It all happened so fast. The tip of Sarah's finger touched the tablet. An instant later she was gone. Vaporized. An ethereal white powder, whisked away by the desert wind, mixing with eons of sand. The workmen stood silent and in shock. Leaderless, their eyes gazed at the now-dull tablet. In bewilderment and fear they shuffled away, then ran, chasing after the remnants of Sarah's dust into the desert.
Actually, the vaporization was not quite as fast as the tablet designers intended. On its first activation in over a thousand years, it took a few extra milliseconds to boot up and do its job. This had the unfortunate consequence of being not-quite painless for Sarah, as the speed of her nerve synapses was slightly faster than the rate of vaporization. No matter, as light years away, the doppelganger tablet on another world did its job without a hitch. The new copy of Sarah stepped forward, lacking only the singular memory of that final unpleasant moment of her former self.
The technician at the Gladeus station was accustomed to wide-eyed looks from new arrivals. "Please move off the platform" he monotoned at Sarah, "You don't want your atoms intermixed with the next arrival do you?". Although the technician often bemused himself with thoughts of two-headed, four legged tourists, he had never seen such a thing - the automatic protection circuits of the portal system were long ago upgraded to prevent that occurrence from happening again.
Sarah, her long-unthought memories coming back to her in a rush, jumped forward and out of the Portal station. The magenta sky loomed above her, the glistening pyramids lined the basalt roads, perfectly maintained and modern. "Oh how beautiful" she gasped, not in surprise, but with a familiarity long suppressed. "Home!"
nice job trybil
ReplyDelete