Shelly silently cursed again at her failure. The diminutive 5'4" scientist with a boyish figure may have looked like a sweet and innocent adolescent child, but she was far from it. Only her fiery red hair betrayed her aggressive and determined nature. Woe to anyone who mistook the 25 year old physics doctor for just a student. Her wrath was something of a legend at the Institute.
She slapped the computer angrily, frustrated at its failure. Her project was a partial success. She could teleport inanimate objects easily. But anything living seemed to be a problem. She looked at the mess the computer had left in the exit chamber. It just didn't seem to understand what to do with living creatures. At best, they reappeared in the exit chamber just dead. At worst, well .......
She sighed as she began to clean up the mess. She really should have a grad student cleaning this up, but no one wanted to work with her because of her reputation. She had left a few flyers around the local University, hoping to attract a naïve undergraduate student. But so far she had no takers. She was a little worried that her failure was becoming too well known.
Shelly backed away from her device, carefully inspecting it to make sure it was properly cleaned. The machine consisted of two square metal boxes connected by a thin tube. The walls of the cubes were on rollers. It allowed Shelly to adjust the size of the chambers. Her investors had insisted on this modification, as they intended to use her device to transport a large volume of goods over long distances. She had at first protested, but was now grateful for the modification. It allowed her to use a wider variety of animals of different sizes as test subjects. The principles of her device were simple. A high power laser vaporized the subject in the first chamber, carefully labeling each molecule. Negative pressure and pulsing ionic charges pulled the molecules through the tube into the exit chamber where they were quickly reassembled by a complex computer algorithm. It was so simple Shelly couldn't understand what was wrong.
Her project was a success initially and her investors were happy. Solid inanimate objects were easily vaporized in the first chamber and were reassembled in the second by the complex artificially intelligent computer program. It looked like the youngest PhD at the Institute was going to be its brightest star. But then she tried to transport living tissue and well ... as evidenced by the splatter in the exit chamber, it was not a success. And after 5 years of repeated failure, her investors were getting antsy. She knew that several of them already wanted to take control of the project away from her, and that was making her increasingly desperate. Her erratic and strange behavior did not go unnoticed by others at the Institute, and she had become somewhat of a lonely recluse.
She looked back at her animal cages, nearly empty. She had hardly any normal lab animals left to use, and she had even resorted to acquiring some more exotic and unconventional animals to use as test subjects. She even considered using her prized pet, the little mascot of her lab.
She booted up the computer for another test run. After adding some more code to its programming and making some more adjustments to its Artificial Intelligence, Shelly was ready to begin another test run. She was sure it would work this time, it had to. She just had to find the right test subject.