Break Through

He had done it; he had broken through!

Henry did an excited fist pump to himself as he sat back in his creaky desk chair and admired the accomplishment that was displayed on the glow of his computer monitor.

In the dimly lit room, hidden away in the depths of his parents' basement, his workstation was littered with miscellaneous computer parts and soldering equipment along with empty soda pop cups and greasy hamburger wrappers. He had not washed or even slept for what seemed days, yet those day to day tasks seemed irrelevant to the project; his life's work.

All the lack of sleep, hygiene, and his poor health was worth it now that he had accomplished what he had set out to do; what no one else in history had done before.

Leaning forward to peer at the image on the screen, Henry reached for a half finished burger and began munching on it absently. The blue hue of the monitor radiated eerily on his face, giving him a ghoulish complexion as his eyes focused intently on the subject on the screen.

It had all seemed so simple once he had remembered a lesson which every high school science teacher had taught in even the most remedial of their classes; everything is made up of matter, and matter is made up of information; calculations, reactions, counteractions, and formulas, all making up everything in the universe.

If that was so, Henry had reasoned, then that information could be hacked into like any other computer program, so that you could break down the secure walls of reality and see what lies beneath.

The most difficult task was creating the sensors that could take the readings from around a specific space, like his downstairs bedroom, and have them feed the data into his CPU so that he could interact with the real world using his computer as a gateway; much like how one interacts with the internet, only the information that is streaming in and out of the processor is the matter that is actually making up the fabric of reality.

Once he had his hardware build and the program configured, it was a relatively easy matter of breaking down the data to code and manipulating it as he had with so many systems before.

And finally, he had done it; he had broken through; broken through our reality into the next.

Continuing to stare fixedly at the display, Henry's brain exploded with the possibilities that his discovery had brought, for there, right on his computer monitor was a window into another dimension.

The figure on the display was sitting at their workstation similar to his own, looking keenly into their similar monitor, snacking on a similar looking hamburger.

Henry almost could not believe what he was seeing, was it another version of himself in another dimension working on their computer as he snuck a glimpse into their reality?

Henry went to reach for a drink of pop but was distracted by the movement of the other in the monitor making the same motion and knocked the half filled cup over, sending it splashing to the floor.

The noise startled him and he swore as he looked down at the mess of syrupy soda that pooled on the concrete floor and then quickly looked back to the monitor as to not miss anything.

Only, when he looked back, the other him was now staring straight back at him, as if he could see Henry watching somehow, yet just behind his double, he caught a glimpse of something even more startling.

On the monitor of the alternate reality Henry, was another Henry, also looking back at his observer, and in his monitor was yet another Henry, and another, and another, reaching back into infinity.

Henry felt his mind begin to unravel as the feeling of being observed himself stole over his awareness.

Slowly he turned away from the infinite display of other Henrys to look over his shoulder.

In the darkness behind him, he saw, only for a single moment before the countless universes collapsed upon each other; he saw what he had done and screamed before reality blinked out of existence.