So yea, there I was. Half drunk, mouth tasting like an ashtray, floating in an endless void.
And when I say endless void, I don't mean "existential metaphor" void. I mean the deluxe, no-refund, cosmic bullshit version. No body. No weight. No pain. Can't feel my hands, can't feel my legs— hell, I can't even feel my lungs, which is rude considering how hard they worked poisoning themselves.
Just my mind. Fully operational. Wide awake. Trapped in the dark like some kind of overeducated brain in a jar.
How long have I been here?
I try to focus on something. Anything. A dot. A speck. A cosmic breadcrumb.
Nope.
There's nothing. Not darkness, darkness implies there's the absence of light. This is worse. This is the absence of even the concept of light or dark.
I can't tell how far anything is, because distance requires reference points, and this place apparently fired all of those. There's no up, no down, no forward. Just me thinking I'm moving and reality responding with a firm go fuck yourself.
I try to reach out. Mentally, I guess. No arm to extend. No hand to miss with. I could be an inch from something or a trillion miles away and it would feel exactly the same.
Which is to say: nothing.
Fuck Fuck. No this is not how I go out. Breathe. Panic acknowledged. Panic later.
I didn't brute-force my way through life just to fold at the finish line.
The void stayed mute. In fact he didn't even breathe! No rush of air, no resistance. Not even silence, because silence still implies something could have made noise.
I'm still conscious. That's not an accident. That's a variable. But wtf can I do? No body. No output. It's fine. Annoying? Yes. But this isn't the end it's just another problem.
Not a single atom moved. Which was absurd. Motion at that scale was inevitable. Thermal noise, quantum jitter, something should've twitched.
But nothing did. And that was the problem.
Because that begged a worse question: was there even matter here to move in the first place?
Where the fuck am I? This is way above my pay grade.Ok focus. Start from the beginning.
My name is [REDACTED]. I'm twenty-three, professionally classified as a prodigy, personally convinced I just fake it better than most. I was half drunk smoking a cigarette in the late hours when even thieves wouldn't rob, then I helped a black kitten…
Next thing I know, I fall? The ground just… gives up. I don't trip. I don't slip. I fall through it.
Concrete, dirt, bedrock… gone. The planet peels away like it was never solid to begin with. Earth drops out beneath me, shrinking fast, until it's just a blue thought in the distance.
Then stars. The Milky Way stretches and blurs, light smearing into something abstract as I punch straight through it.
Still falling.
Past galaxies. Past structure. Past the last familiar scaffolding of reality, until even the cosmic background, the universe's oldest memory, tears like cheap fabric.
And then. Nothing.
I don't know how long I've been here. Seconds? Hours? Millennia? Time's a concept, and there's nothing to measure it against. Nothing. Not a speck, not a shadow, not even a goddamn atom twitching.
Wait… Time?
That's the problem, isn't it? Time only exists because things change. Because something moves relative to something else. Time never stops its march forward, but even time needs a point of reference to be anchored to.
Take a black hole.
Fall toward one and, from the outside, you slow down. Stretch out. Your seconds smear into eternity. Time dilation so extreme you practically freeze at the edge. But from your perspective? Time keeps ticking. Heartbeats still count. Thoughts still line up one after another.
Same reason why no one can confirm the true speed of light even with all our advanced technology. Fun fact we only know the two way speed of light.
Same universe. Same laws. Two different clocks arguing about who's right.
And that's the key.
Time doesn't stop. It relativizes. It bends. It negotiates. It needs something, anything, to measure itself against.
And here? There's no reference. No before. No after.
So the question isn't how long I've been here.
It's whether time can move at all in a place like this.
There's no mass to curve it. No motion to stretch it. No observer to disagree with me.
No spacetime fabric to tear… because the fabric isn't here.
So what happens to time when there's nothing left to slow it down… and nothing left to compare it to?
The answer settles in, cold and thrilling.
It doesn't break. It defaults.
And for the first time, I feel a pressure on my body. Which is impressive, considering I don't have one.
It's not weight. Not gravity. It's like reality itself is leaning on me, annoyed. The universe doesn't like this line of thinking. The heavens push down, laws tightening, concepts snapping into place like restraints.
Unauthorized access, the cosmos seems to say.
Cute. Because it can't reach me. There's nothing here for it to grab onto. No space. No matter. No timeline to clamp shut. This place, this nothing, it doesn't obey. It shelters the thought simply by refusing to exist properly.
So that's how it is! I'm not breaking the rules. I pause.
I'm somewhere the rules don't apply.
And so there was a thought. An idea. Almost by an instinct.
Something took root where the thought had been. A quiet weight, settling deep inside him. Not knowledge. Not awareness. Just potential, compressed and waiting.
A seed.
It had become a power. Something that was his in this void, faint and indistinct. Tiny. Almost nothing. A weightless seed tucked inside him, hidden in the emptiness, pressing softly against the void itself.
It could have been ignored. Overlooked. Forgotten. But it wasn't.
It was his.
And so the seed responded.
Not with force. Not with light. Just a faint agreement, like something finally acknowledging it was allowed to act.
The void loosened its hold, and for a single, impossible instant, he was everywhere and nowhere at once! Emptiness unfolding, the cosmos rushing past without distance or direction.
Stars smeared into meaning. Galaxies folded. The dark itself seemed to move.
And then—
[REDACTED]
I look up and see—
Not just an integral. Not just a series.
A monster.
The holoboard is displaying a non‑elementary improper integral… this definitely involves a power series expansion and a convergence condition…
Even that shitty void was better than whatever hell this is.