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i.
Paraguay was mind numbingly, almost incomprehensibly boring, which in some way, was just another reflection of everything his life had added up to over the years he had been alive.
There was nothing of interest to him in that tropical hellhole of a country. Awful media (he still wasn't sure what exactly how "Magic Realist" had become popular, nor did he even enjoy reading it, even if it was something to do with his time, and the less he thought about the drivel that passed for television, the better) , awful people, even more awful climate, mosquitos; which were never a problem back in America, or even back in his home country – absolutely nothing of interest.
It was miserable, in all its mind numbingly dull glory, but it was in some small way, better than dying. Exactly how, he wasn’t sure, having spent a considerable amount of time ranting to the others in the mansion about how the country was a "place worse than death itself" , but it was better. The mansion itself was rather unpleasant, being occupied by those who had been cast out of proper society for one reason or another; some who had been driven out when their political viewpoints became unacceptable in their home countries, and others who had been driven out with the barrel of a gun pressed to their backs. He had personally found himself within the mansion's walls after a bout of alcohol induced violence; the exact reason for which he could not remember.
But he was still sick of spending day after day as a person who would not be noticed, as another body walking the long march to the grave, and eventually, for reasons that he would soon come to question, the wonderful Doctor Brucker had come to him with an offer. All he would need to do was partake in some experiment, one that the doctor claimed would make him into a new man.
That was how he had found himself paralysed in a perfectly white room, his senses dulled to near nothingness.
He wasn’t sure what this was supposed to do, he couldn’t even remember how long he was supposed to be in here. But at the very least, it was something different.
And if it worked, it would be something that he would be remembered for remembered for.
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ii.
At first, he spent his time thinking (well, not truly at first, he had spent the very first minutes staring at the blank white walls of the chamber, the part of him that had been trained as an engineer wondering how such a flawless construction could be possible), thinking about everything he had done, everything that had been done to him.
He hadn't started in a good place, he had started at the very bottom of the social ladder back at home, in a lonely industrial town, still shuddering from the events of what they then still called "The Great War", "The War to End All Wars". And then, when another war had started, when his home country had been dragged into the conflict, he had been dragged along with it, sent to work on the great machines that rolled over the blasted lands. He had worked so hard to climb up the ranks, even as he failed to progress time and time again, to burn his name into the minds of everyone he had met, and yet, and yet. He was just another nothing, another person who would achieve nothing, amount to nothing; he had contributed nothing, and no one would remember him. Another nobody that everyone would forget as soon as he vanished from sight.
He’d provided his skills to the Brotherhood of Evil, having found his way into their employ after having proven his skills in working with some thieving bastard called Niles Caulder, an act that had swiftly transformed into yet another pointless attempt to prove himself to be somebody, to be anything at all. He built their robot for them; even if Caulder claimed that it was it was a creation purely of his own design, and then he had assisted them in piloting it to steal the Statue of Liberty, and then. And then.
And then Caulder's freakshow called the Doom Patrol had just waltzed in and undone all of his effort. One of them, or all of them, he didn’t care about how it had been done, only that it had been, had managed to tear his grand design into shreds.
As a whole, the destruction of everything he had made, of everything that he had worked for, of every chance he had to make something of himself, took less than an hour.
It was in the burning wreckage that he lost even more than that. One of the other members of the Brotherhood had been injured - the gorilla, if he recalled correctly, and in an action that had in all likelihood sealed his fate, he had made an attempt to flee the scene, not enjoying the thought of being captured by one of the Doom Patrol’s freaks of nature.
Eventually, the Brotherhood had caught up with him, furious at his ineptitude and cowardice, and placed a brutally simplistic ultimatum on his head.
Either he got out of their sight, out of their way, or they would inflict a death upon him that in such a way that would ensure that no one would ever recognise his corpse.
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iii.
After that, he had started counting, counting every second spent in that white void. He could technically see, but there was nothing to see. He had made it to an hour, an hour of counting every lonely passing second, before he lost count once again.
Nothingness was starting to feel like a recurring motif of his life. He had amounted to nothing, he had achieved nothing, and now, he was surrounded by nothing.
Nothing, nothing, nothing, more and more and more of absolutely nothing.
He wanted to go back, to turn back time and tell himself not to accept, to tell himself to stay away from whatever it had been that had driven the hands of fate into placing him in this white hell. This wasn’t worth it; it couldn’t be worth it.
He couldn’t feel, he couldn’t move, he couldn’t even truly see. All he could do was think.
He didn’t want to. Every thought he had was starting to spin into chaos, running down into dark paths. What was the purpose of any of this?
What if he was never let out? Had they simply left him to rot away? Would he die here?
Could he even rot away in an environment so sterile? Or would he remain, even after his mind was gone, or even more disturbingly, remain walking and talking and acting long after all that he was long gone?
Was he just doomed to be forgotten? It felt like they had all forgotten about him. He didn’t even know how long he’d been in here, surrounded by blinding white on all sides, he had lost count of the passing seconds too many times. He couldn’t close his eyes, and sleep failed to take him away, leaving him trapped in a terrifying lucidity.
There still had to be something worthwhile at the end of everything, otherwise, he didn't know what to think anymore.
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iv.
He wasn't alone anymore, or perhaps he had never been
There was a spot on the wall, an awful darkness against the all-consuming white.
What was that? What was that, that was something different, that was something that had changed?
A stain? A mark? A bolt? A scratch? A hole?
A hole to where, if that was what it was. A hole had to lead somewhere. Otherwise, it wasn’t a hole. It needed to lead somewhere to be a whole hole, but it was too dark to be a whole hole that lead outside.
That wasn’t there before, it can’t have been. Or perhaps it had always been there, and he had just been too unobservant to notice it. Yes, yes that was right. It was always there, he just hadn't noticed it before, his eyes had not yet adjusted to the white. A single point left for his reality. Or not. It didn’t really matter, did it. He sure didn’t.
He must have just missed it. He must have just missed it. Or was it a hallucination, his mind inventing something to cling on to, something to exist other than himself, a single sight when all his other senses had been killed by the bite of the needle.
He stared at the small black spot, watching as it sat in a single fixed location, the image slowly overtaking his mind.
It was something to do, and the idea of doing nothing was starting to hurt.
What did it mean? What was it?
His mind felt like it was tearing to bits, thoughts fragmenting and ideas dissolving into abstracted oblivion.
Why was he in here again?
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v.
The black spot was still there, still a single grounding point in the whiteness. He still didn’t know what it was. He wasn't even sure if he even cared what it was, most of his thoughts were fleeting in that way.
In an change that he would have previously called disturbing, it had started to move in a smooth yet erratic path, gliding across the shining white. Was it something alive then?
A small insect, crawling across the wall of the void, something that had crawled in with him, and had simply been away from his vision before. That was the easiest explanation, one that did not eat away at his mind like a starving beat, unlike far too many of the other thoughts that he had had for the undefinable length of time which had passed prior to his imprisonment in this void. Two prisoners in this pointless oblivion.
He continued to watch the spot, watching as it crawled its meandering, shaking path across the nothingness, before a small thought broke through from the churning madness, rising to the forefront as a petrifying impossibility.
What if it wasn’t small. What if it was big, unbelievably, impossibly big, and so very far away, the walls of the room having dissolved away to form a true void, somewhere where the rules of reality didn’t exist.
That wasn’t possible, that wasn’t possible, that should not be possible. He was in a room, not a void, not floating in some empty space between every imagined word. He wanted to convince himself that the perception of the void was just a delusion, but there was no evidence overwise, no evidence arising from his own perception, nothing to prove that it was not beyond his fallible memories.
What if it wasn’t small?
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vi.
It was just him, his thoughts, and the now impossibly big, impossibly far away pitch-black spot in the white void now. He didn’t like his thoughts; they told him about things that he didn’t particularly care for, memories of things that he did not like in the slightest.
He didn’t really see the point in caring about his thoughts in return, if they didn’t care for him, he wouldn’t care for them, with how they told him about such pointless superstitions like society and government and good and evil and all the other such nonsensical things that people inflicted upon themselves as they chained themselves down to fit into those nightmarish constructions; chained themselves down for reasons that he no longer cared about.
He had had so much think about these things, to mull over the mindless idiosyncrasies of society, the madness of crowds; he had found it much more pleasant to stop caring when there was nothing for him to care about, when nothing had cared about him.
He didn’t like his thoughts, and so all he had was the black spot. He had noticed the spot, but it had not noticed him, leaving him alone and ignored, other than his thoughts. Like he was nothing at all. He had noticed the spot a while ago now, how long he still did not know, but he knew that how long it had been did not matter.
Should he be dead by now? How long was it that a human could survive without water? Should he at the very least have passed out? Was that supposed to happen?
He stared at the distant spot. He had noticed it, but what if it noticed him?
What would happen then?
Would it run away, leaving him alone with his oh so hated thoughts in the white?
Would it stay and observe him too?
Would it rush forwards, and swallow him whole?
Something within him shifted with that, vertigo filling his lungs, hollowness filling his heart. He imagined the spot rushing forwards, black overtaking the white, leaving him just as senseless as before. He imagined the black eating away at the suit he wore, feasting on his flesh, reducing him to nothing, the void replacing him, leaving behind a hole in his image as the spot retreated and vanished, shrinking to a size so small that he could hold it between his fingers.
He would be nothing again. Nothing again. Nothing again. Nothing again. Nothing again. Nothing again.
And then -
-Something tears.
-Somebody dies.
-Nobody lives.
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vii.
Alarms blared across the base as something within the chamber shifted, an impossible movement, something moving between the lines.
The guards raised their guns, as the horrible thing within the chamber cut it open from within, as dark the void between stars, breaking it open like a birds egg, like a butterfly from a cocoon.
Bullets screamed through the air at the thing that crawled out from the wreckage, burying themselves in the wall as they passed through an impossible shadow.
The guns clattered to the floor, no hands left to hold them, screaming fading into silence as the rules of the world were bent like clay.
Someone spoke.
"Herr Niemand..."
Everyone died. Something left the room, left the mansion behind, but what it was couldn't be counted as human, couldn't be counted as alive, a metaphorical representation of an nihilistic ideal.
The story continued on for a long time after this, written in another's hand. But those were not my words, and neither were these, for these were simply a copy.
And that's all I wrote.
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