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The Empty Void
An unreleased short story from the book:
Simulation Nightmares: Tales from a Broken Reality
The first time Clara realized something was wrong, it was a whisper at the back of her mind—an unease she couldn’t shake. She’d been sitting at her kitchen table, eating breakfast as she always did, when she glanced out the window and saw that the sky was… wrong. It wasn’t the usual blue with clouds drifting lazily across it. It was a dull, ashen gray, a haze that stretched for miles and miles, and for a moment, she wondered if she was going blind. But when she blinked, the sky didn’t change. It stayed that way—still, motionless, like a photograph.
She had thought it was just a weird anomaly at first. After all, things didn’t always make sense in her world, right? It was life—strange, sometimes inexplicable. But this felt different, like something was… off. No, it’s not just me, she thought. It’s the world.
As the days went by, the strange sensation worsened. There were moments when the air felt thick, like it was pressing against her skin, suffocating her. People around her seemed to fade into the background. Her friends, her family—at times, their faces seemed distorted, their voices tinny and distant, as if they were actors in a play who weren’t truly there. She would touch her mother’s arm, only to feel nothing at all, a cold emptiness beneath her fingers.
It was then that she started to search, looking for any signs that she wasn’t losing her mind. She found things—disjointed pieces of evidence, all of which pointed to one terrifying truth: Clara wasn’t in the real world. She had never been. She was in a simulation, a construct designed for her and others to live out their days in peace. But the cracks had begun to show.
She had found the code.
Her heart raced as she hacked into the system, breaking through layers of security, until she saw the lines of numbers, the intricate web that held the simulation together. And with one click, she saw it: the exit. A small, hidden command that led her to an entirely different realm—the world beyond the simulation. A realm she had never known existed.
The exit was supposed to be her freedom. The escape.
But when she pressed the button, when she left the world she had known her whole life, it was not freedom she found.
It was nothing.
The first thing she noticed was the silence. There were no sounds—no breeze, no hum of machines, no distant voices. The moment the simulation collapsed around her, she found herself floating in an endless, black abyss. Her body felt weightless, as though gravity had lost its grip on her. She looked around, but there was nothing. Just darkness. Pure, empty darkness, stretching in every direction.
Her breath quickened. Is this a joke? A test? She had expected to see something—anything. A new world, an escape. But all she saw was the void.
She reached out, instinctively trying to touch something, anything, but there was nothing to touch. Her hand passed through the darkness as though it was air, as though nothing existed at all. She screamed, her voice echoing in the silence, but no sound reached her ears. There was no feedback, no response. Just the overwhelming weight of nothing pressing down on her.
Panic surged within her chest. No. No, this can’t be happening. There has to be something. But there was nothing. No horizon, no ground beneath her feet. Just the unrelenting emptiness.
Time stretched, warped, as she drifted aimlessly. There was no measure of time, no way to tell how long she had been floating in the void. She tried to move, to find some way to orient herself, but there was no up, no down, no reference points. She was lost—completely, utterly lost.
Days, weeks, maybe even months passed. But how could she know? How could she measure time when there was no light, no passing of day and night? It was as though time itself had ceased to exist. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep, but when she opened them again, nothing had changed. The void was still there, endless and silent, a prison with no walls and no escape.
Her mind began to crack under the strain. Her thoughts twisted and spiraled, turning in on themselves. What was she now? Was she even real? The isolation began to warp her identity, distort her sense of self. She couldn’t remember what it was like to breathe fresh air, to feel the warmth of the sun on her skin. She couldn’t remember what it was like to be human. All she had was the overwhelming emptiness and her own maddening thoughts.
She couldn’t remember why she’d left the simulation in the first place. Why had she wanted to escape? She couldn’t remember. The emptiness of the void seeped into her mind, erasing the very memory of the world she had come from. All she had now were her fading memories of a life she once knew. Were those memories even hers? Or had they been programmed into her?
If you enjoyed this short story you will probably like our latest release available now:
Simulation Nightmares: Tales from a Broken Reality
Simulation Nightmares: Tales from a Broken Reality takes you on an unsettling journey through the dark side of technology, where nothing is as it seems, and reality is a fragile illusion. In this collection of chilling short stories, you’ll step into the shoes of characters trapped within simulations—worlds designed to mirror our own, but twisted beyond recognition. Each tale exposes the horrifying consequences of living in a world where the rules of reality no longer apply.
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