The Algorithm’s Guest

‘That’s a big storm’, I thought, while I felt the water running below my knees, even though I was driving in my car. My car could not resist the tremendous pressure from the water. I was still blaming myself for not repairing the roof fillings when it finally broke down. It was inevitable, so I left it smartly parked in the middle of the road. Fortunately I had an umbrella, but unfortunately it got stuck when I tried to open it, so I gave in and began to walk under the heavy rain. After twenty minutes walking and five sneezes later, I found a path on one side of the road. On a normal day, even being drunk I would not have followed it, but considering I was tired, with no place to go and on top of it, I was beginning to feel the symptoms of a good cold. I didn’t think much about it and followed the path. When I reached the end of it, and the ninetieth branch made another little hole on my overcoat, I had the doubtful pleasure of meeting the house. I should really say “The House”, or “The Manor”, as it was an enormous Tudor-style construction built in the middle of nowhere. I ran without stopping but to stand up when I fell, as my feet got engaged in a personal chat with a stone. With great effort I reached the front door and knocked on it.

The door opened before my knuckles completed their third assault on the ancient wood. No one stood in the doorway. I peered into darkness that seemed to have physical weight, like staring into the void between stars.

“Hello?” I called, my voice sounding pathetically small against the cacophony of rain pounding the earth behind me.

The darkness inside answered with silence, but it was a silence that invited. Or demanded. I stepped across the threshold, my squelching shoes announcing my entrance with all the dignity of a wet cat at a funeral.

The door slammed shut behind me with theatrical enthusiasm. Of course it did. I might as well have been wearing a T-shirt that said “EXPENDABLE CHARACTER” in bold red letters.

“I’m sorry to intrude,” I announced to the darkness, “but my car decided to evolve into a submarine at a particularly inconvenient moment.”

Light bloomed suddenly—not electric, but the warm flicker of a dozen candles igniting simultaneously around what I now saw was an impossibly vast foyer. The ceiling stretched upward into shadows that the candlelight couldn’t penetrate. A grand staircase wound its way upward like the spine of some prehistoric beast.

“Your timing is impeccable,” said a voice that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. It had the quality of expensive whiskey poured over broken glass. “We’ve been expecting you for precisely 47 years, 3 months, and 16 days.”

“There must be some mistake,” I said, water pooling around my feet on what appeared to be Italian marble. “I was just driving to my ex-wife’s birthday party. An obligation I was fulfilling with all the enthusiasm of a man volunteering for a root canal.”

A figure emerged from behind the staircase. He wore an impeccable suit that might have been fashionable sometime in the 1870s. His face was geometrically perfect but somehow wrong, as if someone had studied human features in a book but never actually seen a person.

“No mistake,” he said, his mouth moving slightly out of sync with his words. “You are the one hundred and forty-fourth visitor. The Algorithm predicted your arrival down to the minute.”

“The Algorithm,” I repeated flatly.

“Yes.” He smiled with teeth too white and too numerous. “Would you like some tea? You humans always seem to want tea when you’re wet. Something about comfort and warmth and not wanting to confront the existential terror of discovering your species is not alone in the universe.”

“I’d prefer answers,” I said, but found myself following him anyway, through a doorway that seemed to stretch and contract as we passed through it.

The room beyond defied physics. It appeared to be a cozy sitting room with a fireplace and overstuffed chairs, but the walls kept shifting position when I wasn’t looking directly at them. The ceiling seemed simultaneously ten feet high and hundreds of miles away.

“This house,” my host said, pouring tea from a pot that hadn’t been there a moment before, “is what you might call a node—a point where your dimension and several others overlap.”

“Of course it is,” I muttered, accepting the teacup. The liquid inside was blue and smelled of cinnamon and ozone. “And I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re not human.”

“Oh, I’m wearing a human,” he said casually. “The original owner of this body expired some time ago. Brain aneurysm. Very tragic. But the body was in excellent condition, and my kind has gotten quite good at maintenance.”

I should have been terrified. Instead, I felt a strange calm settle over me, as if this explained everything that had ever gone wrong in my life. The failed marriage. The dead-end job selling insurance to people who couldn’t afford it. The persistent sense that reality was some kind of cosmic joke at my expense.

“So what do you want from me?” I asked, sipping the tea. It tasted like summer lightning and childhood disappointments.

“Nothing you’ll miss,” he said, his smile widening impossibly. “Just a small piece of your timeline. A fragment of possibility. You see, my kind feeds on potential—the roads not taken, the choices unmade.”

Outside, the storm seemed to intensify, rain hammering against windows that showed different weather on each pane—here a desert at high noon, there a frozen tundra, another showing what appeared to be the surface of Venus.

“And if I refuse?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.

“Refusal is also a potential we can consume,” he said with a shrug that rippled strangely, as if his shoulders weren’t connected quite right. “But it’s less… nutritious. We prefer willing donations.”

I stared into my teacup, watching the blue liquid swirl into patterns that resembled galaxies being born and dying. “What’s in it for me?”

“Ah!” His face lit up with genuine delight. “A negotiator! How refreshing. Most visitors just scream or deny or bore us with philosophical questions about the nature of reality.”

He reached into his pocket and removed something that looked like a small silver egg. “This device can rewrite small portions of your personal timeline. Nothing major—we can’t make you a millionaire or prevent your birth—but we could, for instance, ensure that you remembered to fix your car’s roof before this storm.”

The absurdity of it all struck me then. Here I was, soaked to the bone, drinking alien tea with a thing wearing a human skin like an ill-fitting suit, negotiating over fragments of my own timeline like they were baseball cards to be traded.

I began to laugh, and once started, couldn’t stop. The sound echoed strangely in the impossible room, coming back distorted, as if heard through water or across vast distances.

My host tilted his head at an angle no human neck would permit. “Have you experienced a malfunction?”

“No,” I gasped between fits of laughter. “It’s just—of all the people to make first contact with interdimensional beings, it had to be me, a man who couldn’t even remember to fix his car roof.”

“Precisely why you were selected,” he said seriously. “The Algorithm identified you as someone whose life exists in a state of perpetual, low-grade chaos. Such lives generate the most delicious potentials.”

I wiped tears from my eyes—whether from laughter or something else, I wasn’t sure anymore. “So let me get this straight. You want to… what? Eat a road not taken from my life? And in exchange, you’ll fix a minor inconvenience?”

“Essentially, yes.” He sipped his own tea, which was a vibrant purple. “Though I wouldn’t call it eating, exactly. More like… savoring the quantum flavor of your unmade choices.”

I considered the offer. What did I have to lose? A fragment of potential from a life that was already a monument to mediocrity and missed opportunities?

“Fine,” I said. “But I want something better than a fixed car roof. I want—”

Before I could finish, the walls of the room began to pulse with a light that hurt my eyes. My host stood abruptly, spilling his purple tea, which hovered in midair rather than falling.

“The Convergence comes early,” he hissed, his human façade slipping to reveal something beneath that my mind couldn’t quite process. “They’ve found us. The Timekeepers.”

The floor beneath me tilted, sending me sprawling. The teacup shattered against a wall that was suddenly much closer than it had been.

“What’s happening?” I shouted over a sound like the universe tearing at its seams.

“Other entities,” my host said, his voice now a multi-toned chorus, “who believe potential should not be harvested but preserved. Religious zealots, by our standards.”

The doorway through which we’d entered burst open, and figures entered—or perhaps unfolded—into the room. They looked human only in the vaguest sense. Their forms constantly shifted between states of matter. They trailed wisps of probability behind them like cosmic contrails.

“You violated the Treaty of Eternal Now,” one of them intoned in a voice that bypassed my ears and resonated directly in my skull. “This node is condemned.”

My host snarled something in a language that taste like copper on my tongue. Then he turned to me, suddenly urgent. “The silver egg. Take it!” He pressed the device into my hand. “Run! Find the red door! It leads back to your timeline!”

What followed was chaos that defied description—reality itself seemed to be coming undone around me. I clutched the silver egg and ran, dodging furniture that moved with predatory intent and navigating hallways that twisted in non-Euclidean ways.

Behind me, energies clashed that made the air taste like batteries and regret. My lungs burned with exertion and something else—the atmosphere inside the house was changing, becoming toxic to human physiology.

When I finally spotted it—a door painted the exact color of arterial blood—I was on the verge of collapse. I hurled myself at it, grasping the handle with fingers that had begun to tingle and go numb.

The last thing I heard before I fell through was my host’s voice, somehow inside my head: “The egg! Remember the egg! Your potential belongs to YOU!”

Then I was falling, tumbling through impossible space and—

I woke up in my car, the engine idling, windshield wipers working frantically against a torrential downpour. The clock on the dashboard read 7:15 PM—exactly the time I’d left my apartment to drive to my ex-wife’s birthday gathering.

The roof wasn’t leaking. In fact, the car seemed in perfect condition—better than it had been in years.

I reached into my pocket, already knowing what I would find. The silver egg sat heavy and cold against my palm, pulsing with a light that shouldn’t exist in our reality.

As I pulled back onto the road, I wondered what fragment of my potential had been consumed in that place-between-places. What path would I now never take? What choice had been removed from my future?

And more importantly—what would I do with this impossible device that could rewrite small portions of my timeline?

I turned the car around. I wasn’t going to my ex-wife’s party after all.

I had more important potentials to explore.