Winter came early in 2027 and Denver got hit with plenty of snow right in the first go. The chilly winds arrived at nightfall and the entire city got blanketed in eight inches of powdery snow overnight. The morning came with bright sunshine but it didn’t had enough warmth to even begin melting the top layer of snow.

Jeffrey Wilkings woke with a shiver even while tangled in his bedsheets and though the feeling wasn’t unfamiliar to him, he never experienced it before getting out of bed even in the winter.

The drapes were pulled in tight and yet he could see in the normally pitch black room which was another abnormality, so he pulled the sheets tighter around himself and sat up, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed.

- What the hell? - he said as he felt stinging coldness and icy water on his feet that prompted him to reach for his phone and turn on the flashlight function only to see fine powder of fresh snow on the hardwood floor and melting on his ebony skin.

He was dumbfounded with his head still groggy and half asleep so it took him a couple moments to redirect the light to the ceiling and find a bulging segment hanging low and powdery snow slowly drifting down from a thin crack on the surface.

He rolled his eyes and looked down on the ground, finding the edges of the snow pile floor to step around it as he got up and moved over to the living room. He dreaded the moment when he would need to get rid of the bedsheets in order to get dressed. He wasn’t the type who would hesitate much or would be against some inconveniences when things needed to be done, but losing a good chunk of his body heat wasn’t something he would have been looking forward to.

He took a deep breath and dropped the covers while getting into his jogging pants, getting on a hoodie and a set of thick winter socks he had the foresight to prepare seeing the weather forecast last night.

Once dressed, he went back in the bedroom, turning on the lights by the door to assess the problem. He could see clearly that the flat roof was giving way to the weight of the snow above, bending a segment down and tearing the insulation and everything with it and allowing the snow and wind to get inside. He sighed and could clearly see his breath in the cold air that was at least a couple degrees colder than in the living room. He leaned against this bed and pushed it to the side wall to make sure it won’t get drenched with the widening of the hole on the top, then got out a couple tarps he used for painting the kitchen last month, to cover it then got the other under his arm as he got into his shoes.

It wasn’t exactly his idea of fun but he figured he’d need to cover the hole on the roof until the building manager can get a crew to fix it, to at least prevent water damage to the hardwood floor.

Getting to the roof access he found a shovel leaned against the door, so he figured he wasn’t the first visiting since the snowing started. He pulled the sleeves of his hoodie over his hands and took the shovel to go outside.

It wasn’t that easy as he hoped and he had to put his shoulder to the door to push it open with the fresh pushing against it.

The cold air was still, with the sun shining brightly, so he took a moment to close his eyes and enjoy the warmth of direct sunlight after the previous shivering and sworn that he will get a coffee going as soon as he gets the hole covered.

It didn’t take long for him to find the hole as the fresh layer of thick snow slumped down lower than everywhere else on the flat roof, so he took the shovel and cleared a path to it then threw snow off the area he suspected to be unstable, being careful not to step anywhere near it.

Eventually he dragged over a dismantled satellite dish he found by the roof access, turned it upside down and used the shovel to push it over the hole before tossing the tarp over it and used the parts of the dish mount to weigh it down.

He was just about done and sweating in the cold due to the exertion when he heard car alarms going off in the distance which by itself wouldn’t be anything new, but this time it sounded like it would’ve been hundreds of different alarms sounding off at the same time.

He stood up straight and turned around toward the noise and saw something impossible.

On the east there was a wall of distorted air in the distance somewhere as far as Cook Park and it took him a couple seconds to take in the scene and notice that the wall was moving west, straight toward him. He instinctively took a step back and looked north to the distance, then south too but the wall seemed to go on as far as he could see, moving fast, already covering half of the two blocks distance, giving him new and disturbing details to see.

The bottom of the wall seemed to pull up the street surface in the air, almost like looking at the bottom of a shallow lake through rippling water where houses, streets, cars, people seemed to fold in on themselves or branch out with multiple copies of the same object sticking out from the original in varying angles before the distortion would’ve become too blurry to make out what is going on. The air itself changed hue and saturation several times from the greyish blue of the winter morning to cyan blue to sickly yellow, suddenly changing to pitch black with distant stars showing as if it’d show a clear night sky that shifted into a purple glow that filled up with thick smoke that turned into milk-like fog and back to distorted normal before he could tear away his gaze and stumbled toward the roof access.

He slipped on the edge of the tarp and fell on top of it, right at the domed shape fo the satellite dish underneath. He was just about to struggle himself back on his feet when he heard the deep growl of tortured wood loud enough to briefly overcome the cacophony of the car alarms and and the roof gave way, depositing him into his bedroom one floor below.

He momentarily passed out but the howling of wind and tearing sound quickly dragged him back from the edge of unconsciousness and his survival instincts urged him to get on his feet and run.

Instincts and willpower were one thing, but having his brain scrambled from the fall yielded much worse results in escaping that he would’ve been fine with so like any sensible person he cursed and used the frame of his bed to steady himself and turn to look at the hole on the roof.

The wall of distortion was towering over him in the last clear moments of consciousness before he suddenly found himself beyond the looking glass, looking at his hand terrified as it grew another forearm from the elbow and bent unnaturally to the side with a splinter of wood sticking through it, bleeding heavily. He didn’t feel pain though, then he saw a head appear in front of him inches from his own. It had his own face and the other him was screaming with eyes focused on the bent and pierced arm. Around the bedroom went through significant changes, with furnitures being rearranged, including things he never owned, the ceiling was suddenly fixed then the whole wall was missing and the next moment the whole place was on fire but barely long enough for his clothing to get singed. He staggered backwards and fell through the wall between the bedroom and the bathroom and but the wall solidified with only his upper body being through. He heard a crack and felt his legs go numb while the other head stopped screaming and lulled to the side.

He was in full panic and used his arms trying to push himself free of the drywall he found himself fused with, but this time around the wall remained solid while his bones cracked like twigs as his arms bent in unnatural angles and this time around he felt everything.

The pain have set his senses in fire that quickly went beyond everything the human mind could withstand and he found himself in empty blackness, disconnected from the horrors he just experienced.

He couldn’t think clearly but for some reason he was sure of that he wasn’t dead. Even if he would have been, his mind stubbornly rejected that outcome, whatever the case may be. He was still Jeffrey Wilkings and he firmly believed that he will get through this, whatever “this” might be.

---

He was in the black void for so long he couldn’t tell the passage of time without any point of reference. Not only there was nothing to see or hear but he was lacking the natural rhythm of his body. No blood rushing through his inner ear, no breathing sounds or sensation, no nothing.

Oddly enough eventually, he found himself forming coherent thoughts about life, what it meant to be alive for him and how little he knew about life with his 24 years of age.

He was thinking a lot about the nature of that wall of horrors objectively. He came to be more curious about it than afraid of it now that he was so far removed from the physical aspects and couldn’t even remember what he used to call “pain”. All he knew that pain was bad feelings associated with it but he couldn’t recall the sensation.

The black and empty void that surrounded his mind suddenly experienced cloudy flashes of light as if lightning strikes would illuminate the land through a thick cover of storm clouds.

The initial flashes were irregular, seemingly random, then they eventually started to settle into a steady pulsing light before the lights would’ve slowly shifted and took up the shape of a sharply defined horizontal line blinking.

Jeffrey’s mind threw itself on the steady pulsing of the light and immediately associated it to passing seconds. Each blink felt like a second passing by and he started counting them with the sensation of enormous relief over the fact that he could remember numbers and counting.

The line moved and his attention followed it as it jumped to the side and left a bright white H behind.

He was confused but relieved to see something familiar. H a letter of the alphabet, and even remembering the alphabet and to be reminded of it, made him feel good.

The line jumped back erasing the H then moving right it left behind further letters in quick succession, forming words and eventually a brief sentence.

Are you in there?

He wanted to yell YES as reply but he didn’t know how. He didn’t had a voice and he couldn’t figure out if he could make use of the blinking light to form his own words.

WOW, I’ll take that as a yes, buddy - came a quick reply - Try to take it easy for now, I’m working on getting two-way communication calibrated for you - told the next line as the first jumped higher to make room for the new information below.

Jeffrey felt anything but calm. He had thousands of questions, and he needed answers. He wanted desperately to talk to the unknown someone on the other end of the connection, but he forced himself to go along, attempting to maintain some semblance of self control.

He counted the blinks of the cursor, to steady his thoughts and focus on something while waiting. He just got over a thousand blinks before the cursor moved again.

Okay, here comes a calibration procedure. It’ll take you some time to get done with it. Whatever you do, try to remain calm, otherwise it’ll get messed up and you’ll be back to square one.

A flash of anger ran through his mind as he felt like the other person would talk down on him, then he figured, the individual could be just simply factual and dispensing technical knowledge and experience, so he forced himself to calm down, just in time to the following three brief lines.

Ready

Set

Go!

***