They called him a genius.
Seth never cared much for praise. It was noise, hollow echoes from people who couldn't understand the shape of his thoughts. While others chased careers, fame, or love, Seth chased patterns. The language behind reality.
By seventeen, he'd disproven a widely accepted theory in particle physics, not out of arrogance, but boredom. By twenty, he'd built prototypes of quantum processors that governments wanted classified. He declined every offer. Seth didn't crave power or money; he craved understanding.
And lately, something had changed.
It began with the numbers. Constants that subtly shifted when measured too precisely. Equations that refused to balance in ways that defied logic, not in failure, but as if something deeper was mocking his understanding. As if the world was… glitching.
He isolated himself.
His theories were no longer about energy or information. They were about perception. About the boundaries between worlds.
In his thirties, he stopped writing things down. Every time he committed his thoughts to paper, the conclusions seemed… wrong. No, not wrong. Altered. As if something beyond the page twisted the ink the moment it dried.
One night, it happened.
He was alone in his lab, beneath a web of monitors and humming devices. At the center, a crude simulation: a synthetic framework designed to bend space using particle interference. The math was wild. Impossible.
And yet, it... worked?
For a moment, the entire room folded inward. A pulse of silence. His heart skipped. Time seemed to hang, like a breath caught in the lungs of the universe.
And then, Darkness.
After a while, he felt soft terrain around him.
Air filled his lungs again. The scent of pine and forest made him feel alive for once.
He opened his eyes.
Above him stretched a seemingly endless blue sky, white clouds drifting lazily across a twin-moon night. Strange stars shimmered in constellations he had never seen, yet somehow felt ancient. All around him, towering trees reached into the sky like skeletal guardians.
Seth sat up slowly, fingers digging into the damp moss beneath him.
He looked at his hands. They were the same… and yet not.
He felt younger.
He whispered into the air, voice hoarse:
"…It worked?"
Somewhere far in the distance, something howled.
And Seth, genius of another world, laughed softly—not with joy, but with the quiet, trembling awe of a man who had just stepped past the edge of reason.
Then, he passed out once more.