A moment later, we were gone, and when the orderlies entered the room a split second after we vanished, they were perplexed by the empty bed and lack of a body, beginning the great mystery that has remained unsolved until now.

Elizabeth Asha’s body was taken by us.

Chapter 54

Now.

This word.

This one.

This word right here.

What is it?

When you read these words, what are they?

Tiny sparks of electricity travelling as fast as light, coursing through your brain. Neurons firing one to the other, transforming information, converting it into knowledge and sensory experience.

Our bodies?

Information manifest as genetic code. An error in sequencing can cause ill health. A correction can cure it.

Information is at the heart of what we are. Code the right cellular structures and you can create the primordial ooze that is the precursor to life. Ben had found a way to break things down to their most fundamental state – information – and he had devised a way to insert that code into a different temporal phase of reality.

He had solved the problem of time travel by looking at it as a question of information rather than one of energy or matter.

Hold on to a moment.

Now.

This one.

No, this one.

We can’t. Everything we experience as the present is either near past or near future, and yet we perceive time happening to us. We feel the present as a real thing, but it is artifice, a sense of perception to give us a feeling of progress. We create that illusion and imprint our perspective on the universe, but what if all moments in what we perceive as time have already happened? What if we are simply following paths laid down for us?

These questions still keep me up at night as I try to make sense of my life. I used to be a physicist. Then I became an author, but my quest for truth has turned me into a philosopher, perhaps a poet.

The transit itself was magical. As the stars broke me down, my senses changed so my every experience was amplified. The energy was like an electrical charge pulsing over my body. I was able to perceive colours beyond anything I’d ever thought possible. I’d never seen them before or since, and they were so far outside the normal spectrum there is no common frame of reference that would allow me to describe them. It was as though they were the colours of life itself. They went beyond sight and touched a part of my soul that perceived them as part of me. Red means nothing to someone who sees the world in monochrome, and I would not only have to invent new words but impart a new experience to convey the richness of those hues. Imagine all of life as colours, every friend, every family member, all the creatures in the universe, and you’ll come close to what I experienced, and they tinted the world around me as I disintegrated.