An Architectural Mid-life Crisis

I step out of the base this morning to go on a run, when I realize quite to my chagrin, that time and space have folded in on each other.

Like a crumpled ball of paper, a piece of a banister from a 19th Century Opera House here overlaps with the escalator of a 21st century shopping mall there, and the smell of burnt rubber hangs over the whole street.

I look at the strange conglomeration of places and times with a sigh. No telling what's out there, but I DO have to go running, and I need to pick up sugar because the base is running out and we're planning on making cupcakes tomorrow...

I go back inside and change into my supersuit for a modicum of reassuring safety, then traverse the wavering stairs into the melee. I have hardly gone two feet when out of a garbage-can portal climb Sasha and Morgan, two of my fellow highschool students. It appears than they are looking for the center of the Earth, which is now somewhere on the outside, to put it back and right all this mess. They inform me also that all the continents have been forced back together again into one big Pancontinent, with the exception of Great Britain, which somehow managed to escape the great and mysterious migration. It seems that time and space are changing themselves, rather than some human design. It is so random, I am left to wonder if it has any cause at all...

Still. It must be returned to normal, lest Chaos become the new Order and rule over all. Balance is a much better way of doing things.

I run up the side of a building that looks like an Escher painting, following my two comrades, and when we reach the Center of the Outside, Morgan takes out this giant apparatus thingy that I really wish I had created so I would know what it does, and places it directly on the innermost Out, and of course presses the giant red button. "It didn't work that way, originally," he says as he keeps his finger on the button, which is sucking away all the fallacies in the universe, "But I reconfigured it just so that all the systems inside would link to this one button. Because that's how life should be done." When the clean-up is almost through, one of the chickens in Morgan's head crows loudly to warn him, and he shuts off the apparatus by merely letting go of the red button. "Can't have all the weirdnonsensicallness sucked out of the world, now can we?" he remarks as they leave again through a regular stairway and out the stout double-doors. "Then who would want to live here?"

The world seems to agree with this statement, because as they depart, a single leaf falls from a tree and starts lazily trailing them.

There is, of course, no wind.