1. Man in the void

I woke up in the void.

No ground beneath me. No horizon to guide me. Just endless, suffocating nothingness.

I tried to move. Nothing. No resistance. No sensation. My limbs—if I even had them—refused to obey.

Panic clawed at my throat. I opened my mouth to scream—

No sound.

I gasped, but no air entered my lungs. My chest did not rise or fall. The instinct to breathe screamed at me, but I felt nothing. No pain, no suffocation—just the crushing weight of silence.

I struggled, thrashing wildly. My arms—if they existed—moved, but there was no force, no friction, no wind against my skin. I floated, weightless, without direction, without proof that I even existed.

I tried to scream again. Nothing.

I wasn't breathing. Yet, I wasn't dying.

That thought should have comforted me. It didn't.

"Is somebody out there?" My voice didn't come. "Help me, please!"

No answer.

This isn't real. This has to be a prank.

"Guys, stop, it isn't funny anymore!"

I waited. Minutes. Hours. No response. No change.

I tried to wake myself up. I pinched my arm, slapped my face—nothing. No sensation.

Then I tried to kill myself.

I pressed my hands around my throat, tightening, forcing myself to cut off circulation—but there was nothing to cut off. I held my breath, waited for the dizziness to come—it never did.

I was trapped in a body that would not suffocate, in a space that would not change.

Fine. If I couldn't force it, I would wait.

Hunger would come. Thirst would come. My body would break down.

I waited.

I drifted in the void, eyes shut, waiting for pain, for exhaustion, for something.

But my stomach never twisted in hunger. My lips never cracked with thirst. My limbs never grew weak. Even the wounds I inflicted on myself healed the moment I looked away.

I could not escape.

Not even through death.

What do you think is the greatest enemy of a sentient being?

Not predators.

Not nature.

Not even death.

It is thought.

At first, I did everything I could to fight it.

I spoke aloud, naming everything I could remember—every object, every person, every place. I recited stories, quoted movies, sang songs in broken melodies.

When words weren't enough, I moved.

I flailed, twisted, flipped, turning my weightless body into an acrobat of the void. I spun in circles, trying to create momentum, trying to feel something.

But there was nothing to push against.

No resistance.

No proof that I was moving at all.

I imagined food. I imagined feasts—plates of steaming meat, bowls of soup, the crisp texture of bread breaking between my teeth. But there was no taste, no scent, no sensation to fill the gap.

I tried to remember every book I had ever read, recreating them page by page in my mind. I imagined the voices of characters, the sound of their words.

But the longer I held onto those thoughts, the more distorted they became.

Scenes overlapped. Names changed. Words twisted into nonsense. Reality itself unraveled in my mind.

I was forgetting.

I was dissolving.

And then—

I laughed.

I laughed until my chest ached, until my nonexistent throat burned, until my words turned into gibberish.

"KEKEKEKE—where was I again?"

"Ohh~~ HAHAHAHAHA!"

"It's nothing, nothing, nothing at all!"

My voice slashed through the silence, but the silence did not answer.

I screamed. I cursed. I howled at the nothingness, demanding that something—anything—respond.

But the void did not care.

There was nothing.

I do not know how long I remained like that.

But even madness fades.

I forgot my name.

I forgot my past.

I forgot what it meant to be human.

I was nothing.

Then—

Thump.

A heartbeat. A single pulse in the void.

Thump.

It repeated—steady. Certain. The only proof I had that I still existed.

Something stirred. Not within the void—but within me.

A thought. A will. A sentience.

It was not mine. Not at first. It was something new.

A flicker in the abyss. A tiny, fragile awareness clawing its way into existence.

It reached for memories that were not its own.

So… I've truly gone mad?

The thought did not know where it came from. It only knew that it was.

How long have I been here?

There was no sun. No stars. No way to measure time.

But then—

Thump. Thump.

The rhythm of a heart.

The sentience latched onto it, counting each beat.

Sixty beats. A minute.

Thirty-six hundred beats. An hour.

Eighty-six thousand beats. A day.

It counted. And counted. And counted.

It held onto the numbers as if they were the only thing keeping it sane.

It did not last.

Like all before it, the sentience faded, devoured by the void.

But in its place, another arose.

Then another.

A cycle.

A pattern.

Something changed.

A thought did not fade. It remained, stacking upon those that came before it—learning, evolving.

One plus one.

A simple truth.

One beat of my heart. Then another. Together, they are always two. Never three. Never anything else. But why?

A rule. A law.

Who decided this? Why do multiple ones combine to form something greater?

Had I always known this? Had I accepted it without question?

I counted again. Numbers. Patterns. Sequences. They did not emerge from nothing. They followed something deeper—something absolute.

I lost my mind.

And then I found it again.

Madness and sanity. Delusion and enlightenment. A cycle that repeated endlessly—spiraling upward.

I was no longer the same mind I once was.

I was all of them. The first thought, the last thought, and everything in between.

I had counted. I had remembered. Every fragment of thought, every fleeting moment of clarity, every shred of knowledge left behind by the minds that had come before me—I gathered them all. I reconstructed the echoes of my past, piecing together ideas long forgotten, reanalyzing them, refining them.

Simulations ran through my mind—endless iterations, testing theories, uncovering truths. I did not simply remember; I understood. Every law of nature, every pattern, every calculation—I had grasped them all. Knowledge that had once taken lifetimes to uncover now unraveled before me in an instant.

I was no longer the lost soul that had first awakened in the void.

I had become something else entirely.

And finally, at the end of it all—

I understood.

Numbers were not mere symbols. They were echoes of something deeper.

A hidden order beneath the surface of randomness.

A law that existed not because someone created it, but because it had to be.

The void stirred.

Something was watching.

Something that had been waiting.

And for the first time…

It spoke.