A beeping sound pierced through the silent darkness in her head.

“No…it’s too early to get up…make the alarm stop…”. Her head felt heavy. She tried to open her eyes, but the soft lids refused to obey the command.

The beeping grew softer, almost distant. Her hands groped in the darkness until she touched her own head.

Sticky. Why was her head sticky? Her eyelids fluttered a few times before finally opening, but all that reached her eyes was complete darkness. And a small blinking light.

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, the beeping and the blinking light synced up. It sounded like her lab computer. Why would she be sleeping in her lab?

She needed light. A blinding pain assaulted her as soon as she tried to stand up. The feeling was so intense, she couldn’t even register which part of her body it came from. Coherent thoughts left her as she collapsed again, waiting for the pain to subside.

This time, almost moving in slow motion, she managed to get up to her hands and knees. The pain was still very much there, but the assault on her senses were less violent.

It came from her head, definitely her head.

Familiar forms found their way to her hands as she crawled across the floor, trying to reach the wall. Shattered glass. An over turned chair. There! Her handbag. She felt around in it until her hand closed around the object she was searching for. Her cell phone.

The normally dull light of the screen blinded her sensitive eyes, but her eyes adjusted quickly. The first thing she noticed was blood on her hand.

Blood?

The second thing was the time. 14h39. It’s only afternoon. Why is it so dark? Her memories were a jumble as she tried to pinpoint the last things she remembered before waking up.

She definitely got up to go to work that morning. Her position as senior physicist at the University of Stellenbosch meant a lot to her. With her latest experiments on energy starting to give some strange results, she didn’t even take time off on weekends. The possibility of what she might discover was too addictive, it was like a drug to her. She kept on searching, kept on digging, kept on pushing the boundaries of her experiments, even after her peers told her to back off, to get a life, and to slow down.

She definitely drove to work in her car that morning. Her favourite song played on the radio just as she pulled into her parking space, forcing her to either postpone her conference call with a colleague in Hawaii, or miss her song. It was infuriating.

She definitely had that conference call. They were comparing notes on what she was slowly discovering. After that, she went to grab coffee and something to eat, singing while she went. Breakfast wasn’t something she had regularly, it normally turned into 11 o'clock brunch.

What then? What happened then?

She remembered Hawaii calling again. But this time on her cell phone. She quickly checked her call records to see if she remembered correctly. Yes, there it was. Two calls from Sven Ulrich. A brilliant German physicist who chose to spend his days at the Hawaii Space Flight Laboratory.

Why did he call?

The line was clear at first. He wanted to know if she was alone. She needed to get off campus, he said. He had something urgent to discuss with her. He sounded agitated. Nervous, scared? She grabbed her handbag when the line started to go bad.

“Sven? You there?” she asked, stopping by her desk. He shouted something in German, but the static on the line was too bad for her to make it out.

The line went silent, and then his voice came over the speaker clearly.

“I found something in your data. Earlier you said you had a suspicion that you didn’t want to discuss on the conference call? I know what it is. Clara, have you been using dark matter in your lab?”

“That’s exactly what I didn’t want to discuss over the phone. The lens I built for the energy experiment, it seems to be channelling dark matter. I don't know how, yet, but my readings for the amount of light captured versus the used up volume on the resulting power units don't match up. There's something in there with the light! There’s another interesting side effect to it as well. But I really need you to come here. Get the earliest flight you can, please, I need to show you what’s happening.”

“You included a systems diagram for a lens in the info pack you mailed to us 3 months ago. Is that the same lens you’ve been using?”

“Yes. But I don’t think you should use it. We need to figure out what’s happening here first”

Silence

“Sven?”

“I’ll see what I can do, Clara, but we might have a problem. Jakob has already built the lens. The head of physics ordered us to. He wants to start testing your theories as soon as possible.”

The line went dead.

Jakob, another German, was Sven’s lab assistant. She’s been working with them on the research of a more cost effective way of powering space flight.

And then? What happened after? He called twice. What was the second call about?

Her head throbbed as the pain returned, scattering her memories and confusing her. She had to resist the urge to lie down again and close her eyes. She didn’t know whether anyone would find her here, or the extent of her injuries. It was obviously a concussion. She knew she was supposed to stay awake and, more importantly, stay alert.

Her thoughts went back to the second phone call. It was a few hours after the first. 13h44.

She remembered her equipment picking up readings from the lens. But that should have been impossible! Her experiment wasn’t running! She was still analysing data from the last run.

That’s when her phone rang. There was static. Sven was yelling, talking in a mixture of German and English. She couldn’t hear him, the interference on the line was too bad. “……..lens……….power…….Clara….” was all she could make out. While listening, she flicked the on switch on the lens to see if her readings changed.

And that’s when it went black.

What the hell is going on?!

Panic threatened to shut down her body. Her heart raced, a cold sweat broke out over her body, her shaking hands dropped the cell phone. Nausea overwhelmed her, she had to work to suppress the feeling.

“Calm down,” she berated herself. “You’re a scientist. Gather evidence and then analyse what’s going on. Don’t go jumping to conclusions. Breathe.” Just breathe. Deep breaths calmed her nerves enough for her to stop shaking.

The blinking light of her computer caught her attention again. There had to be some recorded data! If whatever happened was caused by her experiment, her computer would have taken readings.

She crawled over to her desk. Ignoring the pain in her head, she stood up and moved the mouse. The screen came to life. She navigated to the daily results and found today's date. At the bottom of the folder was a new file, saved 14h00.

Her mouth dropped open when the file opened. What she was seeing was impossible. The readings were simply staggering.

She forced herself over to the lens to turn it off, but as she touched it, a shock wave was released. It knocked her back and took her sight momentarily away, but thankfully she stayed on her feet. She touched the lens again and felt the release of another small shock wave. But this one was different. She only felt it in her head. She wasn’t physically affected by it at all.

A third time her hand came to rest on the lens. This time, when she felt the now familiar sensation, she kept her hand on the lens.

Immediately a thousand images started to fly through her thoughts. She saw planets being formed. She saw stars created and destroyed. She saw a moon crash into a planet, an asteroid disappearing into a sun. Supernovas released their energy, gas giants formed instantly, planets orbited around stars.

She saw herself in the lab, talking to Sven, touching the lens. But at the same time she was able to see Sven and Jakob in their lab. Jakob had connected the lens to a power source without using a converter, against her instructions. Sven phoned her warn her that they were going to replicate the experiment, and to confirm the correct power supply for the lens, but Jakob was too impatient to wait for an answer and switched the lens on. This happened just as she switched the lens on her side on. She was knocked back from the lens, hit her head against the wall and passed out. She would have a concussion when she woke up. Blood trickled out of the wound where she hit her head. Sven and Jakob were lost to an explosion, caused by the too high voltage of the power supply.

Instantly she understood what happened. The lens she designed was supposed to focus any available light into a unit that would use it to create energy, which would then be stored in power cells. Instead, it was a lot more successful at channeling dark matter, something she never even researched until now, and it was doing it without needing any power.

She never recorded any definite readings on dark matter, because the experiment wasn’t designed to work that way. All she had until now was her suspicions. But now that she was seeing it, she realised that the dark matter colliding with the power she connected the lens to formed a force field around her lab every time. The same happened in Hawaii with Jakob and Sven.

Disaster struck when both lenses were connected to external power sources at the same time.

With the two locations being so close to direct opposites of the world, the two force fields formed two “dark” poles. Two bubbles within a force field of dark matter colliding with pure electricity.. The excessive power Jakob supplied to his lens created an energy anomaly, bending time and space, literally ripping the bubbles from their physical locations, destroying everything she thought she understood about the space time continuum. She was literally flung into a journey through dimensions and universes, where time was relative and existed everywhere and nowhere at once.

Her physical connection to the lens via her handhas allowed an open path for the dark matter into her body, and the essence of it was slowly changing her. It was like the lens communicated to her, showing her secrets she never even dreamed of, seeping energy into her, allowing her a direct link to the matter at all time. She understood that, soon, she would not even need the lens to access the dark matter.

Curiosity held her hand on the lens and she closed her eyes, seeing life in a completely new way. She saw how dark matter was holding the bubble around her in place, protecting her from whatever time or dimension was right outside her window. She saw how dark matter was weaved into the essence of everything. The metals in her lab glowed with a faint aura she never knew existed, the apple exuded life, the wind itself could be seen. She saw the currents of energy flowing through all worlds and shaping it in ways unknown.

When she opened her eyes, she could see the traces of the energy all around her. Her new understanding even allowed her to see herself as an energy form, with all the dormant power around her stirring as she moved.

She wanted to remove her hand and digest what she has just experienced, but whatever was communicating with her through the lens didn’t want her to sever the connection yet. She could feel refusal when she just thought of removing her hand. Not knowing what else to do and needing answers, she closed her eyes again and put her other hand on the lens as well.

This time the images were of her home again. She saw how the physical ground was ripped apart where the two dark matter bubbles had formed. As if it had already happened, and was still going to happen at the same time, she saw the University banning all research into her field, destroying all her notes, restricting access to the disaster zone where her lab once stood. The UN declared the advanced studies of energy illegal, she and the Hawaii lab had become the example for irresponsible testing and experiments. Regret filled her, she never wanted her name in an international law, but at the same time she understood that restricting the access to this knowledge was necessary for the survival of earth.

Her vision shifted to space. She saw earth as if she was on the moon, and then the solar system. She moved further back until she could see the entire universe, expanding and retracting like a beating heart, in a bubble of dark matter. Dark matter kept it all together, and dark energy protected it. She understood at that moment that returning to her own time and place was impossible. The energy acted like a one way door. You could escape from the bubble, but going back into it was impossible.

But what was the earth and its universe being protected from?

As soon as the thought popped into her head, her vision shifted. She saw earth, but in an alternate dimension. She was given the understanding that earth existed in the two planes at the same time, following the same general history and development, but that this earth was also influenced by the things the dark matter was protecting her universe from.

She saw a strange craft crashing into earth. She saw a metal unknown to her being dug up by slaves and used as fuel by a great evil. She saw different creatures, people, and beings interacting with each other, all connected by the same goal. She also understood that who she saw was important to the survival of this planet, and that the evil threatening it would only miss her own earth because of the dark matter protecting it, hiding it.

She felt the evil before she saw it. Its name was weaved into the energy around it, creating it, moulding it. The evil’s name was just as powerful as the evil itself. The name could invoke a part of that evil, manifesting in storms and monsters, summoning its master.

The Cosmic Whale

The shock of seeing something so unlikely, so monstrous, and so evil, caused her to pull her hand away from the lens.

Her eyes burst open, and a sensory overload overwhelmed her. Her transformation by the dark matter was complete. She could now see the source of all the energy around her, feel it, manipulate it.