Overlap

Chapter 95: Nexus of Time

<11/30/2012 - ??:?? | Location Unknown>

Not too many days passed after I brought myself down from the guilt of looking through time. After begging and pleading to God for these visions of the future to stop, I grew hopeful that I would never see another premonition again. What I didn't count on, were the strong demons we create inside ourselves, dooming our very nature of stability.

When I woke to a pitch black world devoid of any activity, I knew I was in some kind of dream or another. The infinite black space around me was cold to the touch, thankfully not cold enough for me to freeze where I stood. Instead of floating without gravity, some solid surface was beneath me, though I had no source of light to see anything, no source of sound to hear anyone.

The empty dream went on like this for a few minutes. The longer I stayed here cluelessly trying to figure out why I would dream of nothingness, the more I felt on edge and afraid. Not much in the world scares me anymore, but the new world around me was the embodiment of the unknown, a mystery that all people fear. Was I really asleep, lucid dreaming in a world with no data? Or was I awake, transported to a place outside of time and space, banished here for my recent sins of interfering with some kind of plan? Regardless, I needed to have answers before long, less I be driven to madness by the never-ending silence and isolation of the void. "Where the hell am I? What kind of place is this?" Just as I tried walking a few steps forward in the pure darkness, a foot shuffling noise in front of me echoed everywhere, until I heard a voice not of my own.

"You're in the place where all moments of time connect."

"Who said that?" My heart was beating a drum solo in my chest, still unable to see anything despite how close this mysterious woman sounded. I thought I would be thrilled to find somebody in this void, but her mystic reply only made me wary and nervous.

The woman snapped her fingers in the dark, invoking a magic unknown to me which immediately lit the space around us, while allowing me to hear beyond the range this pillar. When she let me see where I was, I wasn't prepared to deal with the haunting reality before me. "Take a look for yourself Reed."

I had no choice but to take my time absorbing all of the sights around me. The woman who snapped her fingers allowed for the infinite space around us to become completely visible, with additional light sources pouring out of oddly shaped obsidian pillars floating through the space. I couldn't contemplate where I was; it was a place unlike any I've ever seen before. The space around us was surrounded by disconnected segments of floating rocky pillars without any particular pattern, angled all the way in one massive cylinder surrounding this universe. The distance between us and those walls had to be a few light-years, and they slowly rotated in synch, sliding around the imaginary cylindrical shape of endless space. I could also see what was beyond the cracks, openings, or broken patterns of the floating obsidian stones, pockets of warped space postulated with vast distant stars.

As I turned around behind me, I realized I was standing on one of the floating obsidian islands, the kind that didn't move with the outer layer of the superstructure. There were other islands as well, but there were also oddly shaped segments of pure energy zooming by the central space in this loosely confined area. The zigzagging segments and patterns of glowing lines were pouring out from a central gaseous sphere of glowing blue light, a star too strong to gaze at directly without being blinded. I only had more questions than I did answers.

The moving segments of energy felt more important than anything else here, and I could hear their high-pitch wines of light-speed travel through the central area, heading on throughout a distance without end. The lines all coming from the glowing sphere of quantum fusion were all flowing in a singular direction, but each line had its own unique shape, its unique set of linear arrangements. Some light segments warped and sped forward with greater acceleration than some others. The collective noise of them all passing by sounded so incredible, the ocean of energy sending waves to my small little shore of floating obsidian stones.