Rain slicked the cobbled streets of Oxford, turning the ancient city into a blurred watercolor of spires and shadows. Charles Eduard James trudged through it, collar turned up against the chill, his mind far from the downpour. At thirty-five, he was a ghost in academia, a doctoral dropout who haunted the Bodleian Library more than any lecture hall. Gödel's incompleteness theorems gnawed at him tonight, as always.
"No formal system can prove its own consistency," he muttered to the empty air, boots splashing in puddles. "So where does truth hide? Outside the axioms?"
He didn't see the lorry until its headlights flared like twin supernovae. The impact was instantaneous, a crunch of metal and bone that scattered his notes across the wet pavement. Pain bloomed, then vanished. Charles's body crumpled, a broken silhouette under sodium lamps. Pedestrians screamed, distant sirens wailed, but he was already elsewhere.
No light at the end of a tunnel. No celestial choir. Just dissolution.
His senses inverted. Flesh no longer anchored him. Coordinates melted away. Length stretched endlessly. Width curved until it lost substance. Height folded into irrelevance. Volume, once defined as something built from length, width, and height together, ceased to exist entirely. He was essence now, a point no longer confined by three dimensions.
"Bloody hell," the thought formed, his first coherent one. "Death's just the derivative at infinity."
Awareness expanded. Oxford shrank to a pinpoint. England thinned into a fragile membrane. Earth became a blue marble suspended in void. The planet's size, once measured as thousands of kilometers from center to surface, carried no meaning here. From this vantage, attempts to measure its surface failed to settle into a finite result. The farther one looked, the more it expanded without limit, revealing that three dimensions were only a narrow slice of something far greater. God's supervision existed beyond such measurements, present everywhere within every broken assumption, yet never appearing inside the calculation itself.
Light cones collapsed around him, those causal prisons that once limited influence to a universal speed. Futures were no longer bounded. He pierced the atmosphere effortlessly, the ionosphere parting like fog. Stars sharpened, not as points of light, but as directions within a higher framework of space.
Then came a pull. Not a force, but a bending of geometry itself. Reality drew inward toward a four dimensional surface, where faint shadows of branes flickered just beyond perception.
To be continued...