Returning to work felt frustratingly familiar at this point. I found myself waiting for my car to get to the lab impatiently, walking, nearly running, to my desk, and sitting down. The first thing that I noticed was that, today, unlike both previous iterations of today, the information flooding from our measuring devices held no patterns within their eternally random processes. I waited, watching, for seconds that drew into minutes, that in turn became hours, but nothing. I felt what little composure I had built snap and I fell from my chair to my knees, sobbing at the terrible loneliness that I felt.
Many of my coworkers tried to comfort me, asked me what was wrong, but how does one explain the embrace of God? The hellish combining with the Devil? The absolute, mind tearing madness of the truth of the Universe? Or even just the complete, heartbreaking loss of such greater entities? So instead of responding, I just cried harder. Eventually, I'm not sure how much time had passed, my coworkers just resigned the idea of calming me and returned to work, ignoring the agony I was going through.
Night fell and I stood shakily to my feet. I checked the systems once more, hopeful. Hopeful that those telling patterns would return. Hopeful that it was all a dream that I would eventually recover from. When I saw that there were no patterns, I felt myself grin manically, then start to laugh. I laughed as I walked to my car, laughed all the way to my house, and laughed as I entered my home. My voice, sore from laughter, turned to heart wrenching sobs as I came to the conclusion that I was not deemed worthy by God, and even the Devil didn't want me. I was filthy. I was WRONG.
I could no longer bear the loneliness, so I did the only thing I could think off. I grabbed my laptop and took it apart and removed all of the physical monitoring devices, then put the computer back together. Before I was a scientist, I was a computer programmer and I put that knowledge to use as I turned the laptop on and opened the programming for it and slowly, one by one, removed all of the digital monitoring that had been installed, at least the ones that I could find. Impatient to get started, I didn't look too deeply, which looking back was probably not a good idea.
Having removed all forms of monitoring that I could in such a short time, I began to search for even the slightest glimpse of people who had experienced similar things. Anyone who had seen the horrors of reality, anyone who had truly experienced the warmth of God, or even anyone who had felt the pain, sin, and wrongness of the Devil. I did this for months, my schedule changing slightly to allow for it. I would wake up earlier, search for a couple hours, go to work and search for patterns from the devices, go home and search for a couple of hours, go to sleep, then repeat.
After just a month of research, I found many people claiming to have seen god, seen the devil, or had the secrets of the universe revealed to them. I spent my weekends visiting these people, emailing them, or calling them as was possible. The first man claimed that the universe was simply a spiral that could be unwound at the whims of anyone who understood. This was wrong, I knew it was wrong as I had seen how the universe was formatted. The universe was infinite, endless masses of unintelligible shapes layered over each other, which could only be manipulated by a higher being, and they could rip it apart or rework it as they pleased.
The second person was a woman who claimed to have seen god. There were plenty of people who claimed to see God, so I didn't listen to most, but she claimed that his form blocked out the sun and struck both awe and fear into her heart. This was so similar to my experience that I decided to give it a shot. When I arrived at her house, I shared a very brief version of my experience, not going into detail about what God looked like, then asked her what God looked like to her. She described a man, so I already knew she was wrong, but she continued to describe a man who was taller than mountains, had hair that reached his feet, and a beard that hid most of his body. I found her description fascinating for a fantasy story, but not anything like what I needed, so I bid farewell and left.
I found a teenager who's parents were dead, and they claimed to have seen the devil himself take them away. Drawing them, not into the ground, but up into space. I met this teenager in a video call and we talked for hours. The teen claimed that a massive, horned figure had appeared in space above his home, yet nobody else could see him. His parents had been horrible people, and the devil had come to claim them early. I listened to what he said and took notes so he wouldn't think I was completely disregarding him, but the Devil and God looked the same, seemingly as if the Devil was created in God's image and with God's power. The Devil was no horned figure, and therefore I ignored this teens ramblings.
As the months passed, my coworkers noticed my obsession, and I even had some recommend therapy. I laughed them off and continued to work as if nothing had happened, and I met with and spoke to many other people, all of which I was able to write off as liars after any in depth conversation. After years, I began to lose hope. I had talked to hundreds, if not thousands, of people who claimed to have had similar experiences as me. Years of working on this, searching for anyone, anyTHING that matched what I had seen, and there was nothing. The closest were horror stories made to scare children.
Eventually, I stopped searching as much actively. I created a website that was solely for the purpose of posting information about experiences with otherworldly, other REALMly entities. Of course, plenty of it was fake, most of it was not what I was looking for, but almost 0.1% of what got posted there seemed like EXACTLY what I was looking for, but not to the level I was looking. There were people who described the entities at the edges of their vision, made of shadow or light. There were people who perfectly explained the scratching at the back of your mind when you came across even just the passing scrawls of God. There were, of course, plenty of people who could describe the sound of creatures scrabbling and crawling at the edges of your perception, but anyone who had ever been on a farm long enough could do that. I tried to contact these people, but they never responded, not once.
I found myself trying to find joy in other things, making friends, and even trying my hand at romance. Romance never quite worked out as I found myself comparing the feelings they gave me to the feelings God gave me, and they could never compare as sinful, filthy humans. I instead made friends with other coworkers, and eventually some of my friends grouped together and decided that they would go scuba diving in the summer, and they invited me. I decided to agree with them since nothing had truly come from any of my searching for God, or even any proof of what had happened.
In the months that came between the date being set, and the actual deep sea diving, I found that my friendships didn't even slightly fill the void that had come from being ripped from God's embrace, or even the Devils foul touch, but I felt rare moments of joy with them at times, especially when drunk. However, even when I felt joy, I always felt deeply and utterly... alone. A loneliness that never quite faded when I surrounded myself with friends, or even when I paid for whores, there was nothing that filled that loneliness.
There was no feeling like being in a room full of your friends and having this irresistible feeling that you're alone. No feeling like having a lover, paid or otherwise, in your arms and yet feeling that neither you nor they would ever be enough. It was to the point where I, at many times, felt that there was no point in continuing my painful life, but just the slight hints and glimpses I got of others who had experienced at least bits and pieces of what I had kept me going. It was the feeling of being completely alone while knowing that you didn't have to be. It was like being locked in a box with the one you love more than anything in the world sat just outside that box, completely unaware of your presence just next to them. So... completely alone...