It had started so simply; a recorded digit, gone up by... one.
Not one percentile, not one thousandth, or millionth, or billionth. One. Something so small, something so seemingly meaningless, yet so specific. Far too specific, for his liking.
So, he checked for errors, reset the scans, ironed things out.
There was exactly a 0.7% change in the recorded data. The expected margin of error he already knew about, and so he checked again.
Persisting through an adjustment uncountably greater than itself, the single anomalous addition remained accounted for, despite it all.
It would have been frustrating, were it not so fascinating.
An addition of one, an alien droplet of water in an infinite ocean. So insignificant, so easy to miss, and yet it plagued him.
And so, he would ready the hounds. Engines roared to life at his command, sharpening the scalpel he'd use to pierce through to that singular digit, and cast it into the light for him to understand.
His great machine thrummed as it tapped at the glass walls of time and space, finding the weakest point between it and that one, before it glowed with light that was brighter than bright as it burst through the barriers separating him from the truth he sought, an all-seeing eye readied to be sent through once it did...
... his own eyes going wide as the light of his paradise was consumed, ever briefly, in a great darkness that invaded through the tear in the world. Darkness that, in that moment, he saw movement within.
Safety protocols had activated without need of his command, the tear being sewn shut the instant alien material was detected, the darkness that had been pooling inside, and whatever had lived within it, quickly dissipating into nothingness. The only thing left, the only evidence of the event, being something he picked up from the floor.
His brow raising as he examined the playing card, for once left without anything to say... until, behind him, he heard his monitor flicker on.
Turning to see a sight recorded from that addition of 'one', his probe having gone through in that same instant the darkness had poured in. Now he had eyes that could shed light on it.
And, oh the world that light did reveal, that dark world...
"How very, very interesting..."
