Nothing Doing

He was floating in nothingness. Drifting alone through blue-tinged darkness. Waiting for something to happen. And being somewhat disappointed when what happened was… Nothing.

Not nothing in the sense of the ordinary absence of anything happening to be going on, but Nothing as in a negation of being. Things naturally want to happen, things naturally want to be. For there to be nothing doing – or nothing being as the case may be – indicates something amiss in the natural order of reality. Some outside restraint gumming up the works, something gone awry in the sprockets of humanity. In short, a problem. To float in cosmic nothingness was the thin end of the wedge. Plus it was really, really mind-numbingly, painfully boring. And, as naturally happens when a human being gets bored for too long, the mind will do just about anything to shake things up a bit, and go down some darned strange pathways to do it. He reached out a finger towards the nearest patch of Nothing and focused. At the end of his finger, a little patch of light glowed. Well, this was something.

He considered the nothingness and imagined a solid plane of nothing and started to draw on it with his glowing fingertip. He was trying to draw a box, but when he’d finished, the glowing outlines seemed to solidify and take on depth and shape, until he was actually sure there was a glowing box in front of him. It had air holes in, which he hadn’t drawn. And from somewhere inside he heard: Meeoow?

A voice in his head translated this as: “Why am I in this box? Who put me in here? And if someone doesn’t let me out of here soon, I’m going to get quite annoyed.”[1]

Well, this was something else. He reached out, spinning the box as he drew, and a lid appeared at the top.

The box wobbled from side to side a bit, and the lid bounced off into the surrounding nothingness and disappeared. A head poked itself out over the edge. It had pointy ears and whiskers, and a big, big grin. The cat noticed him and nodded with approval. ‘Finally,’ it said, ‘someone sensible.’

(It says something about how bored you can get when nothing happens that he was prepared to take a talking cat on trust.)

The cat hopped out of the box and landed on the surrounding Nothing with the surefootedness only a cat can find (and possibly only a cosmic cat, at that). ‘One good turn deserves another,’ it said. ‘Would you like me to show you the way out?’

‘Yes, please,’ he said.

‘Right this way,’ said the cosmic cat. A door appeared in the nothing and creaked open. It was hard to see what was beyond, but it seemed to be beckoning to him. And as the cat went through, he followed. Because, you see, Nothing naturally wants to happen…

[1] Perhaps the reason cats are sometimes seen as acting superior is that they can pack a lot into a few words and get impatient when they find that people on two legs have trouble keeping up.