I got out of my red sedan and sighed. It was going to be another long day in the lab. My boss, Kevin, was on my ass about running the rest of the experiment to complete the data sets. Apparently, he had a deadline of his own for publication in the winter edition of whatever journal this load of crap was going into. I sighed again and began the walk to the front of the building.

The morning itself was fairly nice. A soft mist still clung to the low spots and warm sunlight shone on my face. Where I'd parked was about 100 yards from the entrance--a set of tall glass doors flanked by silvery metal framed, themselves encasing a third, revolving, door. I opened the rightmost door and entered the building. The receptionist sitting at the desk to the right side of the room gave me a wave as I flashed my badge in his direction.

"Oh, James," he called after me, making me pause for a moment to listen. "Kevin wants to see you after lunch."

I nodded.

Shit, I cursed inwardly. Kevin wanting a meeting was generally not a good thing. Either he had something to say about the data not being finished yet, or he wanted to complain about something I had or hadn't done. Regardless, I did my best to push those thoughts aside on the way to my lab, room 213.

The lab was a spacious room completely packed with equipment for the current set of measurements. A few small paths through the jumbled mess allowed me to tinker with the settings and troubleshoot issues. I took off my light jacket and sat at the computer that was located to one side near the door. flicking the power switch, the computer hummed to life.

After logging in and checking emails, I went around to the different machines in the room and turned them on in using a checklist to ensure there were no issues. Completing my tasks burned an hour and this was already crunch time. I hit the necessary keys to start the process and left the room to get my much needed morning coffee.

I returned to see the machinery working as expected. This run of tests would take about 45 minutes to complete giving me enough time to start on the documentation for the previous day's data.

I got a knock on the door a half-hour later.

"James?" a head said through a crack in the door. I recognized the face as that of Allie, one of the researchers from the same floor as me.

"Hmm?"

"Can you help me?"

"Sure. I can't be too long, though."

"I understand." She paused as I got up from my seat. "Thanks, by the way."

"No problem."

I followed behind her. She was a bit older than me but still looked good. She wasn't exactly my type, but I saw the way the other men around the office looked at her, so I knew she wasn't short on attention. Thankfully, it was polite attention as far as I'd seen anyway.

Her lab was much the same as mine--a spacious room filled with slightly different machinery. She directed me to one particular machine that was flashing all sorts of colors, most of them red. Something was obviously wrong with it.

"This worked fine yesterday,' she said, "but when I turned it on this morning, it's been throwing all sorts of errors. I fixed the ones I could from the manual, from Google, from experience, but there are another ten or so that I just can't figure out. I know you've got one, to I thought that maybe you could help?"

"I'll give it a look," I sighed.

The machine itself wasn't overly complicated in what it did, but the errors made no sense to me. They were things that shouldn't be possible, even for a bugged machine. I decided to open it up and take a look inside.

it took nearly ten minutes to get to the heart of the thing. It looked nothing like what I'd seen in the one in my lab nor like anything I'd have expected. The best I could describe it would be that there were simply pieces missing. But that wasn't exactly right either. The pieces were both there and not there at the same time, like some kind of sick cat-in-a-box thought experiment gone horribly wrong.

Against my better judgment, I stuck my finger into the soupy mess and everything went blank.