Null wandered aimlessly through the empty streets of the forsaken world, the silence enveloping him like a familiar shroud. There was no destination, no urgency, no reason to move, but the sheer stillness of this existence pushed him to explore. After all, there was nothing else to do.
At first, he sought comfort in revisiting familiar places—places that once stirred a faint hope or a fleeting dream within him. His feet carried him to the parts of the city he had never ventured to when the world was alive, those forbidden spaces he had only glimpsed from a distance. Amusement parks, with their towering rides that once spun with the laughter of children, stood eerily still. The colorful carousels, now faded and rusted, sat abandoned in the silent gloom. He walked through the grounds, brushing his hand against the chipped paint of a rollercoaster car, remembering how he had once wished to feel the rush of wind against his face as it sped down the tracks.
But now, there was no wind, no rush. Only stillness.
He passed by restaurants that had once been packed with people, their neon signs long dead, their tables and chairs covered in layers of dust. He stood in the middle of an empty five-star hotel lobby, a place he had once dreamed of entering but could never afford. Its once grand chandeliers now hung lifeless, casting shadows across the floor. The silence was overwhelming, but Null found that it didn't disturb him. It merely was.
There was a strange comfort in the lack of life around him. In the past, these places had been filled with people who would sneer at him, glance through him as if he didn't exist. Here, in this world, he no longer had to face those judgmental stares. There were no cruel whispers or dismissive looks. No one was here to make him feel like he didn't belong. It was as though this world had become a reflection of his place in the real world—a world where he was invisible, unnoticed, and unloved.
Null walked on, his feet eventually taking him to the orphanage where he had grown up. The crumbling brick building stood before him, an artifact of a childhood he had tried to forget. Inside, the rooms were barren, just like his memories of this place. He wandered through the hallways, stopping at the small, broken-down room where he had spent his early years. The metal-framed bed he had once slept on was still there, covered in dust. He sat on it for a moment, staring at the cracked ceiling above.
But no emotions came. Not even sadness. There was nothing left for him here.
Leaving the orphanage, Null found himself returning to a place far more familiar—the cliff. The very cliff where he had once decided to end it all, to escape the pain of his life. He had stood at the edge, ready to leap into oblivion, but had been stopped at the last moment by a woman—Selene. That memory, though fading, still lingered in his mind like a distant echo.
Now, Null visited the cliff every day. Each time, he stood at the same spot where he had once contemplated death, staring into the empty void that stretched below him. But there was no fear this time, no sense of finality. Just an overwhelming numbness that washed over him like a wave.
And as time passed, that numbness deepened.
Days bled into months, and months into years. The passage of time was a blur in this world where nothing changed. The sun never rose, nor did the moon shine. The darkness remained constant, as if time itself had forgotten to move forward. Null wandered the streets without purpose, visiting places over and over again, retracing his steps through the same empty spaces.
And slowly, his memories began to fade.
At first, it was small things. He struggled to remember the faces of people he had once known, not that there had been many to begin with. The details of his old life, the pain and loneliness, began to feel distant and disconnected, like they had happened to someone else.
His own name began to feel foreign to him. He would repeat it to himself, over and over again, trying to hold onto that last shred of identity. But as the days continued to blur together, even that slipped through his fingers. He began to forget why he was here in the first place. What had brought him to this strange, silent world? What was his purpose? Had there ever been a purpose?
The cliff became his daily pilgrimage, a place of quiet reflection where he no longer sought answers but simply stood in acceptance of his fate. The emptiness around him began to feel like home. The silence that once unnerved him became a constant companion, soothing in its stillness. He no longer needed the world he had come from. That world had hurt him, rejected him. This world, though empty, did not demand anything of him. It did not hate him. It was simply… nothing.
Null adapted to this existence. He learned to move through the endless dark without questioning it, without longing for more. He accepted that this might be all there was. And as time wore on, he began to lose even the faintest memories of his former life. The pain, the sorrow, the fleeting moments of hope—they all dissolved into the void.
He became part of the emptiness.
The mission Selene had spoken of, the purpose he had been sent here to fulfill, felt like a distant dream, something long forgotten. Null no longer cared. He had no need for purpose here. All that mattered now was surviving in this quiet oblivion, this strange, solitary world where time no longer existed.
He had forgotten who he was. He had forgotten why he had come. And as the years slipped by, he accepted that he might never leave. He was alone.
And that, perhaps, was enough.