Causal loop
Contains: F/f, unaware, entrapment, Sci-Fi
The most persistent principles in the universe are
accident and error
Sometimes, even the most complex and perfect system
incurs in a flaw. The smallest and most insignificant imperfection might just
rarely provoke what could be simply defined as a mistake. The chances of this
happening are close to zero; but it is definitely not impossible.
When Rachael opened her eyes, her mind was clouded by scattered
and confused thoughts. She had woken from a dreamless sleep, although she
didn’t remember falling asleep at all. But most importantly, even before
opening her eyes, Rachael immediately knew something was off. When she finally
did, she found herself lying on her stomach on a smooth and somewhat soft
ground, which was definitely not her bed. A dark, immense expanse laid before
her, as far as the eye could see in the almost complete obscurity. Fear slowly
starting to take over, Rachael slowly turned her head upwards. Endless rows of
alien-looking tree-like fibers towered over her. They had no leaves nor
branches, and they were white as the snow. Beyond them, only darkness. Only
after a few seconds she saw the ceiling above her, incalculably high. Her heart
started pounding, a feeling of dread and anxiety finally overwhelming her. That
place looked like some kind of underground cave, judging by the strange humidity
of the air and the faint earthy scent. She definitely wasn’t in her bedroom
anymore.
Rachael rushed up, heavily breathing and starting to
panic. She tried to figure out how she ended up there, to remember anything
about her last memories, but any effort to recollect was met with a blurry of
confused images, made worse by her shocked state, as if her own mind refused to
cooperate. She searched for the answer to a simple, burning question, asking
herself where the hell she was, but could not find it. She started aimlessly
looking around, searching for any kind of indication or sign of civilization
around her, among the tall white forest, but was soon forced to renounce. Resignation
and angst quickly replaced the initial shock. Rachael was completely, utterly,
cluelessly lost. She shouted the loudest “Help!” she could muster. Her voice
was absorbed by the dark vastity, unanswered. Again, she was forced to
acknowledge the futility of her actions. Frustrated and scared, she sat down
under the tree-like strand growing from the ground, hugging her legs tightly.
The pajamas-clad girl simply sat there for quite some time, trying to recollect
herself. All around her, there was an eerie silence. Eventually, when she got
up, she had taken a decision. She walked away from the site of her arrival and
ventured ahead, hoping to find something – anything at all – that could
somehow help her.
Rachael walked, and walked, and walked, but the
landscape around her remained unchanged. She started to walk faster. Then, she
started to run, her socked feet sinking just slightly in the strange terrain.
Step after step, they became sore, and she had to stop. She considered herself
to be quite fit, but the strangely humid air oppressed her, making her lose her
stamina quicker than usual. The lost girl dropped herself on the ground,
dripping in sweat, her long red hair stuck to her forehead and messy. She
looked around: it was as if she never moved. “Damn you!” Rachael shouted with
anger into the darkness. She laid down on her back, holding back tears of
frustration. That was when she noticed, in the very dim light, that one of the
strands was taller than the rest, growing not too far from her. Gathering all
her strength, she got up and reached it. It was four, maybe five times her own height.
Maybe from there she could have a better view of that mysterious place, she
thought. Besides, Rachael knew that she had no other plan. So, she grabbed onto
the trunk and climbed up. It was weirdly soft and easy to grip, and the
intrepid girl had no problems reaching the top. Finally, standing above the
forest, she looked around. The cavern seemed to end in a valley, but it was
miles and miles ahead. Behind her, a wide opening on the ceiling, from which
the scarce light entered the cave. Her eyes took a while to adjust to it, but
when they did, she could look around a little more clearly.
That was when the dreadful realization hit her.
A shoe. She was in a damned shoe.
Her first reaction was of utter shock, followed by one
of lowkey disgust. Her mind started racing, suddenly taking in all the
consequences of her discovery. Calculating the (literal) proportion of such
revelation was an overwhelming task. If this cave was, after all, actually the
inside of a shoe, then the “forest” were the strands of lint of the insole. It
was… sickening. “Just… how small am I?” she barely whispered,
elaborating the fact that this whole situation, by the laws of physics, shouldn’t
have been possible. The stunned girl couldn’t even get over the weirdness of
the sheer size of the mundane object she was trapped in. It was maddening. At
that point, Rachael wasn’t even sure if all this was even real. She knew only
one thing for sure: she had to get out of there. Climbing down the tree-size
lint, she tried to plan her next move. Maybe she could reach the opening of the
gargantuan footwear and from there... climb out? It seemed impossible. But she
had to know where she was. And why she was there.
Unfortunately, she barely had time to touch the
ground. A blinding light from outside filled the shoe, stunning Rachael. Even
without seeing anything, she could feel a presence outside. A long
series of loud thuds, coming from the outer world, suggesting the movement of
something big. After a glimmer of confidence in the past minutes, an
incontrollable fear of the unknown gripped her heart. A gigantic shadow soon
loomed over the insole she was stranded on. And her heart skipped a beat.
An enormous, imposing face was barely discernible
above the shoe. But this wasn’t even the most unsettling part about the absurd
view. Racheal noticed it immediately. The messy fiery red hair, the gleaming
crystal eyes, the soft cheeks, the pensive and absorbed expression. They were
just like hers. It didn’t take long for her to realize the truth, which was
apparently impossible. That massive being didn’t just look like her. It was
her. And, as a consequence of that paradox, she deduced that she was inside
her own shoe. Rachael was unable to believe what she saw. She refused to.
“She’s… I’m… huge!”
Her rational mind tried to elaborate all the logic
possibilities, but the diminutive girl unfortunately didn’t have the chance to
consider it too much. A devastating earthquake violently rocked her entire
world. She found herself sliding around among the fibers of the insole, once
again lost inside the forest. Turning towards the outside world, she saw a
white behemoth entering the cave, wiggling as it made its way towards the
bottom of the valley, shacking the walls of the underworld. She cursed loudly,
recognizing her own, socked foot coming her way. And being in the middle of the
insole, she was exactly on its path. “No… No way this is happening…” she said,
still trying to convince herself that this was somehow impossible. And yet, it
was happening indeed. In seconds, her toes flew over her head, towards the
bottom of the shoe. The socked sole of her foot, however, was quickly
descending on top of her. She ran, but remembering how long it took her to
travel through what was just her insole, she quickly realized how useless running
was. Rachael screamed, but her voice went lost inside her comfortable shoe.
Then, suddenly, her foot came down on her.
Meanwhile, Rachael, the other, normal-sized
one, was getting ready for a new day, blissfully ignorant of the horror she was
causing to the other version of herself. Being the rational person that she
was, normally she would refuse to acknowledge that such a paradox could even
happen to begin with. She wouldn’t believe it if someone else told her. She
would hardly believe it if she experienced it herself… She slipped her shoes on
and put her hair up in a bun, as usual, ready to go out. A long day at the
university was awaiting her. Then, the redhead trotted out of her apartment.
Rachael, the small one, victim of a cruel joke of the
universe, went unnoticed, her size imperceptible compared to her other self. The
unescapable massive foot had trapped her between the expand of the insole and
the tangle of strings of her own gym sock. The white cotton strands smothered
her and pressed her down inevitably. The perfume of lavender of the freshly
washed sock was almost mocking, in her situation. Rachael was cramped into a
small safe space of few millimeters between the tree-sized fibers, where the
pressure of the enormous foot didn’t threaten to break her. She tried to scream
again out of exasperation, but the sound was muffled by the fuzzy walls of her
prison. She couldn’t believe she was being kept beneath the lowest, most
humiliating part of her own body. The situation was so impossibly absurd that
the dust-sized girl would have laughed at it, if she hadn’t been involved. With
every step, she observed from her safe spot the giant foot dominating her view,
shifting and adjusting inside the shoe to be more comfortable, like a giant
white monster too big to be interested in devouring her. She could have never
imagined that a majestic, terrifying sight of such scale was happening every
day, right inside her shoe. And now, she was trapped in it.
Rachael wondered if she could bother with preparing a
plan. She was stuck in a completely different world, was there any possibility
that the giantess could notice something so small like herself? Was there
even a point in trying? BOOM. A deafening step interrupted her flow of
thoughts, as everything seemed to collapse on her. “Shi--”. BOOM. Another. An
another. The other Rachael began to walk.
Still naturally oblivious to the peril she was putting
herself through, Rachael continued her day as normal. She met with her friends,
went to all her courses, had her lunch in a hurry, then more things to do in
the afternoon… All while having a small herself under her foot, nothing but an
error in the fabric of the universe, whose origin was still unknown to the
unfortunate girl. Hours passed, and Rachael’s predicament was starting to drive
her mad. She never wondered what an ordinary day of her life looked like from
inside her shoe, but now, despite herself, she knew it. And she never thought that
her active life could have such terrible drawbacks before that day: any
occasional sprint or brief run during her day was a nightmare in her current condition.
The poor girl was tossed around, back and forth between the forest of lint and
the tangle of stands of her sock. Eventually, she got stuck in the web of
cotton, against the sole of her own foot. Her normal-sized counterpart had just
got up from the lunch table on a full stomach. Rachael wiggled and squirmed,
but her struggles only made her situation worse, her small body being trapped
even faster in the tangle of her own sock like quicksand. She screamed for
help, but no one could hear. Rachael took a step forward. Then another, and
another…
The oblivious girl made her way the old wing of her
faculty. Unbeknownst to many, in a dim hallway, there was an old laboratory,
now abandoned. She had been going there every day for weeks, in secret, tinkering
with old, dusty appliances and devices. Rachael heard that, somewhere among all
the forgotten junk, there were a few promising projects, abandoned for lack of
funds a long time ago. Being the kind of resourceful person with a knack for
fixing stuff (and being late with her own thesis project), Rachael blindly
followed the rumors, hoping for a quick solution to her problem.
Today was no different. The sound of the plastic sole
of her canvas shoes squeaking against the cold floor filled the dusty room. She
resumed her work from a new pile of mechanical junk on a workbench. She stood
in front of it and began searching among the scraps for anything that could
still be working.
That day, she felt particularly demotivated, and her
search wasn’t really successful. After almost half an hour, just when she was
about to give up, she pulled out a strange device, with a red led still
tenuously glowing. Apart from a few cables coming out of the weird cube of
metal and a missing screw here and there, it still seemed intact. Intrigued,
the girl examined it in her hands and, after a quick evaluation, she was sure she
could fix it… Whatever it was. She quickly grabbed some tools from the table
and began to work.
She had been extremely careful while repairing the
object, fearing to break it or to cause any malfunction. After all, it looked
very old and she still didn’t know what it did exactly. “No matter”, Rachael
casually said to herself, “I’ll figure out what this is, eventually”. Her
meticulous work continued with no problems, until she decided to fic the
cables. Her steady grip held one of them, slowly connecting it to the matching
end. She was precisely moving it, with no minimal mistake, when she felt
something. A small, insignificant itch, on the bottom of her right foot.
Stinging, as if something was there, wiggling against her sole.
Down, far beneath her attention, the small
Rachael, completely unaware of where (the other) she was, or what she was
doing, was slowly breaking free from the strings of her sock. Biting, tearing
and snapping with brute force threads barely visible to the naked eye. She had
no idea of what she caused.
Her body reacted to that minor disturb, and her hand
slightly shook. The normal Rachael was struck by a spark, unnaturally powerful,
coming from the cable. She was pushed back by an unexplainable force, that
shattered the cubic device and sent an electric discharge through her whole
body. The strong light emitted by the impact blinded her for a few seconds.
When Rachael finally saw the few remains of the device, she was immeasurably
disappointed. The redhead turned to the door and immediately left the lab
without a word. Frustrated, but mostly sad.
She had no idea of the consequences of the released
energy on the big scheme of universal forces. How could she? She didn’t even
know the exact purpose of the invention she had messed with.
Walking down the hallway, about to return home, she
felt that itch under her foot again. Upset, and realizing that it was the cause
of her mistake, she untied her shoe to inspect the small nuisance.
Somewhere on the surface of her white sock, Rachael
felt her whole world beginning to shake, as her gigantic counterpart took her
shoe off. For the first time, she was transported to the giant world out of her
own canvas shoe. Holding her balance on one foot, the giantess looked down to
the sole of her socked foot, turned towards her face. The shrunken Rachael saw
her own massive face staring in her direction, eyes squinting with
concentration. Never before her reflection was so terrifying and imposing. She
screamed, but she was practically inaudible. She wondered if, even so close,
she could be detected by her other self, and if that would be a good thing in
either case.
In fact, Rachael did spot herself while
checking her sock – an insignificant pinkish mite in an ocean of white cotton –
but didn’t mind it. She just assumed that it was a simple piece of lint,
dismissing any further consideration without a second thought. She never could
have guessed the truth. Most importantly, she was searching for the source of
that itch, but with no result. Nothing seemed wrong with her sock. She pinched
the general area, pulling it up for a while.
Rachael saw her own thumb and index finger descending
towards her. Powerful and solid like mountains, they precisely grabbed the
portion of texture in which she was still partially tangled. She was lifted,
despite all her struggles to free herself. The walls of warm skin from her own
digits slowly enclosed her, increasing the pressure on her microscopic body and
trapping her in her own fingerprints. “Whatever!”,
she heard her own voice booming from above. Suddenly, the fingers let go and
the texture snapped back against her sole. The unlucky girl was thrown back
inside the fibers, absorbed in the tangle, lost far from the surface, nowhere
to be seen.
Rachael simply slipped her foot back inside her shoe
and headed home, sealing herself away once and for all.
That evening, she returned home, exhausted and
frustrated by the unproductive afternoon. She felt like a real failure, a
disappointment. The girl kicked off her shoes, put on her pajamas and dropped
heavily on her bed. She had no troubles falling asleep.
She still didn’t know that the fabric of the universe,
much like herself, had incurred into a mistake, that day. One that she was
responsible for, in more than one way. Rachael didn’t know yet what fate had in
store for her…
… Bounced back in time of one day, before the error
itself was ever made in the first place…
… Transported to the place where the electrical
discharge stopped through her body: the plastic sole of her canvas shoes…
When she opened her eyes, her mind was clouded by
scattered and confused thoughts. She had woken from a dreamless sleep, although
she didn’t remember falling asleep. But most importantly, even before opening
her eyes, Rachael immediately knew something was off. When she had the chance
to look around, she found herself lying on her stomach on a smooth and somewhat
soft ground, which was definitely not her bed. A dark, immense expanse laid
before her, as far as the eye could see in the almost complete obscurity. Fear
slowly starting to take over, Rachael slowly turned her head upwards. Endless
rows of alien-looking tree-like fibers towered over her. They had no leaves nor
branches, and they were white as the snow. Beyond them, only darkness. Only
after a few seconds she saw the ceiling above her, incalculably high. Her heart
started pounding, a feeling of dread and anxiety finally overwhelming her. That
place looked like some kind of underground cave, judging by the strange
humidity of the air and the faint earthy scent. She definitely wasn’t in her
bedroom anymore…