I wrote this story for science fiction elective. :/
[center]In Time[/center]
I peered carefully around the corner of the bookcase I had just moved, luckily, nobody was around. There was a small door there, recessed slightly so as to not be seen by looking behind the bookcase. I looked around one more time, then opened the door and ducked inside. Wow, I thought, I went through all that trouble and all I find is a goddamn dumbwaiter? I'm freaked. But then, I realized it was not a dumbwaiter... I was going down. The plans didn’t show a sub-basement, I thought.
As the elevator, or dumbwaiter, or whatever the hell it was, went down, I reminisced on how I had gotten here, how hard it had been to get among the elite scientists of the USSR, even with the help of the US. I remembered my first interview,
"So, Aleksander Palonov, graduated from Moscow State University, after the Great Patriotic War... Physics, chemistry, calculus... Have you done anything we don’t have down here?" asked the interviewer, who I later figured out was Dimitri Titov, a reputable scientist.
"Yes, I did some research into heat-resistant foams for spacecraft, among other things." I had responded, handing him a folder.
That folder contained a secret of the US I was allowed to reveal. Yes, the space program, thats what the US was interested in. But I got assigned to something else, something boring. My job, and the job of the other people at the facility was to observe, analyze and write reports on nuclear tests. My first assignment was more than two years ago. It was a big boom, obviously, and left some pretty big holes in the ground where caves collapsed. Later, the US informed me that there was something weird about the station I was at, something special. So I stole the plans. Surely enough, there was an unmarked hole straight through the building with a door in the basement.
Suddenly, the thing stopped, and practically shoved me out. It was freezing, dark and damp, I heard water dripping off the ceiling. I proceeded, groping along the walls, since I had no other option. After a short walk, the floors became grates, and there were pipes on the low ceiling. All of a sudden, a huge slab of metal slammed down behind me, and showerheads turned on all around me What is this? I wondered, Some kind of clean room procedure? Are people even supposed to go through here, or this supposed to be for objects?
I ran through of the shower, if that’s what you could call it, since the water was freezing, and I was not exactly prepared for a shower, but when I got through it, I felt around and there was a match on a table, one of the old kind which you can strike on anything rough. I struck the match. On that table there was a white lab coat and a set of raggy red clothes, along with a card that said "We knew you would be coming, Nicholas". It was obviously a joke, but why would St. Nick come through a tunnel? I put on the clothes because I didn’t want to catch hypothermia, and continued walking down the tunnel, and now it really was going down.
I saw light up ahead, and what looked like plants. As I got closer, I realized that what I saw was not plants per se but what looked like a thick green carpet of moss covering the entire passageway. However, where there is moss there is at least some light, so I kept going. As I came even closer I saw that the moss was spreading as fast as water, covering the walls and pipes and the ceiling. I continued walking, feeling a little spooked. Then, the moss stopped spreading, and looked completely like normal moss. But that wasn’t what caught my attention, the passageway opened up into a huge cavern with a hole in the ceiling, as if an earthquake had caused the cavern to partially collapse. As I walked farther in, I noticed that there was broken windows near the ceiling to my left. There was a small door below the windows, so I walked over to that. On it, it said 'rotate left once, right twice and then pull' in Russian. I followed the instructions and the door opened and a skeleton fell out. It was clutching a journal. I picked up the journal and dusted it off. On the cover it said "Project Vise Log". I turned to the first entry, it said:
December 3rd, 1962
Alexi and I oversaw the setup of the facility today, particularly the setup of the temporal field generator and the first few tests of it. The tests were all resounding successes, at max speed we cloned a bean plant (the normal way) completely in less than twenty minutes, and made frogs eggs hatch in a little over 30 minutes. The first subjects are arriving via the tunnels tomorrow.
The second entry was slightly more interesting:
December 4th, 1962
Today our first six subjects arrived, two dogs and four monkeys, we checked them for contamination (we didnt find any, those showers work well), and then put them in the cages, Our first assignment was observing the heredity of certain traits in these animals, so we will have to run the temporal field generator at high speed until Christmas, since they take so long to mate.
I skipped ahead a bit.
December 24th, 1962
Humans. They want us to run experiments on humans...
From there it was quite boring, so I skipped ahead to near the end:
May 29th, 1963
Sometimes theres such thing as too much secrecy, those dimwits interested in nothing more than bigger bombs tested a bomb extremely close to us, and part of the ceiling collapsed. I looked at the info display about the temporal field generator, and they all said "MAX" including the field size. That meant we were inside the field. I tried to change the settings, but nothing seemed to work. Then, knowing that in fact, no more than a few milliseconds had passed in real life, I looked up at the top of the cave, and saw cracks spreading slowly. After a few minutes, a small part of the top of the cave broke off and fell down onto a tank, breaking it open. That made me wonder, how were we even supposed to get out. I guess I was just to excited on Day 1 to realize that there was no way out.
Still May 29th, 1963
The rest of the team has commited suicide. I will wait this out, maybe, just maybe someone will come to help.
May 30th, 1963
The clock struck midnight. This means its been more than three months since part of the top of the cave collapsed. I'm out of food. I'm afraid to open the door, or else I might freeze to death.
I closed the journal and remembered the slab closing behind me.
No exit... No food...
They said they could clone a plant in twenty minutes. That means that at max speed, they could increase the speed of time more than fifteen hundred times. I thought about how much time had passed in here since then, two years and three days ago. More than 3000 years.
No exit...
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I didnt fix the formatting, theres tabs and a little bit of italics in there.