Now.
This word.
This one.
This word right here.
What is it?
When you read these words, what are they?
Tiny sparks of electricity traveling as fast as light, coursing through your brain. Neurons firing one to the other, transforming information, converting it into knowledge and sensory experience.
Our bodies?
Information manifest as genetic code. An error in sequencing can cause ill health. A correction can cure it.
Information is at the heart of what we are. Code the right cellular structures and you can create the primordial ooze that is the precursor to life. Ben had found a way to break things down to their most fundamental state: information. And he had devised a way to insert that code into a different temporal phase of reality.
He had solved the problem of time travel by looking at it as a question of information rather than one of energy or matter.
Hold on to a moment.
Now.
This one.
No, this one.
We can’t. Everything we experience as the present is either near past or near future, and yet we perceive time happening to us. We feel the present as a real thing, but it is artifice, a sense of perception to give us a feeling of progress. We create that illusion and imprint our perspective on the universe, but what if all moments in what we perceive as time have already happened? What if we are simply following paths laid down for us?
These questions still keep me up at night as I try to make sense of my life. I used to be a physicist. Then I became an author, but my quest for truth has turned me into a philosopher, perhaps a poet.
The transit itself was magical. As the stars broke me down, my senses changed so my every experience was amplified. The energy was like an electrical charge pulsing over my body. I was able to perceive colors beyond anything I’d ever thought possible. I’d never seen them before or since, and they were so far outside the normal spectrum, there is no common frame of reference that would allow me to describe them. They were the colors of life itself. They went beyond sight and touched a part of my soul that perceived them as part of me. Red means nothing to someone who sees the world in monochrome, and I would not only have to invent new words but impart a new experience to convey the richness of those hues. Imagine all of life as colors—every friend, every family member, all the creatures in the universe—and you’ll come close to what I experienced, and they tinted the world around me as I disintegrated.
I registered a regular beat that might have been the sound of a heart or drops of water falling on a lake. As the milliseconds passed it grew louder until I became convinced I could hear the sound of the universe in its anticipatory state, an instant before it came into being, and that the beat was a countdown.
The rhythm warped into a deep monotone and signified the buildup of a phenomenal amount of energy. Shock had robbed me of the ability to note the experience of my first transit, but the second journey left a profound mark on me.
When the last of myself was gone, there came an instant between nonbeing and being that seemed to last an eternity. Were we passing through a place without time? Were we at the heart of all things? There was a void, an emptiness that was more than darkness, more than blackness, because dark and black are elements of reality, and this was something else. An unreality, a nothingness hard to even conceive, let alone explain. If reality is day, then this was night. It was nonexistence, and in the brief moment I experienced it, I was without desire or suffering. I look back on it and think that was as close to contentment as I will ever get. I was beyond space and time.
Then suddenly, as Ben’s poem described it, I was on the other side of night and I saw it all.
I was conscious of galaxies being born and dying, of stars fading in the turning eons, of the relentless draw of singularity, but from wherever I was, they all seemed small and insignificant. I was part of the whole, and for a moment that seemed to last for eternity, I felt acceptance and peace as I passed through the very eye of reality itself.
Then I was.
I came into existence somewhere else. At some other time.
There was no reconstruction process. I simply manifested elsewhere, like a rapid and sudden birth.
I still held Beth’s hand, and Ben had the other.
“Where are we?” I asked, a little dazed.
“Somewhere they can help,” he replied. “Come on.”