"Fascinating. An entirely novel data point."
The thought, Alistair Finch's own, echoed in a mental space that was rapidly compressing. The incandescent smear that had been his chronometer pulsed, a dying star in his fragmenting vision. The whine in his skull escalated beyond sound, becoming a pure, vibrational assault. His body, usually a distant, well-maintained machine, began to send frantic, contradictory signals – pressure, then weightlessness; intense cold, then burning heat. All utterly irrelevant sensory noise.
He attempted to access his internal diagnostic feed, a neural implant that monitored his physiological state. The connection was… frayed. Data packets corrupted mid-transfer. Systemic electrical interference of unknown origin, a detached part of his mind supplied. Or perhaps the diagnostic itself is the point of failure. It was akin to analyzing a global infrastructure collapse while simultaneously being the collapsing infrastructure. An intriguing paradox.
His meticulously ordered study, the last bastion of tangible reality, was now a kaleidoscope of dissolving shapes and impossible geometries. The solid plasteel of his desk flowed like liquid mercury; the rows of data crystals on his shelves shimmered and elongated, their stored knowledge bleeding into an undifferentiated chaos of light. He tried to focus on the spinning compass, but it too was a blur, a tiny vortex in the larger storm consuming his perception.
This was not like the meticulously documented societal collapses he had devoted his life to studying. Those were processes, however chaotic, with identifiable precursor events, cascading failures, and, theoretically, intervention points. The Peloponnesian War, the fall of Rome, the 22nd Century's Energy Wars – all had their grim logic. This, however, was a singularity. No discernible cause, no logical progression beyond swift, inexplicable disintegration. An unscheduled, unannounced, and thoroughly unscientific demolition of one Alistair Finch.
He felt his motor functions attempting to engage – a primal urge to flee, to brace, to do something. He suppressed it with the ease of long practice. Panic was a suboptimal response. Where would one flee, after all, when the very fabric of one's immediate reality was unwriting itself? A wry thought, almost a ghost of his earlier amusement about the garden gnomes, flickered: At least the Orbital Consortium's "limited atmospheric particulate event" models had a certain quaint predictability. This was simply… rude.
A final, massive pressure, as if the universe itself had decided to use his specific coordinates for a cosmic alignment test. His capacity for coherent analysis fractured. Physiological data points, had he been able to access them, would have flatlined. Respiration ceased. Cardiac function terminated. Neural activity… that was a more ambiguous question. The light, the pressure, the non-sound – it all converged into a single point of unbearable intensity.
Then, nothing.
An absence. Not the peaceful void romanticized by poets, but a sterile, absolute zero of sensory input. He was, if "he" still existed as a coherent entity, adrift in a non-space. Time had no meaning. His thoughts, or the echoes of what had been thoughts, were like isolated data fragments in a wiped drive: …novel…unscientific…coordinates…
For an immeasurable duration, there was only this null state. No light, no sound, no touch, no self-awareness beyond a lingering informational ghost. It was the ultimate data loss.
Then, a flicker. Infinitesimally small. Not light, but something akin to it. A single bit flipped in the vast emptiness. Another. A sensation, not physical, but of… direction? A pull. Subtle at first, then with growing, inexorable force. The informational ghost that was Alistair Finch, or what remained of him, was being drawn, recompiled, towards an unknown, unseen destination. The process was not gentle. It was a raw, unfiltered data transfer through an impossible channel, devoid of any error correction or user interface. He was merely the payload.