The Hole
It was a midnight in the summer with cicadas buzzing in the hot, still air. He was sitting by his desk. Its surface was made of a piece of thin, sleek glass in the shape of an irregular polygon of four sides. On the two opposite sides, the glass flowed downwards silently until it reached the mahogany floor. A laptop hummed quietly before him while his tense fingers trembled above the black keyboard.
He needed a break. He leaned back, staring at the ceiling and listening to his own quickened breathing and heartbeat. He had been in this nervously heightened state for days; just a week ago, when he finished his program and began to run tests for debugging purpose, an error occurred, a horrible, subversive error. At first he thought it was just a bug, but as he kept refining his code, he realized it was more a truth than a mistake.
When he turned his head sideways to relax the exhausted muscle in his neck, he saw his game developer awards shining like stars on the shelf on the far end of the room. There was a photo, too, of him in his late twenties embraced by a younger woman, her eyes overwhelmed with affection. It was his ex-wife. She was gone now; the room was so sterile and smelled so bland.
A year ago, he began to suffer from brain atrophy. His short-term memory became flawed, and soon he had trouble recognizing his wife—he could recognize her face, but he had this firm notion that she was a robot. The doctor told them it was called the Capgras Syndrome. The weird thing about this psychiatric disorder was that sometimes it only caused visual but not auditory delusion, so his wife, pushed away by him in fear and suspicion, would retreat to another room and talk to him over the phone. Their new relationship lasted for months, until one day, around three in the morning, she sobbed on the other end of the phone and said she couldn’t do this anymore. As a rational person, he agreed with her, and let her go.
He returned to the glowing computer screen filled with endless lines of source code in C language. He had been polishing this program which, through the paired input of the known, former state and the current state of a person—where the state was usually defined by unique traits such as DNA, behavior, and accent—would return either 1 (match), or 0 (do not match). It was designed to help him with his cognition deficit, to detect whether someone was an imposter of his or her former self. However, in addition to returning 1 when he entered his ex-wife’s information, the program always returned 1, no matter what the paired input was; a lion vs. a car, a painting vs. a song, you name it. They all matched, every single physical thing. They were all the same, all meaningless.
His previous coworkers all confirmed that there was nothing wrong with his code and logic. Now he could not trust any of his senses and cognition; sometimes he couldn’t even tell whether he was awake because reality and dreams seemed so alike.
He gulped down a cup of coffee, which had already turned cold. Somehow his mind kept going back to his adolescent years even though his consciousness resisted. He was now forced to remember the pain he had once felt as a lost and broken boy. Some nights he was just lying in his bed and suddenly his heart ached and the patch of pillow under his cheek became uncomfortably damp with tears.
While he was hypersensitive to pain, he was absolutely incapable of feeling happiness, which left a hole in him that continued to expand until this emptiness seeped into every part of him and completely consumed him. He was scared, and searched desperately for the meaning of existence, a purpose, something that he could hold on to. That was when he found how calming math and logic were. But at the same time, he always believed that the universe simply existed, that every theorem people constructed and proved was just their way of creating meaning and explaining why things were the way they were.
As a successful game developer—and a once-married man—he almost thought he had forgotten all the psychological struggle and the agony, until his own program confirmed the meaninglessness of the entire world he and everyone else had once perceived. His anxiety was coming back; the hole inside him was now torn open again, gaping at him, inviting him to plunge into its bottomless pit. It said, “don’t ignore me; I’ve always been here.”
He looked over at the shelf on the other end of the room. He thought about the moments when he received those awards, when he kissed his wife and put a ring on her finger; he felt nothing, as if he wasn’t… living.
The hole spoke again, “see?”
He understood it now. It was all right to feel empty, since the world was made of nothingness. Love wasn’t real, and death wasn’t either. How wonderful. For the first time in his life, he felt whole.
He embraced the hole and became it. His heart ached, but he told himself that it didn’t matter.