The office had seemed ordinary enough, for the last few days. It had nicer than normal shitty corporate carpet, fluorescent lights that didn't immediately give a migraine, and it was spacious. Until this particular morning, It never dawned on him that the office was a lot larger than he had ever anticipated. A simple desk, a chair, a bank of server racks, blinking lights, and noise.
Even with all these appliances fuelling the research. He figured it could also comfortably house a few ballroom dancers in full flight. He wondered where that thought had emerged from. That is certainly never a typical measure of the dimensionality of a space.
He didn't even know how to dance.
But due to the poor layout of objects in the large space, he had to constantly shimmy into the space behind the hastily installed server racks against the back wall of the room order to troubleshoot a malfunctioning piece of barely commissioned hardware.
Where there was previously wall, there was now something else. First, he observed the ceiling of the space stretching off toward infinity, a lattice work of metal supports and drop down panels. His eyes tried to find the vanishing point, and they failed.
All he saw was a distortion.
The distortion made the now apparently infinite office appear to be a constructed by an enormous and unending vista of barcodes. The world was in black and white; and the point where there was once the back wall was replaced by an indescribable depth. The dimensionality where the wall once was, familiar to thousands of years of documented human history now appeared to be beyond description.
Incomprehensible and shimmering parallel lines, as though the entire world were textured in them, constructed of a materiality that was all foreign and uncanny. The closest analogue that could be used for this visage was perhaps an illuminated downpour of rain, accompanied with the heat haze of a desert mirage.
He looked at it transfixed, unable to fathom what the sensory data failing to be processed represented. Pattern recognition kicked in, and identified an uncertainty, an illusion, a horror, or perhaps a hallucination.
His brain told him it was a humanoid form, which approached the border of the distortion, but it too seemed to be made out of this anomalous parallel lines. It lacked everything that could define it as human.
The body emerged from the divide, and snapped into his universe from its own. It was entirely flesh, with no features, genderless. It was unmistakably human, but entirely blank. An emergent slate, as though this form was just a horrific sculpture.
It approached him curiously.
Author's Notes
This was written live and in person - and the prompt was "Blank" - as a result, I decided to take this into an angle that is an upcoming chapter / part in one of stories for my science fiction anthology. It will likely re-appear in another form (hah, pun!) - but it was good to explore this idea without the need to get it perfect the first time.
