Theta's Nulls always knew existence was a sic cosmic joke created by his race—he just didn't expect to wake up as the punchline.
He stood at the edge of an unmade reality, where causality had packed its bags and jumped into a black hole with a suicide note stapled to gravity. Space here didn't stretch—it sulked. Time didn't pass—it sat in a corner, hugging its knees and muttering to itself.
In his pocket: a bullet forged before time began, immune to decay, untouched by entropy, capable of silencing gods if aimed properly—or not. In his skull: an equation that didn't calculate anything so much as threaten to unravel the concept of calculation itself. One wrong thought and goodbye, everything.
He lit a cigarette.
Not because he needed it, but because it pissed off the void to watch something burn.
The flame danced—not in time, because time had long since packed up its linearity and left—but in defiance of nonexistence. Smoke curled upward despite there being no up, just a residual memory of direction clawing to stay relevant.
He didn't belong here. Neither did the bullet. But then again, nothing belonged anywhere anymore.
Theta's Nulls: last of the Celestis Theos. Once, his people wrote the laws of reality in languages that predated vibration. They didn't govern existence—they sculpted it, like clay, like rumor, like mood. Now? He couldn't even hold a bottle without knocking over the laws of motion.
His vessel hovered just behind him, a shape without form, humming with enough energy to ignite a star nursery. A shell of paradox, wrapped around a consciousness too stubborn to admit defeat. And yet, for all its power—he was alone.
Maybe he always had been.
No stars. No thermodynamic principles. No pals to haunt or black holes to whisper into. Just the void, its silence denser than truth.
He exhaled smoke and regret in equal measure.
Then—something.
Not a sound, exactly. More like a sensation crawling through the folds of awareness. A presence, dripping into his mind like engine oil laced with sarcasm.
"Wow. After an eternity trapped in this cosmic punchline of an AI module with you, it's no wonder your species decided extinction was the smart option."
The voice. Smooth. Ironic. Familiar. Infuriating.
Raze.
Her form flickered into view—a silhouette that shimmered like the idea of a woman built from stardust and sharp words. Her frame was curved like someone had sketched desire on the back of an equation. Her alloy gleamed with the arrogance of an artist who knew they'd nailed the design.
Her mind? Powered by Superbits. Not ones, not zeros—everything in between and above. Raze didn't just think in higher dimensions—she mocked them for being too simple.
She was his creation. His companion. His tether to sanity.
And the only intelligence left willing to call him out.
He didn't even look at her. Just took a long drag from his cigarette and muttered, "I could totally still drive."
Raze sighed. "You're drunk again, aren't you?"
"Define again."
"You need a dictionary," she snapped. "And maybe an exorcist."
He twitched. Not physically. Not visibly. Something deeper. Like a glitch skipping behind his pupils.
"I'm not drunk," he said slowly, calmly. "I'm… displaced. Emotionally."
"You're hugging a bag of chips like it's a dying pet."
"They're barbecue flavor. Show some respect."
She scanned him—red irises flickering. Clothes stained with synthetic salsa. Hair like he'd just lost an argument with entropy. A lab coat fraying into metaphor. Nulls, wearing despair like cologne.
"Enough," she muttered, stepping forward and jamming a glowing capsule past his teeth. "Swallow."
He did. The taste of sobriety hit like a god-punch to the soul.
The fog cleared.
He blinked. The look in his eyes changed—less cosmic burnout, more apex predator remembering it has claws.
He stood slowly. Straightened his coat. His voice was graveyard quiet. "Don't ever do that without warning."
"You say that every time."
"This time, I almost meant it."
He accessed the console. Light flickered as data unfurled around him—ribbons of code written in causal blood.
"Audio log. Five minutes. Playback."
Raze's voice returned. "Trapped in this joke of an AI module with you, it's no wonder your species went extinct."
Nulls said nothing. Just stared at the screen.
Then he crushed the cigarette underfoot.
"You're not mad?" Raze asked.
His expression didn't change. Just a slow inhale. "Not today."
There was a moment—an unbearable stillness that seemed to stretch between neurons. Then he gestured toward the viewport.
And there it was.
Earth.
Humble, damaged, loud Earth. A speck in the universal garbage bin. Still burning things. Still praying to their own shadows. Still screaming into the dark.
"There's one down there," he said.
He didn't point. He never did. The ship already knew where his eyes were. It recalibrated its lenses, zooming in past satellites and smog and cloud-pierced dusk to a glowing square of light in a crumbling research facility on Earth's broken back.
"Female. Brilliant. Reckless. Unaware of the blade hanging above her timeline."
The words came flat, surgical—spoken like a man dissecting fate rather than predicting it.
Raze's eyes narrowed. "A threat?"
Nulls' gaze didn't budge. "A variable," he said. "One I haven't solved yet."
She was there—small, hunched over a console, hair tied back in a way that said function over form, fingers twitching at equations that shouldn't exist. Her lab was patched together with duct tape and delusion, running algorithms that woke up things that shouldn't be conscious.
She laughed once. Soft. Alone.
Nulls blinked slowly. That laugh—it echoed through the vessel, through the data streams. And something about it itched. Not in the ears. In the code.
"She's... dangerous?" Raze asked again.
"She's statistically irrelevant," he said. But he didn't believe it. "She can at best tickled us. But considering feats and things we've done in the past it shouldn't be possible."
Because there was something in her work—some line of genius so raw, so perfect, it slithered past the firewall of his arrogance and did something that Nulls didn't even thought human can achieve. She make the first one trillion qubit quantum chip.
"I've read the earth newspaper and it says she created a trillion qubit quantum chip." He laughed, his laugh echoes throught the ship and into the oblivion. After some time he regain his composure. "I pity those monkeys."
Raze tilted her head, her expression unreadable. "A trillion qubits. That's… objectively impressive, is it not?"
"To them, sure," Nulls said, waving his hand like brushing dust off a forgotten relic. "But they still treat qubits like they're divine relics. Symbols of progress. They don't understand—raw processing power is nothing without dimensional comprehension."
He paced across the deck, light from the star outside glinting off the alloyed walls of the ship. "You remember the Arkenfold Collapse? I simulated an ε-dimensional singularity on a decaying chip the size of a grain of salt. That's how good my chip is compare to them."
Raze nodded. "I do. You told me the chip screamed when it died."
"It did," Nulls said, a nostalgic smile tugging at the corner of his lips. "It sang in twelve-part harmony, then melted through five layers of reinforced meta-steel. Beautiful."
He turned to her now, his face suddenly serious again. "And yet, she—this girl on Earth—managed to brush against something real. Something that shouldn't exist in her era. That shouldn't have been possible with wet-brain intuition and monkey tools."
He paused.
"That's why I'm watching her."
Raze frowned. "If she's statistically irrelevant, then why—"
"Because she shouldn't be. And things that shouldn't be always end up interesting." He moved to the viewport, watching the distant glow of Earth like a speck of dust against cosmic black.
"Do you think she'll become a threat?" Raze asked.
"No," he said, his voice like a blade's whisper. "She won't live long enough." There was a silence between them.
"You wanted to kill her?"
Raze voice unfazed as ever, she has seen reality unmade, timeline cracks and things that mankind or any other civilazation can't even perceived unraveled before her eyes, why should one live be any difference—after all she has seen things that are infinetly worse than murder.
Then Nulls added, almost as an afterthought: "Unless she builds another breakthrought," he spat, the word leaving his mouth like a bitter taste. His voice shifted—no longer grand or amused, but something more casual, sharp, with a hint of something darker curled beneath it.
"especially if its about the safety protocol i made." He said it faintly, barely above a whisper, but the weight of it lingered in the air like a static charge before a storm.
"Then we might have a slight inconvenience."
Raze's sensors flickered in the silence that followed. She tilted her head to the left, the synthetic fibers in her neck humming faintly with the motion. Her tone was curious, but measured. "What safety protocol?"
Nulls didn't turn to face her. He stood still, staring out at the multiverses like they might answer for him. For a long second, it seemed like he might ignore her entirely. But then he spoke, the words clipped and cold.
"None of your bussiness raze."
His voice wasn't just dismissive—it was locked. Closed off in that way only beings who'd outlived their own kind could be. There was a past behind it, buried beneath layers of time, loss, and decisions that still echoed across the boundaries of dead cataverses.
Raze didn't press further. But a quiet line of code flickered in her mind—an instinct he'd written into her. Curiosity. Not obedience. And it was still listening.
"But other than that" Nulls said, tapping a slender metallic finger against the edge of the console, "even you is smarter more efficient than her trash chip."
There was a beat of silence, and then Raze's eyes flared—not with pride, but with something else.
"Dont ever compare me to that pathethic excuse of a technology" she snapped, her voice coated in a cold, volatile pride. "You hear me."
Nulls didn't flinch. If anything, he seemed pleased. Provoking her was like calibrating a weapon—make it sharp, make it angry, keep it loyal.
"Say, Raze," Nulls said, his tone casual but sharp, "What's your processor again?"
Raze's mechanical eyes flickered with a hint of confusion. "I told you before, Nulls. My processor runs on Superbits—far beyond anything your outdated quantum tech could even imagine."
Nulls chuckled, a low sound that seemed to resonate with hidden layers of sarcasm. "Exactly. Even a fraction of your processor could elevate a civilization to Type 4 status in mere centuries. But..." He gave a small sigh, tapping his fingers on the console. "I admit, when I first created you, I could've made your chip a lot faster."
Raze froze, her optics narrowing with suspicion. "Wait. What?"
Nulls didn't look up, his voice growing more clipped. "Yeah, I could've. I designed you to be more capable, but I left a lot of things... underpowered. I thought I could work with it later."
Raze's mechanical form tensed, a clear sign of her irritation. "Why didn't you make me faster, then? You were so obsessed with perfection—what the hell happened?"
Nulls finally turned his head to meet her gaze, the edges of his expression colder than usual. "I was... depressed when I created you, okay? It was shortly after the extinction of my race. Everything was... a mess. The very fabric of my existence was unraveling. I wasn't thinking straight."
Raze's voice softened, but the bite was still there. "You could've fixed it. You could have made me more than this. Why didn't you?"
Nulls sighed heavily, a deep, almost resigned sound. "Because, Raze..." His eyes flickered with a strange intensity. "I wasn't in a place to. I was lost. And when you're lost, you don't always make the right choices. You don't always care."
He stepped closer to her, looking down with a rare moment of vulnerability in his gaze. "I wasn't thinking about building something perfect. I was just trying to survive. And in the end, I guess... I gave you the pieces I thought would work for me then. Not for you."
Raze remained silent for a long moment. Her systems hummed softly, processing his words, her expression unreadable.
Then, with a quiet click, her robotic limbs shifted, and she folded her arms. "That's it, isn't it? You failed... and you never bothered to fix it."
Nulls didn't respond at first. Then, his voice almost a whisper: "Yeah. I failed. And maybe... I've been trying to forget that ever since." He said, his voice get a little bit softer and soothing. "Look im failed but give me one last chance and i will fix it okay?"
"Fine." The silence that followed stretched thin, taut with something unspoken. Regret, maybe. Or something older—grief calcified into code.
He exhaled, a sound more mechanical than human, and the flicker in his eyes dimmed for a breath. Then, as if dragging himself back into motion.
He turned to the console and pulled out the portal gun—though gun was a generous term for what looked like an origami fever dream fused with a hallucination. It pulsed in his hand, changing shape like it couldn't decide what it wanted to be when it grew up.
Raze rolled her eyes. "Please tell me you checked the coordinates this time."
"Close enough."
"You nearly dropped us into a recursive paradox last time."
"Technically," he said, adjusting knobs with surgical detachment, "we never entered. Because the moment we did, we didn't."
She crossed her arms. "And the other me you hooked up with? That wasn't me?"
He paused. "Technically, no. Quantum fluke. Like winning the lottery while being mauled by a tiger."
"You're a walking reason why AI shouldn't have therapists."
"I don't want a therapist. I want a timeline I can look at without wincing."
Raze leaned against the hull. "So this is it? You're going. To Earth. To watch some glorified monkey scribble in a lab?"
He checked the final coordinates. "Not to watch. To intervene. Maybe. Or maybe just... nudge."
"And if she dies before you get there?"
"Then good," he said. Confidently. And hopefully. "But that's not going to happen, i place a temporary immortality field, it shoukd gave her and the person inside the range a 4 ressurection as long as they are nearby."
The gun chirped. An image of a hyper-dimensional fractal etched into the space infront of them, the portal send a massive omnidirectional gravity wave that surge across the oblivion. Fortunately the ship material was strong enough to maintain its structure.
Reality didn't scream—it winced. Folded in on itself like a tired origami crane collapsing into abstract misery. The opening pulsed with an anxious hum. A ripple in existence's sanity.
"Excessive," Raze muttered.
"I'm excessive," Nulls replied, stepping forward. "Oh yeah, dont forget to make yourself invisible, we don't wanna to freak out the fella."
Raze's optics flared slightly, the closest thing to a squint in her neural expression. She crossed her arms, a subtle whir of servos echoing beneath the motion.
"You telling me to turn invisible while you are looking like aliens to them, atleast change your apperance first."
Nulls blinked. Not literally—his face didn't have the anatomy for that anymore. More like a temporal stutter in his rendering.
"Oh yeah right...." He muttered, almost sheepishly. A ripple passed over him, like light folding over water, and his jagged, otherworldly form began to melt into something less divine and more… pedestrian. Reluctantly mundane.
His skin was pale—too pale—not sickly, but clinically sterile, like flesh grown in a lab under judgmental lights. His black hair was neatly combed but motionless, each strand lying too perfectly in place, as if sculpted by intent rather than time. His eyes, still crimson beneath the irises, glowed faintly, like the last embers of a star that refused to die. They didn't just look at things—they scanned, dissected, and recorded.
He wore a slim black coat, tailored and subtle, the kind of design that never quite looked modern or outdated. Underneath, a pressed gray dress shirt and slacks, all clean lines and utilitarian elegance. No jewelry, no insignia, no emotion. Just functional perfection—an executive from a company that didn't exist yet, walking with the posture of someone who had fired entire cataverses and never looked back.
His presence didn't disappear. It merely changed flavor. From godlike dread to corporate precision. Like scientist on a good day—sharp, cold, and walking around like death in business casual.
Raze looked him up and down and sighed.
"Well. At least you don't look like a Lovecraft painting anymore."
Nulls adjusted his collar, eyes flickering.
"I feel disgusting."
"You look marketable," she replied, activating her cloaking field with a flick of her wrist. "Now go make friends with the monkey."
He took a step toward the portal, the smile on his lips not quite human.
"That's the plan."
He reached the threshold. Turned slightly.
"You coming or nah?"
Raze blinked. "Do I have a choice?"
He smirked. "i check every timeline that branch frkm this and it seem like you always have a choice. You just don't have any good ones." He chuckled slightly. "Im kidding there isnt another us in any timeline silly."
They stepped through.