Instead of sitting down to a proper breakfast like a normal human being, Julian stood in the entryway with one shoe laced on a prayer, frantically zipping a backpack that was already missing half the notebooks for today’s microeconomics seminar.
“Take these sandwiches, or you’ll come home with a stomachache again and groan until nightfall,” his mother said, shoving a tin-foil bundle into his hand, just as the smell of burning toast wafted from the kitchen.
“Thanks, Mom, gotta run! If I’m late for Kowalski’s lecture, the guy will fail me on the first attempt without batting an eye,” he shot back quickly, trying to cram the food into his bag’s side pocket.
“Yeah, off you go, boy. Just don’t forget to fix your fringe, or the dean’s office will think they sent a new female exchange student again,” snorted his older sister, Karolina, from the couch. She didn't even look up from her phone, though the corner of her mouth twitched distinctly upward.
“Hilarious. Truly top-tier morning comedy as always,” Julian muttered, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose and running a hand through his soft, shoulder-length hair, which had indeed flared out in a completely unruly mess once again.
“Wiktor, get off my leg or I’m gonna fall!”
His younger brother, an eight-year-old kid in dinosaur pajamas, only hugged his calf tighter, flashing a toothless grin.
“You promised we’d beat that co-op level when you got back! You promised yesterday!”
“We will, we will, just let go of me already or I’m really gonna miss my bus,” Julian sighed. But instead of pushing him away, he just ruffled the boy’s messy hair, a faint smirk playing on his lips.
The way this entire family can spike my blood pressure in the first five minutes of waking up is a damn art form, he thought, finally slipping out onto the stairwell and taking the steps two at a time.
The clock on his phone showed a merciless six minutes until the bus arrived.
The air outside was crisp, smelling of early autumn and damp asphalt. The stream of cars on the main road crawled at that characteristic morning snail’s pace that always heralded massive traffic jams downtown.
Julian walked briskly, popping his earbuds in and starting an audiobook for some new fantasy novel. In reality, after three minutes he completely stopped listening to the narrator, his mind instead calculating how much savings he had left from his part-time job at the bookstore.
If I don’t spend anything on stupid stuff this month and skip ordering food on weekends, I’ll easily have enough for that new game expansion.
And maybe I can finally save the rest for an apartment deposit, so next year I won't have to listen to Karolina’s daily commentary about my looks, flashed through his mind, when suddenly a loud clatter and the sharp crash of plastic hitting pavement echoed on the sidewalk ahead.
A few steps in front of him, a girl in an oversized coat had dropped a large bag. In the blink of an eye, dozens of tiny wooden beads and small paint containers spilled out, rolling in every direction across the sloping sidewalk.
Julian instinctively slowed down, checking his watch.
Oh come on, damn it, I have exactly four minutes.
If I stop now, that fucking bus is going to leave right in front of my face, and the next one isn't for another fifteen minutes, he thought, taking two steps to the side to bypass the scattered items.
After all, at least five other people were walking right past her.
He took three more steps forward.
Yet instead of keeping going, the guy stopped.
The girl was crouching on the cold concrete, helplessly trying to catch the escaping containers while the rest of the pedestrians simply routed around her, glued to their phone screens.
I can't believe I'm doing this. I really am an idiot, he scolded himself internally.
Turning on his heel, he squatted beside her and began rapidly gathering the paint tins rolling toward the gutter.
“Thank you so much! I'm so sorry, the zipper broke on this bag and I didn't even realize...” the girl mumbled, gathering the scattered beads with visible relief in her voice.
“No sweat, happens. Grab these and watch out for the street,” Julian said abruptly, shoving the last containers into her hands before springing up from his knees and dashing toward the intersection, cursing his absolute inability to walk past someone else's trouble.
Fortunately, the bus was running just as late as he was, which meant all that rushing would have been for nothing - if not for the fact that he still had to transfer at the busy transit hub down the avenue.
Reaching the pedestrian crossing, Julian began analyzing his evening plans: pick up his brother from the after-school daycare, boot up that stupid game level, and then, once everyone went to sleep, quietly sit down to watch the new anime episode premiering at eleven PM.
Simple, ordinary plans for an ordinary Thursday.
Just survive three hours of lectures and I’m home free, he thought, standing at the curb where a crowd was waiting for the light to change.
Beside him stood a mature woman, under thirty by the looks of it, her hood pulled deep over her eyes. She was holding a young boy by the hand - who jerked at her sleeve every single second - while trying to hold a stroller with a screaming infant in her other hand.
The little boy's sudden tug was hard enough that the mesh bag hanging from the stroller handle snapped. A plastic baby bottle tumbled out, rolling straight into the roadway.
“Excuse me, could you... oh dear Lord, Kacper, leave that alone!” the woman cried out, trying simultaneously to catch the running three-year-old and hold onto the stroller, which had begun to roll down the gentle incline of the curb.
“Easy, I’ve got the stroller,” Julian responded automatically, grabbing the handle and straightening it on a stable patch of sidewalk.
“Thank you so much, really, you saved my life. I think I would've just broken down and cried right here,” she said, exhaustion thick in her voice as she tried to soothe the crying child.
“I’ll manage, it’s no problem,” Julian replied with a slight smile, taking the green light that had just illuminated on the signal as his cue to move on.
And then, everything unfolded with a terrifying, unnatural speed that completely blurred the reality around him.
The loud, piercing blare of a horn slammed into his eardrums from the direction of the intersection, followed immediately by the horrific screech of brakes grinding against wet asphalt.
Julian turned his head and saw a massive, dark SUV clipping the corner at full speed, plowing through the guardrails and hurtling straight toward the pedestrian crossing. The driver must have passed out or lost control completely, because the vehicle didn't slow down by even a fraction.
His brain calculated the positions in a split second with cold, almost heartless precision.
Fortunately for him, he was standing at the edge. He could take one clean, deep step back and shelter behind the concrete signal pole.
He would probably be safe then.
But the woman with the stroller was a step ahead of him, weighed down by children, paralyzed by fear, staring at the oncoming mass of steel with wide, terror-stricken eyes as she instinctively shielded the little boy with her own body.
Run.
Just step back.
You don't even know her.
Why you?
What is this?
I'm twenty-one, damn it, I have my whole life ahead of me!
Why does it have to be me standing here?! every cell in his body screamed, his primal, ugly self-preservation instinct practically commanding him to turn on his heel and run for his life.
I want to live, I really want to live, I don't want to be some hero!
Yet his legs betrayed him in the most absurd way possible.
Instead of backing away to safety, his hands shoved the stroller and the woman sideways with all his strength, dragging the little boy along and launching all three of them onto the safe portion of the sidewalk behind the pillar.
And then came the impact.
CRASH!
A horrific, dull crack of snapping bone resonated not in his ears, but directly inside his skull.
The world flipped upside down - a smear of gray sky, black asphalt, the flash of shattered glass, and the smell of burning rubber mixed with hot radiator fluid.
Julian couldn't feel the lower half of his body. He couldn't feel where his legs ended at all, as if someone had simply unclipped them from the rest of his torso.
“Don't move him! God, don't move him, call an ambulance!” someone screamed above him, but the voice sounded as if it were coming from the bottom of a deep, water-filled well.
Julian lay on his side, staring at a patch of dirty curb, trying to draw a breath, but his chest simply refused to cooperate, producing only a gurgling, quiet rattle.
Oh man... Mom's gonna kill me when she finds out I didn't eat that sandwich and ended up in the hospital... an absurd, defensive thought flashed through his mind, clinging to any shred of ordinary normalcy.
And then came the brutal, cold realization.
No. She won't kill me.
I don't think she'll get the chance.
Panic flared within Julian with redoubled force as images flashed in his mind: his mother's face, the smell of burnt toast, his sister Karolina laughing on the couch, his younger brother Wiktor waiting to play console games together.
It was all drifting away, becoming tragically distant and out of reach - turning into a past from which there was no return.
He tried to speak, tried to force out a single word, but only a thick, warm trickle of blood escaped his lips.
I don't want to die... Please, I really don't want to die...
That was his final thought before the bright day went completely dark, and the world collapsed into a single point.
The darkness had no smell. It had no temperature, weight, or boundaries.
***
What the...?
Am I... alive?
Julian tried to open his eyes. The signal generated by his mind commanded the eyelid muscles to flex, but nothing happened. Despite the attempt, he felt no movement and no visual input.
He tried to move his arm to touch his face, but he couldn't feel his hand, his forearm, or even his shoulder.
Panicking, he tried to take a deep breath to calm his racing heart, only to realize with terrifying clarity that he had nothing to breathe with. He had no chest, no throat.
And worst of all - he wasn't suffocating.
He simply existed as a spontaneous, localized point of consciousness suspended in an absolute, perfect void.
Okay, I died... I'm officially dead. I got hit by an SUV at a crosswalk, he thought after a long moment, trying to force a cynical, detached tone, the kind he used when reading cheap web novels.
So what now?
Where's the famous white room?
Where's some big-busted Goddess who tells me she accidentally killed me and I get five cheat codes for magic as compensation?
Or at least some System interface?
Julian waited patiently, but contrary to his expectations, nothing happened.
Hello? Is anyone here?
Silence.
God? An angel? Satan? Anyone?
The answer was a relentless, deafening nothingness that did not respond to his calls.
For an indeterminate length of time, he tried to remain calm, reasoning that this was probably some loading glitch, a transitional state before reincarnation, a medically induced coma in a hospital, or a very, very strange dream he would wake up from any second.
He started counting to keep from going insane.
One. Two. Three. Four... nine hundred ninety-eight. Nine hundred ninety-nine. One thousand.
One thousand one... One thousand two. One thousand three... One thousand nine hundred ninety-nine. Two thousand.
...
Ten thousand.
...
Fifty thousand.
...
One hundred thousand.
One hundred eighty-seven thousand four hundred thirty-two.
One hundred eighty-seven thousand four hundred thirty-three.
One hundred eighty-seven thousand four hundred...
...
Wait, how many?
Julian went silent when he lost track of the count. For a moment, he tried to reconstruct the last number, but after a few seconds, everything blurred into one featureless sequence of digits.
Giving up on counting, he began reciting song lyrics, plots of books he’d read, meticulously reconstructing in his memory the layout of his room, the furniture, the books on the shelves, conversations with his sister. Anything to keep his mind active, anything to avoid being swallowed by this terrifying, black void.
And then, time ceased to mean anything at all.
He didn't know if hours, days, or entire centuries had passed. Initially, he built complex dialogues in his head with people he knew, but over time he began answering himself, creating fictional versions of his loved ones just to hear a voice - any voice.
Until finally, a moment came when he tried to remember exactly what his mother's voice sounded like.
Silence.
He remembered the words, he remembered the intonation, but the actual timbre of her voice... had evaporated.
No, no, no, no! I remember! Mom?! What did you sound like?! He fell into a wild, silent panic.
He tried to recall Karolina's face. His brother's face. The name of his elementary school teacher. The name of the street he lived on. The details blurred like sand washed away by an ocean wave.
My name is Julian. My name is Julian. I'm twenty-one years old.
I have a mother, a father, a sister, and a brother. My name is Julian... He repeated the phrase like a man possessed, treating it as the sole anchor keeping him grounded to sanity.
Later, still left abandoned in this abyss, Julian entered a state of rebellion.
If there's anyone out there, just give me anything!
Give me pain, give me suffering, take me to hell, I don't care!
Why the hell did you leave me conscious, then?!
Just to torture me here?! he screamed into space, but the void offered no reply to his fury.
Yet after the madness and the rage came resignation at last.
A final, cold stillness descended as Julian stopped counting.
He stopped repeating his name.
He stopped searching for the faces of his loved ones. Instead, he simply existed in weightlessness, merging into the surrounding nothingness.
Maybe this is what eternity looks like. You just... exist, he thought with a strange, numb indifference.
And that was when the crack appeared.