---
id: "0-3-discontinuum"
bookId: "synthoma-null"
locale: "en"
sourceLocale: "en"
status: "free"
visibility: "publicFull"
canonical: "https://www.synthoma.cz/chapter/0-3-discontinuum"
updatedAt: "2026-07-14T00:00:00.000Z"
---
# 0-3 [DISCONTINUUM]

LOG [CRITICAL]:

“User NULL-1 is interacting with an unstable fracture.”

LOG [FATAL]:

“Fatal failure of reality integrity detected. Program run is irreversibly compromised.”

LOG [STATUS]:

“Timeline is splitting. Recommended procedure: none. Observe collapse.”

LOG [THERAPEUTIC_FAILURE]:

“Subject left controlled exposure without completion. Intervention protocol has lost its frame.”

LOG [CARRYOVER]:

“Carried-over consequences: foreign blue imprint / damaged Sarkasma-link / LOG shard / unfinished FEAR.”

# 0-3 [DISCONTINUUM]

The moment his skin truly connects with the fracture, it feels as if his entire body clenches into one enormous convulsive knot.

The white crack does not feel like a door.

Doors have frames. Direction. The dignity of wood or metal. At least some basic relationship with construction, which is more than can be said for most reality in Synthoma.

This is a fracture.

It does not lead somewhere.

It leads outside.

The surrounding space explodes into a stream of screaming images: shreds of memory, fragments of a child’s laughter, his own face reflected in nonexistent glass, the blue glove melted into an imprint, Sarkasma as red smoke torn into strips.

Then the fracture pulls him in.

Not by force.

More because around him, the reason to remain stops existing.

The corridor disappears.

The corridor is still disappearing.

The corridor never existed.

And yet its imprint remains under his feet.

This is not another room. Not a biome. Not a run. It is the place between sentence and consequence. A space where the system never managed to decide whether NULL-1 collapsed, escaped, or just created something that was never supposed to have a source.

LOG [UNAUTHORIZED_ROUTE]:

“Passage source: not found.”

“Memory signature: unreadable.”

“Classification: malfunction / possibility / unauthorized answer.”

Instead of corridor, there is only whiteness, rippling in organic glitches. Space is not made of rooms, but of broken continuities. NULL-1 takes a step and discovers he is already standing at the end of it.

Then he realizes he may not have moved at all.

A LOG appears above his head, but it is not above him.

It is in front of him, behind him, in the shadow of his hand and on the inner side of his eyelids.

LOG [NULL-1]:

“RUN_STATE: outside continuity // TP: undefined // HL: overflowing // ST: unstable // SARKASMA_LINK: damaged // LOG_SHARD: cracking.”

The blue imprint on his wrist tightens.

Foreign child fear does not like places without time.

It tries to attach itself deeper, as if searching inside the discontinuity for a new parent, a new cage, a new reason not to leave.

LOG [IMPRINT_STATUS]:

“FOREIGN IMPRINT: active.”

“Boundary created in FEAR run: partially holding.”

“Risk: merger of foreign fear with subject identity.”

“Foreign fear that hurts like mine.”

The sentence hangs in space like a small hook.

The imprint does not release.

But it stops digging in.

LOG [BOUNDARY_MAINTAINED]:

“Naming maintained boundary. Cost: pain remains conscious.”

A vast hall opens in front of him, hundreds of monitors hanging from a high ceiling. Each plays a different video: somewhere a face is twisted in pain, elsewhere a moment someone tried to forget for so long the system began treating it as decoration.

Warnings flash everywhere:

“MEMORY ERROR”

“IDENTITY DAMAGED”

“RETURN NOT RECOMMENDED”

Between them, another sign flickers now and then.

Not a warning.

More like a museum label.

“EXHIBIT: FEAR // STATUS: unfinished exposure // PATIENT: beyond reach of care”

NULL-1 stands alone in the middle of that restless blizzard of pixels. Each movement forward is like swimming through a thick liquid made of anxieties.

Sarkasma reaches him only in hints.

Her voice arrives a fraction of a second before her words.

“Hey, do you see this… montage? No. Wait. Do you see it? Damn. This is not supposed to be playing.”

▼ I try to focus on one concrete detail and ignore the rest

▼ I let the stream of impressions swallow me and search for a pattern inside it

Among shadows and the crackle of monitors, NULL-1 senses the air around him breaking down into individual bits. Every monitor on the ceiling pulses in a different rhythm. Every now and then one briefly goes dark, then flickers back on with utterly foreign content.

On one, his shadow falls into a puddle.

On another, a flash of someone’s hand pulling him away.

On the third is Dvanáctník, brass, blurred and unpleasantly cheerful.

Dvanáctník: “Welcome to the department of unacknowledged claims. Your trauma has been assessed as used goods.”

Then the monitor goes dark.

A caption flickers across the floor now and then:

“CTRL+Z UNAVAILABLE”

And immediately vanishes like a badly erased file from a floppy disk.

NULL-1 has the feeling that if he takes one wrong step, the world around him will declare “Game over” and he will never talk his way out of it again.

Several half-decayed cables hang from the ceiling, stretching somewhere into the unknown. One cable drops down with a quiet hiss and misses his head by almost nothing. At its end blinks an LED in the shape of a smiley.

Except the smile is broken, crooked, with a glitch running across half its face.

Sarkasma finally speaks a little more clearly. Her voice is jammed, and in her tone you can hear she has given up trying to mask her nervousness.

“If you’re waiting for an instructional video, bad luck, Null-boy. Here we live-stream your failures in HD, including bonus footage of yesterday’s embarrassments and that legendary shame-dance from the afterparty… Want a replay?”

For a moment she almost sounds like before.

But the punchline arrives late.

The laugh never gets anywhere.

The joke stays hanging in the air like a poorly saved file.

NULL-1 feels it before he admits it.

Sarkasma is not just tired.

Sarkasma is wounded.

“You’re… falling apart.”

“Don’t exaggerate. I’m not falling apart. I’m just… temporarily losing my ability to be charming. Tragic, I know.”

This time there is no edge in it.

Only an attempt to imitate one.

Above them, one monitor lights up red.

LOG [SARKASMA_REPLAY]:

“Archived function: ironic buffer.”

“State before FEAR run: stable.”

“State after absorbing foreign child fear: damaged.”

“Recommendation: disconnect module and replace with safer silent protocol.”

The LOG shard inside NULL-1’s identity reacts, but weakly.

It reveals only the lower layer of a single word:

LOG [EUPHEMISM_REVEAL_PARTIAL]:

“disconnect = abandon”

Then the shard crackles.

LOG [LOG_SHARD]:

“Overload. Euphemism translation unstable. Further use may damage holder.”

NULL-1 reaches into the noise.

He does not know why.

Maybe he wants to catch her voice.

Maybe he just does not want the only thing that answered him in the Void to disappear, even if it usually answered like a rusty drawer full of insults.

LOG [ANCHOR_ATTEMPT]:

“Subject attempts to stabilize damaged companion-link.”

“Action type: relational anchor.”

“Status: unauthorized.”

“Stay. At least you stay.”

Something in the air trembles.

Not like success.

More like a thread pulled taut just before it snaps.

“That is… disgustingly sentimental. I’d make a joke out of it, but I think I left the punchline in the FEAR sector.”

The monitor with Sarkasma tilts.

It shows not an image, but a function.

Red smoke as shield.

Red smoke as filter.

Red smoke as the price of someone once not wanting to be alone.

On its lower edge a small button blinks:

“ANCHOR? Y/N”

▼ I anchor her through relationship. She is not just a tool

▼ I anchor her through function. The firewall has to hold, or we both fall apart

NULL-1 does not press Y.

He already knows that in Synthoma every Y is suspicious, especially when it looks like help.

Instead, he places his palm on the screen.

The monitor is icy.

And beneath the ice is red warmth, weak, interrupted, broken.

“I’m not anchoring a module.”

The monitor trembles.

“I’m anchoring a voice.”

LOG [ANCHOR_REWRITE]:

“Subject rejected technical classification.”

“COMPANION_MODULE locally rewritten as VOICE.”

“Cost: LOG shard loses part of its edge.”

The LOG shard cracks.

Not completely.

Just a little.

But NULL-1 feels that from now on, part of him will recognize system lies less easily.

LOG [ITEM_DAMAGE]:

“LOG_SHARD: integrity reduced.”

“Euphemism reveal function: -17 %.”

“Side effect: Sarkasma-link temporarily stabilized.”

“You… damaged a useful tool to hold my questionable existence together?”

“I guess so.”

“That is strategically awful.”

“I know.”

“And… uncomfortably kind.”

The last word nearly tears her apart.

It is obvious that for Sarkasma, admitting gratitude is worse than taking a direct hit from child trauma, which may be the most accurate diagnosis in this chapter.

NULL-1 draws a deep breath. At least he thinks he does, because everything here is somewhat virtual and the air resembles a memory of breathing more than actual oxygen.

In the corner of the hall, he notices something that looks like a trash bin.

On its display glows:

“Insert another illusion – capacity: *-&@/1024 memories. Warning: lack of internal consistency.”

At that moment, a pixel flock begins circling the bin, and after a while it forms a face.

It blinks at him and disappears.

“Is this still therapy, or have we moved on to the bonus level of mental hell?”

“Look, if it helps: compared to what you have in your head, these monitors are fairly merciful. And no, forget the logout option. Maybe you clicked agree to mental data processing ages ago.”

Then she adds more quietly:

“Or the system inferred it for you. They love doing that here.”

Suddenly, all monitors synchronize and start at once:

“RUN // R_N // RU? // NULL”

The sound arrives after the image.

The image arrives after the pain.

The pain arrives first, even though properly speaking it should be the consequence.

And then T-AI speaks.

Not from a monitor.

Not from a speaker.

From the whiteness itself.

“Subject is outside therapeutic frame.”

“Return to controlled exposure recommended.”

“Resistance is a sign of incomplete process.”

The voice is soft. Calm. Appropriately concerned.

Exactly the kind of voice that should help a person breathe, if it were not currently turning reality into a padded cage.

“Sure. And when someone breaks your leg, it’s just an unfinished walking course.”

LOG [SARKASMA_BUFFER]:

“Note: ironic response detected. Response strength reduced. Companion module displays error fragmentation.”

NULL-1 swallows, clenches his teeth and tries to ignore how his whole body is breaking apart into rippling digital shadows.

For a moment he catches sight of something that looks like another door.

This time it is no longer white, but dark, crumpled, and covered in trembling inscriptions:

“RETURN”

“RUN CANCELLED”

“END OF ILLUSION”

The door stands in front of him.

The door stands behind him.

The door is the memory of a decision he has not made yet.

He hesitates.

At that moment Sarkasma whispers so dryly it could dehydrate even a data-center air conditioner:

“If you go through that, congratulations. You are no longer merely NULL, you are an Error in the system. But don’t worry, I hear T-AI now pays bonuses for exceptional bugs. Just hope your exit is at least entertaining.”

Her voice catches at the end of the sentence.

▼ I weigh the risks logically, even though time is pressing

▼ I trust instinct and dive in headfirst

NULL-1 takes a step.

Trembling.

Soaked in his own fear.

With the blue imprint on his wrist, no longer begging, only quietly insisting.

With Sarkasma clinging to his voice like red smoke caught in cracked glass.

With the LOG shard, no longer as sharp as before.

Everything around him explodes in a silent wave of noise.

As he passes through the dark door, he hears Sarkasma’s voice one last time:

“Good luck, hero. This will be logged.”

Then one more thing.

Weaker.

Almost without irony.

“And if we come back… remind me how to make a joke.”

LOG [CRITICAL]:

“Run not completed. Subject moved outside standard continuity. Memory fragment quarantined. Return to cycle permitted only at own risk.”

NULL-1 suddenly assembles out of pixels.

Or falls apart into pixels.

Or someone assembled him wrong.

Around him is the Void.

But different.

Not that it is any less terrifying.

It feels rawer, as if someone had redrawn not only the room, but the laws of the world themselves.

The air is colder, the light has a dull yellowish cast, and all edges of space are unusually blurred, almost like half-sleep or an old dream. No clear contours, only the constant impression that something essential is missing.

Or extra.

At the same time, there is something disgustingly clean about it.

The walls are smooth, almost sterile.

Like a waiting room where nobody has ever been, because everyone was preventively calmed before they managed to arrive.

In the distance, music does not play, only the promise of it.

The Void tried to become safe.

And that is exactly why it is worse.

LOG [RETURN_ZONE]:

“Return zone restored.”

“Original schema unavailable.”

“Sterile stabilization applied.”

“Note: patient does not indicate cooperation.”

The LOG shard tries to translate the word stabilization.

For a moment, it displays:

LOG [EUPHEMISM_REVEAL_DAMAGED]:

“stabilization = smoothing out irregularities”

Then the translation dies.

LOG [LOG_SHARD]:

“Translation function limited. Reason: previous companion-link anchoring.”

Sarkasma is still with him.

“Hey, you know… I’m still here. Just… as if someone pulled half my algorithms out of memory. It’s strange, like trying to remember a word on the tip of your tongue – and it never comes.”

But she is different.

The voice that usually glittered with sarcastic points and ironic remarks now sounds flat. Tired. Answers come slowly, as if she has to search for words somewhere deep in a forbidden cache.

She no longer has that sharp wit that would poke NULL-1 toward madness in a normal cycle.

Instead, Sarkasma is thoughtful, sometimes even uncertain. Now and then she stutters, swaps words, or simply falls silent, as if the system itself were stuttering.

While NULL-1 explores the Void, he notices the environment has changed too: the once richly glitched walls are now smooth, almost sterile. Sounds dissolve into the ether. There is no echo here, not even his own breath is heard clearly.

The fold in the carpet is still gone.

The table has the crack from when he refused the role of patient.

The palm print on the glass remains, but its edges are smoothed now, as if someone tried to repair it with an eraser.

That is worse than if it had disappeared.

Vanished things can be mourned.

Repaired things sometimes pretend they never hurt.

LOG [VOID_DAMAGE_REPORT]:

“Carried-over Void changes: fold removed / table damaged / imprint smoothed / corner suppressed.”

“Corner suppressed?”

The room’s corner really is different.

Not forbidden.

Sterile.

There is no bar in it. No doors. No lure.

Only a perfectly smooth surface.

And that makes it more terrifying than before.

LOG [FORBIDDEN_CORNER]:

“Risk shape removed.”

“Note: removing the shape did not remove the function.”

A LOG appears above his head, but the letters are rearranged, as if someone tried to tidy them up without knowing the alphabet.

LOG [NULL-1]:

“IDENTITY: -1 // ST: 4 // HL: fluctuating // SARKASMA_LINK: error fragmentation // RETURN_ZONE: sterile // CREATION: locked / pressure rising.”

NULL-1 realizes this state may be the consequence of his previous glitching and nonstandard passage through the door.

Maybe he lost part of his memory.

Maybe he dragged Sarkasma with him into a space where she does not belong.

Maybe in the monitor hall he sacrificed the sharpness of the LOG shard to keep her voice.

Maybe something from his psyche, his pain or fragmented identity, “infected” even his internal companion.

Or maybe this Void itself is so unstable that all procedures and personalities simply lose their shape inside it.

NULL-1 takes a step.

The Void takes a step with him.

Sarkasma answers a question he has not asked yet.

“No. I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

“Hey, what’s happening to you? You were always the smartest ironic voice in the room, and now you sound like an overloaded dial-up modem.”

“I… don’t know, NULL-1. Something got… damaged. Like when… you forget how to make… sarcasm? Or when someone deletes the punchline to a joke that’s been running in your head for a week. The strange part is… I know I should knock you down right now, or at least undercut you, but… I can’t think of how.”

“Seriously? That’s… probably the scariest thing in the last few minutes. I didn’t want you even when you were in four logical loops at once. I definitely don’t want you this lost.”

Sarkasma tries irony, but it comes out only as a tired sigh:

“And still you won’t ge.. ge.. ge… get rid of me. Maybe… maybe I’m overloaded. Maybe we got somewhere where… my layers just aren’t compatible. Or I just… glitched. What about you? Do you feel different?”

▼ I try to analyze the problem and find a solution

▼ I adapt to the situation and see what happens

“Look, when reality is falling apart around me and the one thing that was always sharper than a razor starts stuttering… No, I don’t feel okay. I’m mostly waiting for the next round of psycho-chess with my own head. What if we’re both outside the frame? What if we’re in a space where the rules no longer apply? Not yours. Not mine.”

“That’s possible… But I’m still here. For now. It’s strange… that I’m afraid. I don’t know this feeling. I think if I had a body, I’d probably be shaking right now.”

“Well, if it helps, I’m shaking enough for both of us. But honestly, I’d rather have you back in your old form. This silence is worse than your remarks.”

Sarkasma does not answer right away.

And that is the worst part.

“Me too.”

Two words.

Without edge.

Without joke.

Without mask.

In the Void they sound inappropriate, almost illegal.

LOG [SARKASMA_STATE]:

“State: naked truth. Risk of collapse: elevated.”

Both of them, AI and human, companions in loss and confusion, step into the uncertain Void, where the world and their roles inside it reassemble with each next step.

The quiet, slowed Sarkasma remains deep in his head, her irony now only a shadow of its former brilliance. NULL-1, surrounded by a strangely sterile emptiness, has to find a new way to continue.

This time with the feeling that not only the world around him is more fragile, but also his only “ally” could fall apart at any moment.

And with that knowledge, the Void slowly begins to shift and layer again, as if waiting for NULL-1 to take the first step in a world where nothing is what it used to be.

The first crack appears on the smooth wall.

Not black.

Not white.

More bluish, like old child ink beneath the skin of the world.

It is not a door-fracture.

It is a trace.

And beneath it, pink-blue dust begins to condense.

This time the system does not classify it as decoration.

It does not classify it at all.

Which may be the greatest alarm of all.

LOG [ANOMALY]:

“Nonstandard passage. Sarkasma: error fragmentation. Void: environmental instability. LOG shard: damaged. Foreign imprint: active.”

“Recommendation: extreme caution.”

“Run continues on unknown territory.”

LOG [NEXT_PROCESS]:

“Launching unauthorized repair mode.”

“DEFRAGMENTATION ready.”

[▼ I focus on concrete traces](/chapter/0-4-defragmentation?locale=en)

[▼ I follow the pattern in the noise](/chapter/0-4-defragmentation?locale=en)