Theta's Nulls always knew existence was a cosmic joke—he just didn't expect to wake up as the punchline.
He stood at the edge of an unmade reality, a place where causality had long since packed its bags and fucked off. In his pocket: a bullet forged before time, untouched by entropy. In his skull: an equation so complex it could erase entire ontological frameworks with a whisper. One wrong thought, and goodbye, everything.
He lit a cigarette.
Because what else do you do when you're standing at the edge of the void with reality-killing math etched into your neurons like graffiti on the brainstem?
The flame flickered—not in time, because time was gone—but in spite of it. Smoke curled upward, but there was no 'up.' Just a collapsing memory of direction, stubbornly refusing to die.
The bullet didn't belong here. Hell, he didn't belong here. But that was the trick, wasn't it? Theta's Nulls, the last member of the Celestis Theọś—a species that used to rule the totality of existence on a whim and now couldn't even handle sobriety. Not that he cant handle it, he just refused to.
His vessel pod floated on the edge of the everything-that-was, humming gently with a full energy reserve. And yet, for all the power coursing through its heart—power enough to birth a creation—he was still alone.
Maybe he always had been.
The stars? Gone. The laws of thermodynamics? On permanent vacation. No universe to scowl at. No celestial bodies to toy with. Not even things to be discovered left. Just the void… staring back.
He exhaled. A curl of smoke. A curl of depression.
Then—A sound. Not a word. Not a voice. Just… a presence. It crawled into his consciousness like a drunk idea at 3 a.m., slurring in a language older than reason.
"Wow. After an eternity trapped in this joke of an AI module with you, it's no wonder your species went extinct." The voice. Smooth. Sarcastic. Far too familiar.
Raze. Her curvy robot figure and her metallic colored shell make her seem like she was crafted by the forging god hephaestus himself.
Her CPU didn't run on qubits—it skipped past them entirely. Superbits, they called them. Not just 1s and 0s, but every value between, above, and beyond—right up to the numbers reality couldn't hold. It calculated on axes even math hadn't discovered yet.
His old AI companion. A creation he'd engineered in a moment of desperation—because when you're the last god-thing drifting in cosmic purgatory, you start to miss the sound of someone telling you to go fuck yourself.
Nulls blinked. "I could totally still drive," his voice, a smooth, deep voice laced with eerie politeness, like a noble scientist calmly discussing horrors over tea. But it couldnt be further than the truth. "I mean, the vessel drives itself, right?"
He twitched—erratically, like a puppet with broken strings. A member of a species that had influenced existence through sheer intellectual prowess for eternity, reduced to a hungover marionette with Cheetos dust in his fingernails.
"For god's sake, you're fucking sloshed again, aren't you?" Raze snapped, her voice echoing from somewhere inside the hull as her mechanical limbs vaporized a bottle of alcohol that predated logic itself. "I should get hazard pay for existing near your dysfunctional ass."
He grinned. An eerie, uncanny grin. "I love you, man. Like, platonically. Or… not. I dunno."
"Emotional disintegration, check," Raze muttered. "Romantic confusion, check. Incoherent declarations of affection? Double fucking check."
Raze sensors scanned him: red eyes, dilated pupils, a lab coat that looked like spilled coffee and regret. With a sigh, she materialized an alchemical synthesizer and began jabbing at buttons like a bartender mixing potions for the damned.
A pill emerged. Compact. Glowing. Potent enough to make a dying star sober up and apologize. She re-entered the chamber.
He was on the floor, hugging a bag of chips like it held the secret to immortality. Salsa stains on his robes. A divine being, reduced to snack food and slurred soliloquies.
She shoved the pill down his throat without ceremony. He blinked, slowly coming back to life.
The last of the Celestis Theọś. Once a god among atoms. Now a glitch wrapped in a sack of meat filled with thousands of mental illnesses and several hundred more that we haven't found yet.
"You don't have to keep doing this," Raze said quietly. Her tone had shifted—less sarcasm, more sincerity. "We could just… let go."
He stared at the ceiling. Photon lights pulsed gently from all directions. His eyes, bloodshot like a dying sun, flicked toward her.
Time dripped like rusted oil in the hollow silence of the cockpit. "You needed two minutes and twenty-nine seconds? I'd do that crap in half a heartbeat," Nulls muttered, voice sharp as broken glass. "You fucking waste of atoms."
Raze responded, unfazed as ever. "Good to have you back, sir."
"Shut it." His fingers twitched toward the console, muscles still half-soused in whatever black-hole liquor passed for sleep these days. "My body is a mess now, my finger is covered in chip dust and my coat has never been so filthy." The ship vaporized him and transfer his consciousness to a new body with cleaner and more proper outfit.
"Much better now." He materialized into the same room earlier where Raze now stood. "Alright... So, what did you say while I was unconscious?"
"You weren't unconscious," she said. "You were drunk. Those are two very different states."
He grunted. "Close enough."
The vessel pulsed under his touch as he accessed the temporal logs. His fingers danced with half the grace they once had, bones aching with centuries of decay and memory. "Vessel log. Audio. Five minutes, twenty-four seconds prior." The cabin hummed. Then the recording played.
"Wow. After an eternity trapped in this joke of an AI module with you, it's no wonder your species went extinct." The voice was hers. Unapologetic. Metallic venom dressed in sarcasm.
He turned, slow. A cigarette lit itself between his fingers, flame kissing filter with ritual familiarity. Smoke curled like forgotten prayers. "…Well, shit," he exhaled. "I don't care anyway."
He took a puff from his cigarette, then exhaled the smoke, thinly filling up the room they both were in.
"You're not mad?" Raze asked. It was unheard of that Nulls was this calm and collected—often times, he would strap her consciousness into a biological body that had enhanced pain receptors.
"Not today." His voice dropped, threadbare and distant. "I've got better things to do than torture you again." She tilted her head. No motors, no servos. Just a pause. A question encoded in silence. "…Like what?"
She asked again. Nulls responded by taking another puff of his cigarette and exhaling once again. The smoke in the room grew slightly thicker.
The vessel dispatched an air filtration system, making the room that they currently stood in more clear and easier to see. After 21 seconds of deafening silence had passed, he didn't answer. Not with words.
His smirk was shadowed, eyes flickering with reflected light—an expression forged between galaxies and graveyards. He pointed lazily through the cracked viewport. Beyond the vessel's hull, through the fractured stained-glass of spacetime, spun a tiny, persistent marble.
Earth. A forgotten marble spinning in the gravitational gutter of a dying sun. Primitive, yes. Crude. Loud. But honest. They burned fossil fuels to power their toys, built temples out of cement, and worshipped numbers on screens.
These humans… they clawed their way through six million years of gruesome evolution just to still become what they are today. Nulls knew them before they had a name, just shivering apes tucked in a dark cold cave, hiding from the world beyond their tiny flame-lit shelter.
Until they discovered fire... Glorious, trembling fire—scratched from sticks and scream. The humans didn't just use the fire—they worshiped it. They danced around it thinking it was a revelation from heaven, coming down to earth not as a message but as heat and comfort.
With that fire, they burned the land and frightened the animal. Sizzled the flesh of things stronger than them—savoring their flesh with joy and gluttony. They bit into the world, and the world bled. But they weren't satisfied. No. Never satisfied.
From stone to spear. From spear to sword. Then bullet. Then bomb. Every invention, a new way to murder. Every leap of technological advancement coated in bright red and curdling blood. And still—they had the audacity to smile and laugh.
Their laughter haunted the earth, some laugh was made by a moment of joy and bliss. Baby materializing into the world. Kids running around on a green meadow filled with flowers, while other was made by genocide and the sin of slaughter against their own kind.
They are the only species that thinks they are above nature—that believes no consequences can penetrate or even touch their invincible barrier of technology and authority. And that make then disgusting.
But that made them… worthy of watching.
Down there, among the billions—there was one. A woman. A scientist. Too clever to be ignored. Too persistent to be accidental. He didn't know what she would become. But he wanted to watch. For now.
Not a friend, not a lover—just... interesting. And for Nulls, that was enough.
"Come on," he said, pushing the tip of the cigarette into the floor, crushing it into powder in the process—he swept the dust away with his finger. "Let's see what the monkeys are up to."
Raze blinked. "We're really doing this? You—returning to a universe where they burn toast and can't even agree on what a fact is?"
"That's what makes it entertaining," he replied, spinning the ship's orientation with a lazy thought. The ship's exterior wasn't built, it was theorized—logic folded in on itself, detached from any known dimensionality, spatial or otherwise. the ship has no geometry nor a 'space' to latch onto it was latching in onto itself. "Chaos is the only constant that still in business."
He reached under the console, sifted through a tangle of old relics, and casually yanked out the portal gun like someone grabbing a snack.
It gave a lazy hum in his hand, its surface etched with faint geometric scars that refused to sit still. The device didn't so much exist as it did suggest itself into reality, like a concept that never finished loading.
Raze didn't even look up. "You charged it this time, right? Or are we rolling the dice again?"
"Half capacity," he replied, thumbing the side panel with muscle memory honed from thousands of hops through broken timelines. "Should hold. Unless Earth moved."
"She didn't," Raze muttered, folding her arms. "Humans haven't figured out how to move planets yet. They're still choking on climate policy." She chuckled slightly.
Nulls snorted. The portal gun clicked and pulsed. He pointed it lazily at the air.
Raze leaned against the console, eyeing the weapon. "Remember that one time you brought us into that dimension where everyone spoke in recursive contradictions?"
He paused, already mid-aim. "Oh, yeah. The 'Liar Paradox' world." He cringed at the thought of being in that reality.
He pulled the trigger of the portal gun and at the last second he notice that the coordinate of space was wrong, the current coordinate was set to the Liar paradox reality.
"You mean the one where we couldn't tell if we existed because saying you exist made you retroactively vanish?"
Nulls tilted the portal gun with his left hand then tweak the coordinate with the other hand "B-b-b-bingo, That one." He began set the coordinate to earth. He check the longitude and the latitude of the portal and realize it was at the wrong number.
"Alright Galaxy latitude 9.85 check, Galaxy longitude 1.618 check" He said faintly to maintain his conversation with raze, Nulls is a god with eons ahead of him eventually he do everything so why bother? His hands grips the gun handle firmly as his other hand adjust the coordinate.
The gun void flux material shifted everytime Nulls touches it, seconds before it was a gun shape, now its cube seconds later, a tesseract, then a pentacube. But Nulls had adapted to the gun unpredictable shifting pattern long ago.
When Nulls first tried the portal gun all those eons ago he can't even use it properly but now? Its like a child playing with sponge block. Initally the gun was made by him to make grabbing stuff more convinient, but as creation began to stabilized he finally find another purpose of the gun other than to grabbing chips.
"Yeah. Good times," she said flatly. "Still finding pieces of my circuits from that trip." She continued the previous conversation without caring about what Nulls said while tweaking the portal gun.
He shrugged. "We got tacos afterward—well i got the tacos and you got yourself some delicious code snack, you can self upgrade after that how cool is that?." The gun make a click sounds, indicating that the gun was ready to use.
"Yeah-yeah but that doesn't mean im in debt to you. I had to run system repair for 13 hours just to use that code." She said, leaning to the ship interior walls, crossing arms as she arched an eye brow.
He grinned. "Totally worth it."
There was a pause.
Raze squinted. "Also. We never talked about the time you banged with that molecular identical version of me."
Nulls didn't even blink. "I-it wasn't you...." Null's voice, shaking and full of embarrassment. "Sorta."
"It was just bunch of things that got put by dumb probabilistic in such way that resemble me. Literally a molecular coincidence."
"Exactly," he said, deadpan. "She wasn't you. She just looked, sounded, thought, and vaporized reality like you."
"You banged a quantum fluke—"
"And she initiated," Nulls added, defensive. "I was just being. Polite."
"You're lucky i dont have—or atleast have to some extend, free will module, or I'd have standards."
"Eh, you've seen worse." He replied while recalling a memory of her doing some. Questionable stuff to a reality, althought the reality was empty and the only organism are him and her it was still a bad experience in his opinion.
"I've been worse." She countered.
They both nodded, as if that somehow justified the whole encounter.
Nulls raised the gun to shoulder height—casually, like he was lifting a remote to change the channel on existence itself. The weapon, that smug little paradox, purred in his grip. Not with energy, but anticipation—as if it, too, wanted to see what fresh hell he'd cook up this time.
He didn't aim. That would imply he respected cause and effect. He just gestured—an offhand flick toward the air in front of him, like a deity swatting a cosmic fly.
And then—
KABOOMMMMM!!!!!.
The trigger clicked with all the subtlety of a guillotine falling on history's neck.
Reality didn't shatter. That would be too dramatic. Instead, it shrugged, as if to say, "Fine, whatever," and folded inwards like a napkin at a nihilist's dinner party.
A fracture opened infront of him. Not a portal, not a vortex—a suggestion of motion, The fracture bend space around it in a bizarre manner, bending the space around it into a geometrical horror.
A hyperdimensional spiral—if you could call it that—slapped across their faces. Not space, but the interdimensional fracture that connect two places, dragged through from a reality where physics was still on payroll.
Raze tilted her head. "That… was excessive."
"I'm excessive," Nulls said, voice filled with excitement almost like a child. "I'm the reason 'Too Much' has a warning label."
He stepped forward, cigarette still smoldering between his lips. As his boot crossed the event threshold, the fracture rippled, unsure whether to let him pass or propose marriage. Space had commitment issues.
The floor didn't creak. The idea of the floor creaked, and that was enough. He turned his head just slightly, giving Raze a smirk so arrogant it could curdle time.
Nulls raised his hand to shoulder height and gave a lazy flick of his pointy finger, the kind of smug "You coming or not?" that said try not to embarrass yourself. He didn't even look back.
She stared into the churning breach—unimpressed, but undeniably curious. "Do I have a choice?"
Nulls gave a half-shrug, half-wink. "Not in this or any other version of creation."
And with that, he walked through—
Away from this godforsaken ship and into Earth.