Her eyes are closed, and she can't feel the machines that are wired into her anymore.
She loses the feeling of her physical body. This is good, she thinks to herself. Now, we're getting somewhere.
Creating the new body is the hardest part. She has to use her mind to create the arms, the legs, the head. One by one she succeeds in forming them. Eventually, the whole body is ready, and so is she.
She transmits her thoughts, through the machine that is wired to her physical head to send a message to the boys in the lab. “The body is ready.”
She has to wait a few minutes before she gets a response. There are still many mysteries regarding the passage of time between this universe and ours. Finally, she gets something back. “Affirmative, optic sensors are wired in. Your eyes are ours.”
From now on, whatever she'd see would be recorded for further observation. Now, she used her mind to create eyes on her newly constructed head, and she opened them.
The first thing that she saw was an array of stars. She was in deep space, in another universe, surrounded by stars. She thought it funny how every time that they had done this experiment, everyone saw stars. They've tried this with countless other universes and for some reason, every single one of them had these bright lights that were shining, light years away.
She didn't need a space suit in this universe. Nobody needed one in any of the universes that they visited using this method. This is just because this body isn't real. It doesn't require air, heat, or food. It's just here to observe. So she floated around in space, recording everything that she saw through the optic sensors that were attached to her physical brain.
She saw some of the most beautiful things. She saw an enormous blue planet. A water world. And it was flat. The planet's shape was not a sphere, but a flat sheet. Like a piece of paper, floating in space. Impossible she thought to herself. But she knew that it wasn't impossible here. In a new universe with a new interpretation of physics.
She steered herself past the water planet. Passing diamond asteroids on either side of her, she saw constellations. She moved towards them until she saw them more clearly. These constellations had physical lines connecting the stars to form pictures. And they formed the most vivid pictures that she had ever seen. She recognized them too.
Constellations all around her were displaying images of various points of her life. To her left, she saw a constellation that vividly showed her riding a bike for the first time. To her right, a constellation showed an image of her at her own high school graduation more clearly than the actual pictures that were taken at her graduation. And directly in front of her, she saw the recent image of her being hooked up to the mental projection device, which she had to do in order to conduct this research. It took her a moment to notice that the constellations were colored in too. She could see the color of her clothes, skin, and background in incredible detail.
Then all at once, the pictures started moving. They were replaying entire scenes of her life, right in front of her. Then, more appeared. Her first kiss, Her first job interview, even her first words. “This is great!” The voice being projected in her mind startled her. “This is exactly what we needed! Keep recording it!” And so she did.
She floated in place, in awe of what she was witnessing. The stars in the universe were moving for her. Soon, every single star that she could have seen before was a part of one of the, now hundreds of constellation scenes. She stayed this way for hours. By then, her colleagues decided that they had enough information to work with so they disconnected her. She immediately woke up in her own physical body. She pushed herself out of the giant chair that was the mental projection device.
The white walls of the laboratory strongly contrasted with the deep black of space, so she had to blink a few times before she could continue.
When she was ready, she walked towards the large computer screen that all of the other scientists were gathered around. The computer screen displayed the constellations that were displaying her life story in space. The video on the screen was from her perspective, but it was so much more magical and real in person.
“This is it!” The same voice that was speaking to her in the other universe. The head of the project put his hands on her shoulders. And she shared his excitement. “Imagine!”This was the happiest that she had ever seen him. “We finally have proof of the new frontier! Universes of infinite dimensions and possibilities, inside of the mind of every single human being!”
End
Faris Naimi is an undergraduate student at George Mason University. He was born and raised in Virginia.