Spirals

elevator

~~~

It is currently midnight on the first Wednesday of October, and I traveled through a small spiral earlier this morning. This occurred immediately after awakening, and I reckon it lasted about an hour, though I could not check the clock in time. I could tell that I was transported within a spiral the moment I found myself plummeting towards the ocean. The sky around my diving body was completely black, blacker than a starless night of a new moon. I was, most definitely, a couple thousand feet in the air, and I was falling head first towards the water, which emitted a fiery-white glow.

The water came faster than I was used to.

When my head painfully hit the water, I became engulfed in the whiteness of the sea, and my breath was taken from me, not in the manner of being struck, but in the manner of having it physically pulled from my lungs, and then a blurred face came quite suddenly in front of me. Startled, I swam backwards and swung at the figure, and I found my fist pressing against the bronze buttons of a closed, elegant elevator.

After I noticed that the scene did not change within three seconds, I held my head and observed my surroundings. The first thing I noticed was that there were over a hundred buttons, and I had hit five of them just the moment before. The elevator, fortunately, was comfortable enough; with a red carpeted floor, a fixed chandelier, marble-mosaic doors, and soundproof walls, it must have been made for a very important institution, or a five-star hotel.

My head was very much aching from the impact, so I sat upon the floor of the elevator and leaned against the back wall. As a traveler of dimensions such as these, a rule of thumb that I always keep in mind is to exit as soon as possible. Traveling through a spiral can be compared to zooming into a single fractal of the Mandelbrot set. The fractal continues to unfold, revealing more fractals that have the same endless potentials of the current, and the time it takes to see a pattern that reminds you of the very beginning completely depends upon the location of the fractal in space.

The elevator bounced for an instant before accelerating upwards. I glanced at the vintage floor counter and realized that the elevator was already fifty floors down, and that it was heading to the very top, button by button. A speaker from above crackled, and a tinny voice began to speak:

The daily update is here: a beautiful morning out today, with the sun warming up the cold remains of the night. Although, the morning still feels dull and lifeless; is this a dimensional carryover?

The speaker played a corporate jingle before replaying the message.

The daily update is here: a beautiful morning out today, with the sun warming up the cold remains of the night. Although, the morning still feels dull and lifeless; is this a dimensional carryover?

I listened to the repeating voice again and again as the floor counter crawled towards one, dreading that I would memorize it before the ascent ended, until the voice cut off mid sentence without notice. The elevator jolted, and then the lights within shut off, leaving the dim lights of the buttons and the eerie light of the floor counter.

The floor counter read: NaN.

I leapt up, feeling suddenly very trapped and afraid of what could happen next. I remembered prior times when I found myself in elevators, and oftentimes it did not end well. Then, the same corporate jingle from before played itself slowly over the speaker, draining away any life it may have contained, and the same announcer from before began to speak listlessly:

You have things to do. You have things to do. You have things to do.

The morning will shift into the afternoon, untouched by your idling.

Then the elevator chimed, and the doors opened to reveal a point in a black sky above the glowing ocean, and as soon as I spotted where I had fallen into the spiral, I was back on my bed, back in my sunlit room on an October Wednesday morning, back where school was canceled for the day and I was supposed to be catching up on weekly projects as my mother worked and my younger siblings played games and my older sister cooked breakfast for the morning that was already fading away.

I take note here that a spiral may possibly follow the law that, for every motion, there is an equal and opposite motion, and the end of that motion signals the end of the spiral in general.

~~~