With a sickening crack, Sara McAndrews fell out of reality.

It happened on one of those instances of universal refreshing that were so rare as to be almost non-existent.

The universe is a strange place, and it is often stranger than we simple humans give it credit for. There are mysterious laws at work in the core of the universe and in the centres of atoms. They are so strange and bewildering that man's simple brain refuses to grasp the situation, and merely draws a blank.

Of the many bewildering facts and laws that make up the universe as a whole, there is one that simply takes the prize:

The universe is, in layman's terms, only a fantastically huge computer.

No one built it, of course; how could someone build a machine to run all the life that spans the impossible distances of this particular universe?

It was simply born of itself, and immediately went to the task it was made for.

The Big Bang.

You may fail completely to grasp the impossibility of this fact, and that is all well. If you were told that you were nothing more than a few lines of code among several infinities of it, you would no doubt roll your eyes and walk away, slightly unsettled but utterly convinced that it was all a reeking pile of bullshit.

That's the secret.

That is why mankind has not discovered how to manipulate those few scraps of code that it could possibly understand. If he did, however, grasp the situation fully and eagerly, time-travel, faster-than-light travel, and the conquering of other planet would simply be child's play. But, as every adult knows, there are certain things a child should NOT be allowed to play with, under any circumstance…

The universe, being a very advanced computer, will create a massive backup drive within itself every time the basic elements within all of creation align. This is a very rare instance, but it does happen. To the computer, time is completely relative. It exists in a state of hyper time, and a few billions of years is about as important as a passing glance. The machine knows that, as long as it keeps it's backups, the universe will run smoothly along; barring any severe virus or worm.

But what creature could create a virus terrible enough to destroy the UNIVERSE?

None, of course.

Sara had been meditating deeply when the refreshing, purging, and backsaving had occurred. She had been out of touch with reality for little over twenty minutes, lost in her own world of utter concentration and peace.

Traffic, children at play, and the telephone did not even cause a slight twitch, but the sound of reality zooming away certainly did.

It all came very suddenly. There was a huge, distorted crack as Sara's connection with all she had ever known was severed. There was then a deafening boom as she fell away faster than the speed of light, and was then instantly transformed into a being of pure energy.

She tried to scream, to shriek, to yelp in surprise and utter fear. Of course, there was no way that a thing made purely of energy could make use of the old human vocal expressions, but she tried. She did manage to shift her colour spectrum down a notch in frustration, but nothing more was accomplished.

So, falling and flashing bright yellow at anyone who might be watching, (there was no one, no one but the computer who was occupied with other, more important tasks) Sara's first ten minutes of unreality passed.

She guessed it was ten minutes, afterward, but there is no way to be sure. As she had fallen, blinking and roaring, her passage had fractured what little amount of time there was in the void of the computer. As she ripped though the fragmentary webs of time, her watch took the blows, and began counting backward, then forward, and then gave up entirely.

She noticed she began to slow, and decided to put some effort into helping the process. She glowed orange for a moment, then slid up to blinding white, then settled back to bright yellow and didn’t slow in the least.

Sara tried to feel hysterical, but there wasn't much room for panic, because the disbelief and shock was hogging her mind.

Finally, after an infinity of time and after no time, she came to rest in a completely alien environment. She couldn't see things in the customary sense, lacking as she was in any ocular organs, but she knew where her surroundings were. She peered, although a more correct term would be sensed, around herself and discovered objects flying every which way, at very high speeds.

No, not objects, she corrected herself, remembering her high school physics - for at these speeds nothing could exist as a stable solid. She realised with some surprise that even her strange form was still moving, spinning and vibrating fiercely. So, she thought, there were jets of intense energy shooting about in organized routes.

Like a highway: a kinetic highway.

Hysteria was lurking on the edges of her mind, but it faced a sheer wall of shock that it couldn't scale. Curiosity, a more inventive feeling, vaulted over the wall and settled comfortably in her mood.

She hovered, uncertain, for a few moments, and then rocketed off on one of the paths: one more piece of information within a hundred billion that served this part of the computer.

She felt nothing but simple exhilaration as she careened around corners and pelted down immeasurably long freeways. Streaks of light and heat broke away from the main stream and headed off one of the thousands of other lanes, but Sara kept with the thick stream. It had to lead somewhere, and it was probably somewhere big.

The processor was immense, the core of all that the computer represented. She passed into one of its many entrances, and finally slowed herself down.

She was able to do it this time without too much trouble.

Small levers seemed to flick and direct the streaks of information into different directions. Sara flowed at a leisurely pace with her companions, sticking close to the wall of the passage. She took in all the bundles of information, and the other paths leading out, as well as the incessant flow back and forth across the massive space. Awe offset curiosity, and she floated dumbstruck at the… Everything of it all.

The panic and hysteria that were still trapped behind the wall of disbelief had gathered a battering ram of logic to beat the barrier with. They were aware that the only thing between them and total control of Sara's mind was the fabrication that all this was a dream. They beat ceaselessly upon that barrier, while Sara was frozen with amazement.

She blinked – refreshed her energy – and then without further hesitation, pelted off in some random and less-used tangent. Ahead she could see a bluish haze glowing feebly within the dim vastness of empty energy that made up the hardware of the computer. Sara slowed her pace and entered the haze at a relatively small velocity.

All was completely ordered chaos. She marvelled at the tens of billions of flashing streams that flitted about on the outskirts. Further in the middle of the chamber was an intense layer of many, many more bits of information, compacted into almost a single mass. In the middle of all, just barely visible, was a palely glowing orb of intense power.

Panic battered away, collecting weight from the many strange sensations that she was able to feel.

Sara edged forward a few light-years, and then a few more. She silently and slowly converged with the outskirts of the flashing group of light-information. She whizzed alongside the streaming orb, slowly changing hue to the palest of yellow, and then flashing her original blinding white as the battering ram of logic finally cracked through the shock.

For a slight moment, she retained her sanity, even as she became fully aware of what was happening to her. She sensed about in wonder, observing the secrets being the universe and instantly thinking of time travel, the conquering of other worlds, and the unlocking of the deepest universal secrets.

Then Sara made the fatal mistake of realising what she herself was, a miniscule scrap of forgotten code, floating the immense pathways of the gigantic computer.

She flared red and pelted toward the centre of the glowing blue mass.

The universe glowed violet as Sara met the core of the computer, and then all life as anyone could know or imagine ended. Chaos reigned for several millennia as the universe was locked in the throws of an unforeseen virus. Galaxies flew apart, life was sprung and ended, physics became unstable and the very working elements of the universe disobeyed their own steadfast laws.

Sara dug deeper into the blue mass, searching out the one scrap on information that was valuable for her.

It took perhaps five millennia, but finally she brushed up against one palely blue molecule of code. She hovered and sensed at it, making sure it was what she thought it was, and then she absorbed the tiny particle into her own glowing form.

The computer accessed it's backup files, and the virus was wiped from it’s hard drive, and the thousands of years of chaos were wiped form the universe's history.

With a relieving snap, Sara McAndrews slid back in contact with reality. She tried to sigh and suppress the terrible memories, but was dismayed to discover she couldn't. In fact, she couldn't do anything. Nothing. She felt around herself, was shocked to discover that she couldn't feel, and then almost feinted when she realised what she had done.

Sara lurked in the sealed subconscious of her own meditating mind, only nano-moments before the universe was torn away. She screamed silently as she was again ripped from reality, and sent on the dreadful trip into the bowels of the universe once again. She didn't doubt that it would happen again, either. She rather thought that it would continue on for eternity, or until the vast machine finally wore away into dust.

She continued to scream even as her conscious took a bearing on her surroundings, observing the speeding bits of information.

Sara, the real Sara, the one trapped for all of eternity in her own personal hell, sobbed to herself when she realised that it would never end.