DROP POINT Episode Sixteen: Re-Introduction

“Kyle,” said a voice. “Kyle, wake up!” Kyle Carter mumbled and rolled over. “Is everyone from the future so freaking insubordinate?” said Doctor Morris Bradley . “No,” Kyle replied without opening his eyes. “Just me.” “Well then, why did they send you?” Bradley asked, trying to pry the pillow from Kyle’s grasp. “Bloodline or something,” the boy responded, ripping it out of the doctor’s grip and placing it comfortably underneath his head. “Makes sense.” Bradley looked at the dashboard above Kyle’s hospital bed, and found a button. He pressed it, and Kyle shot right up, jerking from the electric shock. “What was that?!” Kyle asked, horrified, and ripped the electrodes from his body. “Something, not harmful of course, to keep patients awake. Ever since Magna 5 built the R-nerve bomb, well, it’s the human body’s defense mechanism to fall asleep when sick, which is dangerous if you’re infected with R-nerve.” “That’s lovely,” said Kyle, sliding out of the bed. “Not really,” Bradley said as the sarcasm flew right over his head. “What’s up?” Kyle asked. “I’m supposed to babysit you while Piott is gone, so someone doesn’t kill you.” “Because that’s your thing, and anyone else going for it would be defying the rules of Dibs, right?” he cracked a smile. “Right,” agreed the doctor, then walked away. Kyle glanced at the bedside clock. 4:57am.

“I’m already on the verge of death, aren’t I?” Kyle said, stepping into the lab of Doctor Bradley. Kenny was on his way from the bunkroom. “No, I had the place cleaned up and re-done,” Bradley noted. “How’s your face?”

“Fine, thanks. The real doctors fixed me up,” Kyle felt bad for saying that, but Bradley didn’t hear him, having rushed off into the remote control station behind the safety glass before he could get an answer. Instead, he said, “I’m going to need your assistance.”

Kyle walked towards the door-less threshold and stepped down into a L- shaped room that lined two sides of the main experiment area. The walls

were a one-way mirror above a long console that ran at waist-height all the way down the room and beyond the corner “Whoa,” Kyle said, taking in all the buttons, graphs, knobs, switches, screens, wheels, keyboards, levers, and small-print notices. They were all virtual. When Bradley turned a knob, he was actually just pressing his fingers against the glass and twisting his wrist. When he pulled a lever, he placed his palm on the screen where the head of the lever was and slid it down. It was pretty cool to watch. The screen glowed neon green with black lines. It was simply hard to believe that each thing had its own individual function.

Bradley was not one to get straight to business. He grinned, and pointed at the thing in the middle of the experiment area. “You’ll love this,” he said, and got to work on the virtual dashboard. The lights in the main area dimmed down, and a circle on both the ceiling and the ground slid apart, and mechanisms rose up or extended down, interlocking. It took the shape of a rectangular monolith with a coin-shaped opening in the middle, like a ten-foot-tall playing card with a meter-wide hole cut out of it.

“Okay, when I say so, you need to press the ‘Return’ key, can you do that?” the doctor asked him. “I mean, the very moment. Not an instant too late, okay?” “Can I do that? Pfft, have faith.” Kyle positioned himself in front of the keyboard the man had been typing in. Right now the little black rectangle with RETURN on it looked more like a sticker than a key.

Bradley then slapped on some goggles and gloves, and nodded at Kyle as he walked by, picking something off a lab table in the corner of the room: big two-hand pliers with something clutched in the middle: a sphere, like a black marble the size of a human head.

When he brought it within a meter of the ring in the monolith, the space in the middle light up with lightning and vehemently attacked the sphere. The sphere flashed a different color each time the electricity hit it: pale green, pale red, pale purple.

Bradley held the pliers as far away from himself as he could manage, and brought the sphere in the middle space. The lightning was blinding now, and the ball was flickering white now. “OKAY, HURRY UP AND HIT IT!” Bradley shouted, but his words got snatched away from the air by the constant sparking and energy storm that was brewing next to him.

“WHAT?!” Kyle shouted back.

“I SAID, HIT IT NOW!” Bradley shouted back, turning away from the light. His goggles reflected white light, making him looked evil and possessed. Kyle read his lips, and looked down at the keyboard. He plunged his finger against the RETURN key, but a nanosecond too late. At that moment, all sound in the room was gone.

Kyle looked up. There were transparent spheres erupting and echoing off of everything, eventually getting sucked into the ball of white light in the monolith. As Bradley shouted something at him, the expanding bubbles erupted from his mouth, spreading out from his body, but then careening off, spiraling and breaking up into clear blotches, into the white light. Whatever it was, it was sucking up all sound.

Suddenly, it started sucking up light, too. Random pinpricks in the air started needling into the ball. Bradley dropped the plier thing and made a mad dash toward the L-room Kyle was in, when there was a bright flash of light, the frozen image of Bradley mid-step etched into the air, and then sucked into the light that was now on the floor, rolling away.

The entire console at Kyle’s fingertips blacked out, so the button was now unavailable. Then, the last few strips of light in the room – the light of the ball itself – went out.

The light of the corridor outside cut knives across the floor, making an unnatural curve towards the left, and disappeared into the ball. A final bright flash of light, and everything went back to normal. Doctor Bradley was suddenly next to him, breathing heavily.

“That was close,” he said, wide-eyed. “What was that?” Kyle asked without moving, still staring that the innocent-looking cloudy grey glass sphere resting in the corner of the room. “That’s the battery that keeps Luna fully functional. I was re-energizing it.” “Did we break it?” “Not, it was actually a smashing success,” the Doctor clapped Kyle on the back, who couldn’t tell if that was sarcasm or not.

The Omniscient Narrator wishes you to know that, just for reference, the next episode is two days after this. To answer your question, yes, this episode has importance. No, the next episode has nothing to do with this one, though.