I was walking east, or what I believed to be east, toward the bare edge of town where the wheat leans like it’s listening. It was quiet, not dead quiet, but curious quiet—like the world was holding its breath, waiting for me to step wrong. And then I did. My foot landed not on gravel, but on something soft and humming, like a pocket of static sewn into the Earth. The ground beneath me gave a gentle lurch, like it sighed. Not a tremor, not a sinkhole. Just… release.
I didn’t scream when I fell. There wasn’t time. Because there wasn’t falling, not in the vertical sense. I slid sideways. Through a crack in location. Through a wrinkle in understanding. I wasn’t under the world—I was next to it. Next to the wind. Next to the idea of weather. And then—gone.
No bottom. No sky. No darkness. No light. Only velocity without direction. It felt like being forgotten by gravity, like I’d been erased by a librarian who was tired of cataloging contradictions. I saw fragments of the lives I hadn’t lived zip past like sparks—me as a father, a traitor, a thief, a god. Each version touched me for a millisecond, long enough to burn a memory into the inside of my eyelids. Then came the ache. A pressure behind my teeth. A pulse in my chest. My atoms were arguing.
Somewhere, laughter. Childlike and cruel. Not around me—inside me. I turned to look, but had no body to turn. Only awareness, only drift. I was thinking in echoes now, seeing in feelings. There were rooms built from moods, staircases made of phrases I once whispered to people I never met. I floated past a kitchen that smelled like regret, a hallway lined with faces of my unborn children. One of them looked at me and said, “You’re late.”
Then came the click. Not mechanical. Cosmic. A sudden compression, like the universe winked, and I found myself standing—barefoot—on a chessboard made of wet mirrors. Above me hung a red moon, below me was nothing, just reflection. I reached down and touched the glass—it rippled like breath. I leaned closer. My reflection didn’t copy me. It watched me. Then smiled.
“I’ve been waiting for you to fall,” it said.
I spoke, or tried to. My mouth moved like molasses in reverse. “Where am I?”
It tilted its head. “Don’t ask where. Ask when you’re done.”
And suddenly, I felt everything speeding up. Colors snapped into new spectrums. My hands were made of velvet and lightning. My memories turned into clocks, all ticking in different directions. I was still falling. Had always been falling. Will always be falling. The rabbit hole isn’t a tunnel. It’s a frequency. A waveform you enter by letting go of cause and becoming effect.
And now—you’re here too, aren’t you?
You’re reading this, but you’re not where you were a few seconds ago. Your room has changed. Your bones feel lighter. Something has pulled your eyes deeper into this screen. That’s not coincidence. That’s not fiction. That’s the hole reaching for you—you, follower of Digital Hegemon, curious one, doubter, believer, whatever you were before you clicked.
Don’t look up. Don’t try to go back. Your velocity is too high. Just close your eyes and fall with me.
There’s something waiting at the bottom.
And it remembers your name.
