Caught in the Vortex

Everything looks like a van Gogh painting now. It's depressing. There is no fine detail, I miss reading, but it's hard to make out letters that aren't more than a foot tall. It all shimmers and wavers, like a signal buffer that close to overloading. I don't know where I am, I can see something of the world, something out there.

I can't touch it, I'm part of this swirling rainbow colored nightmare,and it's not part of the real world. It's like water, I'm part of the water, and reality is the rocks, the river bed, the shorelines. I can run my hands across it and know it's shape, but I can't lift it, I can smell it or taste it.

How long has it been?

The clocks, I can't read them, just stupid red swirls. There are no people in the lab today, I can see people, they shimmer and flicker, more colors swarm around them, like auras. That's something because I can't hear them speaking. It's infrasound I guess, because I know they are, I can feel the vibration of their voices, but there is no sound.

Their thoughts make noise. Him, he's some sort of technician, but his mind isn't on working, he's thinking about sports and drinking. The woman over there, she is in a terrible mood, a cloud of darkness hangs around her. Everyone else knows she is in a bad mood and stays away from here.

I can't remember the last time I ate.

or used the restroom.

I don't even know if I have a body anymore. I am sentience, I suppose. Self-aware, but aware of what, I don't know.

I carried the sample into the refractor chamber, we weren't going to trust that useless droid Marty to carry anything else. For a diagnostic genius, the damn thing can't seem to get around stuttering and falling over it's own metal feet. The sample. It's here. Six ounces of a flaky semi-porous stone resembling an amber colored jade. I'm not sure I have hands, but it's here and I can pick it up, it might be the only real thing here. I am beginning to doubt if I am even real now.

The refractor was going to take it apart, to look inside of it, and then, molecule by molecule, put it back together. I think tis thing came from one of those black site digs on the Moon, real hush hush stuff. There were warnings, alarms, something went wrong. There was a cascade reaction, and the sample wasn't unraveling, time-space around it was. Dimensional Fatigue Event.

Cold sweat.

Panic.

Panic!

Then there were lights, the colors unfolded and billowed around me, around everything. The Refractory Center should be up this hallway. Thing's aren't always right though. Sometimes the hallway is there, sometimes it isn't. The door is here, but it's wrong. It's a green door, made of wood, very strange. It's not the thermoplastic, no security locks. I know what's on the other side, it's a model of a home, dated, very dated. A single family lives there, kids, a dog, the whole bit. But it's completely different colors, and the lights are dim, and I get nervous, and then I get scared if I am there too long.

Maybe the hallway will be back tomorrow.

I might check yesterday, I think I can do that. Yesterday is easier than checking tomorrow. A few shuffling steps and I can see the door, gleaming white, with the comforting green lights.

The long hallway, the sanitizer stations, the UV wash, it's here, but it's glitching, not working right. Damned things never worked right, they would blink on and off at random intervals. Sensor six, right here, was the worst offender. It would be burnt out, from switching on an off constantly, like there was someone just wandering through the corridor. The samples room, the sample decontaminator, the cradle device.I did this, dozens of times.

That day, I stepped back inside the refractory. There were lights everywhere, I can hear them shouting at me, to not go, their voices are dull buzzing sounds, I think I tried to fix it. Maybe tried to pull the sample out of the refractory, shut down the reaction? I wonder if it worked, or is this all that's left of the world.

Sometimes I think about that, sitting in what used to be my quarters.

Is this the memory of the world, the anomaly blow out of control and turn reality inside out like a ruptured balloon? Or do I have it backwards, is that what's on the other side of the anomalies, are they windows, doors, did I fall through one? Is this what happened after we die? Is this limbo? Can they see me if they take a picture with a spectrascope?

I think I might be tired. I don't think I sleep anymore. I can think about sleep, and then I feel better.

It's scary but it works for other things too, I can think about food and I'm not hungry, I can think about sex and either I feel satisfied, or I feel disappointed. I try to never think about negative things, can I make myself sick or even die by thinking too concretely about mortality? I'll look into it when I can't stand this hypercolor twilight existence.

This is what is referred to in the dimensional sciences as a Lambda Vortex. The flow and ripple of the colors and lights around me at first seem random, but under careful observation, they follow basic fluid dynamics. The water metaphors seem to have a decent basis. That's what happened, the refractor interfaced with the sample, and there was a sub-Planck reaction, there was a microscopic breach, punching through to somewhere else. It unfolded, and the lights started.

No, memories are a mess right now.

The sample, I knocked the sample out of the cradle, hoping to interrupt the growth of the anomaly. The anomaly began to rotate, becoming a lambda vortex. These are very dangerous anomalies, among the worst outside of the cataclysmic Mu Reaction, a massive implosion that sucks a hole in existence and leaves a neat scoop left in the ground, or a Delta Wave Formation. That has a pretty sound, delta wave formations sound like ripples in water, but in dimensional science, a delta wave formation is a spontaneous shockwave. Massive fucking explosion, typically on par with Petroleum Era atomic devices.

Lambda rotation, that creates stable anomalies, which generate fixed event horizons. Then things start coming through them, heat, light, radiation, parasites, diseases, strange fluids, teratomorph spawn, and yes, those unofficial cosmic horrors that every government in the world denies.

Handy that they have reflex teams, and SCP units, and the rest. That's a lot of prep and hardware for something that never happens.

The men are coming, I can see them. They are in a hurry, all pointy and jagged. Their guns look like lightning bolts in their blurry hands. Then they are gone. They flicker all over the place, and then they are gone for days at time. I think they are gone for days at a time. Time flows strangely here, again, the water metaphors. Time flows like water, like the way reality ripples around the lambda vortices. I don't think I'm in the water anymore. I can go back days in time, I can go forward, sideways even. I think. Or I'm just going mad. At least insanity seems to be interesting.