The Station, Part One.

There exists a room. At one end, a door; at the other end, a window which leads into a much smaller room. This room, the larger of the two, is a station. You cannot reach this station like you’d reach any other; it only appears to those who have nowhere else to turn.

Do not be fooled, however. This station is not a force of good in the universe nor is it a force of evil. It is instead a force of consequence, and not one to be reckoned with.

Unfortunately for today’s soul, Abraham was not one to have such knowledge; nonetheless, he entered the station with overwhelming hesitation. The heat of the surface world was awful, yet something about the station’s grey, carpeted walls and dirty, white tile floor was much, much, worse. He desired to leave. He wanted so strongly to run home, and yet he no longer had a home to run to.

Like all souls who’d entered before Abraham, though unbeknownst to him, he was lost. Lost in the world. Lost in life. Lost to himself.

But the station had found him.

He walked slowly between the crowd of plastic, folding chairs which filled the chapel-size room. At one spot, the tile was peculiarly sticky. The bright, beaming LED lights hummed above, relentless in their sterilization of the shadows. Abraham reached the window.

On the opposite side sat the Interface, a gaunt portrait of humanity crammed inside a dark, rubbery box. Its pale latex features stared vacantly. Abraham cleared his throat, and it came to something close enough to life. Its words more or less oozed out of its thin lips, asking its customer for a directive.

“I--I’d like to purchase a ticket please...” Abraham said, looking anywhere that wasn’t the Interface’s excuse for a pair of eyes.

It wasn’t enough. More words spilled clumsily into the air, looking for elaboration.

“A ticket to yesterday...please--please,” he stuttered. The sooner this interaction was over, the better Abraham hoped he would feel.

The false human repeated his words, thick like molasses and just as slow. Several servos began operation, and the Interface’s mechanical arm slithered out of the dark; gripped in its digits was a black rectangle, only slightly bigger than a face card. Abraham plucked the ticket free with his first two fingers and thumb. The card was barely tangible and cold to the touch like the fog of dry ice when placed in hot water. As the ticket entered Abraham’s possession, he noticed a second door had appeared in the station a mere five inches from the Interface’s window. Turning to thank the face, he found the window was gone. Looking back, the seating was gone as well. Even the entrance had vanished. Abraham had made the decision and now, with ticket in hand, the only way back was to go forward.

He stared into the door in front of him and he felt the door stare back. Drawn to the silky black void ahead, Abraham was barely conscious of his actions as his feet took him closer. The door vanished behind him, and Abraham was suspended in a space outside of spacetime. For what could have been an eternity or a mere three seconds, he waited. And then? The colors.

Bright flashes of red and orange, green and lavender. Blue, violet, chartreuse and sarcoline moving before his eyes like watercolors made of light. The visible spectrum rained down before him like a waterfall of energy. Sounds like laughter, thunder, the crackling of the ocean. All of it beautiful music rushing to his ears; an orchestra on fire.

Then, all at once, it was over.

Painted before him was not an image, not a memory, but a moment in time.

The day before.