Write a short story based on those four keywords. Seriously (prompt suggested by a friend).
It had been exactly 26 hours, 4 minutes, and 53 seconds since Liam Prescott had last gotten out of bed, and it would be another half-day or so before he would even think about climbing back in.
A time-release caffeine dose, dosage carefully determined over a fortnight before, along with a life-shortening concoction of fatigue and anxiety reducing chemistry—had been self-administered from the moment he woke up, all in the effort to accelerate the completion of an absurd scientific goal: what was now the ninth in a series of failed attempts to bridge the lifeless reality of his underground laboratory to another distant location in the universe.
Well, Liam himself would describe the vibrant, verdant, meticulously constructed and lair as “lifeless,” but any outsider (if any outsider were able find it, that is) would probably jump to tell you that the advanced facility, with its metal and glass interior, dense flora, bright interfaces and alien-looking technology, had to be literally anything but.
Still Liam would now consider it lifeless, as he has for every day for the last twelve years.
Liam swiveled circularly about in his chair and promptly flipped a series of switches whose positions had long been committed to muscle memory. One was labeled “U POWER,” another “LP INTERFACE,” and the last, flashing, red one “IGNITION”.
He opened his day-pack to retrieve two objects in a single motion. The first was a small device, deceptively simple in its controls, and the other was a sort of keychain brooch attached to the device on a loop that looked hastily machined to the top.
Liam slowly folded open the circular, brushed silver brooch to find the last remaining physical memory of his lost soul mate, as he had done all eight attempts before.
“Jane, this is for you.”
The recently appointed Dr. Liam Prescott had never gone shopping for home decor before, but then again, neither had his newly-wedded wife.
Jane Prescott spoke with a voice that was soft but sure, “Liam, I really like all these pretty, modern designs we’ve got, but we could really do with some plants too.”
Liam was not in the business of disagreeing with his beautiful wife, a genius plant biologist in her own right, and likely a much better manager of home Décor.
“What kind were you thinking?”
Jane’s eyes lit up the same way a child’s might when told their curfew has been abolished for New Year’s Eve. “Well, we have plenty of extra space down there. I was thinking of maybe starting a tree garden.”
And so, like clockwork, the couple immediately set off to acquire 50 dozen peach tree cuttings, 51 dozen ceramic pots (in case some broke in transit), 2 metric tons of soil, a lifetime’s supply of fertilizer, and all the necessary components that they would modify and augment into the cutting-edge system behind the first self-watering, self-picking, self-sustaining superfarm of the Prescott Family Advanced Underground Research and Design Facility.
…
“Wow.”
“It’s gorgeous, right?” Liam glanced at his wife with bright eyes and then back at their recent accomplishment. “And the trees are pretty neat too, I suppose.”
Jane giggled. “God damn it, Liam.”
Betraying her previous statement, Jane took her new husband by the hand and turned to face the endless rows of peach saplings.
“It’s still missing the final touch.”
Jane opened her bag and started towards the nearest tree. She began to lay a set of meticulously embroidered doilies, each surrounding a single sprout in the superfarm. The widths of their openings were much greater than the trunks they now encircled, but the idea was that they would all eventually grow to fill out their embroidery.
Liam let out one final protest of the strange idea, mostly in jest, “They look like towels, Jane.”
“Oh shut up.”
Each set was meant to detail a significant event in their lives, from early childhood to college to their marriage; it was all carefully recorded in the cloth of the trees. She had hoped, perhaps naively so, that they would eventually get to see all the trees grow in due time, filling out the tapestry of encoded history in homage to their life together. Jane left a few dozen unclothed trees for future special moments to be embroidered.
She placed the final doily; its winding, clumsily sewed threads depicted the scene of the first time the pair had met: two bright, young minds colliding in the MIT Jameson Biophysics Computation Laboratory. They sat on a bench outside the building, sharing the exhaustive list of things they’d hope to accomplish one day.
Jane finished and walked back, and Liam embraced his wife in his arms for the last time.
He closed the brooch, which was filled with a cutting of her face from the lovingly embroidered scene of that fateful encounter, rather unable to handle the raw emotion of the first and last day they had spent together as a wedded couple.
“I’m so sorry, it was my fault.” Liam said aloud, unaware that he had even done so.
The “towels” of the trees had since been mostly filled, and a few had even stretched until they’d snapped. The first broken memory corresponded (not coincidentally) with the first time Liam decided he would attempt the impossible: to retrieve the woman he lost in what could only be described as a bizarre collision of unfortunate circumstance and insane coincidence during a breakthrough-of-the-century scientific experiment—one whose theoretical formalism was only just beginning to be developed by a select body of fourteen appallingly intelligent applied mathematicians and theoretical physicists the world over.
Still, one decade-and-two-years ago, Dr. Liam Prescott had alone managed to uncover the secret to generating negative energy densities, produced the sufficient quantities of exotic matter to contain them, and constructed the necessary bounding apparatus that (he had thought) would be enough to safely assemble and maintain an actual, miniature wormhole for study in the underground depths of the Prescott laboratory. He was almost correct.
But that miscalculation, slight as it was in nature, would go on to haunt his memory forever.
Soon after the elusive Einstein-Rosen bridge had successfully taken shape, Liam at once found himself utterly unable to—for lack of a better term with any remotely understandable analogy—”close” it, before the growing vacuum had already swallowed his better half, along with much of the peach tree farm they’d built together and the facility’s advanced machinery, through its forceful, relentless pull.
Their destination, he had worked out, was a planet orbiting the habitable zone of the red dwarf star system Kepler-186, a distant 151 parsecs from Earth. Despite this astronomically lucky terminus for a living and breathing human being, the survival of his wife after all this time appeared, at best, a distant pipe dream, and one that continued to dwindle by day.
Eight times already he had tried; eight attempts at reproducing the exact conditions to reopen the portal and find Jane. All had failed.
On two or three occasions he even succeeded at the first task, but the automated tools and apparatus of retrieval proved inadequate each time. The personal ticking time-bombs of the remaining embroidery, which continued to stretch and fall apart with the growth of the now unmaintained garden, along with Liam’s own aging body and mind, forced him into a very difficult decision:
He would go into the void himself, body thoroughly covered in a composite protective suit, and attached by intangible forces to his most advanced and powerful iteration of radial servo motor, designed to pull them straight out of the volatile gateway when the deed was done. Liam was going to attempt to save Jane himself.
If he failed, after all, at least they would be together.
Device in hand, keychain brooch dangling, and thoroughly suited head-to-toe, Liam began a series of operations he had mentally ran through countless times already.
The main interface read “ASSEMBLY and CONTAINMENT: T-30 seconds,” and the entire underground laboratory—what was left of it by then, at least—shook about in protest of its final experiment. The three arms of the silicon carbide containment unit emitted exotic forces yet unknown to the greater scientific community, and in an instant, a perfectly targeted wormhole had taken shape in the now trembling apparatus, something he made absolutely sure of this time through months of intense deliberation and calculation.
Liam took one last look at the home they had built and once hoped to spend the rest of their lives together in, before descending into the abyss.
“Jane, I’m coming for you.”