The Experiential Void

I almost didn’t believe the ad when I found it posted amidst the menial jobs on the government portal. None of them paid enough to put food on my table, but this one promised a respectable wage. We hadn’t yet solved the scarcity problem; it was enough to make you envy past generations, before we eradicated natural death. An eternity of struggle and hunger barely felt worth it.

The position required a linguist. Our field hadn’t been in demand for decades, not since the adoption of the universal tongue. I called my wife over to double-check it, to convince me I was reading correctly.

“It looks real,” she said, her voice hopeful as the screen reflected in her hazel green eyes.

She was always so supportive.

“The Bureau of Science,” I mumbled, scrolling through the requirements.

Looking for a PhD in linguistics and experience with semiotics and formal systems. I had those.

She gestured toward my hand, leaning her weight on my back as she looked over my shoulder. “Scroll back up to the charter.”

The Knowledge Project affirms that all human perception is bounded by accident, prejudice, and illusion. By isolating a subject from all sensory experience, we free the mind to access truth in its purest form. In so doing, we pledge to exhaust every means by which our species may approach the absolute.

I glanced up at her. She shrugged and scrunched her face. “Whatever that means, it pays well. Can’t hurt to apply.”

The interview process was normal. Pleasant. Three important people in suits asking questions about my qualifications between the harsh angles of sleek, beige walls. I told them I’d been a professor back when my language field still mattered.

One of them leaned forward. A young blonde woman, eyes staring through me. “Understand this won’t be a typical translation project,” she said. “We don’t know if the subject will ever speak.”

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

“Listen and wait. Find a pattern. Translate anything you hear for us.”

“Why are we doing this?”

“Look around you. Society hasn’t had a major scientific breakthrough in a hundred years. If we’re limited by our own perception—”

“We need to move beyond it,” I finished for her.

When they offered me the job in the summer of 3085, I took it without considering anything other than my wife, the hunger in our bellies, and our desire to start a family. This was our path out. I couldn’t predict where this would lead, but nothing else registered amidst my desperation.

* * *

When the project began, we overlooked the ethics of condemning someone to a lifetime of pure nothingness. I was blinded by the mundane day-to-day tasks of filing, categorizing, and editing reports on the progress, or lack thereof. The government-appointed committee overseeing the project assured me that, granted enough time, the subject would utter statements of such metaphysical profundity that the sun of understanding would rise, exposing truths long buried in shadow. But I was simply happy making a living.

The committee weathered protests and lawsuits levied by activists, saying enlightenment would absolve guilt. But people’s memories are short, and the protests have long since faded, muted by our newfound affluence: one day’s cause, another day’s status quo. At times, I find myself wishing they’d won.

I listened patiently for a century but found no intelligible noises in the subject’s isolation. I grew unbearably bored. I can still hear the muted thud of the oak desk as I tapped it with my finger across idle hours, attention only half-tuned to the headset cinched tight around my ears.

Our charter pledged to awaken the mind from dogmatic slumber, but I watched the atrophied figure rot in a vast, barren sphere at the edge of our solar system, face contorting in unnatural ways. Could someone who never knew companionship be lonely? In my more empathetic moments, I was certain they could.

Pleading tones drenched their nonsensical utterances. On a few occasions, I almost released them, even though this would violate my oath. Once, my finger hovered, shaking above the emergency switch that would eject them to Earth—a measure designed to preserve the investment in the face of catastrophe. The glow of the monitor bathed me in blue light as I looked at their pitiful face. The subject’s features were barely recognizable as human, with clumps of hair floating beside them. I imagined their first gulp of real air, no longer fueled by the nano-nutrients of their sphere.

But I didn’t dare address their suffering to the committee, unable to bear the thought of endless remediations with human resources and mountains of paperwork. In our world of immortality, an infinite performance review makes the subject’s isolation enviable.

So, I tried to justify my pain by doing the most unthinkable thing one can do at work: I made a decision. Because I realized one subject alone could never form a method of communication. We could listen for another thousand years, to be left with only strings of unfiltered sound, never sharpened against the blade of understanding. Never cut down by mutual recognition.

I recommended a second subject to the indeterminate life of vacancy. Knowing full well I’d double the suffering, I convinced myself that success could make it meaningful. I even assured myself the first subject would appreciate the company. The truth is that my boredom was overwhelming me, and I wanted something to do.

As with the first, the committee birthed them into the distant void.  Again, I waited, and I listened, watching the fetus they’d wrested from the womb blossom in a bath of vaporized hormones, crying for a mother they’d never know—a mother whose only crime was wanting a child outside of the lottery. I suppressed my own tears, and eventually, they gave up. Another century passed with only the unintelligible expulsions of involuntary sound, compulsive babble, and unpatterned chaos. I told myself they were not conscious. No pain, no desperation, no thought.

Most considered the project a failure. A cultural oddity, maintained only as a symbol of our willingness to search every nook and cranny of the universe, as if the effort excused our lack of progress.  Nobody wrote articles about us. Nobody protested. Nobody even considered the subjects as people. Neither loved nor hated. The committee’s lofty task had been forgotten, save for the cursory explanation teenagers got during their civics class—the quest for the noumenal world, reduced to a line on a chalkboard. My efforts to make it meaningful had failed.

Then, in the fall of 3279, nearly two hundred years after the project’s inception, I heard it. A call. A response. Each was amplified by nano-microphones floating in their sphere.

It was barely recognizable as language at first, but it was ordered. Not the pure cacophony I’d heard for two hundred years. And little by little, it grew into a structure of shared semantics, a pattern revealing something I could not yet comprehend.

This slightest sliver of success felt like a gift. I began believing in our project, fueled by a sense of purpose and optimism for the future. I celebrated with my wife. I can still recall the flowing blue dress she wore to dinner, and the glint in her eyes as I explained my discovery. She was proud of me.

I spent the next thirty years forming an alphabet to represent each phonetic unit, calculating their frequency, and structuring them into a syntax that operated more like a complex algebra than a natural language. Perhaps I wasn’t observing torture, but enlightenment. My conscience relaxed for the first time in a long time. I mapped a semantic structure and transcribed the first statement, fingers clacking furiously at the keyboard as I translated it into our alphabet.

Achacattugatta repriamanamairper stochachusta ramanaramnaraman

More came quickly. Over the fifty years following, I filled pages with strings of dialogue from outside shared reality. The earliest exchanges were simple verbal repetitions. An agreement of terms and pronunciation. Through this agreement, they built a referent to the self, now recognized as they who had not said what was heard. In a sense, they created each other.

Their conversation grew more complex, revealing itself in an unbelievably vivid explication of space and time.

Now folded into there, here linked with then, and before looped into a harmonious dance with where. Our language failed me in translating these concepts. Though they have no concept of size, duration, color, or volume, they understood with greater clarity the frozen nature of each moment, each string of changes inexorably connected by causal links bound to the deterministic nature of reality.

When I presented my translations to the committee, they either did not understand or refused to acknowledge anything beyond material significance. They took what was useful. Engineers used their theories to update topological models, creating efficient manifold representations of planets, allowing high-efficiency water dispersion. Planets could be terraformed at exponential speed for a fraction of the cost using the updated models.

Within a few years, affordable, spacious living was available to all—an enormous step up from the grottoes and slums in which many of us spent our long lives rotting. The confined, bare walls of my residence were replaced with a vast, open atrium that flowed into a kitchen bursting with pastels and deep umbers.

“This is beautiful,” my wife said, peering out our large window along the wall. Her silhouette played against the city lights dotting the horizon below. She turned to face me.

“If we ever win the birth lottery, this would be a great place to raise a child.”

I agreed as her body folded into mine. For the first time in a long while, we weren’t afraid.

No one may remember the birth lottery. You can thank our subjects for that.

I knew their language promised more, though my interest remained academic. I transcribed the text at work, then went home to eat dinner with my wife. I took a passage in their native tongue with me one time, a paragraph another, sometimes staying up into the evening to pore over them. Late nights grew into later nights. The further I read, the more pulled I felt to comprehend the things I could not transcribe in our alphabet. Aspects of reality that the committee could never understand.

The subjects’ conversations became revelatory. It spoke of the intangible foundations of reality with the precision of a carpenter describing a desk, each process placed in stark relief, pulled from the flow of sight, sound, and touch.

The new, granular understanding of reality allowed the committee to calculate spacetime gradients at atomic scales, paving the way for precision farming, every nutrient timed perfectly with every square inch of ecosystem. They built massive farm satellites. Every citizen could have the best food available.

I felt we’d obtained enough. It was time to begin introducing stimuli, integrating the subjects into the physical world. But The Knowledge Project had grown heavier with institutional weight. Each time I added my suggestions to the ethics reviews, they were lost beneath mounds of operational adjustments and coding procedures. By the time I readied a report, the required format would be changed, and I would be forced to start over.

Besides, the committee reminded me, I wanted a child. Only working adults were allowed in the lottery. I couldn’t afford to have the project shut down. So, I kept listening, and my mind drowned in their concepts—revelations no mind was meant to understand. My ability to grasp the now-limiting world of forms around me slipped in subtle ways.

Nobody noticed how my thoughts drifted during conversations, or how my eyes turned from the sight of a sunset, hoping to submerge my intellect in the truths empiricism could never reveal. Once, walking home, I heard the whisper of their utterances in the howl of wind and tried to follow it through the boundaries of space.

What once mattered to me became irrelevant. Even the night my wife gave me the greatest news of all, it drifted by unnoticed.

“We’ve been chosen,” she said as she nestled against me on our sofa.

I barely looked up from my papers. She placed her hand over mine. It felt like a shadow casting itself upon my thoughts, an intrusion of external on internal.

“Chosen?” I asked, still reading.

She pulled my face toward hers.

“The birth lottery.” Her smile wavered slightly at my indifference, but I quickly feigned emotions I no longer believed in.

I smiled at our ultrasounds, rubbed her knee as they told us it was a girl. Just like I’d always wanted. Still, I couldn’t go on pretending science held the keys to reality, chained as it was to our minds’ interpretations.

I hoped our daughter would snap me out of it, readjust me to the illusion. But she didn’t. On the night she was born, I rolled the soft, woven swaddle around her shoulders and looked into her eyes. I saw only my representation of a person looking back at me. Her deeper existence lay hidden behind a veil of impressions.

Then at work, I heard their first equations. Mathematical representations of infinity and absence, which made our calculus and computations of recursive series seem as concrete as the integers. Their modal, multi-dimensional logics held a statement and its negation without contradiction. Necessity and impossibility, truth and falsity, mingled within the same phenomena alongside myriad other states lost in the concrete sensorium of practical life.

The committee used the new equations to flatten and bend space itself, allowing travel across vast distances. Mankind colonized beyond the solar system, creating new, bountiful Earth-like planets. Birthing restrictions were lifted, and the lottery abolished. Every citizen was allowed a family without risk of overcrowding.

My fate, too, was altered. I came home one evening to find my wife’s bags packed beside our front door. Staring at me with expectant eyes and our daughter cradled tight in her arms, a tear trickled down her left cheek.

“You barely sleep. You’re never home. I don’t even know who you are anymore.” Her voice cracked as she spoke.

I’d seen this moment already. She was right. How could she understand home meant nothing to me anymore? I knew she wanted me to say something. To ask her to stay. But I no longer believed in the distinctions of space or time, of here and now.

The thud of the door slamming behind her as she walked out felt like a tautology. Who was I to interfere?

Without my wife to temper my behavior, I forced my ethical recommendations on our executive, report format be damned.

“Can’t be done,” he said, reading the email without taking his eyes off the screen.

He adjusted his tie, shifting back into his seat. “We’ve been learning too much. Our population is booming. We can’t halt our advancements again or we’ll end up where we were before.”

“They’ve served their purpose,” I insisted.

Turning to me, his eyes went wide in concern.

“Listen . . . are you doing okay? You look like you haven’t slept in—”

“I’m fine.”

He paused, then raised his hand slightly, his palm pushing toward me, as if pressing me back.

“Where would they go? They’re not in pain. I assure you, our best psychiatrists have assured us that they’ve become acclimated. Why don’t you take a vacation? Nobody will notice if you don’t listen for one week. It could do you some good.”

I scoffed. More bureaucratic indifference masquerading as concern. But he would not budge.

I’d come too far in my understanding to take a vacation. Besides, maybe he was right. Maybe they weren’t suffering, and I was saving humanity.

Managing discrete objects became unbearable as boundaries evaporated into arbitrary concepts. The world around me blurred into an amorphous shifting. As I reached for my coffee cup each morning, the distinction between it, my table, and the floor eroded. Causation became mutual transformation. Identity was no longer singular, but an infinite chain of moment-bound differentiation connected by imaginary strands.

Still, I could work. In some ways, this unraveling made my interpretations clearer, more tuned to the rhythm of their speech. A melody revealed itself through headphones that now felt permanent. They were not speaking. They were singing. A symphony of reality. A fugue that spanned two hundred years. Patterns so complex, arranged in so many dimensions, that they only now revealed themselves to my ever-attentive ears. It harmonized with the fundamental laws of nature, tapped unfiltered emotion, and dissolved logic.

I wept in waves of pure feeling. In that song, I found truth.

I’d been wrong. They had not seen reality directly, but through unbearable suffering were driven to create something beyond representation. In the absence of the world, they painstakingly mapped the cage of perception, and through its negation, found truth—the very structure of being itself. The song was not a description of unfiltered experience, but their key to escape the cognitive prison, and in that escape, penetrating what our senses could never reveal.

In essence, they reached the absolute, but by a different path. A torturous path so brutal that their motivation to flee exceeded the sum of all individual will that came before them. I had inflicted horrors beyond reason, and it led to beauty beyond possibility. Was I a monster, or a liberator?

Upon this recognition came a terrible reckoning. I could no longer remain as I was. In contrast to the music, the world around me took on the form of a grotesque carcass, its limbs butchered and rearranged in horrible ways.

I often wonder about those two floating. The ages they’ve spent in pure cognition. Have they understood this beauty? What has been the cost of this knowledge? Do they take joy in their song? Do emotions make sense without a stimulus? No matter how deeply I understand their music, I know I will never truly have their experience. The shroud remains draped over my eyes.

I tried convincing the committee of our evils, but they claim I went mad. My detractors claimed I invented these ideas, painting my personal guilt onto a blank canvas of signs and symbols. I urged them to understand, but they never will. They say releasing the subjects now, bombarding them with phenomena, would be crueler than their isolation—that considering the action shows how far gone my mind is.

The courts accepted the committee’s accusations. They took my “madness” as proof of unfitness, and with that proof, they took my daughter.

My wife, my family, my friends—all have now long since left, unable to endure my repeated lapses into the discovered language. In whispers, I’ve heard of plans to remove me from the project entirely. But such measures won’t be necessary.

Soon I’ll complete my final task. I’m headed to the tank. The committee has dismissed me so completely that nobody noticed when my ship left Earth’s atmosphere, blending in with the now-common commuter ships.

I see the boundary of the sphere in the distance. My time has come.

I dock my ship in the entrance. The air hisses as it’s released into vacuum. I search for the button to re-pressurize as the door closes behind me. My suit clinks against the ground as I take it off, dropping beside the two I brought for the subjects. My hand pauses at the main entrance as my mind wanders to my wife and daughter. Will they understand what I’ve done? It doesn’t matter.

I kick myself into the void, naked body spiraling as if flowing through a vast ocean. It’s quiet. Movement is slow. The air barely provides resistance, but I push on, swimming through the open darkness. All bodily sensations dissolve. Only the withered figure growing in the distance reminds me I’m moving, illuminated by my flashlight.

They writhe when I grab them, groaning as I kick back to the entrance. Now they are the ones without words—nothing in their language can communicate these bodily sensations. My heart drops. I should have done this years ago. Centuries ago. I can’t tell them it will be okay. Their semantics express no emotion, no concrete things at all. They are back to the incoherent babble I heard in the early days. They will have to start over again. Tears slide down my cheek.

Their skin is slick and soft as I dress them in the suit, their movements awkward and unpredictable, as if shocked by their own body. I see them sitting still in the pressurization chamber, exhausted as I retrieve the second. They greet each other, their weak bodies struggling to embrace, recoiling, then reaching for one another again. I swear I see them smile—the first expression I’ve ever seen cross their faces.

I don my own suit, depressurize the cabin, and nestle them into the ship, telling myself they are forming new words even now. It’s programmed to take them back to the nearest city on a beautiful world with two moons and colorful foliage.

I strip again, this time sealing myself inside the tank naked, praying that perception is as revelatory to them as its erasure will be to me.

I had pledged to exhaust every means by which to approach the absolute, and so I sacrifice myself. Listen, and hear me sing as they did, in the darkness without end.