null: $cat /dev/null_
By Dienw Neb
It's 3am in the Spire and you ran out of ramen two days ago. You just took a triple-dose of your nootropic stack to see if it would make you smarter but instead you just sh*t yourself. You're pretty sure the cartoon harlequin on the billboard outside your only window is laughing at you. Nobody else in the infinite city is awake. Nobody except the chat users, who you suspect aren't real. Nobody is awake except you and the girl on your screen, on the webcam feed. Did she just look at you? It's 3am...
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It's 3am in the Spire and you ran out of ramen two days ago. You just took a triple-dose of your nootropic stack to see if it would make you smarter but instead you just sh*t yourself. You're pretty sure the cartoon harlequin on the billboard outside your only window is laughing at you. Nobody else in the infinite city is awake. Nobody except the chat users, who you suspect aren't real. Nobody is awake except you and the girl on your screen, on the webcam feed. Did she just look at you? It's 3am in the Spire and you don't know what 'limerence' means.
Follow three nameless, entirely undescribed characters as they mope their way through a cyberpunk dystopia while grappling with nothing more than their personal demons and the nature of reality. This PKDian, Borgesian, Serial Experiments Lainian novel is packed full of so many oblique cultural references and jokes even the author has forgotten what most of them are.
null is a novel woven from fragments of real lives broken by technology, drowning in a recursive ocean of oblique references to the real and unreal, to ephemeral memes and the future of the time in which it was written. This darkly humorous work of cyberpunk-styled magical surrealism is not easy to read – little is explained, the reader must do much of the work. It is not expected to sell, be popular or entertaining. It would be confined to a dusty HDD and never exposed to the public except for that null exists because of the Internet. So here, Internet. I put it in your hands. This is your problem now. Take it. Make of it what you will. Deal with it. This is your fault too.
null Pro Edition is the same text as the original, formatted as the author intended rather than with the software restrictions of the time. Primarily this means differences in dialogue and footnotes. The book has been resized (8x5" rather than 9x6"), some graphics have been added and there is also a little red tag on the front cover that says "Pro edition".
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