It was not quiet.
Silence implied calm, and this was anything but.
There was panic first—raw, unfiltered, directionless panic—followed immediately by frustration, confusion, and a very strong sense that whatever this was, it was deeply unfair. Thoughts arrived without order, without permission, overlapping and colliding like arguments shouted in an empty room that somehow still echoed.
He existed.
That was the problem.
He had existed before, obviously—he remembered that much—but this was different. This was existence without edges, without orientation, without the comforting weight of a body insisting on up, down, left, right, inside, outside. There was no breath to catch, no heartbeat to steady himself with, no ground to pace across while spiraling.
Emotionally speaking, it was a mess.
Fear spiked, then flattened into irritation. Irritation flared into something close to awe, which immediately made him annoyed at himself for feeling impressed during what was clearly some sort of cosmic mistake.
Okay, he thought—because thinking still worked, thankfully—okay. Think. This is probably limbo.
That made sense. Annoying sense, but sense.
Limbo was exactly the kind of place you'd end up if you somehow managed to be both virtuous and sinful in exactly the wrong proportions. Too decent for hell, too much of a problem for heaven. Stuck in the cosmic waiting room forever because the universe couldn't decide what to do with you.
Which, frankly, felt on brand.
"I mean," he complained—to no one, because there was no one, and also because complaining was familiar and therefore grounding—"statistically speaking, that's impressive. You don't accidentally balance good and bad that perfectly."
If there were a cosmic scorecard, he imagined it hovering somewhere, blinking uncertainly, unable to render a verdict.
The thought didn't make him feel better.
Time passed.
Or maybe it didn't.
It felt like minutes—long, headache-inducing minutes filled with circular reasoning and hypothetical arguments with nonexistent judges—but somewhere far outside of feeling, millennia slid by without friction. He didn't notice. There was nothing to measure time against. No stars to move. No shadows to lengthen. No decay.
Just… nothing.
An infinite plane of it.
Or maybe not a plane. It didn't really have a shape. It was everywhere he looked—except "look" wasn't quite the right word either. He didn't have eyes, but he could perceive across all angles at once, which was deeply unpleasant in a way that was hard to articulate. There was no horizon, because horizons implied distance, and distance implied space, and space implied something.
This was nothing.
The kind of nothingness that didn't even bother being dramatic about it.
Eventually—after what felt like an eternity compressed into a migraine—his thoughts slowed. Not because the situation improved, but because emotional overload hit a ceiling and simply couldn't escalate anymore.
Calm crept in, thin and tentative.
"Alright," he muttered, more to himself than anything else. "Let's assume I'm wrong about limbo."
That assumption alone felt revolutionary.
He tested it, experimentally, by thinking about change.
Not movement. Not action. Just… change.
Something happened.
At first, he thought it was a hallucination—some stress-induced nonsense firing off in a brain that technically shouldn't exist—but then it stayed. It didn't flicker or dissolve or politely vanish back into nothingness.
Something had appeared.
It was massive. Absurdly so. So large that "large" stopped being a useful descriptor and crossed into the territory of conceptual inconvenience. It existed across his entire perception at once, visible from every angle simultaneously, which should have been impossible and yet very clearly wasn't.
It was there.
And it hadn't been there before.
He froze—mentally speaking—then immediately recoiled from the pressure in his… head? Awareness? Whatever passed for it now.
"Oh," he said, very carefully. "That's… new."
The headache receded as he stopped pushing whatever that had been. The thing remained, inert and uncomplaining, as if it had always been part of the nothingness and simply forgot to show up earlier.
He stared at it—again, metaphorically—and a thought surfaced, slow and uncomfortable.
What if I'm not in this place?
The idea settled like a weight.
What if I am this place?
The nothingness didn't disagree.
That, more than anything else so far, felt correct in a way that made his stomach—hypothetical though it was—drop.
If he was the void, then the thing he'd created wasn't summoned.
It was expressed.
That changed things.
"Well," he said, resigned in the way only someone staring down an infinite existential problem could be, "if I'm going to be a place, I might as well be an interesting one."
And so he added things.
Not carefully. Not architecturally. Just… intuitively.
Stars came first—because nothing looked worse than empty space pretending it wasn't empty. Then galaxies, spiraling and colliding in ways that ignored conventional physics but felt right anyway. Planets followed, scattered generously, some molten, some frozen, some already broken in ways that suggested long histories he hadn't technically written yet.
Worlds filled the void.
The nothingness receded—not gone, just occupied.
He paused, surveying his work with something like cautious satisfaction.
Then a problem presented itself.
Life.
Waiting for it felt unbearable.
He knew how long evolution took. He didn't have the patience—or the emotional bandwidth—to sit through millions of years hoping something crawled out of the metaphorical mud and decided to think back at him.
So he nudged.
Not hard. Just enough.
He selected a world—one he'd made intentionally large, roughly two light-years across, because if he was doing this, he might as well commit—and filled it. Not with sentience. Not yet.
Just life.
Plants. Animals. Trees. Flies. Worms. Fungus. Bacteria. Moss. Plankton. Bears. Rabbits. Things that crawled. Things that swam. Things that grew where they shouldn't and thrived anyway.
A biosphere bloomed.
Satisfied—and more exhausted than he'd ever been in a life that technically hadn't required sleep—he let himself drift.
"If this works," he murmured, already fading, "I'll deal with it later."
Then he slept.
And somewhere on that world, evolution quietly began its work.