Krishna kumar Mani - SFS2 - Science Fiction Short Stories

My invention is a simple medicine. It helps soldiers escape from enemy hands. If he’s about to be taken captive, he self-injects the medicine. He will become invisible within five seconds and that way he can then return to base and avoid being captured.

You might ask if it’s possible for every soldier to be invisible and to win in combat that way. But I tell you that it’s not possible. The medicine is in it’s nascent stage. While the soldier is invisible, no one can see him or hear his voice. He can see others and listen to them but they cannot touch or feel anything. Even walking takes a while to learn. Operating a weapon or fighting someone would be impossible.

This sounds too good to be true, right? But it’s not. Like I said, the research is in it’s earliest stages. The main challenge is how long the soldier can stay invisible. Currently it lasts for five minutes. That’s far from enough time. One hour is what I’m shooting for. But I’ve researched so many hours, days and months. It just doesn’t seem possible to extend the duration of the invisibility. Of course since it’s a secret research, I can’t go down to the local university and ask the biochemists there to help. And there’s a severe lack of test subjects when your research is classified. I have however tested it on a deaf and dumb test subject, two monkeys and myself.

I was spending more and more time but I just couldn’t figure out how to extend the duration. How fast the medicine was taken up into the body and made the person invisible seemed beyond my control as well. My senior officer, who was the last person along with the deaf and dumb test subject to know about the project lost his hope and told me that I should just give up on that aspect of it. But I still had hope. I didn’t want to give up because I felt like I was so close. But no matter if I increased the quantity given or made chemical changes, it was no use. Of course I could be invisible for a long time if I kept re-injecting myself, but since it was impossible to manipulate objects while invisible, I had to become visible again to administer more drugs. This was, of course, a problem.

I was sleepless. I worked so hard that even my monkeys had to help me during two shifts. After two days of hard research with no marked improvement I felt so bad that I went to my house and stayed home the next day. I tried to refresh myself. I needed sleep so badly. I don’t think I ever slept so much.

Once I woke, I felt very refreshed. Again I started to think about how my medicine worked. What my medicine did was immediately spread into the blood and in five seconds it acted. My medicine is a bacteria, you see. And it only makes the person invisible until it loses its high level of concentration. Once the immune system responds and the bacteria die, the person becomes visible again. I’ve tried to improve this duration, but time and time again I’ve failed, as I’ve told you.

After an hour, possibly due to good sleep or a change of place, I had an idea. I rushed to the lab.

I pressed myself for days. One day at midnight I believed I had come upon a breakthrough. I went and looked at the two monkeys who were both asleep. I decided to let them continue to sleep and went to the room where I kept my human test subject. I smiled at him and he smiled back at me. I gestured that he should get ready for an injection. He got ready, we’d done this before.

I injected him with the medicine, and of course, after five seconds he disappeared. I started the stop-watch and had it counting. I didn’t know what he was doing but I knew he couldn’t hurt me. I checked the stop-watch. It had crossed the five minute barrier. I cross checked it with the wall on the clock as well. Yes! For the first time it worked as expected. Now it had crossed the ten minute mark. And then the twenty minute mark.

Around the thirty minute mark I became worried. What if he had escaped? I ordered gate security to alert me and find the dumb-deaf test subject. I knew he could not cross the area because the medicine lost power in the time it would take if it was only the five minute medicine. Since he couldn’t hear, maybe he was out there still, waiting for the medicine to wear off. The only option for me to find him was to go invisible and search for him. So that’s what I did.

As I had thought, he hadn’t left. He was asleep on the bed. I just looked at him and thought that I hadn’t started the stop-watch to measure my own time. But I couldn’t do anything about that now. So I just watched the clock. Three minutes went passed. Maybe I could way for an hour. That was the time that was expected. But the deaf-dumb guy should become visible before me. I was afraid for him. But he seemed to be sleeping and I wanted my test results to be accurate so I didn’t bother him. I went out to the security guard and wondered if they could see me. They couldn’t. They were still searching for him. A soldier entered the lab and placed my lunch and left. But I wasn’t hungry or thirsty at all, another benefit from the invisibility.

Flashback ends.

Finally my research was a success. When invisible people could communicate with one another. There was no hunger or thirst while invisible either. These are the successes of my research.

However, the failure may be greater. It’s been six months since I took the medicine. Today when I woke up, I was still invisible and I don’t see that ever changing. I modified the bacteria so that when they are killed they reanimate from dead cells. I thought the immune system would simply take longer to kill them all. But what happened was an endless chain reaction. When one bacteria dies, another is created and so on and so forth. This will continue until my last breath.

I was so excited to know for certain and to find my test subject that I used the medicine on myself. I knew exactly how to make myself visible. But I couldn’t touch anything. The army believes that somebody kidnapped me and my test subject.

Invisibility feels a lot like death.

I am on the way to the office after a month of sick leave. I’m still not fully recovered though. Physically I’m alright, but not mentally. I lost ten million dollars. Whether someone would call it an accident or an incident, I don’t know. Whatever it was, a month of sick leave is not nearly long enough to get over the problem. And yet I’m going back in to the office today.

You’re probably wondering how I lost ten million dollars. Maybe you’re wondering how I earned ten million in the first place so you can do the same. Well I’m not a politician or a celebrity those things are for certain. To know how this happened, you’ll have to listen to my story.

I don’t want to share my name or anyone else’s name involved because that’s confidential and I value my privacy. What I will share with you though is that I’m in my early thirties and I completed university at a world famous business school. In university they taught me that creativity and hard work were the two key factors to success.

After I graduated I landed my first job in a VC firm. VC firms, or venture capital firms are companies that identify startup companies and fund them. After the startups grow, the VC firms are benefited by revenue from the startup or maybe even buyout the company.

The first thing I realized after joining the job was that there was a large difference between business school and the business world. Creativity, hard work, whatever. Those were nothing without one thing: luck. Maybe luck is 50%, maybe it’s 99%. But when it comes down to luck, business school has nothing to offer.

Luck plays a major role in funding, mergers, acquisitions, all types of business. I know that because I worked for eight years in funding companies similar to my first job. During my experience we funded hundreds of companies. Some promising and useful projects failed. Some funny and useless projects succeeded. The reasons for failure were varied, no two were exactly alike. But every success could be attributed to luck. Every single one.