Phase Q/No More

In the bleak, black darkness, still nothing stirs.

After a while, nothing more moves.

Later on, no more.

Time flows.

After a while, even that stops. Time is no more. It once was. Time, like all it contained, has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Time ends in a quiet little blip. Nothing like the big boom that got it started.

After time stops, space keeps on going, just kind of hanging there without ever changing.

You don’t notice.

At some point, space ends too.

Space ends in a point. It’s sharp, so sharp that it would hurt you, if you were still alive.

With time and space gone, all the matter and energy they contain drains away into the void.

Nothing is left.

Nothing matters, nothing material remains.

You would feel really bored, if you were around.

Back when you were around, and swimming, some of the thinkers said that nothing wasn’t a thing, it was just the absence of anything. Other people of wisdom said that nothing held some special significance, that you could derive meaning from it. Yet other philosophers withheld comment, thinking it wiser to say nothing.

It turns out that they were all wrong.

Nothing is… well, it’s something, but it’s not a thing.

Nothing is what it looks like when you start with something, then take it away, then take you away. It’s that last part that’s hard to wrap your head around.

Anyway, whatever nothing is or isn’t, that’s best left to the thinkers. You have a lot of things to do.

Somehow, you become aware. You didn’t rematerialize here, since there’s no material, and as a matter of fact there’s no here, here.

Yet, you have a kind of perception, a consciousness. You feel a cool, clear emptiness.

And you’re not alone.

There, floating alongside you, in the vast empty nothingness, is the fairy.

“Welcome home.” The fairy smiles.

“Wha--, uh, er, what is this?” you stutter.

“This is where we come from. And where we’re going. How do you like it?”

“Well, uh, I, ah, I don’t really feel much about it, one way or another.”

“Might as we go now, right?”

“What?”

“You might as well skip all that nasty space and time and metaverse stuff, and just jump right in here. Yes?”

“Well, I guess I see your point,” you say. “I just sort of thought that, I, you know, I figured that life would have more to it, more depth, or, you know, complexity, to it, than just a big endless empty nothing. Zero.”

“Don’t forget, you’re not alive,” says the sprite.

You introspect, and realize that even before you rematerialized, or did whatever it is that you did, to come here, you had long since ceased to be a living being, and had instead become something aware yet very much non-biological.

“So, uh, what do we do here?” you ask.

“What do you want to do?”

• Transcend.
• Fly up.

Phase Q: An interactive adventure.