A Sudden Itch

One frame out of nearly a quarter million, that’s it. Filmed at a hundred-thousand frames per second, it was there for only one frame, and that one frame was plastered on websites, blogs, and the front page of most of the tabloids.

Dr. Amy Silva had printed out a hard copy, framed it, and hung it on the wall of her office. She hadn’t expected to see something like it…ever. Had it not been her experiment and setup, she’d have rejected it as a hoax.

The experiment was run and filmed as part of a broader film course on nuclear fission and criticality. Like the “Demon Core” but smaller, a sphere of plutonium was enclosed in a spherical beryllium chamber that reflected the neutrons from fissioning atoms. Unlike that earlier, deadly experiment, it was contained away from people and the top half of the spherical container’s position was controlled by a robotic arm, rather than just a scientist holding an edge up with a screwdriver.

Even in the bright lighting of the chamber, the high-speed camera caught the blue glow as the air outside the gap of the cover ionized. It was there, just three frames after the first sign of criticality, that it appeared.

Just what was in the image depended on who was talking. The tabloids had drawn lines in the sand; nearly half claimed it was an angel, the same number called it a demon, one said it was the ghost of Louis Slotin, while another — known for its devotion to cryptozoology — swore it was a fairy. The scientific community — less those who dismissed it out of hand — were far more measured in their response.

The data, the camera, its sensors, the chamber, and the entire setup had been examined by four independent teams. They ruled out camera or sensor error, reflection on the shielding between the camera and the core, light leaks in the chamber, vibrations, and flat-out fakery.

Every plausible hypothesis posited by scientists including Dr. Silva had been tested and disproved. This left only speculation — opinion that sounded like hypothesis but was untestable and therefore unscientific. These ranged from a minor tear between universes to a glitch in the simulated universe.

Regardless of which non-scientific explanation resonated most with the viewer, the image was at once enigmatic and unmistakable. A three-centimeter humanoid form, with dragonfly-like wings, an outstretched hand as if to block the camera, which seemed to have squeezed out with one foot still inside the gap of the beryllium sphere surrounding the core.

Amy stared at the framed print. If not for the data forensics team verifying that the image data from the camera hadn’t been tampered, and that she’d been present when it was recorded, she’d swear it was the best special effects she’d ever seen.

She hadn’t seen it when it happened, of course. Ten microseconds wasn’t enough time to register in the human eye. She wondered how she might have reacted if she had been able to see it.

It appeared to be coming from within the core itself, as if it had squeezed through the millimeter opening as it exited. So much detail in that one frame. A thick head of curly hair swept back from an androgynous face of indeterminate ethnicity and age, set in an expression of surprised shock.

With the scarcity of required materials, the experiment had not yet been replicated, but Amy spent weeks talking to her peers to find someone who could. The difficult part was the plutonium sphere. She’d borrowed it, along with the beryllium reflection chamber, from the government’s nuclear research lab and they’d taken it back before she’d even had a chance to go through the footage.

Another month and the hype would die down and Amy would never see the same thing again. Of that, she was sure…until the call from the agency that had loaned her the core. They wanted her to be present while they repeated the experiment with a faster camera.

They’d put it to her as though they expected her to back out, but she was more excited at the prospect than they were. She was to recreate every step of the experiment in their containment laboratory, with their robot, and their million-frame-per-second camera.

She was surprised at their setup. They had not one, but five cameras, all set at different angles. The cameras were protected against alpha particles by lead glass. The robot was the same make and model she’d used in her lab, with the same controller software.

Amy went through the checklist from her earlier experiment, explaining each step as she went to the government scientists and the other scientists they’d invited along. A news crew from one of the major organizations was there as well, documenting the entire process.

There was a palpable feeling of expectation in the room as the countdown began. On cue, the robot began to lower the upper beryllium hemisphere and the cooling fans of the cameras whined to life. Two seconds later, the robot raised the hemisphere, and everything shut down.

Aside from the blue glow of the ionized air, no one saw anything unusual. The images from the cameras would tell the whole story, though. Now it was a matter of waiting for a couple hours, while the computers connected to the cameras downloaded the images and processed them into a “watchable" film — assuming one wanted to spend twelve days watching those two-and-a-half seconds.

After processing, the images were scanned by an AI model that looked for anything anomalous. When such frames were found, the twenty-four preceding frames along with the twenty-four trailing were matched with the frame codes from the other cameras. The idea was that anything that happened in view of one of the cameras would be shown at twenty-four frames per second along with the same time from the other four cameras.

The news crew was visibly bored, and the scientists had broken into small groups to talk. Amy, however, hovered near the computer, waiting for it to finish.

When it finished, the number of anomalous frames processed read well over a million. Roughly thirteen-and-a-half hours of footage to go through. Amy wasn’t sure whether to be excited or frightened by that.

A hush fell over the room as the footage began to run on the large screen TV that dominated the side away from the viewing platform. The news crew filmed, but the reporter stood, like all of them, in stunned silence. Goose bumps rose on Amy’s arms as she realized what she was seeing.

Although they clearly zoomed in and out of the core, they hadn’t come from the core. It was as though they’d been in the chamber all along and were only visible while being bombarded with ionizing radiation.

Any idea that they were somehow benevolent or even benign was discarded, though, as their mouths — which opened to insane proportions — were caught in that state more than once, filled with jagged teeth. They fought with each other, four of them ripping another one apart and devouring it in the space of less than ten microseconds after it squeezed out of the core.

Amy looked away from the screen and wondered how many of the toothy little things zipped about her at that moment…and began to itch.