The Null Chamber
Dr. Aris Thorne was a pioneer in sensory deprivation, but he was stripped of his license in 2012 for unethical experimentation. He didn't stop, of course. He just moved his lab to international waters on a retrofitted oil rig.
I was his assistant. I needed the money, and frankly, the science fascinated me. Thorne believed that if you could cut off absolutely every external stimulus—sight, sound, touch, gravity, even the electromagnetic field of the Earth itself—the human consciousness would not just sleep. It would untether.
He built the Null Chamber. A sphere of superconducting lead suspended in a vacuum, cooled to near absolute zero, with the subject floating in a customized superfluid that offered zero resistance.
Subject 1 was a volunteer. A monk who claimed to have mastered deep meditation.
Day 1 was standard. Vital signs stable. Alpha waves dominant. Day 3, the brain waves changed. They didn't look like sleep. They didn't look like waking. They looked like... static. Chaos. "He's panicking," I said, reaching for the abort protocol. "No," Thorne grabbed my wrist. his eyes manic. "He's receiving."
"Receiving what? It's a shielded lead sphere in a vacuum."
"Everything we see," Thorne whispered, "is just a filter. Our eyes filter light. Our ears filter sound. Our brains filter reality so we don't go mad. We just removed the filters."
On Day 5, the audio feed—which should have been dead silent—began to pick up knocking. Tap. Tap. Tap. From the inside of the sphere. The subject was comatose. He couldn't move. But the knocking was rhythmic. Mathematical. Prime numbers.
On Day 7, the knocking stopped. The vital signs flatlined. "Open it," Thorne commanded. "He's dead, Aris." "OPEN IT!"
We unsealed the airlock. The superfluid drained. We pried open the lead hatch.
The chamber was empty. Not empty of the subject. He was there. But he... wasn't. His body was present, but it was two-dimensional. Like a skin suit pressed flat against the curved interior wall of the sphere. He had been unfolded. Every organ, every nerve, spread out in a perfect, impossible anatomical diagram fused to the metal.
And on the wall, written in what looked like his own blood—but was actually just the iron from his unspooled hemoglobin—were coordinates.
Thorne laughed. He photographed the wall. "He went through," he said. "He found the door." "Where?" I choked out, staring at the flattened eye of the monk on the wall. "The bulk," Thorne said. "The space between spaces."
Thorne went in next. He didn't come out flat. He didn't come out at all. When we opened the chamber after his seven days, there was just a small, dense sphere of matter in the center, hovering. It weighed 180 pounds—Thorne's exact weight. But it was only the size of a marble.
I threw the research into the ocean. I sank the rig. But I kept the coordinates the monk wrote. Sometimes, at night, I look at the stars and wonder which one is the door. And sometimes, when it's very quiet, I hear knocking. Not from the door. But from inside my own walls.