In the corner of folding space, where gravitational waves meet to disclose what disasters they have designed, where stars show their age with infrared simmers, a man sleeps, his head enclosing the universe. As he sleeps he tinkers, plays with temporal continuity by vanishing nebulae and perturbing gas giants. He dreams he is floating inside his universe, his blood doesn’t boil out of his skin and he pinwheels around the void at the speed of light to explore his invention.

Then his bones begin to shake and he feels himself folding like laminated dough. Unlike laminated dough, Giles’s body isn’t fifty-percent butter, but he feels like the oils are being extracted from his cells at the molecular level.

Someone – some force – wants Giles the laminated dough to become plain old dough.

Giles opens his eyes and the universe is white. Stars become black paint on a ceiling, or smiling faces of beautiful men and women. The nebula is the glare in the glass in front of his face. His gaze follows the glass around and to his left and right, to his up and down. Giles is inside a large tube.

The smiling faces are there and open up his tube, he wants to strangle the people that took him from his universe and put him in a tube. He grabs a smiling face by the neck with one hand, wagering that these faces are the culprits. But his arm disobeys the brain command – “grab that neck!” it demands, but not a pulse.

One smiling face is contorting its mouth into geometric cavities, melodic noises come from the hole. Giles thought he heard his name. The smiling face reaches down and pushes a button next to him.

“Oops, sorry about that Giles. Forgot to turn on the interpreter. Can you hear me now?”

The smiling face catches the surprise in Giles’s face at the sudden transformation of melodic noises into thought streams inside his head. Someone is forcing their thoughts into my head via sound, Giles thinks.

“Very good. Okay, wonderful, Giles. Your reincarnation was successful. All vital signs are looking fantastic. We’ve kept you on cold for now, just so you can get used to being awake again.” The smiling face looked down at a clipboard in its hand, picked a page up to look under it.

“Ah, fifth time, huh? You’re a veteran at this.” The smiling face reaches out a hand and gives him a light punch on the shoulder. “Let me unfreeze your voice for now, so you can have a go at talking. We’ll have you de-iced in no time.” Another button is pushed near Giles’s leg.

“I-Eee Eey I Wan-w-want. I want. Two. Die.” Giles said. Momentarily, the smiling face lost its smile, dropped it somewhere on the floor. It found it again.

“Great, you’re talking already. Let’s, uh, not rush things and keep that voice on cool a little longer.” said the smiling face with synthetic inflection. It reached for another button.

“Nooo –” was all Giles managed before the neural spikes in his brain become foreign to his throat muscles. Impossibly, the smile on the smiling face stretched wider, then the face turned around and walked off clip-clop, clip-clop, down the fluorescent hall.

Numb, Giles fell back asleep. When he woke up again he was in his bedroom, in his bed, an arm around his wife who rested on the pillow. She was a robin after the winter storm, she hardly made an impression on the pillow. He sat up on the edge of the bed, put his hands in his face, trying to encourage his ego back from the dream world into this one. The one where he is in the bedroom, in his home, in the city of Santa Fe, he works as a librarian at the bookstore and goes to the Christian Fellowship Church on Sundays. Giles’s world.

“Another bad dream, hun?” Giles’s wife puts an arm on his shoulder, massages the knots she finds there against their will.

“Hmm.” Giles replies. It isn’t his place to offload his burden onto this lady, his robin. A man is a concrete sponge, absorbs the weathering from outside and locks the radiation inside.

This latest dream dented Giles’s concrete and a little radiation leaked out.

“It felt real this time.” Giles leaked out.

“Hun, the dream? It’s just a dream.” her words soothed him like a hundred micro masseuses.

“Hmm.” Giles felt his face in his hands, felt his concrete dent become a crack.

“Hun?” Giles cracked out.

“Mmhm?” came the soothing melody.

“Will we ever get to heaven?”

“Of course my darling. When you and I, when we both hit that bucket, God will be right there at those pearly gates, smiling – a big smiling face.” she turned over, pulled the sheet back over her.

“Now get some sleep.”