Electrocuted by a Rainbow

"I've always believed in looking before you leap. Turns out I should have also asked whether the landing pad allows return flights."

The silence that followed Luke's disappearance was the loudest thing I'd ever heard.

Paul and I stood there like idiots, staring at the place where Luke had been. The swirling colours continued their hypnotic dance, utterly indifferent to the fact that they'd just consumed a human being. My partner. The man I'd lived with for ten years. Gone—absorbed into something that shouldn't exist, couldn't exist, and yet clearly fucking did.

My brain ran through its options like a rat in a maze. Explanation one: I was hallucinating. Possible, except Paul was seeing the same thing, and shared hallucinations weren't exactly common outside of cult documentaries. Explanation two: this was an elaborate prank, a magic trick with trapdoors and mirrors and hidden compartments. More plausible, except our study didn't have trapdoors, and the phenomenon in front of me wasn't behaving like any projection I'd ever seen. Explanation three: Luke had actually walked through a wall of impossible light and vanished into... somewhere else.

None of these options were acceptable. And yet here I stood, forced to accept one of them.

The part of me that craved safety—the part that had spent thirty-four years building walls against uncertainty—screamed for retreat. Walk away. Go to the kitchen. Make a cup of tea. Pretend this never happened. But another part, the part I usually kept gagged and bound in the basement of my psyche, was leaning forward with something that felt uncomfortably like curiosity.

Paul broke the silence first.

"You go first," he said slowly, gesturing toward the wall of bright colours with the enthusiasm of someone suggesting I test whether the electric fence was still live.

"Fuck off!" The words erupted before I could moderate them, raw and reflexive. "I'm not touching that shit. We don't know what it is."

My protest was legitimate. Rational, even. Luke had just walked into something that defied every law of physics I'd ever learned, and Paul's solution was for me to follow him? Into an unknown phenomenon that could be anything—a disintegration field, a one-way trip to oblivion, some kind of cosmic garbage disposal for gullible humans?

No. Absolutely fucking not.

But Paul, apparently operating on a different risk assessment than mine, squared his shoulders with the determination of someone who'd decided that cowardice was more embarrassing than potential death. He approached the vibrant anomaly, paused at its edge like a diver gathering courage, and then—with a breath I could hear from where I stood—stepped forward.

And vanished.

Just like Luke. One moment there, the next moment not. The colours swirled where he'd been, then settled back into their endless dance, two humans richer and utterly unchanged by the transaction.

I was alone.

The study felt smaller without them, the walls pressing in with the weight of everything that had just happened. The computer sat on Luke's desk, screen dark, monumentally irrelevant. The bookshelves held their familiar cargo of texts and trinkets. Everything was exactly as it had been five minutes ago, except for the small matter of a portal to somewhere else occupying the far wall and my partner and his brother having disappeared into it.

An elaborate illusion? The thought surfaced with desperate hope. Maybe this was all theatre—a sophisticated prank involving technology I didn't understand. Any moment now, Luke and Paul would come tumbling back through, laughing at my expense, delighted by how thoroughly they'd fooled me.

I waited.

The colours swirled.

Nothing else happened.

Minutes stretched past, each one eroding my scepticism a little further. If this was a joke, it was dragging on too long. If this was a trick, the punchline was overdue. The absence of laughter, of Luke's face appearing through the lights with that infuriating grin, began to feel less like delayed gratification and more like confirmation of the impossible.

They weren't coming back. At least, not on their own.

Which meant the choice was mine: stand here in the study of my own home, alone, while my partner explored whatever lay beyond that wall of light—or follow him into the unknown.

Neither option appealed. But staying felt worse. Staying felt like surrender to a fear I didn't want to own.

"I may as well," I muttered, the words barely audible even to myself. A concession to curiosity. A surrender to the part of me that needed to know, even if knowing might cost everything.

I walked toward the colours, each step requiring more effort than the last. My heart battered against my ribs, a prisoner desperate for escape. The light grew brighter as I approached, the colours more vivid, the hum I hadn't consciously noticed becoming a vibration I could feel in my teeth.

One more step.

And then I was through.

The transition was like being turned inside out and then reassembled by someone who'd only seen humans described in textbooks.

The colours didn't fade—they exploded, fragmenting into a brilliance that seemed to bypass my eyes entirely and detonate somewhere in the centre of my skull. For a moment that lasted either an instant or an eternity, I existed as pure sensation: light without source, warmth without heat, movement without direction. Every certainty I'd ever possessed about the nature of reality came loose from its moorings and floated free.

Then the voice spoke.

Not in my ears. Not in the air around me. Directly into my mind, bypassing every sensory organ I possessed and arriving fully formed in my consciousness like a thought that wasn't mine.

"Welcome to Clivilius, Jamie Greyson."

The words carried no warmth. No hostility either—just a vast, neutral acknowledgment of my existence, as if I were a file being logged in some cosmic database. The voice felt old in a way that had nothing to do with age, immense in a way that had nothing to do with volume. It was the voice of something that had been here before me and would be here long after I was dust.

My vision cleared.

The first thing I registered was the sky—a blue so pure and unbroken that it looked artificial, like someone had painted a ceiling and forgotten to add clouds. It stretched in every direction without interruption, without variation, an infinite canopy of colour that made Tasmania's grey winters feel like a distant memory.

Then I looked down.

Dust. Red-brown dust, stretching to every horizon I could see. Rolling hills of it, like frozen waves on a rust-coloured ocean. No trees. No grass. No buildings, no roads, no power lines, no aircraft contrails, no birds. Just earth and sky, meeting at a distant line that seemed impossibly far away.

The silence was absolute. Not the silence of a quiet room, which still contains the hum of electricity and the distant sounds of civilisation. This was the silence of a world that had never known human noise—or any noise at all. It pressed against my eardrums like a physical weight, filling the space where sound should have been with something that felt almost like presence.

Luke stood a few metres away, his ridiculous boardshorts even more absurd against this backdrop of alien emptiness. Paul was beside him, his face wearing an expression I suspected matched my own—the particular blankness of someone whose brain had encountered an input it couldn't process.

We were not in Tasmania anymore. We were not anywhere I had ever been or could have imagined being. We were... here. Wherever here was. Clivilius, the voice had called it. A name for a place that shouldn't exist.

"Did you hear it?" Luke's question cut through my daze, his eyes bright with a fervour that seemed wildly inappropriate to the circumstances. He was excited. Actually excited, standing in this wasteland of dust and silence, asking if we'd heard the disembodied voice that had welcomed us to our apparent doom.

Paul and I exchanged a glance. Our nod was synchronised, the wordless acknowledgment of two people who'd just shared an experience neither could explain.

"This is where life will begin anew," Luke proclaimed, spreading his arms as if embracing the desolation around us. His words landed with the weight of pronouncement, of prophecy, of someone who'd rehearsed this moment and was finally delivering his lines.

I stared at him. The silence that followed his declaration wasn't contemplative—it was the silence of two people who had no fucking idea how to respond to the suggestion that this barren hellscape was meant to be humanity's fresh start.

Paul moved first. His arms began windmilling through the air, hands grasping at nothing, his movements increasingly frantic as he searched for something that wasn't there.

"What are you doing, Paul?" Luke's voice carried a hint of amusement, as if his brother's behaviour was merely eccentric rather than entirely reasonable given the circumstances.

"I'm trying to find the study walls."

"The study walls?"

"Yes. Isn't this just an advanced form of virtual reality? Or like a hologram?"

I understood Paul's logic immediately. His brain was doing what mine wanted to do—finding an explanation that fit within the boundaries of known reality. Virtual reality would explain the visuals, the sensation of being elsewhere. A hologram would account for the sky and the dust and the impossible landscape. Both options meant we were still in Luke's study, still in Tasmania, still in a world that made sense.

But Luke shook his head, and when he spoke, his voice carried the absolute conviction of someone who'd already wrestled with these questions and won. "I assure you, Clivilius is very real."

To prove his point, he bent down and picked something up from the ground. A book—slightly battered, covered in the same red-brown dust that coated everything here. He held it out like evidence in a trial, exhibit A in the case against our sanity.

Recognition flickered through me, distant at first, then sharpening into certainty. I knew that book. I'd seen it a hundred times, wedged into Luke's bookcase between texts on philosophy and religion, gathering dust because he'd never once opened it in all the years I'd known him.

"I recognise this book." I took it from Luke's hands, the weight of it grounding me in a way the landscape couldn't. "This is one of your uni books that you've had sitting in the bookcase untouched since we met, isn't it?"

"Indeed, it is."

The confirmation should have been reassuring—proof of continuity, of connection to the life we'd left behind. Instead, it made everything worse. The book was real. It had come from our study, from our home, from our world. Which meant it had crossed whatever boundary we'd crossed. Which meant that boundary was real. Which meant Clivilius was real.

The dust beneath my feet wasn't a projection. The sky above wasn't a hologram. This place—this vast, empty, impossible place—actually existed.

And I was standing in it.

Paul's voice cut through my spiralling thoughts, stripped bare of its earlier attempts at rational explanation. "I don't understand." He was staring at the landscape, at the endless nothing that surrounded us. "There's nothing here."

He was right. Devastatingly, obviously right. Whatever Luke had been building toward, whatever grand revelation had prompted him to summon his brother and drag us both through that impossible doorway, this wasn't it. This was dust. This was emptiness. This was the opposite of everything humanity had spent millennia constructing.

But even as the words left Paul's mouth, my eyes caught something that contradicted them. A shape in the distance that didn't match the rolling monotony of the hills. Something angular, artificial, unmistakably placed rather than formed.

"Apart from a pile of large boxes," I corrected, already moving toward them. They sat on the dust like discarded children's blocks, incongruous and somehow ominous. "Why are all these here?"

Luke's response carried the same unsettling certainty that had marked everything he'd said since we arrived. "It's going to be the first shelter here in Clivilius."

Shelter. The word bounced around my skull, refusing to settle into meaning. Shelter implied inhabitants. Shelter implied permanence. Shelter implied someone intended to stay here, in this wasteland of dust and silence, long enough to need protection from... what? The elements? The overwhelming emptiness? The existential despair that came from standing in a place that made you feel like the last organism in a dead universe?

"What the hell does Clivilius need a shelter for?" The question escaped as a protest, my incredulity overwhelming my usual restraint.

Paul joined the interrogation, his voice layering over the echo of mine. "And what even is Clivilius?"

Luke's answer came with a sweeping gesture that encompassed the entirety of our surroundings—the hills, the sky, the dust that seemed to stretch to infinity in every direction. "This place is Clivilius." His voice dropped into something approaching reverence. "And the shelter is for the start of our new civilisation."

The silence that followed wasn't dramatic pause. It was the silence of two minds crashing against an idea they couldn't absorb. New civilisation. Luke was standing in his boardshorts, in the middle of an alien desert, talking about building a new civilisation as if he were discussing weekend plans.

Paul's face had gone slack, mirroring the blankness I felt spreading through my own features. We were both trying to process the same incomprehensible concept: that Luke had brought us here not for a visit, not for a glimpse of something extraordinary, but for... this. For settlement. For permanence. For the abandonment of everything we'd known in favour of dust and dreams.

"It has to start somewhere," Luke added, shrugging as if the magnitude of what he was proposing was self-evident rather than insane.

The shrug broke something in me. The casual gesture, the easy acceptance of upending our entire existence—it was too much. The frustration that had been building since the airport, since the boardshorts, since the first impossible burst of light in the study, finally boiled over.

"What the hell do we need a new civilisation for?" My voice rose with each word, control slipping away. "I'm quite happy with the current one, thank you very much!"

I meant it. Every syllable. I had a life. A flawed, complicated, guilt-ridden life, but a life nonetheless. A job. A home. Dogs who depended on me. A relationship that was falling apart but was still mine to salvage or surrender. I hadn't asked for this. I hadn't consented to this. I'd walked through a wall of light because my partner had, and now I was being told that my reward was an eternity of dust and the privilege of starting from scratch.

Fuck that.

Luke's response was infuriatingly serene. "You'll see in time. It will all make sense."

"Fuck time." The words came out hard, each one a rejection of everything Luke was selling. "I'm going home. This place is shit. It's just dust for god's sake! There's enough of that in the outback."

I turned toward the Portal—still visible, still swirling its impossible colours against the Clivilius backdrop. It stood there like a promise, a doorway back to everything I'd left behind. Tasmania. Our house. Duke and Henri, probably wondering where their humans had gone. Ben—the thought flickered through unbidden, inappropriate, and I shoved it away. The point was, there was a world on the other side of that light, a world I belonged to, a world I was going back to whether Luke liked it or not.

"Well, off you go then," Luke said, his tone light, encouraging. As if leaving were the simplest thing in the world.

I strode toward the Portal with the determination of someone who'd made a decision and intended to see it through. The colours grew brighter as I approached, the hum more insistent, the familiar sensations of transition beginning to build—

And then I stopped.

Not by choice. By force. An invisible barrier pressed against me, solid as glass, yielding as concrete. I pushed harder, leaning my weight into the resistance, and achieved nothing. The Portal swirled centimetres from my face, beautiful and unreachable.

"I'm trying," I said, the words coming through gritted teeth.

"What do you mean you're trying?" Paul's confusion was audible, his voice carrying from somewhere behind me.

"I mean I'm trying to leave, but the bloody thing won't let me."

The reality of the words sank in as I spoke them. The Portal—our doorway home, our only connection to the world we'd left—was refusing me passage. I could see the colours, feel the warmth, sense the presence of that other place waiting on the far side. But I couldn't reach it. Something was actively preventing my return.

Panic began to claw at the edges of my awareness. The walls were closing in, except there were no walls—just endless horizon and a barrier I couldn't see or understand.

What the hell has Luke done?

The invisible resistance had ignited something in me—a stubbornness that refused to accept impossibility, even when impossibility was pressing against my palms.

I stepped back from the Portal, recalibrating. My first approach had been casual, confident. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe this thing responded to intention, to commitment, to the kind of absolute determination that left no room for doubt.

I positioned myself like a sprinter at the blocks, every muscle tensing with purpose. In my head, I cycled through every action hero I'd ever watched—the ones who threw themselves through windows, who dove off buildings, who faced impossible odds with nothing but willpower and spectacular timing.

Then, channelling a Superman I'd never known I had in me, I thrust one arm forward, fist clenched in defiance, and launched myself at the Portal.

The colours exploded.

Not the gentle transition of before—this was violence, pure and searing. Bursts of light detonated against my consciousness, each one carrying a payload of pain that bypassed my skin and went straight for my nervous system. It was like being electrocuted by a rainbow, each colour bringing its own particular flavour of agony. The reds burned. The blues froze. The yellows screamed. And all of them together created a symphony of suffering that made me genuinely believe, for one endless moment, that I might become the first documented case of spontaneous human combustion.

The heat was unbearable. I could feel my shirt beginning to change—not tear, not burn in any conventional sense, but melt, the fabric losing coherence and sliding away from my skin in ways that fabric shouldn't be capable of. The material disintegrated under the assault, each thread surrendering to forces I couldn't name.

Then the Portal struck back.

The force that hit me wasn't physical in any way I understood. It was rejection—pure, absolute, total rejection. The colours seemed to gather themselves into a single pulse of denial, and then I was airborne, thrown backward with a violence that left no room for dignity. The world spun as I tumbled through air that tasted like ozone and failure.

I hit the ground hard enough to drive the breath from my lungs. Dust erupted around me, a cloud of red-brown particles that settled slowly while I lay there gasping, trying to reassemble a sense of self from the scattered pieces the Portal had left behind.

The pain faded faster than it should have—already receding from my mind, leaving only the memory of intensity without the sensation itself. But something else lingered. A wrongness in my arm, the one I'd extended toward the Portal in my heroic dive.

I lifted it. Examined it. Found it unharmed—no burns, no blisters, no visible damage at all.

Except for the hair. Every follicle from wrist to shoulder had been erased, the skin beneath smooth as a child's, bare in a way it hadn't been since puberty. And the smell—the sharp, acrid stench of singed hair filled my nostrils, confirmation that whatever had happened to me hadn't been hallucination.

Paul reached me first, skidding to his knees in the dust beside me. "What the hell was that?" he shouted, his voice raw with alarm.

Then Luke, his face a mask of panic as he grabbed my hand and turned it over, searching for damage that wasn't there. "Jamie! Jamie, are you ok?"

I pulled away from his grip with a violence that surprised us both. The fear had transmuted into something hotter, something that needed a target.

"This fucking place is trying to kill me!" The words tore from my throat, accusation and terror woven together. "What the hell were you thinking bringing us here?!"

Luke's response was frantic, defensive, utterly inadequate. "I didn't know that was going to happen!"

He didn't know. He'd led us through a doorway to another world, trapped us in a dimension of dust and silence, and he didn't know what the consequences might be. The recklessness of it—the cosmic irresponsibility of dragging people into the unknown without understanding the rules—made me want to scream.

But before I could articulate any of it, Paul was moving. He'd positioned himself in front of the Portal, squaring up to it with the determination of someone who refused to learn from observation.

"Are you insane?" I managed, incredulity cutting through my rage. "Didn't you see what just happened?"

"Maybe you did it wrong?" The suggestion was delivered as question, but it landed as insult—the implication that my failure was technique rather than the Portal's malevolence.

"Oh, fuck off, Paul."

Luke bristled. "Hey! Don't speak to him like that."

Something snapped. The accumulated frustration of the entire day—the morning's chaos, the airport waiting, the boardshorts, the lies, the impossible light, and now this prison of dust and denial—all of it condensed into three words.

"Fuck you all."

I cradled my hairless arm against my chest, the smooth skin a tangible reminder of what this place had already taken from me. Luke's defence of Paul felt like betrayal stacked on betrayal, solidarity with his brother over the partner who'd just been attacked by an inter-dimensional barrier.

Paul's attempts to breach the Portal were less dramatic than mine but no more successful.

He tried walking. He tried pushing. He tried sidling up to it like he might slip through unnoticed. Each time, he met the same invisible resistance I had—the barrier that let you see freedom without allowing you to grasp it.

"What the hell is wrong with this thing?" His frustration mounted with each failed attempt, his voice climbing toward desperation.

"There's nothing wrong with it," Luke said.

The words hung in the air, heavy with implication. Nothing wrong. The Portal was working exactly as intended. Which meant our inability to leave wasn't a malfunction—it was a feature.

Luke demonstrated this with casual certainty. He walked toward the swirling colours, reached the point where Paul and I had been stopped, and continued forward without pause. The light embraced him, folded around him, and then he was gone—vanished back to whatever remained on the other side.

For a moment, wild hope flared. If Luke could pass through, maybe the barrier had reset. Maybe our earlier failures had been some kind of initiation, a test we'd now passed.

I lunged toward the Portal, desperation overriding caution.

"Welcome to Clivilius, Jamie Greyson." The voice again, as flat and vast as before. Welcoming me to a place I'd never left, acknowledging an arrival I'd never made.

The barrier held. I slammed against it like a bird hitting glass, all momentum and no progress. The colours swirled centimetres from my face, mocking me with their beauty.

"Fuck!"

The expletive exploded from me, inadequate to the situation but the only response I had. The Portal could welcome me. The Portal could recognise me. The Portal just couldn't—or wouldn't—let me leave.

Paul had collapsed to his knees somewhere behind me, his earlier determination finally exhausted. "I don't understand. Why can't we leave?"

I didn't have an answer. None of us did. The rules of this place were opaque, written in a language we couldn't read, enforced by mechanisms we couldn't perceive. Luke could pass through. We couldn't. The why of it remained as mysterious as everything else about Clivilius.

The frustration needed an outlet. I spun and kicked at the ground, sending a spray of red dust into the air, watching it hang for a moment before settling back to the earth that had produced it.

"Fuck!" The word stretched into something between scream and sob, dragged out until my lungs emptied and my throat burned. The sound echoed across the empty landscape, absorbed by the silence that surrounded us, answered by nothing.

The dust settled. The colours swirled. The sky stretched overhead, impossibly blue, impossibly indifferent.

We were trapped.

The realisation landed with a weight that made my earlier panic feel like mild concern. This wasn't a temporary inconvenience, a puzzle to be solved before dinner. This was imprisonment—actual, physical imprisonment in a world that operated by rules we didn't understand, enforced by forces we couldn't fight.

I stood in the dust of Clivilius, hairless arm cradled against my chest, shirt singed, and stared at the Portal that wouldn't let me go home. Behind me, Paul knelt in defeat. Somewhere beyond that swirling barrier, Luke had returned to a world I might never see again.

Duke and Henri would be wondering where I was. They'd be waiting by the door, ears pricked for the sound of my car. They'd be waiting for a long time.