Anya stared at the blank word processor page for a while. The time felt much longer than it was. A glance at the clock by the door proved it.
With a sigh, she let her gaze fall to the table below the clock. It was piled with stuff she'd been too tired to put away last night after a less-than-great party. She decided to put it away now. Maybe after a short break, she'd be able to get some words to flow.
Jacket in the closet. Keys on the hook. Last, she picked up her purse and the door prize she'd won, still in it's cheap looking packaging. Some sort of kid's toy, probably.
Carrying her purse into the bedroom to stash where it belonged, she examined the package.
It was a plain white cubic card stock box with no plastic panels to show off the contents. Four sides repeated the name "Hyper Knot" in various colors. The font gave a distinctly handwritten vibe, despite the precise spacing and flourishes on each letter. The top had a meaningless splash of swirling rainbow smears. The fine print on the bottom was sparse and printed in a plain black book font.
Contains one Poly Aetheric Knot
N-Codex Variant SN 00000000001
Throw against wall to activate.
She still had no idea what it was.
On the way back to her computer desk, Anya stuck a finger under the top of the box and tore it open.
For a moment, she thought the thing inside was a ball of yarn, about the size of a softball.
But it wasn't that orderly.
Nor was it really disorderly, not like a tangle of string.
Actually, it was kind of hard to look at.
She stopped walking, frowning into the box. What was it?
Cautiously, she poked a finger at it.
It felt soft and warm, like a wool sweater. It wasn't big enough for a sweater.
She pulled it out, expecting it to resolve into a piece of fabric with some chaotic design accounting for how it looked. Maybe a beany or a hanky?
It stayed ball shape. Sort of. It looked round, but also didn't look round.
She shook her head sharply, but the weird effect didn't clear up.
Despite that, it actually felt rather peasant to hold. Soft and warm, but maybe more like fur than wool? Or like fresh baked bread.
"That is just weird," Anya commented to herself. She looked around quickly, then hurried the rest of the way to her desk and set the thing down on one of the disorderly piles of paper that surrounded her laptop.
After making sure it wouldn't roll, she took a closer look at the packaging. There wasn't anything else to see. The inside of the box was empty and blank. The printing on the outside was still just as meaningless.
She set it aside and looked at the Hyper Knot again, cautiously picked it up. It was still hard to look at, and still pleasant to hold. Now it felt sort of like smooth silk, but it looked almost furry.
Anya looked around the room again. There were no blank spaces of wall she'd care to throw anything at, but she did have one of those toy basketball hoops mounted at waist height on the back of the door. The toy basketball had been lost somewhere some time ago.
Anya hefted the Hyper Knot gently. If she threw it against the basketball hoop backboard, it'd probably start singing a silly song or something as it fell through the hoop. Like that joke fish she remembered her brother once had. At the least, it might make an interesting replacement for her missing basketball. Throwing her basketball used to help her think, until she'd misplaced it.
She tossed the Hyper Knot.
It flew in an oddly spiraling arc and smacked lightly into the backboard.
Instead of bouncing off and falling through the hoop, it stuck there, flattening into a pancake shape.
Anya blinked, hung up a moment on the weird flight path. Then, she started wondering if she'd have to clean glue off the backboard.
Then she realized the now disk-like Hyper Knot was unfolding.
Untangling, maybe?
No. It was expanding, the strings writhing and sliding past each other, but it wasn't getting any more orderly. In fact, it seemed to be getting even more complex -- like zooming in on a fractal and finding even more of the same complex patterns repeating themselves.
When it reached the edge of the door, she started to worry whether it was going to stop growing. Maybe it would envelope the whole room and strangle her in weird strands of not quite yarn?
But she didn't feel frightened. And that was weird, too.
The thing spread well past the edges of the door, sliding in front of the shelves and furniture to either side without seeming to deform from its flat disk-like shape. She hoped it wasn't damaging the stuff behind it.
When the edges brushed the ceiling and floor, the disk quit expanding.
Then it began to rotate slowly at the center, twisting the tangled threads into a galaxy shape. Lighter and darker colors migrated to delineate several galactic arms.
Eight of them, Anya thought, but she wasn't quite able to count them without loosing track.
Fractal-like, the ends of the galactic arms began to rotate also, twisting into similar galaxies. And each of their arms likewise.
"Ok, that is just cool!" Anya decided.
Realizing the shape had stabilized, Anya approached to get a better look.
It was still hard to look at.
She reached out with one finger to touch the center of one of the secondary galaxy shapes. There had to be some sort of illusion to make the ceiling-tall disk of yarn look just as dense as the original hand sized ball of yarn.
With a swooshing sound that wasn't really a sound, Anya fell into the galaxy.
It only took a moment, and it felt like diving into a favorite book.