A.R.: Beyond the Universe

Alex wakes to the repeated buzzing of his alarm clock. “Morning already?” He is tired but not sure why. He must have slept well. Instead of waking up on his own before the alarm clock, it woke him up. Feeling not quite awake, he stumbles out of bed and heads for the bathroom. He knows his dog will be waiting to go out and then have breakfast, so he hurriedly finishes his business and slips on some clothes.

As usual, the little old dog, which always sleeps in a back room, is glad to see him, mostly because he knows food is coming. MacGuyver, a Shetland sheepdog, has been Alex’s companion for many years. The dog has taken care of him by being his companion. It is now his turn to take care of the dog. That means getting up 90 minutes earlier than he is used to. If he didn’t, the little dog would not get his food in time, get sick, and throw up. With a short walk finished and the dog’s food bowl quickly emptied again by the hungry canine, Alex pets the dog on the head, toasts an English muffin, turns on the TV, and settles into his recliner to catch up on the morning news.

Nothing new, just some local stuff. He turns down the volume, turns to his side, and dozes off for a nap. He’s not very worried about still being sleepy; he has plenty of time to take a quick nap before going to work and he knows it. It’s something that he does often since he must get up early to take care of the dog before he heads out for work. He knows he has about extra time each morning, so getting a little extra sleep is a nice way to begin the day, especially if he’s still a little tired.

He closes his eyes and the living room quickly fades away into a fuzzy blackness.

Alex finds himself staring at a jet-black space, covered with small, sparkling, distant dots. In front of him and parallel to him is a long, thin, silvery cord. It looks like kite string with a slight glow or shimmering effect. Curious, he raises his hand and starts to reach for it. The closer his hand gets to the cord, the more the cord glows. As his hand gets closer to it, he can feel a slight vibration from the cord. His hand is close enough to touch it, but he holds back. Warnings seem to increase indicate to him that the cord is not to be touched. Just before he is about to touch the cord, does he sense energy flowing through it? Electrified maybe? Better not try it. As he pulls his hand away from the cord, the vibrations seem to cease. He begins to look around.

All he sees is black, with small, bright, distant stars sparkling all around him. He finds that he is alone, floating in space, except for the silver cord. There is nothing in front of him except the cord, nothing behind him, just the little stars. Then he looks down to see not the floor of his house but what he recognizes as the Earth. The multi-colored ball is easy to recognize. Even without his glasses, he can make out the familiar landmarks, continents, and oceans. Alex notices that the cord is constantly undulating, making slow, wide arcs as it makes its way back toward his home world. He can’t be sure, but it looks as though it may start somewhere on the Earth and go up from there. Alex scans the cord to see if he can determine where it originates. From being able to identify the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean, it looks like maybe somewhere in the Himalayan Mountains.

He then looks up to see where the cord goes. Above him, it straightens out to the point of being stiff. It goes past the moon in a straight line into the blackness of space. The cord looks as though it goes on forever, in a very straight, taut line. Unknowingly, his hand has approached the cord again. It is vibrating. He pulls his hand back quickly, raising it up parallel to the cord. That’s when he notices that something has changed. Normally, even from his back yard, the stars always seemed to have sharp, clean-cut edges. When he first became aware that he was in space, he noticed that the star’s edges were sharp and clear. They didn’t noticeably move; they just hung there in space. Now the stars have blurred edges and they are moving in a downward motion. He quickly pulls his arm away from the cord. The stars once again become bright, sharp points of light. Did he just move, or did they? He didn’t feel anything. He looks down to get his bearings by looking at the Earth.

Below him, all he sees is the silver, glowing cord, in a very straight line. There is no Earth to be seen. He looks above him: no moon. There is just the straight cord going to nowhere above him and below him.

He must have moved. The Earth doesn’t move, not like that. Neither does the moon, nor do the stars. He looks back at the cord. He reaches out toward the cord. As his hand approaches the cord, it starts to glow and vibrate. He is apprehensive about touching it. He slides his hand up the cord, keeping it parallel to the cord. As he does, he notices the stars go blurry again. They seem to move in a downward motion. He pulls his hand away from the cord. The stars quickly sharpen once again.

He is the one moving. Apparently, when his hand slides along the cord, he moves along the cord. He tries it again. He brings his hand closer to the cord. He then slides his hand up the cord but does not touch it. Once again, the stars get blurry, going in a downward motion. Yes, he’s definitely the one moving. He slides his hand just a little further up the cord. The stars closer to him quickly blur and turn into long, white streaks and then disappear completely. Only the stars a great distance away remain visible, and even they are moving downward at a very quick pace. Nothing anywhere is stationary anymore. He begins to experiment by sliding his hand up or down the cord without touching it. As he slowly slides his hand up along the cord, he looks closely at a single star to see what will happen. The star begins moving down. He lowers his hand a little and the star’s movement slows. He continues to lower his hand until the star’s movement ceases.

“So, I can control it,” he thinks to himself. “Since it looks like the Earth is at the beginning of the cord, let’s see if I can go back home,” he speculates. Slowly sliding his hand downward, he notices the stars move upward and again become blurry lines. He lowers his hand more and the stars disappear, leaving long, white trails.

He begins to sense a slowing of his movement. He notices the stars beginning to reappear, changing from long lines to blurry stars. Their upward movement is slowing. They once again become clear, with no visible movement at all. He looks below to see the Earth once again.

He looks down at his home world, smiles, and then looks up. “OK, let’s see where this thing goes,” he decides and begins to raise his hand. He looks below to see that the Earth is already out of sight. He raises his hand further to see his beloved sun zip past him and disappear quickly below him. A smile grows on his face as he raises his hand almost straight over his head.

The cord in front of him begins to glow brightly, as if reacting to his movement. He is moving through the depths of space at incredible speeds, having no sense of weight or gravity. It feels like floating on a cloud of air, but with no sense of movement. He feels nothing: no weight, no cold, no feeling of acceleration, nothing. It does not dawn on him that space itself is empty of air.

The space immediately around him also seems to be glowing, with the glow ending just a few inches from his skin. It surrounds him, from the tip of his raised fingers to the bottom of his feet. He is close to the bright cord now, only a few inches away.

He looks up, wondering what is out there. Off to the right, he sees a small group of stars swirling in a spiral shape. Alex stares at it. It is almost hypnotizing. He realizes that what he is seeing is like what he had seen in some photos taken of a spiral galaxy by a deep-space telescope. “How small it looks,” he thinks to himself, remembering that a galaxy is enormously large--millions of light years across, if not more. As it quickly slides downward and fades out of view, a different looking group of stars move down past him quickly. Entire groups of swirling masses come and go faster and faster until they themselves form a single blur, surrounding him completely.

He does not wonder about seeing the spiral galaxies rotating. It may take years or centuries for an entire galaxy to move so that motion in the stars can be seen. He is seeing all galaxies in motion, watching them spinning, moving, changing shapes. As they spin, some of the outer stars are thrown far out into the depths of space, from the main mass.

The blurs past him continue for what seems like hours. Eventually everything vanishes, leaving him traveling through a huge, empty jet-black space. More hours pass. He is wondering just how far he has traveled and how much farther he must go. Somewhere this thing must end.

“What was that?” he asks himself. He can feel something pulling him up and to the right. The more he slides up the cord, the harder the pull. The pull becomes so strong that Alex is concerned that he will be pulled off the cord. “Is it possible to change directions on this thing to see what is going on? Would it even be safe to try & change directions?”

Following his logic for going up and down, he lowers his hand to slow down. He slowly and deliberately begins to move his hand to the right away from the cord, but only a little. He looks hard at the cord, terrified that he might be thrown off it like a roller coaster car out of control.

To his relief, the cord begins to bend to the right, following his hand. He sees that beyond the bend, the cord remains as straight as ever, continuing as a taunt, stiff line. The cord must be stretching, like a long rubber band. Following the pull that continues to get stronger, he begins to move his hand towards the pull. Ahead of him is a single bright star. It is there he is being led to.

The closer he gets to the star, the stronger the pull becomes, the more the star changes. It is now a dull orange planet he is approaching at breakneck speed. He slows down quickly as he gets closer to surface. Alex is so intent in studying this new world that he has not noticed that he has left the cord far behind him and is free falling towards the planet.

Still far above the plant, he cannot see any landscape features. No rivers, no oceans, no hills, no mountains. The curved horizon is unbroken, with nothing to disturb the smooth shape. As he begins to circumnavigate the strange world, he sees a rather odd-looking feature off in the distance.

It is that direction he is drawn toward. He can see it from what must be hundreds of miles away. At first, he thinks it is a mountain range, but the objects look too steep to be mountains. They are too smooth and have very sharp, pointed peaks. They are not brown, or green, or white capped. They are silvery and appear too slender for mountains. They also seem to shimmer, as if moving ever so slightly.

Perhaps the shimmering is the result of waves of heat, reflecting off the ground’s surface, making the mountains look that way. After all, the place looks like a huge desert to him.

As he skims just above what he thinks is the surface, he notices how well everything is illuminated, even though he cannot see a source for all the light. He looks up to see a pale red sky but no sun or any source for all the light. He looks down to the “ground”, which looks like is made of very fine particles, reminding him of talcum powder. The particles are floating, not quite touching each other, all moving in unison. They are not the orange he thought he saw when he first started approaching the planet. The individual particles varied in color, with red and yellow being the primary colors creating the orange he saw. Amongst the constantly moving mass of particles, he also sees smaller particles, with colors ranging in varying shades of blue, green, gold, and silver. The closer he looks at them, the more he notices that these particles are not one color but many. One moment a single particle is blue, then it fades to green, then gold, then silver and back to blue.

Curious, he lowers his hand to see what it feels like. The closer he looks, the more it reminds him of a very thick fog…or a cloud.

He knew what it was like to touch a cloud.

He had done it many years ago when he went skydiving. He had decided the day before going that it was finally time to give it a try. While driving home from work on a warm summer evening, he had heard a commercial on the car radio for skydiving classes. They were accepting new students.

Since he had just gotten paid, he had some extra cash to play with. The price announced in the ad was affordable enough. “So why not?” he thought to himself. He quickly wrote down the phone number. When he got home, he called the skydiving school and found he could get started the following morning, which was Saturday. Being too excited to even give it another thought, he immediately says he’ll be there bright and early.

Saturday morning is a gorgeous day, with a deep blue sky, a few light, fluffy clouds, a warm sun, and a feeling of enthusiasm. After taking care of the dog, he showers, gets dressed, grabs the car keys and heads out the door.

He is going to the local airport for the classes and skydiving (assuming he does not lose his nerve). During the 30-minute drive, he makes a quick stop for a breakfast sandwich and a drink at a drive-thru.

When he gets to the airport, he learns that he has his choice of two skydiving experiences: he can take the 30-minute class and jump out the plane strapped to the chest of an experienced jump master, or he can take the 6-hour course, which is a lot more expensive. After completing the classes, he would be the one wearing the parachute when he did the jump. He would be the one pulling on the rip chord, opening the parachute. Of course, there would be two jump masters with him always during the jump: one on each side (just in case “something happens”).

He quickly decides, “If I am going to do this, I’m going to do it right,” and he chooses the second option. He figures that jumping on his own without being attached to someone else would let him know what it would really be like. He must admit there is a lot of comfort in knowing that there will be two experienced jumpers with him during the jump. He also hopes that they know what they were doing. He has been told they will be there with him at all times, just in case “something happens.”

He also feels little concerned (OK, downright scared) that he might either freak out or get caught up in looking around and not do the right thing at the right time during the jump. Having the two jumpmasters with him during the jump not only provides him with that added level of security he needs to pull off the jump, it also furnishes him with the extra nerve to actually go through with it.

The classes go quickly. He watches some films on what to do, what not to do, and what to do if something goes wrong. He keeps wondering why they mention “what could go wrong” so often.

In one film, the jumper’s parachute becomes tangled just after the person pulls on the ring to open the parachute. The cords had gotten tangled with the parachute. The narrator of the film points out how that doe not happen very often.

“Not often? How about never! What am I am doing here? All it takes is one screw up (and I’m full of them) and I’m dead meat!”

Thoughts of going SPLAT when hitting the ground feel more than a little unsettling to Alex. His stomach muscles are starting to tighten as his instinct of survival begins to kick in.

The instructor’s experience comes through and calms everyone’s nerves. He continues with the film, showing how the jumper can untangle the parachute lines while falling and succeeds in getting the parachute to fully open. Then he floats to a nice, soft landing, still standing straight, knees slightly bent.

Next, each student makes several test jumps out of a mockup airplane. The students jump out of the plane where the door was, to the heavily padded ground 5 feet below them. The goal is to provide a soft place for them to land as they repeatedly jump out of the plane until they get used to feeling what it will be like to leave the airplane for the actual jump.

When all the lessons are completed, it is late afternoon. The last jump of the day is approaching – their jump. Enthusiasm is in abundance as everyone gets into the plane, ready to make it count (or at least live through it). Alex’s two jumpmasters pull him aside and tell him to let everyone else get on first. “The last people to get on the plane will be the first ones to jump out – that will be us”.

“Oh, great. I get to die first,” are Alex’s thoughts.

Normally, for first time jumpers, the plane will go up to 9,000 feet and then everyone will make their jump. Not this crew…they go much higher, to 14,000 feet. That means that the jumpers will have more time to experience a longer fall (or maybe there will be more time for the jump masters to help any of the new students who are having problems).

His energy level unexpectedly increases as the plane goes higher. By the time the plane reaches its cruising altitude from where they will jump out, Alex is full of energy. One of the jumpmasters tells him to get ready.

Being at the back of the plane and closest to the opening where there used to be a door, it only takes a couple small steps before he has his head outside of the plane and can look down at the ground far below him. He grabs the sides of the opening tight to keep from falling out of the plane before the two jumpmasters say he can go. He must step out on a small ledge attached to the outside of the plane, then wait there, hanging on for dear life until the two jumpmasters are ready to jump with him. He carefully steps out of the plane, looking carefully where he will have to step. The narrow ledge, which barely sticks out, is just behind the door opening on the outside of the plane. He has no intention of leaving that plane early or fall off of it, so he holds onto the side of the plane as tight as he can, his chest pressed tight against outside of the plane and his back to the sky. He wonders just how long he can hold on. The strong wind is pushing hard against him. Alex is getting worried that he will lose his footing and fall off the side of the plane early.

Then he gets the tap on his left shoulder—it is finally time to let go and jump. He takes a deep breath and pushes away from the plane as he had been told to do, falling backwards into the sky. He is amazed to find that he has no trouble righting himself, turning over, and getting to the position that he needs to be in: laying flat and looking straight down with his hands, arms, and legs spread wide and curved slightly behind him.

The two jump masters waste no time in catching up to him, and they give him the sign to let him know he looks good. They immediately start doing the exercises he was told he would be doing during the jump. First, he looks around to get his bearings. He then looks left at one instructor, then right at the other. He gives them both the thumbs up to let them know he is OK.

They signal for him to look at the altimeter he is wearing on his wrist. He gestures to them the numbers he sees on the dial. He then finds the pull ring on his chest that will deploy the main parachute and pretends to pull it. He checks with the jumpmasters and locates the ring for the spare chute and pretends to pull it. He checks the altimeter again. The idea is to pull the main ring when he gets to 5,000 feet.

After going through the same set of exercises for a second time, the instructors give him the sign that he is looking good and everything is fine.

He feels surprised that, much to his relief, he has no sensation of falling, just the strong wind against his body and face. His one fear was that he would get air or motion sickness, which was something he knew all too well. He suffers from it on carnival rides, car rides on mountain roads with a lot of sharp curves, and bumpy airplane rides. But this was one time that a plane ride had no such effect on him. Maybe it was all the excitement. He smiles as he starts to relax and gets an aerial view of the Earth far below him.

It is finally time to have some fun and take a good look around. Not far below him, he sees a group of large, white, fluffy clouds. Before he knows it, he is dropping straight into one of the larger clouds. The temperature falls quickly as he drops through the cloud. True, he is wearing a jump suit that fully covers his legs, arms, and body, but the cold seems to go right through it. He feels cold, extremely cold. The moisture in the cloud seems to magnify the cold. It feels just like standing in a heavy fog bank in the middle of winter with a strong, sharp wind blowing hard. Fortunately, the fall through the cloud is short. If it had been any longer he would have felt like a Popsicle.

As he drops out of the bottom of the cloud, the view of the Earth below him becomes crystal clear. Without the cold of the cloud, he warms up quickly. Working for a civil engineering firm, he had spent the last few years looking at aerial photographs. He looks out to see that the Earth’s horizon really does have a large curve to it. He looks right and then left, wanting to see everything he can. There is the river that runs beside the airport he had just taken off from. He looks closely and sees his car and the house surrounding the airport.

“Wow! The houses really do look that small from up here,” he thinks.

It is just like looking at an aerial photograph but infinitely better. This is in 3D! He continues to free fall for what seem like minutes. He knows he is falling toward the ground at a great speed, but it does not feel like it. He is excited and having way too much fun.

He checks his altimeter once more and sees that he has 1,000 feet left to fall before deploying his chute. Wanting to get it right, he waits a few more seconds, looks at the altimeter on his wrist one more time, and gives the sign to the instructors that he is ready to pull the ring to open his parachute. They signal back and gently float away from him.

He reaches to his chest, finds the large, metal ring and says a quick prayer. He gives it a hard pull and can feel something change on his back. Before he knows it, the chute opens above him with a muffled woosh. After feeling a hard tug on his harness, he looks up to check the lines connecting him to the parachute. The lines are untangled, the chute fully inflates. With everything looking as it should, he breathes a long sigh of relief and settles into the harness, finally getting to relax a little. He turns his attention back to sight seeing.

“Everything OK up there?” asks one of the jumpmasters, who has already landed and is checking in with Alex via walkie-talkie. The helmet Alex is wearing has a speaker and a microphone built into it. He tells the instructor he is fine and how much fun he is having.

The instructor tells him that it is time to practice controlling the parachute--how to go right, go left, descend faster, or slow down. He does this by pulling on the rings above him. Pull on the left ring and you go left. Pull on the right one, you go right. Pull both, you slow down. Pull hard enough on both and you can almost stop descending. The instructor on the ground guides him through each of these exercises, step by step. When he feels comfortable enough that the student has a good idea of how to control the parachute, the jumpmaster lets Alex play a little with it, first making wide swings to the left, then right, and whatever he wants to try.

After several minutes of floating toward the earth beneath the large, rectangular parachute, the instructor tells him to start thinking about landing.

Landing? He looks down to see what he did not want to see.

The small airport has three runways that form a large triangle. A very long, very compact bunch of blackberry briars run down the side of one of the runways. The set of wild bushes is about 100 feet long, 20 feet wide, and at least 5 feet deep-full of blackberry thorns! What if he lands near that mess of briars? What if he lands IN the briars? It will be a nightmare getting out. Why on earth would they still have that mess there if there is a possibility of anyone landing in it? Especially with rookie jumpers!

To him, it looks like he is falling in a line leading directly to the middle of those briars.

Much to his relief, the voice in his helmet tells him to pull on the right ring. In doing so, he slowly starts drifting to the right, away from the briars. He hears a few more commands from his helmet speaker and quickly finds himself approaching the ground in the middle of the large field the runways surrounded. He looks over to see the briar patch a nice, comfortable, safe distance away from him.

“Flair now,” says the voice, which means he needs to slow down as he approaches the ground. He must reach up and pull on both rings at the same time, which he does. That slows him down quickly. Just as his feet are about to touch the ground, the instructor gives the order for him to increase his speed slightly and to raise both rings. As his feet gently touch the earth, a light breeze comes up from behind him. It throws him off balance just enough to push him forward, with his knees just barely touching the ground. He stands up immediately and sees one of the jumpmasters running toward him.

“Everything OK?” The jumpmaster asks. The grin on Alex’s face tells the instructor that he is another happy first-time jumper. But that isn’t enough for the newly grounded skydiver. He takes off his helmet, jumps up high, and yells out loud. He has just learned why people go skydiving. The thrill he is feeling after the jump is more intense than anything he had ever felt before. Maybe it is the fact that he has done something dangerous and lived through it. Maybe it is the adrenaline. All he knows is that he now feels the best he has ever felt.

With the help of the instructors, he gathers up his chute and heads to the office, where he takes off the parachute harness and the jumpsuit. The head instructor gives him his jump log, a small booklet containing the date, the instructors’ names, and a description of how the jump went (which was a problem free jump, and the student did very well).

Alex stops daydreaming as he reaches down towards what he thinks is the ground of the orange planet, but he finds he cannot touch it. The individual particles keep moving away from his hand. The more he lowers his hand toward them, the larger the void around his hand becomes.

When he sees any vegetation at all, it is sparse. They start appearing as he gets closer to the strange looking mountains. Occasionally, he sees one of the tremendous plants. They all appear to be the same: about 100 feet high with leaves only at the top. The plants have long, smooth, silvery trunks that must be 15 feet thick. The leaves are huge, each covering an area the size of his house. He notices that the underside of the leaves kept changing colors: from a shimmering silver to a dark gray and back again to silver. Once, when he came very close to one of the huge leaves, the leaf started to quiver and move away from him. He sees another one of the enormous leaves move away from him when he comes within a few yards of it, as if it is trying to avoid him. He is getting the feeling it is not a good idea to try to touch anything on this strange world.

He feels drawn to the direction of the strange looking mountains. The closer he gets, the less they look like mountains but the stronger the pull. The steeply sloping sides seem too smooth, too perfect. It is like they have been machined and dropped there.

The closer he gets, the more he realizes he is not looking at mountains at all. They are buildings, dozens of them and the strangest looking buildings he has ever seen. All the buildings varied in height, from several hundred feet to over a thousand, with Alex’s pulling sensation is drawing him to the tallest of the structures, located in the middle. They are shaped like stretched out, upside down ice cream cones, perfectly round at the ground, tapering at the top to a single point. Their surfaces seem to shimmer in the bright light. Only the tallest of the buildings has any openings in its exterior surface, which were oval, all the same size and occur in no recognizable pattern.

He slows even more until he is just barely moving above the ground. As he approaches one of the tall structures, he can see that the surface of each building looks like a finely woven, tight-weave cloth. Then he notices what the oval spots are. They turn out to be openings with no glass or frame around them. He looks at them and wonders what is inside the structures. “Maybe I can look inside,” he thinks.

Without knowing how, he floats upwards until he gets to the opening that the pull seems to be coming from.

He is hesitant to look in. If whatever is in there can bring him all the way here from Earth, he is not sure he wants to meet it. But his curiosity wins. He turns his head towards the opening and looks inside.

He is amazed at what he sees. It is a round area with no floor or ceiling. There is little boy, maybe 3 feet tall, floating in the air and completely stationary. His eyes are bright blue. He has short, light blonde hair, almost white. He has soft, smooth-looking skin and is dressed in a silvery cloth that covers him from his shoulders to the bottom of his feet. He appears to be holding two different smooth, shiny balls. One is dark blue, about the size of a basketball and the other is medium green, the size of a softball. He seems to be completely oblivious to his observer’s presence. He reaches out, releases the balls and studies them as they float in front of him, the balls not moving. He touches the larger ball. It reacts by swelling, changing colors from to a pale yellow, and then shrinks back to its original size. He takes the second ball and pushes it toward the first ball. The edges of the balls seem to blur and then merge together, forming one ball that is smaller than either of the two original balls. He continues touching it here and there. Every time he does, it takes a different shape or color. This continues, resulting in an endless variety of sizes, shapes, colors, and dimensions. Sometimes the object is so small that Alex can hardly even see it.

It suddenly dawns on Alex that the boy is alone. Where are the boy’s parents or family?

That is when Alex notices that there are no sounds, none of any kind. No wind, no birds, no laughter, no horns or crickets, nothing. He looks down. After all, from his height, he should be able to see lots of people.

But none could be seen, not a single person anywhere. No streets or paths, nothing but the buildings and the misty that forms or covers the surface. That is when Alex notices that the mist seems to be coming from the buildings and fans out in small waves in all directions.

Alex looks back inside to see what the boy is doing. When he does, he sees that the boy is now staring at him. The moment their eyes meet, Alex is frozen in place – he cannot move nor take his eyes away from that piercing stare. Without any warning, his head starts hurting. The pain become excruciating as Alex’s eyesight becomes fuzzy, then nothing.

As the ceiling fan comes into focus, Alex realizes he is at home in his bed. Still groggy, he finally decides that he just had a very strange dream. He looks at the clock on the wall to see that it is 11:15 pm. Five minutes have passed since he laid down to go to sleep. Feeling exhausted, he turns on his side, gets comfortable, and closes his eyes, hoping to go back to sleep. But the feeling of floating and a pair of blue eyes haunts him. It is two hours before exhaustion takes over and Alex can go back to sleep.

Alex does not remember taking a nap in his recliner, almost 6 hours into the future.