Myself and I

The book I chose didn't seem unusual with its knitted covers and title at the front, what did throw me off was the lack of the author's name and tried to see if it was contained inside the book.

I was shocked to see -or was unable to see- that there was barely a letter or any evidence that anything was written on the foxing of the few dozen pages it contained. Annoyed, I was about to return the book on the shelf and pick another if it wasn't for the fact that the shelf was no longer present nor the row that it was lined up with.

The whole library seemed to have disappeared and was replaced by a huge circular laboratory of sorts with Tesla coils scattered almost randomly everywhere and a ring in-between two of them. Next to me was a table and typewriter along with a chair and a cigar with its embers still bright on an ashtray. A note was written by the device and replaced the book for it.

Closely I read what it said:

1)Be stationed at the lever before twelve o'clock.

2)The moment the second-hand reaches twelve alongside the minute and hour hand, pull the switch.

3)I will know that the experiment will become a success if the portal opens a rift into a new possibility. Failure of an experiment will result in a singularity and will try to absorbed everything around it.

In case of experiment failure: run and take on a new identity if chances of survival are higher than 1.5%

The last part was rather comforting, I wouldn't have known on what to do when a singularity would've appeared but now I do. Scanning the room for a clock, one was mounted on the portal and it was nearing 12 o'clock. Immediately I tried to find for the aforementioned lever but none was on the ring.

Around the radius where it was at, there was a pillar that handled the device and ran to it. There were ten seconds -ten ticks- before whatever the portal contained revealed itself as either the experiment being conducted or the very thing that will destroy the lab and theoretically all of existence if the survival rate was 1.5 or more.

Then came the time and I immediately pulled the lever down. The twin Tesla coils sparked to life before spreading to ones around and then to the ring. More sparks randomly blasted out of the coils before smoke, possibly fog, crawled out of the doors before they opened.

No singularity appeared, nothing to eat me at least. Rather it was...