After a few stressful moments, the equipment slowly began to whir down as if going into rest mode. Shelly frowned, staring at the destination box.
Nothing.
"This isn't right," she muttered. The last batch of failures always left some mess behind. She quickly moved back over to the computer to check the logs. Scrolling up, she found the initial problem. After a large line stating "Error" and a timestamp, the system ran out of active memory. The calculations for a full sized human was too much for the system she was dealing with. Smaller animals could be brought across (even if the calculations weren't completely correct), but Zoey was too much for the computer to compute at all.
Shelly continued reading the logs to see if she could figure out what the mass limit was at. It was difficult to tell, but after an hour of chicken-scratch calculations on a pad of paper she had to the side, she guessed the system was short by about 20% of Zoey's full size before the entire process choked and died. Sighing, she backed out of the log file. "At least most of lab animals are under the limit." Then she saw a second file in the directory.
ramemory.dmp
She blinked then checked the file size. It was gigantic, almost the exact size of the active memory across the system. It was an emergency dump file. "Huh. Hello, Zoey.... or at least around 80% of you." This was a good thing, she realized. She technically didn't need to increase the active memory in the system. She would just need to add checks to write the data to disk at certain points and re-read the data back into memory once other processes were done. It would slow the teleportation processes immensely, but at this point she just wanted things to be able to work. Making everything more efficient could come later.
The change to the code didn't take that long, only a few more hours. After a few simulated tests that only faked the data and the transportation, she pushed her updates onto the servers. "Next," she said. Shelly glanced at the boxes to make sure nothing was in either of them, and then went to grab another lab animal. Wanting to put the size "chunker" to the real test, she elected to get a larger animal. It wouldn't have to be as large as a human. She had set the check/writer/process/re-read process to occur when objects or creatures were over around 40 pounds. Best to keep the memory to reasonable levels in case other processes needed to occur on the system during transport. A part of her mind told her she might need to come up with a story for why... whatever-her-name-was vanished, but she figured it wouldn't have too complicated of a lie. She'd just need to get rid of the metal bits the undergrad had been wearing.
"Okay," she said as she gave a shot to a sleeping wolf-dog in one of the cages. "Time to make sure this works." Technically it was to make sure the chunker worked. She hadn't changed anything else, so even if the chunker worked, the sleeping wolf would likely not survive the process... not unless her earlier changes to the blood vessel pressure calculations fixed the issue prior to Zoey showing up.
Zoey! That was her name, Shelly thought to herself.
The wolf was a tough haul, being near 60 pounds. But the creature was at least sedated and wasn't going to wake up or cause any problems. It had been fed and tended to for its entire life. This moment was it's trade-off for a good easy life up to this point, as far as Shelly was concerned. Once she pulled the creature into the box, she removed its collar and stepped out, walking over to the console.
"Running Test 2 infinity and eleven," she said with a sigh. It was getting late. The clock was reading 1:34am. She tried to remember if daylight savings was tonight. With a yawn, she typed "exec transport_sequence" and hit return. "I need coffee," she said, dismissing the idea of the caffeine since she WANTED to fall asleep in a few hours.
> exec transport_sequence
loading ramemory.dmp
testing memory limits
writing to disk ~/chunk_dir/file1.dat
writing to disk ~/chunk_dir/file2.dat
writing to disk ~/chunk_dir/file3.dat
ingesting from chamber
writing to disk ~/chunk_dir/file4.dat
conn chamber2 established
transporting active data
calculating.........
loading ~/chunk_dir/file1.dat
writing to disk ~/chunk_dir/file5.dat
removing ~/chunk_dir/file1.dat
Shelly rubbed her eyes, barely looking at the screen. Instead she watched, after a momentarily delay, the wolf-dog vanished. Unlike before the system did not whir down instantly. The system continued to write and read over and over, output kept dumping to the screen, and then finally the lights in the exit chamber lit up in a sudden flash.
Shelly jumped out of her chair as she heard the girl scream. Without thinking she ran to the exit chamber and looked inside. To her surprised, she saw Zoey quickly pulling off her clothes, which (like her hair) was on fire. Instinctively, Shelly ran for the fire extinguisher, grabbed it, opened the box, and sprayed her girl down. In moments, the undergrad and her discarded clothes were put out. She was burned, but alive.
"Whuh... whut happened?" the girl asked, near panic.
Shelly, still unsure what HAD happened, couldn't think of anything to say beyond parts of the truth. "I... You've just become the first person in history to successfully teleport."
Shaking, the naked girl blinked and swallowed before asking, "I'm not going to turn into a fly, am I?"
"Huh?"
"Never mind," Zoey said, looking down at herself. "Do you happen to have any aloe? Like a tub's worth?" She took a few more raspy breaths. "I need to go to the doctor's."