A sleek metallic vessel falls down from the heavens. It burns and chars in Earth’s atmosphere. Flying downwards like an extinguished star, it eventually cuts through the moonstrung clouds above rural Massachusetts.
2011. A small town about an hour’s drive from Boston. Charlie Johnson, a timid 32-year-old man, recently divorced, recently down on his luck, is driving home from work late one evening. On the road ahead he spots a smooth and reflective chunk indented into the concrete. It’s smoking, burnt, but still somehow unscathed, unreal in a way. Charlie pulls his car over. Walks up to the object. It’s about the size of a basketball, round in some areas but flat in others. Charlie can’t really tell what shape or form this object aspires to. He goes to pick it up, but as soon as his hand touches it – Charlie vanishes.
His mind is bent. His flesh is torn. His very being, the concept of him, the space his physicality occupies in the world; it’s tangled and morphed in a vacuum of energy so unknowable, so alien, that it would break the mind to even fathom. The technology of the object that Charlie touched was a product of beings who were billions of years more advanced than humans. And so, Charlie entered an invisible wormhole into the darkest and deepest part of reality, and his own genetic mind.
Charlie wakes up on a forest floor. His bones and skin ache as if he just had surgery on every atom of his body. He gets up, leaves crunch under his weight, and looks around. The forestscape before him is odd looking; it’s moody and shadowed, plants take on different shapes than usual, the atmosphere is thick with an invisible smoke. Charlie can see some daylight in the distance, he wanders to it.
Charlie was eaten alive by a 40-foot-tall tyrannosaurus rex before he made it to the opening in the trees.
You see, this world was not natural; it was not real in the way that we perceive it, but all truth, and all genuine. The contents of this land were a twisted and violently broken mish-mash of monsters, ecosystems and code from across the epochs of Earth history. They were made out of both the genetic omnibus of terran life as well as the holistic environmental perceptions of those eras. A place that encapsulates the worst of Earthly reality across all time and space. Charlie stood no chance.