The Ouroboros Cycle

Step 001/11

THEN

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“This,” the man at the front of the room said, revealing a slide covered in many colored dots, “is the Universe. Everything that ever has been or- or will ever be that we can reach is on this slide. So far as we know, this is it; the entire sum of existence.”

He turned off the projector, and for a moment the room was dark. When the light came back on, the image was a painting of the Earth, as if taken from above and far away.

“This is us, obviously,” the man said, centering the slide. “Nearly every living thing that we’re aware of has been born and died on this rock.” He paused for effect. “Not such bad real estate, really.”

He adjusted the slide again as the audience attempted meager laughter.

“And this… is an atom. Or at least, uh, a representation of one. Technology hasn’t caught up yet to where we can see these little guys, but we’ve got a pretty good idea about what they might look like. Now, the atom is a- a building block, the very most basic particle in the Universe. Or rather, it might be. There may be particles even smaller than that, and smaller particles that compose those. It’s difficult to say where this ends, but at the bottom of this has to be something fundamental… right? Something that doesn’t just comprise the other building blocks, but necessitates their being. That’s what we were searching for.”

The lights came back up, and the man turned around. His white jacket bore the name “Felix Carter Ph.D.” in blue lettering. His round glasses sat perched atop a red nose, and his grey hair was combed neatly to the side.

“When we approached the uh, the International Academy of Existential Sciences, we came with a single goal; discover the reason why. We weren’t asked to provide an explanation, o-or deduce why the uh, reason why; our task was to find the part of the universe that determines why we are what we are. Today, I’m happy to announce we have done this.”

He extended his arm, and another man came into view. This man was tall, with cropped brown hair and a black jacket. He smiled and waved politely at the enthusiastic applause and stood with his hands clasped in front of him as he was introduced.

“This is Dr. Frederick Williams, of the Royal Scientific Conservatory. It was with his assistance and financial backing that we uh, that we made this breakthrough discovery.”

The two of them paused as the lights dimmed again, and the projector above produced an image. The image was faint, and full of static, but its focal point was clear: a single white line extending across the image, fading at both ends.

“What you’re looking at here is a thread,” Dr. Carter continued. “We’ve only just started calling them that; we had no idea what they would look like when we started. We were able to get this thread to manifest itself using a series of high energy pulses directed at a tiny piece of Ozymandium film. This method was borrowed from Dr. Adam Bright and his team in the United States, who have been working on a similar project in the hopes of eliciting what they’re calling tachyons, the uh, the fundamental building block of time, as it were. We discovered that, by tuning our equipment just so, we were able to make something that shouldn’t happen… happen.”

The image changed. On the next slide, a nearby structure is seen being pulled dramatically towards the center of the thread. On the next, the thread is gone, and the building is crumpled and misshapen.