Self Acceptance (Incomplete)

Chapter One: The lab Accident

It was an average Wednesday evening for Dr. Wallace, and his young student lab assistant, Carla Mencia. Carla was busy making the adjustments requested, and Dr. Wallace was working on an advanced physics equation and typing things out on his computer. They were just about to test out the would-be teleporter, when suddenly Dr. Wallace got an urgent call from his wife, informing him about something that he couldn't miss.

"Miss Mencia!" Dr. Wallace called.

Carla immediately stopped what she was doing and walked over to him. "Yes Dr. Wallace?" She replied.

"I'm afraid I'm going to have to be leaving right now... Something very important just came up.." Dr. Wallace said, quickly gathering his things.

"What happened?" Carla asked as she watch her mentor scramble to gather his belongings.

"It's nothing too major, but my son is about to have his first child, and I really want to be there for him." He said.

"Oh... I didn't even know you had a son." Carla replied.

"Well, I forget about him a lot sometimes, but I can't afford to miss this, but... I think I got a bit closer today on the machine, so I'm going to need you to test it in my absence and record everything thoroughly when it fails." He said while jotting something down on his note pad. He handed it to Carla, who quickly read over his notes.

"Umm, okay. I can handle that." Carla said sounding anything but confident.

"Relax, it's all pretty self explanatory, you can't go wrong." He said on his way out of the mostly empty warehouse building serving as the laboratory.

Carla immediately sighed as the dar closed behind Dr. Wallace.

"Okay, how hard can this possibly be? I've done this a thousand times, how hard can it be doing it without him around?" Carla reasoned aloud.

She looked at the note pad he have her. 'One teleportation test using a pencil, without the metal end please, the metal would disrupt the electromagnetic field and blow up the whole lab. When it ends up failing, record what happened.' The rest of the note listed the exact specifications of the machine he wanted.

"Hmm, that's easy enough.." Carla said aloud.

She immediately prepared the machine to Dr. Wallace's expect specifications, and took off the metal cap on the wooden pencil before throwing it inside pod 1, and closing the door.

"Here goes nothing." She said before pressing the initiation sequence.

Suddenly a loud screeching sound came from the pod, along with a blinding light from the window on the door, just before the same thing came from pod 2 a few seconds later.

Carla opened pod 2, and expect to see the usual black smoke and nothing else, but instead she was amazed to see the pencil was in the pod, perfectly intact. She rushed to the other pod, and instead of the usual pile of burning ash, she saw a clear white smoke.

"Oh my god! It..it worked...it actually worked!" Carla exclaimed as she retrieved the pencil from pod 2. "Let's try that again, just to be sure." She said, putting the pencil back in pod 1, and repeating the teleportation process. To her surprise, it worked again.

Feeling exited, she decided to repeat the process with more active organic material; an apple, which ended up working both times she teleported the apple. Feeling joyful, she repeated the process twice again, only with both the apple and the pencil. To her delight, it worked flawlessly. Seeing it work on two separate things at one inspired one crazy idea inside Carla.

Feeling jubilant, she decided to test the teleporter on herself. She prepared the machine, and took off her boots because of the metal zippers they had.

"Don't want to blow up the lab right now of all times." She said, removing her boots. She quickly padded herself down to check if she had any other metal on her, which wearing a white lab coat over a blue dress, she wasn't.

"Alright, all clear!" Carla said as she set a timer on the teleporter. She immediately scurried into pod 1, and closed the door behind her.

"Oh jeez, the floor is cold!" She complained planting her bare feet on the ground, and waited for the familiar screeching sound.

Unfortunately, in the midst of her joy, Carla failed to notice the red blinking light on the mainframe, signaling a detected error.

Suddenly the loud screeching sound began, but an ominous alarm went off from the mainframe, and the inside of the machine began to shoot off bright sparks.

"'Oh shit what did I do?' Carla thought as her eyes widened, and her heart began to sink. 'Well, I'm going to die..' She thought as the blinding light began, and burned straight through her eyelids. She felt an odd tingling sensation, almost as though she were being tickled, run from one side of her body, to the middle before it briefly stopped, and continued to the other side of her body.

When the machine turned off, Carla burst out of the pod instinctively. She felt a little shaky, but only because she was so terrified.

'Hm. I'm not dead. Thank god.' She thought to herself. Carla then turned around and saw what pod she had just come out on. Pod 1.

"It didn't work?!" She asked aloud, but at the exact same time she said that, she heard the voice of a girl to her left.

"It worked!" Carla heard this voice exclaim.

'What the hell?' Carla said to herself.

Carla slowly turned her head in the direction of the voice, but with her eyes closed, as she was quite afraid of what she would see. When she opened them, she immediately covered her mouth as she gasped. On the other side, just outside pod 2, stood what appeared to be another Carla Mencia; an exact copy of herself, mirroring her own actions as she did them.

"Holy shit!..." Carla and her copy said simultaneously.