We believe to be the only species out there in the cosmos floating on a small piece of rock and orbiting a giant floating star.
Forget everything you know. Gravity, Physics, Science, that's all nonsensical in the grand scheme of things. Nothing truly matters. Not to what I've seen.
So let me tell you a story; one that will change your view on this world and make you question everything, as I have.
You'll find yourself going insane, questioning your life choices, and asking yourself what is the true meaning of reality.
Were we really created to just live and die? Or do we have more of a purpose than what we've bargained for?
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My name was Richard Gallivan. I was never the type to believe in anything beyond numbers.
I used to believe that mathematics was the only honest thing in the universe and the foundation of existence.
People, feelings, and even memories lie. But numbers? They stay true. Like I've always said; a prime is always a prime, and a constant never changes.
Math was my comfort. It was rational and logical, but that was before we found the pattern.
It started on a Thursday. Kamal and Lena, my research partners, were with me in the lab. We were running late night entropy scans, trying to model the behavior of dark energy fields in deep space.
It was meant to be theoretical, and yes, pointless, but it was a great way to pass my free time.
Kamal noticed it first; a prime number spiral forming out of what should've been random data. I remember leaning in, blinking at the screen, thinking it had to be a glitch.
The math was too perfect.
"It looks like a fingerprint." Lena joked.
But it didn't feel funny, at least not to me.
We ran it again the next night. And again. The pattern changed, slightly, but the spiral returned.
It was weird, no doubt. This prime number spiral was embedded inside something impossible: a weird dimensional fractal that shouldn't even exist, let alone repeat across multiple data sets.
It was far too structured, as if something with an intelligent mind made it, as crazy as that sounds.
At first, we kept it to ourselves, but then a few late nights turned into weeks of obsession.
We told the department it was nothing, just anomalies, but every single day, we returned to that spiral.
We tried filtering the data, re-scrambling it, analyzing it from every angle, but every time we tried to erase it, it came back clearer, like it wanted to be bloody found.
Eventually, Kamal suggested we try mapping the coordinates implied by the fractal.
But I noticed something; it had dimensional depth. There was some kind of mathematical scaffolding hidden inside it, like an instruction set wrapped in impossible geometry.
We mapped the coordinates to real space outside of our galaxy, and far beyond the edge of the observable universe.
Lena cross-referenced the location with old background data, and obviously, nothing should've been out there.
Except… there was something.
I hate to say it… but there was a persistent gap in the radiation map. The kind of thing you'd chalk up to faulty equipment if it hadn't been there since the data started being recorded.
We joked for a while and called it "The Quiet Spot."
Like any other normal person who didn't want to think much about it, we gave it a nickname.
The Eye.
But after that, the dreams started.
My nightmares.
They weren't normal dreams, not like the ones you forget in the morning. These stayed with me.
I'd see the spiral in my mind, like a heartbeat. I could hear its low vibration, like a note that never changed pitch.
I'd wake up shaking, teeth clenched so tight that my jaw ached.
Kamal stopped sleeping entirely. He said he didn't want to "give it more chances to talk." I laughed when he said it, thinking it was a joke.
But his eyes… he was dead serious.
One night, he brought in an old HAM radio. He said he wanted to "hear what the numbers were trying to say." I rolled my eyes, but he was insistent.
Kamal hooked it up to our equipment, and filtered the coordinates through a frequency converter. It sounded like static at first.
Then something cut through.
The best way I can describe it was; it was like a clicking pattern. Quite rhythmic, like breathing, or maybe even whispering or something.
We recorded and analyzed it obviously. I mean, who wouldn't? This was absurd. We didn't know what we were dealing with.
Lena ran it through translation software on a whim, but to no surprise, nothing came up, though she kept looking anyway because she was more persistent than this entire damn department.
But over time, she grew pale and talked less. One night, she said she had decoded a phrase, but it was just one line.
"You have seen the outline of the thing that sleeps."
I asked her what that meant.
She just stared at me and whispered.
"It's waking up."
That was the last full sentence I heard her say.
She locked herself in her apartment after that, and the next day she smashed all her mirrors and her neighbors called the police; they found her curled in the bathtub, covered in cuts and weird symbols carved into her skin with something sharp.
After hearing about this, Kamal and I stopped everything naturally.
We got rid of those damn drives and burned the notes we made. We've even wiped the servers clean.
But it was too late—
The spiral wouldn't leave.
I saw it in my coffee.
I saw it in the clouds.
I saw it the way traffic lights.
I'd blink and see that terrible shape, folded in on itself; a shape not meant to be seen in three dimensions.
The night it finally broke, I was alone in the lab.
I opened my laptop, but lines of numbers began to appear, one at a time.
The pattern returned, and then… something else.
I can't fully explain it in words.
There was this feeling that… I was beneath something enormous.
There was something out there, sleeping just beyond the veil of matter and stars.
It didn't say anything, but I understood almost immediately that the numbers weren't equations.
They were coordinates.
A summoning.
A key.
And we, idiots that we were, unlocked the door.
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Since that night, sleep was no longer restful.
I tried staying awake for days, terrified of closing my eyes, but my body eventually gave up.
I finally could sleep after so long.
I could finally get the rest my body needed.
But that was when my life changed forever.
I fell through a spiral.
Through numbers that bent and folded into doorways I didn't know could exist.
It wasn't like I was dreaming at all.
It felt too real.
Terrifyingly real.
I was yanked from my mind and pulled through something that no human being was ever meant to cross.
The moment it began, I felt weightless, and then crushed, like my consciousness was stretched into a thread thinner than light and unraveled across a sky with no stars.
I passed through something like a membrane, and suddenly, the universe was behind me.
I fell through endless vacua; limitless planes, and infinite realms.
Each one opened like an eye.
First came the Black Sea, though it didn't act like water, but a concept; a place where thought itself had weight, and I could feel the burden of old minds pressing against my own.
But dare I say these minds weren't human?
It was older than any other human, and it crawled beneath the foundation of logic itself.
Then came the White Maze, spiraling corridors of impossible angles, lined with mirrors that reflected memories I didn't recognize.
Lives I hadn't lived.
I saw myself as a robed priest kneeling before an altar shaped like a spiral.
I saw Lena, her skin carved with a symbol, floating above a chasm, whispering prayers in some foreign language.
These were parallel worlds.
And then I passed through a Gate.
I don't know how else to describe it.
I was simply falling through dimensionless turns.
Through ontologies stacked like paradoxes.
Through spaces where logic broke apart and symmetry melted like bloody wax.
Each gate was more abstract than the last, and yet more complete, as if every level of reality was only a crude projection of the one beneath it.
I helplessly stretched across ever more rarefied forms of being until I reached the last threshold.
The Ultimate Void.
I call it that now because I have no other words.
But even the term "void" is a lie.
It was a realm overflowing with something I couldn't comprehend.
It was a presence so dense and so absolute, that everything else ceased to matter.
Even my thoughts felt like invaders in that place.
Still, my instincts clung to the only thing I had left: math.
I tried to model what I was seeing.
I tried to fit it into structures I had learned.
Back home, we describe infinity like a staircase. The first step is simple, it's counting: one, two, three, forever. But then we discover that there are larger infinities, ones you can't count.
Infinities that contain all smaller infinities inside them, and others above those, like towers.
Each new level introduces a new rule, a new law, a new way of imagining what size and structure even mean.
And the top of that tower, the very top, is something we don't even have numbers for; just ideas.
A kind of theoretical "god-level" order; one that explains the rest.
Set theory.
Large cardinals.
Woodin cardinals.
I focused on the deepest infinities known to mathematics. I remembered how a Woodin cardinal is a kind of large cardinal that gives rise to determinacy
A Woodin cardinal is already so powerful that it implies the existence of entire hierarchies of truths unreachable by ZFC.
I thought about how each Woodin cardinal expands the universe of sets, and how their very existence gives coherence to otherwise inconsistent truths.
I held onto the fact that within the known mathematical universe, these are some of the largest, most transcendently powerful constructs we've ever imagined.
And yet—
They weren't enough.
In this place…
Mathematics was irrelevant.
My knowledge was irrelevant.
Science, Physics, Gravity, and everything I've ever learned… were irrelevant.
No matter how high I tried to climb it in my mind, this place remained above it all.
God help us.
Please… help us… is this real… what kind of monstrosity exists beyond the confines of mathematics and logic?
What are we dealing with?
The silence didn't even last.
From the heart of the Ultimate Void came the first sound.
A low, trembling thrum. It was like hearing a bass note played on the strings of the cosmos, but after that… came the flutes.
It was an out-of-place melody that weaved a sound beyond harmony or discord.
It felt like listening to time fold inward—like an echo played backward from a future that should never come.
The flutes were joined by drums. It had a terrible rhythm that wasn't beating in time with any normal tempo, but with something more fundamental.
Each beat fractured the rules I had once held sacred.
I saw numbers split open like fruit, constants warping into variables, irrational numbers collapsing into recursive infinities.
The digits of pi twisted like serpents, coiling in loops that led nowhere and everywhere.
I wanted to scream, but I couldn't even remember what a scream was.
I felt math break down.
Not metaphorically, but literally.
In front of me, imaginary numbers became real and manifested, twisting into shapes that shouldn't have surfaces or mass.
Equations took form as living things, crawling across the void, coiling like parasites around concepts that no longer made sense.
I saw a triangle split into four sides.
I watched a point expand into a plane and then compress into nonexistence, still somehow being there.
Zero divided itself, and instead of disappearing, it multiplied.
Up was down, logic was gone, and causality broke in half like glass under the weight it was never built to carry.
And all the while, the music played.
This melody was a mechanism, maybe even a language.
But honestly, I don't even know. I'm just trying to describe what I saw.
Their sound reshaped everything around me.
Every note rewritten a law.
Every beat removed a boundary.
And then I saw them.
The flutists.
Or... what I assumed were the ones responsible for the sound.
Their forms made no sense with limbs that weren't limbs, their faces without symmetry or structure, bodies composed of moving holes that devoured and exhaled color.
They were amorphous beings, and while they didn't look at me, I felt their presence outweigh my feeble existence.
That was when I realized it wasn't just a song, it was a form of worship.
It was a symphony of devotion played for something deeper—and something even they feared.
At the center of the void was the spiral.
No longer etched in numbers or traced in prime patterns, it now hung in the abyss like a wound in space.
And from within it came breathing.
Something inside that spiral was alive.
Or worse, it was the thing being worshipped. It was a sleeping giant beneath the fabric of all logic, matter, and thought.
It was the one Lena warned us about.
The thing that sleeps.
It was waking.
I could hear the idea of it moving, like tectonic plates grinding together.
A vibration so vast it made every bone in my body ache, even in that place beyond flesh.
Then something spoke to me
Oh God, help us…
I couldn't tell if it was a voice or a geometry.
But the message was clear.
It gave me the absolute certainty of annihilation.
I wasn't meant to be there.
I wasn't allowed to be there.
Not as a visitor, thinker, or even as a witness.
This was the veil that should never have been touched by mankind!
The coordinates were a test. Maybe even a trap.
A way of sniffing out curious minds.
Curious minds that could one day grow close to the truth.
And now that we'd seen the outline…
We were marked.
Something from the spiral drew closer, and I could feel it beginning to awake.
I forgot my name.
I forgot my purpose.
I forgot how numbers worked.
I forgot what a question was.
And then—
I woke up.
I gasped for air, choking on nothing. I was in the lab.
My body was drenched in sweat, and blood was on my palms from digging my nails into them.
My computer screen was dark, and everything vanished. But I knew that didn't mean it was gone. It meant it was waiting.
Maybe waiting for me to fall asleep again.
It wanted me to open the gates once more.
And so now, I write this, as a warning.
To anyone who reads this, don't try to find the pattern.
Don't look for the spiral.
Someday soon, when the sleeping thing fully awakens—
We won't even remember what reality was supposed to be.
These are my last words to humanity.
When you find this note, I will already be dead.
I took my own life, afraid of what lies beyond existence.
I don't want it to get me.
So be wise, and live in ignorance.
Ignorance is bliss.