"To understand the universe, you must become part of its beginning. But beware — the beginning is not what you think."
— Journal of Aryan Dev, Final Entry
_____
CERN, Switzerland – 3:03 A.M.
The monitors blinked like anxious eyes. Aryan Dev leaned closer, sweat collecting at the base of his neck despite the freezing hum of the underground lab. His fingers hovered above the keyboard. Behind him, the largest particle collider in the world was warming up for its most ambitious test yet: a collision approaching Planck-scale energy—where space, time, and reality itself blurred.
"You're going to break something, Aryan," muttered Mira from across the room, sipping black tea like it could protect her from what was coming.
"I'm trying to," he replied, not looking back. "That's the point."
He wasn't arrogant—just certain. Certain that beneath the quarks, gluons, and mathematical veils... there was something older. Something fundamental. Something waiting to be remembered.
He had been dreaming about it for weeks. A symbol. A sound. A circle of fire. Om.
Mira sighed. "You know if this goes wrong, it won't be just your career that ends, right?"
Aryan smiled faintly. "I know."
And then he pressed Enter.
💥 0.00000000001 seconds later...
The collision should have produced a controlled burst of exotic particles.
Instead, it tore a hole.
Not in the machine—but in everything.
Light bent inward. Time froze. Gravity whimpered. Mira vanished in a blink, her body undone by laws that no longer held power.
And Aryan?
He fell through the particle.
🕉️ In the Void
There was no pain. Only motion without movement. Vision without eyes.
"You have arrived."
The voice came not from outside, but from within his atoms—except he had no atoms.
"You are not dead. You are not alive. You are between."
He felt a warmth pulsing through what he now realized was his consciousness, not his body. It radiated in patterns—like music made of geometry.
Then he saw it:
A vast, coiling serpent of light in infinite loops, each scale a spinning galaxy.
On its back lay a dark ocean.
Floating upon the ocean... was a figure.
A blue-skinned being with eyes closed in eternal calm.
Upon his navel bloomed a lotus.
From the lotus, a child sat cross-legged, eyes blazing like newborn stars.
"You are Brahma," said the voice. "The dreamer. The architect."
"You must begin the cycle again."
Aryan's thoughts raced. Brahma? Dreamer? I'm a physicist, not a god.
But the cosmos had no care for titles. It only cared for balance.
And now he remembered the dream.
🌌 The Choice
Three doors appeared before him, forged of nothing yet glowing with presence:
Creation – A door of light.Preservation – A door of water.Destruction – A door of flame.
"Choose your path. Only one will be yours for this cycle."
He hesitated.
He knew what this was.
Mythology. Cosmology. Karma.
But beneath that—quantum decision, universal bifurcation. This was the first act of causality.
He stepped forward.
Toward the door of light.
And the universe began again.