The only light in the room came from three large monitors, each painting Arjun Mehta's face in shifting hues of cobalt and crimson. The apartment in Chennai was a tomb of technology, the air thick with the heat of overworked processors and the sweet, stale smell of old coffee and fried snacks. Empty mugs stood sentinel on the desk, next to a half-eaten packet of biscuits. Beyond the glow, shadows swallowed the rest of the cramped space—the unmade bed, the silent speakers, the shelf of forgotten books.
Arjun was in the zone.
His world had narrowed to the pixelated battlefield on his screens and the frantic symphony in his headphones.
"Smoke mid! Smoke mid!" a voice, strained and Polish-accented, crackled through the headset.
"I'm flanking, I'm flanking, don't peek yet!" another, younger, American.
Arjun didn't speak. His breathing was a slow, measured tide against the storm of their panic. On the screen, his avatar, call-signed 'Void', pressed against a virtual wall. The scoreboard was a brutal verdict: 14-15. Match point. His team was down to their last life. His life.
Through the headphones, he could hear the desperate, shallow breaths of his last teammate. Then the wet, digital crunch of a headshot. A stifled curse.
"Void… it's all you."
Silence, heavier than any noise, filled the comms. Four dead men, watching.
Arjun's fingers, resting lightly on the keyboard, were utterly still. The game's soundscape washed over him—the distant drip of a virtual pipe, the scuttle of rodent feet on concrete, the low hum of a fictional generator. He counted the seconds in his head. They'd expect him at the bomb site A. They'd be stacked, waiting.
He bought a flashbang instead of a smoke.
A flick of the wrist, a calculated bounce off a doorway. The white burst on his screen told him it had landed true. He moved, not with frantic speed, but with a terrible, fluid economy. The first enemy, blinded and spraying bullets at a shadow, fell to a single, precise tap. The second, swinging to cover his friend, caught Arjun's knife in his side—a risky, arrogant move that paid off with a silent kill. The bomb site was clear. He planted the spike with five seconds to spare.
The last two enemies converged, their footsteps a thunderous giveaway in his headphones. Arjun didn't hide. He stood in the open, a silhouette against the ticking bomb. They rushed in together. He took the first shot to the chest, armor splintering, health plummeting to a sliver. His crosshair didn't waver. Two shots. Two heads.
The screen erupted.
VICTORY
The headphones exploded with sound—whoops, screams, a cacophony of relief and disbelief in three different languages. "Void! You madman!" "We won! We actually won!" Arjun leaned back in his chair, the faux leather creaking a long sigh. He pulled the headset off, letting the chaos become tinny and distant from the speakers. He allowed himself a smile, a thin, fleeting thing that didn't quite reach his eyes. It was a good play. A perfect play.
The monitors went dark one by one, plunging the room into a deep, suffocating grey. The silence they left behind was a physical presence. Arjun's phone glowed on the desk as he picked it up. No notifications. No messages. He swiped open a social media app—a scrolling graveyard of his own past glories: clipped highlights, tournament results, comments from faceless usernames: "Sick ace, Void!" "Carry me senpai!" He closed it.
His gaze drifted to the only framed photo on the desk. A man and a woman, smiling stiffly at a studio backdrop, their colors slightly faded. He reached out, his finger tracing the cool glass over his father's shoulder. Then he turned the frame face down.
"Another win," he thought, the words echoing in the hollow of his skull. "Another night. Another nothing."
Chennai at night was a beast of a different rhythm. The oppressive heat of the day had broken, replaced by a sluggish, diesel-scented breeze. Arjun walked, earbuds in, a podcast about quantum entanglement discussing non-locality as he passed a shouting match between a bus conductor and a passenger. The neon signs of mobile shops and textile showrooms stained the pavement in garish colors. He was a ghost in the machine of the city, moving through the crowds of laughing students and tired street vendors without a ripple.
He stopped at his usual stall. The elderly vendor, his face a map of wrinkles deepened by decades of steam, saw him and nodded. Without a word, he began preparing the tea—strong, sweet, no milk. The chai, when it came, was scalding and fragrant in a small clay dibba. Arjun sipped it, feeling the heat cut through the numbness. The vendor gave him another quiet nod, a silent communion of two men who understood the value of not having to speak. Arjun left the empty cup on the counter and faded back into the stream of headlights and shadows.
The IT office the next morning was a study in fluorescent purgatory. The air hummed with the drone of centralized air conditioning and a hundred keyboards. A cluster of colleagues by the water cooler burst into shared laughter at some joke Arjun didn't catch. He didn't try to.
He was debugging a line of payment gateway code, the logic clear and sterile on his screen, when a manila folder slapped onto his desk.
"Mehta."
His boss, Mr. Suresh, stood there, his tie slightly loose, a permanent sheen of stress-sweat on his brow. "The compliance reports from last quarter. The formatting is a mess. We need it cleaned up and re-filed by EOD. No excuses."
Arjun didn't look up from his screen. "Sure."
Mr. Suresh lingered for a second, as if expecting more—a complaint, an excuse, a semblance of human engagement. Getting none, he moved on with a frustrated sigh.
Arjun's fingers resumed their tapping. Why am I even here? The thought was not angry, just profoundly weary. The code complied, a task completed. It was nothing like the glorious, binary win-or-lose of the game. Here, there was only the slow, endless tide of tasks, and the grey expanse of tolerating them.
That evening, he walked. The traffic light on Nungambakkam High Road held him captive, a lone island in a river of metal and noise. He watched the world move. A young couple on a scooter, the woman's sari pallu fluttering like a joyful flag. A harried father carrying a giggling child on his shoulders. A street performer trying to get a ring of fire to stay aloft. Life, in all its chaotic, vibrant, interconnected frenzy.
What's the point of all this?
His phone buzzed in his pocket. A notification. 'VoidFan97 has tagged you in a highlight reel: "VOID'S 1v5 CLUTCH – INSANE!!"' He pulled it out, watched the sixty-second edit of last night's victory, set to pounding music. The digital 'VICTORY' flashed. He swiped the notification away, deleting it.
The light turned green. The current of humanity swept forward. He let it carry him.
"Auto, Anna?"
The three-wheeled vehicle rattled to a halt beside him. The driver, a man with a thick grey moustache and kind, tired eyes, grinned. "Late night, sir? Long day at work?"
Arjun slid onto the cracked plastic seat. "Yeah."
"Office-work only, always tension, I know," the driver chattered on, weaving expertly into the snarling traffic. "But have to live, no? Family is good?"
Arjun gave a non-committal grunt, staring out at the passing tableau. The bustling markets gave way to quieter residential lanes. The city lights began to blur into seamless streaks of gold and white, smeared by the speed and the grime on the auto's plexiglass shield. The driver, receiving no fuel for his conversation, eventually fell silent, the only sound the sputtering putter of the engine.
They turned onto a narrow service road, a shortcut. The world grew dimmer, the grand glow of the main roads replaced by the faint pools of light from occasional streetlamps. The auto's single headlight cut a feeble path through the darkness.
It happened without warning.
There was no sound. No roar of an approaching vehicle, no screech of tires.
One moment, there was the dark road, the putter of the engine, the smell of dust and exhaust.
The next, the universe was white.
A blinding, absolute, consuming whiteness filled the auto, the road, the world. It wasn't light from a source; it was light as a substance, solid and total. It didn't hurt Arjun's eyes. It simply erased everything else.
He felt… nothing. No impact. No heat. No cold. The frantic chatter of his mind—the code, the game, the lonely walk, the chai, his parents' faded smile—simply stopped. The constant, background hum of his own consciousness clicked off.
His final thought was not a sentence, not an image. It was a faint, fading echo of a sensation, the ghost of a question.
Is this—
The white did not fade to black. It was a switch.
One position: Something.
The other: Nothing.
And then, there was nothing.