Second Big Bang

Writing Prompt

13.9 billion years in the future, the second big bang happened. The universe born from this travels back in time rather than forward. Over the past several millennia both have been colliding through time and space. In his small apartment, a man begins seeing this other universe in his dreams.

Submission

Plastic water bottles from at least two months are lying around on the floor. Alim stumbles through his one room apartment on the 26th floor after yet another short night. While going to the bathroom Alim kicks the bottles to the side while nearly tripping over them, but he doesn't really care, because he is still sleepy. The apartment in general is pretty messy with alot of clothes lying around. There isn't a real wardrobe, only a bed for a single person and a big desk with a PC and a lot of science papers. Next to the desk are piles of books as high as the table.

Alim worked too long yesterday night and still tries to figure out that theorem he was working on for the last couple of weeks. He may also drank too much whiskey while working last night trying to understand what happens, but still his productivity level never has been higher. That doesn't change the fact that the cheap supermarket whiskey is inducing a more intense headache than probably necessary and the coffee is not working too good as a cure for the headache.

For almost two weeks now Alim is having these dreams. In his dreams he sees a world on earth, but it is a different world. There are peovple and cities, but it's not the same people and cities he knows or has seen before. The buildings just have different placings and look differently, the layout is a different and sometimes the building is the same with a different store in it. Yet he definitely recognizes that it is the same location than the town he lives in himself.

The most recent dreams are more detailed and Alim realized he is always watching a woman. A woman that also is a scientist and also lives in a messy room. She wears a tightly worn white scientist robe with a name tag "Mila".

Alim is sure that the dreams he is having aren't just simple dreams and that they have a meaning in some kind of way he hasn't figured out yet. The scientist in Amin tells him to make more out of it and he also has read about parallel universes before. But this could also just be a crazy scientists wish for a more exciting life. He started to experiment with the dreams about two weeks ago anyway, which was nearly a week after the dreams started to make more sense and after they got more vivid.

He slowly connected some dots and saw some connections between his real world and his dreams, though they didn't have a direct correlation to each other.

One day he was trying to write a note and see if this note appeared in his dream, without success. Another day he tried to remember the place where he saw Mila and went there himself. That was also of no use and he didn't find anything that gave him a hint on what is going on.

The more time passed, the dreams got more lucid and started to feel even more real. Once Alim could swear that he found one of Milas wine bottles in his room, but he couldn't find it anymore. Mila always drank a cheap supermarket wine instead of the whiskey that Alim drinks, but most likely with the same effect.

And then finally indeed something was different. Mila was writing a formula on a whiteboard that she had hanging on the wall, which by the way is the same whiteboard Alim has hanging in his room, and this time Alim woke up to a surprising gift. A formula was written right there on Alims whiteboard, solving an issue he tried to solve before. Without caring that Mila had a solution to a problem he was trying to figure out, Alim hastily tried to recreate the most simple experiment he tried before - he left a note on his desk. Very visible and now with a more cleaned up desk.

Later in his dream he recognized that it actually was there in his dream as well. Was it still just a dream? Is it just there because his mind simply remembers putting it on that exact place on the table? Mila also must have seen it and had an idea as simple as writing the note. She answered Alim on the note and draw a heart. Again it worked and Alim woke up to a note with a heart under his message. At this point Alim was sure, this weren't just dreams anymore.

As exciting as this was, as quickly it was over again. Already after one single day the next experiment that Alim tried didn't work anymore.

Alim was even more confused by what was to come after that event. For the next two weeks Alim was watching Mila doing the exact same things and experiments that he himself did the two weeks before the experiment that worked, only in a reverse order. Alim saw Mila going to the place he went looking for her, he saw her writing the same note which he wrote the first time when it didn't work, he even saw her kicking a bottle on the way to the bathroom after a long night with too much wine involved. After that the dreams faded away and Alim never saw Mila again in a dream.

Over the next days and months more and more people shared similar experiences and their observations around that same day on which Amins experiment was successful. Some of the people don't quite remember the dreams or didn't have such vivid experiences. Others made as detailed and informative observations and experiments as Alim did together with Mila. No one exactly knows what happened, but alot of theories where crafted in the following years.