All I Did Was Science

By K. H. Marah

All I wanted was to make a world.

Stop looking at me. I can feel you looking at me. Judging me. I didn’t ask for much—not to rule a world that already existed, not to bend a galaxy to my will—only to make myself a cosmos, woven by my own mind. I wanted to hold infinity in my hand.

That’s small, and you judge me? You, who have the blood of innocents on your hands?

I built it myself. I used my own strength, my own blood. I didn’t steal from your precious energy reserves. I didn’t take space in a pre-existing world. I didn’t steal from the minds of—

No, wait, hold on. I actually did do that.

Still. The cost of what I did is small. It’s nothing compared to the campaigns of terror carried out by this venerable Council.

But you will sit in judgement of me. Fine. You want to hear my story? I’ll tell it.

I found the foundations of my research in your library: The Making of Pocket Dimensions and Their Limitations. It’s public. You should change that if you don’t want people doing what I did. It won’t be long before someone else figures out the section On Limitations has a different writing style from the rest. That’s why Kihaf disappeared after he finished his research, isn’t it?

Fine. Don’t get nasty.

Once I realized the research on size limitations was bogus, I started experimenting with bigger pockets. Most of them imploded or fell apart when I tried to create matter. Kihaf’s research covered introducing foreign matter to pocket dimensions, but I wanted to make my own matter; I wanted to make it a universe, not a bubble in the interdimensional membrane. Finally, I figured it out. I created one tiny dimension and accidentally tied it into my own energy. Somehow, my mind stabilized the thing enough that I could make native matter.

Where? I don’t know. I lost that one. It’s probably floating around out there, somewhere.

But I wanted a bigger world, a city-sized world, and for that I knew I would need thousands of additional minds. So, yeah, I stole energy from thousands of random people. What was I supposed to do, ask for volunteers for my illegal project?

That still didn’t make it quite stable enough, so I stole the An-tsaina stone from the—

Oh. You didn’t know about that. Forget I said anything.

I, ah, borrowed… something… something very old… to make it work. And it did, beautifully. But somehow my world, my own universe that I made with my own hands, developed a mind. Not sure how. The An-tsaina is not sentient, and I didn’t take enough from other minds to make it come alive.

What? No, I don’t know what will happen to those people when they die. How would I know that?

The world’s pseudo-sentience wasn’t evil—it was actually quite friendly. When I realized that, I gave it a little control over its own matter. Why? I wanted to see what it would do, obviously. Usually, it adapted to what I wanted—which was strange. It shouldn’t have been able to read minds. There was nothing that could possibly allow for that.

No, I didn’t read the research on the An-tsaina. You keep it under lock and key, remember?

Well, then, this is your fault, isn’t it?

Anyway, the world was functioning perfectly at first. The people I invited over couldn’t even tell it was artificial. We couldn’t go outside, though. You can see the end of the universe if you go outside, and that’s horrifying, in an endearing kind of way. The world seemed to like them, and always had what they wanted in the kitchen. And, notably, it let us leave whenever we wanted.

Then I went there by accident.

I’m born to jump between worlds, you know, but never before by accident. One day, I opened the door to my nat-world bedroom, and there I was, standing in the foyer of my artificial world. After that, it happened more frequently, and others who had visited began to suddenly find themselves there, too. And most of them couldn’t world-jump.

I know you can’t. Yes, I recognize you under your Council garb. I recognize all of you.

My world recognizes you, too.

Of course, it always let us go afterward; all it wanted was a quick visit, a friendly chat, and then we could go on our way. And that’s how it would have stayed, if you hadn’t meddled. Just because you were inconvenienced doesn’t mean you had to rewrite the code of my universe. It’s my universe. It’s your fault it started kidnapping everyone who had ever visited.

I don’t know why it anchored to a nat-world, though. That was odd.

Either way, it wasn’t my fault. Those people who walked in thinking it was Hall-Mart, or whatever they call it, and couldn’t leave—they have only you to blame. It was working fine before you started meddling.

You know the rest. It started growing, took up real estate in nat-worlds, wouldn’t let anyone leave, yada yada. I was working on the problem. I would have had it fixed, eventually, if you hadn’t gotten your so-called “engineers” to shatter it into dozens of smaller worlds. I would have figured it out. It’s not like time actually passes in there.

But you—you, with all your crimes and… and other things—you think you can sit in judgement of me? Just for dabbling a little? For doing science? All I wanted was my own world.

For that, you sentence me to death?

Fine. Be that way. I will live on in the world that I have created. Literally. Kinda bound my soul to it. Oops.

And since you scattered my creation across the multiverse, wherever you go, whether you wake or sleep, I will be nearby.

Pop in for a cuppa sometime.

I promise I’ll let you leave.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

K. H. Marah is a ghost living in a biological machine that runs on caffeine and goldfish. In service to the King Who Owns Her Soul, she haunts the Midwest and writes character-driven stories with a peculiar blend of sci-fi and fantasy. Rumor has it she also likes to make worlds, but we’ve been assured by sources who would like to remain anonymous that her worlds don’t kidnap people. Often.

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