Another late night in the lab. The overhead fluorescents hummed like tired bees, casting their sterile light across tables cluttered with sketches, bolts, coils, and notebooks so dense with scribbles they looked like the ramblings of a madman. Elliot Crane didn’t notice the hour anymore. Nights bled into mornings until time itself became irrelevant.

He hunched over his workstation, his white coat wrinkled and spattered with ink, solder, and coffee stains. The badge clipped to his chest bore no real name—just a strip of masking tape with the word “Perpetuious” scrawled across it in black marker. It had started as a joke, but soon Elliot embraced it as his identity.

Ever since boyhood, he hadn’t idolized ball players, musicians, or actors like the other kids did. Instead, his heroes were minds that bent reality: Isaac Newton, Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Michael Faraday, Marie Curie, James Clerk Maxwell, Richard Feynman—giants whose ideas stretched across centuries. While other children traded baseball cards, Elliot traced diagrams of Tesla coils and Newton’s Principia. His parents never quite understood him, but they supported him. When other fathers coached Little League, Richard Crane bought his son old physics texts at yard sales. When mothers gossiped at PTA meetings, Martha Crane defended her son’s “peculiarities” with pride.

But brilliance came with isolation. At university, Elliot’s eccentric habits became fodder for gossip. He rarely socialized, appeared in no photos on social media, and when girls mentioned his name at all, it was in laughter. “The motion boy,” they called him. “Why doesn’t he talk to anybody ever?” They would ask, saying he was “stuck-up and too good for anyone to talk to him.”

The impossible, of course, was perpetual motion—the idea of a machine that could run forever without energy input, a dream that defied the first and second laws of thermodynamics. The first law declared energy could neither be created nor destroyed—only transformed. The second law stated entropy always increased, meaning every process wasted energy as heat. A true perpetual motion machine would need to bypass both laws. According to science, such a thing could never exist.

But Elliot refused to accept that. And that refusal, some would later whisper, was the seed of his downfall. If his obsession had a nemesis, it was Dr. Harold Keene, head of the physics department. A man with sharp glasses, a sharper tongue, and tenure to protect, Keene never missed a chance to undermine Elliot.

“You’re wasting your life,” Keene sneered one morning after a seminar. “You think you’re Tesla, but you’re chasing the impossible. Physics isn’t about dreams, Crane—it’s about laws. And you can’t rewrite those. And they were written by genius minds, not you.” Students laughed. Elliot smiled tightly but said nothing. What Elliot saw in Keene’s eyes wasn’t authority—it was fear. Fear that the boy might, in fact, discover something that reduced the professor to a footnote.

And so, Elliot doubled down. He carried locked trunks of equipment into the lab each night, bolting them to his workstation so no one could tamper. Beneath the tarp lay his prototypes—a tangle of rings, rotating cylinders, and superconducting coils humming faintly when powered. Keene believed perpetual motion was impossible. Elliot was determined to prove him wrong.

By the third year of experiments, Elliot had gone further than anyone realized. He wasn’t simply tinkering with magnets and flywheels anymore. He was toying with the fabric of spacetime itself. The breakthrough came when he stumbled into the realm of gravity wave distortion. By bending spacetime at the quantum level, he could briefly suspend inertia. Objects placed inside the field began to behave strangely—levitating, vibrating, even teleporting short distances as if space itself had hiccuped.

His prototype pulsed with a soft blue glow whenever activated. The design looked crude: a lattice of rotating superconductive rings, each counter-spinning at impossible speeds, surrounding a core chamber that housed compressed plasma. As they spun, magnetic resonance built into a shimmering halo. Elliot called it the Lattice Resonance Oscillator.

At first, the experiments were thrilling. Pens hovered, notebooks slid across tables, and even chunks of metal began to hum and rattle like tuning forks struck by invisible hands. But there was a problem. The energy wouldn’t stop. The machine didn’t wind down. It grew stronger. The lab’s walls trembled, tiny cracks forming in the glass. Elliot’s notes showed the readings escalating exponentially—radiation, vibration, output all climbing. What began as harmless levitation soon threatened to collapse the very room around him.

And then the machine reached for him.

At first it was only his hands—fingers trembling, a quiver he thought was fatigue. But the convulsions worsened until his whole body shuddered in micro-movements he couldn’t control.

“Stop,” he whispered to himself, trying to steady his arm. But his voice came out crackling, warped with static.

He ripped off a glove. His bare hand blurred before his eyes, moving so fast side to side that it looked like a glitch in reality. His skin sparked faintly, blue arcs dancing across his knuckles. And then he felt it—perpetual motion, not in his machine, but inside him. The blue glow intensified. Rings of light oscillated around the device, warping the space nearby. Everything within twenty feet began to rise—the chairs, the tools, even Elliot himself.

“Dear God…” he gasped, though to anyone else it would have sounded like a banshee’s wail drowned in radio static.

He tried to back away, but every step was agony. His legs blurred with after-images, his body emitting heat ripples in the air. He could no longer stop moving. He was becoming the experiment. Panicked, Elliot dashed from the lab. The campus was nearly empty at that hour, but even in the dark he could see his body leaving flickering duplicates of himself in his wake.

Driving was worse. His hands couldn’t grip the wheel, his foot jittered on the pedal. The car lurched forward in spasms, slamming into parked vehicles. Sparks rained as tires screeched. He tried to stop but only accelerated, his body vibrating faster and faster. The crash came sudden—he plowed straight into a late-night café. Glass exploded inward. People screamed, hurled across the room in a storm of debris.

Elliot stumbled from the wreckage, his face a blur, his figure barely human. Blood and light shimmered around him, his outline jittering like a broken film reel. Phones appeared instantly—students recording, narrating in terror. And Elliot ran. Not from fear of punishment, but from himself. From the horror he had unleashed. By the time he staggered through his front door, he was unrecognizable. The slam rattled the house, drawing a scream from his mother in the kitchen.

“Martha—it’s me!” Elliot cried, but the words warped, echoing in a demonic static shriek.

His father appeared with a rifle, eyes wild. “Stay back!”

“No—it’s me, Dad!” Elliot begged, surging forward. He reached for the weapon to lower it—and tore his father’s arms apart in a spray of blood before he realized what he’d done.

“Dad!” he screamed, though it came out a monstrous howl. His hands, vibrating at supersonic speed, reduced flesh to ribbons. In horror he tried to catch his father as he fell, but his touch shredded him further.

His mother froze, eyes wide with terror at the blur that used to be her son. “Elliot…?” she whispered.

He lunged toward her, not to kill but to be comforted, desperate for the one person who had always understood him. He reached out—and she disintegrated into fragments before his eyes.

“No!” he roared, the sound bursting windows and rattling the foundations of the house.

In that instant, Elliot knew. He was no longer human. He was a blade of perpetual motion, a body vibrating at impossible velocity. A human chainsaw. A curse. He tried to run. To burn himself out. His speed grew, the air around him bending, breaking. Sonic booms shattered the quiet night. His body blurred into pure energy, oscillating between matter and light. And then—one final rupture. A sound like the heavens splitting open. And Elliot Crane was gone. Only scorch marks and a crater remained where he had stood. The campus police sealed the lab. The university called it an “industrial accident.” Dr. Keene, ever careful with his reputation, disavowed all knowledge of the experiment.

But students whispered. They spoke of the boy genius who defied the laws of physics. They called him Perpetuious—the one who became perpetual motion itself. Late at night, when experiments hummed and rings of light flickered in the labs, some swore they saw him. A blurred figure darting past, a voice breaking into static over the intercom, tools rattling as though unseen hands touched them.

They say he’s still running. Still vibrating. Still trying to stop.

But he never will.