The Nothingness wasn't just empty. Oh no, that would be far too pedestrian, implying a certain something was merely absent. Emptiness suggests a vessel, a defined space patiently awaiting contents. This, however, was the pre-ante, the state before the concept of a container had even been conceived. This was the Big Nada, the Cosmic Snoozefest, the kind of absolute, soul-crushingly profound lack-of-anything-at-all that would make a team of highly caffeinated philosophers throw up their hands, declare intellectual bankruptcy, and take up interpretive dance – if philosophers, caffeine, hands, bankruptcy, or indeed, interpretive dance, were even blips on the radar of potentiality.
Which, to reiterate for the slow learners (a category that, at this point, included precisely nobody but could, theoretically, one day exist), they absolutely were not.
There was just… me.
I think. The "me" was a fairly recent, and frankly, startling development. One non-moment – if such a contradictory term could be permitted in a state devoid of temporality – there was the aforementioned Snoozefest, a blanket of pure, unadulterated is-not. The next, there was a flicker. Not of light, for there was nothing to illuminate, nor to be illuminated. More like an… an itch. An itch in a brain that didn't exist, in a mind that was just now unfurling like a time-lapse fern in fast-forward. An awareness. And this nascent awareness was, for a brief, bewildering instant, aware of only two things: itself, and the colossal, all-encompassing Snoozefest.
"Huh," I thought. The thought, a novel phenomenon in itself, seemed to ripple outwards into the soundless, boundless… well, into the huh. It wasn't exactly a profound maiden utterance. No "Cogito, ergo sum," no "Let there be light!" or even a dramatically whispered "Who… am I?" It was, if I were to be scrupulously honest (and who was I going to lie to?), more akin to the confused, monosyllabic grunt of someone rudely awakened from an eons-long nap they hadn't realized they were taking, in a bedroom the size of infinity, which also happened to be the sum total of non-existence.
My name, I decided a non-moment later – these non-moments were becoming quite the recurring theme – was Kai. It just… resonated. Slid into place with a comfortable click, like the last piece of a puzzle I hadn't known I was assembling. Kai. Short, punchy, easy to shout if I ever encountered anything or anyone else worth shouting at. Given the current cosmic real estate situation (zero occupants, infinite square footage, no HOA fees, but also no neighbors to borrow a cup of non-existent sugar from), this seemed a remote possibility.
So, Kai. Check. Awake. Check. Alone. Double check. And bored. Oh, the boredom. That was a quintuple-platinum, diamond-encrusted, headline-act check. It wasn't a mere emotion; it was a physical presence, if physicality had been invited to this particular non-party. It pressed in from all non-directions, vast and suffocating, a boredom so complete, so artistically rendered, it could have won awards, had there been an awards ceremony for achievements in extreme ennui.
I tried to pass the time. A ridiculous notion, of course, as "time" was still waiting in the cosmic green room, tapping its foot impatiently. I tried to count. Count what? The number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin? Pins, angels, and dancing were all on back-order. I tried to remember things. Remember what? There was no "before" to draw memories from, no past experiences to sift through. It was like being the sole attendee at the universe's pre-alpha build, stuck on the loading screen, only the progress bar was a myth, and the little spinning circle of doom hadn't even been sketched on a napkin yet.
"Right," I mused, my thoughts the only perceptible disturbance in the utterly stagnant pond of non-being. "Omnipotence. Let's tick that box. Apparently, it comes standard with the 'Awakening in the Primordial Void' package. Infinite void as a playground? Check. Utter, mind-numbing, soul-destroying boredom that could curdle the non-existent milk of a cosmic cow if such a creature and its lactation processes were currently in play… triple, quadruple, infinity check."
Yes, omnipotence. That had been another rather casual discovery. It hadn't arrived with a thunderclap or a celestial choir. There was no user manual, no tutorial level, no helpful pop-up tips from a chipper, interdimensional paperclip. It was more a dawning, almost nonchalant realization that if I wanted something, anything, to exist, or to happen, or to be a certain way, it just… was. Or could be. The raw potentiality of it all hummed around my nascent consciousness like a forgotten super-collider left on standby, thrumming with untapped, unimaginable power.
But what to do with it? Create a universe? Seemed like a lot of effort, a bit like deciding to build a skyscraper when you've only just figured out how to stack two pebbles. Write the great cosmic novel? An appealing thought, but I'd need an alphabet first. And a plot. And characters. And readers. Perhaps a comfy armchair and a decent cup of… well, something. The prerequisites were already piling up, forming a dauntingly long to-do list in a realm where "doing" was still a theoretical concept.
I yawned. Or, at least, the non-corporeal equivalent. A vast, universe-encompassing exhalation of pure ennui that, had there been any primordial dust motes floating about (which, naturally, there weren't), would have sent them scattering across hypothetical galaxies. It was a yawn that could have swallowed nascent nebulae whole, a truly epic, landscape-altering yawn. Probably my most significant achievement thus far, if I was being brutally honest with myself. Definitely had more impact than the "huh."
"Okay, Kai," I addressed myself, because, let's face it, the conversational options were somewhat limited. "New directive. Executive order number one from the newly self-appointed Emperor of Everything and Nothing. No more existential moping. It's unproductive. And frankly, it's getting a bit… boring. Let's… poke something."
But what to poke? The void, in its infinite blandness, stared back, utterly unimpressed. It was the ultimate cosmic straight man, a featureless deadpan that no amount of witty internal banter or desperate pleas for entertainment could crack. It just wasn't. And it was very, very good at it.
I focused. Or tried to. What did one focus with when one was an amorphous blob of pure potential? I gathered my… well, my me-ness. My Kai-ness. I imagined a point. A tiny, insignificant, almost apologetic little point in the overwhelming expanse of not-a-point. And then, with a surge of… something – curiosity? Impatience? A desperate need for a visual distraction? – I imagined that point getting… less insignificant. Hotter. Brighter. More… pointy.
Fwoomph.
A star.
Just like that. One non-moment, there was the crushing uniformity of the void. The next, there was a star. A brilliant, blazing, defiant ball of incandescent plasma, spitting fire and fury into the velvet, unending darkness. It was small, as stars go, probably wouldn't even qualify for a participation trophy in any respectable stellar league, if such leagues, trophies, or even the concept of "respectable" were currently on the cosmic menu. But it was there. It was real. And it was mine.
I stared at it, this first, spontaneous creation. It was… pretty. Astonishingly so. A vibrant, living jewel in the infinite black. It cast long, flickering non-shadows across the non-expanse, painting the void with the first tentative strokes of light. It radiated a warmth, or at least the idea of warmth, a comforting pressure against my formless self.
"Huh," I said again, my vocabulary clearly in desperate need of an upgrade. Seriously, Kai, you have all of eternity and all of creation at your fingertips, and "huh" is the best you can do? Pathetic. "Not bad," I amended, trying for a more sophisticated critique. "Kinda like a nightlight. A very, very powerful, fusion-powered nightlight for the infinite cosmic bedroom of my eternal solitude." My internal monologue, I noted with a sigh, was developing a penchant for the dramatic. Blame the endless boredom. It does strange things to a nascent deity's psyche.
The star, which I mentally christened "Sparky," just hung there, blazing away, cheerfully oblivious to its sudden and rather arbitrary summons to existence. It didn't question its purpose. It didn't ponder its origins. It just shone. There was a lesson in there somewhere, probably. Something about embracing one's nature. I made a non-mental note to ponder it later, preferably when I wasn't so busy being gobsmacked by my own casual omnipotence.
A new thought, sharp and exciting, lanced through my consciousness. If I could make one…
With a surge of newfound enthusiasm, I flicked a metaphorical finger. Fwoomph. Another star blinked into existence, this one a little bigger than Sparky, a vibrant, almost angry crimson. I placed it a respectable, gravitationally-sound distance from its predecessor. Then another, a cool, aloof sapphire blue that seemed to hum with a quiet intensity. And another, a cheerful, sunny yellow, like a cosmic buttercup. Soon, I had a small, scattered cluster, a tiny handful of celestial jewels flung across the black canvas of the void.
"Alright!" I declared, a genuine thrill thrumming through me. This was… this was fun! It felt a bit like being a toddler given a paint set the size of the universe, with an unlimited supply of paint. "This is… significantly less boring!"
I started to play, truly play, for the first non-time. I made a star that pulsed rhythmically, dimming and brightening like a colossal, fiery heartbeat. I tried, with considerable effort and much grumbling, to make one square. It was an exercise in frustration. The star stubbornly resisted, constantly trying to round off its sharp corners, as if deeply embarrassed by its own forced angularity. "Stubborn little blighter, aren't you?" I grumbled, prodding it with a focused tendril of pure energy. It wobbled indignantly, held a vaguely cube-like shape for a few fleeting non-seconds, then, with what sounded suspiciously like a stellar sigh, slumped back into a perfect sphere.
"Fine, be that way," I huffed, feeling a pang of artistic rejection. "Clearly, you have no appreciation for avant-garde stellar geometry. Philistine."
Undeterred, I wove a string of tiny, glittering stars together, like a celestial pearl necklace draped across the throat of night. I tried to get them to dance, to twirl and waltz in elegant, cosmic ballets. They just hung there, shining dumbly, completely ignoring my meticulously choreographed instructions. My skills as a celestial choreographer, it seemed, were sorely lacking. Or maybe stars were just inherently terrible dancers, possessing all the grace of drunken hippos on ice skates. Probably the latter. It was easier on my ego.
"You guys are a tough crowd," I muttered, floating amongst my silent, glittering creations. "No applause? No constructive criticism? Not even a single, solitary heckle to let me know you're actually paying attention?"
A quieter thought, the one that had been lurking in the background like an unwelcome party guest, nudged its way forward again, a little more insistent this time. "If I'm the only one here… who am I even playing for?"
The stars offered no answer, just their silent, unwavering light. The void remained profoundly, stubbornly voidy. The brief, exhilarating rush of my newfound powers, the childlike delight of creation, was already beginning to ebb, the tide of novelty receding to reveal that familiar, sinking shoreline of… well, what else? Boredom. With a newly identified, rather unwelcome side order of loneliness. It tasted a bit like stale, metaphysical crackers.
"Right," I said, giving myself a non-physical shake to dispel the nascent gloom. "Enough navel-gazing. Or void-gazing, in this case. Bigger. Better. More explosions." That usually cheered everyone up. Assuming, of course, that "everyone" was still just a party of one. Me.
I decided to make a super-duper-star. A real titan. A celestial heavyweight champion. I reached out with my will, gathering… well, potential. Raw, unformed cosmic stuff. I pushed it, compressed it, poured my intent into it like a chef forcing too much filling into a cosmic sausage casing. It grew, and grew, and grew, a monstrous, seething ball of incandescent nuclear fire that dwarfed my earlier, more modest creations. It blazed with the light of a thousand lesser suns, its surface a roiling chaos of explosions and magnetic storms. It was magnificent. It was terrifying. It was… honestly, a bit much. Slightly over the top, even for me.
"Okay, Kong," I addressed the colossal, incandescent behemoth, trying to project an air of casual authority I didn't entirely feel. "Don't get any bright ideas about ruling the roost around here. I'm still the Alpha Prankster, the Big Cheese of this particular void. Got it?"
Kong responded by unleashing a violent, almost petulant solar flare, a colossal tendril of plasma that lashed out across millions of non-miles, sending a wave of intense heat and blinding light that made even my non-corporeal, energy-based form flinch instinctively.
"Touchy," I noted, making a mental note to perhaps install an off-switch on my future ultra-creations. Or at least a dimmer.
I spent the next… while (time was still stubbornly refusing to punch in for its shift, existing more as a vague suggestion than a concrete rule) experimenting with my stellar playthings. I made stars that cycled through the entire visible spectrum, throbbing like cosmic mood rings. I coaxed some into humming strange, atonal tunes, the music of the spheres if the spheres were tone-deaf and slightly drunk. I got a trio of medium-sized blue giants to spin so rapidly they flattened into glowing, razor-thin discs, looking like celestial throwing stars. I even tried, with a singular lack of success, to make a star that told jokes. Its punchlines, however, invariably devolved into some variation of "…and then I initiated sustained nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium!" which, frankly, lost its comedic impact after the first dozen repetitions. Stellar humor, I concluded, was an acquired taste. One I had yet to acquire.
Driven by a whim, I began to arrange them into patterns, vast celestial graffiti scrawled across the canvas of the void. A gigantic smiley face, its eyes twin blue giants, its grin a curving arc of smaller, yellow suns. A colossal stick figure waving a cheerful, five-starred hand. My own initials, 'KAI', rendered in letters so vast they would have spanned entire (hypothetical) galactic empires, each stroke a river of fiery light. It was fun, in a mindless, universe-doodling sort of way. But each new creation, each flash of self-indulgent brilliance, was ultimately just me, shouting into the cosmic echo chamber, talking to myself in a silent language of light, gravity, and increasingly desperate whimsy.
I was admiring my latest masterpiece – a rather fetching spiral galaxy I'd just knocked together out of a few billion smaller stars and a generous helping of interstellar gas (go big or go home, that was rapidly becoming my motto) – when it happened. A disturbance in the force. Or, more accurately, a disturbance in one of my stars.
One of the stars in the outermost arm of my brand-new, custom-built spiral – a fairly unremarkable, medium-sized yellow one I'd mentally dubbed "Buttercup" for its cheerful, unassuming glow – suddenly winked out.
Just… poof. Gone. Vanished as if it had never been.
I blinked (metaphorically, of course. Still no eyelids. Seriously, Kai, add it to the to-do list, right under "invent time" and "find decent conversationalist"). "Hey! Buttercup! What gives? That's not part of the approved choreography!"
I focused my attention, my senses (which were rapidly evolving from "vague awareness" to "hyper-perceptive cosmic entity" to deal with this whole 'perceiving a newly-minted universe' business) zeroing in on the spot where it had been. Empty. Well, as empty as a spot recently vacated by a self-sustaining nuclear fusion reaction can be. There was a faint afterglow, a lingering gravitational ripple like the ghost of a celestial sigh, but no Buttercup.
"Did it… burn out already?" I wondered aloud, my voice a silent vibration in the void. "Seemed a bit quick. Stellar lifespans are usually a tad longer than a cosmic coffee break, aren't they?" Of course, since I was literally making up the laws of physics as I went along, it was entirely possible I'd accidentally set its internal egg timer to 'five minutes and poof'. Whoops. My bad. Note to self: implement better quality control for stellar longevity.
Then, just as suddenly and inexplicably as it had vanished, fwoomph. Buttercup was back. Shining just as brightly, just as cheerfully, as before.
"Okay," I said slowly, a non-existent eyebrow arching in bemusement. "Playing peek-a-boo, are we, Buttercup? That's new. A bit derivative of that moon game from Earth mythology I haven't invented yet, but points for effort."
But something was different. I peered closer, my senses sharpening, dissecting the light, tasting the energy signature. Buttercup's hue… it was subtly altered. A shade deeper, richer. More of a vibrant, goldenrod than a pale, buttery yellow. And its corona, the fiery, incandescent atmosphere that wreathed it, seemed to dance with a little more… zest. A little more… attitude. It wasn't just shining; it was strutting.
It pulsed once, a slow, deliberate, almost insolent throb of light. This wasn't like the rhythmic, mechanical pulsing I'd designed into one of its neighbors. This felt… intentional. Considered.
"Did you just…" I began, a strange, unfamiliar cocktail of annoyance, amusement, and outright astonishment bubbling up within my core. "Did you just sass me, star?"
Buttercup, my formerly unassuming little creation, pulsed again, its light flaring a little brighter this time, as if to say, with a celestial shrug and a cheeky stellar wink, "And what if I did, big guy? Whatcha gonna do about it?"
I stared at the impertinent little ball of gas and fire. A star. My star. One of my meticulously crafted, artfully arranged playthings, was now exhibiting distinct signs of… personality. This was unexpected. This was unprecedented. And, if I was being perfectly, scrupulously honest with myself, this was a tiny, thrilling bit less boring.
The void, suddenly, didn't seem quite so empty anymore. Buttercup was there. And Buttercup, it seemed, had opinions.