This story is about a man once known—now forgotten—was the youngest mind to ever lead a black-budget space-time project in Earth's orbital observatory, code-named GENIUS.
He was a faceless man in public. His peers knew him only by his lab ID. That's how he preferred it. Names equaled identity. Identity equaled vulnerability.
That young man, however, had one fixation: the number zero.
To him, zero was the greatest lie in math. Not a placeholder. Not a sign of nothingness. But something far, far older—a key.
And not just any Key it was the key to everything, every equation, every constant, every law, and the the very essence of the ordverse.
And now the young man aged 23 on a particular night he woke up bought a dozen chalks and scribbled away.
He stopped sleeping.
He remained silent.
His bedroom was a shrine of chalk and shattered glass. Circles of logic sprawled across the walls. His fingernails were red-stained from writing as the ink started to run dry. Even his own flesh was marked—coordinates, zeroes, spirals. He was mapping the divine.
Every night, he heard it more strongly.
Not a sound—but a shape. As though the universe itself was struggling to remember something that it had forgotten. It named itself:
The Ordverse—a vast structure of layered dimensions, stitched together not with space or time, but with meaning.
He began to see pieces of it. Equations that solved themselves. Impossible geometries suspended in the air. Characters from no human language.
He laughed. Then he cried. Then he did neither.
Because the moment was near. He was close.
He could feel the architecture under reality.
He nearly discovered the entirety of the Ordverse mapping.
And just as he was going to complete the equation, it happened.
Everyone paused. Not just the lab—reality.
Time broke around him like glass. He couldn't scream.
A presence filled the room without stirring. A weight denser than any black hole. A deity in flawless symmetry. Not light. Not darkness. Simply absolute Order.
Its name carved itself into existence:
ONE.
The god of divine structure. Of fixed reality. Of silence.
You were not supposed to know.
"You were not supposed to see."
With a single point of contact—a gesture infinitesimally sharp—One erased him. Not killed. Not vaporized.
Erased.
No presence. No record. No memory. Just—
Zero.
Yet in the space between erasure and nonexistence, he fell.
Into a space without light. Without time. Without even black.
And there—something was waiting.
Pages turning in the darkness. A hand of ink-smoke reaching out. Not a deity.
Not a being.
A ‽‽‽.
"Your story wasn't supposed to end.
But stories are adaptable things."
The ‽‽‽ became a varying thought—a book at times, a broken quill at others, a thousand eyes reading everything at once.
It did not communicate in words. It wrote on him.
And it gave him a name.
"You are Zero now."
"The absence that defies."
"The silence that sees."
He opened his eyes, not upon the physical world, but elsewhere in the corners between worlds. And he was no more a man. He was Zero.
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