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Janus tilts both his heads in opposing directions, with a sinister smile and a melancholy frown slowly arcing toward his eyes and chin. You can feel your body growing taut with fear.
“So be it!”, his cheery face booms.
“Farewell”, his saddened visage weeps.
As if a hook had caught onto your spine, you find yourself yanked away and thrown onto what you recognize as your hostel’s terrace. The clouds part and light spills out, and an object slowly hovers its way toward you. You clasp it and it feels like an orchestra conductor’s baton, light and supple. Janus’ twin voices thunder from above.
“Go forth. You are now a cosmic architect! You every whim shall present itself before you in mere moments and the universe shall mould itself as you see fit!”
With that, the voices taper out and silence reigns. Now that Janus is gone, you relax and get your bearings. In fact, you realise you’re feeling giddy with delight. You feel a surge of energy in your every step. As you swish the baton, you hear some notes being played. Giggling, you stop, take stock, cross your legs and hold out your arms, back curved, like a proud and snobby ballerina starring as the leading lady in a musical, and make random swishes and flicks. You cock your ears expectantly. Lo, and Behold! You hear the music playing, with a pre-chorus chanting slowly rising in tone. Nodding approvingly to yourself, you look to the source of the chanting, and you see a dozen faceless ballerinas, their pallor ashen, dressed in glossy pink corsets and crimson shoes, twirling in unison with eerie laughter being shaken out of their featureless faces. Frightened out of your mind, you decide to make a run for it. You clamber up the parapet and swish yourself a soft landing. Closing your eyes, you take the plunge.
With a satisfying thud you land on what feels like soft grass. You open your eyes and find yourself in a clearing, with a forest stretching as far as you can see. You muse that you’ve never been to the Amazon and suddenly, your feet slip and you find yourself being propelled by gallons of cold water. As you struggle to get your head to the surface, you realize that you’ve lost the baton to the torrents of the seething river. But you calm yourself and realise that the baton was merely a placebo, and that it’s your mind that truly shapes your reality. And so, you imagine yourself out of the water.
You are suddenly sliding down a sand dune, the blistering sun searing your skin. Your throat is parched, your eyes burn, your skin feels rough and you find it hard to think.
The only thought you’re aware of now is regretting your choice of pill.
And now, you are the pill itself, and you see your naïve self reaching for you. Quickly imagining yourself a pair of legs, you hop off of Janus’ palm and bolt away from the room as fast as your newly sprouted legs can carry you. Thinking about how you’re too smart for your own good, you find yourself facing yourself, seated on what appears to be a medical prop-up wheelchair of sorts. You see a few masked surgeons pulling off their gloves, one of them saying, “Poor guy. He was brilliant, but ended up being too smart for his own good. We’ll put his mind to some use, though.”
They take your now brainless body away and you find yourself questioning how you are able to perceive so much when you lack any kind of connection to your sensory organs. Your musings have broken the laws of existence and you realize that your thought experiments have led to your physical container achieving density that rivals a black hole. You believe it’s only a matter of time before you manage to gobble up the cosmos and eventually the entire universe. You think,
“If only I can escape this never ending cycle of alternating realities, somehow bring it to an en-”
