Creepypastas

The Farnsworth Experiments

You may have heard of the Farnsworth experiments. My dad was one of the scientists involved. He rarely talked about it, and when he did he always said the rumors were overplayed. The team tried and failed, nothing more to it. He seemed to get annoyed at me asking him about it. When I kept it up, he eventually told me a brief account of what happened. It was the mid 80s and he was living in Albany, New York, pursuing his phD. This was a year or two after I was born. He began work on a government funded research project. The experiments were to be done under absolute secrecy. The goal was to test a 15 year old hypothesis that previous to this point seemed untestable. If it were true, then time travel was possible. They spent nearly a year working on the project, known only by it's codename Farnsworth. They tried and tried, but found nothing. Then the project ended. There were no deaths or disappearances. There were no strange events around the region. The reason the government denied the project's existence was purely embarrassment over funding something that in hindsight seemed so ridiculous. It felt good to know the truth. Whenever I heard someone retelling the story, I wished I could tell the real version, but I promised dad I wouldn't, for the sake of his career. For the next few years, I didn't really think about it. It was one little story, among many, sitting in the back of my mind. I went off to college, lived life, and never gave it a second thought.

A few months after I graduated, I drove up to Boston for Thanksgiving of '06. Dad still lived in the same house that we lived in since I was maybe 10. Thanksgiving this year was smaller than years before. I was just me, dad, and my older sister Kate. It was a normal thanksgiving meal. Peas were in short supply, but I never much liked them anyway. Looking around the table, I felt deja vu. We all sat in our usual chairs, clustered around the part of the table not covered in papers and screens filled with incomprehensible equations. It nice to be back. Just when the meal was drawing to a close, there was a knock on the front door. I went to go open it. It was a man, maybe 60 years old. He looked very worn out. His grayish hair was a mess. He was unshaven. My dad came over and said,

"Bill, what are you doing here?"

The man walked in and shut the door behind him. Dad looked over to us and said,

"This is Bill Benson, an old colleague of mine."

Bill looked at me and Kate, then back at my dad.

"John, is there somewhere we can talk, privately?"

"In my office, are you OK?"

"I don't know."

They walked away quickly. Kate and I waited for them to come back, very curious about what was going on. She seemed to remember him, just barley, from back in Albany. She must have been around four or five at the time. We kept looking down the hall to dad's office, the door remained shut. No words possible to make out. After what felt like half an hour, Kate said,

"I have an idea."

She led me upstairs to her old bedroom, situated right above dad's office. She motioned to be quiet and pointed to a vent in the corner of the room. From it we could hear the muffled conversation. They were speaking in jargon. I heard a lot about oscillations. After maybe two to three minutes, I heard Bill Benson shout,

"You can't hide! You have to face the truth!"

My dad replied, sounding more nervous than I had ever heard him,

"I don't know why you went back."

I got up from the floor quickly, hitting my head on a shelf with a loud thud. I heard the conversation stop. As me and Kate walked as quietly out of the room as we could, we heard footsteps downstairs. As we descended the old wooden flight of stairs, dad walked into view.