The Journey Inwards (story below)

He had been an ordinary man in an ordinary chair when suddenly the world began to swell around him. He jumped up in terror as the spider on the carpet became a colossal machine of muscle and glassy eyes.

 

And still, he diminished.

 

Beyond molecules, atoms spread apart into wide solar systems of charge and probability. He wandered through a quantum wilderness where motion became suggestion and cause blurred into effect. He expected nothing beyond this frontier: the last limit science could conceive.

 

But there was more.

 

As he shrank past quarks, past the Planck veil, something astonishing revealed itself. Not void, not silence: immensity. A universe as vast as the one he had left, filled with galaxies that thrummed with their own physics, stars that sang in unfamiliar tones, worlds circling in cosmic geometries. It was not small at all, it was simply scaled to him now.

 

Still he shrank, trapped in a nightmare he could not control.

 

And then, to his surprise, he arrived in a room.

 

A modest room with a carpet and a wooden chair.

 

And in that chair sat a man.

 

Himself.

 

Staring, wide-eyed, at the world beginning to swell.

Done