And then something strangely familiar happened. The ten luminous objects bled the colors of the spectrum, from red to orange to yellow, darkening to green and blue, and indigo to violet before consuming me within their warm radiant light, which simultaneously blinded me and absorbed me into—

—energy.

24

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”

—Lewis Carroll

I can’t say for sure wether I opened my eyes because I don’t remember having shut them. All I remember is that one moment I was freezing, trembling, exhausted, and cleaving to the side of a snow-capped summit—the next, my consciousness was consumed by ten glowing orbs, which condensed into one warm, white, soothing light.

There was no pain or fear, no growling predators or ice sheets, nor was there my physical being. I just seemed to be floating merrily along. I think I was even giggling.

Am I dead?

A red dot appeared. Lacking the perception of either below or above, the singularity simply grew larger until it became a doughnut-shaped object. As it continued to magnify, its details became clear and I could see three circular ring plates divided by blue magnetic fields. As the object expanded beyond my field of vision, its gaping hole swallowed me, changing my view from outside to inside, so that I was now in the center of the ring.

My entire 360-degree field of vision was occupied by rollers, tall canister-shaped, magnetized columns of metal that were rotating around the innermost ring like ponies on a merry-go-round. Though the rollers were revolving at an incredible speed, their velocity was such that they remained uniformly visible, like the rotating blades of a helicopter. This effect allowed me to count twelve of them, aligned side by side within the innermost ring. Held in place by the lower and upper plates, the twelve rollers were not actually touching the plates; instead they were floating upon a magnetic field like a high-speed monorail.

Most bizarre. As my consciousness hovered in the ring’s hole, I could feel a rush of negatively charged electrons racing through the positively charged core. How did I know these particles were negatively charged? I have no idea. But in my present state of existence I found that I could sense it, just as I sensed the electrons forming pairs within the gap, then compressing as they rushed outward into the rotating rollers. There was a powerful magnetic field in play, created by the alternating alignment of the poles in both the rollers and the plates. And I realized it was the outward flow of these paired bosons that was causing the twelve cylinders to rotate within the inner ring plate.

Hitching a ride along the electron current, my consciousness was inhaled through a magnetic layer that carried the particle stream through a second ring plate that was even larger than the first. There were more rollers here, and they revolved even faster.