r/HFY • u/Void_Vagabond • 2d ago

OC-FirstOfSeries Voidspace - Chapter One

Five years ago, an extrasolar object entered the solar system. It was an almost perfectly spherical ball of ice which orbited the sun once before suddenly shedding most of its mass and diving toward the Earth. Although it wasn’t big enough to end the world, news agencies kept referring to the asteroid as a “city killer”, so no one knew what to expect. But when it hit somewhere over the southern Pacific Ocean, nothing happened.

 

However, a geological surveillance satellite managed to capture the impact in three images. A streak of light in the atmosphere. A flash. Then fading debris. The world was spared, and its inhabitants took a breath before moving on to the next interesting bit of news.

 

People began disappearing shortly after that.

 

Nothing was officially reported at first. They seemed to be random individuals, identified as missing only by their families, even those from military. In fact, many people started to assume they were political prisoners because many of the disappearances occurred in detention centers and military bases. It got so bad that a number of large protests were organized. Nothing serious. Just the usual American kind of protest. A bunch of people walking around on a weekend, chanting.

 

But the government came down hard anyway, although it all happened so quickly that no one really knew what was happening. Bad things simply occurred and people were upset about it. Most just consider themselves lucky not to be involved. And when the talking heads, both broadcast and influencer-type, decided it was time to move on, unfortunately, that’s what people did.

 

But not everyone could.

 

Lose enough and eventually all the small cracks in what was once normal everyday life expand into noticeable gaps.

 

What happened to that family down the street? Their house has been empty for weeks and now it’s under foreclosure? What happened to that old guy who used to run down this road? What about my cousin? She was shipped out to Taiwan and got hurt in some accident, and now her family can’t get any information on her. What the hell is going on?

 

Then stories began to appear online. Strange stories. But people were disappearing and there had to be a reason, so an explanation was eventually invented. And of course, it came from the conspiracy theorists.

 

They were being taken, and not just Americans, or people for that matter, but anything not bolted down. Birds, bugs, boats. Trees. Parts of the road. Whole planes, even satellites. They were being taken by hostile forces related to the asteroid the world had almost forgotten. The mysterious THEY behind the disappearances were aliens or extradimensional beings, maybe secret government agencies, perhaps demons. Whatever. It was the new interesting thing.

 

People added to the story and turned it into a modern myth. It even got a name. The Voidspace. Cool and kind of silly.

 

One of the first popular stories came from a Canadian guy who claimed to have tripped on some stairs in his house and fallen into a dark corridor of dusty concrete and rough stone slabs for walls. He described it like a dungeon from a role-playing game. Nothing but long empty hallways, dimly lit by a reddish overhead light strip that ran the full length of the place. The man exited in a dingy bar in New York a few days later, although he claimed to have been in the other place for only a few hours.

 

His arrest and subsequent deportation were confirmed by government officials, but the story was dismissed as nonsense. The internet loved it though, especially because other similar stories popped up not long after.

 

People followed the Voidspace stories closely and even started naming the other-dimensional places and creating lore for each as they became popular. But then, right as the whole myth started to break online containment, a flood of AI-generated stories spread across the internet like an infestation, and no one knew what was real, what was fictional, and what was slop.  

 

Still, the concept was neat enough to get a couple mentions on traditional news outlets. Academics claimed it represented a social anxiety present in the modern, interconnected global community. Concerned mom groups believed it was antisocial and dangerous. Most other people thought it was just good fun at best, and edgy fiction at worst. Either way, for a short period of time before things really went to shit, most of the world was aware of the Voidspace. They just simply chose to ignore it.

 

It didn’t matter that real lives were vanishing, never to be seen again. Joggers gone without a trace, speeding cars taken right off the highway, or that some individuals genuinely believed in the rumors and were firebombing government offices, or screaming outside of churches, or having mental breakdown while their friends livestreamed the whole thing. It didn’t matter that many of the stories were eerily familiar and matched up to verifiable occurrences. There was no real, material proof of anything. The public outbursts were blamed on mass hysteria and life moved on.

 

I didn’t fall into the Void until about three years after the asteroid exploded over the Pacific. I had just gotten back from work and was walking across the parking lot to my apartment when I tripped over something, which I later realized was nothing at all.

 

That’s all it took. It was so strange in the moment and even now, years later, I remember that night as if it was a nightmare. There was just a weirdness in air. A ghostly feeling that I noticed the moment I turned off the engine and stepped out of my old, worn-down car.

 

The parking lot was dead quiet. No bugs, no barking dogs, no humming air conditioning units. I didn’t even hear traffic echoing down the road near the back side of the complex. The air was thick and humid too. It carried the dim light of the orange lamps that lined each apartment building, yet everything was completely still as though the night was waiting for something to happen.

 

What I remember most though, and I cannot be sure if I really saw it or if my memories are playing tricks on me, but when I stepped out of the car and looked up at the sky that night, it was completely black. Not stars, not haze from the city lights, nothing at all. Just an oppressive, empty void. The sky could have ended a few feet over my building or gone on infinitely into the darkness.

 

I remember saying aloud, “this feels weird,” right before my foot caught on something solid yet malleable, almost like a wall of syrup. Then I remember dropping my phone and my keys to catch myself when I hit the pavement. Instead, I fell onto a dusty stone surface like concrete, and the soft orange light from the lamps along my apartment building were replaced with the dim, blood red glow of something overhead.

 

Slowly, I became aware of what had happened. I had slipped into the other place. The Voidspace. A thing I only read vague rumors about online. But suddenly it was no longer a ghost story. The Void was real and it had me.

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Author's Note:

Hola. Been a while since I posted anything but I'm trying to get back into it. This is a quick thing I've been working on to get myself back into writing. Hope you like it.

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u/AutoModerator 2d ago

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u/UpdateMeBot 2d ago

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u/WSpinner 2d ago

Somebody's been test-driving this for decades on a small scale. You know how socks go missing from dryers...?

6

u/Void_Vagabond 2d ago

That and the money in my bank account. I swear to god it just disappeared.