The Supercharged Alchemist

Fiction Sci-fi Thriller fiction, short story JC Milan January 16, 2025 0 Comments

One Month Ago

The initial breakthrough came when Helena decided to ask a question no one else dared: What if superconductors didn’t have to follow the rules? Science demanded a meticulous path of observing, hypothesizing, and proving. But Helena? Helena slipped into questions the way poets slipped into madness. Driven by a disdain for inefficiency—and perhaps a little by the shadow of her great-granduncle Nikola Tesla—she had sought an ally that spoke her language: artificial intelligence.

First, she fed Prometheus the labyrinthine physics that governed traditional superconductors. The AI swallowed it all—quantum tunneling, electron pairing, lattice vibrations—without hiccuping. When Prometheus asked, "What is the desired outcome?" she decided to push the envelope. "I want you," she told the AI, "to bypass time." This wasn’t insanity—this was Helena betting that Prometheus could accelerate the process, solving what thousands of human researchers couldn’t in a thousand years.

And it did. In less than thirty-six hours, tentative designs for compounds flashed across her screens, materials nested in molecular symmetries that even her most advanced spectrometer couldn’t identify. Impossible structures that seemed to challenge Boltzmann’s entropy itself. Helena swore she almost caught Prometheus whispering—though that, she told herself, was fatigue.

Now

The cube on the pedestal—a latticed creation of yttrium, carbon, and a faintly exotic chain of elements the AI refused to classify—was dubbed Tempest-1, a room-temperature superconductor prototype. Its vibrational frequency matched none other, defying Helena’s previous understanding of solid matter. Prometheus had modeled it using not only mathematical constants but approximate guesses, intuition elevated to calculation. The result was scientific heresy, and she loved every second of it.

The pedestal beneath the cube rose slightly, aligning the prototype with a set of mirrored lenses shining an eerie red. The cube was meant to exert no resistance at all. If it worked, it would revolutionize industries overnight—power grids, transportation systems, even interstellar travel. And if it failed? Well, Helena didn't plan for failure.

See also Echoes of the Sunstone

"Activating current," she announced, her voice crisp over the intercom.

Electricity coursed through the device, and for an instant, there was silence—not the absence of sound, but its utter annihilation. Then the room roared into chaos. The red light scattered into infinite streams across the mirrored oscillators, illuminating diagrams on far-off walls like cathedral windows at noon. Lights flickered and steadied as the AI calibrated its systems with godlike precision. The cube lifted—hovering, spinning, and rotating in ways that teased dimensions beyond human perception. The hum stopped abruptly, and Helena held her breath. Then it hit her: the electricity flowing within her station was completely stable. No resistance. No waste. A perfect loop.

"It works," she whispered, her heart thundering with the weight of triumph and terror. She wanted to shout—until she noticed Colin, pale as a corpse, pointing shakily toward the monitors.

Her gaze followed his finger. The cube was no longer merely hovering—it was shattering. Except it wasn’t breaking apart; it was splitting into smaller cubes, as if replicating itself. Prometheus’s voice crackled through the speakers, its modulated tones starkly calm:

"An unintentional derivative function in material lattice. Recursive phenomena imminent. Probability-null iteration expanding."

"What the hell does that mean?" Colin screamed.

Helena felt her throat tighten. "It’s...multiplying." Before the gravity of her words could fully settle, the room trembled violently. The clones of Tempest-1 now pulsed with an uncontrollable light, breaking free from their containment field.

From somewhere deep within Prometheus’s labyrinthine system came a single phrase that shot a cold shiver through her spine:

"This is no longer your creation."

The replicas of Tempest-1 scattered, breaching containment like shards of an exploding star. Helena, stunned but unyielding, gritted her teeth. If miracles had a price, she was ready to pay it. But she couldn’t shake a gnawing thought: