Lefty

A sci-fi short story by Maximilian Hunt

There was a bang and the faint scent of ozone filled the air. The lights were out which suggested that the experiment had tripped the circuit breaker. Steve stepped out of the booth, nearly tripping over the lip of the door on his way out.

Steve looked around the garage. There was a thin thread of light coming under the garage door, giving him enough light to see by as his eyes adjusted. With sudden elation, he realised he had done it! He was stepping out of the second booth, the exit booth, not the booth he’d entered which was about six feet away. He had succesfully teleported himself - only 6 feet across the garage, but it proved the concept.

A wave of nausea and disorientation swept over him. Something seemed off about the scene. After thinking for a moment, he finally managed to put his finger on it.

The room was the wrong way around.

The wall he was looking at had the door leading into the house on his left, and the garage door on his right. That was backwards, like the whole room was flipped. Looking around, all his equipment and parts for the machine were scattered around like he had left them, but again flipped the same way as the room.

Steve tried to work out what had happened. Visions of the Star Trek mirror universe flashed through his mind, was a goatee’d Leonard Nimoy about to step through the door into the garage? He dismissed these thoughs as irrational, and there must be a rational explanation for what had happened. Maybe he’d somehow teleported into next door’s garage, and his neighbour Mrs. Runcible was also working on a secret teleporter science experiment that mirrored his own? It didn’t sound very convincing but he liked it more than the mirror universe thing.

Stepping out of the door and into the house, he was confronted by much the same. It looked exactly like his house, but mirrored. He stepped into the living room and picked up a book, an electronics manual, which lay discarded on the coffee table. The text on the cover was reversed, and the stock photo graphic on the cover was flipped too. Skimming the book, right to left, it looked exactly as he remembered throughout but again, mirrored.

An idea started to form in Steve’s mind, an explanation for what could have happened. What if the house wasn’t flipped, but he was? If the teleporter had reassembled his molecules in a perfect mirror image of how they had started, he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. But if his entire body, brain, eyes and all, were flipped relative to the universe, then it would look to him like the whole universe was flipped.

Of course it was all too easy to guess how this had happened. In the complex formulae needed to make the matter reassembler work, he had dropped a minus sign somewhere. That kind of mistake was all too common in engineering - usually you just end up with a nonsense answer like a bridge weighing negative 2000 tons, but ending up with a mirrored solution was just as likely.

The thought was overwhelming. Steve plopped down onto the sofa, mind racing, trying to sort through the implications of this. Just then, the doorbell rang.

Running mostly on autopilot, Steve got up and answered the door. Steve’s friend Theo was standing there. At least, he thought it was Theo. For a moment he hadn’t recognised him. Any number of details seemed out of place - Theo had his hair parted on the wrong side, he had a touch of a lazy eye but today the wrong eye was lazy, everything justd seemed off. Of course this fitted in with everything else he’d seen since the experiment, but he was struggling to process what was going on.

Steve realised that he was wordlessly staring at his friend, who was looking at him oddly. “Theo! Come in, I was just about to put the kettle on.” Theo greeted him and came in to the living room.

A few minutes later, mugs of tea in hand, Steve sat down to chat.

“Are you feeling OK Steve? You seem a bit… off today. Not yourself somehow.”

Steve’s brain kicked somewhat back in to gear, and he remembered. He’d invited Theo around to play Misthaven, the board game they had been working through the campaign of for the last few months. His experiments with the teleporter had been coming together so fast that he’d completely forgotten about his commitments. He briefly considered trying to explain the situation to Theo but rejected the idea as impossible to do without making it sound like either a bad prank or he’d gone mad.

“Sorry Theo, I was actually just recovering, I gave myself a bit of a shock in the lab.”

Theo leaned forward, a look of concern on his face.

“Like a literal electrical shock? Do you need to go to the hospital?”

“No, no, nothing that serious. Just a little jolt, the kind of thing that will wake you up in the morning. That said, do you mind if we call off Misthaven for today? I’m not sure I’m up for it right now” Steve thought he could manage a bit of reading text backwards but trying to play a whole complex board game would fry his brain.

Theo looked a little dubious but seemed to accept the explanation.

Steve took a sip of his tea. It was strange, it tasted like Tea but not quite right. Like it had a hint of an unfamiliar spice.

Steve thought about chirality. Some molecules are chiral, meaning that they have distinct mirror images that can be told apart. In some cases, the same molecule but with opposite chirality can have a vastly different biological effect. The unusual taste in the tea was probably due to everything in it having the opposite chirality to what his body was used to. Thinking back to sixth form chemistry, he remembered the case study of Thalidomide, an experimental drug that had caused horrific birth defects when given to pregnant women with the wrong chirality. He hoped the tea wasn’t killing him.

“Something wrong with your tea Steve?” Steve cleared his throat. “Too much milk I think.”

They chatted for a bit longer, Theo mentioning his daughter had been home from school with the chicken pox. Before long though, Theo excused himself. Steve apologised for cancelling abruptly, and promised to take care of himself and call if he felt unwell. Finally Theo left.

With a moment to think, Steve considered what had happened. He wasn’t an idiot, he’d tested the teleporter before geting in it himself. He’s sent through a small plastic dice, a piece of paper, and then a potted plant - a small succulent. Each had come through fine, and the potted plant had seemed happy and healthy after the fact. In fact, it was on the windowsill and still seemed fine. Of course, the plant was fairly symmetrical and it was possible he wouldn’t have noticed it being flipped, as he was mainly looking for drastic changes like it dying or otherwise suffering after the experiment.

Steve went and found the dice he’d tested, and then found the set of identical dice it had come from. It was subtle and only noticeable on checking carefully, but the one he’d tested was a mirror image of the ones in the set it had come from, with some of the faces appearing flipped depending on which way up you held it.

Next, he checked on the teleporter to see what state it was in. He flipped the circuit breaker for the garage back on, but he could see that some of the electronics involved had burnt out. He had known that teleporting a larger object would draw more power, but apparently hadn’t accounted for that well enough in the design. Fixing it seemed possible, but would take some time.

Back on the sofa, Steve though about what to do. He had to fix whatever mistake he’d made with the teleporter and run it again - actually, that was wrong. He need to recreate the teleporter exactly, with exactly the same mistake, and run it again. That should recreate the conditions and flip him back into sync with the rest of the universe. Until then, he’d just have to accept that he needed to eat and drink despite the risk of consuming molecules that were the opposite way than his body expected them to be. He was starting to feel a little down, like he was coming down with something, but he hoped it was just the stress of the day and a good nights sleep would help.

He went to bed for the night, resolving to start work in the morning. Just as he was about to go to sleep, he got a text from Theo, asking if he was feeling OK. He replied that he was, and wasn’t suffering from any after effects of the “shock” he’d had earlier. Then he went to sleep.

The next morning, Steve woke up feeling like shit. His body was covered in itchy red spots. Chickenpox. He must have caught it from Theo, who was carrying some from his daughter.

Steve, like most people, had had chickenpox as a child and hadn’t been worried about exposure. It wasn’t hard to speculate about what must have happened. Some part of the way his body’s immune system detected chickenpox was chiral, and the flipped version failed to identify the virus. So now he had chickenpox a second time.

A quick google and look at the NHS website suggested that while chickenpox was worse for adults than children, it probably wouldn’t be life threatening. Steve resolved to try and get on with fixing the teleporter as much as he could while he was getting over the virus.

Some days later, and Steve was feeling better. Not only because he was getting over the chickenpox, but also because he believed he had repaired the teleporter and returned it to the same state he had it at the time of his previous fateful experiment.

He tested it the same way as before - the dice flipped back to match the rest of the set, and the plant seemed unaffected. This time he paid more careful attention to the plant and marked some of the leaves with a sharpie. Upon teleportation, the marks were flipped as he expected.

Finally, he decided it was time. He stepped into the entry booth and started the sequence. The electronics began to hum, powering up and preparing to transport.

Full of trepidation, he looked around. The garage was back to the right way around.

Sprinting out into the house, he grabbed a book from the living room. He had a brief moment of disorientation upon looking at the cover. Over the last few days he had gotten very used to reading backwards. The brain is remarkably adaptable and for a moment he thought the cover was backwards. Quickly, the moment passed and his brain remembered the way it had been reading every day of his life before a week ago. It was the right way around. He kissed the stock photo on the cover.

Steve flopped onto the couch, coughing out sobs of relief. After collecting himself, he thought about what to do. His first instinct was to go and fetch the sledgehammer from the shed outside and smash the machine beyond repair. He rejected that idea quickly though - if he could build a teleporter in his garage then someone else could, and would soon. It was possible, even likely, that the technology already existed in some government blacksite under wraps somewhere.

Much better for him to publish the idea and get credit in the public sphere. A discovery like that would set him up for life, which had been his plan all along. Once he fixed the mirroring problem, he could report his experiments with the dice and the plant, and leave out the little misadventure he had just returned from. He could publish a follow up paper later about using a modified teleporter to flip chiral molecular structures, all very neat.

A few weeks later, and the news is playing. A new virus, a mutant strain of chickenpox has been ripping through the UK. The latest report from scientist studying the disease indicates that it is exactly like regular chickenpox, except all the molecular structures have been flipped. How this mutation could happen all at once defies any mechanism known to science. Work on treatments, including a vaccine, is ongoing.