“What is this thing?” I ask.
 
A disembodied voice responds within my consciousness.
 
“This is the future birthing into the now.”
 
The otherworldly dance of the gears is complex- like a multi-dimensional model of time. They come to rest and I reach through a gap in the side of the egg. 
 
This is the process of Becoming.
 
As I look at the gears, within my mind I see something like a video feed of future events. One brushes my outstretched hand and suddenly I double over in pain.   
 
With a reflex, I rip the gear out, pulling it through the egg’s lattice wall, and throw it over my shoulder. The machine responds by spinning its gears around again, recalibrating for the loss of one, whispering its light clacking sound into a new configuration.
 
“What’s happening now?”
 
Each gear is the probability of a thought, word, or action in your future. Your destiny is resetting itself around what you have removed.
 
“How did I know I could do that? Pull that gear out, removing that future moment?”
 
Why else are you here?
 
“I have no idea. I don’t even know what this place is.”
 
You are in the In Between.
 
“In between what?”
 
Everything. The Impossible Now between the past and the future.
 
“That makes no sense whatsoever.”

It’s impossible in its short duration. Yet here you are, standing inside the eternity of a single moment. Do you remember who you are in the world to which your body belongs?
 
I look blankly into space, squinting with the effort to remember. 
 
“I have no idea.”
 
Then you see the truth in how the past is dust.
 
“OK. Why do some of these gears—these futures that I touch—make me sick and not others?”   
 
All choices have unintended consequences, some unfortunate and some not. The pain each brings is your guide.
 
“Where are the gears that feel good?”
 
You’re not here to feel good.
 
A new gear swings into view. On this one I see a Ferris wheel and happy grandchildren whizzing by, fingers grasping their car, laughter… they smile at me, or through me, looking off into their own world.       
 
Obviously, I let that gear pass by.
 
More gears emerge within view, some passing through others, several clear and definite, many less so and hard to focus on, though all bringing with them their clear images of meaning.
 
Each time they come to rest, I pull out a gear that I feel by my pain to be to my future detriment.
 
At one point I look at the growing pile of gears.
 
“It’s starting to look like if I don’t have a bad future then I have no future at all. Even though I now feel less pain, am I going to die sooner from doing all this?”

Your destiny has to fit itself around futures that aren’t meant to be. Your number of breaths are already counted. I will worry about your last one. 
 
 “I don’t know how comforting that is.”
 
Eliminating bad choices doesn’t mean you won’t make wrong ones. You won’t know they are wrong until after they pass. Since right and wrong are variables over which you have no control, the answers to what comes tomorrow are a waste. Better is understanding the beauty of how everything fits and re-fits together.
 
“What am I missing here, in my lack of understanding?”
 
What is clearly before you. Grace. No one deserves salvation. It can only be given by Grace. It is your birthright, but it must be chosen at the expense of the world that separates us. 
 
“This fixing my future is painful. I feel ashamed that I’m not doing it with some moral compass. I’m only guided by pain. I don’t even know where or when these futures happen.”
 
Where or when are not important. Removing your enthusiasm to further chain yourself to the world isn’t as painful as carrying the crushing weight of those chains, once forged around you.
 
“It’s as if this place was made so that I can do one thing and one thing only, with no chance to screw it up.”
 
If those with choices make poor use of them, then offering fewer possibilities could be called mercy. 
 
You can’t change the past. But you can make better choices in the future. Everything is interconnected.  And pay more attention to your relationships. Be gentle with everyone, as I am gentle with you.”
 
“Gentle? What’s gentle about all this?”
 
You prayed for something for which being here is the answer. And now the man who fell from the sky is not the same who flew into it.
 
I look up into the stone-gray sky and then out across the seemingly dead and abandoned city. I look back to the egg and reaching up, place my hand upon it.  And I say, “I think I can live with this now.”
​

​I wake up in a hospital.  I am told that my plane crashed and the doctors run down the list of all my injuries.  I discover that I was put into a coma upon my arrival and was kept there for one week.  For that entire time, I was in the In Between and did not stop yanking out gears until I left. But time doesn’t seem to move at all there and it’s not like I had a physical body that needed to rest, eat or sleep.