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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baQVB2W1KAQ

“There’s something in the air
Burning ions in the oxygen are all aglow
A feeling everywhere
Premonitions of the storm that comes
But I won’t go”

He had just activated the Devi, hoped it would be a recall program he’d prodded, and pushed maximum power into the... contraption for lack of a better term.
The device, or Devi as his team had taken to calling it, appeared to be a small part of a larger whole.
It was littered with smartdust, appeared to writhe and wriggle when not being directly looked at, and was supremely close-lipped compared to other smartdust he’d.
Spoken to?
No matter now, his team was dead and he had no other options left but to hit the Devi with massive amounts of power and see if it would help current matters either by blowing everything into atomized dust in a massive energy emission or tearing everything asunder in an uncontrolled n-space rip.
The assault force that had murdered his colleagues were forcing the door behind him as he “hit the throttle”.
His efforts were rewarded with the airglow of heavy ionization and his stomach felt like he’d been tipped over the edge of abyss, violently.

Somewhere in the back of his mind the thought occurred to him that this was a horrifically terrible idea.
Might have been the fact that he could see himselves everywhere as he fell through realities, catching glimpses of things happening that he shouldn’t have been able to see or know.
Could have been seeing the assault force both murder him and miss catching him simultaneously, a Shroedinger’s deadman flailing through madness and mist.
Or it simply could have been that the very second the Devi tore space asunder he knew instantly what he would come face to face with.
And he wasn’t sure that would have been preferable.

To outside observation he was falling through a series of n-space portals, rapidly being transferred from widely separated locations as if he were a metal projectile magnetically conducted down a gauss gun.
No sooner would one portal spit him out but a new one would swallow him up.
To his infinite horror he found a few of the openings were spitting him out of bright white hot fireballs resembling fusion weapon detonations.
Or worse, teleFRAG shots.
He didn’t even want to consider what hard radiation was frying him.

Just as his perception began to completely break down, he was aware of something looking at him.
His journey was at an end, the final portal delivered him to what appeared to be a planet sized black hole.
He saw the light bending around the dark sphere, the accretion disk.
Everything told him that was what he was seeing.

So his surprise was immediate when he felt sand under his back.

He rolled over onto his side, nausea washing over him, his head rolling with invisible waves.
His suit radiation meter gave a sudden shriek before breaking.
He wasn’t alone.
“I was hoping to find you, sir.” he told the passively quiet figure watching him.
“Now why would you do a fool thing like that?” Matthew Soames said as he considered the desperate and miserable figure laying on a dune of smartdust at his feet.
The information it was telling him about their visitor wasn’t good.