It did not begin with a sound, or with a flicker. It manifested as a feeling of being unfolded.

  One moment, he was Matthew Brown and the next the universe dissolved. It wasn’t violent or painful; it was a serene unraveling of all sensation. His body became a thin note that stretched on forever. The air escaped his lungs and became a color he had never seen. His very atoms were gently pulled apart and laid bare, like a blueprint unrolled for inspection.

  He was no longer a body. He was a single, dimensionless point of awareness, adrift. And yet he was all points, all at once.

  And in that state, he could perceive them. They were not shapes or figures. Instead they felt like vast, cool pressures as if standing in the presence of mountains gathered in thought. They read his consciousness, sifting through his memories like grains of sand. Reading each moment like a point of data. When their ethereal protocol was completed, an immense and silent question was posed. It felt as if an infinite number of doors were presented at once, along with a singular request for a point of re-entry.

  Overwhelmed, the consciousness that was Matthew Brown fractured. A chaotic torrent of sensory data erupted through him, and it remembered. The rough texture of a favorite blanket, the smell of mildew, the sound of footsteps, the precise angle of sunlight through his bedroom window as a child. It was not an answer. It was a psychic scream made of pure, fragmented memory.

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  It was accepted as coordinates.

  And the beings, perceiving this cry of terror as a rich data-stream, began the next phase of their work. In their vast and humane misunderstanding, they filtered the signal, discarding the complex noise of his adult life and locking onto the simplest, most stable data points. They had no understanding of what childhood was. They took the burst of sensations as a set of instructions.

  Next was an act of biological assembly, a translation of a code they did not truly comprehend. Based on the coordinates that had been unknowingly provided to them, the consciousness that was Matthew Brown was pulled from the ether, compressed from infinity into a single locality. They poured him back into the confines of three dimensions, weaving the disparate threads of his senses together. The feeling was of being meticulously rebuilt, atom by atom, from a blueprint the maker had the barest understanding of, but a procedural optimum was finalized.

  Finally, there was a fall not through space, but through time, for it was the only measurement at this higher plane. It wasn’t a journey toward a destination but a simple act of return, like a cell being returned to its petri dish. There was a final, crushing compression; a sense of infinite awareness being forced back through an impossibly small aperture.

  And then, the soft feel of bed sheets.