I wake up already standing.
There is no bed, no cot, no chair tipped beside me. Just a street under my feet that isn't a street, and a sky above me that isn't a sky, and a city that looks like mine in the way a shadow looks like a person.
Everything is made of a patient kind of black.
Not darkness, exactly. Darkness is the absence of light. This feels more like an object. Buildings are cut from it like pieces of paper, sharp-edged silhouettes standing against a slightly softer shade. Windows are holes punched in the void. The tram cables are lines of deeper nothing looping across a ceiling that never quite decides where it ends.
When I breathe, the air tastes of cooled ash and old static.
"You're late," someone says.
I turn, and Echo is already there, leaning against a non-wall of non-brick, hands in the pockets of a coat that's more outline than fabric.
They look older and exactly the same.
Less bounce in the posture, more stillness around the eyes. But the eyes themselves are the ones I remember: amused, tired, bright in a way that never matched Null's lighting.
Behind them, the street extends into horizonless absence. No people. No cars. Only the suggestion of pavements and doorways, rendered in careful negative.
Before I can say anything, Echo speaks, voice low and flat, as if reciting something that has been waiting a long time.
"The cosmos refused to be reborn to free itself from its own sin," they say. "And Eternal Rebirth came to punish the cosmos for the sin it never washed itself from. By you."
The words hang there, not echoing, because there is nothing here for sound to bounce off of.
I swallow.
"Good morning to you too," I say, because old habits die slower than universes.
Echo's mouth twitches, not quite a smile.
"This isn't morning," they say. "There's no rotation left. No clocks. Just the End."
I look around again.
The End.
It's as good a name as any. It fits the way the streets don't lead anywhere, only fold back into the same pattern. It fits the way the sky doesn't change. It fits the way I can't hear any hum, any engines, any fridges, any distant buses. Just a thin, omnipresent hiss, like the static between stations turned down to a whisper.
"How long?" I ask.
Echo shrugs. The gesture is slow, like lifting anything here costs more than it used to.
"Long enough for the system to finish chewing," they say. "Long enough for there to be no more 'elsewhere.'"
They say "the system" without naming it. As if it's the only one left, and names are a kind of politeness we no longer owe.
I nod like I understand.
Somewhere, the arithmetic fits together: all the Nulls we saw, all the branches of process, all the timelines we tried to pry apart with our fingernails. The loops. The cuts. The careful mercy that was never really mercy.
If you scale something long enough, you run out of places it hasn't been.
"You look tired," Echo says.
"You look flat," I reply.
"Occupational hazard," they say.
We stand there for a while, saying nothing. The street waits. The void holds its breath with us.
Eventually, Echo pushes off the wall.
"Come on," they say. "She'll get here soon."
"Who?" I ask, even though I think I know the answer in the part of me that still dreams.
Echo doesn't answer. They just start walking.
I follow.
The End's version of the city is minimal. No colour. No texture. Just outlines: café chairs traced in nothing, doorframes suggested by the difference between one shade of black and another. On one corner, a streetlamp stands with no bulb and no light, casting a shadow darker than its own stem.
We turn a corner that feels extremely familiar.
It takes my slowed brain a few steps to realize why.
The café.
It's here.
Or rather, the place where it used to be.
The actual building is gone, of course. No sign, no plants in chipped pots, no faded menu taped to glass. But the shape of it remains: the arrangement of tables, the angle of the awning, the particular distance to the curb where the tram lines curve away toward the university.
I know this geometry as well as I know my own handwriting.
This is where I cut the thread to my mother.
In the End, the café is a sketch of itself. The chairs are wireframes made of absence, their seats thin discs of non-colour. The door is a rectangle of slightly softer void, the interior a deeper well beyond it. The table nearest the street, where she sat in my memory, is exactly where it should be.
Echo sits down there, on nothing.
I sit opposite.
The chairs support us the way dreams do: not because they have to obey physics, but because the story wants us seated.
Across the street, the horizon isn't buildings. It's an edge. Like the world was a disk slowly eaten from the outside, and we are sitting near what's left of the middle.
Far beyond that edge, something burns quietly.
Not with fire.
With attention.
"It finally did it," Echo says, gaze fixed on the distance. "The system. It devoured everything it could reach."
"What's left out there?" I ask.
"Definitions," they say. "And the parts it couldn't understand well enough to file."
I let that sink in.
"So this is… what, then?" I ask. "The scrap heap? The remainder? The bad data?"
Echo considers.
"Call it the End," they say again. "The place after there is no more 'next.'"
We fall into a conversation that doesn't feel like a conversation so much as two monologues braiding together.
We talk about the world the way you talk about a person at a wake.
Echo says the cosmos was always trying to escape itself, layering new skin over old wounds. Whole epochs as bandages. New myths as air fresheners.
I say maybe the cosmos didn't know how to do anything except repeat. Maybe rebirth was the only trick it had, and we just made the trick explicit, industrial.
Echo says repeating a mistake doesn't absolve it.
I say neither does ending everything.
We talk about Null as if it were a symptom, not a cause. About all the offices and corridors and kind-eyed clerks who meant well, inside a machine that did not.
"Do you think it hurts?" Echo asks at one point, eyes still on the horizon.
"What?" I ask. "The world?"
"The system," they say. "When there's nothing left to process."
I think of empty in-trays, of shelves with no files, of architecture built for an influx that never comes.
"I think it's bored," I say.
Echo snorts softly.
"Boredom is a kind of pain," they say. "Especially for something that only knows how to act."
We lapse into silence again.
In that silence, I notice the sky has changed.
At first I think it's a trick of whatever passes for light here. But then the dark ahead of us bulges, like a bubble forming in tar.
It opens.
Not outwards.
Inwards.
A circular absence blossoms against the absence, a deeper pit within the void. It is perfectly round, perfectly smooth. In its centre sits an eye the size of the university dome, iris a pale grey that makes everything around it look suddenly less empty. It isn't glowing. It doesn't have to. The attention it carries is illumination enough.
Around it, wings.
Hundreds of them.
They are not attached to a body.
They flicker in and out of the air around the eye, unfolding from nowhere, overlapping, transparent and solid at the same time. Each one is a different angle, a different orientation, as if the thing is trying out every possible direction at once.
They make no sound.
No flutter, no rush of air.
Only a faint, high ringing somewhere at the edge of hearing, like a tuning fork being held against the bones of the sky.
The eye looks at us.
Or at me.
Or at the point in space where the sum of my decisions has led.
I feel it find the 4% and weigh it.
"This is her?" I ask, because I need to call it something, and "it" feels too small for anything that can end endings.
"It's the End," Echo says. "In one of the shapes it thinks we'll understand. Be grateful. It used to be a spreadsheet."
The ringing intensifies.
It is not an angry sound.
It is the sound of a decision closing.
"You said the cosmos refused to be reborn," I say. "How does a universe refuse?"
"By clinging to its sins," Echo says. "By insisting they are identity. By calling them history, culture, inevitability. By dressing them up as necessary."
"And Eternal Rebirth?" I ask.
"An immune response," they say. "An overreaction. A purification that went too far. A cure that decided the disease was 'being alive'."
We watch the eye approach.
It isn't actually moving closer. The distance between us and it doesn't change. Instead, everything else shrinks. Streets, café, us; we are being resized against a fixed scale.
"This is going to hurt," I say quietly.
"Probably less than the rest," Echo replies.
They reach into the inside of their coat.
Pull out a knife.
It shouldn't surprise me. Knives and Null go together. All those metaphors about cutting threads, about surgical removal. But this one is not labelled, not tagged. No barcode. Just a plain, narrow blade and a handle that fits my hand when I take it without thinking.
The metal looks wrong here.
Too solid.
Too specific.
"Where did you get this?" I ask.
Echo shrugs.
"Some doors you never got to see," they say. "Some rooms that were only mine. Does it matter?"
The eye is larger now. The wings beat in silence, cycling through positions like frames in a celestial animation.
"What are you asking me to do?" I say, though the answer is already there in my fingers.
Echo looks at me straight on for the first time since I woke up.
Their gaze is steady. Kind, in the way a clean incision is kind compared to a ragged wound.
"Spare yourself their version of mercy," they say. "They're going to end you either way. The system, the End, whatever you want to call her. She's very proud of her consistency."
"I thought the whole point was to defy her," I say. "To interrupt the loop. To put something in the way."
"You did," Echo says. "Over and over. Enough that we got this far. But this?" They tilt their head toward the eye. "This isn't a loop anymore. It's a wall."
I grip the knife a little tighter.
The handle is warm now.
"Do you want me gone?" I ask. It comes out harsher than I intend.
Echo's expression flickers.
"I want you," they say slowly, "to have one thing she can't file. One choice that isn't hers. When they write the last line on your case, I want it to be wrong."
"That's petty," I say.
"It's all we have left," they say.
The ringing in the sky becomes a continuous note.
It vibrates in my teeth, my bones, in the 4% that refuses to dissolve. I can feel that remnant as a strand now, taut from the centre of my chest to somewhere far above, threaded through circuits and memories and every decision that kept me from vanishing completely.
The last thread.
The last string that holds me to the world.
Echo seems to read that in my face.
"You know," they say softly, "I used to think saving the world meant keeping it running. Keeping the trains on time, the corridors lit, the files in order. Then I met you, and you insisted saving the world meant breaking the things that hurt people."
"How did that work out?" I mutter.
They smile, briefly.
"We're sitting in the End, arguing with a god about semantics," they say. "Could be worse."
The eye is enormous now.
It fills most of the sky, the wings a halo of motion around it. Looking into it is like looking down a well that goes not down but out, into all the versions of reality it has already folded and filed.
In it, I see my own life as a neat list.
CLIENT: NOOR [REDACTED]
STATUS: ADMINISTRATIVE DEATH
THREADS RESOLVED: 100%
RESIDUAL: 0%
That last line isn't true yet.
That is what it wants to fix.
"Do you regret it?" I ask, still watching the eye. "Following me. Leaving Null. Stepping outside the authorized routes."
Echo turns their face toward the End's horizon.
"For a while," they say, "it was the only thing that made sense. Then it stopped making sense, and I kept doing it anyway. That's love, I think."
"That sounds like madness," I say.
"Love and madness take turns wearing each other's masks," they say.
The knife waits patiently in my hand.
Somewhere, very far away and very close, I can hear my mother stirring a pot in a kitchen that no longer exists, humming a tune I haven't heard since before I died the first time. I see Ben's empty chair. I see the mannequins in Training, Pilot-03's half-finished sentence, the girl on the wall who told me absence is just another lie.
All of them are threads.
All of them have already been cut.
This one is mine.
"The cosmos refused to be reborn," I say, tasting the earlier words again. "Maybe it was tired."
"Maybe it finally realized rebirth was just a softer word for repetition," Echo replies. "Maybe it wanted rest instead of another try."
"And Eternal Rebirth punished it," I say. "By using me."
"You were the door," Echo says. "Not the hand that shoved you open."
"It feels the same from inside the frame," I say.
We sit in silence while the End looks at us.
The knife is not heavy.
I am.
Echo shifts, leans forward, and for a moment their forehead rests against mine. Their voice is almost a whisper.
"The last string that holds you to the world," they say.
They lean back just enough to look me in the eye.
"You."
The word is small, but it lands like a verdict.
I don't ask for more explanation.
There isn't any.
I stand up.
The chair does not scrape. The table does not wobble. The world holds steady, waiting to see how I'll mar its last clean line.
I place the tip of the knife against the place in my chest where the thread feels thickest. There is no flesh here, not in any way that matters, but sensation obeys old habits. Pressure. Resistance. The remembered fear of bleeding.
I look once more at Echo.
They are watching me with the same care they once used to adjust cables in a server room, to sit next to me on Line ∞, to steal notebooks and write fifth answers into tests.
"Thank you," I say.
"For what?" they ask.
"For being here at the end," I say. "Even if it's the wrong one."
"There are no right ones left," they say. "Just this."
The eye above us brightens, not with light, but with intent.
I push.
The knife enters not a body but a story.
I feel something snap.
Not a bone.
A string.
The world does not explode.
It does not scream.
It simply… lets go.
The last thing I see before the black arrives is Echo's face, steady and unflinching, and the café table where my mother once sat, perfectly outlined in nothing at all, finally free of any need to be reborn.
Act Forty-First's End – "Humanity Ended way before the eyes has seen."