between the two, and the heightened complexity of the human organism. But that doesn't mean there wasn't reasons to be optimistic of the Liya Test — a number of simutions were made using almost every known parameter of her organic system and how it would react to the process, and nearly 99.4% of them survived. It was the 0.06%, that tiny fraction of probable execution that now had everyone on the edge. Or worse, the possibility that the simutions were wrong: that there was something they couldn't predict. A rounding error, a change in the weather, one fp of a butterfly's wings that would make one of the smartest women alive die painfully inside a machine she helped build from its start. Every single one of those forty-three minutes were riddled with anxiety that even Doctor Muias failed to control. Even if all scientists present had obeyed their promise of staying quiet during the whole disintegration, they still spoke to him through concerned gazes and shivering gestures. It is hard to bme them. They are all human, and they were watching one of their own be massacred by a beast.
Inevitably, Doctor Muias snapped roughly at sixty percent of the woman's undoing. Nothing in particur had happened, and Liya's screaming had been reduced into a constant slurring. Then, Muias's shaky breathing became a hyperventition, and he lunged himself toward the machine, smming both of his fists against the gss pane, screaming "Get her out!"
The rest of the crew reacted in shock, a few gasps were heard but nobody moved. One of the lead coordinators, a woman of bck, straight hair, also average height (173 cm, in her case...) called Ytrima Nonimos rushed behind him, yelling, "What the hell, Muias?! It's your protocol that we can't —"
"Fuck protocol!" His gnashing teeth infused his words with a blind wrath at the metallic casket, who responded only with 'Cng, cng, cng' as his fists hit the metallic carcass, soon painting it with drops of blood from his grazed knuckles. "I can't. I can't have her die. I refuse to ..." His fists continue the smming. The machine was well-built. It doesn't even flinch, and no dent is visible. Inside, Liya is beyond reaction; her eyes are barely open, and their line of sight is a corner away from the director. His fists give up a few bangs after, feeling himself be pulled away from the machine by Ytrima, but having his hands remain grasped to the device, approaching his mouth to the gss to whisper. "I'm sorry, Doctor... I'm so, so sorry doctor..." He stands back to see his colleagues, all inferior to him in the hierarchy of work but now mocking him from above the moral stand, watching him having become a pathetic, unmasculine outburst. His gsses, foggy, are adjusted, before he stands upright again, rubs his bloodied hands together and says "May the Sun Guide you, Doctor Merebold."
Liya could only be heard by him, mumbling incoherently, foam formed in her mouth as her extremities are finally gone.
Silence returns to the room, and Ytrima moves away from him, only patting the grieving man's shoulder as to not extend the agony of awkwardness. Liya's cranium begun to be peeled then, and in an instant nothing was recognizable in her any more. The eyes bulged around erratically and the neck spasmed periodically.
"It is almost time." Muias spoke as a new, humiliated man. And yet, his team remained silent and nodded as his words echoed in the room. "She'll lose consciousness in a minute."
Once Liya's eyes finally closed, and the heart rate monitor turned off, they knew that their part of the operation had finally concluded. The woman remained there, obliterated, but her consciousness had faded, and in a blink of an instant, it would be carried to the Redoer.
A few mechanical movements followed, and the Undoer had been emptied. Forty-three minutes ago — a woman was there. Alive and confident. Scared yet prepared. Hopeful above all else. She had become nothing, and in her stead remained not even blood. Not even viscera. Without a door being opened or closed, the room had suddenly one less person, and every element of the room wondered how their studies could have led them to such a sinister reality.
