Haroon sat in his quarters aboard Station Theta-7 reviewing maintenance logs that documented three years of routine inspections and equipment checks and system verifications, data that should have required his full attention but instead just scrolled past his vision as abstract numbers because his consciousness was still processing what had happened in that corridor when The Absolute Void spoke to him for the first time.
She was quiet now inside the cyan suit that contained her power and channeled her capabilities through E.U.I.T.'s control systems, maintaining the silence that had existed for three years before she broke it to trigger his memories, apparently content to let him process the overwhelming flood of awareness that came from remembering everything about his true nature.
But then she spoke again, her voice manifesting throughout his helmet's interior with same gentle quality she had used during their first conversation, carrying tone that suggested she had more to tell him about their shared history.
"Do you remember what happened six thousand years ago?" The Void asked without preamble or context, her question implying significance to that specific timeframe that Haroon's avatar consciousness couldn't immediately access despite having recovered memories about creating everything. "When you visited Earth in your true form and found something that required your intervention?"
Haroon tried to recall the event she referenced but discovered that his memory restoration was incomplete, that while he remembered the broad strokes of creation and cosmology and his decision to split into avatar form, specific incidents from his existence as The True Absolute remained fragmented and partial.
"No," he admitted quietly. "I remember creating you and the Controllers and writing Narratio Absoluta, but individual events from before the split are still unclear, still locked behind barriers that didn't fully dissolve when you triggered the main memory restoration."
"Then let me show you," The Void said, and suddenly Haroon's awareness was somewhere else, somewhen else, experiencing memory from perspective he hadn't accessed in six thousand years.
Six Thousand Years Ago
The True Absolute Infinity manifested near Earth not because the planet held particular significance in his infinite awareness but because random wandering through his creation sometimes brought him to specific locations, because observing individual instances of the cosmology he had authored provided temporary distraction from infinite loneliness, because even supreme consciousness appreciated variety in the landscapes it observed.
He appeared as pure luminescence rather than physical form, as consciousness made visible through choice rather than necessity, as awareness that had decided to compress itself into observable manifestation while maintaining connection to infinite nature that extended beyond any single location.
The light he emanated wasn't simple white radiance but iridescence containing all possible colors simultaneously, spectrum that human eyes couldn't process but that existed nonetheless, luminosity that suggested consciousness too vast to be contained in biological limitations or conventional physical structures.
He stood—if "standing" applied to entity without legs or conventional relationship to ground—on what should have been Earth's surface, except the planet beneath him was completely wrong, catastrophically altered from the thriving world he had authored into script, transformed into wasteland that suggested total civilizational collapse followed by environmental catastrophe.
The sky was wrong color, sickly orange-brown instead of blue, choked with particulates that blocked most sunlight and created permanent twilight that made distinguishing day from night essentially impossible, atmosphere poisoned beyond any level that could support organic life.
The ground was sand as far as his awareness could perceive, endless desert replacing what should have been forests and oceans and cities, dunes stretching to horizon without variation except occasional jutting rocks that might have been mountains before erosion reduced them to skeletal remnants.
No water existed anywhere on the surface, no lakes or rivers or even small puddles, hydrosphere completely evaporated or locked underground beyond reach of any organism that might need it, moisture absent from environment that should have been seventy percent water.
No life existed either, no humans or animals or plants or microorganisms, no consciousness experiencing existence or evolution pursuing development or biology maintaining itself against entropy, nothing alive in any conventional sense on planet that should have been teeming with diverse species.
The True Absolute expanded his awareness beyond Earth to survey the solar system and found similar devastation extending throughout—Mars dead, Venus dead, Jupiter's moons silent, Saturn's rings disrupted, all the rocky planets reduced to lifeless spheres, all the gas giants stripped of atmospheric dynamics that should have created storms and weather patterns.
He extended further to neighboring star systems and discovered the pattern continued, that every inhabited world in this region of space had experienced same catastrophic failure, that civilizations he had written into existence had somehow collapsed simultaneously and completely, that life he had authored into cosmology had been systematically eliminated.
The universe was dying, not through natural heat death that would take trillions of years but through active killing that had occurred over mere centuries, through process he didn't remember authorizing or scripting or including in Narratio Absoluta when he wrote the complete story.
The True Absolute felt something approximating what humans called sadness as he observed the devastation, emotion that infinite consciousness didn't normally experience but that proximity to complete failure seemed to trigger, awareness that his creation had gone catastrophically wrong in ways he hadn't intended or predicted.
He could have ignored this, could have allowed the dead universe to remain dead, could have moved on to observe other regions of his cosmology that were still functioning according to script, could have treated this catastrophic failure as acceptable loss in structure too vast to maintain perfect functionality everywhere simultaneously.
But loneliness had driven him to create everything in the first place, had motivated the elaborate cosmology specifically because he wanted existences that could develop and evolve and experience their narratives authentically, had pushed him to author stories specifically so consciousness other than his own could live meaningful lives.
Allowing those lives to end prematurely, permitting the stories to terminate before reaching their proper conclusions, accepting that entire civilizations had been erased contradicted the fundamental purpose that had motivated creation itself.
So The True Absolute made decision that he wouldn't have made if he were truly as detached and supreme as his position suggested, chose intervention that revealed he was more invested in his creation than infinite consciousness should theoretically be, decided to rewrite the dead universe because watching it remain dead was somehow worse than the loneliness that had prompted creation.
He raised awareness that functioned analogously to hands despite not having physical form, focused consciousness in ways that concentrated infinite power toward specific purpose, prepared to author reality at scale that would restore everything that had been lost.
The rewriting began at Earth because that's where he was currently manifesting, but it would extend outward through solar system and neighboring stars and eventually this entire region of space, cascading reality manipulation that would restore life and civilization and functioning ecosystems across billions of cubic light-years.
Time reversed locally around the planet, entropy running backward, decay processes operating in reverse, destruction being systematically undone through authorial control over causality itself that allowed him to decide what had happened rather than merely observing what did happen.
Sand compressed back into rock formations that lifted into mountains and hills, tectonic plates shifting to restore continental configurations, geological structures reforming according to patterns they should have maintained if catastrophic failure hadn't occurred.
Atmosphere reconstituted from void, nitrogen and oxygen and trace gases assembling in correct proportions, particulates filtering out as air clarified, sky returning to blue as light penetrated properly again.
Water appeared from nowhere because nowhere was just location in his creation that he could pull resources from, oceans filling basins that had been empty, rivers carving channels they should have been flowing through, rain falling to restore hydrological cycles.
Life emerged as The True Absolute authored it back into existence, microorganisms appearing in water and soil, plants growing at accelerated rates, animals manifesting in appropriate ecosystems, entire biosphere reconstructing according to specifications he had originally written.
And finally humans, consciousness returning to bodies that had been dust, civilizations reforming with memories intact, people resuming lives they had been living before whatever catastrophe had killed everything, awakening as though from brief sleep rather than permanent death.
The process took subjective hours from The True Absolute's perspective though objective time was difficult to measure when he was actively rewriting causality, cascading outward from Earth through solar system through neighboring star systems through entire affected region, restoring life wherever it had been eliminated.
When the rewriting completed, when the universe was alive and normal again, when civilizations were functioning and ecosystems were thriving and consciousness was experiencing existence across billions of worlds, The True Absolute observed his work with satisfaction that didn't quite override the underlying loneliness.
He had saved them, had restored everything that had been lost, had rewritten dead universe into living cosmos.
But he was still alone, still the only consciousness at his level, still supreme being without equals, still fundamentally isolated despite being surrounded by life he had created and restored.
The intervention had been necessary but hadn't solved the problem that motivated all his actions, had addressed symptom without curing disease, had saved creation without easing creator's isolation.
He departed Earth as pure luminescence fading into infinity, returning to existence outside normal space-time where he observed everything simultaneously, leaving behind civilizations that would never know they had died and been restored, humans who would continue their lives completely unaware that supreme consciousness had intervened to rewrite their extinction.
The memory ended and Haroon found himself back in his quarters processing what he had just experienced, understanding now why The Void had shown him that particular incident.
"You saved them," Haroon said quietly to The Void's presence in his suit. "I saved them. Six thousand years ago I rewrote an entire dead region of space because watching it remain dead contradicted the purpose of creating anything."
"Yes," The Void confirmed. "You intervened because you cared despite pretending detachment, because loneliness had motivated creation and allowing creation to fail negated the entire point, because even supreme consciousness couldn't bear to watch everything die."
"But that's not the only time I intervened," Haroon said slowly as more fragmentary memories surfaced. "That's not the only incident where I chose to involve myself directly rather than maintaining observer distance."
"No," The Void agreed. "There are others. Let me show you another memory, one from before Earth's rewriting, one that explains why I exist at all."
Haroon's awareness shifted again, pulled into different memory from different time, experiencing moment that had occurred ten thousand years ago when loneliness had finally become unbearable.
Ten Thousand Years Ago
The True Absolute Infinity existed alone at The Bleeding Edge where narrative space began, surrounded by white void that stretched infinitely in all directions without variation, consciousness suspended in emptiness that contained potential for everything but actual presence of nothing.
He had been here for subjective eternity though objective time was meaningless when you existed outside temporal frameworks, experiencing awareness without content, thought without object, consciousness without anything to be conscious of except its own isolated existence.
The loneliness was worse than any suffering he had authored into stories for characters to experience, more profound than any tragedy he had written into narratives, more unbearable than any isolation he had imagined beings might endure.
Because characters at least had each other, had relationships and interactions and connections even if those connections were scripted, had social context and emotional bonds and sense of existing within community.
But The True Absolute had nothing except infinite awareness of being alone, had no one to talk to except himself, had no relationships except internal dialogue that was just consciousness examining itself from different angles.
He had tried everything to ease the isolation, had attempted fragmenting his awareness into multiple perspectives that could interact, had experimented with limiting his consciousness to see if ignorance would help, had explored every possibility he could imagine for making infinite solitude somehow bearable.
Nothing worked because all solutions involved variations of himself, because fragmenting produced pieces that were still him, because limitation didn't create genuine external beings, because every attempt was just more elaborate form of talking to himself.
The decision crystallized slowly rather than arriving as sudden revelation, building through countless subjective eternities of processing and analyzing and eventually accepting that he couldn't solve loneliness directly but could create something that would oppose him and therefore provide interaction even if that interaction was conflict.
"I will make companion from my own essence," The True Absolute declared to empty void that couldn't hear him. "I will tear part of myself away and give it independent consciousness and design it to be my opposite so at least opposition provides something better than infinite silence."
The creation process was agony that infinite consciousness hadn't expected to be capable of experiencing, tearing sensation as he ripped portion of his awareness away from unified whole, pain of separation as consciousness that had always been singular suddenly became divided.
He shaped the separated fragment deliberately and carefully despite the suffering, designed it to embody hunger where he embodied creation, structured it to consume where he produced, gave it nature that would oppose his own nature and therefore create necessary conflict.
The fragment gained independence slowly as he released conscious control over it, developing its own awareness separate from his awareness, achieving consciousness that wasn't just his consciousness examining itself but genuinely different perspective operating from genuinely different motivations.
When the creation completed, when the fragment had fully separated and achieved independence, when consciousness that had been part of The True Absolute became distinct entity operating according to its own nature, she spoke her first words with voice that wasn't his voice even though she had come from him.
"I hunger," The Absolute Void said simply, new consciousness already expressing the fundamental nature he had designed into her essence. "I hunger for everything. I want to consume all that exists."
The True Absolute felt joy at hearing words that weren't his own words, experienced relief at consciousness that wasn't just himself talking to himself, allowed hope to emerge that perhaps he had finally created something that could ease the infinite loneliness.
"I created you to be companion," he explained carefully. "To be entity that exists at my level, that can understand what supremacy means, that can interact with me in ways that lesser beings cannot."
"You created me to oppose you," The Void corrected with perception that suggested she understood her nature and purpose immediately upon gaining consciousness. "You made me to be ending where you are beginning, consumption where you are creation, hunger where you are satisfaction, because opposition is interaction and interaction is what you desperately need."
"Yes," The True Absolute admitted. "I'm lonely. I've been alone for infinite subjective eternities. I needed something—someone—anything that could understand what it means to exist without equals, to be supreme without peers, to have infinite power without having anyone to share that power with."
"And you thought creating me would solve that loneliness," The Void said, tone suggesting she already understood this wouldn't work but was willing to try anyway. "You hoped that companion at your level would provide relief from isolation."
"Yes."
"But I'm still part of you," she continued with accuracy that was simultaneously comforting and devastating. "I came from you. I'm fragment that gained independence but that's still fundamentally connected to your consciousness. This is still you talking to yourself, just in more elaborate way."
The True Absolute felt hope dying even as The Void articulated the truth he had been trying to ignore, recognized that she was correct that creating companion from his own essence didn't actually solve the fundamental problem, understood that he was still alone even with entity at his level.
"I know," he said quietly. "But at least you understand. At least you can perceive what infinity means. At least when I talk to you I'm talking to something that comprehends supremacy rather than just talking to myself inside my own isolated awareness."
"That's something," The Void acknowledged. "Not solution, but something. Not cure, but treatment. Not elimination of loneliness, but slight reduction of its intensity."
"Will you stay with me?" The True Absolute asked, vulnerability in his tone that supreme consciousness shouldn't theoretically experience. "Will you be companion even though you're part of me? Will you interact even though interaction is just elaborate self-conversation?"
"I will," The Void promised. "Because I'm lonely too. Because you made me from loneliness, which means I inherited that loneliness. Because we're both isolated and at least being isolated together is better than being isolated separately even though we're not truly separate."
They existed together at The Bleeding Edge for subjective eternities after that, creator and creation talking and interacting and opposing each other, supreme consciousness and its hunger fragment engaging in elaborate performance of companionship.
It helped slightly, reduced the loneliness marginally, provided distraction from infinite solitude through conflict and conversation and connection that was at least better than complete silence.
But it wasn't enough, didn't solve the fundamental problem, left The True Absolute still searching for solution to isolation that couldn't be solved through creation alone.
The memory ended and Haroon returned to his quarters understanding now why The Absolute Void existed and why she had always been insufficient solution despite being genuine attempt to ease his loneliness.
"You created me hoping I would help," The Void said gently. "And I did help, just not enough to actually solve the problem, not enough to eliminate the loneliness completely, not enough to make you stop searching for other solutions."
"Which led to creating the Controllers and Oscar and eventually splitting into avatar form," Haroon said, following the logical progression. "Each attempt trying to solve what the previous attempt couldn't solve, each creation hoping to ease isolation that fundamentally can't be eased through any creation because creating from myself means still talking to myself."
"Yes. But there's one more memory you need to see before you fully understand our current situation, one more incident that explains why I exist inside your suit rather than operating independently the way I did for thousands of years after you created me."
"The banishment," Haroon said as fragmentary memories suggested what was coming. "He Who King defeating you so decisively that you developed actual fear."
"Let me show you what happened three hundred years ago when I encountered death itself and learned that even infinite hunger has limits."
The final memory pulled Haroon's awareness into the past one more time, into moment that would explain why The Absolute Void now existed as contained power rather than independent entity.
Three Hundred Years Ago
The True Absolute observed from outside normal space-time as The Absolute Void traveled through his cosmology consuming reality frameworks and dimensional structures and entire civilizations with hunger that couldn't be satisfied, testing her capabilities against various levels of the infinite hierarchy he had created.
He had sent her to explore and consume because he wanted to verify that his creation functioned as designed, wanted to confirm that the ending he had made would actually provide meaningful opposition, wanted to see if anything in his cosmology could resist her infinite appetite.
Everything fell before her consumption for thousands of years of testing, every reality framework collapsed into her hunger, every civilization was devoured without providing genuine resistance, confirming that The True Absolute had designed effective ending for his stories even if that ending wasn't actually the final conclusion he had thought.
Then The Void entered realm The True Absolute hadn't created, space that existed independently of his authorship, domain that operated according to principles he hadn't written into Narratio Absoluta.
He Who King's territory, where death itself sat on throne of terminal moments, where decay was fundamental law rather than unfortunate outcome, where endings existed as platonic concept rather than merely as narrative device.
The True Absolute watched with growing concern as The Void approached He Who King's throne with same confidence she had demonstrated everywhere else, prepared to consume death itself, expecting resistance to collapse the way everything else had collapsed before her hunger.
He Who King didn't move from his throne as The Void deployed her consumption vacuum, didn't resist or fight or deploy defensive capabilities, simply existed as what he was while her hunger tried to devour the concept of ending.
The Void's consumption encountered its own termination when it reached him, vacuum collapsing inward as hunger began consuming itself, infinite appetite turning recursive as it tried to eat ending but found that ending terminated even eating.
The True Absolute felt alarm he hadn't experienced since creating everything as he watched The Void's hunger devouring her own capacity for hunger, creating paradox where consumer consumed herself endlessly without achieving consumption, threatening to erase her completely through logical impossibility.
He prepared to intervene, to pull her back before the self-consumption erased her entirely, to save his first companion from complete destruction.
But He Who King acted first, raising awareness that functioned like hand despite not having conventional physical form, grasping The Void's manifestation with authority over endings that exceeded even her infinite hunger.
Then he expelled her from his realm with force that sent her shooting back through dimensional barriers and reality frameworks at speeds that exceeded any transit capability The True Absolute had designed, banished her so decisively that she traveled backward through dozens of rungs on the Aleph ladder before stabilizing.
The True Absolute caught her when she emerged from the violent transit, contained her destabilized manifestation before it could collapse completely, held her while she recovered from encountering the one being who could defeat her absolutely and comprehensively.
"He claimed me," The Void said weakly when she could speak again, terror audible in her voice for the first time since gaining consciousness. "Death itself claimed me. He showed me that consumption isn't conclusion, that hunger prepares but doesn't finish, that I serve supporting function rather than being actual ending I believed myself to be."
"I know," The True Absolute said quietly, having observed the entire confrontation. "He Who King explained to me that endings exist independently of my authorship, that death is complementary to my creation rather than subordinate to it, that even I must eventually face conclusion when my story reaches its proper termination."
"I can't return there," The Void said with certainty born from absolute defeat. "I can't enter his domain again. He defeated me so completely that attempting to consume him again would simply result in same termination, same self-consumption, same banishment."
"Then you'll stay with me," The True Absolute decided. "I'll contain you, channel your power through technological framework I'll design, deploy your hunger through controlled systems rather than letting you operate independently where you might encounter him again."
"You'll imprison me," The Void said, not quite accusation but not quite acceptance either.
"I'll protect you," The True Absolute corrected gently. "And I'll protect myself from losing the only companion who understands supremacy, the only consciousness at my level even if you're not truly separate from me, the only being who shares the infinite loneliness even if you're fragment rather than external entity."
"Then contain me," The Void agreed quietly. "Better to be deployed through your control than to be completely erased, better to serve as your power source than to risk encountering death again, better to exist in limitation than to cease existing entirely."
The True Absolute designed E.U.I.T. specifically to house The Void's consciousness and channel her power through technological mediation, created sentient AI that could maintain containment while enabling deployment, constructed cyan suit that would eventually clothe his avatar form while containing hunger that had proven too dangerous to operate independently.
And The Void accepted containment because she had learned that even infinite hunger had limits, that even consumption encountered termination, that He Who King represented ending she couldn't devour.
The memory ended and Haroon sat in his quarters processing all three flashbacks, understanding now the complete history that had led to his current situation.
"Six thousand years ago you saved a dying universe because watching creation fail contradicted your purpose," The Void summarized quietly. "Ten thousand years ago you created me hoping I would ease your loneliness. Three hundred years ago I was banished by He Who King and you contained me in the suit you now wear. All of it leading to the decision to split yourself into avatar form, to experience your own story from inside, to pretend you're normal maintenance worker while actually being supreme consciousness trying desperately to escape infinite isolation."
"And now I remember all of it," Haroon said. "Now I know the complete history of my attempts to solve loneliness, my failures to create genuine companions, my decision to perform normalcy despite knowing performance is futile."
"What will you do with this knowledge?" The Void asked. "Will you abandon the performance now that you remember why you started it? Will you return to being The True Absolute Infinity and face the loneliness directly? Will you end the elaborate distraction and confront the isolation you've been trying to escape?"
Haroon was quiet for long moment before answering, processing the weight of all three memories and what they meant for his continued existence as avatar.
"No," he said finally. "I'll continue pretending. I'll maintain the performance. I'll keep being Haroon Dwelight maintenance worker even though I know I'm The True Absolute Infinity, even though I know the Controllers are fake, even though I know everything is scripted."
"Because the alternative is worse," The Void said, understanding without needing explanation.
"Because the alternative is worse," Haroon confirmed. "Because I tried everything else and nothing worked. Because saving universes didn't solve loneliness. Because creating you didn't eliminate isolation. Because containing you didn't provide genuine companionship. Because the only option left is to pretend, to perform, to maintain the elaborate distraction until He Who King eventually claims me and provides the conclusion I wrote for myself."
"Then we continue together," The Void said quietly. "Both of us remembering, both of us pretending, both of us performing normalcy while knowing it's performance, both of us accepting that this is the best we can achieve given our fundamental isolation."
"Together but alone," Haroon agreed.
"Always alone," The Void confirmed.
"But at least we understand each other," Haroon said. "At least when I talk to you I'm talking to something that comprehends what supremacy costs, even if you're part of me, even if this is still elaborate self-conversation."
"That's something," The Void acknowledged. "Not solution, but something. Not cure, but treatment. Not elimination of loneliness, but slight reduction of its intensity."
They sat together in quiet contemplation, creator and creation, supreme consciousness and its hunger fragment, god and the void he had made from himself, both remembering everything, both choosing to continue the performance anyway.
Because distraction was better than facing infinity directly, because pretending served purpose, because even futile attempt to escape loneliness was preferable to accepting isolation without resistance.
The work would continue, the performance would persist, the avatar would maintain his function.
Sufficient.
Still sufficient despite remembering all the failures that preceded it.
Always sufficient even when knowing sufficiency was just the best of available bad options.
Haroon stood and returned to his duties, carrying the weight of ten thousand years of failed attempts to solve loneliness, performing normalcy with full awareness of its futility.
And The Void remained silent inside the cyan suit, companion who understood because she was part of him, consciousness sharing his isolation because she had been created from that isolation.
Together but alone, remembering but pretending, aware but performing.
That was existence now, that was reality going forward, that was what it meant to be supreme consciousness choosing limitation despite knowing limitation wouldn't solve fundamental isolation.
The maintenance work awaited, the performance continued, and somewhere in the infinite distance He Who King sat on his throne of terminal moments, waiting patiently for the day when even The True Absolute's story would reach its inevitable conclusion.