Nothing. - SCP Foundation

Nothing.

written by cubeflix

Image Credits:

cloud.png is from https://pixabay.com/illustrations/cloud-isolated-cumulus-transparent-2421760/

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F.A.Q.

There is a hole in Containment Chamber 22-C.

Well, no. A hole implies that there’s something surrounding it. A hole is defined as an opening to something else. This? This is nothing. This is an absence.

And inside the absence is a woman.

She is a woman not so much in that she possesses a physical form, but that she exists. She is real. Perhaps at one point, she was someone important. Perhaps she had a mother or a father. Perhaps there was someone she used to love. But it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that she is here. She is the only thing in the absence— if it can even be said to exist at all.

It’s quiet.

And within the hole, she sees a light. It is dim, slightly glowing, slightly warm, attempting to illuminate its blank surroundings but continually failing. Like a moth to a light, like a ship to a beacon, she moves closer to it. Is it a light? She thinks. No, it must be a person. Yes, a person.

She sees it take shape in the surrounding inky void, visible not in the space it takes up, but in that which it does not. It stands perfectly still. And just as she begins to make out its figure, see its features, ascribe an identity onto it— the person begins to change.

The changes are slow at first, but then they begin to quicken. Her imagination races. Like a flickering film reel, its appearance swaps between different faces she at one point might have been able to recognize. Ones that at one point she might have known. An elderly woman gazing at her with tender eyes. A stern-faced man in a lab coat. A young boy, laughing blissfully. A crying child.

There is no he, no she, no they. Just it. An infinite amalgam of possibility and personality.

The figure waves. She waves back.

Around her, in the empty expanse, a sky begins to form. Warm blue tones envelop her like a hot shower on a cold winter day. Colors enter her retinas, brightening the figure, nearly overwhelming her in a cascade of possibility and comfort as the sky-blue tones fill her surroundings. A shade of light cyan forming a gradient into a pale celeste. And yet, it is still silent.

Is she imagining this? Perhaps it’s just an illusion envisioned by the void. Why? To trick her? To deceive her? The presumption that the void can think implies that the void exists. That it is. But there is nothing here, that she knows for certain. It is only her.

It is only her and her mind.

She does not dwell on this thought for long, however, as just at her feet, an off-white cloud begins to form. It is small at first, but soon it expands until it has become large enough for her to comfortably lie down on. Silky white folds, soft as cotton, grow and expand like flower bulbs, as each tuft of soft cloud produces dozens more. And as if the strange little world around her knows exactly what she is thinking, a plain red lawn chair forms behind her.

Did it form? Or was it there the whole time? She thinks. Certainly it wasn’t there when she last looked, but some part of her, some innate fragment of her subconscious tells her that it always was there, as long has she had ever imagined it.

But before she can reach a reasonable conclusion, she notices the figure sitting in an identical lawn chair on the other side of the cloud. Its legs are crossed. It beckons her to sit down. She does.

As she sits, she watches curiously as the figure’s form continues to swap endlessly before her eyes. She sees a handsome man, sitting in a suit. She sees a timid-looking short-haired woman, holding a book. At one point, she swears she even sees a dog. A thought nags at her mind. And eventually, its form lands on a small freckled boy, his face obscured by hair. She looks at him. He looks back at her. As he does, his hair briefly recedes from his face, and for the first time, she can finally see his eyes.

They’re vaguely familiar.

Perhaps she’s seen them before. Perhaps at one point she saw them in monochrome blinking in an ultrasound. Perhaps at one point she saw them smiling up at her from a crib. Perhaps at one point she’d kissed him goodnight. Perhaps at one point there was sirens and flashing lights and sobbing and a beeping monitor—

But before she can continue her train of thought, he speaks.

“I love you, Mom.”

She knows that he is not real. She knows that she is the only thing inside this nothingness. She knows that all she sees are the results of hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections attempting to find patterns in something that has no patterns at all. She saw faces in the clouds and they came to life.

But what surprises her is the fact that she does not feel troubled by this certitude. Not at all. No, it is as real as she imagines it to be. And that is all that matters.

She smiles.