Causal loop
Contains: F/f, unaware, entrapment, Sci-Fi
The most persistent principles in the universe are accident and error
Sometimes, even the most complex and perfect system incurs in a flaw. The smallest and most insignificant imperfection might just rarely provoke what could be simply defined as a mistake. The chances of this happening are close to zero; but it is definitely not impossible.
When Rachael opened her eyes, her mind was clouded by scattered and confused thoughts. She had woken from a dreamless sleep, although she didn’t remember falling asleep at all. But most importantly, even before opening her eyes, Rachael immediately knew something was off. When she finally did, she found herself lying on her stomach on a smooth and somewhat soft ground, which was definitely not her bed. A dark, immense expanse laid before her, as far as the eye could see in the almost complete obscurity. Fear slowly starting to take over, Rachael slowly turned her head upwards. Endless rows of alien-looking tree-like fibers towered over her. They had no leaves nor branches, and they were white as the snow. Beyond them, only darkness. Only after a few seconds she saw the ceiling above her, incalculably high. Her heart started pounding, a feeling of dread and anxiety finally overwhelming her. That place looked like some kind of underground cave, judging by the strange humidity of the air and the faint earthy scent. She definitely wasn’t in her bedroom anymore.
Rachael rushed up, heavily breathing and starting to panic. She tried to figure out how she ended up there, to remember anything about her last memories, but any effort to recollect was met with a blurry of confused images, made worse by her shocked state, as if her own mind refused to cooperate. She searched for the answer to a simple, burning question, asking herself where the hell she was, but could not find it. She started aimlessly looking around, searching for any kind of indication or sign of civilization around her, among the tall white forest, but was soon forced to renounce. Resignation and angst quickly replaced the initial shock. Rachael was completely, utterly, cluelessly lost. She shouted the loudest “Help!” she could muster. Her voice was absorbed by the dark vastity, unanswered. Again, she was forced to acknowledge the futility of her actions. Frustrated and scared, she sat down under the tree-like strand growing from the ground, hugging her legs tightly. The pajamas-clad girl simply sat there for quite some time, trying to recollect herself. All around her, there was an eerie silence. Eventually, when she got up, she had taken a decision. She walked away from the site of her arrival and ventured ahead, hoping to find something – anything at all – that could somehow help her.
Rachael walked, and walked, and walked, but the landscape around her remained unchanged. She started to walk faster. Then, she started to run, her socked feet sinking just slightly in the strange terrain. Step after step, they became sore, and she had to stop. She considered herself to be quite fit, but the strangely humid air oppressed her, making her lose her stamina quicker than usual. The lost girl dropped herself on the ground, dripping in sweat, her long red hair stuck to her forehead and messy. She looked around: it was as if she never moved. “Damn you!” Rachael shouted with anger into the darkness. She laid down on her back, holding back tears of frustration. That was when she noticed, in the very dim light, that one of the strands was taller than the rest, growing not too far from her. Gathering all her strength, she got up and reached it. It was four, maybe five times her own height. Maybe from there she could have a better view of that mysterious place, she thought. Besides, Rachael knew that she had no other plan. So, she grabbed onto the trunk and climbed up. It was weirdly soft and easy to grip, and the intrepid girl had no problems reaching the top. Finally, standing above the forest, she looked around. The cavern seemed to end in a valley, but it was miles and miles ahead. Behind her, a wide opening on the ceiling, from which the scarce light entered the cave. Her eyes took a while to adjust to it, but when they did, she could look around a little more clearly.
That was when the dreadful realization hit her.
A shoe. She was in a damned shoe.
Her first reaction was of utter shock, followed by one of lowkey disgust. Her mind started racing, suddenly taking in all the consequences of her discovery. Calculating the (literal) proportion of such revelation was an overwhelming task. If this cave was, after all, actually the inside of a shoe, then the “forest” were the strands of lint of the insole. It was… sickening. “Just… how small am I?” she barely whispered, elaborating the fact that this whole situation, by the laws of physics, shouldn’t have been possible. The stunned girl couldn’t even get over the weirdness of the sheer size of the mundane object she was trapped in. It was maddening. At that point, Rachael wasn’t even sure if all this was even real. She knew only one thing for sure: she had to get out of there. Climbing down the tree-size lint, she tried to plan her next move. Maybe she could reach the opening of the gargantuan footwear and from there... climb out? It seemed impossible. But she had to know where she was. And why she was there.
Unfortunately, she barely had time to touch the ground. A blinding light from outside filled the shoe, stunning Rachael. Even without seeing anything, she could feel a presence outside. A long series of loud thuds, coming from the outer world, suggesting the movement of something big. After a glimmer of confidence in the past minutes, an incontrollable fear of the unknown gripped her heart. A gigantic shadow soon loomed over the insole she was stranded on. And her heart skipped a beat.
An enormous, imposing face was barely discernible above the shoe. But this wasn’t even the most unsettling part about the absurd view. Racheal noticed it immediately. The messy fiery red hair, the gleaming crystal eyes, the soft cheeks, the pensive and absorbed expression. They were just like hers. It didn’t take long for her to realize the truth, which was apparently impossible. That massive being didn’t just look like her. It was her. And, as a consequence of that paradox, she deduced that she was inside her own shoe. Rachael was unable to believe what she saw. She refused to.
“She’s… I’m… huge!”
Her rational mind tried to elaborate all the logic possibilities, but the diminutive girl unfortunately didn’t have the chance to consider it too much. A devastating earthquake violently rocked her entire world. She found herself sliding around among the fibers of the insole, once again lost inside the forest. Turning towards the outside world, she saw a white behemoth entering the cave, wiggling as it made its way towards the bottom of the valley, shacking the walls of the underworld. She cursed loudly, recognizing her own, socked foot coming her way. And being in the middle of the insole, she was exactly on its path. “No… No way this is happening…” she said, still trying to convince herself that this was somehow impossible. And yet, it was happening indeed. In seconds, her toes flew over her head, towards the bottom of the shoe. The socked sole of her foot, however, was quickly descending on top of her. She ran, but remembering how long it took her to travel through what was just her insole, she quickly realized how useless running was. Rachael screamed, but her voice went lost inside her comfortable shoe.
Then, suddenly, her foot came down on her.
Meanwhile, Rachael, the other, normal-sized one, was getting ready for a new day, blissfully ignorant of the horror she was causing to the other version of herself. Being the rational person that she was, normally she would refuse to acknowledge that such a paradox could even happen to begin with. She wouldn’t believe it if someone else told her. She would hardly believe it if she experienced it herself… She slipped her shoes on and put her hair up in a bun, as usual, ready to go out. A long day at the university was awaiting her. Then, the redhead trotted out of her apartment.
Rachael, the small one, victim of a cruel joke of the universe, went unnoticed, her size imperceptible compared to her other self. The unescapable massive foot had trapped her between the expand of the insole and the tangle of strings of her own gym sock. The white cotton strands smothered her and pressed her down inevitably. The perfume of lavender of the freshly washed sock was almost mocking, in her situation. Rachael was cramped into a small safe space of few millimeters between the tree-sized fibers, where the pressure of the enormous foot didn’t threaten to break her. She tried to scream again out of exasperation, but the sound was muffled by the fuzzy walls of her prison. She couldn’t believe she was being kept beneath the lowest, most humiliating part of her own body. The situation was so impossibly absurd that the dust-sized girl would have laughed at it, if she hadn’t been involved. With every step, she observed from her safe spot the giant foot dominating her view, shifting and adjusting inside the shoe to be more comfortable, like a giant white monster too big to be interested in devouring her. She could have never imagined that a majestic, terrifying sight of such scale was happening every day, right inside her shoe. And now, she was trapped in it.
Rachael wondered if she could bother with preparing a plan. She was stuck in a completely different world, was there any possibility that the giantess could notice something so small like herself? Was there even a point in trying? BOOM. A deafening step interrupted her flow of thoughts, as everything seemed to collapse on her. “Shi--”. BOOM. Another. An another. The other Rachael began to walk.
Still naturally oblivious to the peril she was putting herself through, Rachael continued her day as normal. She met with her friends, went to all her courses, had her lunch in a hurry, then more things to do in the afternoon… All while having a small herself under her foot, nothing but an error in the fabric of the universe, whose origin was still unknown to the unfortunate girl. Hours passed, and Rachael’s predicament was starting to drive her mad. She never wondered what an ordinary day of her life looked like from inside her shoe, but now, despite herself, she knew it. And she never thought that her active life could have such terrible drawbacks before that day: any occasional sprint or brief run during her day was a nightmare in her current condition. The poor girl was tossed around, back and forth between the forest of lint and the tangle of stands of her sock. Eventually, she got stuck in the web of cotton, against the sole of her own foot. Her normal-sized counterpart had just got up from the lunch table on a full stomach. Rachael wiggled and squirmed, but her struggles only made her situation worse, her small body being trapped even faster in the tangle of her own sock like quicksand. She screamed for help, but no one could hear. Rachael took a step forward. Then another, and another…
The oblivious girl made her way the old wing of her faculty. Unbeknownst to many, in a dim hallway, there was an old laboratory, now abandoned. She had been going there every day for weeks, in secret, tinkering with old, dusty appliances and devices. Rachael heard that, somewhere among all the forgotten junk, there were a few promising projects, abandoned for lack of funds a long time ago. Being the kind of resourceful person with a knack for fixing stuff (and being late with her own thesis project), Rachael blindly followed the rumors, hoping for a quick solution to her problem.
Today was no different. The sound of the plastic sole of her canvas shoes squeaking against the cold floor filled the dusty room. She resumed her work from a new pile of mechanical junk on a workbench. She stood in front of it and began searching among the scraps for anything that could still be working.
That day, she felt particularly demotivated, and her search wasn’t really successful. After almost half an hour, just when she was about to give up, she pulled out a strange device, with a red led still tenuously glowing. Apart from a few cables coming out of the weird cube of metal and a missing screw here and there, it still seemed intact. Intrigued, the girl examined it in her hands and, after a quick evaluation, she was sure she could fix it… Whatever it was. She quickly grabbed some tools from the table and began to work.
She had been extremely careful while repairing the object, fearing to break it or to cause any malfunction. After all, it looked very old and she still didn’t know what it did exactly. “No matter”, Rachael casually said to herself, “I’ll figure out what this is, eventually”. Her meticulous work continued with no problems, until she decided to fic the cables. Her steady grip held one of them, slowly connecting it to the matching end. She was precisely moving it, with no minimal mistake, when she felt something. A small, insignificant itch, on the bottom of her right foot. Stinging, as if something was there, wiggling against her sole.
Down, far beneath her attention, the small Rachael, completely unaware of where (the other) she was, or what she was doing, was slowly breaking free from the strings of her sock. Biting, tearing and snapping with brute force threads barely visible to the naked eye. She had no idea of what she caused.
Her body reacted to that minor disturb, and her hand slightly shook. The normal Rachael was struck by a spark, unnaturally powerful, coming from the cable. She was pushed back by an unexplainable force, that shattered the cubic device and sent an electric discharge through her whole body. The strong light emitted by the impact blinded her for a few seconds. When Rachael finally saw the few remains of the device, she was immeasurably disappointed. The redhead turned to the door and immediately left the lab without a word. Frustrated, but mostly sad.
She had no idea of the consequences of the released energy on the big scheme of universal forces. How could she? She didn’t even know the exact purpose of the invention she had messed with.
Walking down the hallway, about to return home, she felt that itch under her foot again. Upset, and realizing that it was the cause of her mistake, she untied her shoe to inspect the small nuisance.
Somewhere on the surface of her white sock, Rachael felt her whole world beginning to shake, as her gigantic counterpart took her shoe off. For the first time, she was transported to the giant world out of her own canvas shoe. Holding her balance on one foot, the giantess looked down to the sole of her socked foot, turned towards her face. The shrunken Rachael saw her own massive face staring in her direction, eyes squinting with concentration. Never before her reflection was so terrifying and imposing. She screamed, but she was practically inaudible. She wondered if, even so close, she could be detected by her other self, and if that would be a good thing in either case.
In fact, Rachael did spot herself while checking her sock – an insignificant pinkish mite in an ocean of white cotton – but didn’t mind it. She just assumed that it was a simple piece of lint, dismissing any further consideration without a second thought. She never could have guessed the truth. Most importantly, she was searching for the source of that itch, but with no result. Nothing seemed wrong with her sock. She pinched the general area, pulling it up for a while.
Rachael saw her own thumb and index finger descending towards her. Powerful and solid like mountains, they precisely grabbed the portion of texture in which she was still partially tangled. She was lifted, despite all her struggles to free herself. The walls of warm skin from her own digits slowly enclosed her, increasing the pressure on her microscopic body and trapping her in her own fingerprints. “Whatever!”, she heard her own voice booming from above. Suddenly, the fingers let go and the texture snapped back against her sole. The unlucky girl was thrown back inside the fibers, absorbed in the tangle, lost far from the surface, nowhere to be seen.
Rachael simply slipped her foot back inside her shoe and headed home, sealing herself away once and for all.
That evening, she returned home, exhausted and frustrated by the unproductive afternoon. She felt like a real failure, a disappointment. The girl kicked off her shoes, put on her pajamas and dropped heavily on her bed. She had no troubles falling asleep.
She still didn’t know that the fabric of the universe, much like herself, had incurred into a mistake, that day. One that she was responsible for, in more than one way. Rachael didn’t know yet what fate had in store for her…
… Bounced back in time of one day, before the error itself was ever made in the first place…
… Transported to the place where the electrical discharge stopped through her body: the plastic sole of her canvas shoes…
When she opened her eyes, her mind was clouded by scattered and confused thoughts. She had woken from a dreamless sleep, although she didn’t remember falling asleep. But most importantly, even before opening her eyes, Rachael immediately knew something was off. When she had the chance to look around, she found herself lying on her stomach on a smooth and somewhat soft ground, which was definitely not her bed. A dark, immense expanse laid before her, as far as the eye could see in the almost complete obscurity. Fear slowly starting to take over, Rachael slowly turned her head upwards. Endless rows of alien-looking tree-like fibers towered over her. They had no leaves nor branches, and they were white as the snow. Beyond them, only darkness. Only after a few seconds she saw the ceiling above her, incalculably high. Her heart started pounding, a feeling of dread and anxiety finally overwhelming her. That place looked like some kind of underground cave, judging by the strange humidity of the air and the faint earthy scent. She definitely wasn’t in her bedroom anymore…