I only understood it was the last normal day of my life once it was already over.
At 6:14 a.m., Arthur Leymane had been awake for more than twenty hours. The world, meanwhile, kept running as if nothing were wrong. Cars passed beneath his window with an almost soothing regularity. Traffic lights obeyed their cycles. The sky was overcast, heavy, promising a thin, persistent rain. Nothing remarkable. Nothing abnormal.
That was precisely what irritated him.
Arthur remained still for a moment, sitting on the edge of the bed, elbows resting on his knees. His body protested in silence. Stiffness in his neck. A dull tension in his shoulders. His eyelids burned slightly, as if rubbed with sand. He inhaled deeply, then slowly exhaled. The signals were clear. He knew them by heart.
He chose to ignore them.
He knew the cost. Fatigue was not a sudden enemy, but a slow, methodical erosion. An accumulation of small debts the body would always collect eventually. Arthur recorded them all with the same rigor he applied to an unbalanced variable—then never paid them back.
He had learned early on that certain discoveries did not happen on a schedule. That some ideas only emerged once you crossed the reasonable limit. That blurred threshold where the mind begins to tremble, where thoughts sharpen—and grow dangerous.
He did not seek suffering. He simply accepted it as part of the process.
If his body were to fail one day, it would be for a reason that mattered.
He stood up without turning on the light. He didn't need it. The apartment had become an extension of his spatial memory: every piece of furniture, every angle, every flaw in the floor was mapped in his mind like stable coordinates. He crossed the room, instinctively avoiding the chair he had moved the night before, set his cold coffee on the desk without looking at it, and turned on the main screen.
The display lit up instantly.
Lines of equations already covered the dark surface. Some were crossed out, others hastily annotated. Symbols intertwined, connected by arrows, hypotheses, probabilities. It wasn't disorder. It was a battlefield. A fight frozen in time, suspended on a missing variable.
Arthur sat down slowly. The chair creaked. The sound felt too loud. He inhaled, trying to steady the slight tremor in his hands. His skin felt warm. Too warm. He registered the information and filed it under a secondary category.
Physiological alert: non-critical.
He had long since learned to treat his body as an imperfect parameter. Important, adjustable—but never central.
The problem wasn't his body.
The problem was the universe.
For years, Arthur had worked on a single question. Not the kind asked at conferences. Not the kind that earned raised eyebrows or polite smiles. A simpler, more brutal question.
Why did the fundamental laws appear coherent… yet incomplete?
Why did certain constants feel arbitrary, frozen like dogma no one dared to question? Why did equations describe how the world worked, yet never explain why it worked this way—and not another?
There was no mystery.
Only gaps.
Arthur placed his fingers on the keyboard. A new line appeared. He adjusted a coefficient, recalculated mentally, watched the divergence. No. Still wrong. He erased it, tried again, modified the independent variable. This time, the curve stabilized for a moment… then collapsed.
His heart rate spiked.
He stood abruptly, paced the room, ran a hand through his hair. Fatigue made everything feel slightly out of sync, as if the world were half a second ahead of him. He stopped by the window and looked down at the street.
People walked below. Some talked on their phones. Others laughed. A hurried man nearly collided with a woman and apologized distractedly. Everything seemed to function. Everything seemed… normal.
Arthur looked away.
He could have gone downstairs. Bought a hot coffee. Sat for five minutes in a noisy place, just to remind his brain there was something other than black lines on a white screen. He could have called someone. Anyone. Just to hear a voice that wasn't his own.
But the idea slid off his mind like rain on glass.
Useless.
Too late.
And, above all… strangely foreign.
He often tried to remember the exact moment he had drifted away from that rhythm. That human cadence of pauses, unnecessary conversations, required distractions. Maybe it had never truly begun for him.
He didn't feel superior. Not different either. Just… out of tune. Like a slightly wrong note in a melody everyone else found perfectly acceptable.
People lived in the world.
Arthur lived in what sustained it.
He sat back down. His breathing was fast, uneven. He forced it to slow. The world wasn't going to collapse because he had found a lead. It might collapse afterward.
Arthur had always lived this way—late compared to others, yet ahead of reality. At university, he was labeled brilliant, but distant. He remembered endless meetings where he calmly explained that a foundational assumption was wrong, only to be met with polite smiles. He remembered averted gazes. Awkward silences.
He also remembered something more humiliating: how the conversation would always change afterward. As if truth itself became a social inconvenience. As if the real problem wasn't that he was wrong—but that he was right too early.
Once, a professor had sighed under his breath, thinking no one noticed:
"Leymane, do you want to win against the universe—or live in it?"
Arthur hadn't answered. Not out of arrogance. Out of inability. He had never understood why the question was framed as if the two were incompatible.
Science, to him, was not a career.
It was a necessity.
He had no close friends. Not really. A few colleagues—sometimes admiring, often exhausted by the way he thought. Once, someone had tried to invite him to dinner after a conference. Arthur declined, genuinely surprised. It wasn't contempt. It was incomprehension. He had never known what to do with moments like that.
His apartment reflected it. No photos on the walls. No displayed memories. Nothing unnecessary. A place built for thinking, not living.
He glanced at the clock. 9:02 a.m.
He hadn't slept.
He hadn't eaten.
He didn't feel the need to—yet.
Arthur returned to the thread of his reasoning. The model was there. He could feel it. Not as a vague intuition, but as a structure on the verge of emerging, blocked by one final logical door. The flaw lay in the initial assumption. He had always treated the system as continuous.
What if it wasn't?
The thought struck him with near-physical force. His breath caught for a fraction of a second. He leaned forward and began typing frantically. Symbols aligned faster than he could consciously form them. This was no longer deliberate reasoning. It was flow—a cascade of interlocking evidence.
If the universe was discrete.
If laws were not principles, but instructions.
If reality functioned as a logical architecture…
His vision blurred. He blinked, pressed a hand to his forehead. A dull pain pulsed behind his skull. He clenched his jaw.
Not now.
For a brief moment of brutal clarity, he realized he was losing something. Not just energy. Not just time. Something simpler. More human. The ability to stop. To say enough. To protect himself.
The moment passed.
And the door—deep in his mind—seemed almost open. So he continued.
By noon, Arthur hadn't moved. The light had shifted, sliding across the floor. He didn't notice. He was no longer truly in the room. He was elsewhere, in an abstract space where equations formed a language more honest than words.
At 3:00 p.m., his hand trembled slightly as he typed. He paused, observed his fingers, acknowledged the phenomenon without emotion.
Motor degradation: mild.
He logged the information and kept going.
At 5:48 p.m., he made a mistake.
Not a mathematical one.
A human one.
He hesitated.
The final variable was there. He could see it clearly. But entering it meant accepting a radical conclusion—not just scientific, but personal. If this equation was correct, then the world was not merely describable through mathematics.
It was mathematical.
An executed structure.
A closed system.
But modifiable.
Vertigo seized him—not fear of being wrong, but the opposite. Fear of being right. For an instant, he grasped the implications. The limits that perhaps should never be crossed. The kinds of knowledge a human mind was never meant to hold.
For a fraction of a second, he wondered whether some truths were simply too heavy for a brain to carry without breaking. Not because they were forbidden. Not because they were "evil." Simply because they were too large. Too dense. Too real.
He thought of all the boundaries people respected instinctively, without understanding them. And he wondered if he was doing the exact opposite—crushing instinct beneath logic.
He remained still, fingers hovering above the keyboard.
If he was wrong, everything would fade into obscurity.
If he was right… the world could no longer pretend.
Backing down now would have been worse than being wrong.
Reality, then, was not sacred.
It was editable.
Arthur smiled. A tired smile. Almost sad.
"Of course."
He entered the variable.
Nothing happened.
The walls didn't shake. No strange light filled the room. The world continued on, indifferent. Arthur almost laughed.
Then the screen flickered.
The equations stopped diverging. All of them. At once. The model closed in on itself—stable, coherent, complete. A perfect structure.
Arthur felt something give way in his mind. Not sharp pain. Saturation. As if his brain were trying to contain more information than it was ever designed to hold.
He stood, staggered, braced a hand against the desk. His breathing turned chaotic. Black spots invaded his vision.
"It makes sense…"
He understood. The constants. The exceptions. The anomalies. Everything aligned. The universe was not infinite.
It was constructed.
Arthur collapsed to his knees.
The heat inside his skull became unbearable. His heart raced—far too fast. He tried to stand, failed, and crashed onto the cold floor. The ceiling spun above him. Time fractured, stretched.
For a fleeting instant, he thought he should have warned someone. Published. Shared it. But who would have understood?
Then an absurd thought surfaced—unscientific, insignificant: the image of a skipped meal, an unwashed plate, a message left unanswered somewhere in the corner of his memory. Worthless details. And yet they returned now, as if his mind were grasping for something simple to hold onto at the edge of the void.
The sounds faded. His own breathing felt distant. The last thing he felt was a strange sense of satisfaction.
He hadn't lived long.
But he had understood.
Darkness swallowed him.
Then, within that absolute void, a single piece of information appeared.
[System Rebooting…]