The heart monitor sang its final song at 3:47 AM. Not a crescendo. Not a symphony. Just a whisper into silence. Verum lay still, twenty-two years of borrowed breath collapsing into a single point of awareness, and felt nothing. No fear. No regret. Not even relief. The doctors had called it "Empty Heart Syndrome," as if his condition were a malfunction.
They were wrong. It was preparation.
Death did not arrive as a sudden thief in the night. For Verum, it had been a lifelong companion, sitting faithfully at the foot of his bed since the day he was born. The hospital room was steeped in the sterile, artificial twilight of the city outside, pale yellow light bleeding through the horizontal blinds to paint prison bars across his thin, motionless legs.
He did not blink. Blinking required energy, an assertion of will that he no longer possessed, nor cared to exert. He simply watched the dust motes dance in the fractured light. They drifted aimlessly, colliding, separating, vanishing into the shadows only to reappear in the light. They were exactly like the people outside this room. Exactly like the nurses who hurried past his door, and the doctors who read his charts with furrowed brows. Frantic. Aimless. Bound by invisible currents they refused to acknowledge.
Verum's body was a ruined architecture. Twenty-two years of existence had hollowed him out from the inside. His skin was translucent, a pale parchment stretched too tight over a framework of brittle bone. His hair, stark black against the bleached white of the hospital pillow, was limp and damp with the cold sweat of a failing system. If he had possessed the strength to lift his arm, he would have seen the veins beneath his skin, no longer pulsing with the vibrant blue of life, but settling into a dull, stagnant indigo.
But he did not lift his arm. He merely observed the sensation of his own ending.
The cold had started in his toes around midnight. It was not the biting chill of a winter wind, but a fundamental absence of warmth. It was the temperature of the void. Slowly, methodically, it had crept up his calves, past his knees, settling into his pelvis before marching up his spine. It was unmaking him, piece by piece, turning flesh and blood into mere concepts, and then dissolving those concepts into nothing.
He had no family to mourn this dissolution. There was no mother weeping at his bedside, clinging to his fragile hand. No father pacing the linoleum floor in impotent rage. He was an orphan in the purest sense of the word—untethered from the moment of his conception. There was no history to anchor him to the material world. No photographs gathering dust on a mantelpiece. No one to remember the sound of his voice, mostly because he had rarely chosen to use it.
To the hospital staff, he was a tragedy. A boy who had spent his entire life dying of a degenerative condition that slowly ate away at his emotional and physical core. They had brought him toys when he was small. He had stared at them, uncomprehending of the desire to possess brightly colored plastic. They had brought him books as he grew older, tales of heroes and villains, of love and loss. He had read the words, understood their definitions, but the concepts themselves were alien.
Desire. Fear. Hope. To Verum, these were not human truths. They were heavy, cumbersome chains. They were the frantic thrashing of a drowning man fighting the inevitability of the ocean.
He felt the cold reach his lungs.
His breathing, already shallow, became a conscious effort, and then, a choice he decided not to make. The oxygen mask over his nose and mouth fogged with a pathetic, half-hearted exhalation, then cleared. It did not fog again.
The human mind is desperate to find meaning in the dark. It seeks patterns in the static, constructs gods from thunder, and weaves grand narratives out of random, senseless suffering. As his organs shut down one by one, Verum's mind remained fiercely, terrifyingly lucid. He analyzed the silence filling the room. It was not an empty room because it lacked noise; it was full of silence. Emptiness, he realized in these final, dilated seconds of consciousness, was not a deficit.
It was an absolute state. It was the only truth.
Everything else—the pain in his chest, the hum of the fluorescent lights, the scent of antiseptic, the very concept of 'Verum'—was just temporary noise polluting the quiet.
His dead black eyes remained fixed on the ceiling. The edges of his vision began to fray, dissolving into a soft, encroaching gray. The transition was entirely painless. The pain had belonged to the body, and the body was already a distant memory, a heavy coat he had finally let slip from his shoulders.
He observed the gray eating away at the white of the ceiling tiles. It consumed the harsh glare of the lights. It erased the shadows.
He did not pray to whatever gods were supposed to be waiting on the other side. If there were gods, they were just another form of noise. He did not look back on his life, for there was nothing to look back upon. There was only this continuous, perfect subtraction.
The gray darkened to slate. The slate deepened into charcoal. The hum of the machinery, the distant wail of an ambulance siren far below on the city streets, the rhythmic beep that had suddenly flattened into a continuous, unbroken drone—it all grew distant, as if he were sinking beneath the surface of a perfectly still, black lake.
This is it, he thought, the voice in his mind lacking any inflection. The return to zero.
The cold reached the center of his chest, touched the hollow space where his heart had fluttered its final, useless beat, and finally moved upward, flooding his mind.
Verum's eyes slowly fluttered shut.
The last fragment of sensory data was the smell of rubbing alcohol. And then, that too was erased.
Silence.
Darkness.
Nothing.
The heart monitor sang its final song at 3:47 AM. Not a crescendo. Not a symphony. Just a whisper into silence. Verum lay still, twenty-two years of borrowed breath collapsing into a single point of awareness, and felt nothing. No fear. No regret. Not even relief. The doctors had called it "Empty Heart Syndrome," as if his condition were a malfunction.
They were wrong. It was preparation.
Death did not arrive as a sudden thief in the night. For Verum, it had been a lifelong companion, sitting faithfully at the foot of his bed since the day he was born. The hospital room was steeped in the sterile, artificial twilight of the city outside, pale yellow light bleeding through the horizontal blinds to paint prison bars across his thin, motionless legs.
He did not blink. Blinking required energy, an assertion of will that he no longer possessed, nor cared to exert. He simply watched the dust motes dance in the fractured light. They drifted aimlessly, colliding, separating, vanishing into the shadows only to reappear in the light. They were exactly like the people outside this room. Exactly like the nurses who hurried past his door, and the doctors who read his charts with furrowed brows. Frantic. Aimless. Bound by invisible currents they refused to acknowledge.
Verum's body was a ruined architecture. Twenty-two years of existence had hollowed him out from the inside. His skin was translucent, a pale parchment stretched too tight over a framework of brittle bone. His hair, stark black against the bleached white of the hospital pillow, was limp and damp with the cold sweat of a failing system. If he had possessed the strength to lift his arm, he would have seen the veins beneath his skin, no longer pulsing with the vibrant blue of life, but settling into a dull, stagnant indigo.
But he did not lift his arm. He merely observed the sensation of his own ending.
The cold had started in his toes around midnight. It was not the biting chill of a winter wind, but a fundamental absence of warmth. It was the temperature of the void. Slowly, methodically, it had crept up his calves, past his knees, settling into his pelvis before marching up his spine. It was unmaking him, piece by piece, turning flesh and blood into mere concepts, and then dissolving those concepts into nothing.
He had no family to mourn this dissolution. There was no mother weeping at his bedside, clinging to his fragile hand. No father pacing the linoleum floor in impotent rage. He was an orphan in the purest sense of the word—untethered from the moment of his conception. There was no history to anchor him to the material world. No photographs gathering dust on a mantelpiece. No one to remember the sound of his voice, mostly because he had rarely chosen to use it.
To the hospital staff, he was a tragedy. A boy who had spent his entire life dying of a degenerative condition that slowly ate away at his emotional and physical core. They had brought him toys when he was small. He had stared at them, uncomprehending of the desire to possess brightly colored plastic. They had brought him books as he grew older, tales of heroes and villains, of love and loss. He had read the words, understood their definitions, but the concepts themselves were alien.
Desire. Fear. Hope. To Verum, these were not human truths. They were heavy, cumbersome chains. They were the frantic thrashing of a drowning man fighting the inevitability of the ocean.
He felt the cold reach his lungs.
His breathing, already shallow, became a conscious effort, and then, a choice he decided not to make. The oxygen mask over his nose and mouth fogged with a pathetic, half-hearted exhalation, then cleared. It did not fog again.
The human mind is desperate to find meaning in the dark. It seeks patterns in the static, constructs gods from thunder, and weaves grand narratives out of random, senseless suffering. As his organs shut down one by one, Verum's mind remained fiercely, terrifyingly lucid. He analyzed the silence filling the room. It was not an empty room because it lacked noise; it was full of silence. Emptiness, he realized in these final, dilated seconds of consciousness, was not a deficit.
It was an absolute state. It was the only truth.
Everything else—the pain in his chest, the hum of the fluorescent lights, the scent of antiseptic, the very concept of 'Verum'—was just temporary noise polluting the quiet.
His dead black eyes remained fixed on the ceiling. The edges of his vision began to fray, dissolving into a soft, encroaching gray. The transition was entirely painless. The pain had belonged to the body, and the body was already a distant memory, a heavy coat he had finally let slip from his shoulders.
He observed the gray eating away at the white of the ceiling tiles. It consumed the harsh glare of the lights. It erased the shadows.
He did not pray to whatever gods were supposed to be waiting on the other side. If there were gods, they were just another form of noise. He did not look back on his life, for there was nothing to look back upon. There was only this continuous, perfect subtraction.
The gray darkened to slate. The slate deepened into charcoal. The hum of the machinery, the distant wail of an ambulance siren far below on the city streets, the rhythmic beep that had suddenly flattened into a continuous, unbroken drone—it all grew distant, as if he were sinking beneath the surface of a perfectly still, black lake.
This is it, he thought, the voice in his mind lacking any inflection. The return to zero.
The cold reached the center of his chest, touched the hollow space where his heart had fluttered its final, useless beat, and finally moved upward, flooding his mind.
Verum's eyes slowly fluttered shut.
The last fragment of sensory data was the smell of rubbing alcohol. And then, that too was erased.
Silence.
Darkness.
Nothing.