College is tough, sometimes you stay up for days cramming papers and assignments, sometimes you have to stretch food so thin that all you had to eat through last week was a jar of peanut butter and half a sleeve of crackers. It's not all bad though, you meet good people there and can find some interesting groups or new things you’ve never even heard of. This is how I found Levi.

Levi was in the computer lab one day while I was doing research for a class, he was looking at walls of text on two different monitors. After a moment of gawking at how much he appeared to be taking in I couldn’t stop myself from asking. “What are you doing?”

“Me? I’m reading up how to build new computer parts, mine aren’t good enough for what I’m working on.”

“What do you mean? What are you trying to do, create a killer robot?”

“Funny but no, that would be impractical, I don’t like hurting people. No, what I’m trying to do is create a program that can create hyper realistic simulations of a particle accelerator so I can try to study what happens when set to different extremes.”

“That seems brilliant but pointless, don’t we have accelerators big enough with recorded results?”

“You’re not thinking of the scaling.”

The realization hit me, this guy wasn’t trying to see what would happen. He was trying to see what he was capable of. Then another realization hit me, I want to see what happens next. So the next question I asked was simple. “What are you trying to do?” He just smiled and said “Watch.” After plugging in a bright blue USB stick, he opened a drive with a video. The breath was stolen from my lungs as I watched a beautiful array of flashing colors and dancing lights. “I made it a bit more cinematic with some graphics engines. What do you think?” He asked with a genuine excitement behind his voice. “This is incredible! What else can you do?”

Over the next few weeks our friendship grew, he showed me some incredible things that he made on his computer. After long enough, Levi decided that he needed to try something more ambitious and started to learn more advanced engineering that he hadn’t learned while learning how to make computer parts. It was only a matter of time before programming and engineering met in the middle.

I got an email at about 2 in the morning, I still hadn’t been able to convince him that texting was more efficient than composing a full two paragraph email. Basically he has asked me to come over immediately as he’d done something amazing. When I got to his house he quickly ushered me inside and into the garage. Looking around I noticed two things, this guy was going to be famous, and things had begun to escalate to a point where I was worried. The entire garage had been walled with wires and husks of cannibalized computers all leading to a small metal plate on the floor. “Lee, what is this?”

“I've been working on this ever since my car broke down, I realized that I could use some of the parts for the next big project that needed heavier duty materials. When I was working on a new heating element to fix my stove I accidentally vaporized my bowl of ramen, but there was a problem.”

“Okay I have two questions before I ask what the problem was.”

“I don’t understand, I thought I explained it all okay. Did I miss something?”

“Yes, first of all, what do you mean ‘fix’ the stove?”

“I wanted to make it a glasstop stove that heated the entire surface at once so I could make different meals that I wanted to try.”

“Okay, that’s honestly a better answer than I was expecting, now second, what do you mean vaporized?”

“That’s the problem! Look over here at the panel!”

As I inspected the metal plate I noticed nothing, just a small sheet of metal with wires coming out of it. While I spent my time looking at nothing it came to me, there was nothing there. “Where’s the dust? If you vaporized it there should be debris right?”

“That’s because it didn’t actually heat anything up, it displaced the bowl.”

“What are you really making here?”

A twinge of guilt shot through his face as he realized he was figured out, then proceeded to turn his whiteboard around and show me a complex string of numbers, chicken scratch, and symbols I’ve only seen on TV shows. That last part was probably just him making random doodles. “I understand, absolutely none of this.” He looked at me like I’d just asked him where the sun goes at night, before entering a long winded rant about the manipulation of space and energy with a short intermission about snakes. Keeping him talking about a single topic for too long was about as easy as base jumping was for the elderly, it is possible, with tremendous amounts of effort. Eventually he got to the point. “I can essentially make things go somewhere else, no idea where but I planned around that. Why not just send a live feed?”

“What would you send?”

“I don’t really use my phone, maybe if you video chat me, the signal won’t break after the transport.”

“This feels dangerous Lee, what if something goes wrong?”

“What’s science without a few risks?”

After typing away at a keyboard for a few seconds the entire room started to hum and whir, he called me on his phone and then put it on the plate. When he pressed the next key all I could see was a blinding flash of light. When my vision finally returned he looked at me with an almost desperation in his eyes, when I looked at my phone all the screen said was “Signal lost.”

This of course, raised more questions than answers, where did the phone go? How do we find out where it leads? What else can we send? I didn’t end up leaving Levi’s house that night, or for the next week. The majority of our time was spent trying to figure out what exactly was happening. From our research, we came up with absolutely nothing. After about an hour of mindlessly sending chess pieces and other random objects, we heard a knock at the door. Levi jumped up and sprinted for the door like he’d been spring powered, when he came back to the garage he showed me the package in his hands. “It’s finally here, it's time to get some answers.” He extracted a small device from the package and immediately shoved a battery into it. “What is it?”

“It’s a bug! Usually stalkers or cops get these things to track where people are going, so I got one to find out where it goes by itself!”

“That’s a great idea! Should we send it now?”

After fully activating and turning on the location tracker, he nodded and placed it on the panel in the center of the garage. I activated the panel and once again the light was all I could see. When I could see again, Levi was already at his laptop frantically pushing the refresh key. “Dammit!” He screamed in frustration. I understood, he thought he could finally see where everything had gone but once again, this raised far bigger questions. “Levi-” I started.

“Where is it all going? I don’t understand! I thought maybe we could just track the signal but it isn’t-”

“Levi!” I shouted. He looked at me in bewilderment, I’d never raised my voice with him before but he missed something. I calmly told him what I saw that he didn’t. “I want you to read me the time of the test.” After looking at his notepad he relayed. “8:19, why?”

“What time does it say that the tracker signal is cut ?”

“8:20.”

His entire world shattered in the moment the words left his mouth, he hadn’t just moved something from one place to another, he sent it somewhere that wasn’t our world. If the tracker had just disintegrated, the time wouldn’t have changed. The signal was cut by the object leaving the range, which usually wouldn’t be too hard to grasp, except for the fact that the range is the entire planet.

My stay at Levi’s house only extended further as we tried more and more experiments to get to the bottom of what he had created. We tried sending in something tied to a rope, however it appeared that anything sent through had to be within the confines of the panel. We tried reversing the process but something made a loud snap sound, and everything went horribly wrong.

Unlike the other times, there was no bright light, there was no whirring of machinery, there was only a strange wall in front of me painted in a pale red. Well at least it wasn’t Mars. I thought to myself. I looked around me to find a hallway, with nothing better to do I started exploring. The more I looked around, the less things made sense. There were impossible corners, angles that just couldn’t exist. I walked around the same support pillar three times and the surrounding area changed with each pass. “Where am I?” I wondered out loud. However the moment my thought reached the world around me, the world answered back. “Somewhere you don’t belong.” I couldn’t comprehend what had happened until I felt the breath touch the back of my neck. Even though I was certain that the only thing that could have been behind me was a wall I still broke into an olympian level sprint. I ran until my lungs pumped exhaust fumes, turning corner after corner searching for somewhere to hide. Eventually I felt satisfied and slumped against a wall.

I needed to breathe, to collect myself. I tried to think the way Levi taught me whilst dealing with the unknown, compile information, review the situation, have a backup plan for anything risky. Okay think Mark, obviously this place doesn’t follow your rules, you’re not alone, you don’t know how to get home. I’m safe now but only if I stay smart, I need to find food and water so if my stay lasts too long, I won’t die. I felt a little more at ease once I took the time to think. My backup plan of “Shit yourself and die” isn’t exactly great but I don’t really have a lot of options. Time passed as it ever did, and eventually I fell asleep.

There really wasn’t a way to tell when I woke up, or how long I had slept, however when I woke I felt I had the energy to move on. As I explored the halls further I learned nothing about the space I found myself in, I just couldn’t find the ability to map out where I was going. All I could do was pray that I might be going in the right direction, and pray even harder that there even is a right direction. About two lefts and a right later, I was struck with a heavy determination.

What I came across was a medium sized pile of chess pieces, the tracker, a plunger, and various other items that we had teleported through before messing with the settings that sent me here.The two most important things that I found among it all was Levi’s cellphone, and a week old bowl of ramen. “Please don’t let it be that bad.” I silently pleaded before I lifted the bowl to my mouth.

It wasn’t as bad as I thought, it was so much worse. During the week that had passed, an amount of the broth had evaporated, not all of it though. The noodles that had rested above were solid as if they had not been cooked but instead reinforced with gravel. The noodles remaining under the broth looked safer as the tilted bowl pushed them towards my mouth. As soon as they touched my tongue the noodles had almost instantly ceased to exist, turns out the water slowly dissolved them from the inside out.

After spending a minute sulking in the corner to cushion my newly gained trauma, I checked Levi’s phone. It was dead. “I really don’t know what I was expecting.” The growing annoyance was immediately replaced with the primal urge to freeze. Every hair on my body stuck straight up as a ragged breath cut through the air. “Is this your doing, Torvelk?”

“Torvelk?”

“Intruder in your tongue.”

“NO! I was sent here by mistake, I’m trying to get home!”

“You are lost, Torvelk?”

“Yes! I’m trying to go back to my home. Please don’t hurt me.”

“If someone of your kind can find a door in this space, it will lead back to your world. You are prey to most, including myself.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I have eaten this year, so I will spare you, others here have not eaten in a very long time.”

I had more questions but before I could get them out the being passed through a wall and I saw no more. Minutes passed as I thought. All I need to find is a door, how hard can it be? As it turns out I really can’t say how hard it was as I couldn’t tell how much time had passed. After what I could only guess to be a handful of hours, I stumbled into a room. Unlike practically everything else here, there was something inside.

The room left me about as bewildered as everything else in the liminal space I’d found myself in. Inside were several different things that felt as if they had very little if not zero relation to one another. A life-sized statue of a woman, a decorative football plate, a handgun, and a lawn gnome. I looked at the gun resting at the foot of the statue and pursed my lips in frustration. I knew exactly what was about to happen, but I really needed that gun. Taking a deep breath in, I lock eyes with the statue and slowly bend over to pick up the gun.

As my hand made contact with the grip I felt a sharp pain on my wrist, when I looked down I saw that the gnome had bitten me so hard it almost started to draw blood. I screamed and punted the little bastard as hard as I could. When I looked back to the statue I could swear something had changed but I didn’t have the time to check because that gnome was probably coming for me. Taking one last glance for reassurance the statue blinked at me and once again I was running fast enough to give track pros envy.

When I had the chance to inspect the handgun I found that it had seven bullets in the magazine.I didn’t know if it was even enough to take down one thing here, but I was an american with a gun, that's about as much confidence as I needed to continue on. I didn’t know if it was stress or things starting to show themselves more but I could swear that I kept seeing things through my peripherals. Eventually I layed down in some corner and cried, everything here was just so scary, I didn’t know how long I’d been trapped here. I didn’t even know if I was going to find anything the way I was going but what choice did I have? I cried myself to sleep.

Waking up was a mistake. When I opened my eyes, I looked to see a rather large creature covered in rough matted fur dragging me by my leg. Very quietly, I tried to pull the gun from my waist. It was too loud. The creature looked back at me with fire in its eyes and let out a horrifying screech. I shook my leg free from the large taloned hand-like paws of the thing but it quickly swung its claws at my leg to stop me and pierced the skin.

I tried to scream in pain as the inch long claws dug deeper and deeper into my leg but my head flew back and hit the floor like books being slammed on a table as the creature yanked me forward. As soon as it released my bleeding leg it slowly crawled towards my face, no doubt finally going for the kill. Which is finally when I decided it was safe to fight back. I grabbed the fur on the top of its head and shoved the barrel of the handgun directly into the things eye socket, after pulling the trigger twice the entire body fell limp in an instant. I had to drag myself away from it as standing up felt like trying to put your entire body weight on your pinkies. As I dragged myself further I tried to look around and see if anything else threatening was in the immediate area. Then I saw it. A door. An ordinary door that you’d see in basically any city building.

I stuffed the gun in my hoodie's stomach pocket and started crawling faster. I was getting closer to the door, and I could feel my hopes finally rising. However I heard a very familiar screech, when I looked to see what it was, I saw another one of the creatures I had killed not moments ago. I propped up my good leg and made a weird three limbed crawl-sprint to the door and threw myself at it as hard as I could. My hand slammed down on the handle and flung the door open, I flew through it and squeezed my eyes shut while I waited to find out if it had worked or not. When I opened my eyes, a classroom filled with both terrified and intrigued teenagers looked back at me. “Um, we wouldn’t happen to be anywhere near Bell U would we?” I asked in probably too casual a tone for being covered in blood and having an open leg wound.

Over the next couple of weeks I was moved around a lot. A group of teachers from the high school I had mysteriously appeared in helped carry me to the infirmary before an ambulance arrived and took me to hospital. Eventually cops came asking questions, I must’ve said something right or something wrong because the next morning I woke up in a much fancier looking room. Men in suits asked me some similar questions, but eventually moved on to weirder ones, I'll add some of the conversation here.

“We were told that you kept saying you went ‘somewhere else’ mind telling us what that means?”

“Wherever I was, it could not have been earth, things were wrong.”

“What do you mean wrong kid? What did you see?”

“I don’t know what I saw! I don’t even know how I got there, all I know is that almost nothing there was what it seemed.”

The suited man whispered something to himself before asking. “Was something wrong with the walls?”

That’s when I realized that these men knew way more than I did. Eventually I was able to charge Levi’s phone, which was still in my pocket after everything. When I contacted him he sobbed over the phone, he was so happy to hear I was okay. After the men I had assumed were agents of some sort released me after some lengthy paperwork, I learned that I was two states over from my town. When I got back home I told Levi everything, he doesn’t care anymore. He doesn’t like working around computers anymore. I on the other hand can’t stop thinking about that place, I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe some part of me wants to go back, maybe I just want more answers.