Korridorium

♫ Heimsókn ♫

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94/398

I enter the corridor because I heard a strange noise. At eye level, a blinding light flashes at the front door—two, three times. Is someone welding it from the outside? It flashes glaringly again, three times, like a knock, but utterly silent. Without a second thought, though I’m standing there only in my pajamas, I rip the door open.

In the shadows of the entryway stands—something. Or rather: it hovers. It looks like a three-dimensional kaleidoscope whose luminous shards constantly migrate inward, until they suddenly shift direction and flow outward from the center like molten iron.

The voice is very soft and gentle, and it feels like I’m hearing a familiar, beloved lullaby. It says, “You caused a spiral arm of the galaxy to vaporize.”

I stare at the apparition. Words fail me. I want to run away, hide, or just faint. But it’s as though my thoughts no longer find resonance within my body—no anchor to trigger a physical act. I remain stone-still before this thing.

“You built a machine,” says the voice.

A machine? Yes, there was something. But it wasn’t me. Just a dream. For weeks, I’ve been waking up at the exact same time in the middle of the night, at 2:22 a.m., and I always remember a vivid dream in which I’m some sort of engineer, obsessively building an incredibly complex machine—it fills nearly the entire warehouse I rented, using powerful Hadron lasers and a kind of miniaturized fusion reactor to manipulate gravity and rupture the space-time continuum. Dream by dream, I completed my work, even though I secretly knew the device could have uncontrollable side effects. Until last night, when I finally activated the finished machine. I can’t say what it did because the moment it started running and revved up, I woke up. That was yesterday. It was 2:22 a.m.

Even now, in the middle of the night, it could be 2:22 a.m. But this is not a dream.

“You built a machine,” the voice repeats, as I’m hypnotized by the slow flow of liquid metal and a sense that the being with its gentle singsong is about to tell me something terrible.

“Your machine pierced the dimensions of the world, shattered your planet, and dragged many, many stars and planets in the vicinity into destruction.”

“But that’s nonsense! The Earth didn’t perish just because I dreamt something!”

The kaleidoscope pattern changes, but I can’t say how. The voice now seems more stern. It says, “The world in your dream was real. As real as this one. We had hoped you would decide not to activate the machine at the last moment, but to destroy it.”

“I had no idea what it would do!” Really? No, I did. In the dream, I knew very well the risk I was taking. I just kept pushing it away.

“Many civilizations had to die,” says the voice.

Because of me? Am I supposed to be guilty? “What about you?” I ask, “You’re alive, I assume.”

“A few, like me, were hurled through perforated dimensions into parallel worlds.”

Parallel worlds: In the dream, I repeatedly suppressed the fear that my ingeniously devised machine—intended to tap into vacuum fluctuations for unlimited free energy—might unravel the fabric of time and space. And now, an entity stands before me, thrown into my world through a dimensional rift—perhaps the last survivor of an entire planetary civilization that I have on my conscience. Slowly, the staggering weight of what the entity is telling me begins to sink in.

“If you knew about it, why didn’t you prevent it?” I ask in a hoarse voice.

“You have to do that yourself,” answers the liquid kaleidoscope hovering before me in the entryway.

“How?” I ask, bewildered.

The being slowly floats upwards and fades away. It has delivered its message and now retraces its path—wherever the destination may be. “How should I do it?” I call out.

The being vanishes. I hear no more answers, but in my mind, a thought forms, saying, “Dream a new world into being.”

A profound despair seizes me. It wasn’t me! I scream internally. It was that deluded engineer!

But the being is right: I was the man in the dreams, the one who decided to take the risk. I have the deaths of humanity and a multitude of other civilizations on my conscience; I have, with my obsession and greed for fame, led billions of people to their deaths, and a substantial chunk of our Milky Way along with them. I want to push it away, deny it, blame someone else. But although they were just dreams, deep inside, I know that my visitor is correct in his accusation. I was that obsessed engineer who disregarded all the ominous premonitions and set the machine in motion.

As I close the front door, my hand trembles. I must prevent it! I think, and at the same time, I laugh bitterly: How can I prevent something that has already happened?

But couldn’t a space-time fabric that includes parallel worlds also include the possibility of turning back time? Did the kaleidoscope being perhaps speak of this when it said, “You have to do it yourself”?

If it’s true—if it’s true that through my fault, humanity and a handful of other civilizations were destroyed—then I will thwart this dreadful act at any cost! Numbers, equations, and circuits race through my mind. The long nights as an engineer have paid off. Slowly, an image solidifies in my mind: a device, a time-and-world machine with a single purpose, meant for one-time use. It will be a kind of ark. But I won’t fill it with animals or people: It will transport me to a place and time that will allow me to prevent myself from punching holes in the cosmic fabric. I will undo it, thoroughly and physically! It must be possible.

That night, I lay awake for a long time.

Quantum fluctuation: