A MOMENT AGO


"Dammit!"

Raghav cursed with clenched teeth, his brow lined with sweat drops shaking from the effort his jaws were making. He could barely remember what had happened and how he had reached here. His mind seemed bizarrely fluid.

Ear-piercing hooters broke out just then and the whole facility was agog in the harsh noise; lights flashing red everywhere. The lockout gates would have started falling into place, remembered Raghav, as he knelt with his head bowing down and nearly touching the hard rough concrete floor.
He held a device with an LED panel that was glowing red, with the words "FATAL LEVEL" flashing in black letters. He recalled how demurely the night had begun.

He had settled down in front of his large computer screen at home with a favourite documentary about the Egyptian Pyramids, beer at his left side, cheese-lings at his right. He had placed his feet on the fluffy foot rest under the computer desk and sank back, feeling the cold wet beer bottle in his left palm, when the phone had beeped innocuously.

He'd taken his time to check it; he had been in no hurry.

And then everything had changed! It had happened!

And the first thought he'd got was, it would soon be news at the company headquarters as well and then the whole board would be wide awake.

It was his baby, had always been his. He'd sacrificed so much for this project, accepted this life, just in the hope of this very outcome. And now he couldn't bear to share this offspring with anyone. He had to reach it before they could even start making their way to Geneva.

Raghav felt a wave of nausea hitting him, with his chest undergoing spasms. He knew he had little time to lose. The flashes and the hooters continued relentlessly.

He had been in a tearing hurry and way too careless when he came into the electromagnetic flux chamber. The force field generator was running when he had arrived and was not properly shut down when he stepped into the chamber. He had been engulfed in the low intensity fields pulsating in the chamber. The radiation device clipped onto his chest started beeping the moment he came in and even though he thought the levels would remain below red as during all the tests, some damage had obviously been done to the radiation protection in the machine and the level spiked to deep red. He would die in 20 hours, or 24 at the most! The thought had hit him like a truck.

The de-radiation gel tank was in the next lab and probably shut off due to the isolation lockout doors. Reaching there would mean re-routing the gate controls manually, and while that could be done from the wall console at the far end of this lab, it was a hit or miss. He had no idea if it would take 10 minutes or a 100 to crack it. By then the vultures would be here!

The moments of anguish gave way to wails of anguish and then finally to spasms of anger. Anger at the world; at the high-school crush who had refused his affections; at the college dorm mate who had enjoyed a life of liquor, LSD and Latinas, only to scrape through college by copying his work; anger at the company board; at the programme director; at himself!

And then suddenly, he froze. His heart beat like a jackhammer but his body, his limbs remained stoned. His brain was buzzing at billions of thoughts per second.

'I can go back!' was the final conclusion of the brain frenzy. Yes, I can change it all. I can go back in time!

 What a dumb idiot he had been sitting here crying like a girl when probably the entire senior management of CERNTech was hurtling towards this very lab. This was his chance to steal his life back from this mean heartless world. His baby was going to deliver him into a new life!

He started laughing. 'I can go back, re-start it all!' He shouted out loud, 'I can go back. I can get my life back!'

He stumbled to the main control console for the force generator and punched some keys. Then he gave a slight smile, crooked, lop-sided. Some interesting thought had probably coursed through his mind because he reset the keys and smiled again. Then he stepped into the center of the generator and waited, his smile broadening with each jump in the hum of the machine, his eyes sparkling along with the flashes of electromagnetic and gravitational fields hugging him.

"Dammit!"

Raghav cursed with clenched teeth, his brow lined with sweat drops shaking from the effort his jaws were making. He could barely remember what had happened and how he had reached here. His mind seemed bizarrely fluid.

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