60: Piran
Piran
Nothing.
Null stream.
Piran felt nothing, rested in nothing. But nothing was a state, one of two. Everything was binary, at a deep enough level.
So this was data. Null data. No—deeper than that. This—wherever this was—lay beneath code. And the nothing had a beat. Like pulses on atomic circuits.
thisThe pulses beat in rhythms that interlocked, and there were so many that they became solid, became a landscape that buoyed him.
This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. He’d never experienced code like this. Standard formats, his symbol language, even the root of the Ancients’ code—none of it had been so immersive, so visceral.
And then pain tore through the pulses like a wall of distortion.
It consumed him. Not his body, because he couldn’t feel that. But through him,
