The pull intensified. What remained of Alistair Finch's awareness—a disembodied locus of rapidly re-coalescing data patterns—was accelerated through the non-space he inhabited. There was no visual component to this transit, no rushing stars or psychedelic tunnels popular in speculative fiction. Instead, it was a kaleidoscope of raw sensation, pure information unconstrained by human sensory organs. Pressure fluctuations that would have crushed any physical form, temperature gradients that spanned impossible extremes, and a constant, thrumming resonance that felt like the foundational hum of reality itself, played out of tune.
He tried, out of ingrained habit more than any expectation of success, to impose order on the chaos. To categorize. The attempt was futile. This was not data to be analyzed; it was an environment to be endured, an overwhelming torrent of the alien. It was like trying to catalogue the individual particles of an exploding supernova while simultaneously being one of them. There were moments, flashes of something akin to lucidity, where he perceived patterns – impossibly complex, fractal, and utterly unrelated to any physics or mathematics he knew. These were glimpses of a system operating on rules so far beyond human comprehension that "unscientific," another of his fragmented last thoughts, felt like a monumental understatement.
If this was a form of travel, it was brutally efficient in its disregard for the passenger. No amenities. No orientation briefing. Just a raw, forceful extrusion from one existential state to… another. A detached fragment of his former self might have critiqued the user experience as being "sub-optimal." He certainly wouldn't be recommending this particular transit method on any review platforms, had such a concept retained meaning.
The sense of an external agency grew stronger. This wasn't a random drift; it was a guided trajectory. Something, some unimaginable force or intelligence, was directing this. Was it the same force that had initiated the compass's wild dance, the localized distortion of his study? The "cosmic anomaly" he'd fleetingly theorized? Or was that merely the entry point, the localized symptom of this far grander, and far more terrifying, mechanism? The questions were formless, arising from the core of his processing without the structure of language.
Then, the torrent began to differentiate. The overwhelming chaos resolved into distinct, albeit still alien, streams of sensation. It was as if he were approaching a shoreline after a storm at sea, the undifferentiated roar of the ocean slowly giving way to the individual sounds of waves and wind. A new feeling emerged: confinement. The formless awareness that was Alistair was being compressed, shaped, funneled into something with… boundaries.
A sudden, jarring impact – not physical, but informational. A massive influx of data, dense and incomprehensible, flooded his reforming consciousness. It wasn't knowledge in any structured sense, more like a raw imprint, a brand seared onto his very essence. It was vast, ancient, and carried a weight that felt like aeons. He recoiled from it, a purely instinctual response from a being that valued its own intellectual sovereignty, but there was no escape. The imprint settled, a foreign core around which his own awareness was now forced to crystallize.
The sensation of being slotted into place. A definitive, final click, like a component locked into a complex machine. And with it, the first muted trickle of new, different sensory input, fragile and tentative. Not the overwhelming cosmic data feed, but something far simpler, almost primitive. A dull ache. The feeling of coarse fabric against… something. A distant, rhythmic sound, like a heavy hammer on stone, yet muffled. And a smell. Damp earth, woodsmoke, and something else… something metallic and vaguely unsettling.
His reconstituted awareness, still reeling from the transit and the alien imprint, hovered on the edge of this new, unrequested reality. The last vestiges of Neo-Alexandria, of Dr. Alistair Finch, of the 03:17 AM chronometer and the absurdity of sanctioned garden gnomes, faded like a dream upon waking. There was only the immediate, the encroaching, the unknown. A new set of variables. A new system. The barest hint of a cold, analytical spark, buried deep but not extinguished, began to stir. This was, after all, another data point. A rather significant one.