by Phil Edwards
To tame the T-rex, tap here.
Dr. Hammond joins you as you lug the femur toward the stegosaurus. It is silent as you insert the giant bone, and even though it’s completely the wrong size, the beast doesn’t seem to mind. It turns out that dinosaur surgery is pretty easy if you have the right tools and a complete indifference to the outcome.
“Now the real fun begins!” you shout as you back away from the dinosaur.
“Actually,” Hammond says, “that’s about it. The stegosaurus is pretty boring. We tried riding it, but it just stood there and yawned. Lot of grazing. Not much fun.”
“What do we do now?”
“Do you want lunch? I’ll find your sponge.”
You and Hammond go to the on-site cafeteria, which has a great deal on personal pan pizzas. Though Hammond never does find Beatram—he says the sponge is in another department—you eventually move on. You take up painting pottery as a hobby, but you never get very good, because it always makes you think of your lost and beloved sponge.
Life moves at the pace of a disappointing stroll through an abandoned mall. You die ten years later. The lab mortician says you died of a broken heart (because you ate a lot of fried food).
THE END
Dr. Hammond smiles.
“Go ahead. Get that sick pic!”
“You don’t seem like the type of guy who would say sick pic.”
“I contain multitudes, little scientist.”
You can barely contain your excitement as you poke your head inside Chompy’s mouth. You can feel his weak, boneless breaths. Then you hear a creaking from above and a snap.
Darkness blocks your view, and suddenly the dinosaur’s wet mouth is wrapped around your head. Hammond is audible, but just barely.
“Don’t panic,” he shouts. “The strings holding Chompy’s mouth open just snapped. The little guy doesn’t have the ability to open his mouth on his own. I’m going to get a crane.”
“Mhfasd fjasjs!” you shout, but it’s just gibberish to Hammond. You tried to say that there was no time—you can’t breathe inside the dinosaur’s surprisingly halitotic mouth. Slowly, the darkness turns to black. You see a vision of a white tunnel with a beaker sponge at the end.
The lab mortician says that he’ll need a few hours to clean the raptor slobber off your face.
THE END
“Dr. Hammond,” you say, your voice quivering, “I don’t want to take a picture with Chompy.”
“Then what do you want to do?”
“I want to rebuild him.”
Hammond leaves you with sweet Chompy, the gentle boneless raptor that you’ve so quickly come to love. Is he the same as Beatram? Of course not—they have different interests and personalities, and also one is a sponge and the other is a boneless cloned dinosaur. But they have enough in common.
You scavenge the lab for substitutes. Hammond said the dinosaurs reject inauthentic bones put inside their bodies, but what if you created splints instead? It’s the perfect plan, especially once you find ample PVC piping filled with asbestos.
You scrape the asbestos out with your hands, Chompy watching bonelessly from a distance. You whisper to him as you work and cough.
“Don’t worry, little one. We shall fix you soon.”
It takes you forever to get all the asbestos out of the pipes, and there are setbacks when you briefly try to eat some (it looks like cotton candy). But you eventually empty the pipes and fit them to Chompy’s body. Slowly, his shapeless body takes a beautiful form that you can’t help but love. You watch as he takes his first steps.
You feed him a steady diet of ground up poodle meat (you find a stash of poodles in a nearby lab). He grows stronger. Originally, you plan to use him to find Beatram, but you realize that you’ve found a new companion, and that’s all that matters.
You and Chompy grow old together. Seventy years later, when you are on your deathbed, you hear PVC pipes pop across the room. Chompy drops something from his mouth onto your chest.
It’s Beatram, sweet Beatram. Chompy has found him after all these years. You die with your two closest companions, together again.
The lab mortician says you had a lot of asbestos in your lungs.
THE END
Devin eagerly fondles his DMZ.
“It’s called Colder Fusion.”
“Of course!” you shout. “That was the problem all along. It wasn’t cold enough!”
They make you chief of the project and you spend weeks developing your press conference speech. You convene a gigantic three-day event (it turns out that organizing a massive publicity event is easier than remembering the difference between hydrogen and helium).
On the day of the big reveal, you ask Devin for the device.
“Where’s the Colder Fusion machine?”
He grins.
“It’s called revenge.”
“OK, I don’t care what it’s called. Give me Revenge, I have a big press conference!”
“No, you fool, I made it all up.”
You step onto the stage and thousands of people applaud. You step up to the microphone and say three words.
“Look over there!”
You scamper away and never wear a lab coat again. You lose your chance to find Beatram and discover the truth about the laboratory. Years later, you do show up as a trivia question on Jeopardy! (sadly, nobody remembers your name).
When you die, the mortician says, “OK, I’ll grab lunch after I’m done with this one.”
THE END
Time! You’ve heard so much about it, but never could remember the difference between the big hand and the little hand. It turns out that the lab has developed a machine that can send you backwards.
“We’ve developed a rift in spacetime,” Emma says. “A bridge from one period in time to another.”
“Genius!” you exclaim. “So we can finally see how they clean beakers in the future. Or in the past!”
“Exactly,” Emma replies. “Wait, what?”
“Where does it go?”
“We don’t know,” Devin says as he opens a curtain. A portal swirls behind him. “I would jump in to fix my missing arm, but we’d rather have an idiot test subject go first.”
“I’ll do it!” you shout. “I like beakers.”
“Yes, we know,” the twins say at the same time.
They say a bunch of long and big words about time, and death, and paradoxes, but you spend most of it thinking about the opportunity to get in an extra nap.
What mysteries lie beyond the portal? What incredible surprises that you’ve never experienced before? What new experiences will you find, experiences that won’t be underwhelming, or seem a little cheap and anticlimactic what you realize what they are? Experiences that, in reality, turn out to be one of the more disappointing outcomes to spring from a fantastic concept like time travel?
You jump through the portal.
To travel through time, tap here.
You shout outside.
“I’m alive you guys, I’m alive. OK, we did the stupid experiment. Now let me out of here!”
It sounds like they’re mumbling outside, and Devin yells at you.
“Yeah, but did you drink the poison?”
“Remember when we played hacky sack? That was so fun.”
“Drink the poison, scientist.”
“But what if I’m not in a poisony mood?”
“We really need this for our grant. It’d be a huge favor.”
You think it over and realize you do owe them a favor, since they didn’t poison you yet. It’s only reasonable to drink the poison.
“Just this once, you guys!”
“OK!” the twins shout back.
You drink the poison and lean against the back of the cube. You try your best to observe how alive you are, but after a few minutes, you start to lose track and your mind wanders. You wonder if Beatram ever wrote poetry, or if the Fake Science Laboratories are funded through some large and menacing conspiracy that you’
ve completely failed to discover. But then that poisony feeling kicks in.
The lab mortician says that you’re definitely dead. “Extra dead,” is his quote.
THE END
“You guys,” you shout, “it’s crazy in here. I’m alive and dead. I’m learning so much science. No more poison necessary, I’ve cracked the case on this and really advanced humanity.”
“Awesome!” the twins say together. “Let’s throw in the cats.”
“What?”
You hear what sounds like an airlock hiss. A small door opens in the side of the cube and a white Persian cat strolls inside. Then another. And another. And another. The cube fills with cats.
“We need to know if it’s repeatable,” Devin says. “You’re teaching us so much about quantum mechanics. You have no idea how helpful this is going to be for our careers.”
Emma sounds just as happy.
“So we need you to poison each of these cats and tell us if they’re alive and dead too.”
The cube is so crowded that cats start crawling all over you.
“You know, guys, I don’t know much about your so-called science.” The fur is filling your throat already. “But isn’t this all just some thought experiment to prove that quantum mechanics is stupid?”
“That’s what we thought, too,” Devin replies. “We just wanted to get rid of you, but then you showed up alive and dead! So let’s load up on cats and poison.”
A strange substance begins to fill the room, green in color and distinctly poison-smelling.
You have to escape as soon as possible. But how? Then you realize that the cats themselves are part of the solution. You might not be able to stop the experiment—but maybe you can ruin it. If Emma and Devin observe the cats, they’ll have corrupted their studies. It’s your only hope.
Frantically, you shove cats into the airlock in an attempt to prop it open. Eventually, the cat pressure grows too strong. The airlock bursts open and Devin and Emma are covered in cats while you make your escape.
Instead of being horrified by your experience, you’re inspired. You don’t just have airlock-cloggers in these cats. You have allies. And now you’re going to do something amazing with them. But part of you yearns to taste revenge (figuratively).
You can perform Devin and Emma’s own twisted experiment on them. Or, if you prefer, you can lead your cat army to discover the truth about the lab.
To force Devin and Emma into the experiment, tap here.
To lead a cat crusade, tap here.
“We won’t just find the studio,” you tell Masterson. “We’ll sneak in and use it to broadcast the truth about the lab. We’ll tell them everything—about Mars, about the baking soda, and even about the chocolate.”
Masterson looks afraid, but he nods in agreement—he knows you’ve planned the perfect attack.
You disguise yourself as janitors to enter the studio, but a scientist stops you.
“Only scientists are allowed in here.”
You think on your feet.
“We’re actually scientists dressed as janitors.”
“Go ahead,” the scientist says, and you and Masterson sneak ahead.
The set looks just like Mars, except there are cameras, green screens, lighting, electrical supplies, and a film crew. It’s the perfect place to reveal the truth about the lab. But a bank of television screens forces you to make an unexpected choice.
The security cameras show the view from the lab, and the scientist who took Beatram is on one of them. She leaves the lab—and you can see your sponge on her desk. You only have a few moments to get him back. But if you do, you can’t broadcast the truth about the lab.
To broadcast the truth, tap here.
To ditch Masterson to find Beatram, tap here.
“I’ve got a plan,” you tell Masterson. “We’re gonna make it blow.”
“But how?”
“The same way the lab blows up the Earth. Baking soda and vinegar.”
You and Masterson run toward the lab’s supply room and find baking soda and vinegar, but it’s too hard to carry the barrel of vinegar and the bag of baking soda at the same time.
“Here, I’ll just combine them,” you say. “We’ll carry them together.”
“No!” Masterson shouts, but he’s too slow to stop you. You pour the baking soda into the vinegar and suddenly a wave of foam overtakes you, pushing you through the hallway and out of the lab completely. The lab is fine, but you aren’t.
You drown in the deadly mixture, never to see Dr. Masterson again, never to tell the truth, and never to be reunited with your beloved beaker sponge. The lab mortician shakes his head when he sees your body.
“I’ve seen it so many times,” he tells his wife, a famous sweater catalog model, later that night.
“Darling, come to bed.”
He shuts off the light.
“Do you know what killed that poor scientist?”
“Darling, please, don’t trouble yourself.”
“Our own invention.” He closes his eyes. “That darn volcano juice has taken another soul.”
THE END
You motion toward the grey and, as if you can control the flow of time and space itself, you find your body pulled toward it. You whoosh into the void.
When you emerge, everything is colorless. All the men wear long coats and crisp hats, and all the women wear dresses. You stop a woman on the street.
“Excuse me, miss, but I’ve traveled in a long tunnel without a lot of light. You look like you know where I can suss out some science.”
You jerk your hand over your mouth. You have no idea why you spoke that way.
“Sure, but it’ll cost you, see,” the woman says.
“Everything has a price.”
You still can’t believe what you’re saying, but it starts to make sense. You’ve traveled to some black and white dimension, a parallel noirniverse. You search behind you for the portal but find nothing.
You die twelve years later while investigating the mysterious disappearance of Daisy Montgomery, heiress to the Montgomery Mill fortune.
The corrupt city mortician takes a long drag from his cigarette after uncovering your body.
“I’ve seen fewer holes in Swiss cheese. This is what it looks like when you get your beaker cleaned...by bullets.”
THE END
You lurch toward the off-white and, miraculously, your body careens toward it. When you come to, dozens of well-dressed people crowd around you.
“Welcome to our planet, traveler. We are the people of Taupe.”
The wormhole took you to an incredibly tasteful planet filled with refurbished vintage furniture and tasteful decor. The people there are always a little annoyed (and annoying), but they accept you as one of them because you were wearing your off-white lab coat (which has a few tasteful coffee stains).
As long as you search, you never find a portal back to your own world, so you start a new life on Taupe. You open a store called Restoration Beaker and sell artisanal beakers to people who want to put tasteful flowers in them. One day, a middle-aged woman taps you on the shoulder.
“I want to fill my beaker with some pebbles. Do you have a beaker sponge to clean with?”
You stare into the distance.
“I have no sponge. Mine is in another world. Another galaxy, perhaps. Another life.”
The next day, you die. The mortician, as appointed by Taupe authorities, says your internal organs were almost identical to that of Taupians, though your brain was kind of small.
THE END
Dr. Masterson shows up, but you don’t have time to think it through—you launch a poodle at him immediately. The poodle licks his lab coat and starts to bite, but then he drops to the floor.
“You fool,” Masterson says. “What is a dog’s one weakness?”
You realize your mistake.
“They can’t read.”
“No,” he says and reaches into the dog’s mouth. “They can’t tolerate ch
ocolate.”
He pulls a half-eaten candy bar from the dog’s mouth and eats it himself.
“I always carry it with me. Now what were you doing in here?”
“Little ol’ me? Nothing at all.”
But Masterson ignores your excuse, even though you suck on your thumb and try to look especially cute and vulnerable. He calls laboratory security (as well as a candy bar delivery service, which you didn’t even realize was a thing).
You never do get Beatram back, and you never eat chocolate again either. Your life is filled with dreary days wishing you had come up with an incredibly clever excuse for being in the room. But alas, you did not.
The mortician says the bullet killed you instantly (in this life, you became a bodyguard for a powerful, yet surprisingly paternal, South American drug lord).
THE END
It’s Dr. Masterson! You know that he’ll punish you harshly unless you come up with the perfect excuse.
“I...like...beakers.”
Masterson stares at you.
“How much?”
“So much. I like beakers. I like beakers!”
He bites his lip, but then he nods and smiles.
“I don’t see any beakers or beaker-cleaning equipment in here, but I trust you. And I’ve come to draft you for a very special project.”
“Good. Because I wasn’t just in the air ducts, I swear.”
He shuts the door and explains it all: he believes the lab has diverted money from their grants to fund a baking soda and vinegar operation, and he wants to blow the lid off the whole thing. You tune out during most of it, but for a second, you think he wants to fight you.
“These fists don’t lie,” you say and kiss your knuckles. “Put up your dukes.”
“I said we have to fight for the truth, not fight each other.”
“You’re a sly one, Masterson, and I like that about you.”
You give him a hug, and when he breaks away, he leads you out of the lab. He’s got a plan, and you’re going to give him a chance.