Wires and electrodes were attached to the stone, which was sitting on a small pedestal in a small room. Eric and Keith sat in the next room, looking through a window at the stone, as well as a series of computer monitors with seemingly incomprehensible readouts.
"I can't really make much sense of this," Keith said. "Is something wrong with the inputs?"
"The inputs are fine," Eric replied. "This is by far the most complex artifact we've analyzed. From the readouts we're getting, it looks like this is an immensely powerful paranormal object."
"Yeah, some of these levels are of the chart." The two of them watched the monitors for a moment, before Keith spoke up. "Maybe we should apply some stimulus?"
"Yeah, maybe that will be a way to tell just how powerful this thing is," Eric said. "Execute the paranormal parameters test." Keith typed some commands, then turned a few dials and flipped a couple of switches. The wires attached to the stone sparked, and new data began flashing across the screen, faster and faster. Soon it was too fast to read.
"Uh... we should shut this down, the system looks unstable," Eric said. The screens were scrolling faster and faster.
"Just another minute, we're getting a lot of data here." Faster and faster.
"Too much data, the system could overload."
"Not yet!"
Suddenly, the screens flashed and went black. After a few seconds of silence and darkness, a bright light began flashing like a strobe in the other room. It was the stone, flashing brighter than it had when Jon demonstrated its power, and it kept flashing, over and over, for close to a full minute. Then, both rooms were plunged into total darkness.
Keith and Eric sat in silence and darkness for a couple of minutes, still trying to process what had just happened. Then, without warning, one of the monitors flickered back to life, followed by all of the lights. The two researchers moved close to the monitor, hoping they might learn something. A simple text readout was displayed:
"System failure. Interface corruption 3xb//. Universe unstable."
"Universe unstable?" Keith said, "What does that mean?"
"I don't know," Eric said. He began typing more. His face went pale. "Uh oh."
"Uh oh? What? What happened?"
"It looks like, if I'm reading this correctly, that the stone overloaded the system. It was then caught in a feedback loop, causing the stone to overload itself. That kind of shock has destabilized the very fabric of reality."
"What do you mean, the very fabric of reality?"
"With an unstable reality, things could change at any time, in any way. We might not notice any of the changes, but since we were near the stone when the overload happened, we might notice all of the changes. Or, we might notice some changes and not others. On the other hand, things might not change at all."
"So, things could change drastically, but we might think they've always been that way?"
"That's only one of many possibilities."
"I don't feel so good," Keith said as he stood up and looked into the other room. Suddenly, he went as pale as Eric. "The stone's gone!" He shouted.
Eric looked up as well. Sure enough, the pedestal on which the stone had sat was empty. The stone had simply disappeared.
