What the old man told me was simple, I was going to suffer, and this was our only option. Travel between worlds was indeed possible, but not in a way that was kind.

To move between realities your body would have to be folded in on itself until you were small enough to fit on the point of a needle. Crushed, and mangled you would be transported from one dimension to another in unimaginable agony. Screaming, insane, not even remembering who you were or why this was happening. It would be a living hell that would last decades, anywhere from 90 to 133 years.

However, once the trip finished something strange would happen, you would wake up healthy, alive, and undamaged. Your body would have been destroyed on the journey but you would find yourself having consumed and taken the place of your alternate universe counterpart.

Those years of pain would still be in your head of course, but in a different way. The human mind is not able to comprehend pain on that scale, so you would not remember those events as if they had happened to you. It would be as if you had woken from a dream that had lasted a few seconds. In fact, the time you arrived in the alternate universe would only be a few minutes out of sync from when you left your own.

Make no mistake, the process would not leave you unchanged. You would be a shell of your former self, artificially calm, never enthusiastic, constantly seeking to forget. Better than the alternative. If for whatever reason you fully remembered those years of suffering by the time you made it to the other side, you wouldn’t have a mind left to torment. You would be a breathing body, but not alive.

Soon it will be my time to make this journey. I must, it is my great purpose. The old man who mentors me has already made the trip twice before. He said the second time round was in a way both worse and better than the first. I asked him to explain, but he never would.

My time approaches, wish me luck.