No one will believe what happened. Three days ago I disappeared for what felt like hours, but our cameras showed only thirty-seven seconds. When I pushed the button to redirect the atom into the 4th dimension, our computer showed success, but we could never know for sure; we just had to trust the output. Something felt wrong though. The servers' humming stopped. Jack was talking about problems in the experiment, but his voice sounded far away. I reached for the computer to cancel the experiment, but reality seized me, stretched me, shortened me, and pulled me apart. Until I was standing on nothing, nowhere, but on something everywhere at once; it was like experiencing a superposition. Nothingness surrounded me, the absence of everything, even light itself, yet I could see perfectly.
I heard joyful laughter behind me. When I looked, my head didn't move, but I simply saw, like pure understanding, and there was a boy, a Christmas tree, decorations, and a fireplace. Childhood happiness, like a wave hit me, not just remembering it but actually feeling it again. The boy was me in 1989, the morning I got my Game Boy, and I could taste that Christmas morning excitement all over again. Then I was eight, learning to ride my bike with my dad, but now I felt both the kid's wonder and understood my father's patience at the same time, letting me experience my whole life like flipping through a photo album, but feeling every emotion.
There was one that caught my eye, I saw myself at seventy, old and bent over research papers in my same lab. I watched my older self decide to start the dimensional research project, the very thing that got me here. I tried to yell, to warn him, to change it. My older self looked up and smiled right at me. I realized this wasn't an accident at all.