“Hold the door,” Marshall says before exiting the elevator. He finds a chair and blocks the door from closing. “In case we need to make a fast exit.

“Good call.”

The Revrell lab is nothing like any lab I’ve ever seen. The floor plans displayed it as four floors but it’s all one lab. In the center of the room I can look down directly to the bottom floor. Each of the upper three built around being able to quickly through a series of escalators somehow running themselves with perpetual motion. I’ve seen pictures of Revrell laboratories before but never been in one. It’s an amazing sight. Multiple different experiments. My wrist comp is unable to interact with some of the Revrell tech, completely beyond the technology I’m used to. All of the terminals here are so different than the ones we use. Ours are typically rectangular with some kind of artificial glass as a screen but these terminals are made up of hard light constructs. I could spend eternity here, running so many different experiments I could never figure out how to do correctly.

“Hey, do you have any idea what we’re looking for,” Marshall asks.

“Right,” I remember the objective. “One of the terminals should be broadcasting the signal, it should be obvious. There’s a lot of ground to cover so let’s split up.”

“Right, I’ll take the top two floors.”

“Alright, I’ll start at the bottom.”

Riding the escalator down, I glimpse more of the lab. If we have to create a new society, I want this place to be my base of operations. I’m sure I can drag a bed into one of the offices upstairs. I’m sure I can bring a bed into the labs, it’ll be the best place I ever lived. The third floor seems to have experiments based on using the second sun as a space station. It’s ridiculous that they would even think of doing something like that. The incredible part is that they have several viable plans. I could have never thought of doing something like this, but looking at the details, it makes sense. There’s one plan to extinguish a portion of the sun, but that just seems insane.

Other interesting plans include implementing a new water cycle. Creating psionic users through gene editing. Resurrecting extinct humanoid species using preserved DNA and harvesting more DNA from ancestors that can be tracked down. Some of them get depraved, raising animals from birth in six times the normal DNA for several generations to see if there will be some kind of evolution. Attempting to create immortals through replacement of organs with cybernetics. I know the whole Revrell species is big on cybernetic implants but the experiments go as far as decapitating some participants.

Reading and observing some of the work they had done on the third floor reminded me that The Revrell are as twisted as they are intelligent. So much of their brain power is spent trying to run inhumane experiments and rewrite the rules of reality. Science should always be moving forward, but their focus is almost entirely on skirting death and bending the universe to their whims.

The bottom floor is when the madness all sinks in. The terminal broadcasting the beacon is easy to spot right in the center of the floor. The more concerning thing is the room is set up like a prison full of glass cells. Each one contains a grub with writing on the cell glass. Dixie Turner, Alicia Cook, Bradley Reed, Eric Gutierrez, Gladys Patrick, Casey Myers, and several others. The tattered lab coats covering each of the grubs makes it clear that these were the scientists working here. They must have locked themselves inside when transform. The grubs seem tame, likely unable to see me. The cells are meant for observation, not conversation. Many seem like they’re almost hibernating and I don’t want to wake them up.

I wonder if the message was recorded before or after people started to transform. It must have been a chaotic moment for everyone here. I wonder if any of these were the politicians who thought cutting off communication would be a good idea. I send Marshall a message for him to get down here as soon as possible while I wait near the terminal broadcasting the beacon.

“What the hell is this,” Marshall almost whispers.

“These are the scientists who sent out the help beacon. It looks like someone was infected, and they all ended up being infected. I wouldn’t be surprised if the grub on the elevator was the last man, or woman standing.”

“I’ve seen some sick shit, but this tops the list. Not just the grubs, but the fact that they had a secret prison built down here. I’ve read some of the stuff they left around, this place is all a temple to bastardizing what it means to be human.”

“You’re not wrong. I’m a scientist, I’ll be the first to admit we can get a little excited about work that may be unethical before we pull ourselves back. But this, this is too much. They had to know The Revrell experiments were wrong when they got here, but they kept the going and all of this is because not a single person felt they were going too far.”

“Go ahead and turn off the beacon, there’s nothing here, no one to rescue.”

I begin to shut off the beacon, but check through the other files as well. There’s so much data here about what happened. I have to go through three security checks and two verifications of humanity before I’m allowed to shut down the beacon. I have no idea why someone would put so much security on just a video message being broadcast on radio.

“If you’re hearing this,” a scientist is displayed in the hologram as I deactivate the beacon. “That means we’ve lost the battle. Not a literal battle, but the battle against our own arrogance, and the wits of The Revrell. But, if you are alive, that means we have not destroyed humanity as we know it. Do not remember us as brave heroes or martyrs. Remember us as those that let a quest for knowledge bring about our downfall.”

“I wasn’t going to view them as heroes,” Marshall speaks.

“Neither was I.”

“Glad we’re on the same page.”