The Aspen Experiments

Chapter 16

Chapter 16 - Professor Hyto

 

"You're - what?" The dark tether of mist still hovered over his head. It was falling, coiling up in a heap on his head and disappearing into his body.  Soon the end came into sight and the whole thing disappeared entirely. 

 "I'm Professor Hyto. Surely John told you about me? Now where are the controls for this frightful machine?" He looked around and spotted the cabinet Ringer left open. He went over and flipped a switch. I heard the machine shut off.

"It's perfectly delightful to see this equipment," he said. "I'll let it recharge before I begin again. We'll need everything it's got."  He walked around the room, opening cabinets and examining everything.

My mind felt blank. Ringer was acting like he'd never seen any of this before. And he wasn't walking like himself. Ringer was restless and jerky. Always fiddling with those syringes or drumming his fingers impatiently on the counter. Now he moved leisurely, opening one cabinet at a time, and inspecting it slowly. He started talking to me too, and his voice wasn't like Ringer's. It had a different cadence.

"I've memorized the notes in Shammas' diary, but there's nothing like seeing the real thing." He trailed his fingers over another box inside the cabinet before carefully sliding it out and lifting the lid. "Aha! The epsilon particle converter! I see some of Ringer's handiwork here." He closed the lid and moved to the next cabinet.

"Shammas' diary was maddening! He had this horrible, inefficient, antiquated equipment - and yet somehow he managed to create simultaneous tunnels within the same subject! According to his notes he could detect body copies, he could even forcibly close tunnels! It was incredible, but I could never reproduce it. I tried everything. I created a machine hundreds of times more flexible and subtle than his, but never with such amazing results. Finally I realized Shammas had been lucky. His science was pathetic, but he had a prodigy! You."

I thought of what I'd tried to do to Ringer. Had I "forcibly closed" his tunnel? Was that what Hyto was talking about? But how could this be Professor Hyto?

"I did make a break through that Shammas never found," Hyto (or Ringer?) told me with a smirk. "Shammas was hampered by his religion. He totally missed the death vacuum.  I know from his diary that he killed several people, but he never discovered how to use it! You see, if someone creates a bodycopy and then dies, right away, you understand? Then there is a body out there trying to fill itself with a mind. It needs a soul, so to speak. Whoever is nearest the dead person gets sucked into the new body."

"Ugh, is that what you...?"

"Yes. That's what I did with Mr. Ringer. I couldn't do anything as long as his soul was here, but when you pinched at him and he came plunging back into his body- that gave me the perfect opportunity! I was going to prep John, but Ringer was more convenient. So I killed him, and here I am. Of course I can't get back into my own body, which is unfortunate.  But I'm not planning to stay in this body long, so that's no matter."

Now the cold shivers were trailing down my back. Hyto was examining the last cabinet against the far wall, still talking.

"I admit, my discovery of the death vacuum started by accident. My machine wasn't perfect and it overloaded. My subject's brain was fried, of course, and my lab assistant was gone. He slumped to the ground in a coma and never came out of it. Ha! I looked him up in the newspaper archives. He was put in a mental asylum, 1910. Claiming to be a man from the future trapped in a girl's body! Henry, that was his name. Lucky for me the story made it to a newspaper, or else I would never have known what happened to him."