Primordium

In the year 2060, Dr. Aurelius Varro—simply Dr. Varro to colleagues and enemies alike—published the first formal description of a discovery that would fracture science and faith: the layers of reality. He called the foundational layer Primordium — literally the origin — and he wrote his notes in a terse, almost liturgical Latin. His personal manuscript bore the title De Structura Dimensionum.

Varro believed dimensions were not continuous evolutions of life but strata—sealed compartments—populated by minds that had never been born into biological sequence. These minds were “primordials”: created and placed into pods, engineered to live inside a grand simulation. The architects—ancient interdimensional intelligences—had crafted the simulation long ago and hid its truth. Primordials were allowed to transfer their consciousness among the various layers of the Primordium, yet the architects never told them their own origins. To protect the experiment, the architects granted primordials effective immortality inside the simulation.

To Varro, the whole arrangement bore an uncanny resemblance to mythic stories of mechanical heaven: it looked like a matrix.

He remembered, as if it were a private myth made real, how at six years old he had first imagined the world as light—one great forgotten halo of brightness. That childhood certainty had hardened into obsession. In his cramped lab he wrote code in Latin-annotated scripts and soldered a small, white, rotating device he called a consciousness uploader. Four days after the last compile, he had the device humming on the bench. He loaded his saved program, clipped the uploader to his laptop and spoke aloud the command he had scrawled in the margin of his manuscript: Primus Origo — Visualizare.

He pressed the power switch on the right. A little blue orb to the left blinked, then steadied into a fixed glow. The bench vanished for him; the world tipped. Varro blacked out.

When he opened his eyes he was already inside: not in a bed, not in his lab, but within a pod. His reflection in the curved glass was wrong and perfect. He was not flesh but a yellow, flaming outline, white eyes like flares. He reached and wiped the inner surface; beyond it, aligned in vast, dim rows, stood a trillion more pods. Machinery breathed a mechanical cadence. An enormous guardian—an articulated sentinel of the architects—patrolled the aisles, its servos whispering against metal.

Varro held himself still and prayed he would not be noticed. The sentinel paused at the pod in front of him, its optics sweeping for life signs. A blue menu overlay flickered inside his vision: a column of selectable options—dimensions listed like menu entries. Lower on the list: “Ghost Mode.”

He tapped the option with a thought.

Ghost Mode dissolved him into a digital translucence. He slid from his pod, a silent ghost through the machinery. The sentinel did not detect him. He climbed, glided to the upper catwalk and looked down on the world outside the facility. The surface of the interdimensional realm was an ancient desert ringed by cities of impossible steel and glass. Spacecraft hung like silent fish above, and on the ground interdimensional beings moved with casual mastery. Reptilian sentinels clustered at the base of certain towers—guards assigned for any primordial who might escape the simulation. They would kill or recapture.

Varro selected the fourth-dimension entry from his menu: time. The doorway opened and he found himself in 2060 again—his city—crowded with humans and automatons, the skyline he had always known. He rotated time backward, watching personal outcomes unspool like film. He stopped at 2010 and peered at a younger world. He tried further layers—higher, stranger, nested realities—but curiosity has a limit. Exhausted, he chose Go Back and returned to the present.

In his lab he unfastened the uploader, turned the device off and went to bed in his sleep-stained pyjamas. The night birthed a fever dream. He felt himself as cosmos: his inner self a sun-contained galaxy, his outer shell compressing to black void. The inner light flared, became the primordial yellow again, and then a cell closed around him. He saw his reflection in the pod glass—this time outside looking in—hearing his thoughts scatter like smoke through a chimney and leak into the roof of the world. The cosmos shifted under the pressure of those thoughts.

The alarm cut the dream—electronic and relentless. Varro switched it off, ate a quick breakfast, brushed his teeth, pulled on his lab coat and walked to the small, secret room that held the rest of his life. He unlocked it and stepped inside.