500 v. 0.6

Immediately after the final quarter-turn on the second set of knobs, the room filled with a deafening silence. At that precise moment, there was a pulse of white light so brief and so intense, one might not even be able to differentiate it from a blink.



Derek looked up to find both birds suspended in midair, surrounded by a familiar sphere of translucent blue energy he had only previously seen in textbooks.




He stepped away from the control station, jaw slightly dropped, and fought the urge to reach out and grab one of the spheres. He had enough training time to remember that while you could only see the blue energy, there was an invisible sphere of energy around the orb that was quite unstable, and if it was disrupted, it would send a shockwave through whatever organic substance touched it so powerful that it would completely vaporize it. Then there would be no unfortunate ash heap.



“Well done,” the instructor calmly encouraged. “Well done indeed. We haven’t had two Resheph Spheres contained in this lab for three lunar years. Stand there while I start the condenser to stabilize and dissipate the Nesheph layer.”



Resheph and nesheph were the aptly named layers of energy that created the blue spheres that held the birds suspended in time. They were terms from the old language adopted into the current era of technology and science. Defined, the root sheph literally means "light." "Good Light" and "Evil Light" respectively is how the Ancients would interpret the terms. Anything in the physical world that could be seen was good, and anything in the physical world that could not been seen was considered evil, or deceptive, if you will.



These things in science needed some term to describe them, and silly as they sometimes came out, the old language was rife with words that nobody used anymore.



A small pole lowered from the ceiling over each one of the daises. Mounted on the end of each one of the poles was a small inverted pyramid of condensed carbon. The condenser attracted the Nesheph layer of energy, focused it on the carbon pyramid, and dissipated it in small, focused sparks of light--much like a sparkler looks like on the Fourth of July, but at a slightly slower pace.



Not realizing how close he was to the remaining bird specimens, Derek removed his safety goggles to wipe some sweat from his brow. As the hand with the recently removed eye protection swung to his side, the elastic strap from the goggles caught one of the jars and knocked it to the floor. The glass shattered and the bird took off in flight to make a quick escape directly over one of the Resheph spheres.



“Nooooooooooooooo!!!!!” was all Derek could shout as he reached for the bird. The sparkler stopped. The room seemed to distort as the Nesheph pulsated spastically.



The instructor looked up from the controls in the small room where he had been operating the Nesheph Condenser.