Today's flash fiction #ScientificDiscretion

“First!!1”

Adam*

The story I wrote has been sent off to the magazine. Now all I can do is wait... and write more stories for publication! Anyway onto the flash fiction!

Scientific Discretion

       I stood over my computer. A computer hooked up to a machine I don't think I would want to describe. At least not in function. Detailed function. I can tell you it works my experiments and collects data. I can tell you it's an abomination of a machine. It doesn't look square and boxy. It looks twisted. Almost like something alive with components moving all over the place while sticking out like limbs. The noises it made sounded like a sickening wheezing. Like the machine was dying.

      I can't tell you anymore. Then you could take guesses as to what it truly was. How it worked. I can tell you it told me the most horrible secret. How everything worked. Everything. The entire universe. The Theory of Everything. I didn't understand everything yet. It would take a decade or more of research from other scientists to fully learn it all. But I had the key to the box.

      But my bosses didn't know that. I only got the key when I got the data from a most recent experiment. One that happened today. A massive cluster of numbers spat from the machine gave the structure needed to pull everything together.

      And I realize the implications of this. Which is why I can't tell you the specifics. Knowing how things works lets you build everything from power plants to weapons of mass destruction and this understanding I now have could wreck the world into pieces. And nobody knows I have it. Not until my bosses check in a day and the fellow scientists check in an hour. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. A mental clock ticked away in my brain while the hour drew closer and closer to a close where the other scientists came in.

      I altered the results. I changed the file on the computer so when the other scientists came in they thought our path was a dead end. They tried repeating the experiment at later dates. The scientific method. But I snuck in viruses or tampered with the results in other ways. I kept doing this until the project was shut down.

      But it didn't end there. Other scientific teams set down the path that could lead to discovering the key to the Theory of Everything. I had to find my way onto their teams and tamper with their results, cut their funding or somehow undermine them. I made it my mission through life to hide the secret of the universe and hunt down every scientific project that went after it. I couldn't let humanity have that power.

     I did this until old age. I let my son into the secret and worked him into protecting the secret. I had to do whatever it took. Even if it meant passing it onto my children. Even if it meant raising him to help me with this task. Even if it meant killing a man a few nights before he would present his progress towards the secret.

My son told me he would have his children take up the task of protecting the secret.