Nuclear Fission
Clint stood nervously by the door of Dr. Carlson. His nerves were fueled by a combination of anxiety and excitement as he waited, fiddling with the paper in his hand. A basic report he’d bunched up for delivery to the man, the perfect excuse to get to ask his big question.
Jackie was out for the week, which meant that Clint was left alone for once. A student assistant running all laborious operations in the lab, without his pesky supervisor to overthink everything. Jackie wouldn’t have let Clint do this, not under his careful watch. Clint would’ve just been pushing random objects through the device and gathering the products, ticking off checks on the data sheets and jotting down mundane observations.
Jackie was a fool for thinking Clint wouldn’t do this. Clint had been quite explicit in why he wanted to do the research that they did. Hell, he’d been hired because of those motivations. Dr. Carlson had said Clint had the crazy to do this research, that Clint was an ideal candidate. Jackie had remained vigilant in “protecting” him still, sweet but annoying with his lab safety.
Clint was nervous but confident in what the Doctor would say. He’d even dressed up for the occasion, although it would likely be impossible to tell. New cargo pants, new hiking boots, new long-sleeve. Everything new, even down to his fresh haircut. Clint was ready for today.
He’d knocked minutes ago but that was just how things were for Carlson. Always lost in his thoughts, that man. Never missed a thing but sometimes he took a bit to answer something like a knocked door. It came eventually with a strained “Come in” and the door gently swaying open with a loud creak.
Carlson was a beautiful man, somewhere in his sixties with warm dark skin. His face lit up with a shock of a white beard, finely shaved and sharp as a knife. He was dressed classily, in a brown suit and well-worn work boots. Muscular enough for the suit to be tight in all the right places.
It all served to contrast with the crazed dilation of his eyes, bright blue staring right in Clint’s. It was matched with an equally gleeful smile, although it was slightly tight from exertion. Dr. Carlson was currently wrestling a large squid back into his salt water tank, pressing its twsisting tentacles back into place amongst the anemone.
“Hello Clint!” the man’s happy and high voice sounded as the squid finally relented, squirming back under its hide in the corner. “You know how miniature krakens can be, so curious and violent” he said as he clipped the flimsy aquarium ceiling back down into place.
Miniature krakens did not exist. Not in most places.
“Hi Dr. Carlson, just wanted to check in today. Have the daily report for you, everything’s nominal. Zero molecular corruption with fission as usual” he drolled out, on the same script he did most days. Today was different though.
“Perfect!” Carlson exclaimed, happily tearing through the report. Writing down what looked like notes, but were in fact likely just happy faces and stars. Carlson could read these in his sleep, but always failed to contain his excitement. He quite literally tore off the last page in a flurry, it flopping down behind him.
His wild eyes once more fixated on Clint, intense and interested. “Great job keeping up with all this work Clint, considering the Jackie is out. Has he been doing well in his search?”
“Yup, sent a text yesterday. Says the haunted mansion was a success, chock full of ghost particles”
“Excellent! Always good to see Jackie making strides in his research. He should be making his way back in a few days. California is quite a long drive.”
Carlson’s eyes stared through Clint and sweat prickled his back. He needed to ask his question, but it was hard to voice it. Carlson was who he wanted to be when he finally got his PHD, all deranged and confident.
The doctor saved him from his misery.
“Anything you need Clint, considering that Jackie is gone?” he said, voice thick with an invitation. Clint would almost be tricked into believing it to be a flirtation had he not been around the man enough. Jackie called it his trouble voice, saturated with the eternal scientific question of “can we?” rather than “should we”. It made Clint smile in viscous return, his own crazy resonating alongside his mentors.
“I figured it was time for a different sort of testing on the machine now. It’s been cleared for all materials, biological and in-organic. Perfect fission is consistent and errors are in the zero. Safety has been completely assured with animal testing, specimens have been unaffected and thrive.” He rattled off, vomiting out the script he’d repeated in his head for the last two months.
“So much testing performed with completely perfect results, I know. The only barrier left had been Jackie, unfortunately” the doctor hummed. “He is an excellent PHD candidate, but he is too anxious. Won’t let us do the most fun parts of science. The dangerous and exciting bits. I’m sure you know what I mean”
Clint nodded and hoped with all his heart.
Carslon raised an eyebrow and shrugged. “Like I’m gonna stop you from doing what you want. I’d be a hypocrite to stop a prospective scientist from sciencing their little heart out. I approve of this new line of testing, although I must supervise for fun”
“Fuck yeah!” Clint said, unable to stop himself. He couldn’t help himself. Four months of work all leading up to this point. Four months of work to succeed in the greatest dare he’d ever received.
“Fuck yeah.” The doctor repeated with a grin, getting up and heading to the door.
Clint was already sprinting down the hall.
——————————————————————————
Jackie knew he fucked up before he even opened the door. He’d been rightly distracted by his own needs. One simply can’t refuse capturing the consolidated theme park spirits of Disney world to use in hard science. Its completely irrefusable.
He still cringed as he heard the moans from inside the lab. Clearly Clint’s, but echoed a few times. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what had happened.
They were a lab specializing in the splitting of matter. Not the weak sauce splitting of atoms, the kind that was always liable to explode and reduce everything in a mile to cinders. They dealt in the proper splitting of the atom, a complete mitosis resulting in two daughter atoms. Both completely and perfectly identical to the original. Revolutionary work, defying the previous laws of physics with the creation of new matter.
Dr. Carlson often said that Oppenheimer could suck his dick. They held the real science of nuclear physics in this lab, so far from the low tech shit the rest of the world was dealing out.
Clint had been their first student in years. They weren’t a very exciting lab, consisting of only Jackie and Carlson. Compared to the size of the genetics lab headed by Dr. North down in Wester Hall, they were an insect. Why play with particle physics in the Carlson lab when you could study how to rewrite an entire genetic code at the North lab. It’s just what most STEM kids did at Melton Valley community college. That or animal and cryptid sciences. People went wild for Moth Man these days.
Clint had been a nightmare from the jump. He was insane from the moment he started talking in his interview and Jackie’s blood pressure had immediately shot up. The kid shared the same mad science as the twisted heart of Dr. Carlson and they were an unhealthy pair in running the lab into their shared insanity. They got along like a house of fire and Jackie was frantic in putting out the inferno they often literally produced.
Clint was working for them on a dare. He’d been honest about that and it had been why Dr. Carlson had hired him. His old frat mates had supposedly challenged him to be his own frat after a party. Clint had specified that they were still his buddies, no bad blood. Frat row had just had an empty house that no one wanted. A perfect cursed beauty, but MVC had never gotten enough students to fill all its housing.
He’d stated with conviction that they were going to help him fill it. They were a matter duplication lab and Jackie understood well the implication. Dr. Carlson had been out of his wits excited for such a ridiculous motivation. In his words, “It was a mark of genius to break physics on a dare”.
Clint was a sweet kid nonetheless. Always on time and always ready to work hard, whether it be on engineering or carrying things to and fro. Even surprised Jackie on his birthday, despite how Jackie had been stalling on human testing for so long. Jackie was just terrified of another crazy in the lab.
Hearing at least three identical voices exerting themselves past the door, he kicked himself for not having been there to at least pump the breaks a bit on the kid’s intentions.
He tried to keep it in his mind that he was supportive as he opened the door.
As expected, Dr. Carlson was typing away at his computer, completely ignoring the tangle of limbs next to him. He had his ear buds in and his phone screen clearly depicted the latest season of “Ice Road Truckers”. His data sheet was a mess of binary and random words, flowing across his screen in a constant pour.’
Clint meanwhile was the pile of bodies on the floor. The possibly contaminated floor. Jackie had thought he’d taught the idiot better.
There were four of him, pushing and repositioning themselves. Two were mostly clothed, their shirts pulled off or their pants pulled down enough for their cocks to dangle out. Two were entirely naked except for their shoes, one of them giving oral to the other. The one giving was also receiving, another Clint stroking his cock as another Clint in turn stroked his. A loop of sex, duplicates mumbling half pleas of “more” and “please”.
They were almost too far gone to notice Jackie make his way up to them, displeased expression apparent. He’d caught Clint masturbating before, but that was fine as long as the guy was careful. Jackie couldn’t care less, breaks were breaks. These dipshits could get glass in their buttholes or something though. Lab floors were gross.
“Boys” he interrupted. He heard the Clint sucking cock choke on it in surprise. Those with free mouths gawked at him, color flowing into their cheeks.
“I got permission” one of them said.
“Yeah, Dr. Carlson shot the neutrino himself. Felt surprisingly good, you’d be surprised”
“Don’t sweat it Jackie”
“Yeak don’t worry”
The little troupe of twenty-three-year-olds were all rushing to getting their pants up enough to cover their cum soaked briefs. The two naked Clints quietly bickered over a single set of clothes. Jackie could guess that one Clint had been thoroughly undressed before a duplication. One of those Clints appeared to give up, letting himself be the single with his dick out as the others became a little matched set. They each put on their innocent little face, squeezed against each other. Jackie didn’t fall for it.
“Get the fuck off the floor boys, you know better” he grumbled, moving past his student assistants to settle a jar in front of the Doctor. It glowed slightly, tiny bright dusty shapes swirling inside it. The action seemed to break Carlson out of his trucker trance, his excited smile directed straight at Jackie. The teeth were blindingly bright.
“You got your dreaming ghosts I see” the Doc exclaimed, shaking the jar and agitating the souls inside. “These will be perfect for your intangibility particle exercise!”
“Didn’t stop Clint, I see” he said, dead inside.
“Why would I” the doctor muttered as he inspected the jar. He moved to type the word “Spooky” onto the binary code before tossing the jar back into Jackie’s waiting hands. “You should make sure to centrifuge out the fanatic spirits, their slimy ideals get stuck in the purification analyzer.”
“Yeah sure….” Jackie sighed, watching the man press play on the video of the trucker reality show and reenter his trance of the data sheet. That left Jackie to the Clints.
They were messing with each other, having transitioned from fucking to a light rough housing. Bickering comfortably like old friends, each Clint unabashedly clicking into place in the company of their doubles. They each kept a constant contact with at least one of their doubles, seemingly on the edge of falling back into their orgy. Jackie had to deal with this mess of new student assistants another time. It was 7 PM on a Friday.
“Ok boys, I’m tired I just drove twelve hours to get here. I don’t understand why you shits are even here this late, the floor is a wild place to fuck. Go home please”, he said, rubbing his eyes. Not even his favorite podcasts could make that long in his truck bearable.
The naked Clint made to argue, but another quickly shut him up with a tug on his dick. That now dominant Clint spoke up, keeping the other quiet with an absentminded stroking. “Yeah yeah, lab safety and shit. Pretty uncomfortable here on the floor so I get it, all cold and dusty and covered in chemicals.”
“Yeah, we’ll head home, should be nicer” another spoke up.
“I didn’t get to finish though” the naked one whined.
“We’ll finish you up in the car bud” one of the clothed Clints promised.
“Yeah bud” another reassured, hooking his arm around the naked one with a grin.
“Boys I love this new development in our lives, but I just need you to leave the lab” Jackie said in his best boss voice. “Ya’ll can’t fuck here, its nasty. Being naked is against PPE rules, you could get a shard of glass up your butthole. I really shouldn’t have to explain this.”
Jackie watched the four boys roll their eyes as they lifted each other up, mumbling about how Jackie probably masturbates to the safety protocol. Clint had made that joke before, but Jackie just took it as a point of pride. He was, for instance, the only one in the room who hadn’t had a mutagenic parasite rearrange his bones. Lab safety in a place like this paid off.
The naked Clint stole a lab coat to cover up his glory as the others exited, one up front heartily claiming that he was driving and that the others could deal with their naked self. Technically taking a potentially contaminated lab coat out of lab was also against the protocol, but Jackie wasn’t going to argue against his student assistant avoiding flashing their janitor Carol on the way to Clint’s Nissan. Carol was too nice and had already seen too much eldritch garbage. Clint’s surprisingly large dick was too much on top of that for the poor forty-year-old.
“Bye Jackie” four identical voices harmonized; a sound Jackie would need to get used to. Jackie mustered a “Bye boys” before the lab door slammed close. The dear old Doctor even muttered a goodbye through his haze, but about twenty second too late.
Jackie glanced over at the machine that had done this, the obelisk of a matter duplicator taking up the lab space in the back. Pure white and still beeping and booping with system reports, its door still releasing a little bit of steam from multiple successful doublings. Surrounded on all sides by various duplicated objects, from pairs of Clint’s sneakers to two identical parakeets that just sort of lived there now.
Jackie couldn’t lie that it was at least a little bit inviting, in the way that the call of the void always was a tad tempting. He could imagine himself being lured into it after the Clints inevitably ran him ragged, two Jackies (or more) to take on the world. It was a ridiculous thought, no matter how insidiously interesting.
Jackie walked out the door before his tired brain could betray his sanity, leaving Carlson to his work. He wasn’t sure if the man slept, although he wasn’t really sure if the man was even human. He was inhumanly driven by a single-minded stupid goal. Just like Clint and just like Jackie.
Jackie liked to judge those two for being crazy but he was just as mad. Hell, he’d ridden a Disney ride for four hours straight collecting the souls from the ashes of crazy fans spread in it. He was creating equations that would bend science so he could get off too. He was amongst his people.
At least he was subtle about it.
