We'll have to break free. Some part of us, perhaps, will stay there, inside the house. A layer of skin will fuse to the floor, or singed hair will become someone's paint color. Doesn't matter. We'll have to burst out together, holding hands, already outside this system, having already created our own and saving the world from collapse. No, saving ourselves. And, perhaps, each other.

Countdown, click, open your eyes. Collapse, oscillations, straight line. Will we make it?

We’ll find ourselves outside the house, and then we’ll hear it vibrate. Just now, two of its dimensions became insignificant. Two degrees of freedom were added. In them, the house convulses spasmodically and emits a diabolically low sound. Everything comes into motion, and this motion is malignant. Everything in the house shakes, rattles. The old man coughs, the old woman laughs, Dopfelheimer gets his revenge. He roars: “Hey, lucky bastard, how does it feel? Are you happy now?”

Not yet, to be honest.

Here, I’ll realize it’s time to give answers before the micro-collapse levels the house. And I’ll yell into the house through a broken window: “Dopfelheimer! Mark my words: life experience is measured in hertz!”—he’ll consume my answer, and it will take him a few seconds. Then he’ll sing his hurricane again: “Hertz, to all hell! Do you even know what you’re babbling about, pup?!”—I won’t want to answer. But I don’t know how not to. I’ll yell, running away and carrying you in my arms: “Dopfelheimer! When you consume your experiences, chew on your life experience to answer a complex question, at what frequency do your thoughts oscillate?”—his simple, Marshallian-shaped convolutions… “What are you doing, you dog?!”—another crack will echo from the house. I’m not sure that question will be addressed to me, because there's already a dog in there, but I’ll answer anyway, one last time, with a single word: “Hertz, Dopfelheimer!”

Countdown, click, open your eyes. Drink a little, you can slap your forehead, look over there. Will we make it?

We’ll run across the white sheet. Towards where its edge is supposed to be. The house behind us will be at the mercy of infra-vibrations, gurgling with all its vocal cords, of which there are plenty—more than people. Shards will fly off it and seed the white sheet. The house will be a nuclear bomb wound into a spiral. The chain reaction will start in its very heart, with Dopfelheimer's card, and end at the house's peak. It will explode into shreds, and all its billions or trillions or googols of dimensions will collapse like simple spokes. They will crash and clang, punching a hole in the white sheet, and a new world will be created. That’s how it will seem to me. That will be our perception, yours and mine.