Seeking Secrets

by Shumiry

Prologue

Prologue

“You know how sometimes, you'll be out somewhere, and feel like you shouldn't be there? Like you don't belong? That's how I felt every day.” -Secret Seeker

He leaned his head back as the machine finished strapping him in. It had made everything take much longer than if he could have simply had an assistant perform these duties, but he'd learned long ago, Never trust anyone. As he listened to the whirring pieces of machinery do their jobs, he could see in his mind the gears, pistons, circuitry and wiring that made it all possible. Each piece painstakingly crafted and placed, all in preparation for this day.

A century.

He'd been chasing this dream for just shy of one hundred years. The fluorescent lighting illuminated the bare tile floors, a handful of tables, and the wall of terminals, dials and meters that was the face of the supercomputer handling the calculations, power dispersion, etc. All at once the machinery stopped, snapping him out of his reverie. For a split second, panic gripped his gut, vanishing when he heard the familiar voice of his machine.

“Preparations complete.” He waited, thinking, running through all his calculations, checking, double checking, and checking again, making sure he had thought of everything. A chuckle escaped him as he recalled something from long ago, “Triple checked the check list? Check!”

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” he said, the safety phrase that kept him from accidentally activating the Shifting protocol.

“Shift me from this hell, that I might finally know peace.” Immediately he heard the clicking and humming of a hundred million switches flipping within circuitry. The gyroscopic arms of the device began a slow rotation around him, building speed with each second. Soon, they were whipping around so quickly that he couldn't discern them as anything more than a slight blur. He trembled in terror. A fear he hadn't known since that day almost 60 years ago, fear for his life, swelled within him. Fighting the panic, he struggled to remain calm, to avoid thrashing against the bonds that held him, not that he could have accomplished anything by doing so.

The humming grew louder as the third phase started, and he began to see something impossible. A splotch of midnight blue, like someone had spilled a piece of the night sky, was spreading before his eyes. It undulated and stretched, arcing over and beneath him, tiny pinpricks of white on a blue-black blanket, until all he could see was a cosmos he had never before witnessed. The hum reached the limit of his hearing, bordering on the decibel level just below his pain threshold, and his head began to pulse with a headache.

“Oh myself hurry up!” he shouted, or thought he did. It was impossible to tell as the hum vibrated through him, robbing him even of the feeling of his own speech, much less the sound. For a moment he was reminded of attending a rock concert, and being right next to the stage, the memory bringing a smile to his lips, as the cosmos began to move past him. He seemed to be rocketing through space, or maybe it was rocketing around him. Shifting was still largely speculation for most of the world, and as far as he knew, he was the first one to attempt it.

He had to shut his eyes against the blurring lines of the stars, and had the strange sensation of rotating, marveling at the feeling since no gravitational pull existed in space to affect the fluid in his ears. The feeling occurred again, this time in another direction, and he chanced opening his eyes to try and see what caused it. Immediately he vowed not to close them again. To his right, a massive black hole was in the process of devouring a sea of stars, a reddish orange swath, swirling around a black center, bleeding into yellow and green and blue. Tears formed in his eyes at the sight of something so beautiful.

Soon, too soon, it was gone, replaced by other scenes of cosmic wonder, each second making it harder to watch as he apparently continued accelerating, like trying to watch a single tree through the window of a car as he whipped past it. The thought occurred to him that this was impossible, that he had to be moving at something like one hundred million times the speed of light, when he heard a noise that brought his terror back full force.

The shuddering sound of machinery struggling not to fail.

Before he could truly be caught in the grip of his fear, the sound happened again, louder this time, and he heard a massive clunk of metal crashing into metal. He felt his body lurch, his head snapping forward and limbs flailing about as all the lights of the universe seemed to wink out. In some dim corner of his mind, he wondered why his restraints hadn't, well, restrained him, then all was darkness and silence.

Comments

[FacelessPanda]

I don't know why but I digged the prolague