The world outside the window of their flat no longer existed as a familiar landscape. The monstrous distortions of the air, previously an unsettling vision, now began to twist and stretch at an appalling rate. As if reality itself were being torn apart, strand by searing strand. The square solidity of buildings dissolved into fluid, impossible shapes, their walls bending and stretching like melted glass. Leo and Marcus, crouched on the floor by the window, felt a tangible change in the air, an urgency that was no longer vibration but force, thrusting and tugging at them in all directions. The low thrumming hum that filled their universe grew louder into a thundering roar, a sound wall which seemed to sweep over their ears and vibrate within their bones. It was a sound that contained all sounds but was none of them – an eternal chorus of creation and annihilation blended.
The luminous oddity which began as a disk in their front room expanded out now, not like a balloon inflating with air, but like a rent in the cloth of being. It was a raw, unprocessed power that consumed light, space, and matter. Leo felt something queer, as if the atoms of his own body were being rearranged, his accustomed form disintegrating into constituent particles. No pain, just an overwhelming sensation of disorientation, loss of self as his physical boundaries had all significance stripped away. He locked eyes with Marcus, and in that quick, mutual moment, he saw the same realization breaking – they were no longer witnesses, but objects, entirely under the control of an uncomprehended, much less rejectible power. The very notion of 'their apartment' was dissolving, the solid walls, the worn furnishings, the cozy detritus of their lives only temporary illusions in the all-pervasive reach of this transmogrifying power.
The feeling was a cruel contradiction of sensory overload and raw emptiness. One moment, they were surrounded by an impossibly brilliant, multi-colored light that burned their retinas even with their eyes closed; the next, they were plunged into an abysmal darkness, an emptiness so total it felt like the absence of anything at all, even of awareness itself. The feeling of floating, of gravity itself being shut off, was very disconcerting. They were lost, not in space but in some deeper dimension, where up and down, forward and back, were nothing. Marcus the scientist was able only to stand by, his rational mind struggling to deal with the absolute impossibility of it all. His sensor, still clutched in his hand, had long since died, its circuits having been surely destroyed by the enormous fluxes of power. He tried to say, to ask something, to say something, but nothing could be done. His vocal cords couldn't make a coherent sound in this strange material.
Leo, in his artist's instinct, found himself stretching for metaphors which completely eluded him. It felt like to fall down a kaleidoscope, but rather than colours and shapes, it was sensations – pressure, irrational fluctuations in temperature, glimpses of impossible geometries flashing at the periphery of his awareness before they vanished. He had a chilling sense of being drawn out, being stretched thin like taffy, then being compressed, as if he were being squeezed through an impossible diameter. This was not travel for them as they had known it; it was destruction and re-formation, a temporary erasure of what they had been and a violent remaking into something new. The homey odor of their apartment, old books' slight odor, and Marcus's solder flux were replaced by the antiseptic, metallic odor, an odor that bore witness to complete lack, to a space where organic life, as they understood it, was not possible.
The plain hopelessness of their circumstances was the most overwhelming aspect. No control, no agency, but the raw unvarnished power of forces operating on scales and laws that humanity could hardly even imagine. They were specks of dust in a tempest, utterly irrelevant and entirely at the mercy of the gale. The change wasn't a journey; it was an explosion and implosion simultaneously, a tearing apart of the known universe and stitching of another, with them caught in the seam. The moment of ultimate dispersal, when their separate forms seemed to break down, was appallingly brief, but it lasted an eternity. It was the ultimate giving up of self, a capitulation to something that broke every physical law they had ever known.
No sooner did it begin than the overwhelming sensory torrent started to disintegrate. The ear-shattering shriek dissolved away, to be replaced by a low, hammering thrumming that was less a sound and more like a fundamental vibrational frequency of the universe itself. The hot light, too, dissipated, coalescing into a nebulous, ambient glow that filled an environment totally alien. Leo blinked, the light blinking wildly to attempt to acclimatize. The darkness had vanished, replaced by a soft, pearlescent light that appeared to emanate from the very air that surrounded them. They were no longer suspended; they were standing, though the ground beneath their bodies felt odd – not solid, not soggy, but something in between, yielding slightly to their weight.
Marcus, standing beside him, panted out a raw breath, a sound that was gloriously human in its imperfection. He swayed precariously, his arms out as if to reassert himself with the corporeal world. "Leo?" he rasped, his own voice raw and unsure. "Are you. are you there?"
Leo wheeled to confront him, his own voice trembling as he replied, "I'm here, Marcus. I believe." He looked around at him, his artist's eye trying to decipher what he saw. They were in what looked to be an enormous chamber, the walls curving up and away into a softly luminous haze. There were no visible edges, no corners at all, only rounded, flowing planes that seemed to throb with a soft, inner radiance. The pearlescent glow pervaded everything, leaving no jarring shadows, filling the air with a vision of serene beauty that was in complete contrast with the apocalyptic illumination they had experienced a moment before. The air itself was altered, thinner, yet with a contained energy that made the hairs rise on the back of his arms.
"Where… where are we?" Marcus gasped, his gaze sweeping the alien landscape. His rational mind was attempting to categorize, to identify, but everything was so fundamentally other. There were no familiar shapes, no known substances. It was a world which seemed to have been sculpted from raw light and energy. "This… this was not something I could have expected. The crossing… it was instantaneous. Not like any theoretical wormhole or warping of space. It was… absolute."
Leo felt a primal fear, but one mixed with a strange sense of awe. The helpless transit had been terrible, but what followed, this stillness, this brilliance, was another sort of mystery. He observed, for the first time, that this odd surface beneath their feet was not uniform. Subtle, faint patterns, suggestive of microscopic circuitry, pulsed with soft light, scratching intricate, angular patterns that wove and reconfigured as he watched. It was beautiful, in a shiver-inducing, otherworldly way, evidence of an aesthetic ethic that was utterly foreign.
"It was like… like we were unraveled and rewoven," Leo described, struggling to describe that which could not be described. "All that made us us was… scattered, and then stitched back together, but… differently. I can still sense it, that… that reweaving. It's like my bones are humming a different tune."
Marcus nodded, his eyes fixed on one of the throbbing patterns at his feet. "The energy signatures… where the crossover happened, they were off any scale we're familiar with. It wasn't displacement; it was a fundamental alteration of our physical reality. If my sensors had worked… I can only hazard a guess at the data. But this… this place. It's like the destination, the terminus of that impossible path." He moved forward slowly, his boot making a light, almost musical sound on the radiating surface. The rhythms beneath his feet ignited for a brief instant, as if answering him.
"What do you think it was?" Leo breathed, his voice so low. The absolute scale of the event, the power released, was unthinkable. It suggested cause and effect, a force with phenomenal power and purpose. "Was it the atmospheric phenomenon? Was it… them?" Unsaid was the question hanging in the balance: who were 'they'?
"I don't know," Marcus admitted, his scientist's pragmatism wrestling with the overwhelming evidence of the strange. "The perturbation in the atmosphere was clearly the stimulus, but the nature of the force… it was something out of our imagination. It didn't react like any kind of physics we knew. It was like the universe had been programmed over for an instant, and we were caught in the overwrite." He paused, looking up at the shining fog that covered them like a ceiling. "But we exist. We lived. At least, our minds did. Our bodies. I don't know what we are anymore."
Leo felt a profound sense of isolation, not just from their house, but from everything they knew. Their own world, the world of cities, of weather, of steel and concrete, was irretrievably distant, a dream from another existence. It was a world of soft light and quivering energy, of flowing lines and latent forces. He raised his hand to touch and reach out to the curved wall beside him. It was cool, smooth, and curiously yielding, like burnished alabaster, but it accepted the weight of his touch without indentation.
"We have to make sense of this place," Leo said with a touch of determination in his voice. The original shock began to dissipate and was replaced with the urge to locate himself and to get an order of sorts in this unsorted world. "Has got to be some kind of logic to it, if we just don't see it yet."
Marcus stood facing him, a spark of his previous analytical fire igniting in his eyes. "Precisely. We were scientists, observers. That has not changed, although our surroundings have. We are required to document, hypothesize, test." He looked down at his hands, his fingers curling as if confirming their existence. "But I imagine 'testing' here will not involve parameters with which we are familiar."
The transition had been violent, abrupt, and totally disorienting. They had been uprooted from their accustomed lives and thrown into a world which contradicted all their previous learning. The catastrophe had not only moved them; it had totally altered the very fabric of their living, leaving them alone in a strange vacuum, with nothing but their combined intelligence and the indelible stamp of their shared experience to guide them. The journey, if it could be termed that, was more of a redesigntion of existence in toto than a movement through space at all, and the departure of them was complete; their arrival, however, was the beginning of a new, unfathomable book. They'd been shot into space, and now they needed to learn how to navigate it. The silence of the pearlescent room was not silence, but a foretelling of the secrets about to be shared with them. The air hummed with questions only just starting to coalesce in their minds.