On Nothing and Terminal Velocity

*click* 7…

*click* 6…

*click* 5…

At each floor (*click* 4…) the corresponding number above the door lights with a click, punctuating the metallic scrape of an old elevator in an old building descending to the ground floor. Aryn checks his watch. 4:30. Only two and a half hours until this is over.

*click* 3…

“Four days in a row,” Aryn thinks, Thanksgiving break just a couple hours away. This break is necessary. Between the influx of orders this week (everybody gets their work done at the last possible minute, it seems) and some tension between him and the new guy, the last month has been an absolute drag.

*click* 2…

Before that long break, this ten-minute one is the last today. The coffee upstairs is horrid, having been made this morning and left in that decanter for, what, six hours now? It’s even stale by the time he gets to it when he comes in at 10. At least enough people use the coffee in the common room on the ground floor of the office it’s brewed relatively frequently. Aryn anticipates the cafeteria smell and fluorescent lighting and long tables with tattered wooden chairs from the 80s with that awful prickly upholstery on the seats. He’s made this trip twice daily for two years now. There’s no actual cafeteria here – just some vending machines and a microwave. But it’s comfort. It’s not-work.

*click*--

No number. Weird. Light must be out. These elevators are serviced yearly for their vital parts, but the stupid lights keep disappearing, and the lights outside don’t always work when the elevator arrives. There’s no way to tell whether it’s going up or down without that bell.

As the door lurches open, Aryn steps out, checking his watch again. He looks up in time to see his foot miss the floor. He falls. There’s no floor at all here. The light is apparently just fine.

As he’s falling through nothingness, now looking up (there’s nothing down to look at, and some small part of his brain is sure looking at the one thing that exists will make some difference), the elevator door closes, and the perfectly-working exterior indicator light goes out. The elevator has gone to service another patient user. After a few more seconds, the closed door becomes a pinpoint in the distance, then it vanishes completely.

Describing “nothingness” is impossibly difficult. Suffice it to say Aryn still checks his watch every few minutes, partly out of curiosity, having grown up believing all falls end eventually and because this one is taking longer than any he’s experienced thus far, and partly out of simple boredom. There’s not a lot to look at when nothing is around; nothing is very much like a blank canvas without any texture or color. It isn’t even grey. It just isn’t.

After about ten minutes, according to his watch, Aryn begins to wonder whether he’s really falling anymore. Is it possible the door moved away from him as he stepped out? Without a way to orient himself and nothing to indicate movement (surely air exists, since he’s not suffocated yet, but there’s no wind in his face from rapid movement), Aryn believes himself to now be in stasis, suspended in a… what is this place, anyway?

Perhaps ten seconds after deciding he wasn’t moving, he changes his mind. The ground or something equally expansive and flat appears and begins approaching rapidly from his left side. He’s falling. Sideways, in fact. Before Aryn has a chance to wonder what, exactly, terminal velocity would come out to in a place of nothing and whether he’s been falling long enough to reach it, the ground or something equally expansive and flat interrupts his train of thought with a dull thud.

As his mind fades to black (at least there's color now), a mumble: “Terminal velocity, indeed.”