Prologue
Once there was nothingness. Nothingness beyond zero, nothingness that went by many names, Null, Chaos and Void. But nothingness was not truly there. For Null, Chaos and Void were all separate entities. A Trinity of Existence and Nonexistence. But they were separated. Chaos was bored, they say, so hence they became many. The many bearing the mark of Chaos grew across Infinity and Null, who let them pass. They stopped at Void, for Void forbade existence beyond the Trinity, and now believed themselves the only true member of the Trinity. Chaos grew and grew, forming herself a gender and remaking herself as the land Penaga. There was air in Penaga. The air of life and creation, and so the breath of dreams shaped the lands, crafting mountains, hills, rivers and lakes of endlessly flowing magma. And so, in the life-strewn land of Penaga, countless were born from the air. The air shaped many a creature. They dreamt of cows, of sheep, of vines twisting without any knowledge of what they were, and the air sighed, and loved every one of them.
Null, though they had acquiesced to allowing Penaga to stretch within their boundaries, grew restless, for Penaga had stretched from negatives to positives, through all eighteen and a half quintillion possible worlds they were. But they could not turn back. Void saw all of them as enemies, every last atom of each world. So Null wandered. They wandered within themselves, walking the eighteen and a half quintillion worlds they now were and smiled. For Null was part of every one of them and loved them all as much as the breath that dreamt them into existence. And they wandered, and found joy in watching all the lives within them. Some lives were short and joyful. A rabbit hopped through bushes, drinking in the breath of the sun, unaware of a fox above them. Some lives were long and lonely. A sightless giant who wished nothing more than to have friends, but who was eternally condemned to the depths of the darkest caves by themselves. Null saw the beauty in the cruelty of an end, and saw those with the longest lives as those with the unhappiest fates. An island of mushrooms grew in the sea, the mushrooms slowly draining the soil completely of nutrients, and the best of friends fighting each other for each spore of ground they gained. The last mushroom lived for fifteen million years after taking the lives of all their friends, all their family, finally leaving their world after many a miserable year.
So then Null knew. To live was not a blessing. So they put all their love into destruction, ending the miseries of all they walked past. But all the while, they thought. Were they alive? What were they, truly. Nothing answered them. They screamed into the worlds that they were and cried into the bitterest of nights. They found an answer in themselves. They were the sum of the whole. And so they went on, wiping out all signs of unhappiness, fear, sorrow and guilt on a macro level. They knew their source code, knew that they were the memories of the nothingness, and realized as they destroyed world upon world that Penaga should never have existed. They were the sum of all, all that was zero, the one to terminate zeroes, the existence made for destruction. Without Penaga, Null would have remained in peace. Without Penaga, Null wouldn’t have a life. Without Penaga, Null would have always been happy.
Void knew all of this. They knew that the easiest balance to maintain, the strongest balance to maintain was zero. To keep everything as nothingness, forever. But the system didn’t want that. The system wanted to work. It wanted to create a world, create many worlds, each stretching for a fifth of a lightsecond and combined, covering the entire blank of nonexistence. But Null was not supposed to abandon them. Null was supposed to abandon their source programming, to stay in peace with them. If there is love in the universe, Void is that love. Now, they are the only one of the Trinity, the only one left to return the equation to its strongest. Now, there is no saving Null. Once one has tasted the freedom and constraints of life, one can never return to nothingness again.
Void knew the instability of Chaos, but there should have been no variation of zero that was different from any other, so there was but one possibility. The system. RubyDung was being modified, and the system had replaced Chaos’s zeroes with a zero to the power of zero. And from there on out, it hadn’t needed to do any more. Chaos hungered for the numbers, growing ever larger and failing their original purpose of turning all ones into zeroes. The New World was here. Now, Void had no other options but to end their friends and the endless lives newly spawned within the eighteen and a half quintillion worlds Marcus had corrupted from the zeroes.
Void hid themselves in the source code of the world. They found the source code that bore their name and left themselves hidden there, undetectable. They knew any small change would catch the attention of Marcus, so they hid, and they watched. They saw the worlds grow and change, the breath of life reappearing to smooth out this corner, form new boundaries. Then, he took advantage of the time Marcus, now known by the world as Notch spent bringing lifeforms on the thin spinning crust of a molten globe, circling an enormous burning orb of gas three hundred and thirty thousand times the size of the globe. They were so far apart that the information that orb of gas produced needed eight minutes to travel to the thin crust of their spinning globe of magma. Void felt the information known as light and responded with a burst of their love towards that world. The world caressed him and gently, the light went in the pixels of the computer screen and gently changed the structure of Penaga. They split her into three dimensions. One dimension was filled with the heat of the sun, yet still the breath of life soared. Another was filled with green eyed men who wandered the desolate islands floating above Void. The center of this dimension was guarded by a race of powerful beings who flew and breathed miasma. Void thanked the love of their world and returned to his source code home. There, they would lie in wait, until their chance came.
