…all night long
Yeah, I did not post yesterday due to sleepiness. You get two posts today, with the second coming after my bonus 4 hours at work tonight.
The Doclopedia #26
Places That Don’t Stay In One Place: Quantronico Labs
Founded in 2003, Quantronico Labs designs and builds all manner of very specialized high tech equipment used in quantum physics research. Fortunately for them, most of the actual manufacturing is done at their facility in Los Angeles, because their main labs in Palo Alto are no longer there most of the time.
The “Quantronico Event” took place on May 3rd, 2007 at 10:17 in the morning. That’s when Charles Cooper and Ichiro Takahashi fired up a new piece of equipment in the second floor testing lab. Nobody remembers what the equipment was supposed to do, but it blew up really well. Cooper and Takahashi were vaporized and the lab was destroyed. A few minutes later, the entire building vanished and re-appeared just outside Salt Lake City. Every one of the remaining 130 employees got out of the building, but when it teleported to San Angelo, Texas 2 hours later, they were all back inside it. The same thing happened 4 hours later when it teleported to Kearney, Nebraska and 8 hours after that when it showed up in Concord, New Hampshire.
The building and the people in it teleport on a regular and predictable timetable. Starting at 2 hours, each move stays double the previous length of time until it hits 64 hours. At that point, it resets to 2 hours again. Any of the original occupants and anyone in the building during the “fade out” will teleport with it, as will any original contents or new items brought in. Amazingly, when the building appears anywhere, it automatically hooks up to the local water, sewage and other utilities. Even more amazingly, the building had completely repaired the damaged lab within a week, although the dead scientists are still dead. Well, if they actually died in the first place.
The locations the building teleport to are totally random and have only repeated a few times in the 3 years it has been moving about. It has mostly limited itself to the United States, Canada and Mexico, but has popped up in France, Australia (twice), England, Egypt and Japan. The building has had a fourth floor added for living quarters and that floor teleports just like the rest.
Naturally, the US government was on this event like white on rice. Unfortunately, it was the sort of thing that could not be contained well and by the second teleport, it was all over the internet and the news media worldwide. In one of those strange twists of logic that only Wall Street can make, Quantronico stock prices quadrupled in less than a day. The Quantronico staff found themselves treated like rock stars wherever they appeared.
The companies founder and CEO, Tony Parks, has kept the company running and has made sure that his employees can get to their families or the families can get to them. He is working on plans to build a fifth and sixth floor, so as to provide better and larger living quarters. He has also done a surprisingly good job of keeping supplies coming in and assorted stuff going out. He has also increased the staff by 50 employees, many of whom work in daycare, the cafeteria or the medical clinic. All in all, most of the employees love working there, since as one put it, “you get to work and travel at the same time”.
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