The Afterlife Machine: VI. Resolution

As Emily’s senses slowly reassembled, she became aware that she was sprawled amidst the smoldering ruins of the auxiliary control room. Debris and twisted wreckage surrounded her in a nightmarish panorama of devastation.

She blinked her eyes, struggling to remember what had happened. Fragmented memories of the imploding vortex and the blinding whiteout crash-landed in her mind.

With a start, she pushed herself up to a sitting position, wincing at the explosion of pain from her battered body. Had her cosmic gambit actually worked? Or had the forces she’d unleashed reduced all of reality to a scorched oblivion?

A faint groan from across the room provided her first hint. One of her lab technicians, his clothing charred and face masked by a trickle of blood, was stirring amid the rubble. Alive…they were both still alive!

As her surroundings took shape, Emily realized that while the control room had been utterly decimated, the rest of the facility seemed remarkably intact beyond the sections immediately engulfed by the vortex. Of the howling rift that had threatened to unmake all of creation, there was no visible sign remaining.

She opened her mouth to call out, but her words caught in her throat as she took in the full scope of the holocaust around her. Limp forms in tattered white coats lay strewn about, some shielding their eyes as if having witnessed something so mind-shatteringly cataclysmic that they had retreated into catatonic fugue states.

Forcing herself to confront the full weight of the scene, Emily knew that many of her team had perished, either torn apart by the cosmic maelstrom or disintegrated by the reality-rewriting implosion. Their names and faces flickered through her memory, good people who had sacrificed everything in pursuit of knowledge and truth.

Her eyes at last settled upon a charred mass of viscera and desiccated forms – the twisted remains of the eldritch entities she had somehow banished back through the rift before its violent collapse. A putrid, dying stench emanated from the scorched, alien shapes, already drying and petrifying as the laws of nature reasserted themselves.

Somehow, by the narrowest of cosmological nails, she had threaded the infinite improbability and pulled reality back from the brink of total entropic dissolution. The door had been slammed shut, sealed by forces that had temporarily transcended and unraveled the standard laws of physics.

But the toll, the cosmic debt that had come due, was nearly incalculable in terms of lives lost, careers ruined, and sanity shattered. Emily herself felt like a martyr horribly disfigured from some cataclysmic crucible, her brilliant inquisitive mind forever marred by the sight of the awful, eldritch truth from realms beyond mortal ken or comprehension.

As she limped away from the charred aftermath, she knew that those who had witnessed the events firsthand would be forever silenced, either by death’s oblivion or a self-imposed cushion of denial to protect what tattered remnants of their sanity remained.

The world could never know just how perilously close it had come to total, cosmic unraveling. At best, there might be some wild, unsubstantiated rumors and fringe stories about unexplained events in that little city for a brief while. But the truth of what had actually transpired within those lab walls would remain eldritch, a dire cosmic reckoning swallowed by space and time as if it had never occurred.

Except, of course, for Emily and the few haunted survivors who would carry an indelible, crippling knowledge of what lied on the other side beyond the veil of reality. She shuddered to imagine what lingering cosmic perversions and madnesses might be left to fester within those traumatized souls as they went to their graves silently screaming…

In the aftermath, Emily attempted to rebuild some semblance of a normal life, if such a thing were even possible after brushing against the outer peripheries of the cosmic abyss. She resigned from her academic position, unable to step foot on a college campus again without succumbing to shell-shocked flashbacks.

The official story provided to the authorities was that an industrial accident involving experimental energy reactors had caused the catastrophic implosion. It was a flimsy cover story at best, but Emily knew the truth could never be divulged – that they had recklessly tampered with cosmic forces far beyond their mortal scope.

Most difficult of all was Emily having to reckon with the sacrifice she had made that fateful day. Though it had been the only path to preserve all existence, she could not help but feel a profound sense of guilt and loss over her ultimate inability to reach out and reunite with her daughter Sarah’s spirit.

In her darkest moments of respited reflection, she tortured herself wondering if Sarah had truly been reaching out from some higher plane, or if it had all been an insidious lure deployed by the malignant forces lurking beyond the veil. She would never know for certain.

The dreams, when they came, were plagued by half-remembered visions of cyclopian entities writhing amidst realms of fractured geometry and howling aethers. The maddening vistas hinted at by those fleeting glimpses into the peripheries of the afterlife haunted her subconscious constantly.

Emily became a shut-in, rarely leaving her home except for furtive errands in the dead of night. She saw phantasmal shades flickering in the corners of her vision, residual afterimages etched into her psyche by the harrowing ordeal. Loud noises caused her to panic, silently reliving the explosive moment when reality itself had buckled and nearly caved in upon her.

On a few sleepless nights, alone with her thoughts and terrors, Emily wondered if taking her own life might be a blessed release from the crushing guilt and cerebral contamination. But she could never follow through, worried that in death she might breach another veil, passing into even more disturbing dimensions of cosmic unnaturalness.

So she lingered, a hollow, haunted shadow of her former self, having peered across the abyss of oblivion and returned forever changed. The woman who had naively sought to reveal the mysteries of the afterlife now understood all too well that some metaphysical doors were meant to remain sealed, lest realities far worse than any mortal conception of hell come spilling through.

As the years passed in fortressed solitude, Emily gradually found some measure of cautious re-engagement with the world. She forced herself to go about simple routines – shopping, self-care, the basic motions of life. Anything to distract from the crawling sense of cosmic dread that never fully abated.

On a crisp autumn evening, nearly a decade after the cataclysmic events, Emily stepped outside to collect her mail as the sun began to set. As her eyes followed the descent of the fiery orb along the horizon, she was struck by how it seemed to be…wavering, ever so slightly.

An unmistakable tremor, a subtle wavefront pulsing through the fabric of reality itself in the blink of an eye.

Emily froze, her breath catching in her throat as a thousand haunted memories and horrors detonated in her mind. Could it be…had something else slipped through in the wake of that cosmic near-rupture? A fragment, a discorporate sliver of the outer realms, come to pay her another visitation?

She stood transfixed, silently pleading for the worrying distortion to be no more than a trick of fading light or her own anxiety-addled mind playing tricks. But the pit of dread opened within her once more, an inescapable existential certainty that the doors were not as permanently sealed as she had desperately hoped…

The Afterlife Machine: V. The Turning Point

As reality itself began to fray and unravel around the nexus of the swirling vortex, Emily knew they were rapidly approaching the point of no return. She had to make a decisive move – either to fully embrace the oblivion beckoning from the other side or to take drastic action to reseal the rupture, no matter the personal cost.

Her mind raced as she watched the nightmarish forms continuing to pour forth from the rift. These were not the wandering spirits of the dead, but something far more primordial and malignant. Ancient, outer forces that had existed for eons before the first spark of life, patiently biding their time to seize an opportunity to reconquer the material realm.

And in her team’s arrogant quest to shatter the cosmic veil between worlds, they had thrown open the gates and welcomed these bringers of entropic oblivion.

Sarah’s voice still echoed in Emily’s mind, crying out for her mother’s help amidst the eldritch chaos. Maybe if she fully surrendered to the vortex, subsumed herself within its cosmic maelstrom, she could find her lost daughter’s soul on the other side?

Her agonizing indecision was shattered by the sound of a tremendous roar followed by a tremor that nearly knocked her off her feet. One of the larger shambling monstrosities had smashed through the lab’s exterior wall and was bearing down on them, a glistening mass of rancid flesh continuously splitting and reknitting into different extremities.

In that visceral moment of face-to-face confrontation with one of the vortex’s hellish harbingers, Emily knew what she had to do. No matter the consequences, no matter how slender the odds, she had to find a way to shut it all down – to create a metaphysical tourniquet around the runaway surge of cosmic forces.

If the vortex was allowed to grow any larger, it could rip apart the very fabric of reality itself, potentially snuffing out all semblance of life and existence for eternity. She had gambled everything on unveiling the truth beyond the mortal veil, and now the stakes were the continuation of all creation as they knew it.

“Everybody, fall back to the auxiliary control room!” she barked at her remaining staff. “We’re going to try to reverse the polarity and create a contained implosion within the central core!”

Her voice was nearly drowned out by another unholy bellow as more twisted forms emerged around the periphery of the widening rift. Clutching the device that could theoretically detonate the core implosion, Emily issued one final order.

“No matter what happens…don’t let anything through that doorway.”

With those grim words lingering in the air, she sprinted towards the control hub, dodging a viscous spray of ichor as another abomination exploded through the debris…

Here’s a continuation of “The Turning Point”:

Emily raced through the shattered hallways, her mind laser-focused on reaching the auxiliary control room while chaos reigned behind her. Grotesque shapes slithered and oozed forth from the ever-widening vortex, their unearthly shrieks and roars echoing through the facility.

She chanced a glance over her shoulder and immediately regretted it. One of the monstrosities, a shifting amalgam of dripping flesh and bonelike protrusions, had cornered two of her lab assistants. The abomination reared up, membranous appendages unfurling as it prepared to strike.

“Don’t look back! Just run!” Emily screamed at the paralyzed researchers.

Her words broke their trance and they scrambled away, the creature’s desiccated limbs smashing down where they’d been standing mere moments before. Emily pumped her legs harder, finally bursting through the reinforced door to the control room.

She slammed her hand onto the activation panel, and banks of monitors flickered to life displaying the cascading diagrams of energy flows and ionic charge vectors. If her hasty calculations were correct, reversing the polarization of the central quantum reactor could theoretically create an implosion event – a runaway entropic force that would act as a cosmic zipper, drawing the rift closed from the inside.

But like everything else that had spiraled out of control, the risks were catastrophic if she made even a miniscule miscalculation. The implosion could just as easily detonate in an apocalyptic blast of exotic particles, further destabilizing the boundaries between dimensions.

Her fingers flew across the holographic controls, adjusting parameters and reconfiguring safeguards to allow an overload of the reactor’s containment field. All the while, the inhuman din of the facility being overrun heightened around her – shrieks, roars, the thunderous impacts of falling debris and rending metal.

With a deep breath, Emily initiated the overload sequence and braced herself. A rising hum quickly crescendoed into a deafening whine as the reactor core strained against its newly configured limitations. Then, with a bone-rattling quake, the implosion was triggered.

Emily’s world became a blinding kaleidoscope as waves of exotic energies detonated throughout the facility, all converging towards the yawning rift in reality. She watched in awe and terror as gravitational lensing distorted light and matter, bending the laws of physics like so much putty caught in the cosmic vortex.

In that searing moment of reality-shattering forces, Emily’s thoughts turned to her daughter one last time. She realized with clarity that even if Sarah’s spirit had called out, even if some part of her had been trapped amid the chaos, there was no way she could ever be reunited with her little girl now.

No, this was the only path – to sacrifice that fragile hope in order to prevent the total annihilation of all existence. She only prayed that wherever Sarah’s soul resided, she could understand and somehow forgive her mother for the agonizing choice she had to make.

With that fleeting acceptance, a brilliant all-consuming whitelight blotted out Emily’s senses…and then there was only oblivion.

When she finally regained consciousness, her first auditory input was one of eerie silence.

The Afterlife Machine: III. Unraveling Consequences

In the days and weeks following that chilling incident, Emily’s team endeavored to comprehend what they had unleashed. The machine, which they had naively hoped would illuminate the path to the afterlife, seemed to have blown the doors off their spiritual realm, allowing any manner of entities to spill through.

At first, the manifestations were sporadic – disembodied voices whispering through the lab’s speakers, strange shadows flickering at the edges of their vision. Unnerving, yet ephemeral occurrences that raised more questions than answers.

But as they continued their experiments, probing deeper into the mysteries of the afterlife, a darker pattern began to emerge.

Malevolent presences, unmistakable in their malice, started channeling through with increasing frequency and strength. The scientists would awaken, drenched in cold sweat, from nightmares so visceral and terrifying that they could scarcely tell dreams from reality.

Objects moved on their own volition, sometimes harmlessly…and other times with violent force meant to inflict harm on the vulnerable researchers. Ghostly apparitions materialized, moaning in anguish or bellowing in fury at having their eternal slumber disturbed.

Still, Emily refused to abandon her work, convincing herself and her team that they could find a way to establish controlled communication. If they could just decipher the mechanics behind the rift between worlds, they could isolate the benevolent voices while barring the malicious ones from entry.

But with every new session, every attempt to manipulate the frequencies and harmonics of the machine, they only seemed to open the floodgates wider. Darker and more ancient presences crept through the growing fissure, entities that defied all human comprehension.

One night, after a particularly harrowing experiment, Emily awoke paralyzed with an icy specter looming over her bed…

One night, after a particularly harrowing experiment, Emily awoke paralyzed with an icy specter looming over her bed. Its form seemed to shift and undulate, as if caught between planes of existence. She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound would come.

The apparition leaned in close, its breath raising the hairs on the back of Emily’s neck. “You dare to trespass upon our realm?” it hissed in a multitude of voices. “Know that there are forces at work here far beyond your understanding.”

It reached out a ghostly appendage, and Emily braced herself for oblivion. But instead of harming her, the entity seemed to plunge its ethereal essence directly into her mind.

A kaleidoscope of horrific visions exploded behind Emily’s eyes – realms of torment where anguished souls writhed in eternal damnation, their shrieks of agony echoing across the planes of the afterlife. Worlds where the barriers between dimensions had shattered, and formless, primordial horrors poured through like a festering plague.

Emily’s psyche teetered on the brink of shattering as these unspeakable revelations burned themselves into her consciousness. Just as she felt her sanity slipping away, the visions imploded in a merciful blast of darkness.

When she awoke the next morning, Emily could scarcely remember her own name. Her colleagues found her huddled in the corner, pupils dilated and body rocked by endless tremors, as if her very soul had been savagely violated.

It took weeks for her to regain her fragmented memories, to piece together the dire warning that the entity had imparted. In their arrogance, they had disturbed the balance between worlds – and there would be grave, unimaginable consequences to pay.

From that day forward, a pall of dread hung over the laboratory. They had taken an irrevocable step, one that could no longer be reversed or undone. The door had been opened, and there was no closing it now.

The dead were walking among the living, heralding an age of darkness that Emily’s team had unwittingly ushered in. And they were quickly losing control of forces she had naively presumed they could master.

Time Will Tell: Chapter 2

Here is a rough first draft of Chapter 2:

Sam studied his reflection in the mirror with dismay. After just a few more uses of his time stopping power, he now looked like he had aged 10 years. Tufts of gray hair, wrinkles, and an old man’s paunch stomach stared back at him.

At first, Sam had enjoyed the thrill and freedom of being able to freeze time. But now the aging consequences were becoming severe. He had to be careful and limit using his abilities, otherwise he could end up elderly very quickly.

At school, Sam’s teachers and classmates started noticing his altered appearance.

“Sam, are you feeling alright? You look a little tired,” said his English teacher, Ms. Willis, eyeing his graying hair with concern. Sam just mumbled an excuse about not sleeping well.

In the cafeteria, his friend James waved a hand in front of Sam’s face. “Dude, you look ancient! What’s going on?” Sam laughed it off, saying it was just bad lighting, but he felt uneasy.

Emily, the pretty girl who sat next to Sam in Chemistry, stared at him wide-eyed. “Sam, you look…different. Did you get contacts or something?” Sam knew he had to tell her the truth.

After school, Sam took Emily aside and revealed his secret power. He explained how he could stop time but it caused him to age. Emily listened in astonished disbelief.

“Prove it,” she said. Sam focused inward, feeling time come to a standstill around them. Emily gasped as the world froze. Sam unfroze time again.

“Oh my god, Sam, this is insane! But we have to find a way to stop the aging. Maybe if you use your powers less it’ll reverse?”

Sam nodded grimly. He knew he had to quit relying on his abilities, no matter how exhilarating they were. With Emily’s help, hopefully he could find a way to turn back the clock and regain his true age.