"Good God, why the hell are the atoms still dancing?" He asked himself. "It's been three minutes, for fuck's sake!"
Winston was getting close to pulling his hair right off of his head, and eating them afterwards, just because a monitor was messing with his observations. In a sense, he was experiencing the one thing that every new Astrophysicist feared the most, which was multi-billion dollar equipment malfunctioning, or breaking all together!
"Fuck!" He shouted, "Flatline already!"
The thing that was eating him alive, was one of the monitors, or more specifically, one of the expensive computers in the control room he was in, insisting that the gravitational observations he was trying to make of a black hole that was millions of light years away, was being interrupted by simple flickers.
In simple words, something as simple as a truck passing by, or the waves that clashed on the ocean shores from miles away, or even someone's clapping butt-cheeks as they walked, was interrupting his observations! For three minutes straight!
The Gravitational Wave Interferometer, which was essentially like a lenseless telescope that measured tiny ripples in reality itself, was so sensitive that interruptions like these were common.
The monitor that portrayed the data, or the measurements, usually featured a flat line that barely changed. Today, the graph was flying up and down the monitor, for five minutes straight now, as if a caffeinated monkey was flying a plane near the sensors!
In short words, this wasn't supposed to happen, so he kept checking the thin fiber-optic cables that were attached to his many computers. He was looking for malfunctions, and was hoping to find it, really, because a cable with a micro-dent was far less expensive to replace in comparison to the technology stashed east of the clean room, on the other side of the glass.
After ten minutes of crawling around on his knees, checking every inch of the fiber-optic cable that was neatly coiled in his room, he got even more frustrated, because he didn't find any malfunctions. He didn't see any, at least.
Everything in the control room worked like it was supposed to, and yet the thin line on the monitor kept jumping around as if he was 'studying' a patient who was close to cardiac arrest. It kept bouncing around for fifteen minutes now, so either the technology beyond the glass, into the clean room was malfunctioning, or the black hole he was observing from millions of light years away was feeding him new data, new behaviour, and perhaps even a grand, new discovery!
Winston didn't know which possibility stressed him out more. He looked through the glass, and saw that his colleagues in the clean room weren't behaving as if something was wrong, which led him to believe that he just made a new discovery, one that he couldn't wrap his head around just yet.
With that said, he ran back to his computers, but on the way there, he tripped over his own feet, and hit the large, advanced control panel, head first! He was alive, but as he regained his composure, cussing at every name he could think of, he noticed a spark on the control panel.
Winston wasn't dumb enough to touch it now, he was even lucky that he hadn't been electrocuted when he bull-horned the panel a moment ago, but at this point, he was so worried, so frustrated to the point where his composure was finally calm. Perhaps calm to a fault, because he had endless theories of what was going to happen next.
Alarms started going off immediately, but he was numb at this point, so he showed no emotion. He just walked towards the east side of the room, and looked past the clear glass, observing his colleagues on the other side, in the control room, as they sunk into endless panic, heading for the door.
If the billion-dollar technology that was stashed in this building hadn't been malfunctioning before, it sure as hell was now! He was aware of that, so he stood on the other side of the mess he caused, ready to face the consequences.
Suddenly, the pin-code operated door that led to the control room he was in, split open. Lydia walked in, rushing towards him, spouting several questions as she approached.
Lydia was considered a princess around here. She was a stunning woman, with hair as radiant as gold itself, so thick that no hair band could ever hold her hair together. Her long bangs jumped around her face, and in front of her glasses as she approached him.
"What the hell did you just do, Winston?!" She shouted, and the rest of her questions revolved around that matter. "The cryogenic pipes are bursting all over the place, dick weed! Do you want to blow us up!?"
When Winston didn't answer, she got even more frustrated, and grabbed him on the shoulder, jerking him sideways so he'd face her.
"Oh, God…" She gasped, as she saw blood spewing out of a tear on Winston's forehead. "What did you do to yourself? I never imagined that someone could get this fucked up in a control room! You're bleeding all over the place, all over your lab coat!"
"Heh," He chuckled, and finally started talking to her, "Forget about the blood, Lydia, it's nothing but a scratch, and it pales in comparison to what's about to happen next."
"No shit, Detective Dipshit!" She shouted, and her Canadian accent got thicker the more frustrated she got. "We're all gonna die! Blow up!"
"No," He shook his head, losing his senses by the moment, with a smile so crooked that one would think he was having a stroke. "We'll die far before we blow up."
Realizing the condition he was in, an involuntary tear ran down her cheek, and her voice softened, converting into worry.
"Are you having a stroke?" She asked.
Winston didn't answer, and within her panic, she ended up looking at her reflection on the glass, and noticed that her thick, patty lips were crooked as well. This surprised her more than the accident did, because although she was panicking, she was still sure that she wasn't suffering a stroke, and yet, her lips were crooked, telling her otherwise.
"We can't be stroking at the same time," She lowered her voice, unsure of what to think, "Winston, what's going on?"
"Event Horizon," His crooked smile deepened.
The two of them then saw the steam from the liquid helium, rapidly expanding from the other side of the window, blurring the glass in the blink of an eye! This malfunction he caused was supposed to kill all of them, and the both of them were well aware of this, but what would the police categorize their deaths as?
Dumbassery? The result of a frantic Astrophysicist? Clapping butt-cheeks somewhere in America that overwhelmed the sensors for fifteen minutes straight, causing hundreds of deaths? Or, a black hole?
The sharp sounds of steel beams screeching, bending, and the building collapsing began to overwhelm their senses.
Moments later, the thick wall in front of them started crumbling, the glass started denting, and then the entirety of the wall got sucked into the other room. Winston had accidentally caused a black hole. Its size, unpredictable.
"I love you, Lydia," He looked at her, but his voice came out as if it was stretched out for thousands of years. "I'm sorry…"
The building, or perhaps the world as they knew it, was being sucked into the black hole. Death was a given, but everything beyond that, beyond death, was impossible to predict.