Free Souls of the Never: A Fantasy Scifi Romance Time Travel series, with Dragons, Elves and Faeries. (Tales of the Neverwar Series Book 1) by CJ Rutherford, Colin Rutherford Page B

ready for hours now, but this was another way for Jason to keep them, and if he was honest, himself, focussed. This was the moment they had worked toward for the past three and a half years, ever since the first incontrovertible evidence had been gathered of the existence of extra dimensional space. This in itself had been a small step toward the final completion of a stable wormhole to another dimension, but the evidence that the space in between these dimensions existed, and was theoretically navigable, was a huge achievement.
    And so it was with pride that Jason looked up at his wife, sitting in the viewing gallery with a number of the senior members of the facility. She winked at him cheekily and he smiled back mouthing ‘I love you’ to her. She looked around, embarrassed to see a few of the others had seen his open display of affection and they were smiling in her direction. But she didn’t mind. After all, she knew most of them, had known them for years in fact, and both she and Jason considered them friends.
    The time had finally come, and Jason sat in his chair with his pulse racing and entered the coded sequence to start the process.
    Jules reached across from her seat next to him and squeezed his hand. He turned and they simply smiled and nodded to each other. Neither of them believed in luck, just in science.
    “Particle beams at full strength, beams are in alignment,” reported Jules as she watched the monitors. In the chamber which housed the phenomenon, known as the collider aperture, but affectionately christened the rabbit hole by the team, dozens of beams collided at the same point creating a microscopic reaction similar to a sun.
    Jason punched another sequence and watched as the instrumentation confirmed the convergence of the beams. The monitors automatically dimmed the display so the guests could watch without the need for protective glasses.
    “We have a collision event,” he said, sounding calmer than he could possibly feel. The handling of collision of particles traveling close to the speed of light was a delicate balancing act. One tiny mistake in their calculations could start a chain reaction which would kill them and everyone else in the underground facility instantly.
    “Stand by for matter injection,” said Jason quietly.
    The exotic matter in question had been collected during multiple beam collisions at variable lower intensities over the last few months, and stored in magnetic containment vessels. Of course there had been several smaller-scale experiments carried out to prove the theory behind what they were about to do, but this was the first full-strength procedure. The magnetic siphon moved slowly into position.
    Jason gave a final look around to his team and to the people in the gallery, and to his wife and unborn child, and pushed the button which ended his world.
    What happened next should have been impossible, as a barely-visible, instantaneous reaction ripped across the space between the collider aperture and lab. Something not quite there appeared in the air before the viewing gallery. Like a circle of silver shot through with diamonds, it was present for just an instant before seeming to lunge at the group before simply winking out of existence. Whatever it had been was gone. And so was Alice.

11 – The Never – Lost souls
    How long the soul floated in the emptiness could not be guessed. There was no time in the void between dimensions, so there was no way for it to reference the passage of minutes, hours, or even years.
    A whisper remained, of another soul, linked embryonically to its own being, but the memory was weak, clouded and dim as everything before here and now was. The other consciousness had passed on somewhere else, leaving the single soul wandering this void, lost and alone.
    Alone, that was, until it felt the presence of another–an entity which wasn’t a soul, or if it ever had been, it was blackened and corrupt beyond redemption.
    The wandering soul