Pt 15: The Panel

Monday May 30th, 2016
8:26 am (7 hours of sleep)

Tumbling through forever, I found I couldn't speak. I had found myself along passages of time and space long since forgotten by the children of the infinite. What seemed like eons and millenia adrift along corridors and passages, I came upon a door labeled "maintenance". How I managed to open said door I cannot say but I know one thing is for certain. I should never have crossed the mantle of that ill fated room.

It seemed like a natural boiler room. All except the far end had a large panel with all sorts of buttons, dials, levers, and many colored blinking lights. All of these seemed to be labeled with some function of the universe from causing rain to fall to creating planets and other celestial bodies. I would have had to exhibit a level of self control I knew in my wanderings of the infinite, I had long since lost.

I approached the panel all aglow with thoughts and ideas of what this might mean for reality. Did I, at this very moment, have the power to create and destroy the very fabric of what we had ever known? I inspected this panel of creation and realized there had been someone here long before my own admittance to this back room of reality. Some switches had what looked like a layer of dust on them while yet others seemed newly installed and shiny.

As I inspected the panel I noticed some buttons and levers were pushing and pulling themselves. One button labeled "birth" kept pressing itself with a speed no mortal man would be able to track. another labeled "death" seemed to be attempting to keep up with it's counterpart. All the buttons and levers each having there own distinct purpose clearly labeled was fascinating enough, though through my inspections I became transfixed with one particular lever the color of cobalt. Not because I knew what would occur should I use it for it's designated purpose but because I didn't know it's purpose. It was ancient in design with a layer of dust showing it's neglect but what interested me most was the fact of it being unlabeled. Something of it's mystery was so enticing that I had to interact with it.

I found my hands upon that mysteriously beautiful piece of cobalt equipment That now I wish I had never laid eyes on and with almost no force at all had flipped it. What came next is hard to describe. The senses of a physical being like myself don't seem to e acute enough to take all that I witnessed in. Several colors and hues that don't exist upon any known spectrum appeared to come from within the machine and swallowed all other colors from the room. My senses overcome and failing me, I started to question my sanity as a deafening sound akin to the chaotic roaring of a battlefield though not like any field of battle I have witnessed. As the sound grew in crescendo all emotions of awe or wonderment seemed to have been absorbed by the panel only to be replaced by dread and a sense of impending death. Not my own death but the death of everything. The death of reality. I fought with the switch attempting to will the thing to it's previous position. However, nothing I did nor any number of profanities forced the object of my previous fascination to it's starting position.

As the cacophonous roar grew ever more I saw upon the floor printed as plain as you are reading this right now, a sign which read, "Caution: interfering with the workings of this panel may cause an imbalance and subsequent total collapse of reality. Have a pleasant day". The reading of the sign was the last thing I experienced as the hallways and backrooms of reality collapsed into nothing.