It was the work of months, years, lifetimes, plus or minus a week, for accounting purposes. But now, finally, we had achieved what had always been considered impossible, unattainable, mythological, illogical – the creation of a true void.
Not simply a vacuum, but a full, total, all-encompassing nothingness. Matterless, energyless, structureless, lightless, pointless. A cube of perfect nothingness, six feet wide by six feet deep by six feet high (all the measurements had been changed from metric to fulfil the new patriotism in science criteria).
I was the one chosen to unveil it to the assembled crowds. I smiled, pointed. From the crowd, gasps, cries, shouts, moans. A muffled weep. Three swoons soon followed, plus two faints, one feint.
“It is impossible,” said a voice.
“It is illogical,” said another.
“It is incomprehensible,” said a third, which might well actually have been the first, again.
“It is… unavoidable!” said a fourth, or third, or maybe just the second again, who knows. What I do know were the hoped for laughs their pun had been designed to elicit were not forthcoming. Laughter was not permitted in the hall. We all knew that. Not since the incident.
The owner of that voice was ejected, barred, tarred, shamed.
Yet soon he returned.
“I wonder what it feels like,” said Toby, as he silently emerged from the wings to take his place beside me on the stage.
“It is a void,” I said. “It is by its nature sensationless.”
Toby reached out a hand.
Toby breached the border between the not-void and the void.
“Ha, it tickles,” he said, with a slightly coquettish giggle not becoming of a man of his size, stature, nomenclature.
And with that he stepped inside. That was the end of the void.
__________
Notes:
1. Written in September 2020
2. About the mysterious Toby Vok