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He was in the Nothing, again.
He hadn’t been here the first few times, at least, he didn’t remember being here. And every time he entered the Nothing, it somehow lasted longer, even though the Nothing felt like a place outside of the construct of time as he knew it.
He remembered everything here. That this was supposed to be Her, not him. That it had been Her, but something had happened, that They had come to warn him, that She was the only hope to help him save Her. That he took Her place. But he hadn’t saved Her, not yet. Her essence was still out there, in the same paradoxical existence as his.
Did the other Her come to the Nothing, too?
Maybe they’d run into each other.
It would be so nice to hold Her again. Could you touch someone else in the Nothing? Probably not, because then that would be Something, and this, obviously, was the Nothing.
If touch was out because it was Something, then talking would be, too. Would seeing? Would he see Her like he did when he’d Leaped? If they were both in the system—wait, all three of them: him, Her, and Them—was the Nothing part of the system? Was the Nothing a place somewhere deep inside of It, somewhere in the datastream, had he even left the building?
He hadn’t programmed the Nothing in, not that he knew of. And he knew everything when he was in the Nothing, so it had to be true. Someone had told him that It had a personality, was the Nothing somehow tied to that code they’d decided against including? Probably not, computers operate perfectly fine in the absence of a Barbra Streisand personality module every day.
It had been a while. Not just his current time elapsed in the Nothing, though that would also break a record if things like record books could exist in the Nothing. It had been a while since he was himself, fully. Yes, when he was in the Nothing there wasn’t another person vying for attention like when he Leaped, but he didn’t have a physical form in the Nothing. No body. No body, no crime. Had he committed a crime by Leaping?
Can you be arrested for stealing your wife’s job when you’re trying to save Her life? Not without a body to arrest you can’t. And She wasn’t his wife yet. She should have been, enough time had passed, (he knew things like that in the Nothing, somehow) but no wedding. No body, no wedding, no crime.
No Addison Song.
and then the light came in (it always came in at the moment he began remembering names) and Ben was just as suddenly gone from the Nothing as he had appeared there, if one can appear in a place that only exists in their formless wandering soul