A featureless grey in all directions that wasn’t cold or hot, light or dark, no variation. An unbound awareness that cannot find form, a sense of a wave preparing to rise and then flattening out. The greyness fractured and instantly re-assembled, changing and unchanging at the same time.

In an instant the quiet grey became a point of light with a pulsating brightness. The lightening and darkening point spread out into a line, fading in and out and changing colours. The ends of the line moved around and was vibrating at different speeds. The multi-coloured line stretched in different directions and started undulating, pulling itself into multiple lines that connected to each other and disappeared, re-appearing as different lengths, sizes and colours.

The pattern of lines moved forwards and backwards, rotating around each other. The lights of some lines brightened other lines and some blocked the lights of others. Shapes of lines merged into forms, wrapping around each other and moving as distinct objects. The objects moved in straight lines of varying speed or curved around each other, speeding up the closer they got and then swerved around each other. Larger objects influenced the motion of the smaller objects. They would merge with some, fling out others and keep some in circular motion around themselves.

Leanna O’Regan awoke with a start, visions of all these quickly shrinking, orbiting objects moving in and out her consciousness, the space around her pulling itself into identifiable things: cool air, a room, a chair and table, her hands over her face, a bright light above her and a hard floor beneath her. She realized she was flat on her back and she removed her hands from her face. It started to come back to her where she was… on a ship of some kind in the middle of the ocean. She was a captive, she had to escape.

She tried to move her hands onto the floor and to roll herself over to lift herself up, but she was too weak to do so. She tilted her head to look around the room, but it split into slices that ran away from each other in all directions. Feeling nausea from the multiple visions of the space she occupied, she pulled up her hands to hold her mouth. She shrieked when she saw a stream of bones, sinew, muscles, and flowing blood come at her eyes. Her eyes darted around the room frantically and she could see the ocean depths below her and the sky above her reach out to the stars.

The Earth zoomed away from her and rushed back, the sun spewed it’s dangerous, burning lights outwards, the spinning Earth catching the lights and matter like a spindle pulling in yarn. In an instant she fell back into her body, watching herself split up and move in different directions all at once. One version of herself looked back, desperate and distraught.

“Where am I?”, she screamed, her throat clenched as if she heard her voice come from different places around the room. Her multiple bodies came running back to her, bloody skulls filled with flashing neurons, preceded by protruding stalks of eye balls wide with terror. “Am I dead?” she asked a presence she could sense was watching her.

“You are far from dead, Leanna,” a deep voice nearby said quietly. “You are at the moment more alive than you could have ever imagined. I have made you a god. You will help me find my peace.”

*** This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. ***